Vintage CQ...Waste Canvas Grids

I blame it all on the great Barbara Meger, a national smocking teacher whom I was honored to teach crazy piecing to last year. I had suggested she incorporate smocking into a crazy quilt block and just look at what she did...

Besides her extraordinary smocking and stitching, what really grabbed me about this block is that grid in the lower right. I just love it!

So on a much humbler level I decided to put some grids in some of the patches of my border blocks. Using waste canvas seemed like the best way to get them accurate.

Just count and stitch. Easy peasy.

This is how it looks with the waste canvas grid removed. (Bev, this is the offending yellow patch, by the way.)
And here is how I like to do that....

I cut away the excess, then cut again to make the strings shorter and therefore easier to pull out. And on this one, I added the second color of thread after removing the grid, figuring I could eyeball that o.k. Again, this lesser amount of stitching makes the grid easier to remove....

...and you get this.

Then I thought, why not just use the grid as a marking tool and dispense stitching through it altogether?

Comme ci...

Comme ca....

....Et voila!

And again, using a larger grid this time....

The chalk pencil is good for the larger grid and dark fabric.

This one uses a third color and I like it, so I will probably go back and add that to the other grids...

...like this one.
(Isn't that Oya needlelace trim great? As well as the pinkish/violet one in the fifth picture from the top? You can buy your own here from Rengin in Istanbul...)

But then I got cocky and tried doing the whole grid stitching process without a marking anything at all.

It was a small patch and I thought I could get away with it. Looks pretty wonky, though, especially with that perfectly woven grid nearby. I'm glad I didn't use highly contrasting colors.

I love these grids and will add more to my blocks, but first I'm taking a small break to work on a present that I can't blog about. I'll be back in a week or so....bye for now!