A Finish and OMG Done

We headed south last weekend to see Mini (what her mama has been calling my little granddaughter, as in Mini Me from an old Austin Powers movie, lol) and also to finish the puff quilt ... and it is finished, whew! I swear it was harder getting the backing on than anything else in the quilt. I cut it smaller than the top, because it, well, puffs; so I was afraid the backing would stick out around the edges.  In cutting it smaller, I wound up having to create another pleat in the puffs around the edges to ease in the extra fullness. Never again!!

Today should have been a paperwork day, but it's turned into a sew day, which is way more fun. Just checked off my One Monthly Goal, which was to finish the top of my In Honor Of (credits here). Yay, I like it so much!

This has been sitting around for a couple years at least. Fulfilling a goal set by me that doesn't necessarily have to be an entire quilt every month is so doable. I think this will work out just fine as long as I don't get too ambitious.

It also happens to be UFO Challenge #9 on my chapter list, so now I need to get it quilted!







Update: to see what others have finished for the month of March, click here.

Next up, quilt the Ombre Herringbone, which is waiting on the frame. And...

... another Yankee Puzzle I started in our chapter workshop a week and a half ago. Haven't got the first one quilted yet, but I'll get there. Still working on sewing the blocks. All of my fish MUST be swimming in the same direction, so I am trying to keep the black away from the border strip so there will be enough contrast. It's getting complicated, lol.

My quilt chapter is also doing a round robin this year, which they've called the Pizza Box Challenge. Guess why. I'm not a designer--I'm a need-a-recipe-give-me-a-pattern-any-day girl; so I'm asking myself why I signed up. That said, I finished round 1, and I'm happy with it. I kept it simple, no need to make myself nuts. The reveal isn't until June, so I can't show you a thing!

This is the center block I made for my challenge. I love scrappy, so I ran with it and included bunches of fall fabrics in my box. Of course it'll be interesting to see what comes home.

March Finish -- Prehistoric

I know that spring is right around the corner because the daffodils tell me so. But you wouldn't know it by the temperature--it was 10 degrees when I got up this morning. They're difficult to see in the photo, but there are two daffodils that have popped up, about 5" tall now, snow be damned.

The other reason I know that spring is coming is because my Christmas cactus--which NEVER blooms at Christmas--is bearing some new buds and blossoms.

It's actually a Thanksgiving-spring cactus because that's when it blooms. Last year at Thanksgiving, it had more blossoms than it's ever had. The real spring Christmas cactus, called a summer cactus according to the tag, actually does bloom in the summer. But only once in about 4 years, hahaha. 

I got another row finished on the In Honor Of QOV this week, but the push was to finish the dinosaur quilt for my granddaughter for presentation this weekend. Although I bought the rest of that cool border stripe that was on the bolt, it still wasn't quite enough for the pattern I intended to make, so I elimated the additional piecing, added the three borders and called it good. Just as well, because it's bigger than I anticipated, which is fine. 

I wound up having to piece the side borders, which was interesting, and definitely a make-it-work moment. I managed to match the motifs perfectly, and most of it got chopped off in the corner miters, lol. 

And for her new toddler-sized pillow, a pair of pillowcases to go with the quilt. 

It took me three days, working most of the day and into the evening, to start and finish the entire quilt, plus the two pillowcases. I think I am a new fan of panels.

Another February Finish

First and foremost, I apologize if someone has posted a comment to my blog and I haven't responded. Blogger is still not forwarding comments to my email address. I have tried to fix it several times without any luck. I shall keep trying.

B-Ribboned, from a kit by Carla Klop of Kits by Carla, is finally quilted, bound, labeled, and ready for presentation. Done. The Maine state coordinator for Quilts of Valor had a booth at our chapter quilt show in October last year, and she gave me the kit to make, along with several more panels. A few of our chapter members took panels to work on also, so I'll have a few more quilts to pass on to Donna.

I love kits, and this one was nice because it included fabric for the backing and binding as well. I have to say that the ribbon border was a bit of a chore but well worth the effort. I quilted it with a pantograph called Patriot. It's the one I use most often for my Quilts of Valor, mostly because I haven't yet found another that I like.

This is another QOV I've been working on for awhile, and I'm anxious to get this one finished up too. It's called In Honor Of, from a pattern I found in the Jan 2013 issue of Fons & Porter's Love of Quilting by Diane Tomlinson. They run a pattern for a QOV in every issue, which is one of the reasons I continue to subscribe to the magazine.

This quilt is made with Stonehenge fabrics by Linda Ludovico. I like these fabrics and this pattern so much that I bought enough to make two, one to donate and one to keep.

Recently I found a dinosaur panel at Marden's, and I was surprised to see it's also made by Stonehenge. Last week I found some of the companion fabrics from the same collection at Cotton Cupboard in Bangor, enough to make a small lap quilt for my granddaughter. She's into dinosaurs these days, so I want to hurry up and get this made before she goes out of her dinosaur phase, lol.

I guess most quilters probably have plenty of UFOs, and I have dozens. I am a sucker for an inviting new project whenever it comes along, which means whatever is current is most likely abandoned. Several years back I found the One Project a Month program and signed up. In the right sidebar is a link to that website, and my list of monthly finishes follows. For me, it hasn't been entirely successful, even though I did manage to finish 12 quilts last year; but it's still motivational enough for me to keep at it.

This past week I discovered a website called Elm Street Quilts. They have a similar program in place called One Monthly Goal, and they have sponsors and monthly drawings for prizes. What's not to love? So I signed up, and I'll give that a try too. More motivation. There is a new icon in my sidebar that will take you to the page with information about the challenge.

In keeping with the rules of the challenge, my One Monthly Goal for March is to finish the top of In Honor Of. If I persevere, I might even get it finished. You can visit the Goals folks have submitted for March here. If you're interested, you can sign up too, but hurry if you plan to do it--the deadline for sign up for the month of March is the 7th.

Lol, I need all the motivation I can get--some of us need it more than others. My quilt chapter is also doing a UFO Challenge this membership year. For those who wanted to participate, we were to choose 10 projects to complete before our second meeting in June. Those who finish all 10 would have their names submitted for a prize drawing. So far I've finished one, so I doubt very much if I'll pull it off. But even if I only get 2 or 3 done, that's still more than I might have got done otherwise. My list of 10 UFOs for the challenge has also been added to the sidebar.

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.

Yankee Puzzle

I spent most of Tuesday and Wednesday cutting and kitting up fabric for this Yankee Puzzle quilt. This picture is an image from EQ8, but I do have one made up. My quilt chapter is very charity minded, so we are having a workshop next month to make 10 of these quilts to donate to a local area veterans' shelter. The chapter paid for all of the materials for these quilts; so several of us washed, ironed, and cut fabric for the kits. I think a few chapter members will also make their own quilts, so hopefully we'll have more than 10 finished quilts.

For those who are interested, the designer wrote instructions to construct the quilt and made a series of step-by-step videos detailing each step. That post is here.

This was my chapter's raffle quilt from our show this past October. It's called Scrap Crystals, designed by Bonnie Hunter. (Yes, we got permission to use it as a raffle quilt.) My dear friend Koleen passed away in July 2017 from cancer, and one of the things she told us before she died was that she wanted Tacoma to have this quilt for our raffle quilt. At that point it was still just a top, so one of our members quilted it, I bound it, and it became part of our October 2018 quilt show. We earned over a thousand dollars from ticket sales from Koleen's quilt, half of which we just spent for the Yankee Puzzle kits.

The winner of the raffle quilt heard the story about Koleen and gave the quilt back to us because he thought one of our members should have it. We again raffled the quilt, internally, and awarded it to one of our members. From that second raffle, we earned  $760. Thursday five of us made a trip to the Harold Alfond Center for Cancer Care in Augusta to donate those funds, to be used for cancer patients within our own communities. I think Koleen would have been very pleased.

I bought this puff quilt for my granddaughter and her brother for Christmas 2017. This is one of those things that I never had a desire to make and was more than happy to pay someone else to do it, swore I'd never make one. About two weeks ago, dear DIL, who is not a quilter, in fact can barely thread a needle, decided she wanted to make one of these things. So! I hunted down a YouTube video detailing the process, and I will be spending the day today helping her put this together....

I'm taking this cute little apron down with me today for my granddaughter. It's vinyl-coated fabric, not stiff at all, so just a quick wipe to clean it up. One of my friends actually made it for one of her great grandchildren; but it was too small, so she gave it to me. What I absolutely love about it is that there are casings on the sides, so you can adjust the size of the tie around the neck. Brilliant!

Baby Girl has always loved to put things in my shirt pockets, so I wanted to make her an apron but never got around to it. Problem solved! She's two and a half, so I think it will fit her just fine. Barbara gave me the leftover fabric from the apron, so I added the pockets after the fact.

It's A New Year...

... and migosh, it's already February. Time moves so quickly these days. Last year was an extraordinarily busy year for me. Staying busy with the family accounts for much of that time, but I also worked two quilt shows during the summer and fall, and then the holidays. There simply are not enough hours in the day.

And soapmaking. I spend more time reading about soap than I do about quilting. I took a couple of adult ed classes in January and February last year and learned how to make cold process soap. I've been hooked ever since. I make it on a small scale for family and friends, and I really like experimenting with all the different ingredients you can add to soap. I've added body butters and lotions to my repertoire, and my extremely dry skin is so much better for it this winter.

This past Christmas, my son indicated he wanted to learn; so I bought him all the tools and some reference material; and he's as hooked as I am. Now my daughter-in-law has gotten in on the act, and my younger son told me yesterday he wants to learn too. I'm lovin' it.

This is a lovely batch of orange-scented soap with some marigold petals on top that I cut last week. I'm anxious to use it, and I wish I didn't have to wait for it to cure for four weeks. 

I managed to finish 12 quilts last year, some of which were in the works for quite a while. All of the ones featured in the last post, which was from May of last year, were completed. Nothing like commitment to display at a quilt show to motivate, and here are the others I finished last year.

Jungle Blooms was my first effort making a One Block Wonder quilt, from Maxine Rosenthal's book of the same name. I really enjoyed making this, and I absolutely love how it turned out. Can't wait to make another one. The cutting and piecing are not difficult, and moving the blocks around to create a design was absorbing.

I quilted it with something that looked like a palm frond, which I thought appropriate for the theme.

I was very happy indeed to finish Twisted Ribbons. I don't know how many times I blogged about it, and it dragged on and on. Decided it was time to knuckle down and get it finished, and it went in our chapter show in October.

Farm Girl Sampler from Lori Holt of Bee in my Bonnet was a fun quilt to make, but it definitely wasn't a quick quilt. All the blocks were made with rotary cutting instructions, no templates or applique; so some of them took a bit of time to make. I've already purchased Lori's newest book of sampler blocks, Vintage Christmas, and looking forward to getting started on that one.

Lori designed additional blocks that were not in the original quilt, so I subbed out the house for the cow block. There's a barn and a milking pail in the quilt, so I thought, why not?

I don't knit much anymore, but I was happy to include the sheep anyway.

I was also happy to see Lori included a spool block. The gingham plaid is cute enough to make a whole quilt with. Lori's book had quite a few other projects in it besides the sampler quilt, and blocks were all included in two sizes. There is so much you could do with these blocks.

This year will be another year with multiple charity quilts, and some golden oldies for a chapter UFO Challenge. This Quilt of Valor is from a kit that the state rep gave me to work on last October. The ribbon border was a pain but worth the effort. I've been trying to make time to get it loaded for quilting, but that hasn't happened yet... I've finished a few other tops that are also in the RTQ (ready to quilt) pile, and you'll see those eventually; but the Quilt of Valor is the next one I need to push to finish.

Piling Up Tops

Hello everyone, I've been so busy quilting that I haven't had time to blog. Nah, not really, I'm just not a good blogger. There has been lots to do around the house and in the yard this spring, and we're spending what time we can with our little granddaughter.

Warmer weather has finally come to Maine--80 degrees today and tomorrow with more warm days in the forecast. I'm not much of a gardener, preferring plants that take care of themselves completely. I've posted photos of my hostas in summers past, and they are a perfect example. They have done such a good job of taking care of themselves that quite a few of them are at least 6 feet in diameter. And my ferns along the edge of the woods are over 3 feet tall.

This year I had a yearning for a few flowers, so I bought some marigolds, pansies, and a few herbs and cleared a place for them in the back yard. The flowers don't seem to be doing very well, but the herbs are doing fine. Now that the trees in the back yard have leafed out, lack of sun may be the problem. Forgot about that when I planted the flowers. Like I said, I'm not much of a gardener.

I also bought three mayapples. My mother in Maryland had bunches of them in the woods beside her house, and I always loved them. I didn't know if mayapples would grow this far north, so I was surprised to see some at the nursery this year. They are a shade plant; and two of them are flowering, so they must be happy in their new location. I noticed this afternoon that something is eating the leaves, so I'll have to get to the bottom of that and fast.

I have been quilting as much as I can, and I have managed to get a couple of finishes and a small stack of quilt tops added to the pile with Stella Blue. My quilt chapter has been making and donating small quilts to NICU for a couple of years now, so charity baby quilts are an ongoing thing. I finished another Bricks quilt for NICU...

... another Teddy On Vacation (made one just like this 7 or 8 years ago, and this was from the left overs), still just a top ...

... and two more Jumping for Joy quilts (made the first one a year and a half ago from an article in Quiltmaker magazine), which got loaded on the frame yesterday. I don't know why on earth I bought so much of this teddy bear fabric, but it makes for a nice baby boy quilt. Still have plenty more to use up.

I was very happy to get the Halloween Fun top finished. Found a pantograph that looks like a spider web that I plan to quilt it with. Might have to practice a little first. Just have to decide if I want to use a light gray thread or something else.

 My potholder quilt was finished a couple weeks ago. The potholder method of quilting was introduced to me a couple years ago in a workshop by Wendy Caton Reed sponsored by my quilt group. Wendy is an award winning local quilter and has been quilting with the potholder method for many years; and she also writes a blog here. She had a phenomenal trunk show before the workshop featuring many of her original designs.

I love everything about the potholder method. Each block is finished as a small quilt, quilted and bound; then blocks are handsewn together to make the quilt. You can start small, just by sewing four blocks together; and you can keep adding more blocks until you get to the size you wish. At every stage, you always have a finished quilt.

After the first workshop, I made the first four blocks of this one-block strippy, which hangs in a narrow space in my bathroom. It was a finished product, and it stayed like that for quite a while. We just had another workshop with Wendy, and I made two more little blocks and added those to the bottom. I think I'm done with it now.

 After the Halloween quilt top was finished, I needed another embroidery project to work on, so I started Baltimore Revisited, which is a design from Anita Goodesigns. There are 20 different blocks. Each block is stitched out both in redwork and in a colored filled in design, so 40 blocks total.

I spent two months trying to decide which size to make and exploring different methods of quilting the blocks. In the end I decided to make the smallest size block, which finishes to 5-3/4"--because I like little blocks. And I decided to make it in the potholder style. I just have the one block quilted and bound, and the second one is just waiting for the binding. And I'm loving it.

"Myron's Campfire", from one of the Civil War Legacies book, was the next little top I finished. It measures something like 17" x 19" and was a fun, quick little quilt to make. I already had the civil war repros out to make the one-block strippy potholder quilt, so I got this finished up too.

The last top I've managed to get done is another Strip Tease quilt. I made one of these a long time ago and had a bunch of strip sets left over. I have several one-patch projects lined up to get rid of scraps and fabric I don't love anymore, and this was one of them. These are all 45 degree diamonds. On my list of one-patch quilts I want to make are quilts with 60 degree diamonds, half hexagons, half square triangles, and tumblers.