My Northern Studio

My Otsego Lake quilt (or at least some pieces of it) have come home.  I've set up my "quilting studio" in my cabin on the lake for a 10-day one-person retreat.  It's a bit primitive, but it works (more or less).  You can see the lake through the windows (hence the glare).

Yes, that's a picnic table on the front porch.  The machine is a little Singer, devoid of doo-dads, that I picked up last summer for $89 at Meijer's Thrifty Acres.  I spent the last few days before I came up here cutting the pieces for the five quilt-along blocks that I'm behind on and the block for my Simple Sampler class.  I also brought along my small cutting mat and other tools and a bagful of pieces for the Otsego Lake quilt.

I immediately ran into an unanticipated problem.  The Singer doesn't come with a quarter-inch quilting foot.  I ran a strip of freezer tape over the machine bed to mark out the quarter-inch line, but I couldn't use it to sew the the half-square triangles, since the squares cover up the tape.  After much head-banging I drove back into town to search for a solution.  I found a little half-inch ruler with a marked center line.  You just line the center on the diagonal of the square and mark along either side for your sewing lines.  This puppy is going to get a work-out!

By the way, these are the curtains that inspired the Otsego Lake quilt.  I made these last summer; the light and dark are the fabrics that make up the centers of the two alternating blocks in the quilts.




Below is a close-up of the "woods" fabric.  Now that I see these again, I'm thinking of maybe adding a narrow strip of red above and/or below the woods, to go with the red squares in the quilt.  But that will wait for next summer -- I want to see what the quilts actually look like, first.

 

These are the Otsego Lake blocks...