Hive 4 ~ September 2014 Block Tutorial

What's your name?
I'm Heather and you can find me at Sew You Think You Can Sew.
Where do you live?
I live just a bit north of Santa Fe, New Mexico.  In April, I returned to the US after spending over 5 years living abroad in Vienna, Austria.  It has been quite a transition!

My old view

My new view

Tell us about your family.
We don't have kids, but we have three furry creatures in our new home.

Sherlock the cat

Alice and Cooper after eating the wall

Tell us how you got interested in quilting.
Mom was a brilliant garment seamstress.  Call it rebellion, but I never got into sewing growing up.  Later, I took up knitting and spinning, and slowly began to do some sewing.  I took a Craftsy quilting course and I was hooked!  I'm not sure I would have done it close to mom and her critical eye, but half way around the world it kinda stuck.

How do you organize your fabric stash?

By color.  I finally have a craft room of my very own, but it holds more than just quilting supplies.  I have garment fabrics in here, yarn and fiber.  I also bought myself an industrial machine for some home decorating projects.  I keep scraps in a bin in this same cubby, but my current organizational scheme could definitely use some work.  I've only been here for 3 months, so I think as I use the space the solutions will become clearer.

Who is/are your favorite designers?

In Europe, American fabric lines were hard to come by.  The quilt above was made with a collection from a Swedish designer named Lotta Jansdotter.  I like her stuff a lot.  I'm still learning all the fabric possibilities open to me in the US.

What is the one thing you have learned or wish you knew when you first started quilting?

Color theory is something I am still getting my head around.  My first couple of quilts were a cacophony of color.  Less is sometimes more.

What is your favorite sewing/quilting tool and why should we all go out and buy it?

There have been so many great tools to add to my list on this blog.  Me, I have to be a bit unorthodox and tell you about a trick I found using something you probably all have in your house right now.  You know when your cutting surfaces and ironing board get all fuzzed up with little threads and bits of fabric?  I use this and clean it all off.

I traveled a lot for my job and probably had 10 of these lying around.  They clean up so nicely.

Who's your favorite fictional character and why?

Is it possible I don't have a favorite?

The tutorial......

OK, so I am a bit of a geek and I found this cool art on Kickstarter.  This guy actually thought up the idea of putting household chemicals on polaroid film, then exposing them to 24,000 volts.  I bought two prints of similar colors that look like this:

Phil Stearns -- Retinal Pigment Epithelium

This will be the palette for the blocks.  The shades are aqua, orangy yellow, purple and pink.  The block I would like made is a free pattern on Craftsy.  There is some paper piecing, but not too much, I promise.  I'd like the background to be white.  I don't know exactly how it will all turn out, so have fun and mix it up as you wish.