Designing new quilt blocks

One of the blogs a follow is Wayne Kollinger's Sketch Book. I find his exploration of what works and what doesn't endlessly fascinating (regardless of whether I always agree with his aesthetics). His most recent post explores the idea of designing a new quilt block by adding to the underlying grid. He took several 3x3 blocks, adding a frame to give a 5x5 design space with the original block at its center.

I thought this looked like a wonderfully fun idea, but decided to work from 4x4 blocks. Here are some of my first results, built around the "Crown of Thorns" block (above right).

I came up with three different new blocks, each of which I quite like:








And here are three quilts with those three blocks:

Cross crafting

Dorothy's Baby Blanket,
originally uploaded by sbweber-knits.

I sew quilts (among other things) and, even more than I sew quilts, I design quilts. To do this I use Electric Quilt software, a product I can't recommend highly enough. Recently, I have realized that this software can be used for some of my knitting projects as well.

I'm working on a baby blanket for Dorothy, using the " Baby Blocks" pattern by Ann Norling — a lovely, simple pattern. Too simple for me — which is no criticism of the pattern as written, just a recognition of my own preferences.

So, I "drew" up the pattern in EQ and started playing, representing the stockinette in one color and the reverse stockinette in another. This is the variation I came up with: a second internal border of the smaller checks, and a central diamond. My new pattern is still pretty simple, but it will be enough more challenging to keep me happy as I knit it.

And for that matter, it would make a lovely simple quilt, too!

A bit o' history

Since I did promise this would be the topic of my next post...

As I remember it, my first experience with any form of needlework was when I was in kindergarten or maybe first grade. My mom sketched out a cross-stitch pattern of my name for me to follow. I believe my brother, a year younger, did his name as well (on a separate piece of fabric).

I continued to do at least some cross-stitch until shortly before my first daughter was born; I have since discovered that for me at least, cross-stitch does not blend as easily with having young children as various other types of needlework.

I learned to hand sewing sometime in elementary school, machine sewing in junior high school. (I vividly remember being annoyed that by the time I got truly good at making doll clothes, I was too old to play with them.)

My aunt tried to teach me to crochet when I was in my tween or very early teen years, but I ended up teaching myself when I was sixteen (from a "Learn to Crochet" article that I still have, somewhere). I actually crocheted a fair amount in high school, during class — it helped me focus, and I was fortunate enough to have teachers who didn't mind as long as my grades stayed good.

I made my first attempt at knitting sometime in late high school, a dolman sleeved sweater to be made from a pink/gray variegated acrylic yarn — what can I say, it was the 80s. I got several inches done before deciding that I would stick with crochet.

I pieced my first blanket top, a log cabin pattern, from material I had tie dyed myself during the summer before I went away to college. I didn't return to piecework and quilting until the spring of 2004, when I made a baby quilt of my own design for a friend (at left). I've since make one other baby quilt, when I took a class on paper piecing in 2007. Both of these can be seen in my Picasa Web Album:

Quilting

In the fall of 2006 I decided to give knitting another try and took a class. Fortunately for me, the instructor looked at how I was holding the needles and said, "Oh, you'd do better with Continental knitting than American..." She was right, it suits how I already hold yarn from years and years of crocheting, and I've been happily knitting every since.

And what that doesn't cover, no one needs to know! (It's questionable whether anyone besides me needs to know this muc. *grin*)