Third Saturday of August 2022

For August this year, my guild was encouraged to hang quilts with the theme of Hot August Nights. Not wanting to duplicate what I displayed for the Third Saturday of August of 2021, which had the same theme, I picked two wall hangings with hot colors instead. One has a black background for hot August nights and the other has a white background for hot August days. 

Hot August night quilt
I did not make this quilt but rather picked it up from a vendor at a random quilt show perhaps five or so years ago because my husband, a cat lover, really liked it when he saw it. It measures 37½" x 44½". When we brought it home, he draped it over the computer chair in his office. The cat liked it, too. It does not have a name other than the rather unimaginative Frank's_cat_quilt. It has no blog post associated with it nor did it make its way into any of my annul list of completions.

Hot August day quilt
I made only two blocks in this quilt. The rest I won in one of my guild's block of the month drawings in 2018. I did assembly the 32" x 32" wall hanging though, as described in my 2/5/2019 post. The hot red triangles appear to be tossed about by an occasional cool breeze. This quilt, too, has no name other than the equally unimaginative Quilt_I_assembled_from_blocks_of_the_month. I did complete it in 2020, a year I simply marked by hand with pen in one lower corner opposite my initials in the opposite lower corner.

Interestingly enough, the sewing I did on these two quilts is little to none. That is quite fitting. Since August is so hot, who wants to work hard? Even the backs are kinda hot.

Hang Your Quilt Day
Beginning April 2020, my quilt guild members began a tradition of hanging quilts in the front of their homes on the third Saturday of the month as a source of enjoyment for the community and as a thank you for the essential workers during the pandemic. My initial post about this practice is in my blog post dated 4/22/2020.

Midnight Crossing

I started a brand new quilt out of Moda's All Hallow's Eve fabric line kit, a kit that I'd targeted as a goal for completion in 2022. It appealed because, although it is a seasonal Halloween theme, the color palette is softer than the typical bright orange and stark black of the holiday. The intricacies of the piecing were also an enticement. The pattern is named Midnight Crossing, by Fig Tree & Co.

Each of eight fat quarters makes two blocks. I goofed on my first two blocks from one of the fat quarters. Can you see my mistake in the following photo? I had to rip out and resew three seams in each of eight corners because I sewed the flying geese units on reversed from what they should have been. Possibly I was so focused on orienting the print the same way, I was distracted when joining the flying geese on two sides of the squares. Not a very good start. The honeymoon phase of this new project sure came to an end quickly.

I forged ahead and corrected my error and here are two blocks correctly assembled. Only fourteen left to go. Fortunately the allure of the seven other fat quarters boosted my spirits and encouraged me to continue.

The center X unit was unique to me and fun to assemble, so that also kept me engaged enough to make them in either orange or black. I reversed the pressing direction of the diagonal legs of the X per the pattern directions because I wanted the legs raised rather than depressed. This direction also prevents the seam from showing through the light background. I did press the final vertical and horizontal seams open per the instructions; I rarely do that but in this case it made sense and the crosses lay flat. The following photo shows the front and the back of one center X.

Upon closer inspection, after the soft orange X's were assembled into the centers of four blocks, I noticed that the orientation of the fabric was not consistent in the four legs. I wanted to try to improve that in future X's I made. By pre-laying out the mini-print and paying attention to its orientation, I could unify the direction of the six-petaled dots. I laid out the black squares so that the dots were consistently in rows instead of randomly in rows or columns. Yes, it is a mini-print that reads as a solid, and so, strictly speaking, uniform orientation is not necessary; but it is possible. I added the white squares in the corners as needed, and happily I could generate four X's with uniformly oriented dots. To see the difference, compare the black X's with the previous orange X. It is subtle – subtle enough that I am not going to take apart and re-assemble those X's with non-uniformly oriented dots. I will take extra care for the remaining four X's I have yet to assemble.

So far I have completed six blocks, two of each shown in the following photo and the remainder of the X centers, shown in five stacks of two. I am still enjoying myself. The honeymoon phase still lives on.

Since those X's do resemble railroad crossing symbols, I am keeping the pattern title Midnight Crossing as the working name for this quilt. This name choice might please my ferroequinologist husband.