Tag: Piecing

Empty Design Wall

My design wall is empty because I have finished piecing the Eye Spy (hexagon quilt)! Hooray!


I worried about not posting any progress or anything here during the past few days, but I wanted to soldier through the piecing. I knew you would all wait for me ;-), but I do like to write every day and this blog gives me one opportunity to do so.

Eventually I had to take the top part of the piece off the design wall and put it on the floor. I don’t have a design wall that allows me to see a whole twin sixed quilt. Having the bottom of the piece on the floor and the top on the wall just didn’t work for me.

Having it on the floor is inconvenient at the best of times, and was really inconvenient this time, because I had to move a lot of stuff from around the room to get the piece to fit. Still, the inconvenience gave me an incentive to soldier on; I was able to see what fit together where and how to piece it, so it worked out. As you can see from the photo above, it fits a lot better now that it is pieced together.


This is a detail of the finished [bottom left] corner. I added the red diamonds after deciding that I did not want a wonky border. I will cut half of the diamonds off to make the border straight….eventually.

I really had topuzzle through some areas. The [bottom right] corner was one of those. That hole just appeared when I laid the piece down on the floor and I didn’t know whether it would be taken up with piecing or if I needed to add a piece. I ended up adding two of the hexagon units eventually to fill in.

So, now the piece is in the closet with 4 other quilts that need to be quilted. I will send the Cheerful Baskets to TFQ to be quilted by The Quilting Loft as soon as I make the label and back. I had a strong desire to piece tops after finishing the Cheerful Baskets. While The Tarts Come to Tea fluttered in and out of my mind, nothing sprang to mind and demanded my attention after finishing the hexagons. Perhaps finishing will be on the list. Perhaps I need to make those backs and get that sleeve done, etc.

I did have sewing the FOTY blocks into a quilt on my list, but have decided to take that to the CQFA quilt retreat to sew. By that time, I will have, hopefully, finished washing and pressing all the fabric I bought in 2008 and will really have a large block of time to get busy on it.

Hexagon Edges

I am also still working on the hexagons. I am in a spot where there is a lot of sewing triangles to hexagons and then pressing. It is the part where it looks like not much progress is being made.

However, I did take some time to figure out the bottom of the quilt. I am at the point where I need to shift everything up.


Since my design wall isn’t big enough to handle a twin sized quilt, I need to shift the top off the design wall, leave a few pieces so I know how to hook the top and bottom together and then slap up the hexagons destined to be on the bottom of the quilt.

So far, it isn’t working. I haven’t gotten the right steps in my head enough to move forward so I am sewing equilateral triangles to hexagons (check!), pressing (half check!) and sewing together four hexagon units to make diamonds.

I am also still thinking about the side borders. My decision was to have an uneven border. That decision is still not settling completely well with me. I am thinking of making a big diamond template and sewing a plain red piece (or use different fabrics) onto the edges.

New Star Block from Flickr


New Star Block
Originally uploaded by kirbyloulou

I saw this block about 2 weeks ago and have not been able to get it out of my mind. With the many, many blocks in the DS pool, I wasn’t able to find it again either. I was really glad to come across it today. Love the pointy corners.

Puzzling Through the Eye Spy; Progress

The first order of business this week (after all the cooking and tidying, of course) was to, once and for all, decide how I was going to put the quilt together. Below, you can see I have arranged the ‘blocks’ (two equilateral triangles and a hexagon) two different ways.

On the right the blocks were oriented with the triangles on the top and the bottom of the hexagons (Option A). On the left, the blocks are arranged with one triangle in the upper right hand corner and one triangle in the lower left hand corner (Option B).

I discussed previously that I thought the edge would be a problem. I finally decided that I would go with Option A. Mostly, I decided that I could better figure out how to make the edges straight using the diamonds. With Option B, the side edges seemed like they would really be a problem and I would end up hacking them off, which I didn’t really want to do. You can see the edge that seemed to be a problem on the photo above left.


I stood staring at the above piece for a long time trying to figure out what do next and how to deal with the edges. I decided that I would only hack parts off as a last resort and I was looking at pieces for the edges to see which motifs wouldn’t be compromised if I cut them in half. That still left me with the problem of how to finish the edges so that they could be bound in some normal manner. As the picture above shows, those points on the top and bottom don’t qualify as easy to bind. As an aside, I have no problem with doing difficult bindings, but there has to be a design purpose as in Pink Spider Looking at the Stars from my early days of quiltmaking.

This is a close up of one section so you can better see the connections between the pieces.


This is one unit. After finally deciding on a plan to put the blocks together, I began to look at a unit and see what it needed to create a flat top edge. One thing I did with a hexagon was to sew one triangle to the bottom only. That creates one unit with a flat edge.


Having successfully created one flat top piece, I sewed a triangle on to the bottom of another. It wouldn’t butt up to the unit I already created, so I sewed a triangle to the side. Doing this made me realize that I needed to decide on which angle I would be sewing the units together. Once I made that decision I would have to strive to sew triangles to the top pieces to make straight lines to match that angle.

By sewing the black and beige unit to the larger diamond unit, I was able to to make the flat top longer and keep the straight line angle for sewing additional units together in place.

My challenges didn’t end there, though. I had to work out the next section. The way I started (above) obviously wouldn’t work if I wanted to avoid set in seams.

In the overall scheme, the above depiction might work, depending on the way I sewed the piece together and how the rows lined up.

I sewed another red triangle on to the opposite side. This gave me a straight line. With this succeeding, I started to realize that I only needed to sew a triangle on to the bottom and the left side of each top piece. You can see how the black and beige piece fits with the tropical drinks patch.

Above you can see the macro view of how I will sew the lines of the units together. I will sew from left to right.

I still have to make the rest of the top and that is what I am working on now. Stay tuned!

Puzzling Through the Eye Spy

This week was kind of crazy week work-wise for us. As I result, last night was the first time I got back to the Eye Spy. I spent the time with a bit of sewing, a bit of cutting and lot of puzzling. I am puzzling through the best way to put it together. As you may know, I like to jump right in and start sewing. This gets me into trouble sometimes, but I do enjoy just sewing. Puzzling through problems isn’t so bad as I can’t always visualize the whole process. Of course, if the problems become too problematic then the quilt pieces usually go back into the closet.

I started working on the sewing on that Sunday where I introduced the piece but I didn’t take the edges into account. I am very much into my self bordering technique and would like to use it here. I used it on the Interlocking Triangles quilts and some others. Essentially it means that I don’t like to hack off bits of a border block to end the quilt.


I attempted to work on this yesterday while I was sewing triangles to hexagons. My dilemma, defined, is that I really don’t want to just randomly hack off the edges to make a straight side. Nor do I want to apply a binding to an edge that needs a miter every two inches.

First, I broke the hexagons I have sewed into two groups. Left, the pieces are arranged in a way where the triangles are pointing up. In this orientation, there are no straight edges. The side edges could be okay with a slightly irregular edge made by putting the piece together in chunks using diamonds (see far left).

The top and bottom edges would be a piecing nightmare, however, because I would have to inset triangles somehow. I can imagine that this would be a top that ended up becoming a permanent member of the UFO/ WIP list.

Right, the hexagons are arranged in a way where the triangles are pointed to the left. This is the way that Simply Quilts suggested putting this top together and what the directions on the package of templates suggest. Still, hacking off the edges to make this work makes me cringe. I was considering putting fabrics that were allover prints on the edges so the mutilation wouldn’t be as brutal. I don’t know.

Options:

  1. Hack off the top & bottom or the sides, depending on layout.
  2. Choose to piece the quilt in chunks using diamonds and do inset piecing to make a straight edge along the top and bottom.
  3. Deal with very uneven edge in the binding process.
  4. Add some other shaped pieces to the edge in a uniform color (more red?) to make the edge square.

Left is a detail of the corner of the piece with the section I have sewn together and arranged with the triangles placed pointing left.

I’ll have to troll the web and look at what others have done.

Judy Martin’s QOM

I think I need to make a shrine to my favorite quiltmakers. Judy Martin is one of them.

She, periodically, posts a Quilt of the Moment (QOM) and the one she has now is gorgeous. You must go there right NOW and download the pattern, then come right back! Once the pattern is gone, it is gone forever; she doesn’t repost them or archive them or anything, so time is of the essence. It reminds me of my Spiky Stars quilt (must do something about that crappy picture!). It has that whole ‘the center is not the center’ thing going, which I really like.

I will post a picture here for anyone who makes a quilt from this pattern. Judy is also giving a prize to people who make a quilt with this pattern. Check out her site for specific details.

Sunday Work

The dishes and laundry are waiting and I am having another Manderly kind of day. Not as bad as the other day, but still kind of unfocused. The tab with my blog has been staring at me all morning making me think, as I have been plowing through some work, that I should write something. This was actually a good thing, because it spurred me on to go upstairs, turn on the sewing machine and sew. After sewing some hexagons, I took the Cheerful Baskets off the design wall so I could put the hexagons up. The photo on the left is my production today, though I did start sewing some of the triangles on earlier in the week. The big piece that I showed previously is also in there. I was really amazed at how fast these little hexagons turn into a hexagon with two triangles. Very satisfying. I always liked the Grandmother’s Flower Garden with diamonds in between and it just occurred to me that this is what I am making now in just a slightly different scale.

I don’t work with conversationals very often and now I know why. It is almost as though my eyes have a hard time focusing on so much visual stimulation in one piece of fabric. I don’t think that is what is happening, but that is what it feels like. The pieces that attract me the most are the ones that have a fairly clear and consistent background (one color). I don’t think that the entire piece looks horrible or anything, but it is a different kind of project to work on.

Below and right is my total progress. I put the pieces up so I could see what I had accomplished. I just put the pieces up on the design with very little rearranging. I did take care to place the monster pieces, of which there are several, far from each other. I’ll move the other pieces around as I get to it.

My next task is to figure out the normal size of a quilt. I don’t know if I will go for a full or twin yet. Some of it depends on how many hexagons I have (I haven’t counted, but I know I have a lot). I also don’t want to make the quilt three times the shape of my design wall, which I did with Thoughts on Dots last year, because that is a weird shape.

Following that, I have to cut more triangles. I went through all those that TFQ and Julie sent to me. I did start cutting more already and I have a great deal of respect for my friends, because they are a bit of a challenge to cut.

I found that my larger rotary cutter moved smoothly next to the triangle template. However, it felt too big, so I tried the smaller rotary cutter that TFQ usually uses. It didn’t roll quite as smoothly, so I’ll have to figure something else out.

One good thing about cutting triangles is that I get to look through and select red fabrics to use. I need to find a variety so I don’t use the same combinations over and over. So far I have cut batiks without hauling any bins down. I’ll get to that next.

Tidying Up My Mind

Yesterday was a gossamer or chiffon dress and drifting around Manderley kind of day. I mean that I drifted around the house from thing to project to computer to laundry not really accomplishing much as if I were a lady of leisure with servants to pick up after me.

The house is kind of suffering from my drifting, but I did accomplish a couple of things. First and foremost, I finished the Basket top. It was challenging to sew together. Somehow I couldn’t wrap my mind around a sensible way to put it together. I think the sashing tripped me up a bit. It is together now and nobody will know how much unsewing I did once it is quilted and hung.

It has now been named Cheerful #1: Baskets. TFQ thought up that name and I like it. It also implies that we will make more cheerful quilts together.

I need to make the back, which TFQ suggested be made out of a spring green fabric. I probably don’t have enough of one to make it, but I will collect a few spring greens and make it up. Then I will send it up to her and she will have Angie from the Quilting Loft quilt it. TFQ suggested it and I like the idea. I have a feeling quilt tops are going to pile up around here as my free time expands and we work through our financial issues.

Although I could have gone straight to working on a WIP such as the Spiderweb or the Tarts Come to Tea, I went, instead for a new project. The Eye Spy quilt for which TFQ, Julie and I have worked so hard cutting pieces has been on my mind lately. The offspring is probably too old now to appreciate the Eye Spy game, but I still wanted to put the quilt together, so I started.


My first impression of the piecing: FUN FUN FUN!!! I sewed a triangle on to a hexagon on opposite sides of the hexagon. I wanted to make sure I knew how this thing was going together, so I sewed the airplane to the yellow umbrella drink and it was really easy to put together. I couldn’t stop piecing last night and stayed up way too late. I just hope I have enough of the red triangles. I also have no idea what to do with the edges, but I will worry about that later. Right now Girls Just Want to Have Fun!

I have also been reading Ringle and Kerr’s Quiltmaker’s Color Workshop: The FunQuilts’ Guide to Understanding Color and Choosing Fabrics. I especially got into the text yesterday morning before I got up. I think my mind was in the mood for food, because when I went to the workroom a group of fabrics waiting to be ironed caught my attention. They were fanned out in a certain appealing way and I just had to take note.

I ironed them and cut the pieces I needed. These are the pieces I need for the FOTY 2008 quilt and they are currently on my design wall where I can admire them together. The blues are not completely matchy-matchy. There is something calming and/or restful about the color combination. I think I have good scale variations and may just have to do some project with just these fabrics. I am tempted to sew them together and keep them in a group in the FOTY quilt. We’ll see.

Finishing To Do List:

  1. Sleeve for Nosegay
  2. Back for Making Cheerful Quilts #1: Baskets
  3. Back for Crazy Quilt Test
  4. Handwork, binding and sleeve on Pamela Allen House quilt (no name yet)

So, I think I have tidied up my mind enough to get moving on some other issues – real issues – but I am glad that I was able to clear out these ideas. I would love to hear your thoughts!

PIQF Baskets

One of the good things about going to quilts shows, aside from buying fabrics, is the opportunity to get inspired. Due to the large number of cheerful quilts, I am really inspired and anxious to sew.

TFQ and I started a basket quilt based on a block in a quilt we saw at PIQF 2007. We saw another quilt with the same block at APNQ 2008. When we got to my house after the show, we worked on it again.

Above are the original blocks and the colors/fabrics (left) that we are auditioning for the next groups of blocks. We decided to make 9 more blocks and, thus, needed more of everything. TFQ had a plan, so we had searched out and bought all of the butter yellow fabric at the show. The right butter yellow is not the *it* yellow fabric this year and we had a hard time finding it.

One aside about fabric is that it seems like fabric is only available for a short time. I understand that fabric manufacturers need to sell new fabric all the time. However, I buy fabric on spec and it is usually a few years down the road before I get around to using it (remember the whole drama with that Denyse Schmidt fabric???) and knowing whether I like it. I understand that, like book publishers, they can’t keep all fabrics in print all the time. Still, I think it would be a service to either keep track of fabrics people are missing OR every few years reprint some of the popular fabrics from a line. In fairness, the FOTY project is an effort to use a bit of the fabrics I buy right away, so I can see whether I really like them and buy more in a timely manner. I have to remember to keep that in mind while I am cutting and sewing the FOTY pieces.

This is the whole piece minus some of the setting triangles on my design wall now. I have a whole dissertation on those d*mn setting triangles that I hope to spare you. I am really pleased with how it looks. I stared at it for about 45 minutes this morning and could only find a few minor pieces to move around. I am anxious to get busy and sew it together. Of course, I still need to cut most of the setting triangles.

Above is a detail. The block in the upper left hand corner is one of the new ones that we pieced this year. One of the things TFQ did is pay more attention to which triangles were going together in each block. She gave me little sets of all the pieces already sorted so all I had to do was sew them together. I really enjoy sewing with her as we divide up the tasks and can accomplish a lot more. I am really pleased with how cheerful the whole quilt is looking.

Now to the setting triangles problem. Figuring out the size is the problem. If I were truly organized, the whole quilt would have been laid out and measured and figured out before I started sewing. That is just not how I work. Where is the fun in knowing exactly how things come out? That is not to say that I don’t have any idea in my mind, but I do leave the sashing (yes or no) and layout (on point or straight) decisions until after I have made blocks. I want to see what they need.

OK, you are not going to be spared the dissertation. Sorry! Skip the next paragraph if you can’t deal with my setting triangles drama.

I bought a cool new ruler to easily cut setting triangles. BAH! It is impossible to figure out how it works so we couldn’t use it. TFQ, who is GREAT at figuring out directions, gave it a go. No joy there either. What a waste of money. We resorted to looking through a number of books to try and find the directions. I know now why I don’t do on point sets that often, because the directions in a variety of books are atrocious. The best chart we found was in the Joy of Quilting and it gave no direction for blocks with sashing. I guess people don’t make quilts that are designed for an on point setting and have sashing. We ended up guessing. I haven’t cut all of the setting triangles yet, because I want to sew a couple of blocks together with the sashing to see what size they end up and they fit with the guesstimate of the setting triangles size.

Stay Tuned!

Joy of Quilting Joy of Quilting by Joan Hanson

 

My review

 
rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is a book that I mostly use as reference. One good thing about it is that it has chart of the sizes to cut setting triangles for an on point quilt. This chart only works for blocks with no sashing.

View all my reviews.

Chocolate Box Again

The Chocolate Box is truly finished now. Except for the quilting, binding and sleeve. 😉

I like the the way it came out, but I wish I had made more of an effort to keep some of the non-chocolate edges larger. Live and learn.

After finishing the back for the Purple Bullseye, I realized that I needed a bit more of an edge to accommodate the jagged edge (photo above, bottom right). Since I was in back making mode anyway, it seemed like a good time.


You can’t see the bit I added, because the back is really large and I really couldn’t get it all in. Now Colleen will be able to get it on the quilting machine with no problem.

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.

Next up in the Tote Bag Department

As you may recall, I made this lining for the Cupcake Tote, but ended up not using it.

After finishing the Eggplant/Lemon tote and embellishing the Chocolate Flower Tote, I, once again, turned my attention to this troublesome lining. It wasn’t intentionally troublesome, but the colors turned out to be a problem.

I looked through my fabric, not really sure what to pick. I pulled out these dots from the Timeless Treasures Basix collection. I love these dots, though I love the ones with the white backgrounds more. I thought I would use them, but when I looked at the three pieces together, I decided that making visually decisions visually was a good idea. The colors in the cake fabric didn’t go with the dots. No purple or pink in the dots and no turquoise or orange in the cake fabric. Too bad, because I have a lot of black dot fabrics that I haven’t used at all. The outside fabrics had to go with the lining, though.

After looking carefully at the focus fabric and looking through my black and white fabrics, I found this red batik and this violet dot.

This is the grouping that I picked. I wanted the fabrics to all go together without being too matchy-matchy. I also wanted to use some dots. The violet dot is very thin and I don’t like it forpiecing. I don’t have much of that red batik, but think it will be nice as an accent. I completely ignored the aqua pockets that I already sewed to the inside of the lining. Nobody will see them much except the owner.

Stay tuned.

Out of the Mouths of Babes

Here is the latest update to the Flowering Snowball (Cross Blocks).

As I have mentioned, I am nearing the end of the project. I am not sure what the end actually is, but am thinking that it is 10 more of the middle blocks and then a round of border blocks. I haven’t designed the border blocks, but will design them to complete the colored areas with the rest being white. I was also thinking of a black border. I need to play around with what I am thinking because it is much easier to show a photo/image than explain.
Here is a detail.

The Child came in and joined me while I was looking at the blocks. He said that it looks too chaotic and I need to put some solids in it. HUH???

I do think he is right. I don’t know if I will use tone-on-tones or something like low contrast batiks, but I think I need to add some resting spots for the viewers eyes. I will try it out and see what I come up with.