2 Quilts Have Returned: Passionate Purple

Passionate Purple detail
Passionate Purple detail

As you may remember, this is part of a series of Bullseye quilts I am working on with JulieZS and Adrienne.

I tool Thursday off of work so that I could rest up for my quilt marathon. One of the things I did was to go and pick up my quilts from my longarmer. Passionate Purple was one of them. Now I just have to finish it. However, after looking at the quilt for a few days, I am thinking that I may take it back and get her to do some more quilting on it. It just isn’t flat enough for my tastes. I don ‘t mean flat as in I pieced it badly and it pooches. I mean flat as in the quilt is quilted within and inch of its life and there is no pooching from unquilted areas.

Passionate Purple back, detail
Passionate Purple back, detail

Here is a little of back. Perhaps you can see how much unquilted space there is?

Passionate Purple, full
Passionate Purple, full

Here is the full piece. I don’t think you can see the quilting at all in this picture.

I am struggling a bit with my camera lately and am hoping it will not die.

Random Blog Ring Bullseye

Ellen Guerrant
Ellen Guerrant

I barely know what a blog ring is, but today I clicked on the random link from the Pink Chalk Studio blog and ended up on the Occasional Threads blog. I saw this bullseye there and thought I would share. The writer loves the colors, which are not my thing (no turquoise, what was she thinking???) 😉 , but I really like that little black strip separating some of the pieces. This also looks like the Wonky Circles quilt.

A Different Bullseye


IMG_bullseye0001
Originally uploaded by bluecottagegardens

I always like to see different people’s interpretations of blocks. The Bullseye design is no exception.

I am still working my way through the DS Pool on Flickr. There are a lot of great quilts and projects in that group. Part of the reason is that the the DS fabrics are pretty great. Here is a bullseye, which I came across. It is a different looking Bullseye than the ones that the Julie and AJA and I have done. I like it.

Bullseye Back (Purple)

I am waiting to get an appointment to deliver my quilts – YES, quilts plural!!! – to my quilter. I have to call her and get a date. Last time I tried she was out of town on all the days that would have been convenient for me. I almost finished a third top last night, so I may wait to add the last two borders, and get the back done before I make the appointment.

Above is the back of the purple Bullseye. I was really pleased with how well this back went together. The whole quilt really went together well, but the back was especially easy. The fabrics I used are much lighter than the front. I wanted to use some fabrics that I owned and liked and had also been around for awhile yet hadn’t yet made it to the front of a quilt.

It is really a thrill to have three quilts (almost) ready to go to the quiltmaker. Sadly, two of them were not on my 2007 UFO list, so that list won’t be much smaller unless I get really busy.

Bullseyes – Major Progress

The last update I gave you on the Bullseyes was on September 8 and I was slowly working through the trimming and sewing the patches together to make blocks.
I went through this process kind of slowly because I was enjoying the fiddliness and taking my time. Above shows the quilt top as it was sometime in the last week or so. You can see that patches are sewn together to make blocks and some blocks are sewn together to make. During the past week I have been sewing chunks together and this morning I had only seven seams left. I finished this morning after wrestling with those last seams.

Finished top!! Hooray.

I hope to be able to finish the back today as well. I already made one piece of it with some leftover quarter circle/triangle patches.

One of the things I tried on this quilt was sewing the seams open. I saw in the Kerr/Ringle color book that they press the seams, on all of their quilts, open. I thought this would be a good project to try it. I was pleased with how easy it was to deal with several seams meeting at one central point. Because of the layers of applique’, it was a little tricky to get all the little bits to lay flat. I also found it easier to press from the back when pressing the seams open. My points matched up pretty well (at least no worse than normal). I did use pins to help that process. All in all, I liked pressing the seams open. I’ll have to read a little more of what Kerr/Ringle say about their reasons and report back.

Progress on Bullseyes- YES!!

Last week I noted that I wanted to get moving on the Bullseye, because I wanted to get it off the design wall and to the quilter. Yesterday, I got busy and began sewing blocks together. This is a project, because I need – well, want – to keep the patches in the order I have laid them out. As TFQ pointed out, in the future nobody will notice and I won’t remember, but there is no sense in laying them out and not, at least, trying to keep them in order.

I spent several hours yesterday sewing blocks together, trimming applique and squaring up the blocks. I decided that it would be a lot easier to square the blocks as I went along rather than waiting. It did take longer, but I am happy that I am trimming and squaring now since it will be a lot easier to put the blocks together later.

The sewing part is a little tricky, because, while I was sewing blocks, the blocks I was sewing together have nothing to do with the design on the quilt. Groups of blocks make up the design.

You can see from the photo, above, how much the piece will shrink once all of the sewing is completed. Right now there is about a 2″ gap between the sewn block (left) and the unsewn blocks (right). It never ceases to amaze me how much fabric seam allowances take up. There will be more once I start sewing blocks together.

Towards Final Bullseye Arrangement

After magnificiently struggling with the layout for the Bullseye, I believe I have settled on a shape I can live with and one that is successful. The difference between this and the others I have done is that the ‘knots’ I have created are self contained. I keep thinking of them as Lovers’ Knots, but I know that term may confuse people who know the actual Lovers’ Knot quilt pattern.

I have more patches on the wall and am finalizing fabric placement now. I hope to get to sewing today as I would like to have this piece ready to take to the quilter with the Chocolate Box. I am itching to get back to the Pineapple (amazing, but true). I need to move a couple of projects forward first.

Bullseye Progress?

I can’t really decide if I am making progress on this project. It has been on my wall for awhile and all the ways I have tried to arrange the pieces have not been successful or satisfactory. I want to finish it and get it off my wall, because it is a dark quilt and doesn’t make me feel happy when I look at it. I like the quilt, it is just the wrong time of year to have a dark quilt on the wall.

Until yesterday, the above photo shows the most recent design. It had been on the wall for awhile and I knew it wasn’t working, but was considering sewing it together just to be done with it.

Sadly, this layout looks like two separate quilts, which is not good. I suppose I could put one on the front and one on the back. Not happening. I want a cohesive/unified design. I seriously like the snaky bit highlighted with the warm colored (red and pink) fabrics, but I couldn’t figure out how to include it and all the other patches. I like the half block wedges (see photo below) that end up, often, in the corners, s, in this iteration, I tried to replicate those on the left side of this layout. It doesn’t solve the problem of two quilts in one and the wedges don’t show up very well in the overall piece.

Wedge detail.
Detail showing my attempt at the wedge design.

I saw a quilt of Kerr/Ringle’s called XO in the Modern Quilt Workshop book. The blocks had patches the same shape as my bullseye wedges, but Bill and Weeks had added a thin strip of fabric in between. Above shows my attempt at using their idea. I considered trying a purple/violet fabric, but ultimately didn’t choose this option, because I was too lazy to find the right fabric and think I came up with a better idea.


Yesterday morning, I had a brainwave and the above layout is it. Is isn’t finished and there are still a couple of problems to work out, but so far I like this layout the best of all. The red/pink snake is gone, but so is the two quilts in one problem. Some of the problems I have to work out are:

  • fabric placement
  • how to work with the many more pieces I have than are shown with a small design wall.
  • getting the whole piece to be cohesive while using all (or most of the blocks)
  • Making the piece fit in a square or rectangular format without adding blank pieces of fabric. I added blank pieces in Feelin’ Blue and don’t want to do that again.

None of these are as insurmountable as the layout. I think I have a good one here and will move forward with until such time as it is finished or I decide it was a bad idea.

Bullseye Arrangement

I have a sinking feeling I already posted this picture, but I can’t find it in the blog, so either I am losing my mind or imagining things. Either one could be positive. 😉

This is the first arrangement. It will work, areas I want to stand out stand out. With a few more blocks the self bordering will work as well.

I know I rearranged the pieces after I took this photo, but, once again, my camera is upstairs, so it will have to be a post for tomorrow.

Friday Sewing Session

I almost never sew during the week anymore. I used to sew almost every night, especially back in the dark ages (especially bW) when I had to wait for a port to open to connect to the UNIX based Internet, but then life happened and work grew more demanding and I seemed to not be able to find the time. Yesterday, I found myself, unexpectedly with a free afternoon. After making sure my most arduous work tasks were done, I raced with glee up to the workroom and got down to it. My spine actually tingled with the thrill as I started to touch the fabric!!! I know that sounds like a stupid sentiment, but there you have it.

Frankly, I wasn’t sure what to do when I got up there, but, with a limited amount of time, I quickly told myself to stop wasting time and start work.
Julie’s Bullseye pieces had arrived so the, as yet unsewed, FOTY* pieces had to go. Before I took them down, I took a picture of what was happening, because I particularly liked the interaction of the turquoise blue and the pink. For FOTY, I like to fussy cut motifs from conversational fabrics. The fish is from the fabric I made Dad’s pillow covers from.

Here are all of the Bullseye pieces I have received so far. My pieces as well as Julie’s are shown. My pieces are mostly on the right and Julie’s are mostly on the left. I played around with them after I took the above picture and realized that I am glad I didn’t receive all of the pieces at once. It has allowed me to contemplate the arrangement of the pieces without being overwelmed.


This will, hopefully, be the focal point of the piece. If not THE focal point, perhaps it will be one of the focal points. Receiving Julie’s pieces allowed me to make this area stand out more because of the way some of the colors were placed. When I receive AJA’s pieces, I may be able to use some of her pieces to make it even stand out more.

This is primarily the section where I placed Julie’s pieces initially. They will get moved around as I swap sections out.

As I moved pieces around this morning, I found that some of the pieces stood out more than others. With putting the “red” pieces in one section (detail above), I realized that some of the pieces stood out more than others. Some were more subtle than others. This got me thinking about where to put the subtle pieces and whether I should put all the subtle pieces together or mix them up. I don’t know yet.


I also worked on was the Chocolate Box (above). I needed to straighten up the borders, which were quite wonky, so I proceeded to put borders on. The photo above looks weird, I know, because it wasn’t taken straight on (I was standing on a stool on, what is now, the left side of the photo) and then I rotated the photo. It is pretty straight except for the little jog in the left, bottom corner.

When I started this quilt, it was mind sorbet for me. I want it to continue to be this way and so I didn’t think very much about what type of borders to add. I just began sewing. I hope it will be successful and I think it is so far, but I don’t want it to be a serious project. As a result, I don’t want this quilt hanging around; I want to finish it. I don’t mean to make it sound like I don’t like it or that it is somehow a stepchild project. It is an experimental project and I want it to stay that way.

I put on all the borders and pronounced it done. However, when I looked at it this morning, I decided that I needed to do something about the jog. Although it is at the bottom, I think it will cause me problems later- with quilting, hanging, etc.

I may work on the back before I go back to the bottom border. I am interested in what you think, though, so let me know.

*Fabric of the Year project pieces

Rebel Quilter’s Bullseyes

JulieZS, one of my partners in Bullseyes (in case you haven’t been reading) sent me the link (http://rebelquilter.com/latest_news.htm) to these bullseyes by Susan Leslie Lumsden. I can’t really see them up close and personal, but I love the colors and the look of them. I am always interested in seeing other people’s iterations of bullseyes.

clipped from rebelquilter.com
Slipstream Adventure
Slipstream Detail A
Slipstream Detail B
Live Water Magic Time
Strength Through Diversity
  blog it

Projects Calling

I couldn’t stay away from my workroom on yesterday. I found a playmate for the child and left them to their own devices (except for an occasional admonishment to go outside away from the screens) while I sat and sewed. I sent Aja’s Bullseyes off to her, as I may have mentioned, last week. She received them Thurs or Fri, so I only had my blocks to work on.

This calling business was a bit disconcerting, because it seemed like my mind had a mind of its own. Normally, I will sew a bit, do the laundry a bit, sew a bit more, make my weekly phone calls, sew a bit, change the laundry and do the dishes and sew a bit more. Yesterday my body and mind were united and they were having none of it. I went to the workroom and basically stayed there. No dishes, no laundry and the dinner didn’t get started until almost 7pm. IT WAS FABULOUS!!!
This is one of the blocks and I really liked it. I fussy cut the last circle and was sad to slice it up, because the flower is so perfectly displayed.

These are my blocks after I have added the last circle. The blocks in the upper right hand corner are blocks that weren’t in the photo I posted the other day. My design wall isn’t big enough to accommodate all of the blocks.

These are details of the blocks from the upper right hand corner.

Now my Bullseye blocks are nearly complete. I have sewed the last circles on and trimmed all the blocks down to 9.5″.
This is how the back of a block looks after I have sewn the last circle and before I have cut the back of the second circle out. You can see that Julie and Aja have cut out the backs of the background and the first circle.

Here is how the above block looks after I have cut out the back of the second circle. This reduces bulk and provides lots of lovely circles for another project.

I finished the process of cutting out the backs of the second circles, and I have sliced the blocks into quarters. I am preparing them to be sent off to Julie and Aja.

Here is how I set up the blocks to slice them. I love the Creative Grid rulers, because they have a lot of different markings that allow you to line up the ruler so the block is sliced very precisely.

I keep two quarters of the block and send one quarter each to Julie and Aja.

Here are my slices. I just slapped them up on the wall, but I like the internal maze surrounded by a larger maze and may go with that type of design for the final design. I think I will have to put some of the stronger colors, perhaps red, in that internal maze so that it stands out. I will also want the self bordering technique to give the piece a finished look You can see it in Seeing Red.

Bullseyes – Another Round

Friend Julie sent me a second package of Bullseyes sometime last week and I decided I needed to get my act together and sew them up.

Adrienne’s blocks detail.
The rest of Adrienne’s blocks after I put the circles on.
Adrienne’s blocks after Julie put the first circle and I sewed the second circle.
The rest of Adrienne’s blocks after Julie put the first circle and I sewed the second circle.


The rest of my blocks. I was surprised at how much non-purple the other girls used, but then I remembered that that is the fun. DUH! I have cut all the squares for the last round and hope to sew them on this weekend. I recut a lot of them so that most, if not all are purple. I want to cut them up and send them off before I start off on my travels.