While I am making progress on preparing to sew the FOTY 2012, I still have a pile of fabric to press, not to mention the other pile I have to wash AND press. There is no way for me to get it all done, but I will get as much done as possible before I start sewing at the CQFA Retreat in January.
I do enjoy this process, however. I like seeing these photos and thinking about what I made from the fabrics.
I have FOTY 201o hanging in my hallway and I keep walking by thinking “I need to find that fabric; it would be perfect with X project.” That is really fun.
And now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Yesterday was fun, but I am ready to get back to normal blogging. It was exhausting trying to keep up with the questions and the comments. Look for winners and more tomorrow.
I have been cutting and pressing fabric a little at a time. I realized that I needed to get my act together if I am going to work on this quilt at Retreat at the end of January. I do enjoy looking at the patches on my design wall and thinking about where I bought the fabric, what project I was working on when I cut the smaller squares and future projects I am planning.
I did find that this process was good for putting fabrics together that I might not thought of putting together. I got a Chicopee solids pack (Thanks, Temptress Adrianne!). While those fabrics were waiting to be pressed, they were on top of a large floral by Philip Jacobs and I noticed they all went really well together. There was another dot fabric that was perfect, too. Not sure what I will make, but something.
I have a big stack of fabric to press and cut and another big stack to wash, press and cut. Not my favorite tasks, but not horrible either. Great for calming me down in stressful situations. Too bad they won’t give me the space to set up an ironing board, iron and cutting mat at work. 😉
The time is really flying by. I was thinking about ordering my turkey next week (maybe the week after). I bought some pumpkin for Thanksgiving and Christmas pies last week in my attempt to get ahead of the major shopping in the next few weeks. I am behind. Behind in blogging, my house feels like a wreck, behind in cutting new and used fabric. Everything.
Case in point: it has been almost two months since I last posted FOTY fabrics. The last blog post was in late August! Gracious!
Still I was able to get some new fabrics cut up. I was also able to scrounge some squares from fabrics I have been using. Are you able to see the projects I was working on in this group?
I see some blocks I made, a journal cover I made and a few fabrics slated for journal covers I will make. One reason I love this project is that it is like a memory book in fabric.
I noodled around enough so I didn’t have time to write a book review, so here is an update the cutting for the Fabric of the Year 2012 quilt. It has been nearly a month since the last update.
For those of you have forgotten or were never in the loop, the rectangles are new fabrics – lots of these are from Quiltology – and the squares are fabrics that were in my stash that I have just recently used.
I am having fun cutting into fabrics that have been around for awhile. That is another good aspect of the donation tops – fabrics get their day in the sun and I get some space in my fabric bins.
I’ll get my act together over the weekend and get you some meaty posts to sink your teeth into. Stay tuned.
All of the pinks in the Pink Donation Quilt have a square in the piece on the left. There are a few from some fabrics I bought in the last little while. I also have some patches from the Art Gallery scraps I received.
I have to admit that I arranged the scraps a bit so they look good in the photos I post for you. Look for these patches in the final piece.
Many of the fabrics in this group are from the back of the Flowering Snowball. I am also diligently pressing and cutting pieces from fabrics that have been washed. The chair on which I hang just washed fabric is no longer falling over. That is a good thing.
There is some Half Moon fabric there, which I need to figure out how to work into a project. No ideas there yet. I have to say that I really came to like that large grey dot and ended up buying a few yards more to use as a background. This, dear readers, is why I do this project. By working with the fabric a little bit, I find out if I like it during a time where I have a chance to get more. I know I am repeating myself, but perhaps one reader will be enlightened. 😉
Fabrics from the most recent A-B-C Challenge blocks are also represented as are fabrics from the NSGW pillows. Kind of like a fabric diary of my recent work, huh?
So cutting for the Fabric of the Year 2012 quilt continues. As I have said, I am really enjoying cutting up patches for this quilt. As you can see, I seem to be doing a lot of cutting.
I am cutting for other things as well, which is what I call the Hunting and Gathering stage. For scrappy quilts, it is better to cut for a long time and save up the patches until you have enough to make the size of quilt you want. I am doing that for a couple of someday projects.
The pieces for this project seem to be multiplying by leaps and bounds. It doesn’t seem like I am working with so many fabrics, but I am sewing relatively fast, so, perhaps, I am.
More Late April Pieces
I am trying a new technique for pressing fabric. In between other pressing tasks, I am pressing the fabric I have washed recently. It means a steady stream of cutting and new fabrics to play with. In the second group (left), I was a little dot heavy. 😉
I was also trying to fussy cut bits from the larger floral patterned fabrics. There are also a group of solids for the QuiltCon challenge. I can’t decide whether or not to include a print in that project, so I have started with the solids and we’ll see how it goes.
This week’s patches are from the batches I have washed recently. I have been trying to press a few yards as a warm up for my quiltmaking sessions. Trying to do that means that I am making progress on the ironing and cutting.
I was afraid that I just wouldn’t get to the washing and cutting and ironing this year. I know people say that they get so much fabric that they can’t wash it all before they use it anymore. I can’t imagine using a lot of fabric I haven’t washed. The unwashed fabric stinks so when I press it.
As I mentioned, the squares and rectangles are a pleasure to work with so far.
A lot of the black on white prints come from working on the Flowering Snowball. I cut two of the purples (above towards the right side of the photo), because the motif is so large that the pieces I cut look very different from each other. I like that print a lot, especially the background color. We’ll see if I remember once I start arranging and laying out the quilt top.
FOTY 2012 Patches, too
There is a lot of white in the prints I have cut so far this year. I wonder if this will be the year of the much lighter quilt? The white doesn’t bother me so much, but we will see once I start arranging.
I also found that I have started to press and cut the larger pieces that have been languishing. In some cases, at TFQ’s suggestion, I am just pressing the edges and leaving the rest of the piece until I use it. Most of them are not very wrinkled, so I think it will work out.
Patches for FOTY 2012
I also have to say that using rectangles and squares makes it much easier to photograph the patches when they are cut.
I have to admit that I am enjoying just cutting squares and rectangles for FOTY 2012 so far this year. I am so glad to be using simple shapes and the squares and rectangles are making me feel much more creative with FOTY 2012. I have been playing with the layout of the little groups I cut as I go along.
I do not regret using the diamonds for FOTY 2010 or the triangles for FOTY 2011. I am pleased with the results. Both were great experiences and I am glad to have worked on them. I do think that it is good to simplify sometimes.
The aspect of FOTY 2011 that I am carrying forward to 2012 is the idea of using smaller pieces of the fabric I have used during the year, but didn’t buy this year, alongside the new fabric. I am being much more diligent about cutting fabric I have used and I have used a fair amount already this year. I love most of the fabric I have bought, regardless of when, so I want to give all the pieces an opportunity to shine. Also, in an ideal world, I would use more fabric than I would buy. Since I like to make decent sized quilts, that means that I would need to include more fabric. Definitely a wallet vs. idea war going on in my head.
I haven’t done anything with Fabric of the Year 2012 yet. I decided that I would go even more simple than last year, but would keep one of the elements of FOTY 2011. I decided that I would go with squares and rectangles. I will cut squares out of fabrics I have used this year (but not bought) and rectangles out of the new fabrics.
A lot of the fabrics in the photo are from the Flowering Snowballs foreground. I only used one piece from each of the fabrics in the Flowering Snowball blocks, but I figured it still counted. They are all great fabrics, aren’t they?
FOTY 2012 Squares - March
I really like the scrappy look, but think it will be even better when I start arranging the fabrics at the retreat in 2013. Seems like a long way off, but here it is already March, so I know it will be here sooner than I think.
From my brief comment, you might have inferred that I am also working on the Flowering Snowball. I am. More on that later.
The Fabric of the Year 2011 top, back and binding are finished and ready to be sent to the quilter.
As you may know from my previous post, I ripped out the first inner border (which meant ripping out all of the outer borders as well) and replaced it with a different fabric. The ‘different’ fabric, is a 2002 star fabric from kp kids. I used it a few years ago on Women’s Work #1. The stars suggest the same form as the triangles and the color is the right amount of black to frame the piece.
I also trimmed a bit of the grey Ta Dot from the top and bottom borders. The top and bottom borders didn’t need that much space.
FOTY 2011 before removing diamond border
You might think I am crazy for doing all that ripping. I really think I need to make visual decisions visually, but sometimes I can’t see the piece as a whole until I get pretty far along the sewing path. I really want to do my best work and in order to do my best work I needed to get rid of that diamond border. I couldn’t get the joins in the strips I was using for the border to match up to my satisfaction. TFQ pointed out that the diamond fabric was printed off grain so the parts of the pattern printed on the fabric was not the same each section of the strip I used. She is right and I didn’t notice it until she articulated it. All I could tell is that I didn’t like the border and I needed to rip it out. So, I ripped it out.
FOTY 2011 back
I used large pieces to make the back, for once. The two fabrics on the left are Basic Grey and I thought using the large pieces would show off the labels and the portions of letters, which are part of the pattern of the fabric. I was also pleased that I was able to use the last bit of the Belle Fleur fabric. I like that fabric and I am glad I have a piece that I can keep for awhile.
Backs are arduous and I am really glad I was able to focus on using large pieces and getting the back finished.
I made really good headway on FOTY 2011 over the weekend. If I had not gone to BAMQG, I would have finished the top, but socialization is a good thing. 😉
The photo on the left shows where I left it on Sunday night when my family finally managed to drag me away from the sewing machine. I start the piece by laying out the patches in the bottom left hand corner. I, first, concentrate on arranging the pieces in that area and move towards the upper right hand corner. The patches, before sewing, take up enough space to cover the entire design wall. As I sew, I move the sections (chunks) away from that beginning corner towards the upper right. It helps me know how much I have left to sew.
It turns out that I had a fair amount of unsewing to do. When I started, I just sewed one triangle to another without really thinking of how I was going to put the chunks together. As you can see in the light blue section, I now have all of the chunks angling to the left. To get them to line up, I had to rip some pairs out and sew those patches to other pieces.
I also needed to rip out and recut the smaller triangles. I am not sure what happened, but when I sewed the three prints and one background triangles together, they were at least a 1/2″ too big. I tried to work with them that way, but, in the end, I ripped them out and recut them, then sewed them back together. I have a few more to do in the last couple of rows, but am almost done. I am much happier with them now.
I may finish the top this weekend, but we will see. DH and I have to try and fix our printer and I have an event on Saturday to attend. I hope to have a bit of time to sew.
