Creative Insommnia

Ahem, well, its been a busy week. I haven't had time or energy to cook dinner (sorry KoA recipe challenge, I'll make it up to you this week!). Its also been my first week back to work for a full week since the holidays. Oh, and I'm training my new manager. 

But on Friday our house passed city inspection, which is a huge weight off my shoulders and leaves me with what seems like limitless free time. A delusion, I know, but one I'm perfectly willing to nurture. 

Which brings us to Saturday morning and insommnia. A rare thing for me but I take advantage of it when I can. I woke up at 4 am and tossed and turned for half an hour before giving up. 

That's how we got:

I have sliced up the remaining bargello fabric and arranged them in the correct order to make two matching placemats.

And:

This blanket for my cousin is now about 50% put together. FYI, I'd much rather sew than crochet and I doubt I'll be taking on more projects like this once I finish the four that I've started. Yes, I started four of these "quilt crochets." Oops.

And a new innovation (for me at least) is my scrap bucket, which has usurped my trash can next to my cutting table. I've found that as money gets tighter, I'm looking to reuse anything I can, so now instead of just keeping the usable pieces, I'm even saving the shreds of trimmings. I think I can use them for stuffing in draft dodgers and whatnot.

A new toy came in the mail this week. I haven't gotten a chance to play with it beyond seeing how it works, but the OmniAngle Wedge Ruler, which does six different angles (9 degrees to 45 degrees), is now in my rotary cutting ruler collection. This ruler will allow me to make nifty quilts such as this one:
 

By Completely Blocked

And last but not least, I spent a couple hours goofing around with Electric Quilt 7. I really really really want to be able to make it do non-traditional block shapes but I'm running into a couple problems. I picked up a book of tutorials that should help. I'm hoping the fact that I can't make the program function as I want it to is a lack of knowledge and not a fault of the program. After all, this is supposed to be Adobe Photoshop for Quilts.  The patterns I'm trying to use with EQ7 are from a great book called "Simply Amazing Spiral Quilts" by RaNae Merrill.

I plan to make several of these in the future. It comes with a CD for printing paper piecing patterns and EQ5/EQ6 templates in addition to full instructions on drawing customer spirals by hand and techniques for properly joining spirals. Check out how intricate these designs are:

I don't know whose designed this quilt. Please contact me if it is yours.

Now part of WiP Wednesday by Freshly pieced! Check out the current works in progress.