The Hatter Quilt

 Free Spirit Fabrics released a quilt design called The Hatter Quilt.

I believe it was designed by Tula Pink for her Curiouser and Curiouser fabric line and it's free to download right now. It is actually a fairly simple quilt that uses one block, the Key West block. I believe I was attracted to the design because of her striking use of the black & white stripe.

I could probably machine piece the blocks, but I've been looking for a project I can work on by hand, so I am going to convert it into an EPP project by combining the two half-diamonds into diamonds that span the two blocks, and by combining the four corner triangles into one square piece. I'm also going to reduce the size of the blocks to 9" so I can buy some pre-cut diamond papers. Life is too short to cut out 504 little diamonds.

I poked around my fabric collection and I found the "Accent on Pansies" collection I bought during the pandemic. At the time, I happened to notice it on clearance so I bought enough for an unplanned quilt, which means way too much. LOL 

I didn't manage to get all the fabrics in the line, but I have some of the top four shown in the palette on the left. And, on the bright side, I think it will look good with a black and white stripe, so I will go ahead and use one.

This is the rough plan I put together in Electric Quilt 8. I normally plan queen-size quilts for our beds, but this one will be as big as I can manage. If I get sick of working on it too quickly, then I guess I'll be making a wall-hanging. LOL

The little squares look funny in this pattern because today I was not insane enough to input this pattern manually so I could put actual squares in there. You all get the idea. The squares will be filled with these little flower motifs, which I will fussy cut.

So, there we go, yet another project to put in my queue. I'm obviously much better at planning quilts than finishing them. 

Because it's Tuesday, I guess I'll go ahead and link up with TuesdayToDo, which will be #14 for me. And I guess I was supposed to give progress on my last list. I finished cutting out the T-shirts for a future quilt and I packed them away into my basement storage. Once I cut out the parts we wanted to save, they took up a LOT less space.

I finished the Sewcialites Quilt early, before the end of the quilt along, because I was eager to clean up the scraps and put the project away before I got too distracted.

And I still have not finished the set of Finger Lakes blocks, but I did make some forward progress. I think I could finish them in another hour.

And for the next list, which is likely to be for more than a week:

1.    Finish the first set of blocks for the Finger Lakes Log Cabin quilt.

2.    (And from out of nowhere, it's never been on any list before,) I think I will start cutting out the above Hatter quilt. I probably won't take the time to cut out all the pieces, but I would like to have some handwork project I can take with me when we leave the house. I'd like to always have something with me that I can work on for a few minutes at a time.

June Update

I didn't do a flurry of activity at this blog, only to abandon it. I just have not been working on sewing projects this month.

Last week, I did work for a few hours on my Finger Lakes Log Cabin before it got too hot, but once it got uncomfortably hot in my sewing room, I abandoned that project until it cools down again.

Now that we're vaccinated, and all my clothes are unpacked, I figured we'd better start doing square dancing again, or I would need to get rid of the clothes. Honestly, I probably will still get rid of some but since there is pretty much no demand for square dance clothes and fabric has gotten crazy expensive, I'll likely cut some up for the fabric. But, I haven't gotten to that point yet.

We danced quite a lot, but then the weather in Portland got crazy hot. It was 115℉ (46℃) yesterday and 110℉ today. Dances are canceled when it gets over 90℉. And frankly, it has been so hot we've had to spend a lot of time watering our yard to try and keep our plants alive. And, even with our AC running all day, our bedrooms are too hot to sleep in comfortably. We've spent way too much time the past week hanging out in our cold basement streaming TV.

Since I'd like a project I can work on while in front of the TV, I started exploring some options for a new EPP project to try. I've never made one before and I've wanted to make one for years. I thinking about trying Free Spirit's The Hatter Quilt (the download is free right now).  

This pattern is not actually an EPP pattern, but I am going to convert it into one. I am going to combine the two half diamonds into a diamond and the four corners into a square. I don't think I'll be buying special fabric for the project. I already have way too much fabric I bought during the pandemic so I'm going to try and use fabrics from my stash. But I will probably buy a stripe once I find one I like.

It's supposed to be cooler tomorrow, so I'm hoping to spend a couple hours pawing through my fabrics and see if I can find any that speak to me for this project. =)