I have received more Flying Geese and I have made a few more as well. My last update was May 23 and this group doesn’t seem like enough, but it has to be. I am pretty sure I am not behind.
My geese have been a tough group to make. I am having problems with the measurements on the rulers I am using. I don’t know why the directions say to make the small squares one size and then the geese cannot be trimmed to the proper size. I was in a panic and a rush, so I sent them to TFQ anyway. I know she can handle the smaller seam allowance and I will make a few extras down the road.
Still, I am annoyed at the measurements.
Yes, I am cutting the squares larger now, but I have a whole bunch of squares that are just slightly too small. It is very irritating.
While I haven’t spent a lot of time at the machine, I seem to have made quite a large amount of progress. I would say that the Field Day top is almost done. I screamed through some piecing last Sunday (not the Sunday that just passed) and was shocked to see how much I had gotten done.
I have a couple of things to decide about this top:
Do I sew top and bottom borders of the Sangria on this piece?
Should I get some of the Goldenrod and put a thin border around the outside and then another border of Sangria?
The other problem is the last row. It was doubled up on top of row 7 and I don’t know if was intended to be row 8 or half of row 7? If it was to be half of row 7, then I added more coins where now it is much, much too long for a row. I may cut it in half to make row 7 long enough or add more to it and make the quilt wider.
If I make the piece wider, it is going to be a weird shape and I don’t know if I want to inflict that on someone.
I haven’t posted about this Stepping Stones project since February, mostly because I haven’t really worked on it until recently. And ‘worked’ is a generous description of my efforts. I have been pushing red and turquoise through the machine as leaders and enders in between Field Day and the Food quilt.
Voila!
Stepping Stones June 2015
More blocks.
Progress. And so it goes.
I plan to be a little more precise as I make the blocks so I don’t end up with a weird shaped quilt. Sometime I’ll drag the already completed blocks downstairs and lay them out on the bed so see where I am. I haven’t done that yet, though. 8 blocks does not a quilt make, but they are large blocks and we have a small bed, so I don’t imagine I will have very many more center blocks to make.
I made these two top blocks as leaders and enders when I was working on the borders of the Food Quilt #2. The bottom one is, as you can clearly see, still in progress. I do take my time picking out the fabrics to include.
I don’t remember exactly when it was, last Friday, I think, but I had a brief window of time before I had to go do something else for someone. The grief at the implications of my BIL’s loss were starting to creep into my brain in the quiet and threatening to overwhelm me.
4 ‘A’ Blocks
I turned to the Improv pieces I had worked on at the workshop. They were sewn together as you see (left photo), but I wasn’t happy with them, so I unstitched them and began to rework them.
Tina’s idea (from Little Blue Cottage) is that there should be a lot of negative space in the center. Because I like the interplay of the strong pattern, I wanted the blacks and whites to act as the negative space and the red to act as the foreground.
This isn’t a terrible idea, but it wasn’t working with this layout. I looked at it a lot, trying to like it – or at least be okay with the center. The reality was that I didn’t like it. I wasn’t achieving anything near what I was imagining, thus the ripping.
Big, fat Improv
The ripping really didn’t take long, but it did allow my mind time to wander, which is not what I wanted. After ripping, I began adding more neutrals to the ‘legs’. The photo (right) is what the pieces look like right now. I have not sewn the four blocks together yet. I haven’t decided if I am done with the ‘A’ blocks yet.
I think I will definitely add some more red to the outside. I also think that a few more neutrals is in order. It needs to sit a bit.
Windowframe layout
I wandered around it for awhile and then began to wonder whether I should reverse the blocks and arrange them the way Tina intended the pattern to be arranged. I think the neutral part of the blocks look too skinny again when arranged with the red in the middle. It isn’t terrible, though.
I think the ultimate path is to make some of the ‘B’ blocks and see what happens once I have more to look at.
I had the class and so much stuff to catch up on over the weekend that I didn’t have a lot of time to sew. I decided that I wanted to make progress on something. Not just a few blocks, but some real progress.
Food Quilt.
I knew I could make progress on it because I was pretty close to having the top done after the retreat.
Food Quilt #2 Top – June 2015
I got on it and the top is together with borders, though it took me a few hours on Monday to get the whole top done, but next stop: Food Quilt back.
The holdup at the retreat was that I forgot black to use for borders. I had plenty of black at home, so I waited until this week to do it.
After putting on the black inner border and the piano key food border, I decided I wanted a black border on the outside to contain all that food. I am pleased with the way it came out.
Food Quilt Holders
I caught a quick glimpse of the boys as they prepared to be quilt holders for me. This is what it looks like when they are acting as my quilt holders. I have learned just to wait for them to play around. It is fun to watch. I mean, you have to have fun in normal life, right?
You might remember that made a Food Quilt for the Young Man. This is a graduation gift for the Young Man’s friend. I kind of like the idea of them having similar quilts. It is like there will be a connection through these quilts. Sentimental, I know. It won’t be finished for his graduation, but I can send it to him at college and he can see the top.
This is like a bonus week. I keep thinking that it should be June already, but Memorial Day weekend was so early and the week preceding Memorial Day was so crazy that normal life barely registered. So BONUS!
American Patchwork & Quilting magazine
I saw this quilt on a magazine I bought (**Disclaimer: yes, I bought this willingly and with my own money, it is not a review copy). It is called 30 Something (Thirty Something???) I LOVE this quilt on the front and have to put it in my queue to make. I like the different shapes and the way the pieces are set and then make the blocks.
I wouldn’t make in those soft 1930s fabrics, but I would make it scrappy. I am still thrilled with the bright scraps and dots I used for Scrapitude. I think I would use my bright scraps again.
It is so odd when a quilt grabs my attention like this one did. I can look at 100 quilts, yawn and move on, but then one grabs me and I can’t get it out of my head. It isn’t even the fabrics that I like. How can I look at this quilt and imagine it in brights and dots? I look at other quilt projects on magazines and can’t imagine them made any other way–with any other fabric. This quilt is different.
I decided to make the peacock One Block Wonder project. I was really on the fence, as you may have gathered from my previous posts, about making it. I talked about some of my concerns in the last post and had decided not to make it. Things change.
There were a couple of things that made me decide to do it. 1) I was able to find the Timeless Treasure panel on a website. 2) I saw Maureen’s blocks and 3) I really like the colors in this panel.
I was easily able to buy the panel from Miller’s Dry Goods, which I found unexpectedly after doing a simple Google search. The line is fairly new so I wasn’t expecting that it would be available yet. I am still interested in the group of solids shown with the panel, but they are not as important. I think they might make a good addition to the quilt, but I don’t know what the final quilt will look like, which means I don’t know how they would fit in so we’ll have to see.
Maureen read one of my previous posts and brought her One Block Wonder blocks, as well as a piece of the original fabric to show me at the retreat. I didn’t even know she had worked on a One Block Wonder and was very pleased to see what she had done. Pam’s class using a panel seems very different from using fabric, but there are quite a few similarities as well. I was pleased to see how different Maureen’s blocks looked from each other and she confirmed that it is fairly easy to avoid ending up with the same blocks, which adds to the variety of the quilt. We encouraged her to work on her OBW quilt, but she worked on other projects. I would love to see what she does with those blocks.
I do like the colors of the panel. There is no cream, as there was in the other yardage I considered, which is a bonus. I am annoyed at cream backgrounds lately. They look dirty to me.
Maureen assured me, as did looking at her blocks, that the black would not overwhelm the piece. There is plenty of blue, especially turquoise (!!!), in the panel as well.
This is a limited collection for Timeless Treasures and I only bought the panel. If it doesn’t work out, the effort will make a great donation quilt.
The Field Day Zipper takes on a new view once it is on the design wall. So does my workroom. I need to get this piece sewn together and OFF the wall as it really sucks the light out of an, otherwise, fairly bright room.
This is such a weird concept to me and I spent some timing thinking about it. No, it is not directly related to the making of this piece, but it affects my work in general.
First, sadly, my workroom is still life sucking beige. (Why is a question for a long evening and a bottle of your favorite libation.) The ugly and light sucking nature of the color, if you can call life sucking beige a color, means that all the other colors I work with in that room look different. Also the light has to work a lot harder and I have to be careful to move bits of the projects to other parts of the house. It isn’t a perfect system, but it is working to a certain extent.
Anyway, I still have not put up my new design wall, but I did put FDZ up on the smaller design wall (~4.5′ x 7′). It doesn’t all fit as you saw in Design Wall Monday, but it will fit better once I sew some more of the parts together.
The other thing, unrelated to color, about this project is that seam allowance is affecting the size more than I anticipated. When I laid the piece out, the strips of Sangria were roughly equivalent to the ‘coin’ segments. As I began sewing the coins together into vertical strips, I lost many inches. I added a couple of coins to the first couple of rows to see what would happen and how many coins I would need. I could just cut off the solid strips, but I want the piece to be the length of the Sangria strips. I am going to sew more of the vertical strips together and then see what I need to do.
I am desperate to get back to this project — or really any project. I haven’t been able to sew at all in the past week and am feeling the effects.
Before I revamped my design wall, I reorganized the Flying Geese from my exchange with TFQ and took a good picture of them.
Yes, the mistakes are still in there, but they won’t be on the front of the finished piece.
It is kind of fun to see how bright and cheerful they are. Even the grey does not make the group look depressing.
Looking at them this way makes me see all the red and pinky-red I, especially, have used. I think I need to work with some cool colors for awhile.
Looking at them also made me want to sew them together instantly. I don’t have enough to make anything (and I had no time), so I refrained. Still, I think the end product will be one I enjoy when I do sew them together, whenever that is.
I worked on the Box Full of Letters blocks at the Retreat. I made 21 blocks as leaders and enders. The photo (left) shows a selection of the blocks I made.
I love the leaders and enders technique. I couldn’t believe how much I accomplished using leaders and enders.
I still don’t know what I am going to do with these blocks, but I am thrilled that I have an actual group of blocks with which to work.
I am not liking the name Field Day Zipper. It is too long and unwieldy. Anyway, I made progress on this piece at the fabulous retreat.
Field Day- May 2015
All of the pieces are cut and all of the sections are sewn to the background. As well, sections are sewn to each other, so there is no more than two sections are alone. I worked hard at getting the piece put together, but couldn’t quite do it. Still, I am pleased with how much progress I have made and see the end in sight.
The fabrics, as you may recall, are all from one line. As you also may recall, I usually advise people to to remove about 20% of the line and replace it with other fabrics not from that line. One issue that I had is that I did not add or remove any fabrics from the piece. It really shows. I had to be careful about where I placed fabrics so as not to create big blobs of color or pattern. It isn’t easy to remove certain fabrics and add others, but this is a lesson to me to take my own advice.
I spent the first part of the quilt retreat (will write about the retreat in general, but want to talk about the projects first!) working on the Food quilt that will go to a friend of the Young Man’s.
We are friends with the parents also, and they are very interested in my quilts. It seems reasonable to make a graduation gift for their son.
I bought plenty of fabric when I purchased for the Young Man’s Food Quilt, so I have plenty of fabric. The fabric is hard to find near where I live, but I bought most of it in Lancaster County when I was there with my SIL. Food themed quilts are good for boys as they are sort of neutral, but not too girly for boys. Quilts can easily be kind of girly, especially for someone like me who loves pink. 😉
I did the same pattern, a Disappearing Nine Patch, though I arranged the blocks in a different way.
I wasn’t able to finish the top, because I forgot the black I want to use as an inner border. I did make 4 piano key borders to add once I put the black border on the piece.
This project has been hanging over my head so I am glad I have made significant progress on it. Hooray for retreats!
I had pretty much decided to skip the One Block Wonder this time. I really like how Pam’s piece came out, but wasn’t sure I could replicate her success with work as interesting or cheerful. I have seen others that are not as nice.
When I saw the fabric on sale I looked at it and really made a conscious decision not to make a One Block Wonder project. I thought really hard about the logistics, time and money required to make the project and decided no, not now. I didn’t like the fabric enough to commit. I took the book back to the library and that was that.
Yay! Done deal. Moving on.
Then, yesterday morning, I went on Instagram and saw a new Peacock range by Timeless Treasures (damn you, social media!).
The colors in the panel are much richer and bolder. The design of the panel is more complex and way more interesting. The motifs are much more stylized and lush. Oh, and, Timeless Treasures, thanks for including those awesome solids that match the panel. Just what I needed. More temptation!
This is another good reason NOT to keep your tablet by your bed.
So, now this idea is back in the thinking pile. Here are some questions for you to answer:
What do you think of the panel?
If you saw it in the store, would you think of me? (since, of course, I am always first on your mind. 😉 )
Do you think a finished pieced piece would be too dark?
I have made my half hexie star project larger. I like making the stars and, as I have said in the past, they are great for a traveling project. However, I seem to be obsessed with making the ‘top’ piece larger. I don’t know why, but when I sit on the couch to watch TV with DH, I add a star or a row of stars to the larger piece. It wasn’t in my plan to do that, but I can’t seem to help myself. Even the sleeve from the Russian Rubix is languishing, because of this new obsession.
I really need to keep this project going through 2017, so that I have something on which to work when I travel with DH on his rounds to the various parlors. I can’t just zoom through it.
The other night I sewed a row of dot-stars (I decided to make the piece have a stripey effect with stars made from dots on white alternating with the other scrappy stars) together and then added them on to whole piece (see top of picture). Yesterday, I laid the piece on the bed to see how big it needs to be. I estimate that it needs to be 2.5 -3 times as wide as it is now to be a bed quilt with a bit of drape over the sides.
Friday night I pulled out a lot of the center papers, because I was running out, so now there is just a row of papers left around the outside. I got a little over enthusiastic with that process and pulled out half of one on the edge. I didn’t want the stitching to come out, so I sewed the blue batik star to the purple star to keep the purple seam from being lost. That is why you see the blue batik star sticking up, seemingly at random, on mid-bottom right. I didn’t really mean to add another row to the top.
The lavender dot in the lower right hand corner is just clipped to the piece so I remember to place that star in that location. I need to sew it to a white dot star before I sew it to the whole piece. It isn’t hard to inset the stars, but it is less work to sew two together and then add them at once.
EPP Stitching
What I really wanted to talk about was thread. I have a hand sewing kit I use when I sew on the couch that has random bits of thread and everything I need to do almost any kind of hand sewing. I don’t always have the exact color, but usually I can find one in there that will work for whatever my project is.
At some point I ran out of Aurifil #2600 and never replaced it. I could just walk upstairs, wind a bobbin and voila. Sadly once I have parked myself on the couch there will be very few steps added to my FitBit. As a result I haven’t replaced that thread.
I am using an Oliver Twist thread that came with a pack of those threads when I bought them several years ago. It is quilting thread, I think, so fairly thick. I don’t think it is ideal, but it doesn’t fray like some others, though it is hard to thread.
I feel like adding only two stars to the larger piece is major progress. I like the symmetry of the [kind of] rectangle. Somehow this looks like I am making something.
My plan is to make the piece big enough to cover a bed. I will slowly make the stars as I travel with the Grand President (HA! DH) then add them to the piece when I am at home.
I know it seems like I should be able to take this piece with me. It is, however, 1.5′ x ~1 foot and I want to keep it as flat as possible because of the cardboard EPP templates still inside. Making one at a time is better for travel.
I have a bin of stars that I have been making. I pulled out my bin of stars and picked some to add to the piece later. I made the stars and stored them in the bin thinking that I would just make the stars and put them together eventually. I couldn’t wait, thus I started putting the piece together into what you see above.
