Sewing and Beyond with Mary Anne Ciccotelli

One saturday in March 2000 (at the beginning of my quilting adventure) Tom had to go to Washington DC for the day so I was on the internet just surfing around. I did a search on QUILTING. My quilting life would be forever changed. I found a mystery quilt that used the squishies and siggies that people had from their Y2K swaps. Well I had no idea what these squishies were but I had LOTS of fabric (of various contents) in the attic. I climbed that ladder with scissors in hand and set out to cut a bunch of stripes from the various fabrics. When Tom returned home and I told him what I was up to he was pretty excited, it was going to be a FREE Quilt. Little did he know what this Free quilt would lead to.

While working on this quilt I wondered what this Y2K swapping of squishies and siggy squares was all about. I went to the computer to find out. Each quilter took 25 fabrics and cut them into 80 – 2 1/2″ (or 3″) squares. You made a package that included one of each of the 25 – 2 1/2″ squares (which when put in an envelop is squishie) and a signature square. You made 80 of these. When you were done swapping you should have 2,000 different 2 1/2″ squares and 80 signature blocks – thus the Y2K swap. There were different sites that people could put a listing on for those that wanted to swap. So, I purchased 25 different 100% cotton fabric and made up my squishies and started to arrange swaps with other online quilters. When the squishies started to arrive it was so exciting. I spent hours sorting the fabrics into light, mediums and darks. I also realized that my knowledge in values what not the greatest and the you get what you pay for.
The FREE quilt was not that great. I ended up putting it away and started working on my Y2K Frenzy quilt (which is also on my UFO list).

After the quilt show this weekend Tom is on board with planning my QQQ Birthday party. I started to make plans of having a panel for each of my decades that I have been alive. I have at least one quilt that I can put in each panel. In brainstorming about this I decided that I wanted to finish this quilt (before I turn 50) so I would have a very visual example of how far my understanding of values has come. I have learned ALOT!!!!! So I pulled out The Free Quilt and started to work on it. I put the restriction on myself that I could only use the stripes of fabric that I had cut from fabric in my attic so long ago. Lot of these fabrics are pretty crazy to be used in quilts.

I do understand value alittle better and even with working with those attic fabrics I have been able to use my understanding of value and make the design stand out alittle more instead of just have a bunch of squares and half-square triangles sewn together. The block on the right (with some color enchancment with crayons) was pieced back in 2000 and the block on the left was pieced yesterday. Still not perfect but much better than what I did back in 2000.

Here is 15 of the 81 blocks that will be in this quilt. You can see part if the design if you squint your eyes. Guess I had better get back to work on this jumbled mess.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 10:05 am and is filed under Quilt: Free Quilt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.