Monday Bucket List

I haven't done anything on the list since last week.  I've been fighting a nasty infection and it's sucked the life out of me.  Plus the Wee Monsieur has been sick too, so kids haven't been in school and there have been lots of doctors appts.  Hopefully everyone is on the upswing now.

Winter tree quilt-  I started off following the Purl Bee tutorial, and was really unsatisfied by the results.  I didn't like having the seam down the middle of the tree.  Making all the trees different blocks seemed inefficient.  I can see why they did it the way they did, just being able to give people measurements for rectangle is easy for a free tutorial.  I wanted to make my trees differently and I invested in a few different triangle rulers.  I have one top put together and now I know how I want to do the final piece.

Postage Stamp Quilt-  haven't started, haven't uncovered the fabric from it's hiding place.

HST-  so many options, so little time

Drunkards Path-  not yet

Improv stripes bed spread-  Must finish this soon.

Interlocking wonky stars wall hanging-  half a dozen star pieces, debating one star from each fabric, or more than one

Dutch windmills

Rainbow charm squares

Flying Geese

Perfect the zippered pouch

New Patterns- working on 2 different ideas, have prototypes, but need to work out the kinks.

Scrap Attack Quilt Along

I'm in for the scrap attack challenge.  Since I first did the wonky star blocks for my 4x5 Modern Bee blocks, I've known I wanted to do a wall hanging for my living room.  That was my plan for my entry in the scrap attack quilt along challenge.  I have started, I have one star done and a bunch of little white squares cut.  I'm debating whether I should use all my white scraps as background, or restrict myself to Kona white scraps.  

Anyway, when I was pulling out the scraps I got an inspiration for another scrap quilt.  I envisioned improv log cabin blocks, which are my favorite thing ever and which I told myself I wouldn't do anymore of this year, with bright blue centers and moving from white around the blue to dark brown at the edges, set in dark brown sashing.  Despite telling myself that I was moving out of my comfort zone this year, I started on them a few days ago.  It's been a hard week and I needed some comfort sewing.  Plus, sometimes when you get an artistic vision, you have to see it through.

 The top two blocks need one more circuit of dark brown.  The blue centers don't pop as much as I thought they would.  Some of that is starting with blue scraps that have too much white in them.  I'm pretty happy with the shade progression from white to dark brown.  I did need to cut some more beige scraps, but it's in the stash, so that's allowed. 

 Some of the squares I cut wonky and some I left natural.

I think I like the mixture of deliberately wonky and naturally wonky.  Anyway, I'm doing a good job of burning through my white, beige, brown scraps and I'm highlighting a few of my favorite blue scraps.

I'm now thinking that to get more blue in the piece I should sash the blocks in a bright blue, which would contrast well with the dark brown outer ring.  Decisions, decisions!

NOEL finished

I went back through the Christmas fabric to find a different border.  The new border needed white, but not too much of it.  I went with the Christmas word fabric.

 It's white enough and incorporates some of the red and green, but still provides a good contrast to NOEL.

I couldn't resist the candy cane binding and I put almost the last of the Christmas argyle on the back.  Feels good to use stuff up.

The last bit of the argyle, I cut into two 2.5 inch strips and I tossed them in the scrap bag.  I'm sure they'll make it into a pillow next year.

NOEL

I had seen something like this floating about, or maybe I was inspired by the LOVE versions, but one of the Christmas projects I didn't get done was a NOEL pillow.  I sat down Sunday night and made my own paper piece patterns for the letters.  I knew I wanted them to be square because all my pillows are square.  One of things I didn't like so much about the LOVE pillow, was having to square it up.  Since I was working with printer paper I made them 8.5 inch squares, which along with a 3 inch border would give me a generously sized 20 inch pillow cover.

This is what I made.  I haven't put my Christmas fabric scraps away, so I might as well get on top of projects for next year.

I sat down last night to quilt it.  I wanted to do a random line quilting, but I didn't want the quilting to take away from the letters.  After staring at it for 15 minutes, it occurred to me that I could do random lines in each area, so that no line crossed from background to letter.

 I used white thread in the white background, green in the O and E and red in the N and L.

 That's some dense quilting.  This little 16 inch square took me almost 2 hours.

 When I was done, I showed it to my husband and announced, (and I quote) "As they say in the business this has the quilt snotted out of it!"  Crickets chirped as my husband stared blankly back at me.  Finally he questioned, "quilt snotted out of it?"  Doh!  We both laughed.  Reverse that, "This has the snot quilted out of it!"  He said that made much more sense.

I quilted the center before adding the borders, so that I could bury the thread ends under the border.  It's a pillow so no one will see the back.  I auditioned a bunch of different fabrics for the border, before deciding on this one.  I didn't want to use red or green for fear the letters would loose their impact.  I didn't want to use white because I have 4 small creatures (human and canine) living in the house.  I thought the cream with the dots was a nice compromise.

 However, now that I'm looking at it in daylight, I'm not loving the cream and white together and the more subdued greens and reds in the border don't look quite right with the brighter fabrics in the letters.  Suggestions?  Any of the fabrics in these pillows are available.

If you got to the end and still have a christmas project in you, I'd be happy to send you the PDF's for NOEL if you leave a comment.  Also, if you know how to enable downloads, tell me.

Valentine's Day Project

I FMQ a final project and I love it!  I took my LOVE block and put hearts all over that sucker.

 I used a light pink, so the quilting would blend.  I'm no where near good enough that I actually want to draw attention to the quilting, but I'm still really pleased.

 I resolved the tension issues.  I upped the top thread tension to 6, instead of the 4 I usually piece at.

 Look Ma!  No top thread coming through to the back and no loose thread.

 I bound it in a great Neapolitan stripe that was leftover from B's Bento Box quilt.  I think most of the fabric in the top are scraps from that quilt.

 I went searching through the stash for backing and found this fabric, that I had totally forgotten about.  I got it on sale last Spring when the Valentine's Day fabric went on sale.  It couldn't be more perfect, could it?

Monday Bucket List

I've made some progress in the last 2 weeks.

Winter tree quilt-  I started off following the Purl Bee tutorial, and was really unsatisfied by the results.  I didn't like having the seam down the middle of the tree.  Making all the trees different blocks seemed inefficient.  I can see why they did it the way they did, just being able to give people measurements for rectangle is easy for a free tutorial.  I wanted to make my trees differently and I invested in a few different triangle rulers.  I have one top put together and now I know how I want to do the final piece.

Postage Stamp Quilt-  haven't started, haven't uncovered the fabric from it's hiding place.

HST-  so many options, so little time

Drunkards Path-  not yet

Improv stripes bed spread-  Must finish this soon.

Interlocking wonky stars wall hanging-  I made a few stars

Dutch windmills

Rainbow charm squares

Flying Geese

Perfect the zippered pouch

New Patterns- working on 2 different ideas, have prototypes, but need to work out the kinks.

Valentine's Day Project

I believe I've mentioned that I started a quilt group in my MOMS Club.  There were really only two of us attending and that seemed sort of boring, so we brainstormed about ways of bring others over to the dark side with us.  We finally decided that we'd have to teach them to quilt, but with little projects that could be easily finished without much homework.  It's working, we now have 5 of us quilting and 3 more people who come to hang out and watch and are getting inspired.  Plus, it great having a few people not sewing so they can corral the kids of those of us who sewing.  Our first project was quilt as you go pillows.  Next we made appliqued Christmas tree skirts and now we are doing a paper pieced Valentine's day project.  We found free paper pieced letters spelling LOVE and a heart.  My co-founder is making an ambitious sounding wall hanging and I decided to stick with a pillow.  I'm not sure what everyone else is doing with theirs, but it sure will be fun to see.  It amuses me greatly that we've gotten others hooked on quilting, without them yet doing any traditional piecing.  We're remedying that.  We're starting a block of the month project with the blocks being put together for a Project Linus quilt.

Anyway, on to the Valentine's Day project.  I decided to substitute the heart for the letter O.  The heart wasn't the same size as the letters so I improvised a bit.  It worked out in the end, but I wish I'd learn to think these things through ahead of time instead just jumping in.

Of course I'm using scraps, which doesn't make anything easier on me.  There are a few places where I had to improv because the pieces I used weren't quite big enough and I was too lazy to rip the seam and fix it.

The letters are the size of a piece of paper, so in order to turn this into a square pillow cover I needed to add width to the blocks.  I could have done this better.  If I had used a different brown in the middle that seam that isn't lined up would look more deliberate and less accidental.  Looking at the picture, I wish I had stayed with the pink tonal prints and not used that one print with the brown squares.  This is probably why I like to do every project at least twice.  I learn something from the first go around and I change in the second version.  I probably won't make another LOVE pillow, but I think I'll make a NOEL pillow before I put all my Christmas scraps away.  The O in noel would look cute as an ornament, wouldn't it?

I'm going to FMQ this pillow.  It will be my first real attempt.  I'm going to use the heart shaped leaf pattern I was practicing the other day.  Only, I'll leave them as hearts, not make them leaves.  Practicing my FMQ skills on pillows is probably perfect.  They aren't too big, I can use a different pattern on each and if I screw it up, I can toss it.

Inspiration

Wouldn't this West Elm pillow make a great quilt?

I want to go sew right now.

My blog anniversary and FMQ Challenge

I've been blogging for a whole year.  How about that?  My primary goal when I started last year was to keep track of my projects.  I had been quilting for less than a year and I wanted to try new things and improve some of my technical skills.  I've really come a long way.  I can now sew a consistent 1/4 inch seam and I've tried sewing curves, HST and come to love improvisational piecing.  This year, I want to keep improving my technical skills.  I want do more precise piecing.  I have a few more complicated projects planned.  In addition, I've found that my actual quilting skills are holding me back.

To remedy this, I've signed up for the Free Motion Quilting Challenge hosted by SewCalGal.  I dove right in last night and was pleasantly surprised with the results.  Previously, I have only attempted stippling and pebbling on small test swatches.  I know those are some of the harder patterns to get right.  One of the suggestions SewCalGal made was to make big test swatches.  I had been working on 8x8 swatches.  Last night I made up some big ones, 18x24 inches.  What a huge difference that made.

 I started off doing the heart shaped leaves and they flowed really nicely.  That was the pattern for January.  Then I tried a few other patterns, some stippling, some loops, swirling thingies and back to the leaves.

 I burned through a bunch of odd end bobbins, which was nice.  Even the back is mostly acceptable.

 This is probably the worst part of the back.  I guess I'm moving too fast through the tight curves or maybe I need to adjust tension, or a bit of both.

Here's another not great section of the back.  If I make the top tension tighter, will that help?  Do I need to slow down?

I really liked doing those heart shaped leaves.  I think I have good project to use them on.  My little quilt group is going to be working on a Valentines day project.  It seems to call out for some hearts.

Quilt for my dad

My dad occasionally checks in on my blog, so I didn't want to ruin the Christmas surprise on his quilt.  Then I sort of forgot to blog about it, until now.

 I've seen this pattern in a few places on flickr, but always in small scale.  I have a feeling it is someone's pattern, but my inspirations on flickr didn't say where they got the pattern, so I can't give the original credit for the inspiration.  I was looking for a pattern that would come together quickly and show off some of the large scale prints in the Central Park line that makes up most of the front of this quilt.  They are just squares sashed on two sides and rotated 90 degrees for each block.  I had quarter yard cuts and knew that if I cut them up too much, I wouldn't have enough fabric for a nice sized lap quilt.  This worked perfectly.  The quarter yard cuts were generous, so each square is 10 inches with 2.5 inches of white sashing on 2 sides.

 For the backing I did an improv courthouse steps to use up every bit of yardage leftover.  I threw in some Kona Aqua and a burgundy tonal that my Dad's wife had given me for this quilt.

The binding is a Connecting Threads stripe that had the blue purples and red purples from the prints.  I also used one of my GutenTag tags.  I love those things.

actually that was 26 quilts in 2011

After I did my year end mosaics, I finished 2 more quilts and remembered one that I hadn't blogged about.  So I did 26 quilts of various sizes, which works out to one quilt, every two weeks.  Not too shabby.  I think 3 of those quilts were started in 2010, but they were smaller ones anyway.  Without further ado, I give you the last two finishes of 2011.

I made the tops for these two quilts in 2010 when I was working out the pattern for my Christmas tree quilt.  They sat for more than a year, before I made my Christmas to do list and pulled them out as possible sell on etsy quits.  I didn't get them done in time to sell on etsy for Christmas, and I can't decide if I should put them on etsy as winter quilts, or just hold on to them for next Christmas.

This one is a large wall hanging or toddler sized quilt.  I should have put a chunky border on it to bring it up to lap size.  Oh well, live and learn.  I simply love that Figgy Pudding fabric.  I'm going to be heart broken when I use up the last of it.  Fortunately I've got a big stash of it.

 This one is wall hanging sized and is much more traditional Christmas colors.  It's twin is the first quilt I sold.  I still love the feathery holly print I choose for the outline of the tree.  It really gives that lacy effect of the outer most branches of a real tree.

I quilted them both with a combination of strait lines and machine embroidered snowflakes.  My embroidery machine and I have been at odds with each other for a month, but we've recently made up.  I changed the type of needles I was using and suddenly it works like a dream.  Apparently, my embroidery machine hates Klasse needles, but it LOVEs the Brewer titanium needles that are twice the price.  If any my of my readers would like to make a home for either of these quilts, just leave a comment or email me.

I'll give the 26th quilt of the year it's own post, as I originally intended to.