still here, still stitching

I’m sure you quilters know that moment when you lose the love for a project. It’s when the end is almost within sight but there are still some hours to be put in. Well, at least that’s how it is for me.

Actually, I don’t feel like that very often – perhaps because my quilting is usually fairly straight-forward although, as you may have noticed, I am becoming more adventurous.

I still quilt the “old way” – I knot the strands on the back of the quilt and hide the ends in the wadding. My good friend, Cindy, who blogs at Delighted Hands, suggested I try taking small stitches at the beginning and end of each line of quilting and then cutting the threads. Well, I tried that method – I really did. I even tried it in class. My teacher and I discussed it and we tried three different methods but the stitching just pulled out! So I went back to the old way.

Now that is usually not too bad but this time I set myself a real challenge. My Wonky Quarter Log Cabin quilt is made up of twenty 12” blocks. I decided to accentuate the wonkiness by echo quilting around each block. That wasn't too bad – mostly I just had one pair of ends to sew in for each of the twenty blocks.

It took a while to decide on a way to quilt the blocks themselves and finally I settled on radiating lines, carefully avoiding the diagonal through the centre of the block so as not to draw attention to the fact that different width strings don't meet at the diagonal. I chose to do three radiating lines either side of the diagonal – that’s six lines for each block or twelve ends to be sewn in – for twenty blocks.


The first two blocks took three hours to mark up and sew, and that didn’t include sewing the ends in. I still struggle to move a twin size quilt under my machine even though my machine has a 9” harp space. The weight of the quilt drags and catches and I am still learning how best to handle the quilt for the more intricate types of walking foot quilting I do (yes, walking foot – I don’t have a good grip on FMQ and am nowhere near ready to use it on my quilts).

I did get faster with each block but I still estimate that I spent about thirty hours quilting this project and sewing all those ends in. When I thought I was almost done and realised I was only 40% of the way through, having completed only eight blocks, I lost the love.

But, I am the kind of person who likes to finish what I start and today I sewed the label on that baby!

And, guess what? I found the love again. I really, really like the quilting; especially the way I’ve extended the radiating lines into the top and left side border – a stroke of inspiration.

As usual, the back includes my signature panel made up of “left over blocks” (I actually had to make the blocks for the back as DD and OG had only made nineteen of the twenty blocks needed for the front – see this post for the full story).

I’m linking this post with Thank Goodness It’s Finished Friday which is being hosted at My Quilt Infatuation. Why not pop over there and see what other people have finished this week? Perhaps you also have something to contribute.

I’m hoping to be back soon to show you a couple of mum’s completed blankets but spring is just three days away and it’s very tempting to be out in the garden!

Until then, may your stitches bring you much joy.
Lynne

Violet & Friends and the Scrappy Churn Dash

No, it’s not the name of a new children's book or television program. The title is a combination of two of my finished quilts: “Violet & Friends” and “Scrappy Churn Dash” (see what a difference punctuation makes! LOL)

Violet and Friends was begun in 2011 when I first joined the Rainbow Scrap Challenge over at SoScrappy blog. It continued in 2012 as I made more blocks. Finally I had enough six-inch crumb blocks to make a quilt top in violet, orange, pink, yellow, teal and green. I shared a picture of the finished top and the backing panel (it’s my signature to use panels on the back of my quilts) in a post in February last year – obviously I can’t rush into finishing! LOL

This year, I seem to have caught some kind of ‘finishing bug’; instead of starting new projects (so easy to do), I’ve been finishing old ones. Perhaps having mum here is a reminder than one day I may not be able to quilt (or knit) – and I wouldn't want DD to inherit lots of unfinished projects. I inherited three knitting projects of mum’s – one I’ve ripped and re-purposed the yarn (into part of one of mum’s blankets); the other two I’m thinking I’ll turn into one blanket instead of the two that were originally intended.

At Easter, I chose a fabric for the backing and hey presto! A week later, Violet and Friends was finished: quilted, bound and labelled!

  

The quilting was inspired by two classes I took on Craftsy: one was “Creative Quilting with your Walking Foot”, tutored by  Jacquie Gering; the other was “Dot to Dot Quilting” with Angela Waters. Angela’s class was basically about FMQ but I took her ideas and meshed them with Jacquie’s ideas and came up with my own walking foot diamonds (I tried FMQ but I can’t do it to my satisfaction – yet!).

 

It’s custom quilting and, in my opinion, looks great!

The other project in the title, Scrappy Churn Dash, was also started as a ‘Rainbow Scrap Challenge’ project. In January this year, the colour for the month was blue. I had always wanted to make churn dash blocks so made 4.5” squares for the centres. Then I chose a solid chocolate-brown (most people think it’s black) homespun for the churn dash – brown because it is a shade of orange, the complementary colour of blue, this given some warmth to what could have been a very cold-looking quilt. You can see the story of these blocks here in this post from January 2015.

 

I have several metres of one particular blue fabric so the choice for the backing was pretty easy. I only had to make my signature panel. What I had in mind was to ‘float’ churn dashes over the background but the fabrics I chose don’t stand out enough -- I probably should have gone for light colours rather than darks because this medium tone fabric is obviously darker than I think!

   

Anyway, the backing came together quickly and the quilting was done using my new quilting signature – diamonds! This involved more custom-quilting that took a very long time considering there are sixteen four inch squares, eighteen half squares, twelve diamonds, fourteen half diamonds, and four quarter diamonds that were all individually quilted. The only parts that aren’t quilted are the churn dash motifs themselves and the squares in the centre of each churn dash – my teacher and the owner of my LQS both agreed there was more than enough quilting on there to hold the layers in place! It is a donation quilt, after all, and my time is better spent making another quilt than in over-quilting!

My quilts measure about 52” by 64”, so there is quite a lot of turning of the quilt in the quilting process; just as well I bought a machine that has a largish throat! The downside of custom quilting, apart from having to turn the quilt a lot, is all the ends that have to be sewn in when the quilting’s done!

And before I go, I just have to show you my sunglasses case that I also finished in March

and my zipper pouch with box corners that I finished in April.

   

Putting a zipper in is not as difficult as I thought and I look forward to trying some more – I watched several tutorials and think I’ll try this one from Jenny Doan of Missouri Star Quilting Company next.

The sunglasses pouch was made from a tutorial by Gourmet Quilter. I’m not entirely happy with mine but I can see ways of improving on the next one!

After Scrappy Churn Dash was done, I took a few week’s break from quilting and patchwork to work on some family history but now I’m back in to the stitching groove and will be back soon to show you my works in progress. Look for that post next week; Thursday at the latest as I link up with WIP Wednesday over at Freshly Pieced blog.

Until then, may your stitching bring you much joy.

finishes!

I’m linking this post with Thank Goodness It’s Finished Friday which, this week, is being hosted by Janet at Simply Pieced blog.

Last week, before I went away, I managed to get the binding on my teacher’s donated quilt and to hand sew it down. The trickiest part of the project then loomed – getting all the pencil marks out of the border. I’m not sure how long they had been there but my teacher intimated that it had been a while. I rubbed Amway’s LOC into every inch of that border by hand; it took ages. Then I put it in my front-loading washing machine, prayed and let the machine do its thing! An hour later, I hung it on the line – there was not a pencil mark in sight! Praise the Lord!

Sometimes I look at the binding fabric and wonder if I made the right choice. It’s a green and beige stripe; I think it’s a Debbie Mumm fabric. The green is very similar to the greens in the quilt but, because the beige stripe and the green stripe are the same width, from a distance it reads as a muddy light khaki colour!  Up close it looks fine but from further away: well, I’m not so sure. However, it’s done and I’m not going to change it – mostly because I didn’t have any other more suitable fabric here to use! The photo shows my first quilting of a curved line using my walking foot and following a pattern.

 

So, may I present K.’s finished quilt (remember, I didn’t make it; I only quilted the border, bound it and washed it). Unfortunately, the colours are a bit washed out -- the photo above shows the real intensity of the colours.

But wait, there’s more…

Yesterday afternoon, I joined the pre-cut binding strips and attached the binding to my Jacob’s Ladder Goes Barn Raising quilt. Last night, as mum and WM watched the football (rugby league), I sewed the binding down. This afternoon I sewed down the two sides of the label that weren’t held down by the binding.

So, for your further viewing pleasure, may I present another finish:

 

And in knitting news (drum roll please!)…

Last December I started knitting a bear for my great-niece at the request of my niece who bought the pattern and sent it to me. It was a very fiddly knit; lots of teeny-tiny pieces. When I pulled it out last week, I could not figure out where I was up to so decided to start at the beginning of the pattern and put all those little pieces together as directed (I had knitted them on a long train journey and didn’t have the things I needed to sew it together at the time). The head (seen left of photo ) seemed way too big for the body but I proceeded anyway!

Surprisingly, it came together much better than I thought it would. I sat in the hairdresser's shop last Friday morning (20 March) waiting for mum to have her hair set and worked on the legless bear  and left home (for the wedding) last Friday with a bear that just needed some final adjustments. On Saturday, by the time we needed to have lunch and get ready for the wedding, I had got it to the point where I had to add only one more eye and some paw prints on one foot. I procrastinated on that second eye for a couple of days – I really dislike embroidering faces on knitted toys – if the eyes are wrong the whole thing is wrong! the pattern called for buttons but I don’t sew buttons on toys for two-year-old children I prayed and took courage – and it turned out much better than I’d even dared hope! I am very, very pleased with how this turned out!

The greatest compliment came when my niece said “it’s Charley Bear” and my sister came to have a look. She almost reeled in shock when she realised I had knitted it! Charley Bear is a TV character for under-fours. Here’s a clip for those not familiar with the show (I have grandsons so I’ve seen it many times).

I’m hoping to see another quilted finish and another knitted finish before next weekend! Hey, when you’re on a roll … LOL

slow stitching on the first finish of February

I’m linking this post with Slow Sunday Stitching over on Kathy’s Quilts blog when it goes live later today (it's 7pm Sunday here in Sydney, Australia).

This afternoon, I hand-stitched the two sides of the label that weren’t held down by the binding – a ten minute stitching project that saw my Green Scrappy Strippy quilt completed and become my first finish for February!

This project, started in July last year, was obviously inspired by the Jelly Roll Race quilts. However, this quilt is more thought out – all the fabrics used were graded from light to darkest and the lightest strip is one third from the top of the quilt.

Some of the fabrics, such as the ‘red’ strip at the bottom, don’t even read as green and yet, to my eye, they said ‘green’! Perhaps next time I’d better take a photograph of the fabrics to see what the camera sees!

There are thirty-two rows of 2” strips in this quilt – and I’ve barely made a dent in my green scraps! I wonder what month will be green over on the Rainbow Scrap Challenge which is hosted by Angela at SoScrappy blog.

I quilted this about every four and a half inches apart, with two horizontal rows of quilting, about half an inch apart. I say ‘about’ because, to me, quilting is an art as well as a science and imperfections show that it is made by hand not produced by machine! You can see the quilting better from the back, which also shows my quilting ‘signature’: a pieced panel to widen the fabric to the needed width; in this case the gingham fabric was only 36” so I added a 20” panel giving 56” before trimming. (Yes, those light strips truly are green!)

Although the three layers of the quilt sandwich are well-and-truly joined, I wonder whether I should have added vertical quilting to stop the batting from doing whatever wadding does when there isn’t enough quilting. Please feel free to offer a constructive opinion!

I made eight nearly-WOF lengths into binding and should have realised I had a problem when the base of my Teflon-plated iron gripped the fabric instead of sliding over it. But no – sometimes I miss the obvious! I tried to sew the binding onto the quilt – got about a quarter of the way around (about nineteen inches) when the whole quilt slipped and instead of stitching 1/4 - 3/8 inch from the edge, I was suddenly stitching at about 1/16” for about four inches (slow down driver!)! Of course, that meant some unpicking. In the end, I decided to remove the binding completely – I just didn’t feel right about it.

The following day, not being able to find enough of another fabric to make binding, I decided to go with it. My iron stuck to it again and it smelt awful. Obviously it was a polyester blend and something that felt like plastic doesn’t belong on the bound edge of a lovely soft cotton quilt! In the end, I used three different, similarly-coloured, green fabrics that read as the same tone – look closely, you may be able to see them! (probably not!! LOL)

Here’s a close up of one of the fabrics, I’m getting better with my mitred corners! It’s actually much darker than this photo shows – I like dark bindings – but the mitre wouldn’t show when I darkened the photo!

So that’s it! My first finish for February and my second personal finish for 2015 (sixth if you count the four projects I completed in January that were other people’s starts!)

I'm also linking this post with Thank Goodness It's Finished Friday (I'm a little late) which is being co-hosted at Quokka Quilts and A Quarter Inch from the Edge (I've linked at the latter).

So, what do you think? Should I go back and add some vertical quilting? (I’m not taking the binding off!)
What would you do?

blue, blue, blue

No, I’m not suffering from depression; I have three projects to talk about and they’re all blue.

The first is my blue scraps project, Crumbed Churn Dash, for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge over at SoScrappy blog.

In this post, I talked about the twenty-two 4” crumb blocks I made on 3 January.

Before I could proceed, I had to choose the fabric for the churn dash motif. I had thought I would use solid black but, in my eyes, it didn’t enhance the colours in the crumb blocks, and I thought it made the blocks seem flat and lifeless. (I’ve changed my opinion now that it’s too late!)

Then I thought I’d try a pale blue background, even though I was pretty sure I knew what the outcome would be!

I needed quite a large amount of a darkish fabric to make those medium blues stand out. This was the only blue I could find that served my purposes (I tried others but they really didn’t work!). 

I thought it looked good and I had an adequate amount of fabric but I just wasn’t sure… working with checks can be a problem – one needs to keep them straight to look good and there 160 units in the quilt!

I wonder what you would have chosen? I had decided to go with the solid black but was still restless – I have a philosophy that I live by: “if in doubt, don’t!” I really didn’t want to use the black but what could I do? Then I had a brain-wave!

Brown, being a shade of orange, adds some warmth to the quilt and I quite like the combination of chocolate brown and medium blue so I went with that. Of course, I wasn’t going to cut 160 pieces in case it didn’t work so I did four of each unit to begin with; enough to make one block! (The brown is actually much darker than this photo shows)

I was hoping that I’d be able to tell you today that I had finished making all 160 sub-units for twenty churn dash blocks.

But, I was wrong.

On Friday, I finished all twenty blocks! I started the day with eight done, worked consistently all day, and finished all twenty around 4pm.

I love how the brown churn dashes make a grid for the large blue diamonds to hang off!

As you can see, it’s planned scrappiness. I spent quite a bit of time determining the placement of each piece of ‘rag’ (as my teacher calls them)! I’m looking forward to having a ‘proper’ design wall soon so I don’t have to keep working on the floor in another room.

I pressed away from the centre but I think I’ll have to go back and press all the seams joining the top and bottom rows to the centre rows of each block; in this way, I’m hoping I’ll avoid the problems of too much bulk where the blocks meet. It’s a hassle but better than the alternative!

Yesterday, WM and I discussed possibilities for basting. We have carpet throughout the house. I’ve tried basting on carpet and usually end up pinning my project to it! Besides, it’s too hard on my knees and back. Our dining table is timber so I can’t use that for fear of scratching the surface with pins. WM told me that I could use the kitchen bench/breakfast bar  so I tried it out with the Bargello table runner. The bench-top is Caesar-stone so it will be interesting to see how it stands up whilst having pins pushed against it. When I removed the table runner, the bench-top didn’t seem any worse for wear – I was very careful not to push the pins too hard! The only marks I can see are from the masking tape and I’m assuming they will wash off.

Not only did I get the table runner basted, I also got it quilted, trimmed and bound. Woo-hoo! This is the fifth finish of 2015 and the first of five of my own projects that I had waiting to baste, quilt and finish.

There will probably be another post for this project: I wanted to say more but this post is already quite long enough!

With all those to-be-quilted projects, I need another scrap piecing project so I’m joining Sharon’s Let’s Book It challenge this month. 

While I had my blue scraps out, I started a quilt based on a pattern called “Slices” from the book Scrap Republic by Emily Cier. That quilt is only 30” square; I need to make mine 48” x 64” so there’ll be twelve triangles of most colours not the four shown here.

It’s a new project but it will take me all year to complete given that the Rainbow Scrap Challenge is one colour a month. Interestingly, Emily Cier recommends making one triangle at a time; I’m thinking it might be easier to sew a whole lot of scraps together then cut the triangles from the resulting fabric. Of course, doing it Ms Cier’s way means that every scrap is followed by a different scrap; doing it my way, while possibly faster and with less wastage, will result in the same scrap combination over and over. I’ll have to think on it some more. Here is the first ‘triangle’ I made. I’m not cutting the triangle properly until I have all the triangles for a row – bias edges are tricky things!

If you’ve got a few minutes, why not drop into Angela’s blog to see what people have been doing with their blue scraps; and/or Sharon’s blog to see what projects people are making from the long neglected patterns in the books on their shelves?

Also, I’ve now edited my previous post and linked it to JulieK’s Binding Blitz link-up. Please check out that link too; and if you’ve bound a quilt this month, add yours to the party! You know what they say, ‘the more the merrier’!

Time for pink – the colour of February… stay tuned! ;-)

fourth fifth finish in ‘fifteen

I admit that none of these projects began with me. However, I did finish them.

Firstly there were two quilts for which I had to make binding, attach and hand stitch. For our quilting group, they were big quilts; both of them were 280” around.

Then there was the quilt donated by my quilting teacher. When donated, it was at the basted stage so the quilting and binding are my work ( although K. made the binding which was a time saver).

 

A couple of years ago, someone donated a pile of 9.5” QAYG string blocks. I made a quilt from some of them that was shown at the Airing of the Quilts in 2014. 

While sorting through UFOs at the beginning of January, I found another 28 blocks. That wasn’t enough for another quilt so I made another 14 blocks – and in the process discovered that I don’t really like making QAYG string blocks!

Nevertheless all fourteen were made and the quilt was put together. I thought the blocks looked dull and decided I would probably not make another of these quilts in the future.

I chose a royal blue printed fabric for the sashing. It did a great job of making every individual block like a little window or piece of art in its own right and made the quilt look more cohesive. Better still, the quilt went from being dull and lifeless to being quite a ‘happy’ quilt.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough of the blue fabric (which was left over backing fabric from the quilt in the first photograph above) to make the binding. WM laughed when I told him yesterday that I had to audition fabrics for the binding. I wanted a darker blue but didn’t have enough of any blue fabric that worked so I changed to red. I found a reddish-brown that had tiny blue dots on it that I thought worked. Of course, the dots are so small that the fabric reads as solid maroon from even a short distance. This is a very inaccurate photo of the colour which is much darker in reality but at least the photo shows the blue dots!

I finished hand-sewing the binding at 12:30 this morning – I didn’t intend to stay up to finish it but you know how it is – once I was approaching that fourth corner I couldn’t put it down. I like the way the blocks seem to fold in and out!

Speaking of corners – this is the first time in nearly five years of quilting that I have four perfectly mitred corners on the back and front of a quilt! Woo-hoo!

 

That’s my fourth finish for this month – I’m so pleased. Maybe I have time to get my Bargello table runner quilted and bound before the end of the month? I have to make a back and quilt it before I can bind it!

ETA: I did get my fifth project finished before the end of the month! You can see it in this post.

How is your January progressing?

I’ll be linking this post with WiP Wednesday at Freshly Pieced, Binding Blitz at juliekquilts and Thank Goodness It’s Finished Friday as they go live this week.