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
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!
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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:
Do I sew top and bottom borders of the Sangria on this piece?
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
I worked on the Box Full of Letters blocks at the Retreat. I made 21 blocks as leaders and enders. The photo (left) shows a selection of the blocks I made.
I love the leaders and enders technique. I couldn’t believe how much I accomplished using leaders and enders.
I still don’t know what I am going to do with these blocks, but I am thrilled that I have an actual group of blocks with which to work.
Another part of the wackiness of the weekend was adding to my nine patch stash for the Octagon Nine Patch. I made some progress on adding to my nine patch pile.
when I stand next to the piece, I feel like I am making progress, but when I look at it in a photo I post here, I think I will never be finished. I guess that is why I take photos, then I can compare. For example, this photo with the last one.
Octagon Nine Patch – detail – April 2015
One part of my attitude is that people comment on how small the blocks are. Yes they are on the smallish side, but are by no means miniatures.
I think I need to sew some parts together pretty soon. That will make the piece much smaller, of course, but will also enhance the feeling of accomplishment.
I have been preparing for the CQFA Retreat. I have been putting projects, supplies and parts into project bags in preparation to grab and go.
I was all over the place sewing over the weekend and this was part of the wackiness. I don’t know why, but I decided to sew a couple of the blocks rather than waiting until the CQFA Retreat.
I guess they look ok. I am not completely invested in the project yet, but I have some ideas and I want to move forward. It might be a palette cleanser
More progress on the Octagon 9 Patch. It seems slow, but I see the progress. Compare from last time and let me know what you think.
The 9 patches are not in their final locations. I started to arrange them as I made them, but it was hard to judge progress so now I just put each nine patch in the next open space. I’ll arrange them later.
I don’t think I have made much progress but I am making some progress. I finished all of the extra octagons so the piece is much bigger. I have to make a few more just to complete one side. I also still have a lot of nine patches to make.
I am now out of grey squares and have to make a concentrated effort to cut a bunch more. It isn’t a big deal; I just have to do it.
