The Cheerful Baskets is finally finished! I am pretty excited, because this quilt has been long in the making. TFQ had some trouble getting it quilted, so we dropped it off with Colleen in Long Beach and then picked it up at PIQF. She did the most amazing job of quilting it. The quilting is masterful.
TFQ put the binding on (in case I have never said, she is the fastest binder in the universe!) and I just finished with the label and sleeve.
Cheerful Baskets detail
This quilt will go and live at TFQ’s house after I get it photographed. She has a gorgeous periwinkle wall where it will look fabulous.
Don’t you love the red/pink and turquoise combination? I got a great idea for my red/aqua quilt. I love the quilt I saw on Flickr, but it didn’t feel right. I was thinking that I would do it, because I hadn’t found anything better.
Yesterday I was Internet-free (not by choice), but saw a new pattern by Fig Tree Quilts before the Internet died. 60 degree equilateral triangles hang down in one of the versions. This pattern caught my attention, but I didn’t really think much about it until later. Then I saw a few more quilts using this triangle on some taped Fons and Porter episodes using the same type of patches. One was called Kalamkari Strippy (#1307). I am feeling more excited about this new idea. I am also so interested about how the colors on my design wall and these two types of media came together to inspire me.
I made this top from the leftovers of the Frosted Stars. Looking at it in the picture I like it as is. However, I do think that the border is a bit too thin and will get distorted in the quilting process. As a result, I have been looking at borders.
Frosted Stars Leftovers w/Blue
I have enough of the blue fabric to go around the whole piece (but not to show the whole to you).What do you think?
Frosted Stars Leftovers w/Blue & White
Alternatively, I can go with blue and white. I kind of like the blue and white, but one of the boys pointed out that the white disappears next to the blue. I think the values are similar.
My other idea was to put a bit of a piping border in orange in and then add another red border. I didn’t have time to set that up so you could see what it looked like. Perhaps I will.
This weekend was kind of a sewing bonanza. I think I spent about 10 hours at the machine on Saturday, and another 6 or so on Sunday sewing like a crazed woman. The result is two backs and a top, a journal cover, a repaired bag and parts of the Frosted Stars Leftovers quilt. The Frosted Stars top is above. I changed some of Charlie Scott’s pattern, as I have mentioned.
Frosted Stars Top without Final Border
The quilt top, without the final turquoise border is all on the bias and I just don’t believe in giving a quilt to a quilter with a bias edge border. Yes, I am going to send this out to be quilted. I just want this quilt to stay relatively square and adding another border was required. I don’t know why a pattern designer would finish off a quilt with a bias border. Perhaps it is some complicated part of a learning experience of which I am unaware.
I spent a good portion of my day off Wednesday piecing the sashing and the borders on to the star blocks. As you can see, I didn’t quite finish, but I am moving forward.
I made good progress on the Frosted Star quilt over the weekend. Not as much as I would have liked, but I never make as much progress as I would like!
I finished the border piecing for the Frosted Stars. It required that I piece a whole Jelly Roll of strips together in sets of 10 strips each. It was fun to arrange the strips in different and, hopefully, pleasing ways.
I have an amazing amount of leftovers from the above piecing exercise. The pattern refers to a second pattern to use for the leftovers. I am a little annoyed that I would need to buy a Jelly Roll and spend a bunch of time pressing the strips and piecing them together only to find that I needed less than half of the pieces. Isn’t there a better way? It may be that I did need strips that long in order to make the bias sashing/broder strips work. But it may also be that they wanted me to buy a whole Jelly Roll. I suppose I will have to make a second Christmas quilt. Or I could just waste the fabric pieces.
Frosted Stars with Turquoise
My great feat was that I am now ready to put the whole thing together. Since I need to make visual decisions visually, I laid out all of the pieces on two different backgrounds to see which I liked better. I also got opinions from around the house. One opinion was that the turquoise looks like ice. The stars really stand out in this piece, which I like.
At some show I bought a bunch of a turquoise batik to use as needed. I wouldn’t use it all for the background to this quilt, but I wouldn’t have to piece strips together, because I have a long enough length to just cut one piece. In looking at this layout, I think I would have to add a border strip around the outside if for no other reason than to stabilize all of those bias edges.
Frosted Stars with Snowflake Blue
The other background color we considered is the snowflake blue that is part of the 12 Days of Christmas line of fabrics. In this rendition, we noticed that the blue bias strips that make up the borders and sashing drop out, because the snowflake blue is so close in color. The look of this piece is much more subtle.
I got a bug in my ear a week or so ago to quilt the Tarts. They weren’t hanging in the closet quilting themselves and the label does say 2010. I hauled them out, set up the table and quilted away. I did mostly straight line quilting the background of the 3 cups blocks. I also quilted (mostly) the to go cup. I need a differented colored thread to finish that one.
FMQ Fail
Then I got cocky, practiced my free motion skills and did one small strip in free motion circles. Big time fail. I couldn’t get the tension quite right. Yes, I was using the same thread in both the bobbin and the top (different colors, but same thread. Yes, I matched my speed of moving the quilt with the speed of the machine. Fail. The bobbin thread ceased to show through the front, because all of the top thread went through to the back. The yellow you can sort of see in the photo is the top thread. Unsewing is required.
The good part is that I am back in the saddle on this project and there is hope that I will get it done in 2010.
Another quilt is finished. This one didn’t take very long, aside from the cutting, but it was a monster to deal with. The binding took me a long time. I probably spent 10 hours on the binding alone.
This is a gift for one of the nephews. Hope he likes it.
Here are the Frosted Star blocks. After all the drama of this project, I have finally completed a major hurdle.
The next task is to sew the border together. The border is made up of Jelly Roll strips. We’ll see how that goes. I probably need to get a Mary Ellen Best Press refill to get through all of those strips.
The thought of all of those strips makes me think that I am done with Jelly Rolls. Time will tell though. As I love to yell at the baseball players on the radio “it’s not over until it is over!”
I find it really interesting how the colors fall as I press and cut. I do rearrange the diamonds on my design wall, but I generally just grab the next fabric, press and cut. Sometimes, I decide I don’t want to press one color or pattern just yet. They all have to be pressed, so I don’t do very much selective pressing.
I was amazed at this group, because of all the brown and orange that fell together AND it is the month of Hallowe’en.
I am pressing and cutting patching like a mad thing. I am progressing, but not fast enough. I have to keep at it. The edges are on my mind at the moment. I think I will buy Fast2Cut ruler from C&T and the diamond edge ruler from Creative Grids. I haven’t received any answers to my inquiries about whether they will work with the diamond ruler I already have, but have to get prepared to sew this quilt together in one weekend.
Here are four of the blocks I have made for my Frosted Stars project. There are a couple of things I found and a couple of things I decided.
I found that the red is not working. It is too intense for this project, so I am not going to include any other red in the blocks I have made six blocks so far, which is slightly less than half of what I need.
I also decided that I would use the turquoise primarily for the background triangles. I decided that I am going to include a couple of blocks with the silver for the background triangles. I am also going to include a couple of blocks with other blues. Perhaps I will include only one, perhaps more. I haven’t decided.
My next step is to cut a bunch of background squares so I can put more blocks together. I haven’t worked on these blocks since last weekend as I have either not been sewing, pressing and cutting diamonds or have been working on the Zig Zaggy back.
I had some fun over the weekend piecing the Zig Zaggy quilt. I felt a great deal of joy in my sewing this weekend. I know that sounds weird. It is a weird word to use for sewing, but I can’t think of another word that expresses how I was feeling. I am in love with piecing and color right now and simply, as I said earlier this week, cannot. get. enough.
Zig Zaggy - 4 Rows
I decided early in the weekend to try to piece the entire quilt over the weekend. When TFQ and I are together we can get an entire quilt top done. We do large wall quilts or up to single bed sized in a weekend. I got over the idea of finishing the entire quilt top over the weekend, but I made significant progress. Best of all I had fun.
Zig Zaggy Row 1
The first order of business was to spend some time piecing the first row together. I had to figure out how to do it.This way of putting together the quilt goes completely against what I told Frances not more than a month ago. However, this quilt is not really block based, so it has to go together in rows, I think. I tried a couple of different things, but finally settled on a process for the fourth row.
Piecing the first row together meant that I, first, needed to organize the colors and the fabric designs in such a way that there was variety in the layout. Once I got that task finished, the rest was just rote sewing. Not completely rote sewing, but enough to force me to keep my mind from wandering too much.
Some mind wandering is always in order and I spent some time thinking about the border. I’d like to do a spiky border a la Gwen Marston. The more I think about it and the more I look at the four finished rows, the more I think I won’t do it. We’ll see.
Diamonds, late August 2010Diamonds, early September 2010
My design wall is a mess. It is an even bigger mess than when I showed it before. I have at least four projects on it, which makes it difficult to photograph anything cleanly. As a result, I used the eraser function in Photoshop Elements to erase some of the things surrounding the diamonds in the photo on the left. I wasn’t completely enamoured with the effect, so I left the bits and pieces in the photo on the right. I don’t know how to outline a shape and clear the background completely. I would like to learn that.
I have been intermittently pressing recently washed fabrics and cutting pieces from them, so the diamond accumulation continues. I know I will be needing to cut a lot of the border pieces late in the year, so I want to make sure all the diamonds are cut. I am sure I have said that a thousand times. It is on my mind.
I still haven’t figured out if the Fast2Cut 45 degree half and quarter diamond ruler will work for the side, edge and corner diamonds. I still need to figure that out. I haven’t actually seen it in a store, so it is hard to compare to the Creative Grids ruler that I have. It would be nice if Creative Grids made a ruler to go with their diamond ruler. I did see that they have a Triangles 120 degree ruler. I think it would work for the side pieces, which would be great. It would definitely make an easier time than when I cut the side pieces for the Eye Spy.
I simply do not have enough time to sew. I spent a day and a half over the weekend just sewing. I made a lot of progress on the Zig Zaggy quilt and it was still not enough time. I don’t know how much time would be enough time. I haven’t reached that threshold yet. I simply know that I need more.
The last bit of the Chocolate Box I had to do was the sleeve. I made it in a short amount of time and then it seemed to take me forever to sew it on. I really had a hard time keeping the tucks out of the back of the quilt. Not sure why. Anyway, another project off my plate. Hooray!
