Thursday, May 24, 2012

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...
 

1 comment:

  1. Love your lakeside retreat - how beautiful! A lovely place to sew...

    ReplyDelete