Today's Trend and Tutorial - Spider Web Blocks

Lately I've noticed quite a few spider web blocks on modern quilting blogs. Surprisingly, this block has been around for decades.

Jacquie Gering of Tallgrass Prairie Studio created a selvage version. Shucks! I was a hoarder of epic proportions before I sighted this darling piece. Selvages were one of the few things I felt like I could throw away without fearing remorse. So much for that.

The Sew Mama Sew blog has a tutorial here.

I love Aneela Hoey's watercolor version, and not just because of her fabulous fabrics!

I've written some instructions, complete with pictures shown below, for your benefit. 



Today's Trend - Swoon

Swoons, Swoons, everywhere! These generously-sized beauties keep cropping up wherever I look. It's no wonder. For those of us who keep collecting fat quarter bundles and appreciate the fact that the larger the block, the fewer of them you need to make, it's a great fit.

The pattern is here:

There's even a Quilt Along on Flickr here with over 1,200 members.

I love the fabrics selected by Melissa of Ms Midge.

Tula Pink's Salt Water collection is crush-worthy, so I can't resist the Swoon pictured on Everyday Fray.

Ah ha! I have made a discovery from the past thanks to the Little Miss Shabby blog. The swoon block is mighty similar to the historical Jewels in a Frame block here and the Star of Bethlehem blocks here and here.

There's even a Flickr group here.

Book Review - The Perfect Apron

Wandering around Anthropologie's kitchen section, eyeing the pretty aprons, I thought to myself, "You can make that." Never you mind that I've never made an apron before. Well, one thing led to another, and I found myself accumulating oodles of girly food fabrics: the mostly pink kind with cupcakes, modern-colored teapots, forks, chickens with chef hats, and so on and so forth. You get the idea. Once I gathered a bin full of fabric, I realized I needed a little more information. That led to a brief stop at Amazon and this bit of literature:

I decided to, "start at the very beginning. A very good place to start"(to the tune of Do-Re-Mi). In spite of my fabric accumulation, I was missing a few items. With two kiddos, I stayed home and substituted an item here and there. Not having any pre-made bias binding, I decided to make some myself (noticing a trend here), later concluding that it would have probably saved time and money if I made a trip to Joann's rather than hacking into a perfectly good chunk of Kona at a diagonal for the black binding shown below. Rather than using a ribbon for the waistband, I used fabric as well.

I'm satisfied with the result, though the apron angles outward a little more on my postpartum midsection than it does on the skinny domestic gal shown in the picture. I interpreted the directions in a few places where I wasn't quite certain. I'm not sure it they would have made more sense to someone with more seamstressing experience or not. In any event, I'd like to try making more aprons.