Tag: Project-Quilt

Posts about the piecing, applique’ of quilts. Don’t use for completed quilts or non-quilt projects.

The O9P Hump

Math is a problem.

Well, math is a problem for me. I try to avoid it where possible, but as a quiltmaker, I clearly can’t avoid it all the time. I do have strategies. If my blocks are on the design wall, I can count them and don’t have to do actual math. I live with brilliant math geniuses to whom i explain my math problem and they figure it out. Usually, they say, “oh you just have to factor this number into….” then I am back sitting in 7th grade math class the horror that I could not understand the teacher dawning afresh. As a purely self preservation tactic, I start drifting off into color and visuals land while they sound like the teacher on Charlie Brown cartoon (WAH WAH WAH) in the background. I drift back when they give me the answer and everyone is happy. Well, at least I am happy. I don’t think the boys really care or not. They know they will have to explain the same concept to me again at some future date.

O9P Not on the Design Wall
O9P Not on the Design Wall

The problem really comes in when my blocks are not on the design wall and I can’t get a sense of where I need to go. I believe the last time I worked on this was sometime around the end of April. I think I got it off the design wall so I could work on Field Day Zipper and the Food Quilt #2. I don’t really remember.

It is pretty easy to just sew 9 patch, except for the hump. I need more foreground/colored squares. The problem is I don’t know how many I should cut so that I can finish the 9 patches I need and not have too many leftover. This means math and I have been avoiding it. Or I could just cut a strip off each piece of yardage and not worry about the leftovers. Isn’t as though there is a shortage of fabric in my house.

Lots of humps in my life at the moment.

This would be a great project to move forward on as I stitch the FOTY 2014 pairs together, so perhaps I should do some math?

Improv Progress

I am still feeling like I am in some weird in between place with my projects. There are projects where I am at a strange point that seems to be stopping me. I have to count up all of the FOTY squares and figure out how big I need to make the quilt. I need to cut some more squares for the Octagon Nine Patch, which has been languishing for, what feels like, a long time.

Improv Top in Progress
Improv Top in Progress

I decided to work on the Improv quilt again and get that project farther along.I finished a second ‘B’ and decided to sew it, along with the first ‘B’ block on to the quilt. I like what is happening and I can see where I go next, to a certain extent, but I think those 2 blocks look heavy. I might put them on the bottom, but I will see if I can lighten them up with more red on the three sides.

One idea I had from looking at the photo above is to make sure some red meets the red on the bottom and continues over almost to the corner. That will mean making that part of that corner side block last and making sure I remember. I think if I do that, there will have to be a bit of one of the black and white prints in the corner – or a strip of red alternated with black and white prints.

Improve top - turned
Improve top – turned

I also thought of making those blocks the bottom. Heaviness works on the bottom. The photo (left) is the same one as above, just turned so you don’t have to turn your head.

It looks ok, but I remembered that there will be other blocks on each side of those new ‘B’ blocks.

Yes, all the blocks are sewn together. I just wanted them sewn.

Improv Progress

Improv A Blocks
Improv A Blocks

After using some Flying Geese as leaders and enders, I switched to using the large Improv blocks as leaders and enders while putting together the T Donation quilt. The Improv quilt is not a good project for leaders and enders as I really should have it on the design wall and be looking at it all the time as I worked. I really wanted to make progress. This project has been shuffled from corner to corner of my workroom and I am forgetting my plan. My design walls were full of other projects, so it was what it was.

I added a few more strips to make the center (A) blocks more even then sewed the four center blocks together. This breaks my ‘Chunking It” rule, but I just wanted to see the four blocks together. Somehow with them together, I was able to start on the B blocks.

Improv B Block #1
Improv B Block #1

They look pretty good and I got excited about working the B blocks. I had bits and pieces that I made in class that I hoped to use, though I wasn’t sure what I was thinking when I made them, so I kept going. The first one went together relatively quickly and that helped me move forward with the others. I am working on about 4 at once right now and expect to have a big group of them done at once. We will see.

Field Day Zipper Top Near…

Field Day Top Sans Borders
Field Day Top Sans Borders

I finally almost finished the Field Day Zipper top. I thought this would be the end, but I decided after looking at what I have that I wanted to add a top and bottom border. Or borders, perhaps? Making visual decisions visually

It feels like the piecing  took forever. It didn’t really take forever, because the last post, which was probably the last time I worked on it, was just June 15.

I talked about the colors and how I was afraid they would be a struggle to work with. They were a struggle. This project turned into a struggle on a number of levels. As I suspected, the colors are a little more muted than colors with which I really enjoy working. Also, the pattern, which I LOVE was just a struggle to put together. You’d think that putting a bunch of squares and rectangles together would be easy. Normally, it is, but I think I must have cut some of the pieces off grain, because the entire top was a PITA to put together. It was rippling and I have been fighting the entire time to get it to bend to my will.

Also, something about the measurements was off. Perhaps I cut something wrong or who knows? The rows did not exactly line up. I am ok with it, but still annoyed.

You’ll probably see another post about this next week once I finish the whole thing.

Food Quilt #2 Back

Food Quilt #2 Back
Food Quilt #2 Back

The next project I worked on over the weekend was the back for the Food Quilt #2. I am pleased to say that I also finished it. Once I got the applique’ done, it really was just a matter of finding large pieces of fabric and pushing them through the sewing machine. It is a hassle, but I use up fabric I already have, some of which is languishing and it has to be done. Boys don’t like flimsies.

Like the Box Full of Letters quilt project, I also did the binding and got this piece all ready to take to the quilter. I want to finish one more project before I head over there.

I also want to show this quilt and back to the family of the recipient and we are having dinner with them next weekend, so I am thinking of doing it then. I am a little scared to show the YM’s friend in case he says “Meh”. I know his mom will like it, so I may just go for it.

Food Quilt #2 Top - June 2015
Food Quilt #2 Top – June 2015

Box Full of Letters Back

I finally feel like I made some real progress over the weekend. I finished 2 backs, 2 bindings and almost finished a top. I spent some time on Friday sewing, which I don’t normally do and that helped a lot.

Box Full of Letters Back
Box Full of Letters Back

The first item I finished was the Box Full of Letters back. I pecked away at it for about a week, which made it seem like it took forever. That was a frustrating feeling, because the piece is not very big. I finally finished it on Friday and that was a good feeling!

I always try to use large pieces, but somehow I end up with some fiddly piecing. I resolve not to do it again, but there it is.

I also sewed around the edge of the top to stabilize it as there will be no border and made the binding. The whole package is ready to go to the quilter. Hooray!

Box Full of Letters Top - Finished
Box Full of Letters Top – Finished

Throwback Thursday: Hen and Chicks (#TBT)

I made this quilt in 1999 and just realized that I never posted a picture of it. I actually have pictures and needed content so here we are.

Kieran's Hen & Chicks - Front
Kieran’s Hen & Chicks – Front

As you know, I don’t normally make baby quilts for people, so this is one of the few I have made. I made it for one of my nephews when he was born. I am pretty close to his mother and father, so I must have been inspired.

There are a couple of other notable things about this quilt. It is one of the few that I finished in 1999.

I also had a ~2 year old at the time, so getting this quilt together was a major achievement.

Other than those few things, I have no memory of making this quilt. I feel sad about that, actually. I don’t even remember if I quilted it! I do think it came out pretty well and it is bright and cheerful.

Kieran's Hen & Chicks - Back
Kieran’s Hen & Chicks – Back

As you can see, the back has the same font as the Food Quilt #2. This means that I must have had that pattern since at least 1999. The stripe of fabric on the right is Marimekko fabric.

I haven’t seen Jenny posting in a while, but I am linking up anyway.

Quiltin Jenny

BFOL Top Layout

Layout - First Pass
Layout – First Pass

I finally had a large chunk of time to make some good progress on a few projects over the weekend. Yay!

I made really good progress on the Box Full of Letters top. I think I will have a top soon.

As I said before the straight layout of blocks was too boring and it felt too confined or compressed to me. I suppose the ‘modern’ movement is affecting me, because I wanted these little envelopes to breathe a bit as well. I hadn’t any idea what I was going to do with them until I started to put them up on the wall. I had seen a quilt where the blocks were arranged on the diagonal kind of like a rocket taking off.

Yes, I arranged the colors and fabrics as I went along, but not too much.

BFOL - almost done
BFOL – almost done

After I got all the blocks up on the wall in the arrangement above, I looked at them for awhile, moving a few around and trying to imagine the final effect. I decided to go for it and began sewing. I sewed for probably 10 hours on Saturday, which is what happens when I am sew-deprived and finally get some time. I thought I would finish the top on Sunday, but I didn’t quite. I only have a few seams left.

I am more pleased with this piece than I had been. After quilting, I think I will just put a binding on it and leave it without borders.

A Few More Stepping Stones

SS Block June 2015
SS Block June 2015

I thought it had been an eternity since I wrote about this project, but it turns out it has only been about 10 days. June has flown by at mach 10 so I can’t really keep track. Since that last post, I have made at least one more  block.

I am liking the blocks better, especially since I am able to see them all on the design wall together. They look ok separately, but the secondary design really explodes into wonderfulness when I put them all together.

I have about 7 blocks now and the urgency of laying them on the bed to see how many more blocks I need to make is becoming more urgent. Why I can’t grab the blocks and walk downstairs with them is a mystery.

6 Blocks Together
6 Blocks Together

The group of 6 blocks together looks really nice. (6 makes for a more even picture than 7.) I am glad I was strict with myself on the colors, because I think it is looking good. There is a rogue red patch, which I don’t understand, but I probably will just leave it.

As usual, despite the wide variety of fabrics, I still feel like I don’t have enough to make the piece look scrappy enough. I probably need to get over myself.

 

Attack of the ‘Progresses’

Field Day Top in process - June 2015
Field Day Top in process – June 2015

While I haven’t spent a lot of time at the machine, I seem to have made quite a large amount of progress. I would say that the Field Day top is almost done. I screamed through some piecing last Sunday (not the Sunday that just passed) and was shocked to see how much I had gotten done.

I have a couple of things to decide about this top:

  1. Do I sew top and bottom borders of the Sangria on this piece?
  2. Should I get some of the Goldenrod and put a thin border around the outside and then another border of Sangria?

The other problem is the last row. It was doubled up on top of row 7 and I don’t know if was intended to be row 8 or half of row 7? If it was to be half of row 7, then I added more coins where now it is much, much too long for a row. I may cut it in half to make row 7 long enough or add more to it and make the quilt wider.

If I make the piece wider, it is going to be a weird shape and I don’t know if I want to inflict that on someone.

Hey! Remember Me?

I haven’t posted about this Stepping Stones project since February, mostly because I haven’t really worked on it until recently. And ‘worked’ is a generous description of my efforts. I have been pushing red and turquoise through the machine as leaders and enders in between Field Day and the Food quilt.

Voila!

Stepping Stones June 2015
Stepping Stones June 2015

More blocks.

Progress. And so it goes.

I plan to be a little more precise as I make the blocks so I don’t end up with a weird shaped quilt. Sometime I’ll drag the already completed blocks downstairs and lay them out on the bed so see where I am. I haven’t done that yet, though. 8 blocks does not a quilt make, but they are large blocks and we have a small bed, so I don’t imagine I will have very many more center blocks to make.

I made these two top blocks as leaders and enders when I was working on the borders of the Food Quilt #2. The bottom one is, as you can clearly see, still in progress. I do take my time picking out the fabrics to include.

Improv Again

I don’t remember exactly when it was, last Friday, I think, but I had a brief window of time before I had to go do something else for someone. The grief at the implications of my BIL’s loss were starting to creep into my brain in the quiet and threatening to overwhelm me.

4 'A' Blocks
4 ‘A’ Blocks

I turned to the Improv pieces I had worked on at the workshop. They were sewn together as you see (left photo), but I wasn’t happy with them, so I unstitched them and began to rework them.

Tina’s idea (from Little Blue Cottage) is that there should be a lot of negative space in the center. Because I like the interplay of the strong pattern, I wanted the blacks and whites to act as the negative space and the red to act as the foreground.

This isn’t a terrible idea, but it wasn’t working with this layout. I looked at it a lot, trying to like it – or at least be okay with the center. The reality was that I didn’t like it. I wasn’t achieving anything near what I was imagining, thus the ripping.

Big, fat Improv
Big, fat Improv

The ripping really didn’t take long, but it did allow my mind time to wander, which is not what I wanted. After ripping, I began adding more neutrals to the ‘legs’. The photo (right) is what the pieces look like right now. I have not sewn the four blocks together yet. I haven’t decided if I am done with the ‘A’ blocks yet.

I think I will definitely add some more red to the outside. I also think that a few more neutrals is in order. It needs to sit a bit.

Windowframe layout
Windowframe layout

I wandered around it for awhile and then began to wonder whether I should reverse the blocks and arrange them the way Tina intended the pattern to be arranged. I think the neutral part of the blocks look too skinny again when arranged with the red in the middle. It isn’t terrible, though.

I think the ultimate path is to make some of the ‘B’ blocks and see what happens once I have more to look at.

 

Food Quilt #2 Top

I had the class and so much stuff to catch up on over the weekend that I didn’t have a lot of time to sew. I decided that I wanted to make progress on something. Not just a few blocks, but some real progress.

Food Quilt.

I knew I could make progress on it because I was pretty close to having the top done after the retreat.

Food Quilt #2 Top - June 2015
Food Quilt #2 Top – June 2015

I got on it and the top is together with borders, though it took me a few hours on Monday to get the whole top done, but next stop: Food Quilt back.

The holdup at the retreat was that I forgot black to use for borders. I had plenty of black at home, so I waited until this week to do it.

After putting on the black inner border and the piano key food border, I decided I wanted a black border on the outside to contain all that food. I am pleased with the way it came out.

Food Quilt Holders
Food Quilt Holders

I caught a quick glimpse of the boys as they prepared to be quilt holders for me. This is what it looks like when they are acting as my quilt holders. I have learned just to wait for them to play around. It is fun to watch. I mean, you have to have fun in normal life, right?

You might remember that  made a Food Quilt for the Young Man. This is a graduation gift for the Young Man’s friend. I kind of like the idea of them having similar quilts. It is like there will be a connection through these quilts. Sentimental, I know. It won’t be finished for his graduation, but I can send it to him at college and he can see the top.

Going for Broke with Peacocks

Enchanted Plume panel by Timeless Treasures
Enchanted Plume panel by Timeless Treasures

I decided to make the peacock One Block Wonder project. I was really on the fence, as you may have gathered from my previous posts, about making it. I talked about some of my concerns in the last post and had decided not to make it. Things change.

There were a couple of things that made me decide to do it. 1) I was able to find the Timeless Treasure panel on a website. 2) I saw Maureen’s blocks and 3) I really like the colors in this panel.

I was easily able to buy the panel from Miller’s Dry Goods, which I found unexpectedly after doing a simple Google search. The line is fairly new so I wasn’t expecting that it would be available yet. I am still interested in the group of solids shown with the panel, but they are not as important. I think they might make a good addition to the quilt, but I don’t know what the final quilt will look like, which means I don’t know how they would fit in so we’ll have to see.

Maureen read one of my previous posts and brought her One Block Wonder blocks, as well as a piece of the original fabric to show me at the retreat. I didn’t even know she had worked on a One Block Wonder and was very pleased to see what she had done. Pam’s class using a panel seems very different from using fabric, but there are quite a few similarities as well. I was pleased to see how different Maureen’s blocks looked from each other and she confirmed that it is fairly easy to avoid ending up with the same blocks, which adds to the variety of the quilt. We encouraged her to work on her OBW quilt, but she worked on other projects. I would love to see what she does with those blocks.

I do like the colors of the panel. There is no cream, as there was in the other yardage I considered, which is a bonus. I am annoyed at cream backgrounds lately. They look dirty to me.

Maureen assured me, as did looking at her blocks, that the black would not overwhelm the piece. There is plenty of blue, especially turquoise (!!!), in the panel as well.

This is a limited collection for Timeless Treasures and I only bought the panel. If it doesn’t work out, the effort will make a great donation quilt.

O9P Retreat Progress

9 Patch O9P blocks
9 Patch O9P blocks

Another thing I did a the retreat was work on the nine patch blocks for the O9P quilt.

Before I got to the Box Full of Letters blocks, I worked on these. I wanted to finish all of the parts and then cut more when I got home – I need about 55 more 9 patches to fill in the rest of the O9P quilt. As I finished the squares, I realized that they were getting to look too much alike and I decided to switch to the Box Full of Letters blocks.

Good decision as I got two sets of blocks done and major dents in both projects.

No, it isn’t about getting things done and finished, but it is about making progress and both of these projects felt stalled before I left. Now I feel like I am back on the road.