Tag: Piecing

Moving Right Along

I have been trying all week to get a few free moments to show you some pictures. I am off on a trip tomorrow and don’t know if I will get to posting until the first weekend in March, which is why I want to post!
These are the retail therapy fabrics that I bought. I have already washed and ironed them do I could use them in the 2008 Fabric of the Year quilt (see below). I was pretty disappointed in the quality of the fabric in the whole top row except for the multicolored dots on the light background (right). The green and yellow fabric with the white dots are really, really thin. You can see through them and I am sure the seams will show through if I press towards.

I found the other two by searching for violet on the site that shall remain nameless. It turns out that the fabrics are very, very dark. Not violet at all. At least not my definition of violet. [I could go into a whole dissertation on taxonomies here, but I’ll spare you. I’d like to keep a few readers.] That wasn’t the main problem with these fabrics. When I tried to press them from the front, the iron kept getting caught on the fabric. I don’t know if ‘caught’ is the right term, but I couldn’t smoothly move the iron over the front of the fabric. I had to turn the fabric over to press it.

The color is printed on the front and something about the ink makes it not smooth. I love shopping online, because I don’t have to leave my house, but this is a good example of one of the pitfalls: I can’t feel and look at the fabric before I buy it. I could return the fabric, but I have already washed and cut into it. When it is cut into smaller pieces, I am sure it will be no problem.

Here are the two newest members of the Pineapple family. They are both a perfect… 14″. Sigh. They are supposed to be 12.5″. I made these so carefully, I don’t think it is possible to have been anymore precise. I measured each strip to ensure it was 1.75″. I also made sure the blocks were square as I sewed each row on.

I am bringing all the blocks with me this weekend and will work on them when I have time. I also spoke with TFQ about them and some possibilities are:

  • the new iron
  • the service on my sewing machine last fall.

I decided that I would finish this quilt even if it meant making all the blocks over. Blocks never go to waste, so I could make a lot of pillows!
Here are the new fabrics that I cut for this week.

Here they are all sewn together and integrated into the blocks I made last week.

PPP is Over

The Pineapple Pity Party is over. It was good for me to write that post yesterday, because it was like a kick in the pants. As I was finishing the post, I started to think that it wouldn’t be that big of a deal to see what I was facing and possibly make a few more blocks. So, I went upstairs (the DSL still isn’t working up there, so I am racing up and down the stairs all day) and laid out all the blocks on the floor. This exercise coincided with some furniture moving, so it wasn’t an ideal situation.
The piece isn’t as big as I thought it was going to be. Certainly, it covers the floor, but that is it. I wasn’t able to get a picture of the whole thing, which means you can’t get the whole effect, but I think you can get the idea.

I looked at all the blocks and compared them to their neighbors and came up with a catalog of problems.

Top right block too big – way too big.

Top block way too big.

Too big again.

I have a plan of action, however, and I am happy about that.

  1. Make two new blocks: one center and one border and see how they compare to others.
  2. Try to figure out what exactly the problem is.
  3. Compare blocks to each other and sew as many together as possible.
  4. Remake blocks as necessary.
  5. Make pillows out of unusable blocks 😉

Pineapple Sew Test

As promised, here are the two blocks that I sewed together. This is all I have done in terms of sewing and they don’t match up very well, but they also look GOOD! I think this means that they don’t look horrible! Hooray.

Can’t stay away from dots. I saw this outfit and bought it for a friend who is having a baby after many years of trying.
This is a birthday card to me from Pamelala! She sends me a digital art piece like this every year. Perhaps I should make them into a deck. 😉

Finished is Relative

Here are the last four blocks for the Pineapple. It took some time to get these done. I started out normally, but when I got to the last few rounds, I paid special attention to the fabrics I was choosing, so they would be perfect. Perfect is, of course, relative, because of the fabrics they will be placed near, but I just wanted to put some of the dots that I really liked in the last blocks.

I counted several times to make sure that these were the last four blocks and that I had counted correctly initially to make sure I had calculated the number I needed properly, but I fully expect that will have to make more.

As I said, Finished is Relative. Now I am on to adding corners to the blocks. I need to do that so there aren’t big holes in the quilt. I suppose that would be a look, though.

I started out with 2″ squares and cut them in half. They work on some corners, but are too small for others. I want enough extra so I can trim the corners, if I need to do so. I will try 2.5″ or 3″ squares next. I cut a bunch and don’t think I will be able to use these.

Pineapples Return

I did not make a Halloween costume this weekend as promised, but did work on the Pineapples.
I tried to get back into the Pineapple groove by taking the baskets down. I had two Pineapples half finished from before the machine went to be serviced. I started by finishing those and make two new ones. Above are two that I completed and two that I started AND completed. YAY! I only have 4 more Pineapples to go!


Border Pineapples 11 & 12.
Border Pineapples 13 & 14.

I cut strips from some of the new fabrics I bought at PIQF and from fabrics that I washed and the Fabric Queen pressed for me. That freshened up the project and livened things up a bit in the fabric department.

Having a break and doing some different piecing was great, but there is no way that I am stopping this project and putting it away. I really had to get back into the groove and remember my little tricks and tips. The first two I was trying to finish felt like a comedy of errors. I kept cutting the strips too short and putting pieces on the wrong side, etc. I got it all worked out, but jeesh! I can’t imagine what would happen if I put the whole project away for a year or two like some of my other projects.

I ran into the Pineapple teacher at PIQF and was glad I did so. I thought I had to trim the blocks to make them fit together, but she said only to trim the corners, which I have not yet applied to any of the blocks. She said to use the bias to get the blocks to fit together. There is a bit of bias on the edge of each block that I can stretch, if I need to.

I would have done more (and started the Halloween costume), but it turned out that we had a family event to attend today. I thought it was next weekend, so it really cut into my sewing time.

So, I am screwed for the Halloween costume and will have to work on it during the week, but it will get done.

Making Lemonade

When you have lemons, make lemonade.
As you know, the machine is gone and I can’t work on the Pineapples (Well, I suppose I could, but I want to be sure all of the problems are consistent by using the same machine). I have a Janome Jem, which I have only used a handful of times, so I have formulated a list of other things I can work on while giving the Jem a little workout. Here it is:

  • 6 baby blankets: three friends/colleagues are having babies-2 each
  • Binding for Sharon’s quilt.
  • Binding for Serendipity Puzzle.
  • Gift bags: I have lots of fabric for bags, and Christmas is coming.
  • Cut out fabric for test blocks. I am going to start looking at new machines soon and I want to have some piecing in my own fabrics, which I can use to test the machines.
  • Wash and press new fabric.
  • Replenish Pineapple strips.

I also have a lot of hand work, which I can now work on since the thimble came back from vacation:

  • Pamela’s self portrait from June 2006
  • Pamela’s garden from June 2006
  • Pamela’s house and garden from May 2007
  • Kissy Fish

So now I am going to get off my duff (computer) and start some of these projects.

One good thing about the machine being gone is that I could get a good picture of the Pineapple blocks.

More Weekend Work

Making strange mixed media works all weekend didn’t feel comfortable to me, so I sewed on Pineapples while the paint and various layers dried. I completed three more side border blocks. I wanted to make three more on Monday, and think I could have done it, but I had to work on the house a bit, so I did that: 2 days fun-work; 1 day: work-work.

More new fabrics. The two on the top left are replacements, but the others are new. Enjoy.

Creative Journals

I have been feeling, for a long time, how I would like to work on a visual journal – painting, sketching, colored pencils…something. I am an inveterate journal keeper. I have been keeping a journal since about 1980. Perhaps earlier. I have scads of them everywhere. I used to put snippets of things in them and they would get quite fat and I would have to keep it in a big ziploc bag in order to ensure that the bits and pieces wouldn’t fall out. An old boyfriend spent the day reading my journals once and that was the end of him. Jerk. My journals are for my mental health and NOT for sharing. They are not nice, not always pretty, but they are a fantastic exercise.

Anyway, enough boring background.

Lately I have been writing bits and notes in my journal about Thr3fold journal in order to remind myself what I want to write in the review. Putting the notes in my journal keeps all the parts together. Today, I was reading an article in Cloth Paper Scissors. Jane Lafazio, Keeping Creative Sketchbooks, pg.24-27, March/April 2007 issue, writes a little lesson on drawing and the whole article is illustrated with pages from her notebooks. The images are fresh, alive, colorful drawings. They make me want to get closer, to know more. She also writes “The journaling makes my sketchbook more than a series of paintings; it becomes my illustrated personal story.” What a lovely thought. I love the thought of something being my personal story.

Darling Boy made a deal with me to draw every day. This is his picture. Of course it is about war, but I love the little alien in the upper right hand corner. I am tempted to enlarge it and paint it. Something about it appeals to me, perhaps the googly eyes.

Tonya showed a picture of one of her visual sketchbooks, so I have been reinspired all day to figure out how to do this.

And finally, I finished another Cross Block (Flowering Snowball). Two in one week! I am thrilled!

How do you like the fabric with the faces?

Thinking Pink


Today, I was directed to the Connecticut Piecemaker’s site, which showed this quilt, a raffle quilt for their 2008 show. You all know that I am a sucker for samplers and this one is a particularly fine example. I really like the variety of blocks and the fine use of red. The reds are very similar and I wish I could see the individual blocks closer to see if they are the same red, but such is life.

At the Fair last weekend, I was thinking about pink fabrics. The Sampler above brought the thoughts back to my mind. I have over the past year or so had a bug in my ear about pink fabrics, so I have been buying them up – not like crazy, but selectively, just in glorious quantities. Now I have quite a lot of them, so naturally my thoughts turn to what I will do with them. This quilt got me thinking about a pink and white sampler:


It looked better in person, but you get the idea. I am not thrilled about the contrast of a couple of the pinks, but all I need is a spark of an idea and I go off in my own direction anyway.


This quilt has the look of the red quilt above in terms of a consistent value. All the fabrics are the same, so, of course, it would have consistent values. If I go forward with this idea, I would like to achieve this look, but with a variety of different fabrics. I’ll have to work hard at it.

43/47

In order to complete a Pineapple block, including the corners, I need 47 fabrics. In an ideal world they would all be different. Without the corners, which, in this project, I have not yet applied, I need only 43 fabrics. As a result, the Pineapple side blocks are really causing me fits. I need so many more background fabrics than I did with the center blocks. I just don’t feel like I have enough.

In reality, I may actually have enough. Currently I have 32 background fabrics in active use. This means I should only have to use some of them twice. But someway, it is not working out out for me.

Contributing to this problem are the marginal fabrics. Of those 32 active background fabrics, 5 are what I would call marginal. If I had more background fabrics, I wouldn’t use them. The marginal fabrics are defined in my head as having too much color or too much concentrated or prominent color. They stand out much more in these background blocks that are merely supposed to frame the piece.

Also contributing to the problem was the arrangement of the strips. I had arranged them so duplicate strips were dispersed throughout the pile. This wasn’t working, because I would come across a fabric that I had just used. I could certainly skip it, but I felt like I was skipping too many fabrics. I rearranged them today so all like fabrics are together. Hopefully, this arrangement will work better.

I keep looking for more background fabrics, but I have found that I need to shop for these in person or I end up with fabrics that I already have. I am tempted by three or four on eQuilter today, such as Lots-A-Dots’ collection from Santee Print Works, but because I am looking for more subtle differences than online shopping can generally show, I am reluctant to click the buy button. I don’t know when these came out so I will have to see. I put them on my wish list, so I don’t have to go hunting for them again.

Despite the trials and tribulations of backgrounds, I managed to make the last two corner blocks today.
Hooray for me! This leaves me 14 straight side blocks to sew. I doubt I will get the block sewing done by the end of the year, but I want to try. I was desperate to start the Chocolate box quilt this weekend. I just wanted something fresh to work on. Instead I got Thoughts on Dots back from the fair and put it on my bed. That seems to have assuaged my need for something new and fresh for the moment.

Other Asides~~

I was looking at Artquiltmaker.com yesterday and thinking about updating it with Thoughts on Dots as a finished project when I realized how bad some of the photos are. I think I will give my mom an armload of quilts to take to the photographer next time I see her. If I don’t see her before the 7th, then I will take them myself. I don’t want crappy photos on my website and don’t have the equipment to take good photos of my larger projects. Thoughts on Dots will be in that batch as well.

Serendipity Puzzle came back from the quilter and it is fantastic!
Here is the whole thing. You can’t see much of the quilting, but this is a reminder of what the quilt looks like.

Here is a detail (sorry for the blur) of the corner and the border. Notice the slight spiral in the white corner flower (just inside the blue border).

Not sure how it shows up for you, but I like the way she did the quilting so the Dutchman’s Puzzle blocks still show up.

Detail of back. Notice how she used at least a couple of different thread colors.

Now I have a second quilt to bind.

Hanging on By My Fingernails


As you can see, messy crafting runs in the family. I went to a scrapbook night with my sister Friday night. This is her work area. She does gorgeous pages! I created about 10 pages and they were all very basic. My theory is get those photos on pages and be done. When my photos are all up to date, I will take more time for each page. I am still set on the goal rather than really enjoying the process. I’ll get there yet. Sis takes her time with each page and really makes them wonderfully.

Time has been even shorter lately than before. Yesterday, we had a long car drive, so I brought my hand piecing and was able to finish another Cross Block (Flowering Snowball). I thought I would able to do more, but I have to face reality. It takes me about 1.5 hours to make each block.

I can’t help but lay all of the blocks out each time I make a new block. Then I play around with them for a bit. I move them around so that no colors are too close to each other. I also try to make sure the backgrounds are duplicated too close to each other.

This time, I realized that having more choices for foregrounds and backgrounds makes me make better choices. I have been trying not to duplicate colors or fabrics in one block.

Pineapples and Housecleaning

I finished two side border blocks today. I had started them last week or the week before and finally took the time to finish them. I found, as I was working on them, that I really needed more background fabric. I was coming across too many duplicates in these blocks. I had used up a lot of the previously cut strips and needed to replenish my supply. Interspersed with sewing, I cut about 10 new fabrics for the background and began to use them for these blocks. I found that some of the dots I had not used at all. In looking at the pictures above, I wonder if the corners really look like background fabrics?

The above gives you an idea of how a corner of the quilt will look when the quilt is finally put together. You can see the corner block on the left bottom and right bottom. You can see the side blocks on the left top and the middle bottom. The top middle block is one of the center blocks.

I made one or two more Cross Blocks (Flowering Snowball) and laid out all the blocks I have made thus far. I like the way the blocks are coming together. I am surprised and pleased each time I lay them out with the interplay between the fabrics. Laume was right in her comment to the More Quick Bytes post in advising me not to sew the Flowering Snowball blocks together as I went along when she said “Unsolicited advice – I’d hold off on sewing the snowball blocks together until you have them all made. You may find that as you make them you go through stages where you like and use one color more than another, or you run out of one or more background scrap fabrics and add in some new ones. You’ll want those changes to be dispersed evenly within the body of the quilt instead of showing up in little clumps. I assume. And one more thing – they look LOVELY!”. The more often I look at these blocks the more I like them.

A visitor has made me feel like I need to get busy and get rid of some of the junk laying around the house, or at least get it organized. Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of time, so it will have to be a little at a time. I did starting thinking about some of the organizational containers that are currently available. We’ll see what I get.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I always get a great sense of accomplishment out of tidying and organizing (librarian gene, I guess). I just don’t want to spend all of my limited and precious spare time on it.

To that end, in a previous post, I showed some fabrics that Deirdre sent. I really had no time during the past week to even think about fabric and quiltmaking. In order to get back into the fabric groove, I spent some time pressing and cutting them up for background pieces for the Cross Blocks. It was a good, meditative way to get back into the groove of sewing. I still have some more pieces to cut up. This task was also a way of cleaning up my workspace.

I have been using the red mosaic quilting piece as a thread catcher. I needed to get one of the pieces under control, because it was getting unwieldy. If you review the previous post (see link above), you can see how long and skinny the piece was. In its current state, it is still small (~10″x10″??), but really looks usable now. I want to make it bigger, so I am still working on it. Working on it like this is a little more difficult, because the small pieces don’t get added to the square very easily. I am currently working with some small pieces and making them big enough to add on to the piece shown above.

I am planning on adding the second piece, which is an even odder shape to the square above.


Confidential to TFQ: here is the purple I thought would work for your sashing. Unfortunately, taking a photo of it doesn’t do it justice. The above pictures shows too much blue, so I will send you the sample.

I know many of you have commented on recent posts and I have not had a chance to respond, but rest assured that you are on my mind and I will get to it. Thanks for reading!

Contemplating the Completion of the Pineapple

I am not done with the Pineapple blocks yet, but I am within sight of the end. At this point, I find myself contemplating the finishing of the quilt:

  • How will I put it together?
  • How will I quilt it?
  • What color binding?
  • Will I enter it somewhere?

And inevitably, my mind strays to the borders:

  • Should I have a border? Plain or pieced?

My original idea was to put the 20 blocks together and a striped binding and move on to the other ideas flittering around in my mind. If I did that the quilt would look something like:

I can’t help asking myself what the quilt would look like if I used my self bordering technique. The Pineapple blocks would all be complete, for one. There would be no stray, hanging centers. I used EQ6 to test out what it would look like:

I like it. It looks really good. It looks finished. It looks framed.

It means much more cutting and piecing. It means 20 more blocks (double what I will have when I complete blocks 17-20). But it looks finished. I will have to think about it… hard. Now that it is has entered my mind, I don’t know how I will not be able to run with this idea.

I am sure you realize, also, that this quilt, if I had 20 more blocks, will be another monster close to 70″x 90″. The piecing so far has taken me about 5 months, so I can look forward to another 5 months of piecing – not an altogether unpleasant thought, but somewhat daunting however you look at it.

So, dear readers, your opinions are most welcome.