Tuesday Project Roundup: 2,592 Two-inch Squares

I finally finished piecing the blocks for the king-sized quilt I started in January 2023. I did not actually buckle down and finish it in August last year like I announced, but I’m so much closer now! Just have to press and trim all 72 blocks and then arrange them, which is where the magic happens:

The values of the colors and the diagonal piecing make a pattern! I’m so tickled it’s working… and 85% done. (I am absolutely not quilting this myself and may even have the longarmer bind it.)

Wednesday Project Roundup: Puffy Quilted Chore Coat

My quilted chore coat is done! We got some pics on our greenhouse visit and I just love how this project turned out.

I started work on piecing this in early December and had most of that done in mid-January. Then I had to pick a pattern–after muslining the Paola Workwear Jacket, I scrapped it and decided to use the Simplicity 4109 I’d made before. (If you spend two months assembling the fabric for your jacket, you don’t want any unknowns or weird fit issues.)

When it came time to quilt the pattern pieces at the end of January, I knew wanted a really puffy and soft jacket. I love the long quilt coat I made but I used a flat cotton batting and quilted it pretty densely so it just isn’t cuddly. For this, I used “Cloud Loft” polyester batting and just outlined the star shapes and it’s as fluffy as I imagined.

In February, I sewed it all together, made the bias binding, bound the edges, and gave it a final (careful) wash and dry to puff it up but not shrink it. (The Cloud Loft’s bulk took out some of the ease in the pattern, so it was kind of a nail biter if this would even fit in the end–but it did.)

The hanger shot, with a custom label of course:

And the details/sources:

This all started with a pack of 5″ squares from Harmony Provo of the Warp and Weft Honey line. I filled it in with Kaffe Fasset fat quarters from Harmony and a couple Etsy shops, plus some gingham and old, old pieces from stash. I got the Kona white background fabric from Sewtopia (plus some more Warp and Weft fabrics), and used a Storrs cotton lawn backing from Blackbird Fabrics.

Extra shout out to Martha Moore’s tutorial on attaching a collar to a quilted body–the tip to quilt along the roll line of the collar worked amazingly well, even in this puffy batting.

Fiber-nating

I’ve been missing the mountains, but it’s been snowing the last two Sundays and gearing up to go out in the snow just hits different at the end of January vs. at the beginning of November.

So we stayed home and I started quilting my chore coat:

My long black quilted coat used a thin cotton batting and I absolutely paved that thing with quilting–so for this completely different quilted coat, I used a really hi-loft polyester batting and am just outlining the sawtooth stars. And boy is it puffy!

I am going to be so warm. Warm and bulky. Quilt bros will understand.

Pioneer Museum

Continuing my new tradition of doing a fun thing every week–because I make my own schedule now!–I went with friends to the Daughters of Utah Pioneers Pioneer Memorial Museum yesterday afternoon.

I would say it’s less of a “museum” and more of a “clearinghouse for anything old that people want to get rid of” and also a “textile conservationist’s nightmare”…but they had quilts. Quilts that were just sadly folded in glass cases, getting unevenly faded, without a ton of context and not being able to be admired, but quilts nonetheless.

This is the one I most wanted to see in full and learn more about. There wasn’t even a typewritten card for it, but look at those tiny hand stitches:

This isn’t a quilt, but I was so struck by the “used for 50 years” part of its catalog note. It looks amazing for being 250ish years old!

I loved the colors in this one. No date on when it was “brought across plains” but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This one just made me glad for modern medicine. Also, that hand quilting is still tiny for someone losing vision quality:

Do I recommend the DUP Museum as a real museum experience, with organized exhibits and history and context? Not really! Is it fun to just poke around and see what there is? Absolutely! Do I want to call the American Quilter’s Society and get all the quilts rescued? You know it.