Quilts and other UFOs

Saturday, May 23, 2015

Two More Finishes

Every month or so (when I'm not traveling), I give myself the gift of a 3 or 4 day in-home Retreat. All those pesky things that usually distract me from my quilting focus are ignored. This weekend is my May retreat; it started yesterday and will continue through Monday. I'm focusing on my enormous pile of UFOs, which I decreased by two yesterday (thank you, magic binding).

This piece has been a top for ages. I quilted it with simple squiggly line quilting to refresh my muscle memory for machine quilting. It will be a donation quilt, probably for the elderly.

Back when my friend Joyce had her quilt store, she had a club that met once a month on Saturday. At each meeting she gave each of us a 2 1/2" square of every fabric that had come into the store that month. I have sooo many of them, so decided to use them - finally. Each of these squares has a flower, as does the sashing and border. Simple 25-patch. Makes a cute block, yes?

By the way, did you know that a piece of batting makes a great thread catcher? And don't we all have extra small pieces of batting that seem to multiply like rabbits?

Keep the piece wherever you're dealing with small thread pieces and they'll stick to the batting like magic. When it's too full to hold anymore, run the clean side over whatever dust is driving you the craziest then toss the whole thing in the trash.

The second quilt is one I made quite awhile back, had quilted just as long ago, but completely forgot about. I added it to the "needs a binding stack" and whipped this out yesterday. This is the Cheech and Chong pattern from my friend Lynn, over at Country Crossroads. I've made so many of these! This one doesn't count against my "no dupes" project, though, since it was made so long ago. It is a GREAT pattern for showing off fabrics, and when you need a gift. For variety, make double the blocks called for in the pattern and use them, rather than borders, to increase the size of the quilt.

It feels so good to be marking these things off THE LIST and decreasing my number of UFOs! Monster Week is currently going on over at Animal Planet, so I'm "watching" all the creepy animal shows as I sew. If I get bored there, there's always a bad movie or two to be found on Syfy: I adore bad movies! Maybe they'll be showing Sharknado again. One can only hope. Or at least some awful zombie films. Maybe the original Night of the Living Dead. Whoa! That would be for the win.

Off to play with quilts and bindings. Thanks for stopping by!

2015 counts

Tops: 8

Finishes: 14 (6 quilts, 8 other)

Thursday, May 21, 2015

Another Finish

At the moment, I'm focusing on finishing. I have a stack of pieces that need either only binding, or quilting then binding. (The ones needing quilting are small works.) I'm devoting the next few days - through the holiday - to getting as many of these FINISHED as possible: there are far too many UFO project in this household.

This is my latest 2015 finish:

The pattern is called "5 & 10". It was a free pattern at one time, but I can no longer find the link for it. Simple stuff, although it really should have been called "5 & 8", because the big block is an 8" square. The smaller blocks are indeed 5", then sashed. The pattern calls for starting with a layer cake, but I have used my stash whenever I've made one of these.

(I see a piece of my precious Red Sea fabric below. I have very little left and still treasure it after all these years.)

I didn't have any more of the border fabric (I probably do somewhere), but had enough of this great stripe to use for the binding. I think it worked better with the dash of yellow than if I'd had just the stripe for the binding; the eye doesn't get confused trying to resolve the stripe of the binding with the random squares in the border fabric,

Again I used the magic binding technique.

It turns out quite well, and with just a tiny pop of contrast. I have one project where I will use the same fabric as the border for the "piping" so that it will blend into the quilt rather than contrasting. Can't wait to see how that works! Although I enjoy the hand work part of the bindings, sometimes I need to get things completed, and not all quilts need the handwork; many can use a machine-finished binding. Have you tried it yet?

Let's see what today brings! Thanks for stopping by.

2015 counts

Tops: 8 ( I think this needs updating)

Finishes: 12 (4 quilts, 8 other)

Monday, May 18, 2015

Moving Right Along

I've finished the quilting on the gecko quilt. Whew! A LOT of thread was used! I'm pleased with the results though. Now on with the finishing (binding, blocking, label - not necessarily in that order.)

My next quilting project was this cute little tumbler. It's finished now, using the magic binding technique. I didn't do dense quilting because I wanted this one to be soft. The tumblers are 3"; the piece is small.. Love the frog fabric on the back!

(If you're not familiar with the magic binding technique, find it here.)

Throwback to my most recent drive across the country. Badass quilter in The Badlands. It was close to Halloween - I recognize the sweatshirt.

That's my weekend in a nutshell. Thanks for stopping by.

Saturday, May 16, 2015

The Quilting Step

I came home from the last 2015 session of Empty Spools with a burning desire to do some quilting. Not the piecing step, but the actual put-it-together-so-it-can-be-completed step of quilting the quilt. I was also eager to try a bit of the "matchstick" quilting that Jacquie Gering had discussed in our class. I had the perfect candidate. Here's my progress so far.

Just straight-line quilting on this one, but it's a good match for this piece, which doesn't need anything else going on atop its organized chaos.

This is the first round; the lines are 1/2" apart. My walking foot is the perfect measurement for this. You only have to mark your first stitching line (down the center of the quilt). The rest of the lines use the walking foot as the guide. Work from the center out to each side, and remember not to stitch only in one direction (meaning, don't always stitch top-to-bottom. Turn and sew the next line bottom-to-top, then top-to-bottom, and so on.)

And the back. Love this fabric!

Next I'll stitch between the initial lines, making the lines now 1/4" apart. True matchstick quilting would have me add another line after that, making the final lines be 1/8", but I think that will be overwhelming for this piece: I might stop at 1/4". We shall see!

The quilting is both relaxing and somewhat drone-ish. I have a good book on the iPod so I can go for hours, as long as my back holds out. Don't forget to get up and stretch!

I'll keep you posted on the progress. Thanks for stopping by!

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Scrappiness

Along my journey as a quilter, I've accumulated billions, maybe zillions, of strips. Not just the 2 1/2" kind, but skinnies, and somewhat short. Mostly these have come from various classes, most of them taken at Empty Spools. Many of those classes have involved the random cutting of strips without the assistance of a ruler. Just me and my rotary cutter, and whatever (skinny) cut looks interesting. I have so many of these strips now that they occupy a double cabinet in my sewing space. Time to tame them.

I started by making simple strippy blocks. Random widths, lengths at least 6 1/2". If a strip was too short, I added more to it. Sometimes I used sub-cuts from strata made during the aforementioned classes. So far I have this:

My original intent was to put them together, simply alternating the orientation from horizontal to vertical - something like this:

Whoa! Too noisy, even for me (and I like a LOT of noise going on in my quilts). Well, I kept on making strippy blocks, pondering what to do. As often happens, an idea developed while doing my morning journaling. Black and white is soooo predictable, so what if I took Freddy Moran's philosophy to heart ("red is a neutral color") and went down that path?

Now look:

Still fun and loud and noisy, but now the orchestra has a conductor. Much better, yes?

The blocks have been trimmed to 6" square. They are made up of straight strips, curved strips, pieced strips, and anything else I could think of to do to the strips. At this block size, the width of the individual strip needs to be small to keep the blocks interesting. (A bunch of 6" blocks with 1", straight strips would be so very boring, don't you think?)

This has become my Monday project. Each Monday, a bunch of us gather at Cinnamon's Quilt Shoppe for a day of sewing, chatting and cameraderie. It can be such a pain to decide what the heck to work on every week, so I've settled on this for my Monday project for the next few months. I'm not sure how big the eventual quilt will become, so for now I'll just keep making blocks. I have a long way to go before decisions will be needed. I'll keep you posted.

Never having been the type of person that has one thing going on at a time, here's a peek at what's currently up on the design wall:

This is not just one project - it's just a glimpse of what's up there providing me with inspiration at the moment. Oh the stories behind the majority of those pieces! But that's for another day.

Stay tuned!

Below are a few pics of where I was at the end of April. I sure enjoyed myself! Thanks, Penny, for the trip.

Pacific Grove. Home is where the heart is, so that home for me. I don't live there, but my heart is there, for sure. I attended the final 2015 Empty Spools session, taking a class from Jacquie Gering. It was great.