42.7 Swinging back in

The quilt show was close to a month ago. I still can’t believe how much of an impact it had on my life this year.

The last few weekends, I have made a rather restorative decision to sew at home with any time off I have had. This was to “calm down already” and I feel it was necessary.

First it was a reorganization of my books and patterns. I had the idea to put the shorter size pattern into shorter 3ring binders.

The patterns regularly are half size normal paper. It is easier to put the regular patterns into short binder. Originally I had them all in 8.5 X 11 sheets. This worked, but was thick and flumpy.

Ones with paper patterns or fabrics are too thick to fit in the shorter binders without bending or tearing, but I managed to get all the patterns put away this way into something viewable and accessible.

The smaller binder seems to be a good option. They are half the size of the regular binder and I found a small box of pages also on amazon. Good idea to save space on the bookshelf, and because it’s more accessible and usable, it will be easier to decide to pick up and actually use. I hope so.

Also shown was my Countdown to Paducah pattern I downloaded free this year. It takes up an entire binder of it’s own. I like the color scheme and sashing on that pattern a lot. Not sure if it is free anymore or not.

I reorganized my books, my projects in my closet that hadn’t seen the light of day since I moved, and even longer. I found this appliqué project I purchased from a local guild member at a garage sale. Not certain who donated or when.

Lucky me, even though there was fabric from the previous owner of the pattern, I supplemented with some of my own. This was cathartic for me, both the fabric selection and the rest of this pattern. I liked the tracing and the fixing of the heat n bond onto the back, and the cutting out of the fabrics, some of which I did outside overlooking my garden.

I swapped out fabrics a few times. I have one purple flower, one lighter flower, and two bluer flowers.

Yes the pattern is swapped around, but no one knows that (shh don’t tell), or I don’t frankly care. The pattern is Forget Me Not Stained Glass from a company in Alaska.

It was the first time using the premade bias tape, and this was heavenly to use. So easy to hide any cutting mistakes.

I currently have it not sewn down as of yet, all ironed up into the basic version of what it will eventually look like. Since I am going to sew it down as quilt as you go, I have yet to get the backing or batting ready, and am considering changing up the borders slightly to how the pattern has it anyway.

Any event, it’s very lovely on my design wall at the moment.

I hadn’t thought that much about it, but the forget me not applique pattern was the first and only just me, just having nothing to do with other people type of pattern. No responsibilities or tied to anyone else. Aside from how I purchased it.

Also on my design wall is another set of quilt parts I have scavenged this year, working from someone else’s base scraps.

I am looking forward to making this into another mini quilt for my wall somewhere. This gives the slight renaissance festival vibe, and I have yet to prepare the bottom and top for appliqué onto a base fabric. I like looking at, and thinking about these pre made pieces. I also like the idea of taking another’s design, and co-opting it for my own, and how it might not be the same realm of interpretation as the original idea from the person who I bought the premade scraps from.

Another thing to work on this year is the mystery quilt I have been doing with Charlotte Hawkes group. The main quilt revealed back in April or May. So I guess I can say spoilers ahead, but they are now several months back.

*** spoilers ***

I have been staring at this pattern for months now. Putting aside this quilt to work on the quilt show. The last few pieces of one of the steps still needed some TLC and finishing.

it wasn’t until this weekend or last the I finally got the smaller sub blocks done.

I am getting the last touches of the main blocks done that include the sub blocks. I think I ended up counting 24 of these sets today. 6 are done, 18 are somewhere in process.

My main leader and ender had been my warm color version of my modified rail fence, but in all the rebirth, I decided to pull out some pinwheels and knock out some more 5 inch block stash at the same time. So new pinwheel pieces cut for leaders and enders.

I am not sure why several stray blocks were pinwheeled backwards, but they were. (not shown below)

I am currently trying to decide to unpick the backwards ones or not. A few of these were made for some kind of swap with the Twilter podcast loving group that was starting to come together to do things at the time. I am thinking this was done 2010 or 2011 or so. I suppose I wrote a blog post about it some time back.

Maybe I should be soliciting a 5″ square swap of my own. To supplement these blocks.

I do recognize several of these pinwheels as coming out of my own stash, but not all. I must have only traded a couple of the pinwheel blocks, and decided to upsize the quilt on my own. I know originally I was going to sash all them with the harlequin pattern with paper piecing, but I am less sure I want to to that now.

The sashing or block lining would disguise the inconsistencies in pinwheel turning, and would upsize the quilt in general as well. Decisions still to be made here on this quilt.

This takes me up to current time, for the moment.

I am hoping to get back to Free Motion Quilting more soon too. I bought this apparatus, but do not yet have the clamps to be able to make it work to my advantage.

Now I have to prepare again to herd cats with the opportunity quilt for the guild and give another report on Tuesday. I have about half the blocks needed for the quilt as designed. Actually less. Just looking at my notes, I have blocked off one more person that have made blocks than blocks I actually have in my possession.

Blocks for this project due September meeting, so we all have time, but right now out of the 42 blocks I need, I have a total of 13 in my possession. I am already starting to get nervous to get in front of the group about this on Tuesday.

Oh, and after the blocks made, we need to have borders made, and no one else has signed up to help on that yet. I was really hoping some of the alternate blocks would be some cool color other than green. I am gunning for purple personally. For at least a few blocks. But those are the ones I have less of.

I really need to stop all this talking in front of the guild. I don’t think it’s all that good for me and/or my health. Maybe next year??? Once the quilt is made.

But I also have to report in on my part of the guild show. Which went really well. Still sorta mad I didn’t get all the pictures I had wanted. I am sure there are some other fantastic quilts there I missed.

Two days before more “public speaking”. Sigh.

Later!

 

 

 

 

 

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42.6 Whirlwind spring before whirlwind local quilt show

I have been more on a board game and video game kick as of late, so my sewing has been limited in scope this year. Not to mention time spent in my garden which is finally now paying off pretty well with pretty flowers, landscaped border and a few herbs, tall tomato plants, tall pepper plants, and a cucumber plant.

I decided to put myself in charge of quilt drop off and pick up, creating, distributing, collecting new quilt forms for all the quilts hanging in the show, organizing the quilt rack layout, and hanging the quilts for the local quilt show.

This responsibility has caused much panic on my end, I have had to get up and speak in front of the guild every single guild meeting. Sometimes, the panic has been because I have been less prepared beforehand. In addition to panicking about panicking about the whole thing. Don’t ask. I am not sure exactly myself.

The show was just over a week ago, and I feel like I have prepared for, and just ran, a marathon. Or half. At least half, right?

Luckily, the show is every other year. Next year, we only need to work for the much larger regional festival. Which is its own time commitment.

The local show, quilt wise, is set up like this. We only have 3 categories, a small, medium, and large quilt category. No juries, no voting, everyone usually gets their quilts into the show without issue. Sometimes we are bargaining with people to please put in quilts into the show at the last minute because we don’t have as many entries as we would want.

We also have a featured quilter, someone who has a large body of work who will display many of their quilts from years past. Usually they get their own section, and tell their quilt story.

The last two shows we have added a challenge quilt section, where we make something with specific parameters. This current challenge was the theme “summertime” and the dominant and secondary colors are blue and red (can you tell?) with one side of 16″.

For the show itself, we have no judges, but the most liked three in our three categories get a viewer’s choice award.

As for the quilts of my own, I always intend to take pictures of all the quilts, but less confident that I did this year with everything going on. I can’t find pictures of two of my quilts.

Which is sad because it means I may have forgotten to get pictures of an entire row of quilts. Which is my original job, to be the unofficial guild historian.

 

 

My challenge quilt was this one. Based from a 2017 BOM called Caught Ya from Craftsy. It’s called Red Rattle Traps and it for certain means summer to me. I poked myself hard one one of those fishing hooks, so before the show I hot glued the ends. Rather than fish, they are supposed to be lures to catch fish.

We also had a charity portion of the show. We set up a boutique and proceeds go to two local sources.

There was talk of manning the booth for a local festival for the leftover pieces from the boutique to further help the charities involved.

I did not get a picture of the guild garage sale during the show. Our guild typically does not swap fabric pieces throughout the year, so it falls on the local garage sale for our quilters to purge their currently unused stash.

Well, after a full strange week at work after the show, I was glad to finally have a weekend of low responsibility for once. Finally, finally, finally. Hopefully I remembered to get all my stuff done for the show, i took copious notes before-hand and more afterwards about what worked and what didn’t.

It’s hard to work so hard in the middle (early) July when it’s brutally hot.

Next time (2020) I don’t know if I will be blessed to be able to take the whole week off because of the weekend of the show might more readily align with the 4th of July weekend. For my role, it was essential that I do so to be able to get everything done and to try to mitigate stress as much as possible.

Once I knew the quilts were hung, my stress level went way way down because then, I just had to show up and help during other portions of the show, and not make too many decisions.

There was a funny time where for 2-3 hours we didn’t know where one light switch was. Which caused a whole row of quilts to be hung in the dark (mostly) during that time. Which was too bad because that was where our mini quilts were hanging. Later, the light was not an issue and now I have notes on how to do it for next time too!

 

 

42.5 Trimming up the last week of March A Long

It’s been a sorta boring month during the March A Long. I have been dutily trimming up these leftover squares every morning all month long.

I never knew that I had so many pieces to trim!

It’s been fun motivating myself to get to work as of late. I am glad I am finally taking care of this!

But, you guys, I came up with a cool round for the medallion quilt I am working on! So this is incredibly motivating me further. A little bit of YouTube video in the morning, a timer, and enough timevto squeeze in 12 + minutes before work, and some times the full 15. I even have been trimming when I get home if I felt like I was shorting myself out.

 

All the grey and orange pieces shown have been trimmed during the month of March. Plus another 96 pieces of other orange pieces not shown here.

Calculating all the pieces, I have trimmed since March:

The grey / grey border pieces are 6 X 9 X 4 pieces (one side not pictures for sewing purposes), or 216

The middle orange pieces are 7 X 4 or 28

The orange pieces on the side are 33 + 1 miscut piece

The grey / grey pieces 2.25 inches are 77

The grey /grey pieces that were sewn too small measuring 2 inches are 35

The original orange pieces not shown here are 96 I believe.

So, if I do my math right, I have trimmed up during the 15 minutes of sewing in March: (drumroll please)

 

486

 

Wow! That’s a lot of trimming, about 500 pieces trimmed up in March! Dang! This doesn’t include the light grey pieces I cut up to go with the half square triangle pieces.

Now to go through the task of sewing these pieces together. Maybe I will work on that this afternoon. See what motivation can be found in getting a large task off your back if done in really really small chunks! This was (mostly) with all “found time” that I wouldn’t have been sewing — okay I admit to probably doing a little more on the weekends, but dang! That’s a lot of trimming up!

What have you been doing in March A Long? Have YOU been doing the 15 minutes of sewing? Can you get a monkey off your back as well and work out something you keep putting off and putting off and putting off just like I have?

Or can you accelerate your thinking about your own quilting project even more than you already have?!

Thanks so much for playing along guys! I am very proud if you do for 1 day or for all 31!

42.4 Pi Day in March A Long 2018

I finally have time to sit and write a blog post. The sun is finally shining for the second day in a row, the weather is nice, and it is 3-14 otherwise known as 3.14 or pi day as of late (American date style, I guess).

For March A Long, (or is it March-A-Long or is it March Along?) we are encouraging each other to sew for 15 minutes every day!

Anyway, I am so excited for the many people who are joining in sewing for 15 minutes every day, or at least trying to! When I first put up the post, I got a quick comment about how someone couldn’t make themselves ONLY do 15 minutes a day!

That’s super inspiring!!! Super unrealistic for me personally, but I am so stoked that I have at least one person I know that sews for more than that every day!! Probably more than that one person, in actuality.

I have heard more than one person who started setting up their 15 minutes and then kept going a little bit for several days in a row!

You are all inspiring! Check out by doing a quick search of the word #marchalong or #sqmarchalong on your favorite social media sites, and see what everyone else is up to!

For my part of doing March A Long, I have gave myself a rather boring and uninspiring task.

Trimming.

The little grey pieces in the picture on the design wall. Yeah, I’ve been trimming those up to something resembling square.

I decided to go with 2.25 each half square triangle. The most interesting I first thought to do was to put them on my wall like the picture above.

But then because I started working more on trimming the dark parts, I started putting them up in the design and I like this idea better than just plain diamonds.

So now I am going to try to make this work for a round on my medallion quilt.

Earlier last month I was attending a quilting retreat and all these yellow and orange squares I was making for a mystery quilt (Charlotte Hawkes Quilts) I am working on and I had to show off my matchy-matchy colored snacky.

This was the set of blocks I made too big because I didn’t follow the directions. But No Pie here.

Last fall I attended a retreat and put together a pie quilt of watermelon pie. Well Not exactly, but if you squint or don’t think about it too much, this Dresden quilt can be considered to be made of pie with the coloration of watermelon (my inspiration)

Which is actually the only pi I got right now.

Last night I gave a “short presentation aka update” on the guild opportunity quilt which I have designed, and I showed them that I wrote the pattern a second time for these blocks I made last fall.

It was the first time that several of the guild members received the instructions. I don’t know what about it made me so nervous about it.

Did I share that I had so many water melon pie pieces left that I have enough pie for a whole other quilt?

I hope this update is much more exciting than just a small bunch of triangle blocks, which has been the true and real update of what’s been happening in my sewing room since the last time I posted at the beginning of March!

Anyway, I am inspired to keep on sewing! Here’s looking forward to another half of the month that we can get our 15 minutes in every day! #marchalong

42.3 Are you ready for March-A-Long?

Are you ready for March-A-Long?

Wait! I am not! Not really. We will make do this first few days this month.

Every year I like to “host” a month (March) where we encourage each other to sew for 15 minutes a day! This includes the weekdays, which I am terrible at sewing.

Somehow every year February gets shorter.

This year something grinded into the normally “well oiled gears” (aka something dramatic happened in personal life) and made this year even less prepared than ever to host March A Long.

No Pictures. Well maybe this one.

Something happened to the font size when I went to save it and I can’t understand what or why to fix it. New to me “graphics program”. (art originally done by my friend LynAnne in the background)

Anyway, if we want to encourage each other to sew for 15 minutes a day each day in march we can do so by using the hashtag: #marchalong in posts.

If people get creative and share, I can share back what others are doing.

I am not picky on what we call sewing for 15 minutes a day. While actual sewing is nice, sewing in the mind (planning/designing/looking on pintrest etc) will all count as well as the essential tasks of fabric shopping, cutting, tracing patterns.

I am not yet sure what I am going to do for March 1st (tomorrow as I type this), but I will come up with something. I may get my blocks out on my design wall and start planning out the wedges I have to make for my tilted blocks.

Or I could spend 15 minutes towards cutting down my dog-ears on my latest project.

I do have lots to share, and I may have to jump ahead a few months just to be more current and then double-back to catch up on sewing projects. I don’t understand why I make this blog posting thing so hard sometimes.

Talk to you more the next few weeks for sure!

42.2 Making Lanyards for the Guild Show

We decided to change the way we were doing our charity project for our upcoming guild show in 2018. We used to make a quilt (or other) and put it up for silent auction to be given to the highest bidder at the end of the show. Instead we are going to make things to “buy it now” – to borrow a phrase from ebay.

Somehow, this flipped a switch in my brain to say – make boutique like items.

Also my old lanyard was starting to look gunky after several years of use, and I decided to make myself some lanyards, at least one for me, and the rest I can make for the guild for the charity portion of the show.

In the meantime, last June, at the Kansas City show, I saw the vendor Project Lydia. I had seen them before.

They are a group of ladies who make colored beads out of very thin strips (triangles) of magazine paper, and then string them into bracelets and necklaces.

From their website:

Project Lydia is an economic development project that lifts women out of the worst of poverty, restores purpose, hope, and dignity. All our paper beaded necklaces, bracelets and jewelry are made out of recycled material.

And I have put my necklace I purchased from them as my own lanyard for the time being. Sorry for the poor quality picture.

I’ll take you through how I am making these lanyards if you decide to make one of your own. I like the Project Lydia piece, but as it is beads and I use this daily, I have had a poor experience where I had a handmade beaded necklace break in the middle of the hallway when using my badge.

Next to the beaded lanyard is a strip. I start my strips for my new lanyards as 2″.

I then fold towards the middle twice. Actually one fold in the middle.

Open the strip up again, and refold to the new middle line that is just pressed in.

I then take some sort of stabilizer. I already had this with the lines on it for a project long ago abandoned.

I cut just under an inch, about 1/8 inch less than an inch, so that would make it 7/8″.

And I slip it into the middle of the opened up strip, trim it up.

I don’t honestly know exactly how necessary it is for the stabilizer. I have chosen batik fabrics for my lanyards as a good chance for the ends not to unravel.

The next part of this, I fold everything back up, press it again and sew it down. Don’t worry, I forgot to take a picture of this part so I decided to slip it under the presser foot so you could see.

And most of my lanyards are at this stage right now!

The next part of this is the tricky bit that gets rid of the cut edges from being exposed.

I unloosen some of the end stitches on each side, and open up the lanyard about half an inch. I decided to reach in with my scissors and cut just a small wedge on ONLY the inside piece.

Repeat on the other side.

I then decided to notch the front folds just a little bit to help reduce the bulk here.

Then, we turn inside out the very end tip, pushing from the back side, and then using fingers to press this all down. A spritz of water helps with this process. If you see below, there is a fold towards the inside of the very little section (maybe a fourth of an inch) of the end piece.

Definitely fiddle with this to get it flat and then sew down the edges.

How they go with the lanyard pieces.

The reason I start with 2 inch strip is that my lanyards have about a 3/4″ flat space. I purchased them on Etsy about 5 or 6 years ago. This size of strip lays flat exactly with this size of lanyard piece.

For the folding of the lanyard, I chose the best looking side to go through the lanyard piece.

Then next to the back side of the lanyard – OUTSIDE the lanyard, I place the other side, making sure the lanyard is flat all the way through the fabric portion. This is folded back toward the main part of the fabric.

The first piece is now folded over to match the previously folded piece.

Be sure to give yourself a large enough “tail” here. You want to be able to have enough space for your presser foot to be able to reach on both pieces of fabric and also NOT hit the metal portion of the lanyard.

Sew many times back and forth as this is going to have a lot of strength on it. Make sure you sew or correct the last part of the tail that was previously un-stitched by one of the previous steps. For the one in my tutorial, I made the full length of the lanyard a “little bit longer” than I normally like.

Here’s the end stitching.

This shows how it looks from the side.

I should have cut this down a little more. This was done at width of fabric from the original piece, so it started as a 40-42″piece. If I had wanted a shorter one, I would have cut it before folding in the ends. I can work with this long of lanyard just fine. I just hope someone else will like this length too.

Since most of the rest of my lanyards haven’t turned in the sides, I can rectify this for the future pieces. I think we need to get this to the proper length, also taking into account that there will be about 3-4 inches taken up by the bottom section folded over.

42.1 Fabric Refolding During Watching Dr Who and Sewing Room Organization

I started watching Doctor Who when it was on BBC America during the episode “The Time of Angels” and “Flesh and Stone.” What was this that the woman in the series kept counting down, and she couldn’t open her eyes, and these scary creatures who only moved when you weren’t looking?

Anyway, since then, I have been pretty hooked! We watched the episodes of Eccleston and Tennant, and I even said, “hey, isn’t that the guy from Harry Potter? as the bad guy from one of the middle books.” These were watched haphazardly, back and forth, and one at a time. I was loving the energy of Smith, and catching up as I was getting along.

After this last series with Peter Capaldi leaving us fairly soon, and a very long, dry year (<9 months, I hope) before regular, steady episodes to be coming out, I decided this was the fall to rewatch the television series in order from when they came out in 2005.

Why talk about this with a quilting blog? Well, it was a constant background this late summer/early fall to my fabric refolding project.

Earlier this year, I took a picture of my cutting station. You can see on the right side a lot of fabric on the wire shelves where I used to store ALL my fabric. And under my cutting station, I have stacked two shoe racks found at either the container store or home depot that I had purchased over the years. The top is just an ikea tabletop and the whole thing just sits there, behind which is my batting that is not designated into various projects yet.

On the left side of my picture, you may be able to see, or not, that I have scraps of various sizes cut up and ready to use.

Right now my 5 inch squares of cool colors are bulging and ready to use. I can usually pull out easily a 5″ square for anything I wish. I think I may decide to do a quick scrap quilt with 5 ” squares and white borders.

I was looking at the other parts of this setup and figuring out how likely it could be to refold my fabric so it wasn’t so tight and narrow and slide it into the various sections of my shoe dividers.

So I took my fabric out, section by section, put on Doctor Who in the background, mainly going from the beginning of “new Who” – starting in 2005 episodes, and background binge watch 134 episodes once I figured out some of the timing of some of the specials. Thank goodness to Amazon Prime that has this available to watch!

I unfolded fabrics and refolded fabrics. Ironing most, straightening up edges that needed straightened up, cutting up and creating more 5″ squares. Here’s my neutrals side that I have built up over the years.

And here is my fabric color side. Bottom so purples and multicolors, and ombre colors, and black and whites, and blues and blue-greens.

I still have a place to stash my fabric scissors, my blue tape (magic), my extra 1 gallon and 2 gallon baggies. Also reds and pinks and yellows.

Surprisingly this is most of my fabrics. Now my wires can house my finished tops and basted tops & bottoms.

I am thinking of relocating my fat quarters into a different area, but that would require removing them from the sections. OF COURSE, I decided this AFTER I got about everything put back into place.

I do have some repurposed DVD shelves that we weren’t using, so they found their way into the sewing room as well. I am thinking as I get out fabrics to use, as I put them away, I will sort them into fat quarter size or less, and half yards and higher. The half yards work well here in the shoe racks, and the fat quarters should work on the DVD rack once they are folded again to the right size.

Back a year ago, I decided not to move my thread rack. I had bought several of these tubs with the locking tops and they work well in my closet, and so for my large thread spools I have kept them in place.

Maybe I will pull them back out later, but if so, they will go somewhere else other than a thread rack.

My little spools I keep getting extra gifts from my aunt and a few times it has been small spools of thread.

I found a littler version of my other bins for the small spool storage.

Here are the bins that have now replaced what I used to use gallon bags for.

My UFO’s live here on the side of my closet and I even found some larger ones at Menards that fit perfectly with the other bins. There is plenty of fabric found here on the side as well. The other side of my closet is almost the same. I was going to try to get the larger sized boxes that fit a 12×12 block and perhaps I still will, but I keep missing the sale on these boxes that I saw one time.

Also this year, I lost the zipper pull on my main small vinyl bag that housed my most used supplies for traveling. This would be things like my glue stick, seam ripper, hand sewing needle, and so on and so forth.

So I purchased this in a set of makeup bags on amazon, and I am liking it so far, seems to be a good substitute that hopefully will be able to survive some abuse.

I haven’t still felt after a year of getting everything exactly the way I want it in my sewing room. I still use a rickety laptop table for my machine proper, which the benefit of is that it can wheel up next to my computer desk to make sewing more accessible from my computer.

This will eventually either be replaced with a handmade sewing table or a Sew-Ezi table. This works and works well until I start sewing fast and then if the machine isn’t sitting exactly right, it wobbles.

I have been thinking of reorganizing my sewing room. My cutting table is just a half an inch too narrow for my full cutting mat. If I can give up the large amount of space in the middle of the room that is (mostly) untouched, then I could upsize my cutting table, switch my current cutting table to my sewing machine.

But I am not ready for this as of yet. So a nice start is Doctor Who  and folding fabric that I have already done. I am not a quick one to make quick decisions. Quick decisions don’t normally work very well for me, but eventually I may reorganize more and differently. I don’t currently find I use my portable mini design wall. And when I do put something there, I look right past it for a couple of weeks trying to find it.

42.0 Designing a quilt for the guild

Every other year our guild is making an opportunity quilt – sorta like a raffle quilt – for the guild. Our current one will be drawn for in a few more weeks.

Here is our current guild opportunity quilt that is just about out the door!

We used Tula Pink’s Modern quilt blocks in greys and blues. Bordered in green to help get the blocks to the correct size, and then grey sashing with subtly darker cornerstones. We were making these blocks from our own guild’s stash, and it turned out great because there is such variety in the colors used.

We did this with expressed permission from Tula Pink, and specific instructions for guild members with the patterns involved. Which makes sense for the designer to protect their own copyright.

***

Somehow for the next opportunity quilt, we were having a guild discussion and, sorta because I through out a question or two, I sorta attached my name out there for designing/picking the next one we do as a guild.

We won’t have to have the quilt fully made until like January or February of 2019, but I am trying to think early, think ahead on this.

Something about this project was nagging me. I spent a good chunk of time looking through quilt block books, scrap quilt books, this year.

I have been spending time flipping through my quilt-block calendar.

I usually flip through this and leave it up on a block that I would like to make, like the one in the picture above.

I went through lots of designs on electric quilt 7 and just spent time thinking and thinking and planning and planning.

I printed out several different types of quilts that would be fun to do.

I had some time away from my computer and away from Electric quilt. During the times I was away, I used my book of 1000 quilt blocks, and my calendar and started sketching by hand on my moleskin, and used my good coloring pencils for some design inspirations.

A few days I couldn’t find my moleskin and I used this sketchbook to get a generic idea for other blocks.

As you can see, I like the grid work already done, everything is much better attended to.

Something about this block drawing and coloring is very soothing.

I think some of these would be nice to add into Electric Quilt and then explore some other color ranges.

I also think I zeroed in on some designs that won’t work well with a mixed group, but will work better as a non-scrappy quilt, that I am saving for myself. Tell me a better way to start and desire to make many many more quilt starts?!

I was attempting to figure out what blocks would be interesting enough that one would want to purchase a chance at, but also easy enough to have people work towards the quilt together, that will work as things with their stash.

I kept coming back to a quilt design that I had done a while ago. That I had altered a while ago. A quilt block called Aunt Sukey’s Choice.

Over and over, I saw this design and kept thinking it would work!

I was able to make one block for the quilt, and I even showed it off to the guild. A guild member had a good suggestion about the middle portion being one piece instead of four smaller pieces and reworking the white sections nearby. I like this idea and it will help simplify the quilt a bit.

I tend to work in “cool color pallets” or “warm color pallets” when doing scrappy quilts.

I ended up reworking this quilt a little bit after showing it off to the guild. The one I had shown to the guild was just blue and green alternating. I was leaning towards cool colors anyway.

But If I think of this quilt block as a sort of “nine patch”, the half square triangle sections could look just as good in reverse as they do pointed out. And alternating reverse blocks with non reverse blocks would be good design in and out and have a good direction to the the quilt.

So this is my rework of this design, which, for the moment, I am calling Sukey’s Reverse.

I am going to write up directions to the quilt, This is the same block but with different colors and a reverse section next to a non-reverse section. Nothing harder than what was already done.

I am giving myself the option to use a small amount of sashing that could fit in between blocks with dark blue cornerstones if the quilt blocks are not squared up correctly.

A suggestion has been to get members to upsize the blocks and then cut down to the correct size before putting together. Also we could assign the half square triangle blocks to someone, and the four patch blocks to someone, and we could cover the various amounts of skill needed for the quilt.

If we’re smart, we can do this out of our stash.

I kept getting told to use a block or pattern that was either free or get permission to buy the book. And depending on my pattern writing skills, my guild members may ALL agree in the end. But this is what I wanted to do from the outset, take something familiar and then make something new with it.

If this pattern is already out there and possibly popular, please let me know, but this was something I truly created from a block pattern and a good design program. I am liking the blues on all the outside blocks, and the other colors on all the inside blocks I think this will ground the quilt but also have a nice variety of colors and interest and fabrics!

41.9 Medallion Dreams in the Summer

As you might have seen I have a few other things on the design wall I stared at this summer. Some of these are inspired by the round robins I was part of a few years ago, and yes, I still love my round robin quilt and it’s my most cherished quilt ever, even though it’s taking a break currently waiting to be sure that no more water is coming down the ceiling from it’s normal place.

Here’s an old picture of my round robin quilt before it was quilted. But this will give you an idea what we are talking about with round robin and medallion quilts.

I made a post about How Round Robins work, with that post being the center of a trading round robin & medallion quilt parts and pieces, and here was the final picture of all the other round robins that we did that year. Some of the pictures below I was part of early, some was part of at the end. Very high levels of creativity!

For this year, I decided to make at least 3 medallion quilts from the starts I have here. These will sorta follow the round robin rules, but I don’t have any other quilters to trade with for these. So whatever I turn out will be my own round robin creativity. Which is the fun part.

First medallion

I had a left over block from my blue and red and purple cathedral windows type quilt. I decided to make it into a medallion quilt. Here’s an old picture of the quilt. I use it all the time, nice lap sized quilt!

I have the block bordered and was originally thinking pillow, but why not just make it the center of a new quilt?

I am thinking something like this would be a nice finish for my first medallion quilt of the summer. Some of the design is inspired by the wrought iron fences from one of the quilt vendors I saw. And yes I also want to make some form of wrought iron fence applique quilt. This is just the design from the base blocks in EQ7 from the block library.

I still haven’t yet completely committed on this first medallion quilt, This might be the last round, but I am currently stuck on the “second round”. I do like what I have here, but in thinking of fabrics that will go with this, I am not exceedingly sure. Which might be telling me to make some sort of change to this second round. I think I like the 3rd round good, even though it’s a combo of the applique pieces provided by electric quilt designers.

The first medallion quilt I have not decided any fabrics beyond what has already been done.

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Second medallion

The second block I want to also medallion / round robin quilt, I have all the fabrics for it, but haven’t settled on a design yet for the second round, but I have some basics started. This center I got from the guild show last year 2016 as either someone else’s unfinished top/block/medallion.

I wasn’t the only one who saw it and liked it, I am intrigued by the fact that someone didn’t just finish this little joy as is, but for me, I am thinking, we need to do something nice to this and make it the center of attention. The nice coral and yellow blocs are pretty small.

I have been collecting fabrics to match this medallion already.

Some of the fabrics I have also include some bonus pieces from my Arkansas Crossroads Quilt.

I keep bringing the half square triangles (the things in the lumps on the right) to various sewing days and other things to trim them down but every time I get them out to sew with, I decide to work on something else. I am thinking these pieces will either have to be an outer round, or I will have to double and triple them up in an earlier round. Here’s the start of playing in electric quilt 7 with this quilt. I am not totally sold on the design yet, but it’s a start. I found these blocks interesting to work with. Probably too much yellow, but don’t worry, I will adjust or switch.

Third medallion

A third block I also have had for a while is this dark blue with red flower block.

This block I had purchased at the fabric recycles place and I thought it would be fun to challenge myself to making something new with it.

I actually was the one who put the orange border on the quilt block already. This quilt I was going to try to “medallion up” at home at the same time as working on the other medallions of the round robin quilts. Little did I know how much I was putting into their designs and how much that would take.

At that time, I picked out most of these fabrics, but not yet designs.

I haven’t worked a lot with the red orange yellow pallet and I am liking the start of this one too. I need to recreate this one in electric quilt and see if I can spark something already. Maybe this one needs to be multiple medallions on point settings since I haven’t done too many of those yet. I think I may start with that idea and see where it goes.

An update to Electric Quilt 7 just came out – EQ8 – and I purchased it! Looking forward to using it instead to push these designs forward!

41.8 Sewing in Spurts in Summer 2017

This past summer, I have not been exactly away from my sewing machine. I’ve not exactly been glued to it either.

The last post of personal sewing was in May, when I was working on Grandma’s Footstool quilt, which you saw in full as a quilt in the Kansas City Regional Quilt Show.

The quilt now rests in the sun of these shorter fall days while I contemplate where it is going to permanently reside.

This next piece isn’t a quilt, but a metal “barn quilt” that I had to purchase at the show. I promised myself it would make it outside in my yard, but this wall still had an empty space, and I think I still like it here. For now. Maybe this is where Grandma’s Footstool will reside more permanently if I do move this block outside.

In June, I attended a mini quilting retreat, a weekend away with my sewing machine and several “mostly new-to-me” friends, although I am starting to get to know some of the ladies better the last year or two they are in my guild. The group of ladies I joined for the retreat have been sewing together for years and years and go to retreats every month. I got lucky last year in hitching a space at the retreat last year, and attended this year, and am going to try to plan to attend next year.

On that retreat, I used some leftover pieces to make a nice scrappy small quilt. This was actually made the last thing at the retreat.

I had the aqua and maroon four patch squares from so long ago in addition to the one in the middle with gold, I had brought with me the gold pieces and decided just a nice scrappy quilt (my size) with it. I am improving the borders as I rarely do a “plain border”.

The color in this quilt isn’t near as wonderful as what it could be in actuality. Something about the photograph tones down the colors here to ‘real life’.

During the retreat, I worked on quilting the small quilts I have had here ready to baste since earlier this year during March A Long.

This one was mostly “fish-scale” aka clamshell quilting. As I put these random pieces together last fall, I saw the main piece as a fish head and tail. One block got away from the design so it was going to be its own miniquilt I might as well put them together. Currently it’s just a pin holding the piece on the bottom together, but I like the flow of both pieces visually. The quilt above was leftover blocks from someone’s other quilt that I took the scraps. I can call this quilt something like Fish Scraps. Or Fish scraps and heads. If I ever get the gumption to put a quilt in my bathroom, I think this might relocate to there. Right now it’s got a great small space next to my design wall.

This mini quilt is super mini, like 1.5 feet by 2 feet. The half square triangles used were 1.5 inch bonus blocks. Isn’t this a nice setting for these tiny blocks? I couldn’t decide on a flange color so I went with three, blue sides, pink top and bottom, and purple corners. This is currently in the entrance to my quilting room. Simple. I was originally thinking of donating it to my guild show, and I still can, but I think I will have a hard time doing that.

The other quilt that was from the same leftover pieces from the same quilt. These were a little larger 1.75″ each half square triangle. I like the setting on these, and yes, the oranges/yellows cut through the diagnonal here. No name on this one yet. Again couldn’t decide on binding, went with a highly contrasted choice since that’s what this quilt told me it wanted. This quilt is a little larger overall, about 2.5 feet by 3.5 feet or so.

This quilt I have had pieced for several years but never had the edges pieced. I originally intended this quilt to have wonky borders and binding, and then maybe it was a year ago, I decided to add the black triangle border. Now on retrospect, I could have added another black border to the quilt before quilting and binding this.

The binding is a gold and black inner flange, set quite wide to get the effect of the pattern better, I had drawn out a year ago what I originally wanted the quilting to look like, but I never until this year decided to do the actual quilting in such a high contrast color.

This optical illusions quilt started off its life as a single ombre fabric that graduated from green to black. I was specific in how I cut the fabric up to piece back together, and most of that was done in 2012 – according to my notes and pictures. I am glad I went simple and bold on the center of the quilting, I like what the gold brought into this quilt, even though it was scary to quilt. Most of the quilting was done still at the retreat, but in the wee hours of the morning when there were no eyes on me at the time. Then I just got to sit and stare at this quilt for the rest of the retreat.

Speaking of sitting and staring, I finally got my applique hot air balloon sewn down to a white piece of paper. For a while this summer, I had the balloon floating over this scenery piece I picked up from a guild member at one of our guild quilt shows. I do like the affect, and I kept searching for tree fabrics until I realized that we are supposed to be looking at tree tops here. I am thinking I may not match these two pieces up this way anyway, and go with a different background even yet from what I here for the hot air balloon. I have stalled out on the basket, something I didn’t draw already, and I have sorta one made, but not really liking it yet so far.

 

The piece on the right on the top, was from way way back with a tilted four patch swap with Quilt Cabana Corner Sandi that I made for myself as inspiration. I was making a quilt top the way I always do, and I decided to cut it and I am wanting to quilt it and somehow attach the three pieces together. Possibly. I had this out to remind myself to quilt it, but this didn’t happen.

Also, this might seem less impressive, but I expanded a scrap quilt this summer to be bigger than it already was!

I believe this scrap quilt that you already saw pictures of last fall was on my design wall like this until I realized that if I turned it, I would get to use the whole design wall more efficiently and get a better chance at not duplicating too much.

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I did have other sewing adventures this summer, but I am going to break them up into other posts. It worked well for me last month to write several posts all within the span of a few days, and I am currently on the same kind of roll here.

Several of these quilts were finished, but none of them are really large in size. It helps me to stay motivated to get small things done. And then they can be moved around my house and displayed there!