My crafts & creations

I knit and quilt during my spare time. So far I have made six sweaters and I'm working on a couple quilts. My first quilt, a log cabin queen-size, has reached the quilting stage and is languishing there. I find hand-quilting really hard and slow. My second quilt is in the piecing stage. A few years ago I designed a sweater myself for the first time. I found some cool (free) wool and I found a cool stitch pattern. I started making this into a scarf, but Laurie (my sister) suggested it would make a really nice summer sweater. So I told her I would make it into a sweater if she would promise to wear it!

In order to get the right shaping, I made pieces the same size as the pieces which went into a tight-fitting T-shirt I owned. I finished it in time for her birthday, and she loved it. This is me modeling the sweater shortly before I gave it to her.

If you want to recreate this sweater, I could copy down the stitch pattern for you. I didn't write down the pattern as I went along -- I really just shaped the pieces the same way the knitted store-bought top was shaped, and it turned out great. You probably have a different body shape from me and my sister anyway, so you should shape it differently.

I doodled my way into a quilt design the other day. I like it because it will be simple to make, yet has a complex and pleasing overall design. I'd like to do it as a scrappy 9-patch with various different materials, dark materials for the figure and light materials for the background (or vice versa, if I have more darks).

Has anybody ever seen this before or something like it? If not, then I claim the right to name this pattern (as of August 1996): "Nine-Patch Knot" or "Nine-Patch Celtic Knot".

Let me know what you think.

Here are more quilt piecing ideas which may or may not be original, but which I have never seen before. I started with a block, cut the block diagonally into two half triangles, and cut each triangle into three making a block of six parts. Now these six parts can be split into three colour groups in several ways, and when many blocks are put together to form the quilt there are many different possibilities and I haven't started to cover them all. I like the visual effects of these designs -- you can see stars or lines or diamonds or other figures depending on the focus.

If you wanted to do something a little more complicated with many more pieces, you could use a triangular log cabin block as the base (see left). Start with a little right-angled triangle (the grey one in the image). Sew strips around it log-cabin style to make a larger triangle. Sew two triangles together to make a block. I imagine the effects would be a lot like the simpler quilts above, with more subtlety possible in the shading. Once again, many more variations are possible than I have shown here.

Let me know what you think of these ideas too!

Lisa Lippert (to home page)