the original crazy quilt

The whole quilt...almost.

Some pictures to show the amazing details.

There is a feather stitch and a flower stitch in this pic.

Just look at all of the different stitches in this one pic.

The orange block has a flower stitch at the base of it.

A better pic. of the flower stitch.

My mother inherited a crazy quilt from her grandmother Runkle. I remember looking at it as a child and seeing the different embroidery stitches, and wondering how they were done. It intrigued me that you can take different shaped pieces of fabric, and stitch them together and make a beautiful quilt out of them. So I wanted to share pictures of where my inspiration came from to make my own crazy quilt.

Seed Stitch and Double Seed Stitch

Seed stitch is created by knitting one stitch, then purling the next one to the end of the row and the last stitch of the rows is the same stitch you start the next row with.

Double Seed stitch is created my doing two rows of the seed stitch  pattern the same then switching to the row of the pattern.

This now means I have enough blocks to do one complete row!!! Wow, that even surprises me, now I just have to finish some other knitting projects so I can get back to it.

Reverse Stockinette Stitch Stripe

Reverse Stockinette Stitch Stripe.

This is the fifth block I've completed for my quilt. Memorial weekend was spent on the boat at Lake Michigan, and we had a tornado warning. So I gathered my knitting and went to the bathhouse with it, I proceeded to knit through the storm, and meet a lot of women from the marina that I didn't know. They asked me questions about what I was making then later in the weekend would comment how I had finished and started a new block. It was an interesting way to meet different people, and it will be interesting to see what happens as the summer goes on.

Crazy Quilt

Garter Stitch Stripe

This is a Reverse Stockinette Stitch.

I finished two more blocks this weekend for my crazy quilt, and today I decided to count all the blocks I'm getting out the book I'm using it has 49 different stitches. I was planning to make a quilt with 42 blocks...so I'll just make all of the stitches in all the book and make one quilt with all of them. The only stitches I won't use will be more open stitches and combine them with the crocheted blocks and make them as a summer quilt. So I'm happy with the book that I'm using and how much I'll be able to do with just it.

My Crazy Quilt

When starting looking into knitting I bought the book Teach Yourself Visually Knitting by Sharon Turner. Within the pages of the book I found three chapter of basically just different stitches and I felt the best way to really learn to knit would be to start with those patterns and learn them...but I got started with my Homemade Pay-It Forward. Now that I've completed all of those projects and had a broken needle which prevented me from working on my other project, I needed something to do. So I open that book again and realized with all of the different patterns I could basically create a crazy quilt out of these different stitches, and since I want to also take up crocheting I could add those block into this quilt.  I am a person who loves different textures and I know that this quilt will have so many different textures to it.

Garter Stitch

Stockinette Stitch

Now I know it won't be a true crazy quilt since that is made of  fabric scraps, different textures of fabric, but to me it will always be my crazy quilt. My mom then made a comment that with Intarsia knitting I should use those blocks to a baby quilt or toddler quilt, and I then added that I could learn to knit the alphabets and add that to my child's quilt. And with some of the more lacy blocks won't knit well with more solid of the blocks so I can then make a summer crazy quilt, and add more crochet blocks to that crazy quilt. I making my blocks 7x9 and some other book suggested 42 blocks of that size...so this will be a work in progress (wip) for a while, especially if I'm going to be making three and doing other projects at the same time.