first block

January 26, 2013 by absolutelyspeechless | 7 Comments

Question: do you ever set up goals for your day, or things you need to do, and build in little rewards for yourself when you do them?

Such as, “As soon as you finish cleaning up the kitchen, you can sit down with some coffee and look at Facebook for 15 minutes”, or “after the bathroom is clean, you can watch the latest episode of ‘Parenthood’”; or, “work on the ironing for 15 minutes, and you can have a handful of Hot Tamales”.

Maybe I’m the only one.

I just seem to work better sometimes, when I have the motivation of a little reward at the end of the task.

Today, I promised myself that if I got some of my chores done, I could do a little sewing.

I’ve been thinking about trying some modern quilting. It’s hard to exactly pin down just what modern quilting is, but this definition from the Modern Quilt Guild does a pretty good job:

Modern quilts and quilters:

Make primarily functional rather than decorative quilts
Use asymmetry in quilt design
Rely less on repetition and on the interaction of quilt block motifs
Contain reinterpreted traditional blocks
Embrace simplicity and minimalism
Utilize alternative block structures or lack of visible block structure
Incorporate increased use of negative space
Are inspired by modern art and architecture
Frequently use improvisational piecing
Contain bold colors, on trend color combinations and graphic prints
Often use gray and white as neutrals
Reflect an increased use of solid fabrics
Focus on finishing quilts on home sewing machines

I really like the simplicity and minimalism you will find in most modern quilts, as well as the greater use of solid colors.

So it made sense to me to use this pattern that was featured on Sew, Mama, Sew’s blog during their “Modern Block of the Month-Sew Along”.

I dug through my containers of fabric a few days ago, and came up with these pieces.

All solids. Three were somewhat fray-y (fray-ish? prone to fraying, I mean). The one that wasn’t was the tan one–which was actually a bedsheet that had gotten torn. Now it can have a second life in another textile.

The cutting was a little fiddly and rather tedious (as usual–my least favorite part of sewing). But I finally got everything cut out to the right dimensions, and laid them all out on my cutting mat, so that I would (hopefully) not get mixed up on what piece went where.

Next came the sewing them together. It went pretty smoothly, thanks to the clear directions; I only messed up on one connection. Well, I messed up on that particular seam twice, actually.

But that’s what seam rippers are for. They are the erasers of the sewing world. :)

I didn’t iron after every sewn seam (bad quilter!), but I did iron all of the 5 pieced-together pieces, before I sewed those all together.

And here is the end result.