A Long While

I've been gone a long while from my blog, and how annoying to discover Google search links automatically appearing in my post!! Took me a while to figure out how to get rid of that unwanted feature. I suspect that is more for Google's benefit than mine! 

This year has gone by in a flash. At the beginning of July, I realized half a year had elapsed, and now here we are almost into September. The most momentous thing that happened this year is that my younger son got married earlier this month--his first marriage and her second. We welcomed his bride and her two children to our family, ages 14 and 7. 

I spent much of the earlier part of this year doing my work for the Maine Quilts show, which happened at the end of July. I have worked for quilt show now for nine years, and I'm thinking next year might be my last. I'm not getting any younger, and I really would like to spend more time with my family at camp during the summer months. A real vacation might be a nice idea too.

I really haven't gotten much quilting done this year, which is a crying shame because I have so much beautiful fabric. There's another good reason to give up my activities with Maine Quilts. The neutral strings quilt, which I called Cafe au Lait, from my last post was finished. 

I like this quilt so much, and I'd love to make another one, maybe in diamonds, especially since the bag of strings I was working from doesn't look like it was touched. An altogether too common story. 

I pieced the backing in an effort to use up some tans I no longer wanted. 

And I quilted it with a pantograph called Malochite, which was interesting and fun to do.

In April my quilt group held a charity sew day, and we made this pattern called Iceberg from Villa Rosa Designs. Precut friendly, makes a great lap size, and it's easy to sew. 

I quilted it with a pantograph called Knit 1 Purl 2, which I hadn't tried before. I liked the way it looked, but I wish I could have kept those lines a little more even.  

I got two more quilts finished in July. One was a UFO that was several years old, Bitcoin, a Bonnie Hunter design. Another quilt that will be a favorite of mine. And, in an altogether too common story, the strip bin doesn't look like I touched it, even though there are 3,330 rectangles in the quilt. I may have also, ahem, cut more fabric as I went along making the quilt. 

And I used everything in this quilt, civil war repros, batiks, calicos, modern fabrics, florals, novelties, kids prints, you name it. And some of them are really old, like from decades ago. It all went together so well.  

This was, as Diane Harris from Stash Bandit likes to say, a ridiculous amount of fun. I had a ball picking out each set of matching rectangles to sew together and moving them around on the design wall. The rectangles finished to 1 x 2, and I am working on another Bitcoin with slighter wider rectangles. There might also be another one in my future with bigger rectangles.    

My other finish in July was this quilt called From Our House, a free pattern from Riley Blake Designs. I used the same fabrics from Riley Blake that were used in the pattern because I liked the colors so much, and I liked the look of a textured solid-like fabric. This is more  modern for me, which is something I'm gravitating towards more and more. It would probably be more accurate to say modern traditional. 

I had a friend quilt it because I was running out of time before quilt show, and I love how it turned out. The pantograph is called Bayside, I think.  

 

The Phoebe Quilt

We had another round of snow last night, another 6 inches or so, and just a few days after the last round. Because the temps have been so cold, nothing has melted; so we probably have a foot of snow on the ground now. Too bad it came so late in the winter before the ground froze because without that insulating layer of snow, we think the line coming off our septic tank at camp froze and split. Water ran down the hill under the sheds and froze, so the entire shed is now sitting on ice. Nothing to do about it now, but no idea what that will look like in the spring, but we'll get it fixed. More snow next week. Oh good. 

These are my sedums in the header photo, which we never cut down in the fall. I love how they look with the snow piled on top.

I spent all morning watching James Bond movies and finishing the Phoebe quilt. It finishes at 60 x 80. I intended to donate it; but hubby liked it, and I thought he wanted to keep it--until he saw a four patch quilt I started with the scraps from this one. Look! Over there! So easily distracted, lol. So this one will in fact go to Maine Veterans.

There isn't much blue in the quilt, so I used up another piece of blue fabric languishing in the stash for the binding. I also didn't have thread to match, so I used a variegated thread with that color blue in it, and I quite like the way that looks. Never occurred to me to do that before, but I'll definitely be using more variegated thread for bindings in the future. 

The backing fabrics were maybe 3-yard pieces that I've been wanting to think of a way to use for a long time. Truthfully, I don't know why they appealed to me. Maybe because they were a good buy at Mardens, lol. In any case, the middle piece is now out of the stash. More and more I'm liking the strip pieced backings on scrap quilts, an idea from Bonnie Hunter's blog. Great way to use up some stash.

This neutral strings quilt is the next one to get prepped for the longarm. When my friend passed away in 2017, I inherited 48 of these 4-inch string units.  

I had no idea what her plan was for these, and I didn't know what to do with them either because they're very busy. I finally decided to just sew them all together, and I really like the result. These are made of those low volume prints that are too busy for a low volume quilt, but they're perfect for this. 

The blocks came with a huge bag of strings in these mostly tan colors. Koleen loved those colors, but I much prefer whites and creams, so it took that much longer to figure out what to do with them. I needed another 72 units to bring the quilt up to the size I wanted, so I worked out of her bag of strings, and they blend well. That bag is so stuffed with strings that you'd never know I took anything out of it, lol, isn't that the way? The quilt is now 40 x 48, which will fit on the wall in my bedroom perfectly. 

Linking up with Oh Scrap!

New Year, New Projects

The weather has been bone chilling this month, especially at night; but we don't have much snow on the ground. When we first moved to Maine nearly 20 years ago, the snow might be up to my waist some winters, but not anymore. Snowmobilers and skiers aren't happy about it, but I'm fine with it. Pandemic or not, I've stayed in because it's just too darn cold to go out. 

The holidays passed uneventfully. My sister-in-law was here for two weeks, and it was nice to have the company. We worked on a puzzle together, something I hadn't done in years; and I enjoyed it so much that I hauled out a few more and built those too. The last one was 2000 pieces, and I have one left I haven't built yet that is 3000 pieces. That might be big enough, lol. Ravensburger, whom I heard from my SIL is a premiere puzzle maker, has one that is over 40,000 pieces. Can't imagine. 

Hardly any sewing got done in December because of the festivities and company, but I did manage to get the Holiday Extravaganza top put together. These fabrics were a collection from Alison Glass, and I just love them. Not a clue how I'm going to quilt this yet. 

Nothing much got done in January either, but the Christmas Cards I was working on as a leaders and enders project is now a finished top as well. The letters are machine embroidered, and the tiny Christmas bulbs make them look like strings of lights. No clue how I am going to quilt this one either. 

I'm not in the mood for One Monthly Goal anymore, preferring to start new projects and skip around between the new ones and the old ones. I updated it and left it in the sidebar simply as a space holder so I could remember how to do the html if I go back to it at some point. There seem to be a bunch of sew alongs that started in January, and I decided to follow along with a couple of them. 

Michelle Renee Hiatt's Best of the 60s mystery quilt actually started in mid December. This block of the week focuses on the use of Studio 180's Star 60 ruler; and as you can see, all of the blocks so far have been 60-degree pieced triangles. Clues up through clue 11 have been posted, but I've only worked up through clue 8 because I am having a bit of trouble with fabric choices. That should be resolved by clue 13, and then I can get back to work. 

There are three of each block so far, and I'm wondering if the entire quilt will be pieced blocks or if there will be any plain filler blocks.
 

I've had a couple sizes of Strip Sticks for quite a while, and they're working especially well to press open all the seams in these blocks. Batiks press up well anyway, but the strip stick helps my blocks stay nice and flat. 

For those who might not know, strip sticks are wood sticks covered with a thin layer of padding and some muslin. They are flat on one side and rounded on the other, making them especially handy for ironing strip sets. In blocks like these triangular blocks where there are a lot of seams close together, the strip stick is superb at isolating one seam so you don't accidentally mess up any surrounding seams with the iron. 

In February, Moda started a monthly sew along called My Favorite Color is Moda.Sampler style quilts are suddenly appealing to me again, so I bought a kit of fabrics in a colorway I liked plus the pattern book and got started.

I have never like working with solids, and this kit is all solids. Some of the fabrics in my Holiday Solstice were solids, hand dyed fabrics with a little texture actually, which I liked. So I decided I would give this a try. So far I'm bored, lol, but I think it will get better. 

The blocks in the sampler are variously sized, and block 1 is the largest at 36" square, big enough for a one-block baby quilt. I didn't imagine this block was so big in the picture above, but it's a pretty big quilt. 

The projects above are on hold for the time being, so I've switched gears to pineapple blocks. The colored blocks were swap blocks from years ago, and I dug them out two summers ago to work on at camp. The colored blocks are finished now and sewn together in rows of two; and I'm working on a border of blue pineapple blocks at the moment.

I've always been a slow sewist, slow at everything really; and these blocks take a long time for me to make. I'm about halfway there, and if I can make  two a day or every other day, I can finish the rest by the end of the month. Then there is another pieced border and some plain borders, so there's still a lot of work left to do. My goal is to have the quilt completely finished by mid May in time to register it for Maine Quilts 2021. It's virtual again this year, so the quilt has to be finished to take the photo.

Working with scraps always seems to beget more scraps, and the pineapple blocks are no exception. I continue to accumulate strings from strips that are no longer wide enough to use in a round. Coincidentally, I came across this block on Pinterest the other day, and a light bulb went on. This block is absolutely perfect to use up the blue strings, along with smaller chunks. I decided that my only rule for these blocks was that the fabrics had to be predominantly blue. Other than that, I don't care if the fabrics are prints, plaids, batiks, calicos, whatever. As long as they read blue, they're going in. No worries either about contrast or value, just sew them together. How refreshing! Mindless sewing at its best.

The pattern for this block linked from Pinterest to happyturtlequilts.blogspot.ca. If you search on Eastern Sunrise, you'll find it. It's 7-1/2" finished, and it's paper pieced, but that's not a hard and fast rule for me. If my strings are too narrow, I'll add more until the paper is filled. Plus they're pretty fast for me to make, a lot faster than pineapples anyway. A size 90 needle and a 1.5 stitch length makes quick work of removing the paper. Put together in rows, these blocks kind of remind me of barbed wire. I love this!

I plan to go through the stash and cull all my blue fabrics that are ugly, unappealing, old as the hills, or problematic in some way, and cut them up for this quilt. I could probably use the ones that are fat-quarter size or larger and piece them together for the back. Probably won't put a dent in it, lol. I also have a stack of muslin I've been trying to figure out what to do with, and these blocks will be perfect for that too.

The Puff Quilt... and a Finish!

Making the puff quilt was not as difficult as I anticipated, and I'm documenting the process here, not only for some other soul who might take the challenge, but mostly because I don't want to forget how I did it. I figured out a few tricks of my own beyond what I saw in YouTube videos.

For someone who really was learning how to sew for the first time, DIL did extremely well with the process. And what a taskmaster! We decided to make the quilt 12 x 12 puffs or 144 puffs. I cut while she sewed, and we sewed up all but 24 squares on Saturday and finished the rest on Sunday. I was exhausted Saturday night when we finally quit.

We used 4-1/2" muslin squares for the bottom, and 5" squares of focus fabric for the top of each puff. Squares were sewn on three sides with a 1/4" seam allowance, leaving one side open for stuffing.

Because the top square was larger than the bottom square, it was necessary to sew a pleat into the top square. We eyeballed this so the pleat was approximately centered on the square.

Once all the squares were made, we sewed 12 squares together to make each row.

At this point the squares were not stuffed. I tried sewing two stuffed rows together and oh, what a chore that was. It was so much easier to sew an unstuffed row to a stuffed row, then fill it with the fiberfill and sew the squares in the whole row closed.

I also discovered that if I sewed the row closed with an 1/8" seam allowance, then I didn't have to worry about a line of thread showing on the top after the rows were sewn together. When I added the next unstuffed row, I used a 1/4" seam allowance.

I took 9 rows home with me to work on because DIL wasn't sure how much she'd be able to get done on her own. She actually got her 3 rows all done a day or so later. I finished mine last week.

I very much like DIL's fabric choices. She has another piece for the backing with black skeleton heads on a white background that I think will be really cool.

I also finished the binding on this string quilt last week. This is a rather strange quilt to me, but I took a liking to it and wanted to make it. It is from a book called Small Pieces, Spectacular Quilts by Biz Storms and Mary Elizabeth Kinch. They called it "Go With the Flow", I call mine "Heartstrings". There are some insane quilts in this book, but there are a couple others I'd make.

The blocks finish to 12", and they are composed of vertical bars of varying widths. One of the blocks has 5 vertical bars, the rest have 4 or less. My friend Koleen, who passed away in 2017, was making 4" x 8" sections of string blocks for a quilt of her own design at the time. I had about 6 of those blocks plus all the string sections she'd made; and I tried to love them... but I didn't.

When I found this pattern and decided to make it, I took Koleen's string blocks and worked them into my 12" blocks. Every last piece of Koleen's string blocks was incorporated, even if it meant taking the smallest leftover strip and using it as a string itself. These blocks are so busy you really have to hunt to find these string-pieced strings.

Done!

I also turned out a new batch of soap last week, a small one-pound batch. I realized that if I kept making 2- and 3-pound batches, not only would I quickly run out of storage space, but I'd never be able to use it all up. This batch got too thick before I had a chance to try and swirl it, but I still like how it turned out. I'm not much good at swirling anyway, but I keep trying, lol.

The colors are not quite true in the photo--the purple is brighter, and the white is whiter. I scented it with lavender and chamomile. I hadn't used chamomile before, didn't really care for the scent, but it's very intriguing blended with the lavender. Chamomile essential oil is pretty expensive, but I'll use it again.

2016--It's A Wrap

The last time I posted was two months ago. I guess that's par for the course. I'd like to try and do better this year. The last several months were busy ones, with our chapter quilt show, fall clean up, winterizing the house and cars, a death in hubby's family and a trip to Maryland for the funeral, hubby's knee surgery, weekends with Baby Girl, the holidays and all that entails, and as much quilting and knitting as I could fit in. I finished 18 quilts in 2016, which is a record for me, and in a variety of sizes, from queen to to miniature. 12 of those were UFOs, and it makes me exceedingly happy to see them finished. 8 were charitable donations for Quilts of Valor and NICU. This year I want to continue to focus on quilts for donation and the UFOs, and I'd like to make some quilts for family as well.

A little over half of the quilts I finished last year were linked in the sidebar. What follows never made it on the blog.

A couple years back, these Turning 20 quilts were going to be one twin-sized; but I changed my mind and threw it in the closet. Last summer I dug it back out and made two crib quilts out of the blocks. One was donated, the other went to my granddaughter. Her room is pink and gray, and the quilt adds a lovely touch of color.

Credit where credit is due: Turning 20 Book 9 by Tricia Cribbs

Charity Baby #3 is called Strip Mine, from a Quilt University class by Patti Anderson. I've seen the pattern all over the place, so it's not unique to her; but her method of construction might be. A good scrap buster and easy enough to sew.

True Blue is a 24" square quilt, from a kit I bought one summer at quilt show. Both the pattern and the fabrics are from Kim Diehl.

Charity Baby #5, Jumping for Joy, was from an article in Quiltmaker Nov/Dec 2016 by Paula Stoddard. That issue arrived at the right time for a quick and easy retreat quilt. I finished the top at our October retreat in Jackman and got it quilted a week or so after.

I was in the mood to make a Christmas quilt this year, so I dug this UFO out of the closet and finished it. I appliqued the snowflakes in the blue blocks with my embroidery machine, then machine quilted it with a snowflake design. I consider it a winter quilt, not really a Christmas quilt. We have lots of gray days in Maine, and I like this quilt because it's cheery.

Warm Wynter Wishes was designed by a friend of mine when she was designing and selling patterns, but this one was never published. After a couple of years of pestering, she finally let me make it. She is now working on a sequel that she plans to share.

The last quilt I finished for 2016 was QOV #3, Stars Over America. I think I used every star fabric I owned, then quilted the whole thing with stars. The stars were paper pieced.

My goal for 2016 was six quilts of valor, which obviously was too ambitious. This year I'm aiming for four.

Credit where credit is due: pattern called Steve's Star, by Steve Bennett (Judy's husband), from Judy Martin's Piece and Play book.

One last project--a selection of small bags for Daughter-in-Law for Christmas. The cloth bags are from Lazy Girl Designs--Sweetpea Pod, Becca, and Fobio. The black vinyl mesh bags are from the pattern Zip It, Screen Play II. My DIL carries a smallish purse, so the large Becca works well for her. Not me, lol, I carry everything under the sun in my purse, so I need a big leather bag.


I will be busy the rest of the week trying to catch up on others' 2016 year end posts. Happy New Year to all.

Quilter At Work

I'm glad the holidays are over, but I hated to take down the Christmas tree because I was enjoying the lights in the evenings. So we just took it down Tuesday, in time for pickup on Wednesday.

I've been a busy bee in the sewing room the last week and a half, organizing and lining up projects for the month. There are six, including three UFOs, but some will be ongoing. First up is a Stack 'n Whack, from a Bethany Reynolds workshop back in 2008. I actually blogged about it back then, and it's languished. It only needs one more side of the binding stitched down, and it will be finished.

 

Candystripes is another UFO from a very long time ago. The project is from an issue of American Patchwork & Quilting, and it was originally to be for my niece. After I made over 100 of the four patches, I realized that it wasn't really suitable for a kid her age, so... it languished. Now our quilt chapter is working on quilts for incubator babies, so I'll make small quilts, about 36" square or so, until all the four patches are used up. This is the first--6 rows of blocks x 9 blocks down. Maybe I'll have enough for three little quilts.

The Twisted Ribbons quilt I started last year for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge was resurrected and is the last of the UFOs to be worked on this month. There were 12 ribbons in all, and I'm working on the 6th, so it will be an ongoing project for a few more months. I decided not to start this year's RSC until the Ribbons are finished.

Moonglow is a Block of the Month pattern from Jinny Beyer that's been around for a decade or more, maybe two. A knitting pal of mine started it when it first became available, made three blocks, then it languished. Last year she talked to me about helping her get it finished because she'd invested quite a bit for the kit. She'd made the first three blocks with templates, and she'd had a little trouble with them; so we ripped them apart, and I taught her how to paper piece. Her sewing skills are rusty, so I wound up remaking the first one for her and will remake her next two, then start her out fresh with block 4.

I'd always wanted to make the Moonglow quilt too, so I found a kit at Plum Creek Quilts for a ridiculously low price and bought it. My first block is finished too; but I have to say, I much prefer the colors in my friend's quilt. Unluckily most of her fabrics are no longer available.

Project Five is Talkin' Turkey, from Bonnie Hunter's string quilts book. One of my dearest friends and I decided to work on this together in the new year. Late last year she was diagnosed in stage 4 cancer; but she's decided to forge ahead with me, so Sundays will be our Turkey Tracks (as we're calling it) days. The plan is to make 10 of these string-pieced blocks at a time until all 120 are done, then we'll move on to another kind of unit. I made a few blocks for the border too. Her treatment program gives us hope, so we plan to see this through to the end.

The first Quilt of Valor in a series of six this year is in progress. It is from a kit purchased two summers ago at MaineQuilts. The pattern is from a Thimbleberries book and is so simple to make. The fabric does all the work in this one.

That's good, to have a quick one for this month, because I have other projects to finish! I have at least two more QOV's that will be made using panels, but I'll alternate them with ones that are all pieced.