Some Finishes

It's been quite a while since I've posted, so there's a lot to catch up. I blogged about the Triangle Tangle quilt and the Poppers quilt in December. Both were quilted and finished last month.

This last one, finished this month, was a recliner quilt for my brother-in-law. I needed something masculine and relatively quick to make, and this fit the bill. The fabrics came from the Alpine Woods collection from Benartex, as did the pattern, Mountain View Lodge. I simplified the pattern and reduced the size of the blocks so I could have a little bit smaller quilt. I sure like how it turned out. I have one more panel and some extra fabric leftover, so I will probably make one similar for hubby or maybe one of the kids.

Trianglemania

Tuesday's blizzard was a real doozy--winds gusting up to 50 mph, bitter cold wind chills; and as near as we could figure, we got at least a foot and a half of snow. I don't know if I've ever seen it snow that hard. Yesterday we had another storm that started in the morning and finally stopped about midmorning this morning, and dumped another 10 inches. Monday the weatherman is predicting 5-8 inches, and there's another storm rolling in Wednesday.

I'm glad the snow is happening this month instead of in December. My older son was not able to get home from upstate New York for Christmas, so we packed everything up and took Christmas down to him. Wouldn't have gotten to see him if we'd had all these storms.

The neighbors spent all morning digging out from yesterday's storm, and there is just so much snow everywhere. Hubby had to rake the roof, and now there's a pile of snow nearly 6 feet high in the back under the kitchen window.

My sewing studio is in the basement of our home, but I keep a small sewing table and a machine upstairs in the spare bedroom. In the spring and fall, I like to sit up there and sew, enjoy the breeze coming through the window, listen to a few tunes, or just enjoy the quiet in the neighborhood.

Tuesday I sat in front of the window and sewed and watched the storm. I worked on a couple sets of triangles for two different quilts. These triangles were waste triangles left over from my Bali Stars quilt that I finished last year. I had bunches of them, so I used a few to make this mini a while back. 

I continued to make triangle units with the rest of the waste triangles and sewed up a bunch of larger half square triangle units as well. The project languished because I wanted a different layout from the mini and couldn't figure out what I wanted to do. Finally this week I came across a small photo in an old quilt magazine that used the same units. It was some scrap quilt book by Fons and Porter; but I recently saw this same design on Pinterest, so I really don't know who to attribute it to. Anyway, I love it, so I'm using it. There will be a couple of narrow borders, I think.

On Tuesday afternoon I also worked on some triangles for a quilt I'm making by Edyta Sitar of Laundry Basket quilts. She has gorgeous designs, and I have several of her books. In order to make a queen-sized quilt, I need 784 half square triangle units. I'm about halfway there, I guess, so lots of sewing left to do.

I have the Inklingo software by Linda Franz, and my new favorite way to make bunches of half square triangle units is to print out a grid on paper and sew them up. I could print directly to fabric if I wanted, but it's so much easier for me to see the lines on the paper, and I don't mind ripping the paper off after.

I think this must be the same thing as Thangles, but with Inklingo I have the ability to print out many triangles quickly and in multiple sizes. If you have neither Inklingo or Thangles, you could draw a grid yourself.

I layer my two fabrics right sides together, pin the paper to the fabrics, and then sew all the lines for the triangles.

The dotted lines are sewing lines, and the solid lines are cutting lines.

Once the triangles are cut apart, the dog ears are trimmed away, the paper is removed, and the triangles are ready to be pressed open. No further squaring up is necessary. Simple, precise, and fast.

Rainbow Scrap Challenge 2015 - January

Even though I haven't finished the blocks for last year's Rainbow Scrap Challenge, I'm going to do it again this year. I'll be making almost four times as many blocks each month this year, but they're considerably easier to put together. I managed to get another set of last year's Dakota Farmer blocks done a few weeks ago, in blues. Two more sets to go for 2014, yellows and oranges, and I'll be ready to put that top together.

I was very interested in Angela's Sampler for this year's challenge but felt I wanted something less complicated. I have two big quilts I have to get done before mid-April and was worried about getting behind, so I'm going to save the directions and maybe do it next year instead.

For this year's challenge, I'm making blocks for a quilt called Twisted Ribbons. It's from a book by Elsie Campbell called Nine Patch and Snowball Quilts. It's an older book, from 2003, but I've wanted to make this particular quilt for a long time. The color for January is blue, and these are the blocks for the first ribbon, made with 15 snowball blocks and 13 nine patch blocks. No borders per se on this quilt, so quick and easy.

Each ribbon segment is made up of one snowball block and one nine patch block. Both blocks will eventually have squares and triangles added to the opposite sides in a different color for an adjoining ribbon. There will be 12 ribbons, which will take me through to the end of the year, but I may change up Angela's colors a little bit. In the quilt in my book, the author combined yellows and oranges in the same ribbon, so I'm not sure what I'll do for that yet.

There's a Mr. Linky on Saturdays on Angela's blog so you can see what other quilters are working on, here.

Rainbow Scrap Challenge

Oh yeah, I finished another batch of Dakota Farmer blocks for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. At least there was no color for December; but still, at this rate, it'll take me next year too to get this little quilt done.

Piecing With Poppers

We're having a wintry mix of weather this week. I'm fine with the snow, but I hate ice and cold rain, which is probably mostly what we're getting this week.

Last summer at MaineQuilts, the state quilt show, I won this pack of five fabrics as a class door prize. Not my choice of fabrics, but I thought that at least they went together nicely. Coincidentally I wandered into a vendor's booth that same day called Piecing With Poppers. Poppers are narrow strips used to accent the fabrics and blocks in a quilt. The vendor displayed some representative quilts, kits, patterns, and of course, the Poppers. I bought a package of bright orange Poppers, thinking that I could combine them with the door prize fabrics to make a small quilt to donate. Plus I was interested to see what the technique was all about.

I made some rail fence blocks with the fabrics and arranged them randomly on the design wall. The Poppers were then sewn between the blocks and between the rows. Initially, I was having difficulty aligning the vertical Poppers, so my pal Barbara suggested offsetting alternate rows. Not only did that alleviate the alignment issue, but I thought the quilt was so much more interesting to look at. So this is the arrangement I'm going with, and I like it!

The Poppers are cut 3/4" wide, and the pattern suggests a different way to sew them together. Because the strips finish to 1/4", one side of the presser foot sort of wants to skew all over the place after you've sewn the first side of the strip. For the second side I tried it my own way first, the usual way we all sew, but I had to admit that the Popper way gave me a much better result. When sewing the second side of the Popper strip, the trick is to use the first seam as your reference guide instead of the right edge of the fabric. I had to move my needle position in order to accomplish that. Buy a pattern and give it a try, no affiliation.

The Poppers are available in various yardages. 3 yards of Poppers is 90 cents, I think. I bought a package of 45 yards for $13.50 because I had no idea what I actually needed; and I'll probably use about two thirds of the package for my quilt, which will measure something like 44" x 56". I wanted to know what kind of value that was, so I figured out that if I cut the Poppers myself, I'd get 48 strips from one yard of fabric at $10 or $11 a yard, which would be 53 yards of Popper strips. For me, I'd rather pay the extra for the convenience of not having to cut all those little strips.

I think this is an interesting technique, sort of reminds me of some stained glass applications I've seen in the past. I'm already lining up another project that I saw in their booth. It's black and white subway tiles with bright yellow Poppers, but any bright color goes with black and white. Maybe I'll put different colors of Popper strips in it.

I worked on pillowcases for Christmas this past week, made 5 sets plus one single. Some are for gifts, some for donation. This set with the snowmen is for me!

I also finished the second Curvy quilt, renamed Curvaceous because I like that word, from my workshop last year. I got it quilted and machine stitched the binding on last month. Should have had it finished last month too but just didn't get to it. Design by Mark Lipinski.

I am definitely in the mood to work off some UFOs, and I finished this top last month and got it loaded on the frame Saturday afternoon for quilting. This quilt was an exercise in learning how to make bunches of triangles using several different methods. It was a Quilt University class from 10 years ago taught by Myra Giesbrecht, but I don't know if they still teach it. After Carol Miller passed away, QU was taken over by Ruth Blanchet who renamed it Quilt Academy. You can find it if you google it. Anyway, in the quilt there are plain half square triangle units, quarter square triangles, striped half square triangles, three quarter half square triangles, and half square rectangles. I subsequently wrote a post about one of the methods to make half square triangle units, and I continue to get more comments on that post than anything else on my blog. Hope to get this quilted and bound before the end of the month.

Millenium Resurrected

The color of the month for October for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge was brown/black, I think; but that's not part of the plan for my quilt, so I got caught up on my pinks and greens. I don't know what the color is for November yet, of course, but I think I'll probably get caught up on the blues and purples next.

There are only seven different colors in my quilt, so I suppose I'm about done with the Challenge anyway. If I can get all the blocks done by the end of the year and get them sewn together into a top, I guess I'll come up with a new plan for a Rainbow Scrap Challenge quilt and start over in January.

While I was finishing up these two sets of blocks this week, I remembered my Millenium quilt. Anyone remember back in the year 2000, when it was popular to make millennium quilts--a quilt with 2000 pieces--to commemorate the beginning of the next hundred years? I thought (foolishly, perhaps) that it was a good idea to jump on that bandwagon, so I spent weeks looking for a one-patch design or a block design that might lend itself to a millennium quilt. I finally settled on a one-patch triangle and figured out that if I created half square triangle units, I could make a quilt with 1998 pieces by setting the units 27 across and 37 rows down.

I also wanted to make it as a charm quilt, so I traded triangles with a friend of mine that lived in downtown Reykavik, Iceland (we were living there at the time). Between the two of us, we couldn't even come close to cutting 1998 different triangles out of our own fabrics, so I bought a box of 2000 different 4" squares from Keepsake Quilting, who was also celebrating the new millenium. Duplicates were weeded out of the box, and other fabrics were eliminated because I couldn't categorize them as one specific color. Seems to me those were mostly novelties and florals.

Anyway, I worked pretty diligently at it for quite a while but eventually moved on to other projects. In 2002 I dug it back out and got the pinks, reds, purples, and blues all sewn together. This was not quite half the pieces. Then it went back into the closet.

I resurrected it this week and am now working on aquas, teals, and greens. Originally I thought I'd need about 5 groups of eight rows in order to hit that 1998 mark, but I wasn't sure if I could come up with enough yellows and oranges for a group of eight, or enough browns, grays, and blacks for the last group of eight rows. But I have 27 rows now, and if I add another row of pinks and another row of purples, that'll make it 29, so I think I'll make it.

I'll applique the last two triangles on top of the border, and I'll add another triangle in the border for every year past the year 2000. I even have millennium fabric for the back.

Tacoma Lakes Quilt Show

Our quilt show was held over the weekend, and it seemed to be a great success. It was months long in the planning and then over before I knew it. I was the Registrar for quilt entry, so I was pretty busy the last couple weeks before the show, taking in quilts, making sure they were ready for hanging, helping to lay out the show, and logging in all the entry numbers.

We set up the show Friday night; and other than decorations, we set up the entire show--118 quilts--in less than three hours. Every committee was well organized, and everyone knew exactly what they needed to do. Sunday evening, I think the whole thing came down in about 45 minutes. We used a gymnasium at a local elementary school. The lighting was fabulous, and we had plenty of room to move around.

Our special exhibit was a display of America the Beautiful quilts, a year-long project from McCall's Quilting magazine a few years back. The group that made these challenged themselves to use only fabrics and scraps they had on hand. They were all so different and turned out so beautifully.

Viewers Choice was awarded to SallyC for this spectacular bargello. Sally is one of our newer members. I didn't find out until this weekend that she is also a new quilter. This quilt was only her second quilt. Pretty impressive, huh?

Sherry's Prairie Sampler was one of my very favorites. I loved everything about this quilt.

Margo's Ohio Collection was another of my favorites. I have the book and would very much like to make it one of these days.

Suanne's quilt was so fun, and I really like this one too. She collected pinup girls for 10 years in order to have enough different fabrics. I wish I'd gotten a picture of the back, because there were larger squares of the pinup girls on the back too. The quilt is called "For the Man Who Loves Women" and was a gift for her brother-in-law.

I got my little crocus finished in time for the show too and put it in the minis section. I blogged about this quilt a long time ago, got the top finished and never got it quilted. Story of my life.

I can never decide how to quilt these little quilts because I don't hand quilt; and stitch in the ditch is, in my opinion, a pain. Nonetheless, I did a little topstitching with a 100-weight thread, which I liked, and ditch quilted the rest of it.

When I outlined the leaves, I carried the tan thread out into the borders but didn't like the way the tan thread looked on the border fabric. So I took a dark purple Sharpie and colored the thread. It worked great, and that's not the first time I've done that. Sharpies are good for a lot of little touchups like that. I used Sharpies to color the threads that frayed around the arcs in the clock quilt too.