hst – MorePleaseThankYou

Bloc Loc!!!

Sep 282016

Here’s the quilt I made because I wanted to play with my Bloc Loc HST ruler. I love this ruler! (Also, I love chain piecing and HSTs.)

The whole top is made from fabric from a kit for Emily Cier’s Chi quilt. I bought it mainly because I wanted the book of patterns, and then I also thought it was cute that some of the shapes looked like shaved ice cones. But when I opened the kit and read the instructions that said to interface the five charm packs of white squares, I knew that wasn’t happening!

Inspired by Susan Kephart’s random vector quilt, I did a low-tech version by first laying out all of my HST units so that blocks with the same colors weren’t too close together. Then I numbered the four orientations that HST units can take (1-4) and used random.org on my phone to choose the unit layouts as I sewed rows together.

I’m all out of order, but trimming the HST units was so fun (I know, I’m a dork!) with the bloc loc ruler. Being able to quickly set the diagonal ridgey bit against the HST seam makes trimming go by much faster!

The quilt ended up pretty big — it used 12 charm packs, so about 79″ x 90″. I gave it to my father-in-law, and I was so happy when he said he liked it because it reminded him of the quilts his grandma used to make! 🙂

Purple thunder!

Jun 162016

I really appreciated Cosmo’s first grade teacher this year — she emailed the parents all the time, which meant that I actually knew what was going on. Cosmo hardly ever remembered to tell us stuff… which is normal, right? 😀

Since I was in a quilty mood, I made an Arrowhead quilt for her end of year present. The pattern is great! The design is obviously fantastic, and the instructions were really nice — it includes efficient cutting layouts for using fat quarters for all three sizes of the quilt. (I used yardage, though, so I didn’t have to pay attention to those.)

Since it’s mostly HSTs, I got to use my Bloc Loc ruler again (I haven’t gotten pictures of the first quilt I used it on, yet). I LOVE this ruler! Since I’m a cheapie, I only have one — the 6.5″, which was the biggest size that I saw on sale at the time. The next time I have to make flying geese, I’m going to get one of those rulers, too! I can’t do the same thing as with the HST ruler and just use the biggest flying geese ruler for all size blocks though, can I?

I actually spent quite a bit of time planning how I was going to straight-line quilt this. I drew a whole bunch of options on my computer and kept bugging Mike to help me decide. But then after I quilted all of one set of diagonal lines on the quilt, I got impatient to be done and stopped. hah!

When I was squaring it up, I found out that all that diagonal quilting had pulled the quilt very not square. (The flimsy had right angle corners, I promise.) Oops! That didn’t make me go back and try to fix it by quilting in the other direction, though — I just took my lesson and went on with binding.

After the school year had ended, Cosmo’s teacher mailed us a really nice thank you note… which inspired us to actually remember to make the kids write thank you notes to their great-grandma for a present box she had recently sent. See, such a great teacher — teaching the parents, even!