Category Archives: Inspiration

So I want to make a quilt for my mother-in-law for her birthday.   She has a lot of fantastic art hanging around her home and I was especially inspired by this piece:

I’m going to make a napping quilt heavily inspired by this piece.  And here are my plans:

72″ x 63″ composed of 9″ blocks.   The blocks are going to be wonky nine-patches, but each one will be unique (not the same wonky style block repeated).    Should be fun!

I actually have another quilt almost finished that I haven’t posted about yet.    It’ll be done in the very near future, however, so just stay tuned!

Our dear friends are having a baby!  Little baby Irene…  future wife of my son?  A mother dreams!

Anyway I want to make her a quilt, and for my inspiration I turned to the cover of this Kaffe Fassett book:

Although I own and treasure other Kaffe books, I am sad to say I didn’t purchase this one… yet!  Maybe someday when I’m not pinching my pennies so tightly.

But I did love this pattern and so I’ve learned how to tackle long triangles.  Perhaps I am a big dummy, but I thought I’d be able to just cut two rectangles in half and sew their corresponding triangles together point-to-corner to make a set of long triangle blocks.  WRONG.

Here’s what I’ve learned you do:

1. Make a template of your triangle shape – including seam allowance.

2. On your template, mark two points as indicated:

3. Then poke holes in your template at these points using a poking device, such as a thumb-tack.

4. Cut out all of your triangles and arrange them as desired, good side down.  Then place your template on your triangles and mark the dots using a fabric pen, pencil, or permanent marker (with caution).

5. Stick a pin through the marked dots, pinning two triangles together – good sides touching.

6.  Pin the triangles together, keeping a pin in that marked spot, and aligning the long edges together to the best of your abilities:

7. Sew and press open!

8. Now you have nice normal rectangles you can easily sew together and make fabulous blocks and then a fabulous quilt top!

Word of caution:  I used a lot of solids and a lot of batiks, and man those suckers are sneaky about which side is their front and which side is the back.  So perhaps you could be better than me and mark the back side with a sticker!

Also – I realized about 1/5 of the way through my cutting that I wasn’t always making the same right-triangles.  Sometimes I’d cut so that the diagonal line was going from the top left corner to the bottom right corner, and other times I’d do the opposite!  Luckily I caught my mistake fast enough to make sure I cut equal amounts of top-to-bottoms as bottom-to-tops, knowing that the sideways laying blocks of triangles would all be one kind, and the “vertical” triangle blocks would all be the other.  Looking at Kaffe’s cover – did he do the same?  I think so!  Not the easiest way to go about things.