Category: 2021

26 Projects 2021 #7

Finished 2021 Quilt Projects

Finished 2021 Small and Non-Quilt Projects

This category covers bags, toys, aprons and knitting as well as other non-quilt projects.

Doing Good

In Process or To Make
The ‘In Process’ is used to denote projects on which I am actively working or are on the design wall waiting for me to stitch. I am continuing to try not to put away projects. I find putting a project away ensures I never work on them, because I just lose steam.

Quilts

  • The circle quilt is on the design wall

Small Projects to Make or in Process

Most of my progress involves thinking or just cutting.

  • One Hour Basket for my stuff that tends to accumulate on the dining room table. I may switch to one of the Minikins projects or a Catch All Caddy for this purpose.
  • One Hour Basket for DH’s stuff that tends to accumulate on the dining room table. I may switch the pattern to one of the Minikins projects for this purpose.
  • Percheron Pouch cut out and ready to sew
  • Retreat Organizer – another project from the Crafty Gemini Organizer Club, also on my list, but not yet started. Recently, I saw one of these made up and I am not so nervous about it
  • Superbloom tote using Hindsight fabric – not started
  • Tessuti Japanese Apron – cut out and ready to sew. I am figuring out how to make it reversible.
  • Ultimate Project Organizer – another project from the Crafty Gemini Organizer Club, also on my list, but not yet started
  • Ultimate Carry All Bag gift – Bag-a-Long for BAM – I have the inside pockets as well as the front panel made and am looking forward to the next step
  • Ultimate Carry All Bag for me – I have the inside pockets as well as the front panel made and am looking forward to the next step
  • Westchester shirt – this is a Crafty Gemini pattern. I bought the fabric at PIQF in 2018. I have the pattern pieces cut out and ready to sew.

Handwork

I decided that some of my projects are in a different class because they are hand piecing or embroidery or beading. They take longer. Thus I created a new category and have moved some projects here.

Ready for Quilting

  • Nothing at the moment

In the Quilting Process

In the Finishing Process

  • FOTY 2019 – needs a sleeve
  • Frolic! – need to sew on the binding
  • Rings quilt – needs the binding sewn

Still WIPs
I still have WIPs. Who doesn’t, after all? A project in the ‘UFO’ category means I am stalled. A nicer way of saying UFO is a WIP. The list is a lot shorter and the projects are newer, for the most part.

  1. Handbag Sampler – this is still the forgotten project. It should be on the UFO list. The blocks were teaching samples when I taught a sampler class some time before I started writing the quilt class sampler tutorials. I found one block recently, but otherwise I actually don’t know exactly where the blocks are hiding. I crawled up in the far reaches of my fabric closet to see if I could find them and they weren’t where I thought. I am sort of mystified as to where they could be. I haven’t even found a picture of all the blocks. Sad.
  2. Lobster – I think I might make this into a tablerunner for the buffet. I think that will be a good and fun use of the piece even if the colors aren’t quite right for the dining room.
  3. Pies and Points from 2016 Victoria Findlay Wolfe class. The last time I worked on it was when Julie and I had a playdate in April 2018. I brought this piece with me so I could cut more elements (Julie has a Sizzix). I lost my excitement about this piece shortly thereafter and still have to get it back. Thus, I had to move this to the WIPs area.
  4. Pointillist Palette #4: Fourth is a series of 6 quilts; needs tiny square patches sewn together. No progress.
  5. Self Portrait: started in 2006 at a class at Quilting Adventures in Richmond, Virginia. I am still stalled on this again. As one of my oldest (I am pretty sure) UFO, I put it on my blog and out into the Twitterverse and Diane suggested that I not consider this as a self portrait. I think that strategy is a great idea. I am now trying to think of a new persona for her.
  6. Serendipity Lady – I am still planning to take this piece to be framed.
  7. Who Am I? – This piece is still languishing. Perhaps having a larger design wall will help me regain momentum. The amount of satin stitching I was facing was a problem until I thought of BIAS TAPE. I am going to make the words with bias tape, perhaps different widths, then I won’t have to sew the satin stitching. Red Scribbles and Friend Julie helped me come up with this solution. Now I just have to do it!

Update on Ends Quilts

These quilts are all made from the edges that are cut off of other quilts as they are being squared up. Sometimes I make the backs larger than needed so I get some large-ish pieces back. Those pieces are hard to store, so making some donation quilts out of them is a good idea.

July 2021

Pop Parade Ends (n.10)
Pop Parade Ends (n.10)

Ends n.10 (Pop Parade)

February 2021

Ends n.9 quilted
Ends n.9 quilted

Ends n.9 – see more information

June 2021

Ends n.8 Finished
Ends n.8 Finished

Ends n.8 (Bonnie & Camille) – see more information. Since I only make the tops, they don’t always get done in order.

January 2019

Ends n.7 Donation Quilt
Ends n.7 Donation Quilt

Ends n.7 – see more information

October 2018

Ends donation top n.6
Ends donation top n.6

Ends n.6 – see more information

June 2018

Ends Donation Top n.5
Ends Donation Top n.5

Ends n.5 – see more information

March 2018

Ends n.4 Final
Ends n.4 Final

Ends n.4 – see more information. You can see that Ends n.3 and Ends n.4 are related.

 

Ends Donation Quilt n.3
Ends Donation Quilt n.3

Ends n.3 – see more information

July 2018

Ends n.2 donation quilt
Ends n.2 donation quilt

Ends n.2 – see more information

March 2017

Ends Donation Top - March 2017
Ends Donation Top – March 2017

Ends (n.1) – see more information – this is the top that started it all!

You could also put scraps together into strips, add some background and make one of these. These are very improv-y and there isn’t a pattern. It is a good way to do something good with fabrics I wouldn’t otherwise use.

Shark-like Behaviour

I do not like prep.

I do not enjoy cutting fabric out.

I know I should, but I almost never put all of my ingredients out in little bowls, measured and perfect, before starting to cook.

I do not like the spackling and sanding part of painting.

I do not like waiting in traffic. I like moving forward.

I like to move forward: start and go. Usually, I do not start, because I know I need to do prep and I don’t like it. Quiltmaking is the exception.

Primer on the wall
Primer on the wall

My DH is good at preparation part of painting. Meticulous, in fact, which is good since he is preparing the walls for paint. And he is making good progress. Yesterday he put primer on the walls. The primer is white so I can start to see what my work room will look like. It looks so much more fresh and white. I am pretty excited to get rid of that life sucking beige.

Painting a Memory

A long time ago I used to paint. When the YM came along it became impossible. I would just put out paints and he would need me. By the time I got back to it the brushes would be ruined and the paint dried out. It wasn’t feasible anymore.

It actually worked out. At the time, I was said, but I got rid of a lot of painting supplies and began to focus on quiltmaking. I am happy that I did. I think having 100 canvases around the house would be much harder to deal with. Also, I wasn’t a very good painter. I enjoyed it, but I would never have been great.

Auntie's View
Auntie’s View

Before that I painted a picture of a view I looked at as a kid. The view is from inside my godmother’s kitchen out into the dining room and is completely stylized. I don’t really know why this view made such an impression on me, but I remember sitting in the kitchen and looking that way a lot.

The walls were not violet. The stove, a space age looking electric behemoth, was on the left inside the kitchen door. Auntie (what we called my godmother) never made cakes like that  and the Christmas tree was not in the dining room. The overall arrangement was correct.

Worse Before Better

YM's Room
YM’s Room

Our house is a disaster. 🙁

This is the best looking, most organized room in the house, the YM’s room. Our bedroom, actually, has not escaped the rehoming of stuff, but it has the least amount of stuff.

All of these boxes are fairly organized, though I couldn’t tell you exactly where any one thing is, but when I see the top of a box, I know what is in that box. If you want something in the bottom box, tough luck. The other thing is that we can’t really do anything. I have a small space to work (and occasionally write a blog post), we can watch TV and sleep, but that’s it. No sewing, no cutting, no EPP unless it is hand work that needs no prep, no extra fabric nothing else. I like to be able to sew whenever I want, so this is difficult.

My mantra is that it will be awesome when it is done.

Workroom is almost empty
Workroom is almost empty

One reason for all this disorganization is that there is almost nothing in my workroom.

My sewing table and my work desk are still in the room, only because they are too heavy and awkward for the two of us to move downstairs. The green bookcase you can see peeking out of the right of the photo is in our dining room now.

DH has scraped the walls and will spackle and buy paint tomorrow. The goal is to have the room done by the time he goes back to work next week.

I know it will get better, but right now it is horrible to live here.

Falabella Pouches

Falabella Pouches
Falabella Pouches

A month or so ago, as I waited to start my new contract job, I finished these Falabella Pouches. I didn’t write about them sooner, because they are gifts for my younger (middle) sister and her birthday is today.

She is an artist and has no qualms about asking for what she wants. She wanted something to hold her pens, etc.

The Falabella Pouch is part of Sara Lawson/Sew Sweetness’ Minikins 3 set of patterns. I want to make more of the various Minikins patterns since I bought all three ‘seasons’. Her request helps me with that goal.

 This is a pouch that gets taller if you pull up on the zipper or smaller if you pull down on the zipper tabs (shown vaguely in photos above).

I used ripstop nylon for the inside. If Lil Sissy’s pens open, I wanted some kind of fabric that was marginally cleanable. This was a difficult fabric with which to work. It frayed a lot. Some people said to burn the edges, but I was too chicken to do that.

Large Falabella Pouch
Large Falabella Pouch

This was the first time I used Zipper-by-the-Yard for a project. I bought it specifically for this project, because I found some zipper pulls with the Eiffel Tower on them. Lil Sissy loves Paris, so these are perfect. I used Sara Lawson/Sew Sweetness’ video on adding a zipper head to zipper tape.

I have tried this activity before and never been successful. The video has one trick in particular that makes the activity work. I couldn’t believe how successful I was! I also did not use a fork, which is what Sara demonstrates. I used the self adhesive towel holders** I bought from Amazon. I can see how a fork would work just as well.

I bought the zippers from the Sew Sweetness site and can’t wait to try them again. I want to make another Piebald with a double zipper and now I know I will use this zipper head technique to do it. I know I must sound like an idiot, but I can’t tell you how gleeful I feel about this zipper!

Anyway, I sent these off last week, after admiring them for a few weeks. I hope Lil Sissy likes them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Workroom Refresh Storage

Boxes in the YM's room
Boxes in the YM’s room

Boxes and boxes are filling up the YM’s room. There are a lot, because they are small and filled with books. I used all of our CSA boxes that we have not been able to return due to the pandemic. They turned out to be a good size for books. I ran out eventually and had to scrounge random amazon and other boxes. Eventually, my mom bought me some boxes from Home Depot and that was the last of what I needed.

The YM is coming for a visit in a week and I need to get all of these boxes out of his room

Yellow Improv Grows

Yellow Improv Donation Top in Progress
Yellow Improv Donation Top in Progress

Slowly but surely this piece is growing. The top section, which I think of as the main piece, is about 20×20 now. I am working on growing the bottom piece to fit on to the top piece. At the moment the bottom piece is  made up of 3 different pieces.

I find that I need triangles in these pieces to add interest. The additional, non-yellow, colors add interest, but I find that if I have too many squares and rectangles the eye doesn’t move around as much. In this piece, however, there isn’t much contrast and that helps the eye not linger on the squares and rectangles.

I learned this from the Green Thing, the first top in this series. Those bars, which aren’t even really green, provide a focal point, but I find that the focal point takes away from the rest of the quilt. Good thing I’ll have enough green scraps to make another!

More of the Workroom Refresh

View west
View west

I spent last Saturday doing the final clear out of my workroom. It is kind of horrifying to do something like this. It shows how much stuff I have. I don’t feel bad about it, but I need to use it. I produce a lot, but I need to produce more. Now that I have a better idea of what I have, I can use more of it. I am also going to be more careful about what comes into my workroom going forward.

View south
View south

The other thing is the dust. There are places that are inaccessible so the dust bunnies are large.

The view in the photo, right, doesn’t look like much, but I moved a lot of random stuff out of that corner. I had organized everything I could, but it was still kind of a jumble of projects and other random stuff. There is still some project boxes and my thread box there, but the corner next to my design wall is a lot more clear.

View east
View east

I am getting rid of some ugly pieces of furniture. That brown bookcase in the corner is out of the room as I write this and will be leaving my house soon. It is too short and too ugly for the future. I hope to bring in some fresh white bookcases. I haven’t picked them out yet, but I will.

Boxes of fabric
Boxes of fabric

Clearing out the last bits from my workroom is a big drag. It has to be done, but is a big drag. It’s like moving. Stuff that has always been in a  spot has to be moved. A lot of it has to be wrapped up, you need boxes. Bleah. It’s just a lot of work. I keep thinking of the end result.

I had a pile of just pressed fabric and a pile of fabric waiting to be pressed. I decided to put them all in boxes. It was a good opportunity to check out some fabrics I hadn’t seen in awhile. I picked out another group of fabrics for a different quilt. Stay tuned for that post.

The removal of everything gives me two opportunities to go through my stuff. I am donating a lot of books. I also threw out a bunch of stuff I didn’t need to keep around. I hope to go for another round when I put everything back.

 

Ends n.10

Pop Parade Ends (n.10)
Pop Parade Ends (n.10)

In a way the sewing I am doing at the moment is all about getting stuff off the floor so I can move it out of my workroom before the painting starts.

The other day I organized bits of batting and the edges that came back from my quilter after she quilted a quilt. I have at least one more quilt to make from ends.

This one is the fourth quilt I have made from the Pop Parade fabric. Most of it is not Pop Parade, but you can see the Pop Parade clearly.

I also used some Dit Dot Evolution fabric for the background. I bought the fabric online and it is the wrong color. I was going to give it away, then I thought I could just use it for donation quilts, so I did. I prefer clear white, but I prefer to use fabric rather than just give it away. Someone will like this quilt. It isn’t at all ugly even if I didn’t use my preferred fabric.

I have to make a back, which I would like to do before I go to the next Sew Day.

Block Blast from the Past

Pre-Blog block
Pre-Blog block

In the course of cleaning out my workroom, I found this block. It was crumpled up and dusty in the bottom of a bag I haven’t used in a long time.

I made this block in my second quiltmaking class. That class was focused on drafting blocks. None of the blocks were straightforward, so drafting and making templates was the only way to get them made. I drafted the pattern for this block before making the templates and piecing it.

In my early days of the quiltmaking, I primarily used solids. I did have a wild streak that you can see in the border. I fussy cut all of those pieces so that it looked like the block had a special border. I didn’t do a spectacular job on the fussy cutting, but considering it was one of the first dozen blocks I ever made, I am pretty proud of it.

Tim’s Improv Donation Top

Tim's Donation Top
Tim’s Donation Top

I finally got to work on Tim’s donation top. I can’t believe it was May when I worked on it last. Fortunately, it was only a week before that I started working on the piece.  Time is flying by.

I don’t think this is my best work. there are a lot of disparate elements. Somehow it works. It kind of looks like buildings surrounding a park to me.

I struggled with this piece, because of the green and orange. I don’t sincerely dislike green, but I don’t make it a main color in any of my quilts except the Improv Color quilts.  I also like orange, but somehow this was a struggle on which to work.

Tim's Improv Donation Back
Tim’s Improv Donation Back

The back went relatively fast. I took both pieces to Sew Day and gave them to Peggy and the team for quilting.

Missouri Star Block

Double Missouri Star
Double Missouri Star

I talked about one of the Triple Play Missouri Star videos in a recent Various & Sundry post. In this video, Jenny, Natalie and Misty take the same block pattern and make different quilts. I really liked what Natalie did with her version and I decided to try it out myself.

I thought it would be a quick test. Then I thought that I know how those quick “tests” go and started surfing around the Internet for fabric, thinking I would make an entire quilt. Fortunately, I got myself under control and decided to make one block with the True Kisses fabric I have and go from there. Cotton Cure still has packs of yardage.

I stopped and started the video as I followed along with the Missouri Star directions. Unlike other shows, Jenny and the gang tell viewers what sizes to cut, show you how to sew and press so you can follow along and make the block or quilt just from watching a free video. I like this about them.

Double Missouri Star center
Double Missouri Star center

The Missouri Star is a block they use for their logo. In this video they redid it. Jenny shrank the block and made a quilt from smaller versions. This version provided the directions for the center of Natalie’s block (above).

I didn’t choose good fabrics from the True Kisses line. There wasn’t enough contrast in the legs. Unfortunately I succumbed to the lure of those fabrics and the desire to just make something.

Trimming alternative
Trimming alternative

In the video, they show how to use the Clearly Perfect Trimmer**. I didn’t have that ruler so I tried their alternative method of using a regular ruler and it absolutely didn’t work. I should have saved myself the trouble and just squared up the various pieces the normal way.

My pieces were all the wrong size. Since I followed the Missouri Star method for making HSTs, all of my edges were on the bias. The small center block looked awful. I took the whole block apart, trimmed and put it back together again. I was reminded of how bias can work against me. I also think I didn’t completely understand the alternative method of trimming.

Using the Clearly Perfect Trimmer
Using the Clearly Perfect Trimmer

I did end buying the Clearly Perfect Trimmer**. I had never heard of this ruler and I was curious to try it out. I can’t really tell if it was any better than trimming the regular way. The one difference was that you only make two cuts vs making two cuts, turning your piece and making two more cuts.

I haven’t read all of the directions for this set of rulers, but I am interested in learning how to use more of its capabilities.

Despite all of the ripping, I am pretty pleased with the way the block came out. I won’t be making a whole quilt, however.

 

 

 

 

 

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