New Project--Mile A Minute Quilt

The small scraps

Our Clark County Quilters group is holding virtual Saturday Workshops every Saturday in January. Pre-COVID, attendees would have selected one or two classes from a list of about a dozen offerings. Participants would have driven to the class location to attend the classes. 

Saturday workshops is one of my favorite activities that the guild supports because it is when members teach other members. It looked like COVID would cause this activity to be canceled; but, the workshop chair decided to try holding virtual workshops. Cost for the classes is $5 for a half day and $10 for a full day. (If we were meeting at the church, the fees would have been $10 for a half day and $20 for a full day.)

There are nine workshops scheduled. Two half day workshops are scheduled for for each Saturday except for the last Saturday of the month. On the last Saturday, the class is all day. For the first time, it is possible to take all of the classes. I enrolled in all the classes except the one that I am teaching! 

Yesterday, the morning class was "Mile A Minute Quilt." It is a great project to use a lot of scraps. Ada did a great job describing the steps and demonstrating the technique to the 30 of us who tuned in to Zoom to learn. I originally had pulled a pack of batik strips from a guild exchange long ago and the leftover green batik fabric from the Skittles & Sherbet project as my scraps.

The small pieces

After listening to Ada's introduction and Rizza's question about triangles, I got to thinking about the batik leftovers from "Into the Depths." Rizza was one of the workshop participants. Had I been at the in person workshop, I would not have been able to use those scraps. 

The process reminded me of making a log cabin block. I first pieced parts of some of the larger scraps with a 2 1/2 inch strip from my batik exchange. Then I took apart the smaller scraps and trimmed them to a useable segment. I stitched the segments together. Once I had a length, I stitched it to the batik strip. When I started to add the third round, I used the second batik strip. What I found interesting was how even the edges became because cutting consisted of slicing the pieced sections. 

Pointy parts pieced--parts for section two 

The next step, was to cut the fabric into squares. My goal was to see how large a section I could make from the scraps and two batik strips. I made a piece of fabric about 12 by 16 inches. I'm not sure what size square I will cut or if I will even cut squares. I plan to piece a few more "sections" and listen to the quilt before I make cutting decisions. Stitching 2 1/2 inch strips feels to me like stitching with a quarter yard of fabric. I've been sewing with strings and pieces smaller than 2 1/2 inches for months!

Rizza's question about how to piece around a triangle got me to thinking about the points that I was cutting away. Perhaps, I should piece a couple together to add more variety to the piecing. So I pieced some of the points together. I liked what happened so I plan to piece more of those in the future. 

Leftover blocks may become a border

It was a fun class. Had I started with larger scraps--these are parts of one and a half inch strips, I would have likely made actual blocks like others in the class. I'm happy with my progress.

Included in the scraps were a number of blocks that I didn't use in the original quilt. Perhaps, these will make a border. There are also some larger pieced chunks which I might be able to use. For the time being, I put all the scraps, my progress and the directions back into the project box. I need to work on a couple of other quilts first!

The afternoon class, with an attendance of 17 participants, was a lecture about how to take children's artwork into thread. It was informative. Even though I have taken a couple projects from artwork to quilts, I picked up a few tips. Judy shared fun examples of children's artwork with cats as the subject matter. (She is a cat lover.) Judy was a great speaker. She made the two hours pass like it was 15 minutes! Even better, I got to know a couple members which is another reason why I like the Saturday workshops so much!

If we had been able to meet in person, the maximum class size is about 20 people. A number of the rooms are small so some classes are limited to less than 10 people. It was great not packing up the machine and class supplies. I also like having classes through the month. I hope the program is successful enough to hold virtual workshops after we can meet in person.

Finish at the end of the session

I'm working on my first quarter goals. I'm planning to make monthly and weekly goals. Even though I have goals, I rarely make much progress. It takes me longer than I think for projects. Perhaps, if I divide the the work in achievable segments, I'll make better progress!

I'm linking this post with Oh Scrap at "Quilting Is More Fun Than Housework."

Regarding COVID:

Worldwide: 84.7M confirmed; 1.84M deaths

United States: 20.5M confirmed; 350Kdeaths

Oregon: 116K confirmed; 1,503 deaths

Parts of the world and parts of the United States continue to be locked down because of increasing number of COVID cases. In Oregon, for the last four days, there have been more than 1000 new reported cases each day. This week, there was a severe allergic reaction to a health care worker who had the Moderna vaccine in Eastern Oregon. The worker had to be hospitalized. I know of some health care workers who have received the vaccine. Some received the Phizer vaccine and some have received the Moderna vaccine. All reported sore arms; but none reported other side effects. Since December 13, 38,698 people have received the vaccine. About 26,000 doses were the Phizer vaccine.