43.4 Sukey’s Reverse Quilt Top Completed!

After coming back from a much needed vacation, I set up to finish the quilt top for the Sukey’s Reverse quilt for the guild. Last post, I was waiting for some blocks, and with special guidance, was able to ask for last minute help getting the blocks done and to me in the deadline I set for myself.

So, just before leaving on vacation, I was secure in knowing I had the blocks in my possession, and the weekend I got back, was able to “vacation de-stress” and make my “at home” quilting retreat to work on the final borders and layout and quilt top for the Sukey’s Reverse quilt.

First, I made some of what I called, “magic sashing”. 

The very edges of the quilt, I made a 1.5″ strip with mostly white, but with “cornerstones” on each side of 1.5 by 1.5 so that the sashing is the same size as the final unfinished quilt block: 12.5″ Pieces added were 10.5 X 1.5

This finished out the larger block design on the outside edge.

Another guild member made several of these “inset border” blocks, just the same small block pieces that were in the rest of the quilt. I tested out the “seminole piecing” technique of surrounding these blocks by triangles cut by a quarter square triangle method.

These borders were fun and it’s always fun to “fudge” the numbers of each color needed for the side of the quilt. The quilt is based in blues, so the swirly blue is the main color in the border. But the quilt is also based in some other cool colors, and it was fun to put them into the quilt in addition.

By surrounding the block by the same color as the white (one of the colors of the four patch) the two colored pieces appear to “float” in the quilt. Since I was doing the seminole piecing, I decided one side of the triangles would be the same background, and the other side would be colored. This also makes the pieces appear to float in the middle of the border without being too wild or hard to do.

By the end of the weekend I came back, I had the whole top together and pinned to my design wall, and all the pieced borders of the quilt done. Notice how the center fabric was one fabric I had in my stash that leans purple, and somewhere in the middle on each side, is one or two fabrics that lean blue green, but the rest are blue.

The following weekend, or maybe it was the one after, I was able to attend a sewing day and get a “stay solid border” in between on the edge of the quilt.

I had electric quilt calculated the number of blocks needed for the quilt as I had made, and then got a rough idea of the full size of the inner border of the quilt.

I was originally going to make the dark border a little narrower, but tried to “size up” a little bit to try to match the pieces on the outside.

I was close. So very close. Different adjustments might have had to be made as necessary.

Turns out each pieced border was 0.25″ too long. Trimming it up, I now have added my quilt borders shown above to the edge of the quilt.

The edge of each of the side borders is also the same background color as the rest of the background. This made it really easy to be able to trim up my slightly too long pieced borders without sacrificing the design. Also lucky me that after sewing was only 0.25″ off!

I was going to add one more dark border (hard to see in the picture above, but dark blue/blue-purple is the inside border).

This quilt is measuring 103.25 by 90.25. and this part is done up to here. I am hoping to turn it over to the quilter to have it done in the late winter/early spring for the 2019 fundraising.

Lots of work, a few “rouge blocks”, lots of cajoling or reminders of getting the blocks back, and lots more organization than I really wanted to do.

At the end, I did push my guild members to get the blocks done. But contrastingly, I did push myself to get the rest of the quilt done also. Most large chunks of spare time on the weekends so far in the last month and a half have been doing something more on my part of this quilt.

I was pretty exhausted this year doing all this guild work for 2018. Doing a large part of putting together the guild show and putting this together also, not a great idea to do both around the same time frame. Maybe if there was only one or the other, it would have been a little more manageable.

A few personal items in my life early in the year, and extra hobbies this year have pushed everything so squished for 2018.

But even with all the issues, prodding, pattern writing stress, I am happy with the quilt as it is. I find it funny that my extremely scrappy blocks made first almost look out of place. But not. Not really. So many “quilt philosophies” here. I love group quilts and seeing everyone’s creativity!!!!

I haven’t quite finished the updated instructions on the borders. It’s been a mish-mash of pictures and ideas so far which I haven’t edited down to a complete item. And it turns out that the borders fit better than I originally planned as they were actually cut.

I am going to miss having Sukey’s Reverse quilt in the house! I will need to do a major amount of donations to be able to get the quilt back! Or I could make a second one. A year from now the quilt will be drawn for. A large year and fun year of this quilt in the making.

I am also going to be happy moving on to something else for a while!!!

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40.0 Guild Challenge Quilt from Coloring book inspiration

Oy!

I took a few months off quilting to reset. Something about taking all my closet out, moving my ironing board and design wall, only having limited time to do outside tasks before blazing hot temps take hold – where we are now! – and family emergencies during another month, offset me from quilting until getting this challenge quilt ready for the June local guild meeting.

I’ve been a guild member since 2009, and this is the first “guild challenge quilt” I have participated in that we have had of this kind.

Ok, so we were given a challenge fabric and told, keep it small (about 2 feet), add one off white solid, add one other solid, and the rest is up to us.

So I purchased some variations of solid fabrics.

I had a thought about recreating either a fabric design, or a notebook cover, or a coloring book I picked up a while ago.

Between this and a frequently added Pintrest board of gradient colors, I decided to try to recreate the front design.

I drew a quick sketch, then one morning, I sat down with some rulers and circles, and drew out and then colored a design based off this colored pencil design. And proceeded to color it in.

I drew the design actually on the heat and bond paper that gave me a “real life” feel of the size of each piece I was adding to the quilt design.

This design turned out very “arty” for my taste. I think I teased a portion of this somewhere else.

I used the gradients of having several different colors of teal as the focus, and the little accent pieces of yellow, orange and pink to pop in and out of the piece.

Setting up the quilting part, I started looking at videos and how best to approach this. I was essentially setting up a large applique quilt, but have decided in many recent times that I feel like I have very little patience for handwork. I needed to do this quilt raw edge.

I remembered a video Leah Day did of a piecing applique quilt from several years ago.

If you don’t swing back to her video, I used the ideas of a few major concepts that later helped me with my quilt.

1. Leah showed the upward direction on the back of her pieces so she could piece her quilt correctly again. This helped me get the right orientation.
2. Leah had an outline behind her fabric she was pasting her quilt onto.
3. Leah had flipped her design right to left to get the correct orientation on the front. This was something I should have remembered on my own, but actually did not.
4. Leah suggested cutting and placing strips down on the quilt, line at a time. Which was a slow way, but it got me organizing my quilt in such a way, I didn’t get any part mixed up with any other part.

Ok so I flipped the design around and put the new flipped design on another piece of heat n bond paper. I also eliminated the very “darkest” teal. In matching it up in a line with the other pieces, it had the wrong tone. It was darker, but it had a little bit more brown or grey tinted into the fabric color that didn’t “pop” with the rest of the quilt color.

Actually eliminating the one fabric made it easier. I had done a proof of concept piece, and as much as I liked the tweezers and setting the pieces down, I actually liked having slightly larger pieces in my finished piece. It makes it more likely to be done when this is all said and done if the pieces are a little larger.

The darkest teal in this piece above, I took out.

Then I had one more challenge that I myself had created for myself. My original design was on heat N bond, which would mean that if I added pieces to my finished quilt and ironed them down, that I would heat n bond my “design” to the table.

Luckily, I had all the small quilts I have been free motion quilting during the month of March. I took a quilt sandwich of similar size, placed that on the table, and then took a piece of freezer paper, traced the outlines onto the freezer paper from my heat n bond design, then heated up the freezer paper “pattern” onto the back of the quilt sandwich as a barrier for the table.

I had traced the outlines of my design several times before really getting started on the fabric part of my quilt.

When everything was ready, I took some close up pictures of my design for reference.

And once I had the whole quilt photographed, I carefully cut up the patterns out of the heat n bond paper, one strip at a time.

It was so nice using solid fabrics for this quilt, I didn’t have to worry about right side and wrong side. I applied each piece of my template to a piece of numbered fabric. I tried to consider the raw edge quality of the quilt, and attempted to make the main line go along the grain of the fabric if possible.

After applying the pattern to the fabric, I carefully cut the fabric around each piece, giving a little bit of a seam allowance to each side evenly. I was going to have to slightly overlap the pieces with the neighboring pieces. If each of these pieces didn’t match up with my original designed sizes, that was ok, as long as the overlaps made sense with the rest of the quilt.

And here was another section cut out and then flipped over.

And a different section that was meant to be “interrupted by another piece”. –  Shown from the back.

As I completed each section (slowly), I carried them over from my working space to my ironing board.

After cutting out to size all the sections of this quilt, I picked a section to start with, and using the (faint) outline on the freezer paper as a guideline for placement, got my section organized the way I wanted it. Then hit it with a hot iron.

The adding of each section became more and more fun. As long as I was paying attention to what goes under what piece, this quilt seemed to work out well. You may be able to see the faint outline under the off-white fabric.

I ended up using tweezers to help me place the “right” fabrics on front or on the back. For me, my general guideline was to have the lighter fabrics on the bottom, except in cases where that was an “alternating design”. I also tried to keep yellow on the bottom in places I would also be able to chose that too.

I originally had a different blue piece for the top corner that matches the “eye” I have on the right side. After doing all these pieces and strips on these smaller sections of lighter blues, I decided I wanted to add a little bit of color to the background. Adding even more of the quilt pieces to the quilt below.

In addition, I had a bright patterned yellow fabric that I tried to put into the quilt that would fit in the section next to the blue as part of a “sun” piece. Boy was it bright and distracting. I laid the cutout piece next to that section of the quilt, and it was too distracting. It felt like a “sun” part, but it just wasn’t working.

I did find a very light yellow and forgetting to flip the diagram over, I ended up placing the very very light back of that piece on the bottom right corner opposite my blue piece. It’s there, but hard to even notice, it’s so light.

And then I put the “front side” of the really light yellow to make sure I got a feeling of “offwhite” for the challenge portion of the quilt. It was a very lightly mottled tone-on-tone that fully reads as solid.

This is actually where I am with this quilt right now. It needs sewn down currently.

I did get it spray basted to a piece of batting and backing is the blue fabric in the “eye of the bird”. It reminds me of a bird with arms and a ball in his hand that trumpets out the front.

Sorta kinda but not really.

As I sew these pieces down, I will also quilt through the quilt sandwich at the same time. This will save me a step.

I was able to show off what I have finished to the guild on Tuesday, which was the “soft” due date for the quilt. We had quite a few people bring their challenge quilts to the guild meeting. Mine was not finished, but I was able to hold it up for all to see what I was working on, and to my knowledge, none of the pieces fell off in transport to or from the meeting.

This is going into our quilt show held on July 8th & 9th. Assuming I can actually sew it down & bind it in time. I may even use the challenge fabric in the binding!

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31.5 My quilts that I put up in the show specifically

If you are a normal reader of my blog, you may recognize one, two, or even three of these quilts. Here they are.

Most were in the “smallest” quilt category, competing against themselves for viewer’s choice. And they’re pretty much all wallhangings.

First the most obscure quilt I’ve done. I called it “irregular ice” and it’s pretty much a table runner with a strange shape. But I think it’s the shape that makes this quilt cool. 

Ice to remind me of cold.

I was so glad they put the two Fibonacci quilts next to each other so they could be buddies. 

The only comment I got was on the feathers the one quilter who always wins awards and stuff said she liked my feathers.

I like the juxtaposition of the two differences together, one with lots of quilting one with a lot less, and the change of the borders to see how different that is with the same center fabrics.

These quilts make me feel like an “artist”.

I have a small story to show and share later about this quilt, but here it is as it was hanging in the show (it’s changed since then a week or two ago).

Third quilt I ever done. I love this quilt, this baltimore album quilt (Mimi Dietrich) that is the first headlong plunge directly into the world of hand applique.  Whee.

I think that the Dancing Ribbons quilt has been talked about and shared a lot on this blog, but then again, a large portion of it was done during last spring & summer (2012). The hanger fell off my door and so currently need to rehang this quilt.

I figured out a lot of things that I hid in this quilt.  I made a list and asked the questions on the description page to the quilt viewers.  This was placed a tiny bit high so I don’t know if a lot of people read this description or tried to find all the things.

I loved getting a chance to see the back of my Exothermic Wonders quilt. Love the freeform piecing of this section with the quilt leftovers.

And of course, you gotta see the front side too which is now the center picture on my ipod.

Which is the largest quilt to date I’ve ever ever done.  And LOTS of work.

Well I hope you enjoyed the quilt show that we had.  Feel free to pin back to the posts about the show.

31.4 From the quilt show’s featured quilter

Many many decades of work went into these quilts and the skill of the woman who made these quilts.

She shows up at a lot of guild meetings, has had cancer, has been looking very good lately, and was glad to be able to feature her quilts in our show.

I personally may not be the most likely pairing of our featured quilter, but I admire all she’s done for the guild in the past and it’s just so nice to see her and talk to her at times.

In all these years she still volunteers to work on other people’s bindings, and she still excels at embroidery, does hand quilting, and last year had the best folded fabric quilts.

Her love of fabric and quilts is amazing and she had 20 quilts in the show, and I’ll show you some of her range.

This was the most “Darla like” quilt of any she has done. You have the bargello and the applique, and this is just nice.

This one she was telling someone is her favorite quilt.

Some nice stitching and embroidery here. Bluework.

Soft embroidery here.

Love these baskets. Beautiful!

Cute pumpkins for something different.

Simple, small piecing.

Super sized center with alternating on point and normal set embroidery blocks. Done in beautiful redwork.

It’s been amazing getting to know Arlene over the years and I am glad to see what she does and brings to all of us! Smiles all the time. 🙂

31.3 Some of the Larger Quilts

There were less quilts in this section, so I will show you a larger portion of these quilts.

This was a LOT of piecing, a LOT of applique, and I saw it at several retreats and up on the wall a lot while the quilter was working toward finishing this quilt.

 

A cute little fall quilt.

And cute little winter quilt.

Night flight. I sat across from the quilter who was making this during the retreat where she was piecing these. She had every 10 blocks finished safety pinned together and that is still a lot of safety pins!

Minglewood done in Christmas colors.

Minglewood in ‘light brights’.

This is a cute little quilt. Look at all the pretty sashing, in addition to all the piecing!

Next, I should show you the featured quilters applique quilts, and then finally my quilts.  Stay tuned. Lots in this virtual quilt show.

 

 

31.2 Smaller Quilts from the 2013 show part B

Keeping on showing the smaller quilts from the local quilt show.

 

Look at all these feathered stars! 🙂

 

The lady who made this quilt was sad that this was her only entry into the show.  But I like all the tiny pieces that she does really well!  And again applique on the top!

There’s something zen about these japanese fabrics and birds, and sashing and lanterns. Very cool.

Another one of those quilts that shows self expression! Love this cute little quilt and what it represents!

This quilt is a nice clean looking quilt in some of my favorite colors!

Lots of patriotic applique here.

Whole cloth style twilling embroidery.

 

Lovely little birds and quilt shape. Looks like it could fit above a door or desk or other area and just bring a simle to your face from an unexpected place.

Next post I am going to hit you with will show a few of the larger quilts that were put on the edges of the show.

 

31.1 Quilt Show 2013 smaller sized quilts took over

The tiny quilts really took over the show with twice as many as any other quilts.  Size of small quilts went up to 57″ so my tiny ones were right up there next to some larger lap sized quilts.

These are some of the other members’ quilts that I liked.

Beautiful whole cloth quilt and you can see what looks to me like ruler work in the center blocks.  And they sashed it, and added feathers.

This quilt is part of a quilt kit that highlights twilling, the knotted embroidery stitch that is so popular here. Love this quilter’s work, that takes a lot of time to twill that much.  And the gradation fabric!

Funky jewely applique. How cute.

Now I know who’s quilt this is. I love the addition of some photographed blocks. On instinct I knew it was important when posting originally (this is a little bit edited a few days later), but the impact of this quilt fort he recipient and for the quilter is amazing. I wish I had time to really look at this quilt in person at the show.  Luckily the quilter who made this has a blog, and I would love to direct you to read her story about this quilt.  This is the latest about this quilt, a little bit sad (3rd paragraph in).

What a memory!

Actually, this is an older picture of our featured quilter. This little wallhanging is framed and embroidered celebrating a very special anniversary, done by her daughter who is part owner of the local quilt shop.

Because I’ve seen this a lot, I keep thinking this quilt is older than it really is. This quilt is whole-cloth-style but is actually twilling and the quilting is amazing on it too. There is a subtle “low volume-ness” to this quilt.

I think this was a round robin quilt with the applique society. We saw it come together at a retreat I believe. So Cute!

Well I do have other small quilts, but I am breaking them up into another blog post. Hope you’ve enjoyed the virtual quilt show so far. Stay tuned.

31.0 Quilt show middle sized quilts, part two

Last weekend we had our quilt show and I am finally starting to get pictures transferred from my computer to the internets.

I think I took over 300 pictures, so this big task has been looming over my head for a while.

So I’ve been hanging out and quilting instead.  But as the quilt show post is the first ‘blog post UFO’ I’ll work through some of those pictures first.

We had 3 major categories of quilts, small quilts, twin quilts, and queen/king quilts.  All determined by size. I’m going to start off with pictures of the middle sized quilts as they were first to be photographed.

Well at least the ones that got in on that side of the show. There were a few smaller and larger quilts thrown into this section of the show.

First is the DWR (Double Wedding Ring Quilt). Applique is not a stranger to members of this guild and adds to this quilt quite a lot. Done by the guild president.

I liked this quilt, it is funky colors. And triangles. Lots of triangles. Half Square Triangles.

This quilt is by our quilt show coordinator most years and designer. This quilt has been seen in the local quilt shop before. She probably has a pattern for this quilt.

This is just amazing amount of piecing and work. This was part of a two and a half year project and/or class/and or BOM (I wasn’t part of it) and there are several ladies who tackled this pattern. The name escapes me right now, but I do remember it’s not Dear Jane, but one of the other ones like it.

This quilt is a paper pieced version of a BOM that I wanted to do in dark blues.  I have loved this pattern for years. Somehow I think this was hung such that I couldn’t get the full quilt in the picture sadly.

I have always liked the “Priscilla style” blocks in EQ and love the edging on this very modern looking quilt. This was one that we folded in order to binder clip the quilt to the backside. I hope this quilt survived the fold okay after it was taken down (didn’t see, too much else going on).

Love the subtle blues and browns in this quilt.

Someone’s little owls!

Not my colors in particular, but it was one of the guild pass around Pizza Box blocks and I made two of the blocks for this little guy! Turned out great with the sashing!

I like the mountain feeling this quilt gives!

Wild colors, and the black spirograph fabric is wonderful!

This was one of our minglewoods. I think this was another BOM and/or class as this quilt was done in several colors throughout the year.

I hope you enjoyed part 2 of the quilt show. I will try to get parts 3 & 4 & 5 done sooner, but some of it depends on upload speeds & my patience.

26.1 Guild Night!

Tonight is guild night! I get excited about guild night for several reasons.

1) I get to ‘stay up late for it’

which usually means that

2) I come back all excited

3) I zonk out the next day (takes a large amount of nasty, acid green, highly caffeinated beverage to keep me coherent the next day)

But other good reasons to go are

4) I get to see something new that someone (local) has done, get experienced in seeing lots of types of quilts usually, OR

5) I get to try a new technique with the guild, like make a scissors fob, a little carrier case, a microwavable bowl, littlefoot paper piecing …

6) I get to take pictures of and see other people’s quilts and then in the next month or two put those pictures on our website

7) I get to see what we’re working on for or group BOM’s (what others have done) and get to see my next month’s bom.

8) I get to see lots of embroidery (including twilling), and occasionally hand quilting going on during the meeting itself.

9) This means I can also hand piece, embroider or hand quilt my own stuff that I bring to the meetings.

10) I get to talk with a lot of my (not all) in person quilting friends.

You want to see what I’ve done for my BOM’s so far? There are only 2 months in, and tonight I’ll get a chance to think about the 3rd.

April’s Block

May’s block (a little personal blurring occured)

… that’s it. I’ve been waiting for a chance to use this pattern to embroider that I believe I got for free somewhere.  It’s SO CUTE and just fits the new block owner perfectly.

I hear there are other BOM’s that are also embroider, but they haven’t shown up yet, so I don’t know if they’ll be the same album block design or not.

So far they look traditional, and they are to a point, but we’ve got some applique coming, and a kalidescope type block, and some random HST’s coming too.

Tonight the rest of them are doing a christmas in July swap. For me I think this one I’m passing on.  Just Cuz.

17.3 SQ Episode 027 – Behind the Scenes

Podcast Feed

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