Wednesday, August 19, 2020

Starting Dot Dot Dot Quilt


Two weeks ago, Hurricane Isaias came near enough to us to take out our electrical power.  With no electricity from late Tuesday morning to early Friday evening, I had to abandon my machine sewing project and turned instead to cutting out circles for my future Dot Dot Dot quilt (from the pattern by Laundry Basket Quilts).

Earlier, I purchased a 2" circle template made out of acrylic from Paper Pieces.  It has a quarter inch seam allowance added and is handy for cutting out the fabric circles.  Thinking the cutting would be tedious and not in any hurry to complete this quilt, I planned to cut circles from fabric as I was using it for its original project.  However, being unable to use my favorite power tool, I began pulling bins of fabric from storage and cutting instead.  



The pattern requires 440 circles appliqued to the background; I have about 100 cut to date, mostly from my stash of purple (minimal), yellow (moderate) and blue (numerous) fabrics.  I want to do the rainbow arrangement like the original quilt shown on the pattern but am realizing my fabric stash is not ideal for this purpose.  First, many fabric prints don't lend themselves to this project.  Each dot needs to read as a single color so those that are multi-color prints, or two colors that aren't side-by-side on the color wheel (like red and blue), neutral colors like gray and brown, pastel or faded colors, and low volume prints won't work.  Second, I have very little purple and next to no orange in my stash.  

I'd like to participate in a fabric swap for making this quilt.  Are any of you interested?  My idea is to trade 75-100 2.5 inch squares of fabric suitable for the dots.  I have an abundant stash of blues and reds and quite a bit of yellow while I'm especially in need of orange and purple.  If three or four of us swapped together, it would increase our options for this quilt nicely, and I think this amount could be mailed conveniently in a regular business envelope.   If you'd like to participate, leave a comment here or email me.  

That brings me to another topic:  comments.  A few months ago, I was receiving so many spam comments that I switched to moderating comments so I could easily delete those that detract from the topic here.  Over the past few weeks, the spam has gotten worse.  For each legit comment from a quilting reader, I receive about 10 comments that are sexually explicit and two or three trying to sell bitcoin  or something else sure to be a scam.  Moderation allows me to delete these comments so blog readers never see them, but I'm wondering, do those of you with your own blogs have the same issue?  If yes, do you know of anything more to do about it? 


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8 comments:

  1. You made good use of your no power days. Having an acrylic template keeps your circles from wobbling. I've had trouble with the spam as well. I don't know why there's such a problem now nor how to stop it. It's disturbing.

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  2. I'd love to swap, although I'm not sure that I have many oranges and purples in my stash, I'll have to check! I would like to do one as well, but not sure which color direction I would like to go. I'll think on that for a bit!

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  3. The Akismet plug in does a good job mixing spam comments.

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  4. Akismet does a good job on blocking spam comments on my wordpress blog. My email is what's getting hit by spam again after it seemed to slow down during virus shutdowns.

    good luck on the exchange - sadly right now derecho cleanup is so high on my priorities I dare not join :-(

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  5. OMG...didn't know that Blogging also had issues and wow, not fun Cathy. What a pain and sorry to hear. Enjoy reading my bloggs and would be disappointed if I were not able to read these blogs. Sorry for some stupid people.

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  6. I get so much JUNK and some sexual stuff, that I block the sender. I use AOL and I have quite a list of naughty people who are in the corner and now blocked. It's disgusting.

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  7. I admire your resiliency. My extended family in NJ also lost power. I hope you didn’t lose much refrigerated items. I went to Sandy Hook on Monday. So relaxing at the shore. You made Good. progress in this Isaias dot quilt!

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  8. This is not spam, however it is a photo of my husband. I don't have a google account so I'm stuck with this.
    I also started my version of Dot, Dot, Dot, but am using Wonder Under to adhere the dots. I made an 18" pillow with the Dot, Dot, Dot and it really came out cute.
    Good luck with your project and happy sewing,
    Robin Elaine

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