A Few Days at the Lake

I got a chance to stay up to camp for three days last week. It was cloudy and/or showers the entire time I was up there. I thought I would make it up there again this week for a few days to help hubby put some dirt in what we hope will be a garden area, but it is supposed to rain all week. The entire month has been cool, cloudy and rainy. Other than June 1 and 2, we have seen only two days in the 80s. I hate the heat so I am not complaining, but a little more sun would be nice. 

I had a specific summer project to work on at camp for three summers running, and that was The 21-Year Pineapple Project that I finished early last year. Last summer I worked on a couple different sets of blocks but not a dedicated project. 

This year, my summer camp project is Conestoga Star, another oldie but goodie. The pattern originally appeared in an issue of Fons and Porter's Love of Quilting. I bought the pattern and fabric as a kit from Sew Batik, which no longer assembles their lovely kits like they used to. I am adding bunches of my own batik scraps for variety. Got plenty of those!

All of the blocks in the center of the quilt are paper pieced; and although the picture doesn't show it, I now have three complete rows. Three more rows to go, and I'll be ready to start on the borders. This quilt is a big one, finishing at 88 x 100. 

Fall Has Arrived

I took pictures for a blog post, and then kept putting it off until....four months later! Why? Well, my work for quilt show kept me busy straight through the end of July. Two days after quilt show ended, I tested positive for covid. I managed to outrun it for two and a half years, and it finally caught up with me. I counted my blessings that it wasn't even as bad as my worst cold. Hubby is still a covid virgin, hasn't contracted it yet.

In September I had the second of two planned surgeries this year and am still recovering from that. All of my health issues have now been resolved, and I got a clean bill of health from my PCP earlier this week. Yay!

My activities have been very restricted since the most recent surgery, so my recovery therapy was this 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle. I built a few puzzles decades ago but started building again a couple of years ago. My recovery therapy after the January surgery was a 4000-piece world map puzzle. Loved it. 

So this puzzle was a thousand pieces, and the dimensions listed on the box are 425mm x 300mm, which works out to be around 16" x 11". The pieces are about the size of a dime. 

 

I did manage to get the whole puzzle together but forgot to take a picture of it. The landscape wasn't difficult; but the sky, which looks to be about half the puzzle, was very challenging. Naughty words were uttered. 

Sitting at the sewing machine was also an allowed recovery activity. I made a bunch of single blocks from new projects I wanted to try out; and I finished some tops, some quite old, that went into an ever growing pile of quilts to be quilted. Nothing actually finished though. 

Tis the Season, a BOM from Missouri Star Quilt Co, was one of the tops that got finished just a few weeks ago. I loved the colors when I saw it, and the blocks were not difficult to piece. This one went into the RTQ pile. 

This quilt, called Scrappy Mini from 'Paper Pieced Mini Quilts' by Wendy Voster, was a project I started this past summer to use up a few scraps. I  added the borders last night and batted it up for quilting. This little quilt will measure about 9-1/2" square when finished. 

I finished this quilt top last week. I went on a bus trip with my quilt chapter a couple of weeks ago and was introduced to the concept of a 3-yard quilt. This was one of two 3-yard bundles I bought at one of the quilt shops, along with a couple of pattern booklets. I liked this pattern because it reminded me of the BQ quilt series from Maple Island Quilts. 

3-yard quilts is a concept developed by Donna Robertson from Fabric Cafe. She has a number of booklets with patterns that are quick to make. This one is not going into the RTQ pile--I hope to get it loaded this weekend and get it quilted for a little boy in the family.

One note about these 3-yard quilts. They are based on fabric that is 44" wide. I prewashed the fabrics in this bundle and wound up short. There was supposed to be another row, but I just didn't have enough fabric. So either don't prewash or buy extra.

Over the summer, I started hearing about temperature quilts. Evidently the idea has been out there for several years. After a little research, I thought it was an interesting idea for a quilt and decided to give it a try.

The inspiration for my design was a pattern called "Temperature Quilt" from Canuck Quilter Designs. Her quilt uses rectangular blocks, but they undulate in regular waves across the width of the quilt. It was more interesting to me to place the colored squares within the block based on whether the daytime temperature went up or down from the previous day. If the colored squares remain in the center of the block, then the daytime temp did not deviate from the day before. I like the unpredictability of this approach. Maybe it's going to look like a hot mess, lol. but I like it. 

I also liked the simplicity of this design, and I knew it was something I could stick with every day for a year. We're talking 3 or 4 pieces in a block, so that's quick to sew every morning. I had no idea about yardage requirements, so I decided to use solids that I know I can reorder if I run out of a particular color. Plus the quilt looks modern to me, and I like that too.

I'm using 12 warm colors and 11 cool colors for my quilt. Each color represents a 4-degree temperature spread. After working on the first three months, I recognized that there are three or four sets of colors that are too close in value. Moving the colors up, down, or middle helps to make the temperature changes more visual. I'm debating whether to start another one sometime next year for a different location, and I would look at changing up either the colors, the temperature spread for each color, or both. 

I started my temperature quilt on August 1, and the months of August, September and October are all sewn together. November should have more blues in the blocks, but Saturday and Sunday are supposed to be 70 degrees, so maybe not, lol. The weather has been crazy all year.

Some Finishes

Nearly everything came to a halt at the beginning of May as my work for quilt show ramped up. At the end of the month, it became important to my mental health to get into the sewing room; so I took a couple of days to quilt and bind my little Christmas Cards mini, which finished to about 16" x 18". I do like this little quilt a lot. 

After finishing up most of my work for the month of June, I dedicated myself to finishing Granddaughter's birthday quilt. Unicorn Abstraction was a kit from VioletCraft, and it has all the elements my DGD loves--a unicorn, rainbow colors, stars, and metallic fabrics. And she loved it when she got it for her birthday. 

The quilt finishes at 60" x 60", and the entire quilt is paper pieced. The pattern was well done, and I had no trouble assembling the pattern. 

One really good tip the designer had was to use those little plastic binding clips to align the pieces when sewing the large sections together. I was surprised how well they worked. 

Another really good tip was to use glue to hold the fabric pieces down at the edges of the sections. Except for the head and tail, most of the pattern pieces were really big, and they flopped around at the edges. I have never been a big fan of using glue in any of my sewing; but in this case it was nearly a necessity to keep everything flat and aligned. 

I used the Sewline glue pen on the regular fabrics, but that didn't hold the metallics down well at all. So I resorted to Roxanne's Glue Baste It, which worked a little too well. I found it a bit difficult to remove the paper in those spots, but I'm sure it all washed out in the end. 

Loved the detail in the head and the tail.

I quilted it with a stars and loops design from Sue Schmeiden. Before I washed it, it looked like the horse had curly hair, lol; but after laundering it became soft and crinkly, and the quilting was less clear. 

This afternoon I finished binding the Bon Bon quilt, which was the first quilt made from Barbara's Scrap Bag. See the post here describing my Scrap Bag Challenge.

My quilt chapter found a new organization to donate to this year, called C.R.O.W.N.S. They are an organization local to Maine that provides assistance for women and girls who are being trafficked in the state. I found it shocking to discover that this goes on in Maine. C.R.O.W.N.S. was asking for quilts about 50" x 60", and that is just about the size of this one, so it will go to them. 

The original quilt pattern called for more blocks to make a square quilt, and the blocks were to be set in a Trip Around the World pattern. I wanted a smaller rectangular quilt, so I settled on this zig zag sort of design. I like it just fine. 

I quilted it with the Popcorn pantograph by Jodi Beamish. 

With the exception of the solid whites that went into the Bon Bon quilt, this is the entire stack of fabric from Barbara's Scrap Bag, which is taller than my big embroidery machine. I started cutting up some of the low volume neutrals for Bonnie Hunter's Cherry Crunch quilt, and didn't even put a dent in them. There's a LOT of fabric in this stack. 

I have a couple different quilts I'm going to cut for as I go along, but the next one I intend to work on in earnest is Carolina Chain, from Bonnie's book 'Addicted to Scraps'. That should use a bunch.

The 21-Year Pineapple Project

That is the official name of the pineapple quilt because that's just about how long it took me to finish it. What started as a block swap amongst internet friends stretched out for years. Nonetheless, it is finally quilted, labeled, bound, and ready for quilt show in July. It was worth the wait because I love it. 

I quilted it in a variegated yellow thread, using the Pina Colada pantograph, a pineapple motif, from Urban Elementz.
 

The quilting shows up splendidly in the border. 

 

I thought maybe I wanted the quilt to be larger, but I couldn't work out the math for the additional borders, so I wound up with extra pineapple blocks. Didn't think I'd use them in another project, so I put them on the back of the quilt, along with a couple of orphan blocks. Good way to get rid of those too!Yay!

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.

OMG for February and A Finish

Happy Trails is my One Monthly Goal for February, to finish the top, quilt and bind it.

To see what goals others have set for themselves, click here. Evidently the process has changed slightly, and you must click the InLinkz block at the end of the post to see all the entries.

I need 24 blocks for Happy Trails, then I'll sash them with cornerstones and add a border for a twin sized quilt. There are only two rounds of triangles around the center four patch, and I have the first round of triangles sewn to the remaining blocks. One more round and assembly of the top can commence.

I finished the Heat Wave quilt this evening. It has been a long time coming--one of my oldest UFOs--and I am very pleased it's finally finished. I hand dyed this 8-piece gradation of fabrics plus the background 20+ years ago and started this project with them. I barely had enough of the red to finish the project, so I wound up using a red batik for the binding. Looks just fine.

One of my friends quilted flames in all of the spiky pieces with a variegated thread and a simple meander of a sort in the background areas. It was exactly what I wanted, and she did a fantastic job.

The background is also hand dyed but not by me. Not nearly as bright as the front, but I've had this piece for years too and wanted to use it up.

Credit where credit is due: Heat Wave by Karen K Stone.

Machine Applique Monday

I have three sewing stations set up in my basement sewing room; and yes, it's nice to have the space to do this. I like being able to set up three different projects and not have to keep picking them up to work on something different. My primary station is where my Janome 6500 is--love that machine.

Another station has my Bernina 200E set up, and that is the machine I primarily use for machine embroidery and machine applique. In my humble opinion, Bernina has the perfect buttonhole stitch, and I use it exclusively for machine applique.

Last week I finished buttonhole stitching another project that will be a Christmas gift so can't speak of it. The newest one is a small Lori Smith quilt with 6 applique blocks. Although I can needle turn applique pretty well, I prefer the machine work because it's faster. Besides, if it's good enough for Pat Holly and Sue Nichols (and they're award winners), it's good enough for me.

Anyway, I've just got started on this, so I'll be a while on this one. I can't hunch over the machine for too many hours without discomfort in my back and shoulders, so I just work on it for a few hours on Mondays.

The last station in my sewing room is for my Singer 301. It was my mother's only sewing machine, and I learned to sew on it when I was 15. I was delighted to have it after she passed away. It hadn't been used for years, so I found a gentleman in Nobleboro who works on vintage machines. He took it apart, cleaned and oiled it, and rebuilt the motor for me for a very reasonable price; and now it runs like a top.

The Singer 301 is a slant shank machine, so I bought a generic 1/4" foot for it. Still can't get an accurate quarter inch seam allowance with it, so it has been relegated to paper piecing. This is the machine I used for the Honeycomb quilt. The top is now complete, just have to figure out what I want to do for the quilting. This little quilt finishes to 12" x 14".

Since I've been on a tear for months in the sewing room, not much knitting has got done; but I'm nearing the end of my Imagine When shawlette by Joji Locatelli. The construction is accomplished with short rows, using wrapped stitches. And you don't have to pick up the wraps, so it's really easy. The yarn is a wool-silk blend called Amitola from Lousia Harding--love the long colorway.

It sleeted most of the day yesterday, which is okay because sleet doesn't stick to the trees, meaning no down power lines. I'm sure the roads were slick, but they're really good about plowing and salting the roads up here. Then it warmed up and rained, probably a good part of the night and all morning today. Late in the afternoon, we're finally seeing a little sun peaking out.

Honeycomb

Honeycomb is another one of the little kits I picked up at quilt show last year, along with the True Blue quilt I had on the blog a couple of posts ago. It's another pattern with fabrics by Kim Diehl. Her method of construction for this quilt was to sew background squares together, then applique the hexagons onto the background, maybe so the background diamonds would appear unbroken.

I decided that method was not for me, so I drafted a paper piecing pattern and have been making them that way. Row 1 is a little off, so I am restitching it, and there's one more row to be added to the quilt, plus borders.

I worked on the quilt today and before this, on Friday evening. Coincidentally, on Saturday I happened to be cruising Wanda's Exuberant Color blog and saw a spiral baby quilt she just finished that she referred to in an earlier post as Fractured blocks. Her quilt was based on a quilt from Kathy Doughty's book, Making Quilts With Kathy Doughty.

I like Wanda's quilt very much, and while I was contemplating how I might draft the block for it, I realized the paper piecing pattern from Honeycomb would work just fine, minus a couple of extra seam lines. Love it when an idea comes together.

The Honeycomb blocks are 2" finished, so I kept that same size for the units in the Fractured blocks. This is one block, 6", and I want to make a 9- or 12-block quilt. I did order Kathy Doughty's book because there were other quilts in the book I liked, and I'll wait until the book arrives before I make any more Fractured blocks. Some of the units are mirror imaged, and I want to see exactly what Kathy's instructions are for making the block sets.

It was in the 40s over the weekend, and I was thankful that nearly all of the ice on the walkway and driveway melted. That would be just in time for a winter storm watch Monday night into Tuesday. Could be snow, sleet, or freezing rain. Great.

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.