Crumb Blocks Find a Home

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Norma Hanson

I had a large pile of crumb blocks that desperately needed to find a quilt home. These blocks have been sitting on the shelf in my studio for years collecting dust. As we all know, blocks on a shelf do not do much for warming a body or soul.

So, recently, I took that stack of 40 crumb blocks off the shelf and transformed them into two large lap size quilt tops. (62″ x 74″).

At one point I had all 40 blocks sewn together into one large quilt top without sashing and cornerstones. I wasn’t happy with the chaotic look of that top and so I picked out the seams and stacked the blocks back on the shelf. The blocks sat for a few more years without being touched because of the memories invoked by all that reverse sewing that I did!

Each crumb block is pieced together from 4 smaller, 6″ square crumb blocks. There is everything in these blocks–nine patches collected from a guild nine patch block exchange many years ago, scraps of fabric from leftover quilts made for Christmas, Valentine’s, Easter, floral, and other themed quilts. These quilt tops are truly a trip down memory lane. It always surprises me how much emotion and memories can be triggered by looking at the scraps of fabric in one of these quilts.

Fabric requirements for each quilt:

20 crumb blocks – 11.5″ square

Sashing – 34″ WOF cut into 17 – 2″ wide strips, subcut into 49 – 11.5″ strips

Border – 35″ WOF cut into 7 strips – 5″ wide

Backing – 4 meters

Nine Patch Path Leftovers

Posted on November 11, 2007 by Norma Hanson

This is a small quilt that I finished in October but forgot to post about. This quilt was made from scraps left from a much larger project. The larger project was Nine Patch Path and was finished and given to my MIL on May 2, 2007 .

I love using up all the last little quilt bits and making something useful out of them. Even the batting used in this project was made from leftovers pieced together from many larger projects.

Customer Quilt – Uneven Nine Patch Quilt

Posted on July 30, 2007 by Norma Hanson

This is a customer quilt that I recently finished. I am always on the lookout for quilt designs that can be converted quickly into interesting quilts. It seems these days that the time I have available to work on my own quilts is less and less. I don’t have the time to devote to those heirloom quilts right now. There are many bloggers out there making donation quilts for one of the many needy organizations and so I thought you might enjoy looking at another idea.

This Uneven Nine Patch or Puss in the Corner block is very simple construction–5 1/2″ square center, surrounded by 2″ squares and 2″ strips for a finished size of 9 1/2″. (Please note that measurements are finished sizes, not cut sizes.)

This quilter set the blocks together with 2″ sashing strips and cornerstones and finished the quilt off with a 2″ inner border and a 5″ outer border.

The fabrics in this quilt definitely add interest to an other wise simple quilt block, but the formula works.

Machine Quilting

Posted on March 10, 2007 by Norma Hanson

Last Saturday at our guild workshop, I offered to help Kathy with her machine quilting. I brought along some of my smaller quilts to demonstrate that there is a lot you can do to machine quilt your quilts with your domestic sewing machine (DSM) and your walking foot.

Kathy commented that she should be writing down the ideas. No need to make notes, these pictures are posted for you, Kathy.

This first quilt is a rail fence miniature. As long as the curves or arcs are gentle, they can be accomplished quite nicely with a walking foot and there is no need to drop the feed dogs and wrestle with controlling the stitch length and moving the quilt at a steady speed while stitching in free motion.

This quilt was marked with a blue marking pen using the edge of a glass to make the arcs across two strips.

This picture shows the closeup of the stitching on the blocks.

This is the back of the same quilt. The scallop design on the border was accomplished with a stencil. Again the curve is gentle and easily accomplished with the walking foot.

The secondary design was not intentional and has the appearance of the apple core block.

The alternate squares in this miniature nine patch were stitched to look like the nine patch blocks–simple straight lines.

I love it when a secondary design that wasn’t part of the original quilt plan emerges in my quilts. When I finished this log cabin quilt and showed it to my husband he declared that he could find the surprise in my quilt–the birds. This quilt was a simple two colour log cabin and there was no intention on my part to arrange the blocks to form four birds in the four corners of the quilt. Further to that, without realizing it, my quilting accentuated the bird image.