My First Tumbler Quilt! (Not Tumbling Blocks)

First, in case you are as confused as I was, a "Tumbler" quilt is  completely different from a "Tumbling Blocks" quilt! 

"Tumbling Blocks" are made from 60 degree triangles and diamonds, and wind up with a 3D effect. They're great fun to look at, but technically can be a bear to make. I don't even remember how I pulled off the blocks below, from a Tokyo-themed quilt I made in the 90s, called "Sushi in the Sky with Diamonds." 

I must have had a much higher tolerance for mitering in those days. On that same quilt, I also threw on some hollow tumbling blocks, carrying little passengers cut from Japanese fabric. 

But in three decades of quilting I never made a much easier-looking "Tumbler" quilt, whose patches are shaped like - guess what kind of glassware? 

Until now! Here it is. Made as part of my emergency response to the massive baby tsunami happening among my family and friends since the Covid era began.

What made this quilt possible was a wonderful craft thrift shop, Remainders, in Pasadena, California, which has every kind of fiber art notion from the past 50 years. Remainders sells them at such reasonable prices that if I don't like it, I just donate it back to them to sell again! It's like a lending library of sewing stuff!

Specifically, I found this:

It's Marti Michell's "One-derful One-Patch Templates" They're $23 new at Joanns, but half that price at other retailers (which makes the price only a few dollars more than I paid at Remainders.) 

You may ask, "Why would I need to buy a Tumbler template when I can perfectly well cut a tumbler shape out of a Cheerios Box?" And I asked myself the same question. Then I tried it, and my newly-educated answer is, "This template rocks!" 

First, it's thick acrylic, so unlike a cereal box, you won't trim it with each piece you cut. Second and more mysteriously compelling: The template has these two little jogs in the lower outer corners, on the wider end. Look closely at that bottom right edge in the photo above - the template is not quite straight there. 

When you cut the shape with these slight extra angles, they piece together much more cleanly than if they didn't have the extra angles. If you understand why, please explain it to me!

UPDATE! Several alert readers have explained it to me - Tumblers have strange little dog ears. Reader mary greene (who doesn't capitalize her name) sent me to this tutorial by Nancy Zieman. If you scroll down to the section titled "Construction," the third photo below that subtitle, you see the tiny dog ear on the bottom right that's created if you don't have a shaped template. Because Michell's template has you trim that first, the pieces' alignment is less confusing! By the way, mary has a hilarious blog, where her favorite post is "Two Dog Shirts for 50 Cents," here. 

I also found many of the fabrics for this quilt from Remainders,  of course supplemented them with pieces from my own exhaustive, exhausting, library of novelty prints.  

I debated whether to include popcorn (upper left in photo below), since it's a baby choking hazard, but hopefully by the time the baby is old enough to comprehend a picture of popcorn, they will be old enough to safely eat some. Also, the parents could lie and claim they're floating yellow teddy bears.

Every baby quilt should include mooses (above left).

Below, the back. I like putting fabrics that I don't have the heart to cut up into small pieces on the back.

I decided to give the back an astrophysics, fish and pet theme. 

My great debate with myself with this quilt was whether to leave the sides zig-zag, or cut the edges even, thereby losing half of each outer side row. And speaking of pets, my grand-cat assisted me in scrutinizing this important issue closely.

I finally decided to leave the zigzag sides. I cut the binding from bias. At the four corners, I turned the bias the exact same way as for a regular 90 degree corner. And for the gentle ins and outs on the sides, there was no need to take the quilt out of the machine. Just stop on each outermost and innermost point, needle down, and swivel to the next direction, turning the bias along with the rest of the quilt. It's surprisingly easy! 

Tumbler quilts do take a little more time than square-based baby quilts - but with a sturdy-yet-mysterious Marti Michell template, they're relatively fast and a lot of fun. (No financial affiliation). I'll hold onto my new favorite template for a while and see what babies come along next! 

Celebrate Catastrophe! Turn UFO's into FrankenQuilts!

Presenting my new FrankenQuilt! 

Yes, sort of like that, except in fabric!

It's stitched together from old body parts stashed in my UFO* cupboard, a freakin' scary place. Said cupboard contains 25 years worth of aesthetic outrages, piling up since I started quilting.

I normally avoid this cupboard, to preserve my sanity and self-esteem. Occasionally I squint my eyes and shove things in, slamming the door shut quickly so nothing escapes.

But the demise of my computer forced a confrontation. The computer was behaving so badly that my DH had to send it to a computer meditation retreat, where it contemplated the ways it had wronged me, and gradually repented.

Without my computer, endless hours yawned ahead. I was in the middle of several writing projects that I couldn't do on my phone. I was creatively stuck on a major quilt.  I tried, how you call it, "vacuuming the house," but that only took a half hour.

So I was forced to the cupboard. Among the better offerings was this top. (Pretend it's not quilted).

It's made up entirely of wedge-shaped pieces, cut circa 2001, when I was obsessed with Marilyn Doheney's wedge rulers. My kids were little and I made a bunch of hyperactive medallion quilts for gifts and our preschool's auctions. Here's one I donated:

The medallion includes chopped flamingos, tigers, zebras, alligators, manatees, and polka dots....

I liked that so much I made another one to keep....

When these and others like them were done, I had a thick stack of leftover wedges, like this: 

They sat on the UFO shelf for many years. Somewhat recently - maybe within the last three years - I sewed them into another medallion, 

and raw-edge zigzagged that onto a teal background fabric....(pretend this isn't quilted)....

...plus made four borders out of strip-pieced wedges and solid fabric wedges....

 ...And then restuffed this whole thing back into the cupboard....

...where I found it last week.  Also in the UFO cupboard, I also found a stack of blocks from my much-more-recent hashtag obsession. (i.e. earlier this year).

My tutorial about how to make these blocks is in this blog post.

I decided to lay my spanking new hashtag blocks around my spanking old wedge medallion.  Although the colors didn't match, I kind of liked the effect!  There weren't quite enough hashtag blocks, so I whipped up some more...




...below, a half a hashtag is better (and faster) than none....

Plus some of my original hashtag blocks were insanely boring, so I shattered them....

....and surgically enhanced  others: 

 The border quilting, as you saw in the shots above, was straight-line quilting. The corner blocks were quilted with curly loops. I quilted a sun in the middle....

...and did a whole lot of freemotion wiggling on the teal background....

I think the uneven wedges look like the stitching on Frankenstein's neck! With or without wedges, you can make a Frankenquilt too! Just follow this simple tutorial:

 1. Await a mild catastrophe that forces you away from as many electronic devices as possible. At the very least, your PC should crash. It would also help if your Kindle, cable, and cellphone goes down. However, if your electricity goes down, this won't work, unless you own a hand-crank.

2. Go to your UFO cupboard, grit your teeth, and pull stuff out. Find things that are remotely related, and sew them together. If common sense tries to stop you, explain to it that you are making a charity quilt, or an ottoman quilt, or something that honors the kooky spirit of Young Frankenstein! When it's over, you'll be exhausted but happy!

* UFO=Unfinished Objects. A more euphemistic/positive term is "Works in Process."

Circular Quilts, New and Old

As a quilter for nearly 20 years (!), I have a particular passion for quilted circles, medallions, mandalas, Mariner’s Compasses, radiating stars, kaleidoscopes, and such. Circles make some of the most fascinating quilts, not to mention quilt books and tools  –  so, of course,  I collect ‘em all! Some of my favorite approaches to circular quilts:  

•  I’ve probably made a half-dozen quilts using Marilyn Doheney’s 9-degree circle wedge rulers, including the quilt at the top of this story. With this system, you strip-piece fabrics into sets, then place a wedge-shaped ruler in different positions on the set, and cut out wedges. The design possibilities are so infinite that a quilter named Sheila Finklestein wrote an amazing book called “Magic Quilted Mandalas,” showing a multitude of results that can be achieved by placing wedge rulers like Doheney’s onto striped fabrics – exclusively. If Finklestein had gotten into using multiple fabrics, not just one or two with stripes, the book would have turned into Wikipedia. Using Finklestein's approach, here's the center of a baby quilt I made using a single striped fabric for the central circle:
  

  

• Similarly, Cheryl Phillips’ “WedgeWorks” books use a 15 degree ruler, strip piecing and wedge-cutting at different angles to create satisfying circular stars.
  
• Bethany Reynolds’ bestselling and user-friendly“Stack’n’Whack” approach has quilters using the lines on their clear acrylic rulers to cut wedges. (This is a chuppah/wedding canopy I made using her techniques):

• Gail Garber’s spectacular “Stellar Journeys” book uses wedges which can be created by  paper-foundation piecing, or piecing from templates.
• Ricky Tims’ ‘Kool Kaleidoscope’ approach has quilters strip-piece fabric sets, cut them out with templates, then join sets, to make complex repeating wedges.

• At the top of the complexity and technical challenge scale, there’s Paula Nadelstern, queen of the kaleidoscope, with her incredibly intricate, plastic template-based construction.

• Far at the other end of the precision spectrum, I’ve enjoyed Dianne S. Hire’s book, “QuiltersPlaytime,”  which includes directions for  creating funky imprecise medallions, made with the wedge shapes that are strip-pieced and cut by eye.  

• (I have not yet read, but high on my wishlist are RaNae Merrill’s two books about spiral mandala quilts).

So, speaking as a circular quilt geek, I was pretty darn excited when I received a review copy of C& T’s book “Circle Quilts;Create Dramatic Medallions from Strip-Pieced Rings,” by Colleen Granger.

Like all the quilters named above, Granger is an innovator. She’s come up with a new way to subdivide a circle: Rather than creating wedges that start in the middle and extends to the circle or star’s outer edge, many of her circles are constructed in concentric rings. Each ring consists of repeated paper-pieced arcs. Completed arcs are sewn together to form the entire ring; and consecutive rings are topstitched together, using invisible thread and a small zigzag stitch, to form the medallion.

When rings are laid together, the colors line up to form unique designs. Like the image on the cover, many are angular, high-energy, and very striking, reflected in names like ‘Tornado Alley,’  and ‘Shazam!’ All three have unusual asymmetric lightening-like jagged shapes emanating from the center, some in a spiral. If I’d first come across these quilts at a quilt show, I would probably have stared at them for a long time before finally giving up hope of figuring out how they were done!

The book provides black-and-white drawings of each quilt, which you can color in, with spaces to glue fabric swatches.  The drawings, with their unusual subdivisions, are also works of art in and of themselves; it’s fascinating to look at the drawings and figure out how the color and shape placement in each individual ring relates to the next ring to create new shapes.  

There are also a couple of floral-feeling circle projects, including “Blooming Garden” and “Flower Dance,” which create the illusion of curves, when in fact all the piecing is straight lines.

Another interesting touch is that some the centers are constructed from many pieces. (Rather than just appliquéing one circle in the middle.) There are helpful tips for getting multiple seams to meet neatly at the center.

And there are directions for what Granger calls “power piecing”. The technique is copiously illustrated with photographs, which is a very good thing, because foundation paper piecing can be very confusing!

I’m wild about her ‘Labyrinth’ quilt;  it’s made up of tiny squares, but they’re not cut individually; for this pattern, the quilter makes strip sets, and those are pieced into arcs. She describes the (fun)‘brown bag’ method for randomly choosing strips for this project.

There are plenty of extras. Granger provides directions for finishing a round quilt; or, for setting the circles into a square or rectangular setting. There are also directions for mitering borders, and for four different pieced zig-zaggy borders that reflect the “lightening bolt” feel of the circles.  There’s a ‘Shazam’ pillow project, with instructions for adding piped cording, and installing a zipper (something quilters don’t practice much, so explanations are appreciated.)  There are directions for creating bias and straight cut binding; for making labels, and for creating hanging sleeves for circular and rectangular quilts.

An interesting detail: Granger says that, with her round quilts, “I insert stainless spring steel in my bindings to help hold the quilts round and taut.” I never heard of that before, but she refers the reader to her website www.sewlittletimequilting.com.  There, I found a product called “Quilt Shaper Light," stainless steel that is threaded into the binding to hold the quilt stiff – Pretty interesting!?   

I hope she writes a new book, soon, because I want more! More about how she develops designs, and more quilt patterns too!  

In sum, this book is fun, clear, brilliant and innovative - a worthy addition to the best circular/kaleidoscopic/medallion quilting literature, with excellent, clear directions that confident beginners and advanced quilters can use and enjoy.