Tag: Fabric of the Year

I have a lot of fabric to press and cut, especially since I washed several yards the other day. I am determined to get busy on FOTY 2015 early in the year. It won’t be until at least February as I won’t be able to sew on most weekends in January. That means no sewing. I wonder what I will write about?

I digress.

I want to do FOTY 2015 early in the year so there is less overlap with FOTY 2016. I am not sure how that will go as this is all the progress I have made since  the November 16 post. I should go and count my patches to see how many I had. I really don’t want a repeat of cutting down all the patches like I did for FOTY 2014.

I mentioned cutting some pieces for the EPP. When I cut those pieces I also cut patches for the FOTY 2015. This group is, thus, really heavy on the colored dots on white.

I’ll need more colored dots on white for the EPP project so you’ll see more of these types of fabrics.

My DH actually ironed pants when I wasn’t home and messed up a bunch of my fabric. I had to re-iron some of my pieces. I decided I needed to get busy and cut and file some of those fabrics. Thus, I have also been working through cutting the fabrics from my ironing board.

Another thing I did on PlayDay was to cut up my Ta Dots fat quarters into 10.25″ squares. I did this in anticipation of making half square triangles. As I did that cutting, I took the opportunity to cut up a lot of FOTY 2015 quilt rectangles.

I am not planning on letting these patches lay around all year next year. I am working on cutting pieces I need for various projects from the yardage I have pressed and plan on working on this piece early in the year.

Note that I said “plan”. We’ll see how it goes.

This plan was set in motion by my need to cut a lot of different fabrics for the HSTs and Flying Geese I needed for the Carpenter’s Wheel. The Ta Dots HSTs were an added bonus. Getting fabric off of the ironing board has made me feel like I am making progress, even if I am just cutting.

The black and white stripe at the bottom is one of the stripes that will be used as the other half of the HSTs.

The other night after starting to arrange the patches for FOTY 2014, I was laying in bed and thinking about the arrangement and wondering what it would look like if I alternated light and dark for the whole thing instead of gradating the colors? This is where my mind goes when I am trying to go to sleep.

I didn’t have an equal amount of lights and darks in this batch, but I made an effort to do the light and dark arrangement just to see what it would look like. To get an idea.

Shockingly this is the first FOTY 2015 post. I have been cutting squares and rectangles, but, clearly, have not posted them.

I am not sure why since I have been cutting since late March or early April. I know the problem hasn’t been too much content. I guess I must have forgotten to post.

I have to admit that I am behind in the FOTY projects. This has been a weird year and I am ok with my slow progress. I think I’ll pick up speed later. A girl can dream anyway.

I know that you see some food fabrics in the top photo, but not all. I didn’t have enough of some of them to cut pieces. Sad, but not a complete tragedy. I might get more.

Lots of orange and pink, too. Don’t you love it?

Onward!

Yes, I have cut off FOTY 2014 and started in on FOTY 2015. I have yet to put FOTY 2014 together, but that task is coming soon. I have to clear off some of the ‘debris’ before I start on another project as design wall intensive as the FOTY quilts tend to be. At the moment, both design walls are filled with other projects.

The important part is that it is 2015 and FOTY 2015 is in progress. I had a number of pieces of fabric that I had pressed, but hadn’t cut into, so those fabrics were the start of this version of the series. Also, with all of the sewing I did on Sunday, I had a lot of squares of ‘previous’ fabrics to add to the stack.

I decided that I liked the idea I used in FOTY 2012 where I had smaller patches for fabrics already in my stash that I pulled out in that year. This time, the sizes will be a little different: 5.5″ x 3″ rectangles and 3″ x 3″ squares. They should fit together nicely.

I have already had the first batch of patches on the design wall and taken them off again and started on the second. We are off to an excellent start!

I think I might be ready to start cutting for FOTY 2015. I know. It is nearly March and finally I am getting in gear for 2015. 😉 Sometimes you have to let the process guide you.

I said last time that I wasn’t sure how much more I should cut. I think that I made that comment because I didn’t have a clear view in my mind of how to start FOTY 2015. I hadn’t decided on a shape. I have a better idea now.

As mentioned previously (or, maybe, on Twitter), I have been ironing fabric. when my sewing chair starts to fall over because I have too much washed, but unironed fabric hanging on the back, I have to iron. I ironed a lot while listening to Outlander (long LONG audiobook) and let it stack up on my ironing board, but finally I was ready to cut.

I still have a stack on my ironing board, but Voila! These are the patches I have cut in the past few weeks. I thought there were more, but if there were I lost the photo.

Yes, I cannot help attempting to gradate the patches.

Here are the most recent patches. I can’t decide if I am going to keep cutting until I start laying out the piece on the design wall or if I should stop now.

The CQFA Retreat will be in May this year, but I certainly don’t want to wait that long. On the other hand, I haven’t chosen a shape for FOTY 2015. Lots to do.

Yes, it is 2015 and I am still gathering fabrics. In fairness, most of these were from the end of 2014. In any case, it is my project and I am still gathering fabrics. 😉

I can’t arrange this piece until the Black & Grey Teenaged Boy Quilt is off the design wall and that project is going nowhere at the moment.

There are a couple of things going on. First, there are certain fabrics I want to include in this entry in the series.

Next, I am doing quite a bit of scrap reduction and when I have a large enough piece that I can use a goodly chunk of it, I cut a piece for the FOTY 2014.

Finally, I am annoyed that I didn’t decide on shapes like I did for 2012, which were rectangles and squares. I’ll probably go with that arrangement for the 2015 version. That is still some time off, so we’ll have to see.

Like a bad penny the pieces for this quilt just keep turning up. I purposefully did a load of fabric laundry on Wednesday, even though I was enjoying my unpressed fabric free space, just so I could add some more pieces to FOTY 2014.

I did a load of turquoise/aqua so I could also cut some patches from that color for another project.

The last time I had enough rectangles to show you was in early November. I feel like I am not cutting enough pieces for this project (within the parameters, of course), which makes me feel like it will be 8″x10″. I know it won’t be that small, but I want it to be a nice sized wall hanging.

Also, I look at the fabrics and think they are not that interesting. Of course, I have to remember that they will be completely rearranged and their individual motifs will be lost in the overall layout.

I think I might be experiencing a bit of a creative block. I need to find some rote sewing to do.

Off to cut those rectangles from the fabric I just washed.

I went back in time to look at the tags for my last FOTY post and was shocked to see that it was August that I last posted. I really couldn’t believe it, but I looked at the various Design Wall Monday posts I have posted recently and those same FOTY patches were there with very few changes. I actually took a picture of this group (above) right before the picture of the design wall for yesterday’s post, so next time I do a DWM post, you will, hopefully, see a new batch of FOTY patches.

The reason it took me so long, aside from being really busy during the week is that the last load of fabric I washed was grey and light neutrals, which I found really depressing to press, so I kind of avoided doing it. TFQ saw the pile and got down to business, so now I have newly pressed fabrics from which to cut patches.

I also have a lot of great fabrics waiting to be washed and I should make time so the patches can go into FOTY 2014. The new year isn’t that far away and pretty soon, I’ll be sorting thesepatches into color groups and picking the shape for FOTY 2015. WOW! Time flies.

One of my goals for Labor Day was to finish the Fabric of the Year 2013 top. This was a daunting goal, because each piece has to be sewn to another one in a certain order.

That meant that I started in one corner (see below), sewed two pieces together, put a leader/ender in the machine right after the two FOTY pieces, sewed those, took the FOTY pieces out of the machine, pressed them and put them back on the wall before taking the next two pieces. Repeat. There are 306 pieces in this quilt, so I made progress on ~306 pieces from other projects as well.

This project is extremely taxing in terms of piecing. I was pretty much done with the project when I finished top, so I did try to piece the back with large pieces of fabric. I used two pieces of different Philip Jacobs fabric. They go together well enough and I enjoy the large lettuces. They make me laugh. I hope I’ll still laugh when I am liking the project much better.

Normally, I would have put a quilting border on it, but I emailed Colleen and she said just to stitch 1/8″ away from the edge and that would keep the quilt from getting out of shape when it is quilted. I hope it works, because I want the shape of the quilt today to be the shape of the quilt forever. If it works, I’ll have to remember this trick for the future. I do like using ugly fabric as a quilting border, though.

Below are some photos of the project in process.