It struck me this morning, as I was thinking about the crazy quilt block I need to make for my stitching group, that I should invite y'all to join me on this adventure! This would be a very simple, very s-l-o-w stitch-a-long.
If you've listened to my most recent episode, you already know the backstory to this. In a nutshell, I've started meeting with a couple of quilty friends who are also embroidery enthusiasts and we've decided to start working on crazy quilt blocks. We're not swapping or putting them all together into a single quilt or anything; we're each just making our own blocks and then bringing them to our coffee shop meet-ups to work on the embroidery while we're together. We are, however, swapping some fabrics and threads with one another to help augment our stashes.
I'm also using it as an opportunity to finally do Allie Aller's Crazy Quilt class on Craftsy;* I've owned the class for a long time and have watched it before, but never made the time to actually do a crazy quilt. So my first few blocks will be based on her techniques in the class.
Our blocks are supposed to be 8" finished which, handily enough, turned out to be the same size as the ones in Allie's class. Convenient, that. I'm using my collection of cross-woven cottons (aka "shot cottons") from Indonesia as my base fabrics though I'll be throwing a lot of scraps into the mix.
So, if you'd like to play along, we're aiming to have our first block done (just made, not fully embroidered) by Saturday, December 12. Leave a comment here if you're interested in joining in a crazy-quilt stitch-along--if there's a few of us, I'll set up a Flickr group for us to share our pics-in-progress! Maybe I'll throw a give-away in there somewhere along the way. Can you tell I haven't really thought this through in any formal way yet? I just wanted to invite y'all in on the fun!
I've got some crazy quilt resources to recommend, too, if you're interested.
Books:
- Allie Aller's Crazy Quilting: Modern Piecing and Embellishing Techniques for Joyful Stitching
- Quilting...Just a Little Bit Crazy: A Marriage of Traditional and Crazy Quilting, by Allie Aller and Valerie Bothell (I don't own this one but one of my friends bought it at Joann's and is raving about it. I suspect I'll end up with it myself eventually.)
- Foolproof Crazy Quilting by Jennifer Clouston. (This was recommended highly by one of my podcast listeners so I've ordered it but, as of this writing, haven't received it yet. Love the "stitch maps" feature, though, so it does look like it'll be great help! (Later update--I've now received this book and love it! Her CQ patterns are hexagons which is a neat twist. I won't be doing that, but I do like all the inspiration about stitching and combining stitches and such. This will be an excellent resource.)
Blogs on embroidery or crazy quilts
- Mary Corbet's Neeble n' Thread. This is the go-to blog for embroidery.
- Pintangle by Sharon B. She also sells templates for Crazy Quilt stitches to help you marking designs if you'd like.
- Colour Complements blog and store by Lorraine. I already talked about her a little bit in this post--I'm a fan.
And I now have a Crazy Quilt board on Pinterest that one of my stitchy friends and I collaborate on.
(*As a Craftsy affiliate, using this link helps support my podcast and blog. Thank you!)