Dan's Ramblings

Dan here ~

I think it’s Monday evening, close to midnight. It was a clear cold day today. Breezy at times, but not a really bad day. 

Daughter, Vanessa and her two kids stopped around for a visit today. The kids ran around some on the pond and seemed to have a good time. Granddaughter Kailey had fun standing on the pond watching the crows and ravens flying around. We even got to see some crows harassing a good sized hawk. Kailey has two birds that she keeps in cages in her room. No thanks, but she enjoys them and has learned a lot about them. She is also the one of the grandkids that seems to have gotten most of the drawing talent. Most probably from the Freeman side of the family. Here is an example of her work from an exhibit last past year. 

Thanks to Kailey, Vanessa says she now knows more about birds than she ever thought she cared to know. Doesn’t hurt either one of them to learn something new. 

Jakob has a birthday this Thursday. Unbelievably, he will be 14. A lot has happened in 14 years. If he keeps growing he will be ducking doorways before too much longer.

We did not get the snow I talked about last time. We got enough to say that it snowed, but only a couple of inches. I did run the blower up the length of the driveway but only because I want to get it sanded. We got a few days of walks in and the sand make it a little safer for us old folks walking up the hill.

I finished quilt #7 for 2024 this evening. I again found some “orphan” blocks. I grew them to 13” finished blocks. Some of them were quite large when I started so did not take a lot to grow them to get there. A few however needed some encouragement to get grown all the way up to 13”.  One started as a small 3” finished block. I actually kinda like that one the best. 

 

Probably followed closely by this one. 

It is a total mongrel of a block I made one day while I was playing with my Rapid Fire Lemoyne Star tool. I think the DNA shows that it is two parts banded Lemoyne star, two parts Blazing Lemoyne star, and four halves of hourglass or quarter square triangles units. I have no idea how many times I almost threw that block away over the years. It was always, “No hold on to it, some day I’ll use it”. Well some day arrived. If this is an example of time will tell, then time has been told. I think it works quite well in it’s forever home in this quilt. Isn’t that the hope of every orphan to fit into a forever home?

The 1-1/2” strips I surrounded several of the orphans with were found in a bin earlier in cleaning up a much larger bin. The strips came from a quilt that I planned to make some day. I was going to duplicate a quilt that I had made quite a while ago. Back in the early days of our Quilt Camps I would attempt to make a quilt while I stayed home and tended shop. I pulled all nighters sewing while Carol was up at the Country Club Inn with the campers. I would bring it up on the last day of camp. This is one of the earlier ones I did. 

Log Cabin Leftovers

I called it “Log Cabin Leftovers” because it was comprised of the leftover blocks and pieces of the quilts made for the Log Cabin room at our Quilt Inn. Well, during the cleaning process I decided I had no more interest in remaking a quilt I have already made than I do in following a pattern of a quilt designed by someone else. These strips became fair game and several were used here. I think many more will be turned into 1-1/2” four patch units and grow into other quilts.

On #7 after I had the twelve 13” blocks I needed, I now needed to add sashing strips etc. and borders to get to my normal size. This ended up being 59” by 75”. This is a good size, it is under my size requirement to not need a wide back and I was very pleased with the results, win…win.

2024-7

For the sashing I opted to try something a little different. I first popped with my Corner Pop II at 4-1/2", this brought me most the way across the base at 2-1/4”and 4-1/2” up the side of my 2-1/2” finished sashing. After processing this pop, I popped the corner again using the original Corner Pop to get another star within the first one. 

I opted to use two tones of the same color for the stars, the blue was what I had here at the house. I thought the yellow would “pop” the sashing and I think it did quite well doing what I asked. 

I decided on a square in square for the corner stones and introduced a new fabric and color into the center. This gave me a fabric and color to use for the outer border. With a 4-1/2” pop needed in the outer border, I went with a 5” finished border so that the points of my stars would be easily kept out of the binding. Again, I was very pleased with this one. 

Ideas are still germinating for #8, I guess will some clean up some of my work station in the mean time while I let the voices in my head argue about #8”s design.

Enjoy the rest of your week, many of you that are school related have this week off. Enjoy it and your kids, I have every week off, eventually I might get used to it.

Be safe, spring is around the corner. It may take a while still to get far enough down the block to turn that corner but trust me, it’s coming.