More to learn, always...A tutorial.

This chard, besides being tasty, looked interesting to me today, like a piece of flesh or an organ. (yikes, that sounds kind of morbid.) But an interesting thought--veins in a leaf--veins in a heart. Homology in the universe-- Talk amoungst yourselves...
My village is coming along. I pieced together the middle piece last night, after it had been laying on the design wall begging to be dealt with. I decided to take out a house that I was feel ill towards and I made the light one on the end, and finally I felt that it could be sewn together. I am not totally happy with the edging that I put on. I think that it needs to be spruced up. I love the print of the fabric and the neighborhood has so many bias edges, that I thought that it needed to be "gated" before I left it to hang for much longer. I think now my study of wonky houses needs to continue...I am going to make a bunch more of the "sub-urban" houses around the outside and cobble them all together somehow.

We will see what happen. This is the MOST experimental I have been with my quilting. This is not going to be my masterpiece (Not that I am ready to make a masterpiece, I find that I am freer to try different things if I state that at the outset.) This is going to just be a exploratory large quilt, so that I can see what I can do if I am not trying to make some thing look "a certain way"--I am not sure if I am explaining myself properly--But I tend towards a "product-minded" out some rather than a "process-minded" outcome (could I get more analytical?? Please!) This project has really made me excited about the process of quilting. I have been working on this piece in fits and starts, letting it rest when I haven't been able to figure out where to go or when I have felt frustrated with my skills.

Making the pink house in my swap quilt (if you want to see how it was received you can look here.) helped me make something that was more "pretty" and increased my confidence so that could continue with this neighborhood quilt... We will just have to see... For our tutorial today:

Changing rotary cutter blades.

1)Change blades often, it reduces wrist fatigue when cutting through multiple pieces of fabric. A sharp blade also decreases the incidence of a wavery line when you are cutting over multiple seam allowances. 2)Have care when reassembling the rotary cutter with the new SUPER sharp blade. If it falls, even from a short distance, it will slice ANYTHING, your finger, the door in your growing neighborhood....ANYTHING.

3)Be prepared, when the door gets sliced, to not flog yourself too terribly. Remember there are no accidents, only (re)design OPPORTUNITIES!! Yeah me! At least it wasn't my finger??

JMB