Houses and an invitation

My log cabins are done!

I have loved this pattern forever, and I am so glad to have finally had the chance to learn how to make log cabins. I used the piecing instructions in Modern Log Cabin Quilting, by Susan Beal, which seems like a wonderful book so far. One day I will make a full log cabin quilt.

And now the invitation part: if you are in the Seattle/western Washington area, you can see the quilt I'm making as part of the Lo-Fi Festival at Smoke Farm (about 1 hour's drive from Seattle) on Saturday, August 12 13 (I'm so excited I can't count!). Please come! It's gonna be smokin'.

If you're not in the area, I can promise many more pictures and thoughts about the quilt, its design, the process, and just in general way more than you probably want to know about the event, here on this blog sometime during the third week of August.

Ok?

A gross of geese

Yep, 144 of them to be exact.

(Each of those piles above contains four geese. I used this tutorial for piecing flying geese four at a time, and it is GENIUS. Seriously, I cannot imagine what I would have done if I'd had to piece them all individually and sew all those seams on the bias.)

Sewing these made me think a lot about muscle memory and how practice really does make perfect when it comes to making things with your hands. That's fascinating to me. I started analyzing some of it--the way I learned exactly how far to put the needle into the fabric in order to avoid the fabric pulling once I started sewing; or the paradoxical insight that watching the needle wouldn't give me an accurate seam, I had to just focus on a tiny corner of the presser foot instead. But there's more, I'm sure, that I haven't articulated but that my body has noticed.

I've done a lot of sewing over the past couple of weeks (not just these geese, but a couple other projects that I'll share in a bit), and I can see that I've gotten a lot more skilled, which mostly means faster and more precise with my seams. It's really glorious.

Next up: a quartet of log cabins!