I sewed my way through the NBC coverage of the Kentucky Derby this afternoon and have a new frock to show for it. Wanna see?

I used this tutorial from the gals at Presser Foot (read the March archives for the full instructions) and I’m pretty pleased with the results. All the sewing was easy enough for a beginner like me, and there were no hiccups except for that minor roadblock with Signy Husqvarna’s stitch width limitation.

Whoops, should’ve tied that belt a little tighter.

And this is what almost 26 weeks of Minnow looks like, for the record. It made me a little goggle-eyed to realize the other day that if 26 + x = 40, x must be equal to 14. That’s 14 weeks left of just me + Mr. Garter. Not very many at all, and Minnow could even come early. So we seized the day, lit a fire under our own derrieres, and went out to dinner at Toro Bravo, a tasty Spanish-influenced restaurant that our neighbors have been raving about for a year. (It’s right near the hospital where we’ll be delivering, actually. My thoughtful husband offered to trot over and fetch take-out if either of us should feel peckish at a critical moment. Maybe after the baby’s out, honey.) Anyway, I think I could eat bread fried in garlicky olive oil and topped with fromage blanc and sautéed nettles every day.

But I digress. Back to the frock:

I bought this nice linen at Bolt — it felt so soft and cool and summery. But what I really liked about it was its unexpected pretty blue selvage. I know you’re supposed to cut off and discard the selvage, but I couldn’t bear to do this. So I purposely left my selvages a four-inch margin with the idea of using them in the belt and ruffles. Linen already has a bit of a rustic, homespun look, and I thought I’d just play this up by exposing the raw edges. And I’m jolly pleased it worked out as I’d imagined.

I built in some room to grow so I can keep wearing this little number for the next month or six weeks at least, I hope. Maybe the weather will even get warm enough that I can wear it without jeans and a shirt underneath…

There are six blocks to my little quilt for the nieceling. Three of them have large trees, like this:

As I described in the last post, the circular part is pieced in. I sewed the trunk to the bottom of the tree before I set it in and just poked it through to the front, then sewed it down as a last step to finish the block. From the back, it looks like this:

I’ve been on kind of a sewing binge. I hope after the weekend I’ll have a finished dress/tunic to show you. My binge may also have included some fabric purchases. I may have discovered the rabbit hole that is Glorious Color. (Why yes, I do covet the Liberty assortments. Do you think I could register for one, you know, for the baby?) But with spring busting out all over, how could I resist these?

Hmm, WordPress has once again managed to desaturate my photos. Imagine these brighter!

Some of these, at least, are going to become ducky little Oliver + S garments. If my sewing skills hold up, that is. (I had a small tantrum over the fact that my sewing machine has a maximum stitch width of 5mm and is therefore unable to sew a zigzag stitch over (but not into) a piece of quarter-inch elastic. I called the sewing machine store to find out if there was some magical way to sew a longer zigzag that I was missing, but there wasn’t. I actually tried manually shifting the whole piece back and forth between every stitch, but this was too ludicrous for words. Finally I pulled up my socks, thought through the problem, and used the other kind of zigzag that makes several stitches on each pass, having carefully stretched and pinned the elastic ahead of the needle. It turned out fine.)

One evening last week I was puttering about with quilt bits at the dining table (which sees dining only when there’s company, I’m ashamed to say… general-purpose work table would be a more accurate name for it, as it is currently covered in quilting supplies, leftover jetsam from our tax preparation, a vase of anemones and tulips that are beginning to drop petals, a friend’s novel draft, sundry medical devices, and goodness knows what else) when my eye was caught by a glow at the window.

A real photographer might have stood a chance at capturing the beauty of the last light slipping beneath the rain clouds to gild the tulip tree. I wish I could give you the peachy russet and ochre glow.

I love this hundred-year-old queen of the neighborhood, with her graceful branches and proud stature, her distinctive four-lobed leaf and outlandish flower. Even her name is beautiful: Liriodendron. She isn’t a true poplar, but she’s partly behind my rather arbitrary decision that my newly unvented quilt blocks are poplars.

This is only a dummy block to make sure I was getting the hang of the technique; the real blocks are more visually stimulating and I’ll show them to you soon because on the whole they’re pleasing me. But actually I like this scrapwork dummy enough that I may make it eleven or fourteen companions to produce a more sedate version of my little niece’s Poplar Blocks. I had planned to do this quilt with appliqué, but I had concerns about how my little hand-stitches would hold up to the repeated washings a baby quilt is likely to require. Just at the most felicitous time, some ladies in a local fabric shop mentioned Dale Fleming’s “six-minute circle” technique for piecing circles, and I thought I could easily adapt it to make my tree shapes. They take me longer than six minutes. The first one took forty, and I’d guess the following blocks have taken fifteen or twenty per tree. But it’s a darn sight faster than hand-sewing is for me and really should be sturdier. And I get to use a glue stick, which just makes me chortle. I have derided the glue stick as an inferior form of stickum since grade school, and here it’s exactly what you need.

I had a productive Saturday and the piecing for the blocks is almost half finished. I also managed time to take a class on encaustic wax painting from one of my favorite eighth graders (she’s been studying the art form all year for her independent project, a graduation requirement at our school) and to throw a couple of skeins of wool into a Kool-Aid dye bath to improve their color. That’s three new art forms for me in one day! Whew! And sure enough I woke up on Sunday with no energy and had to take a long afternoon nap again. Some days I feel so vigorous that I just want to make the most of it, but then I have to pay the piper. C’est la vie enceinte, I guess.

I’ve spent the past five days under the thumb of an ugly cold, not much good for anything but lolling on the couch with my box of Kleenex and countless mugs of tea. I’ve read about 140 pages of Wuthering Heights, watched the Pride and Prejudice miniseries for the umpteenth time, and I’ve finished sewing the binding for the baby quilt I started last summer. See?

This is the slapdash log cabin I named Satsuki (for the girl in “My Neighbor Totoro”). I finished the top months ago, then realized that the eight-point stars I wanted to machine quilt over each block were going to cause a problem.

If you don’t quilt from the center of the whole quilt, you tend to get bunchiness somewhere. For me, that was going to be in the sashing between blocks. I was too wedded to my eight-point stars to change my mind, and not feeling fastidious enough to make the quilting process much more complex by sewing the parts of the six stars on the interior of the quilt first. I wanted to just sew one whole star at a time, block by block, so that’s what I did. Like the rest of the quilt, the stars are intentionally free form. I made no attempt to align the points from block to block, and I let them be lopsided because the bright center squares aren’t really in the center of each block.

Sure enough, the bunchy sashing happened exactly as predicted. So I created a fix and pretended it was a design element.

Yep, I used red embroidery thread to whipstitch up the center of the sashing, gathering and securing the excess fabric in a pleat.

If you want to make a quilt like this yourself, you’ll need a yard of fabric for the back (I had enough excess in my yard to also make the small squares that link the sashing strips from the backing fabric), a yard of flannel for the batting, five fat quarters in neutral fabrics (mine looked very quiet in their bundle but livened up considerably once I was sewing them) for the log cabin blocks and the outer border (this was exactly enough; I had hardly any fabric left over), about a third of a yard of neutral sashing fabric, and small amounts of leftover brights for the block centers and binding. Start with a 2″ square of your bright fabric, then start snipping scraps of the neutrals at random to fit around it. I cut every piece with scissors as I was ready to attach it, and I let the strips be variable widths so the whole thing would be rustic and cattywampus. Don’t measure anything, but keep working around and around until it looks like you’ve got a square about a foot wide. When you’ve made six blocks, square them all up to 12″. Cut seventeen 2″ x 12″ strips for the sashing and twelve 2″ squares for the small squares linking the sashing strips. Assemble them around the six blocks and sew all together. Then cut the remaining neutral fabrics into 4″ strips of variable lengths and piece them together in lengths sufficient to log cabin them around the quilt to form the outer border. Make the quilt sandwich with the backing and the flannel, then draw eight-point stars (as you’d see in a compass rose) radiating from the center of each block to its edge and corners (don’t quilt into the sashing). Machine quilt around the center square and along the lines for the star you’ve drawn. You’ll need two hanks of embroidery thread to whipstitch the pleats; just pinch up the center of the loose fabric in the sashing and whipstitch from the center of one of the small sashing-linking squares (these must have a name, right?) to the next. Let the center of that little square stay loose and poofy. Repeat in all seventeen of the sashing strips. Cut 2″ strips of variable lengths from your scraps of brights for the binding and attach it in the usual way. (I like the directions in Bend-the-Rules Sewing for the Lap Quilt for bindings.) Et voila! A cute baby or lap quilt that makes you feel terribly creative and folk artsy and doesn’t task your patience for fussiness or accuracy. It’s liberating, I promise you.