27.5 SQ Ep 047 – Tardis Travels And Quilting Tips

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Journey back in time with me over the last two months to hear what I’ve been working on, and get a few tips of things I’ve discovered along the way.

To learn any of the tips, I’ll have them only in my podcast episode. There will be a little drum beat before each one. Quiet but hopefully helpful in organizing when something new is coming your way.

First Stop

Hand embroidery project BOM (version 4 out of 4). Previous posts for other versions of embroidery blocks for the guild.

As you may be able to see the edges are serged. You may also notice it isn’t finished.

Why didn’t I work on it this afternoon? Why? Why? Due Tuesday and this takes me a long time to do. Plus the knot in the blue thread.  Ack!

Second Stop

Mystery Quilt for Gemini Sky

All the tons of pieces I had to cut out and sew together!

There’s 72 + 72 + 72 HST’s here. There’s 13 + 13 + 13 strips of four fabrics here.  There’s 36 squares here of each fabric (in baggies), and two long borders of focus fabric.

This presewing is done!

The workshop is later in October during a Saturday afternoon where we get to see what this looks like.

Here’s a possible arrangement of HST’s showing the fabrics (please excuse the poorness of the darkest blue fabric below)

So they work together I think. Phew!

And here’s the TA – DA Triangles I referenced in the episode.

I cut the interfacing into manageable strips so I could cut the fabric better and sew it cleaner and easier.  The strips are three squares wide by 4 across.

Third Stop

Don’t Panic – Reference Episode – Life the Universe and Everything

And here you can see the Kicker border, in addition to the invisible (can’t you see it?) aurifil monofilament thread – LOVE IT!

And see, I really did quilt the letters all the way through. Two steps in one!

Fourth Stop

Black Baltimore Beauty!

And here’s a close up of the quilting!

Last Stop

Card Trick

The alternate blocks of the square in the square is great for setting with the card trick.

Here’s a close up of the convex / concaveness of the two blocks together – meant to see the quilting designs, but does not show up well.

Some of the items referenced in the episode.

Lint brush, light with parabola cover, aurifil monofilament thread, and frixion pen.

Music and sounds

freesound.org

QuintoOFLam.aif by ramjac

lazery thing variants.wav by Timbre (modified for the tardis sound)

Original Japanese Version of Sukiyaki by Kyu Sakamoto

27.2 Hand Embroidery Work Progress

Still getting good comments about my quilting progress. And I wouldn’t say healed exactly, but, getting better, mostly stronger every day I do not deal with the issue that caused me grief a few weeks ago.

Mostly.

Anyway.

I have since bound fully the 2 quilts from last weekend’s post, but I have seemed to misplaced my millner’s needles that I use all the time for applique & binding.

Since I realized this on Sunday morning (LQS closed Sunday & Monday for Labor Day), I haven’t gone out to purchase & finish those projects displayed last week.

But.

Our guild pizza box, a personal BOM that each member is doing.  If you’re late to the game, each member decided their own BOM and we’re passing it along the members that are participating.

We have about 12 ladies doing the Pizza box, and 5 of those are hand embroidery work!  I think one is applique (haven’t gotten to it yet), none are paper piecing (I should have done that myself), and several are specific blocks.

The reason so many are embroidery is complicated & simple. Our Ruby Stitchers group is our Applique Society group, and is going really strong. I don’t attend myself, but I do enjoy the art of applique, embroidery & handwork, but making the meetings would be another hard thing for me personally. So I’d consider joining.

Also, our Local Quilt Show is very active in embroidery, and particularly twilling, something that they have lots of supplies & experience in making quilts with the redwork right there on the quilts!

Also, the lady who organized the pizza swap was one who showed us all an example. Her embroidery example.  Which, I believe, sparked a whole lot of people to say – “ooh, I’d like to do that, that sounds really neet. good idea.”

So we have over a third of the pizza boxes are hand embroidery.

Which I like, but when can I sew blocks together.

Also several members doing hand embroidery for their blocks were put on the list one right after the other because of late sign up to the list. And as such, a plethera of embroidery is happening here.

I have personally done 3 out of the 5 embroidery blocks, and the 4th one is coming my way during the month of September. (will have the new assignment on sept 11th)

So here’s a post that shows them all together.

The first one was for the quilter who designed the swap & organized it.  I had downloaded the pattern over 2 years ago and was just itching to use it in a block somewhere.

The quilter really loves pinks, purples and these colors so I kept to that theme.  I think this turned out really rather nicely!  I received this block in May.

The premise was that the blocks were done by the quilter giving out the challenge, with stabilizer on the back.  And we were supposed to embroider something including our name & location.  So I didn’t get to chose the block color on any of these, except to pick out of the premade blocks my favorites.

The next one uses batiks.

She had lots of drawings of bugs, animals, and seemed to want a nature themed block.

I loved this owl I saw, even though it took me a while to find it (on a free coloring book picture I think). Of course now I kinda wish I had done a swan, because owls are somewhat overused.

But this quilter is smart, willing to work for the guild, and a new member. The owl is likely to be the only one of its kind, which I sorta like too.  I received this block in July.

The last one I’ve had the privilege to work on is for one of our oldest members.

She does a superior job quilting, her quilt won the largest quilt category with her pralines & creme quilt from the tucks and textures quilt book, which she all did by hand with the help of another lady in the guild.

I should have whitened up this picture like I did the last two, the background is white, not grey.

This quilter is classic, does fantastic handwork, and she is so elegant that all I could think of with her was the word, “rose”. So I had to make sure I found an embroidery of a rose. Then substituted a rose in the corner piece as well.

Here’s a picture of all three embroidery pieces together in a mosaic.

 1. bommaydh, 2. bomjulydb, 3. bomaugal

Three different styles.  A lot of handwork & time.

Here’s to 2 more blocks in the future!

17.3 SQ Episode 027 – Behind the Scenes

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We’ve gone behind the scenes of the local quilt show.

First there are questions about how you want to organize your show, meant for reflection on how your current show is running or how you could work on a new show.

Discussing

• Location
• Publicity
• Organization of Tasks
• Manual Labor
• Timing
• Organization of Quilting Categories
• Rules on who can participate in the show

Also discussing my role in the show

• At the embroidery booth

• Taking Pictures of the Show

• Talking with our featured quilter

• Hanging out at the garage sale

• Looking at the opportunity quilt

• Checking out the back of this quilt

• Getting candid pictures of the setup

For photos of the quilts themselves, go to the guild’s shutterfly page.

Music provided by:

From Freesound.org

• By suonho MemoryMoon_space-blaster-plays.wav
• By jobro Newsdesk.wav
• By kjackson Change_6.WAV
• By acclivity WeddingBells1.mp3

From mevio’s music alley: Held Together by Rod Kim

10.14 Podcast Episode 21 – Make it Sew

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Not much new to report here. Check out yesterday’s post about my Make it Sew project.

Included in the podcast this time:

• The Android, The Captain & The Meek Engineer
• how science fiction characters are like quilters
• a description of the Make it Sew project
• a request for quilters to take parts of several ideas and meld them into something new
• the home sewing front (you’ve had a front row seat to this on the blog)
• personal stuff about work, myself, and how I’ve been getting out of a funk

Additional music

freesound.org

• By primordiality titled Fanfare 1.wav

mevio’s music alley

• By Tom Shad, Apodcastchristmastheme
• By Alexandre Falcao, Flood of Positive Feelings
• By Fluox speelt Fluox, Tedeebedibbedib
• By Deep 6 Holiday, Will You Remind me

9.7 Inflorescence Types and other Leaf Drawings

While looking up flower types, I noticed a section of the Kansas Grasses and Wildflower site that may be of use to quilters when considering drafting their own flower pictures.

Leaves and flowers all look different, and if you’re willing to ‘go rouge’ and just Frankenstein together a flower with different flower parts, rather than copy a picture of a flower directly, you may want to learn about things like inflorescence.

Flower drawing by Dean Haddock, found on the Kansas Wildflowers and Grasses website.

On the wildflower and grasses site, there are a series of flower and leaf part drawings that do an excellent job of explaining what types of ‘stemming and flower bunches’ (my words) occur without an explanation, just pictures and names. 

This not only gives you the names for the types of flower variations, but may give you some ideas of how to draft your flowers in EQ7 or something similar. 

Think of all the gorgeous applique or embroidery that could take place from this!?

Here are some leaf types.

Flower drawing by Dean Haddock, found on the Kansas Wildflowers and Grasses website.

My sunflower patio quilt has what looks like an ovate leaf shape, with singular inflorescence, for example.

6.1 The Home Sewing Front

Here are pictures from the Home Sewing Front

Kelley from the Pioneer Quilter has issued a May Mayhem challenge which I am taking. Kelley wants us to quilt 15 minutes every day in May.

I had to practice for about a week to make sure I could discipline myself in quilting every day. Brye asked Kelley if we had to sew every day or we could double up one day instead. Kelley responded that she wasn’t going to sit in our living rooms, but progress was progress.

So I came up with the Drill Sergent idea:
“Okay you quilting scum. Get out the needle and give me fifteen stitches! Don’t even think about putting down that project, you still have 10 minutes left, you filthy maggots!”

Image courtesy of wikipedia

Here are my May Goals for May Mayhem (found in big tent Brye Lynn’s subgroup)

1) Finish the embroidery for quilt guild (two small 15 minute sessions should knock this out)
2) Complete the tote bag in time for the swap deadline
3) Finish fans on quilt, cut and applique corners down
4) Get an idea on quilting pattern for the fan quilt (perhaps trace it down & deciding backing fabric for it)
5) Cut out and finish one more applique piece for the sunflower quilt
6) Find another hand project for work (only if #5 is done).
7) Craft more podcasts in May than in April. Oops!

Guess What?  While waiting for Audacity and Podbean I found two sessions of 15 minutes in the past few days to finish goal #1!

Progress on April 24th

A couple of long sewing sessions – one watching television, and one sitting on my newly cleaned off porch got me mostly finished by yesterday afternoon.  Here is the finish!

Next project!

2.3 I’m an Embroiderer!!!

Today I can call myself an embroiderer because I officially “finished” my little applique design embroidery study.  I was going to make a small wall hanging out of this to hang below my ‘baltimore style applique quilt’, but maybe this is destined to be a pillow instead.  What do you think?

This was done with leftover pieces from the mimi dietrich applique quilt I did.  The pattern pieces are hers, but the layout is my own.  I had several variations of this design I played around with before settling on this.

• Mimi Dietrich Favorite Applique Quilts

The flower has a little chain stitch and then some small satin stitch.

• Chain stitch
• Satin stitch

The swag has two blanket stitches (top and bottom in blue), three mountmellick stitch (middle blue, middle red and gold, top blue), and a double chain stitch down the middle (gold).

• Mountmellick stitch
• Blanket stitch
• Double chain stitch

On the bird, I used a blanket type stitch for the beak (probably my weakest choice of stitch is on the beak), a modified algerian eye stitch for the eye, and stem stitch for the bird feathers.

• Algerian eye
• Stem stitch

And its not photographing well by itself, but I used stem stitch on the heart, and inspired my swirls from the fabric pattern within.  There are red swirls which are “echoed” by the dark dark navy blue (looks like black … shhh don’t tell anyone it’s not black).

In any event, I’m going to try my hand at hand quilting this just to get the feel of hand quilting.  But I don’t have any supplies for hand quilting.  Have to go find a thimble and a quilting hoop first.  And probably some hand quilting thread.  Time to pick up another project until I get to the quilt store (after the holidays).

… or I could try hand dyeing fabric with koolaid …

… or I could start to work on stamp carving with erasers …

… or I could make dragon boat ornaments …

… or I could make chemistry inspired christmas ornaments …

…