Sew Along Update - Week 5

Good Monday morning, dear readers, sewists and quilters! Are you here for your weekly installment of the Spring Dreams Sew Along news? 

You are in for a treat today, gentle readers, as Dee has provided me with a wonderful snapshot of her history with all things sewing to use for today's post. I have always loved Dee's way with words, and have 40 years worth of saved correspondence from her as proof. She writes beautiful prose, often with powerful images that help the reader see the ordinary with new eyes. Throwing away her letters would be the equivalent of burning a book. I can do neither! See if you agree with me...

Though I’ve lived for decades in a place where there may be more cows than people, certainly more cornstalks than people, I did not grow up on a farm or in a village, and neither did my parents or both sets of grandparents. My maternal grandparents worked in tall office buildings.  My grandmother made the lined and tailored jackets, fine fitted skirts, and crisp many-buttoned blouses she wore to work downtown in the capital city of our almost Midwestern state.

By the time I knew her, the dressmaker’s dummy in her second floor sloped ceiling sewing room wore only the occasional “church dress.”  Yet all the bits of wool and satiny lining and muted shirtings showed up in my Christmas presents of beautifully made doll clothes.  My dolls were “dressed for success,” and parties and weddings and church meetings.

I knew what a sewing machine and a pattern could do making clothes, and made many of my own, when I moved away from the capital city and was fortunate to meet colleagues Jayne and Sharon.  Their long experience fashioning beautiful quilts, and their generosity, kindness, and intelligence, have inspired me over and over for a long time.  Thanks for the invitation to sew along, my friends!

My Spring Dream quilt is a bit different. The fabrics I’ve chosen are saturated with color; I wanted to use a jelly roll of soft white I bought on sale to offset them; and I’ve long admired the diagonal line in the 5 dark 4 light nine patch.  I’m also a fan of “white space” or open space if deep color is used.  Jayne long ago showed me how she sketched designs on graph paper, and that’s what I did to get an inkling of what my idea might look like.

My drawing also tells someone more experienced with words than numbers, yours truly, how many of the different pieces I’ll need. I played around with some multiplication, but there’s nothing like a picture to give a person confidence in a story problem!

As to fabric choices, I have designer bundles to thank, a bit of over-buying, and a long time standing by the cutting table where all the pieces were posed and auditioning for me.  In the end I kept two many-color florals and balanced them with those of less color variety and those with even less.  Will the finish be a “dream?”  I hope so! 

With all the strip sets sewn, I’m ready for 2.5 inch slicing, a full bobbin, a Jayne-recommended audio book, and the lovely puzzle of stitching together 72 squares with nary a repeated fabric in any 5 darks grouping.  Here we go!

Here we go, indeed! Isn't it exciting to begin, finally, stitching these carefully constructed units into actual blocks? Dee is at this fun point when the mental picture and graph paper sketch becomes real, tangible blocks. The design takes shape and comes to life.

Some housekeeping details to bring to your attention, especially for those who are sewing along with us.  First, I mentioned in a post this past week that the chart on Day 1 of our sew along might have errors. To clarify, the errors are only in the dimensions of the completed quilt tops. All the counts on the numbers of corner stones and sashing strips are correct.

Second, I have plans to write up a post which will pull all the pictures of all the sew along quilts together. This will prevent folks from having to hunt down certain quilts. It will also be simpler for my linking purposes to have just one to link, rather than several.

Stitch away, my friends! Please contact me if you need us to address something that we have not covered. We will continue with our creations, too, and by the end of spring, we will all have wonderful new quilts to share.

Happy Quilting, Friends!