43.8 More Ruler Work Observations from Beginner – MAL 2019

I am staying as true as possible to the quilt for 15 minutes challenge for the month of March – aka March A Long. The only date that might have been missed was Friday. Even on Thursday when I was feeling a little under the weather, I looked through some designs in books that have been sitting on the shelf for years.

I have been staying on my free motion / ruler work for quilting working on my practice project.

Last week I did some cross hatching, this week, I tried out the football curved ruler.

A little bit of practice every day. One day was the outline of two footballs offset on the same row, the next day was the pebbles.

I filled in the corners with this weird gap thing set aside for something and the swirls that I almost see as my default traveling pattern.

I have found that instead of a generic meander, I tend to go with swirls as a “I don’t know what filler to go next with” filler to get from place to place and to speed up.

As you may notice I have a strange red thread design in the center of these white patches.

I did this with the marking pen around the ruler for the center of the design. This was to practice using my marking pen. I am not known to do a ton of marking or registration marks on my quilting. The pen took a while to get used to being used again, but seemed to do decent with the initial design.

This was before tackling any of the “rulers on the machine” work. Then I echoed it. Three times. Uhhh… two echoes, three lines.

Anyway, I am mostly happy with the work I did on the first pass, but my echoing skills leave a lot to be desired.

I am wondering what about this is hard for me to do correctly. Is it that I go too fast, or I can’t see well enough or I just “lose where I am” a little, or am a little careless, or I try to “make up for previous passes” by making a change the next echo and then actually make it worse.

Granted, this would be better if the thread color actually matched the background.

This is a small issue I have to work out on my own. This quilt has both light and dark patches, and for some reason, I have decided to make it all symmetrical. Same shapes in each corner, same threads. Sometimes it means that the thread color contrasts, the other times it blends. More or less.

I am finding myself feeling moments of “rush” with this quilt. It is practice, I did not piece it. I do not see it hanging in my house, or given to someone else. I don’t know if it would be “good enough” to donate to the local hospital or not (for a lap quilt), I am mostly going through the motions on this quilt to really use as practice.

So I am periodically “speeding up” through some of the quilting.

When I first started, I was having lots of shredding thread issues. Because of that, I lowered the tension “way down”. So what did that cause? Eyelashes.

I went through the entire corner blue section with this rushed, low tension top which caused the back to eyelash incredibly badly throughout.

I am finding it hard to make myself stop and figure out what I am doing wrong, just getting through the section of practice without doing as much learning as I “could be.”

Since I was needing more practice echoing, I decided to use the curved rulers to help me out on echoing this.

And then finding a fill that works too. This worked well. I am amazed at how much I get confused or frustrated when turning the quilt around to the the other side of the design. Somehow now doing the same shape, in the same way, on the same kind of quilting background, I feel more frustrated on the 2nd half than the first half. Almost every time.

I am finding myself hitting the ruler on the machine, or getting it stuck behind where the foot gets in the way.

At least I figured out that the more I can do on the machine in one direction, the better off I seem to be. The first few circles/loops, I was turning all the way around instead of working “just the tops,” or “just the bottoms”.

I think if this machine was a higher shank machine with more throat space, this task would seem way easier at the moment.

Which I have to use what I have at the moment. I need to start a fund for getting either a Juki or something bigger like a sit down 16 HQ. But that, being down the road a bit, will have to wait. It’s hard to say, because I do really like piecing a LOT, and designing a LOT, and for those activities I only need the machine I have now.

I hate to come away from this post feeling negative about the whole experience. I am not feeling that way necessarily.

This is fun, I might need to figure out how to move on to my real projects pretty soon though. Keep my tension in check. Watch for my foot slipping off the screw and falling down – something that happened this morning and caused issues trying to get through some of the tough seams on the underside in particular.

This is really nice, and I am glad I am working on this, and I know in a few short weeks I will be piecing again.

This is my stopping point at the moment. I need to get on and do a few other things this weekend. I have a plan for the other four corners in this section, and I have three of them to do still. I really hope this practice quilt doesn’t take the entire month of March to quilt, but as long as I March-A-Long and keep at it, I will eventually be done! And I will have a nice reference too!

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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!

39.0 First BOM – Stained Glass

For the brand new year, I happened upon a brand new BOM that I decided to join up and work on.

I love the stained glass look for quilts, and this one just spoke to me this time.

A designer for which I know little about, lives in Europe, I have bought one of her patterns before and the quilt is on my list to do, Ula Lenz has made the Ray of Hope quilt in hexagon style.

I have already completed the first block, here are some of the pieces I was working on.

I had a bright bag of orange, purple, pink batik scraps that I knew just “went together”. I think someone from my guild donated them to me at the last retreat a year ago. I had kept the fabrics separate from the rest of my stash, hoping to find a use for them.

I remembered seeing these fabrics recently, so I located an appropriately dark batik that I had bought to use for some purpose that matched these pretty batiks.

I have already cut out the border fabric for these blocks, the way Ula has us do the quilt is to make sashing and fun border wonky stars in between each of the hexagon blocks.

There are many color ways that would look fantastic for this quilt. I have luckily got the first block done, so I hope that I will be able to remind myself to download her next BOM when it’s posted at the beginning of each month.

It’s free. As you can see, each of the hexagons will be done in three sub blocks, and several of them have different amounts of seams on them.

Paper piecing doesn’t scare me.

Here’s the pretty block without the border pieces.

I hope I can keep enough of these fabrics in the quilt. I may try to find another light fabric to help with the contrast a little more on future blocks.

And here’s the block with border pieces. So now it can be sewn in square.

35.7 Dancing Ribbons corner quilting not turning out

Okay I have been living with some darker fabrics next to my dancing ribbons quilt, trying to make the fabric decisions on what will work best for the corner blocks.

And then on a whim this past weekend, I decided to start cutting up and using an even lighter fabric for the corner fabric, making my lightest color fabric on the left in my picture above now become the darker of the 2 blue fabrics.

Then I have everything cut out, and all my sets of pieces cut out, sewn together & trimmed.

This means all the paper pieces are trimmed and all the fabric is sewn together in groups of 2 trimmed.

But you know the old saying “Measure twice, cut once”? Yeah, I don’t think I did that.

See how much smaller my completed corner is from the size of the quilt? I forgot to double check my measurement of my quilt block before printing out the EQ7 paper piecing.

I had put in the center block to being 20 inches instead of the 23 inch finished size. I was hoping to go large and then cut back, not the other way around. 😦

Sad trombone.

Also, seeing exactly how bright I went with the brighter fabric now this “way lighter” corner thing looks really out of place.

If I manipulate the one corner I have done in photoshop to see the quilt as it may appear (with the too small corners) it will look kinda like this.

I don’t mind lighter corners, but this seems too light. I think I may rethink this redesign. I may go with the original darker fabric to tie it better to the original colors. I was “this close” to using the darker fabrics Saturday, but then “on a whim” (which sometimes works) I said that I liked this lighter fabric too much and I wanted to use it.

Since I have to redo the corners anyway for being too small, I will switch back to the darker fabric & purchase more of the ‘medium’ I have in this piece.

The dark from the corners of this piece will become the light in the next part of the fabric. The time I spent working on this quilt, there were limited hours for in-person fabric shopping. So this quilt will sit another week during the thinking stage.

The yellow bright corners may be too bright for this quilt, I have a duller version of the yellow. Possibly, I am going to rethink the actual corner colors.

I did have a thought about adding borders to the corners to make them fit better, but I don’t really want to try to mess with that.

I don’t mind too much about this setback. I DO really like the four corner colors that I have created.

So much that I decided to complete the four corners as a small quilt of its own. With a minor change with the inner star which I will highlight with the quilting stage.

This is a cute little happy blue quilt. I will have a quilt plus the reverse of the same thing in the corners of the Dancing Ribbons quilt. With different colors.

Just not destined for this quilt at this time. Very pretty!

35.6 Golden Card Trick Quilt

In my “year of FMQ” I have sat down and finally quilted this card trick quilt that I have had in the works since April of 2009. Making it my oldest UFO.

I do realize that there still needs to be one small line I missed on the card trick block itself and the corners aren’t tacked down – said I would get to them later & forgot that I never finished them until after I put my FMQ foot away for the day.

The card trick & square in square blocks are quilted on the top with a golden/orange contrasting thread.

But the threads on the straight lines in the ditch around the blocks are much lighter – a light taupe for some of the straight lines.  For the swirly details I decided to pick a color in between the lighter taupe and the golden/orange, and use a golden yellow color thread for quilting.

Quilting is swirls and long feathers in a box around this section.

And circles and a pinched block for the middle of the blocks.

This quilting went rather well, and is the largest thing I have pushed through my Janome Magnolia machine. Not too hard to do, but too much bigger would be harder than this.

A small amount of success for finishing the quilting. I have been weary of “overquilting” this quilt, but I think this one plays nicely with some curves and some straight line free motion quilting. I have basic straight lines in the borders.

I could alternate with fills, but currently they are left plain, which is fine with me at this time.

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.