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Wow. I Am Very Smrt.

The bad news; Jenna is starting to get just a teensy bit bored, and has taken to dressing somewhat oddly. What is a person supposed to do with a girl as goofy as this one?

 Let me preface the following by saying that it wasn’t my fault. I know I said I was going to make a pretty pink and green and white quilt, but as I’m sure you know, sometimes things can get ever so slightly out of hand at the quilt shop. After all, if they hadn’t placed the whole line of Moda ‘Merry and Bright’ and Marcus Brothers ‘Snowflakes Welcome’ right by the front door, I’d have stayed on track and would be in the middle of making myself a nice, girly quilt right now. But, noooo. I saw the holiday fabrics, and that was the end of me. The chartreuse green and red plaid was what grabbed me first, quickly followed by the candy cane-like red and green diagonal stripe. And once I had those two, the rest just sort of fell into place, and I was lost. So much for the ladylike quilt. 

Kirk (world’s most wonderful video guy) and I are getting ready to begin filming my feathers DVD. The script is pretty much done, and Kirk bought some neato new equipment which will more easily allow him to film close-ups as I quilt, so now all I need are some quilts to use as demo’s while we’re shooting, and what could be better than some holiday quilts? Everybody likes ‘em, plus once we’re done shooting I can use them in my house. An excellent plan, if you ask me. 

I started with the ‘Providence’ block from Marcia Hohn’s site, www.quilterscache.com If you haven’t ever been there, you should go. She has so much stuff there it’s unbelievable, including an enormous library of free block patterns. Anyway, I changed the block’s center a little bit, pieced four blocks and put them together in a medallion, and decided that I will place it on point, in a sort of a modified square in a square layout, mostly so I can have giant setting triangles in which to demonstrate feather fillers.

 Then I decided that before I add those setting triangles there needs to be something in between the blocks and the triangles, to break things up a bit. That cool red and green plaid was yelling at me, so it has been elected to be sashing. However, it still needed ‘something’ so I decided that I would use some red piping in between the blocks and the plaid. Stay with me, this will have a point eventually. I used Susan Cleveland’s cool Piping Hot Binding technique, and her Groovin’ Piping tool, which is the slickest thing since sliced bread if you’re trying to make a nice, tight, even piping. Her website is www.piecesbewithyou.com , in case you’re wondering what on earth a Groovin’ Piping Tool is. (no affiliation, other than being a very satisfied customer. 

The red piping looked good, but, once again, it needed something, so I decided to copy my friend Renae and try doing some decorative stitching on my piping to jazz it up. Using a Sulky dark gold metallic thread, I did a ladder stitch over the piping, with the straight stitches thisclose to the cording and the ladders going out over the cording, creating a very gentle scallop effect. I tried to take a picture for you in the sunlight so you could see the subtle sparkle that the metallic gives, but I’m afraid that the photo turned out a bit flat. Believe me, it’s sparkly, but not too much so. 

Once my piping strips were all sparkelated, it was time to apply them to the pieced blocks. Carefully stitching them into place, lost in my reverie about what a spectacularly gorgeous demo quilt this would be, and how I would have scads of DVD viewers saying things like “My! What a subtle, elegant piping she has used!” or perhaps “Wow! That Kimmy is certainly an admirable quilter and I should send her some chocolate as soon as possible!” I was just tickled pink to see that, when finished, my piping edges lined up perfectly with the raw edges of my blocks, my stitch length was even, the brilliant red line of the piping was absolutely dead-on straight, and every single one of my points was chopped off by the stupid piping. <sound of screaming and Tourette’s-like cussing>

All that work, and I chopped my points off. Can you even believe what a dork I am? I have been quilting for a hundred years, and yet I still make mistakes as elementary as this one. Woe is me.  

This is what I started drinking while retroactively stitching all of the piping. It’s a margarita, and there had better be more where that one came from, is all I can say. 

I will now cut my plaid sashing strips, and apply the piping to them instead, in hopes that my points will remain in their pure and unadulterated state if I don’t have a bunch of bright red piping laying directly on top of them. I sure hope it works, because that’s an awful lot of sparklified piping to throw away, even for a doofus like me.

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