Hi everyone! Things are beginning to loosen up here a little bit on the lockdown front, but I’m not sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, I wish things were back to normal, and despite what people keep trying to say, I think that we will eventually get back to a more normal situation. This whole “new normal” thing is, in my opinion, vastly overblown, unless the “new normal” is that now people finally know how to wash their hands properly. The only thing from this whole experience I really want to keep is the ability to work from home. Otherwise, the rest of this has pretty much sucked.

What I have enjoyed is the lack of commute time. In the past, my commute has been at least 45 minutes to get to work, and more than an hour to get home. In inclement weather, it could take more than an hour to get to work and two hours to get home. I’ve been able to reclaim so much of my day just by working at home, it’s unreal. I hope that I can continue to do this, at least part time, when they decide that we need to be in the office again.

Now that I have so much time freed up from the lack of commute, I’ve been able to make real progress on my Little House on the Prairie Quilt. The top is completed, and I’m really happy with the way it turned out. This isn’t the best photo, but I didn’t have a helper when it came time to take photos.

 

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about using my Cricut Maker to cut pieces for this quilt. For the most part, it worked out well, but I have noticed that some of the pieces were warped when I went to put them together. I’m not sure what caused this, but I suspect it could be an issue with ironing, or maybe the pieces actually did get cut oddly due to some issue with the Maker, or possibly the mat. I had a couple of instances where the mat got caught in the Maker due to a mis-read on the mat size, I’m guessing. I was trying to use one 12×12 and a 12×24 mat in one project, and for some reason, the Maker would seem to get confused and try to cut out pieces that were supposed to be on the 12×12 mat as if they were on the 12×24 mat. Now, my 12×12 mat has a bent corner at the bottom right and it’s really not usable for anything that requires the entire mat to be used. I tried to order a new mat, but everyone, including Cricut, is out of stock on the fabric mats. For now, I’m using the 12×24, but at some point I really need to replace the 12×12. And now I know to keep a couple of extra mats around at all times, so I’ll be stocking up when supplies are available again.

At any rate, overall, I’m pleased with the way my Maker did with cutting out the pieces for this quilt. I did learn something new at the quilt shop last weekend when I was talking about my issue with getting straight cuts using a rotary cutter and ruler. The folks at Sew Special Quilts were telling me about a quilter (and I apologize, I do not remember the name, so if you know, please let me know in the comments) who uses a five pound dumbbell to hold the end of the ruler steady as she cuts. Fortunately, I had some five pounds weights here, because apparently you can’t buy those anywhere right now, either. I tried it out Saturday afternoon when I got home, and lo and behold, it works! I got perfectly straight cuts with little effort just by putting one end of the weight on the ruler, and the other end on my cutting table. Total genius! I really would love to give credit where it’s due, so if you know of the quilter who came up with this idea originally, please let me know.

Using this method, I cut out some more pieces I needed for my Little House quilt and managed to get all of my components put together so I could start assembling the blocks. I am so excited for this quilt, which I plan to keep for myself, because I love the chain look of the blocks. One of the primary reasons why I used the background fabric in the nine patch pole position was so that it wouldn’t interfere with that chain. I was concerned that using the print fabrics as the primary fabric in those nine patches would detract from the frayed sawtooth block, which is, in my opinion, the real star of the show.

I’ve already got my next quilt in the planning stages, the Unity quilt by Bonnie Hunter. While she is a big fan of mystery quilts, I prefer to see the design so I can determine my colors. For this one, I am going patriotic and making it red, cream and blue. I’ve already bought a majority of the fabric, and there will be some scrappy-ness to it, because I have a TON of tan scraps. I’ll share my vision for this one in my next post.

See ya soon!