But first I decided to see if my idea for Zoey's quilt was going to work. Um hello, are these not the sweetest quilt blocks you've ever seen?

They're Pinwheel String blocks from Gwen Marston's book "Liberated String Quilts and I'm using the Joel Dewberry aviary fabric I recently added to the stash.

My plan is to use dark pink or orange to create the pinwheel in each one. They're pretty teeny tiny though, only about 5x5.

You will need sashing (or something) in the end anyway, so I thought, hmmm, what if I lattice around each pinwheel with the stripey fabrics from the set (using the pink stripes around pink pinwheels and the orange stripes around the orange pinwheels)? It makes the blocks a better size anyway and then no sashing the whole thing in the end (or not unless I want to).

What do you think? Does it work for ya? It'll be a bunch of crazy pink & orange stripe meetups between blocks. (Or I could lattice around again with a calmer fabric, like the bird print or something.) Yes? No? Maybe so?

WAIT STOP THE PRESSES

Maybe what bugs me about the pink stripes is how i made them go OUT from the original block in every direction (i.e. some horizontal, some vertical)...

What if all the lattice stripes were horizontal, kind of like this:

And then when they were up next to each other, it would be like this?

Or maybe y'all are fine with the pink stripes as is. I don't know! I NEED OPINIONS. Thank you for your time. And good night....

I can't take any credit for the combination of fabric & pattern: it was a kit!! (Except for the backing, which was waiting patiently in my stash for the next little girl quilt.)

Bought from my favorite quilt shop in Minnesota near my mom's: Gruber's. But actually bought at the Chicago Festival where I was very excited to find Gruber's had a booth!

The pattern is called "Grandmother's Inspiration". And if you were wondering about the scale when I showed you Mariko's quilt last week, here Little Pinkie is hanging in the same spot.

The quilt is 45 by 35.

I would have actually probably finished the blind stitching in one day if I hadn't been at Lollapalooza all weekend.

Now on to the next....

In unrelated news, I finished all the gridlines last night, and sewed the binding to the front / now it's just blind stitch to go and this baby will be out of here. Check out the awesome fabric I used for the back.

And in even more unrelated news, Happy Birthday to my cousin Rachel!!! And to my friend Jess!!! Hello two british birds with the same birthday. Great way to start the month.

Fortunately I did NOT take any Sunday night so I was able to use my day of waiting (Monday) to get a ton of quilting done on Little Pinky. I'm just doing a double-line grid, using the seams of the blocks/squares to decide where to put the lines. I guess this is a little smaller than the last baby quilt I made because it seems to just be flying along.

If I finish the quilting in the next two days, will I be able to blindstitch down the binding in just two days and get it out of here by Friday? (Remembering how this weekend while blindstitching Mariko's quilt, I made my left thumb go numb THREE TIMES one morning.)

I had more than nine Asian fabrics I was in love with, so I spent some time pickin' and choosin'. I picked nine fabrics and in the process of having people confab about what order and if they were cool, Mariko's response was "I LOVE THOSE THEY ARE AWESOME." Since I had a yard of each and you really only use 1/2 yd of each, I figured I could just as easily make two matching quilts. Ha. Just as easily.

In 2006 when Mariko and I went to Australia, I brought samples of each fabric that had Asian characters written on it so she could tell me "which end was up" (fortunately some of the fabrics have characters going in both directions! Yay!).

Sometime in November or December I had both quilt tops done (I did them simultaneously. One column for you, one column for you, a second column for you, a second column for you...). I quilted mine first, as a trial run with my darning foot & some stippling paper, and I finished it in January 2007.

I didn't work on Mariko's right away, I was so sick of looking at these fabrics under my needle!! But then Ashley finished a version of this quilt and I got back in gear.

Et voila.

(p.s. as you can see, there is just nowhere in my apartment to take a decent picture of a big quilt. Ah. Bygones.)

Mariko's quilt is exactly the same as mine, but for two elements.

1) The backing. I had her pick which fabric she wanted out of a selection.

(My back was gold dragons. See it here.)

2) And the quilting. Mine has stipples, hers has braided columns.

Yay, I'm so glad I'm finally finished with this baby. Putting it in the mail tonight!!!

Now off to work on quilting the Little Pinkie while I wait for Office Depot to show up with yet more "storage solutions" for my ever more cramped and filled up apartment...

Since you last saw it, I finished the sashing and inner border of the white (sprinkled with tiny pink flowers), and added an outer border of the same pink squares that made up the inner blocks.

Do you know what I mean now, Jan? :)

And it's only 6:30, there's still plenty of time tonight for me to at least get the backing set up and maybe even start basting. Wow, talk about Friday night productivity!! (I gotta get it in now, I'll be at work all day Sunday.)

Focus = NOT. Moving in the fan wind = Yes.

And I still have to finish the binding on Mariko's quilt so I've got lots of things to choose from.

We won't talk about how I screwed up a little on the final two borders and may wind up with slightly ruffly corners thanks to my TYPICALLY "aw fuck it!" attitude when I am doing any kind of sewing. I sincerely doubt little baby Lindsey is going to notice that!!

Allrighty, I've got things to do here, peeps, I'm Audi-5000 (Reality Bites, anyone?). Maybe at least one finished quilt by Monday night? Fingers crossed!!!

So apparently you're supposed to pay this one forward. Duuuuude. How could I possibly choose just five rockin' girls when there are so many? Y'all know who you are. Consider yourself...

OK whenever I type "consider yourself" my mind then keeps going with the song "...part of the family. consider yourself...at home!" Come on, no one else loves Oliver?!?!

OK so anyway, as I may have mentioned, I'M ABOUT TO MAKE YOU VERY JEALOUS. And remember up top how I mentioned Hope having randomly made me something once? Yeah, uh uh, awkward segue, but back to that...

So you may have heard through the vicious knitting grapevine about how I am somehow able to get people to knit stuff for me? Like I say "OH THAT'S SO PRETTY I WISH SOMEONE WOULD MAKE ME ONE" and somehow I have these freaky nutso crazy girls as friends who say things like OK I'LL MAKE IT FOR YOU. No, seriously? SERIOUSLY.

[I may be a little too punchy to be writing this. Bygones.]

So once Becky made me a sweater (this one, but in hot pink). And once Leigh did (a ROGUE no less). And Monica did. Yeah, uh huh. No joke.

And I mean other people have knit me stuff for, you know, birthday presents, or swaps, (let's see, Alice made me a shawl, and Monica (who also knit me a ram) and Amy have both made me socks, and Claudia and Rachel made me socks but those were in exchanges so they don't really count and Strizzy made me a hat/mitten set in a valentine's swap, man we need to do one of those again, and Mariko's made me TONS of stuff including this awesome dude and Mary made me the dude from the BAD BOOK and I can't even talk about all the shit Ashley made me in our recent swap...)....and Carrie made me anemois for my birthday and Heidi sends me jam and coasters and necklaces and all kinds o' stuff.... AND OH MY GOD EVERYTIME I LOG OFF I THINK OF SOMEONE I FORGOT. IT'S LIKE I'M AT THE OSCARS AND I'M FORGETTING TO THANK MY HUSBAND AND MY DIRECTOR AND THE CAST AND CREW AND AM ONLY THANKING THE BOY I GOT TO MAKE OUT WITH ON SCREEN. Lordie. Bygones. Consider yourself mentioned even if I didn't... OK? OK.

Yeah, I was like ALREADY the luckiest girl in the world.

Well check me out NOW, motherfuckers!!! [as my polish grandmother used to say when she swore in front of me "pardon my french!"]

Handmade (doh!) for me by Melanie, who sadly gave up her blog like forever ago and no matter how I cry will not be convinced to start one up again.

I cry please blog please blog please blog and she ignores me. And then I cry i want a ripple i want a ripple i want a ripple.... And she said "SEND ME THE YARN BITCH AND I'LL MAKE YOU ONE." Yeah? yeah. OK.

AND HERE IT IS. I guess now I'll just have to cry over her lack of blog into my blanket!!!!

Honestly peeps, winter cannot come soon enough!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's made of Rowan pure wool DK that I ordered from the Knitting Garden. I ordered one ball of almost every color and two of some and had it all shipped right to Melanie's house and said surprise me.

WOOOOOOOOTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT.

Can't say I'm not lucky. Nope. Can't even say it.

OK I'm going to go turn the air conditioner as high as that fucker will go and curl up in my blanket and think lucky thoughts. Maybe tomorrow when I get home from work there'll be a BOY in a BOX, whaddya think?!?!?!

I'm sooooooooo happy to be able to update my iPod this evening. I was really going a little nutso on the topic. So the pic above (4 inch strips sewn together in pairs then cut in 4 inch increments again) was sometime Saturday. And the picture below (previous duos sewn into six patches, then set in blocks between sashing) was sometime Monday.

Since then I finished putting the white (it's not solid but you know what I'm saying) strips around. Now the entire thing gets a "border" of the same 4 inch pink squares that were the six patches in the centers. I've sewn those border strips together, hopefully tonight I'll press them and sew them on. Then it'll be on to the basting. Woot.

It's really miraculous how fast a SMALL quilt made of LARGE pieces can go together. Considering that most of the quilts in progress are LARGE quilts made of SMALL pieces I can now better understand the futility I feel when working on them.

And the stash binge pictures referred to a few days ago are up on flickr now if you want some real eye candy (click flickr in the logo image).

Electricity = so necessary.