Tag: Project-Quilt

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

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!

Some New Work & Some Finished Work

Thanks for continuing to read!


This is the piece I made in the Laura Wasilowski class through CQFA. This piece looks like the pieces I have worked on in Pamela Allen’s classes (May 2007 and June 2006). I seem to have a thing going for flowers in my small quilts at the moment. I think it is good to have a theme for classes, so you can try the teacher’s technique out without trying to think up interesting subject matter as well.

I would recommend a class with Laura. She is teaching at PIQF this year, so you may have a chance if you attend that show. She is a calm teacher (though we had none of those people who demand a lot of attend from the teacher – you know who they are), explains things very well and doesn’t try to cram too much into a class. There was lots of fusing going on and she gave everyone plenty of time to complete the various steps. She also sings various Chicago School of Fusing songs, which are quite entertaining.

I finally had a space large enough in my living room to get a full picture of Thoughts on Dots. Not the best picture, but at least you can see the entire thing. This quilt went to the County Fair today to be exhibited through mid-August. I can’t wait to see it hanging up. Hopefully, it will be a location I can use to get a good photo.

As you may be able to see I chose the green fabric for the binding. I was tempted by the red, but went with the green in the end. The green fit in with my theme of cheerfulness better for this quilt. Thanks to everyone who gave me their ideas and opinions. Your time and energy were greatly appreciated.
Block #20: complete! This completes all the center Pineapple blocks.

Corner block #1. Most of it is made of fabric with white backgrounds. The fabrics with the colored backgrounds aren’t quite dark enough. I will try to make the contrast between the back- and foregrounds more prominent.
Corner block #2.
This is, essentially, how the corner blocks will work with the center blocks.

One Last Pass at Binding Thoughts on Dots

After reading comments from Sherri and Laume last night, I decided that I needed to do my due diligence and try out green and purple/violet as bindings as well.

So I got up and applied some green to part of the quilt. The green is really good; I like it a lot. It works really well with the blues, pinks and the darker blue. This wasn’t the corner that I used for the other samples, so I removed the green and put it on the corner I was using for the sample.

I put the green on the ‘common’ corner and I think it looks just as good on this corner.

As a nod to Deirdre, I found a violet with some wavy stripes (with dots inside the stripes). I like the violet a lot, but I think the green is better. What do you think?

As an aside, in looking through my purple bins, I found that there were not really very many good violets in my bin. I don’t know if that is a product of my buying habits or the availability of violet. I’ll have to see as I see what fabric is available.

Make Visual Decisions Visually: Thoughts on Dots

My main goal this evening was to find the right binding for Thoughts on Dots. I have entered it into the county fair, which means I have to do the finishing work (binding and sleeve) fairly sharpish – 21 days from today is the last day to hand in the exhibits.

I thought I would use this Jane Sassaman fabric, but when I put it on the quilt (albeit messily here),I found that it isnt’ the right fabric. I like the stripes, but the colors aren’t right. GREAT! (<- note sarcasm) What a pain! Now what? I have blue on the mind, so my next choice after pawing through a boatload of fabric is a dot. I applied this fabric much more neatly, so I hope it doesn’t give it an unfair advantage. I think it is better, though. If I use this, I will not have much left, which makes me sad, because it is a really good dot fabric. Perhaps fuschia or red? Opinions are welcome.

Here is another bad picture of Thoughts on Dots quilted and trimmed. I am totally in love with this quilt. While it was gone, I forgot how much I like it.
Detail photo of the quilting. It is an allover pattern that reminds me of clouds. I think the quilting looks cheerful and doesn’t take away from the fabric placement.


Pineapple blocks 18 and 19 completed. You can see some of the new Kaffe Fassett dots in the corners.

Pineapple block #20 is on the top. Still not complete, but getting there.

The bottom two blocks are the first border blocks. They are 2 of the 4 corner blocks. I realized, in making these, that I have to use bold fabric for the lines of color since the ratio of color to white is so low. In person, they look quite cheerful.

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.

Stars in Alignment

For once, the stars were in alignment which made my technology work and me able to solve my template problem. As I mentioned, I was unable to locate my original EQ file. It has disappeared from my computer or was saved to such a weird location that I will only be able to find it by stumbling across it when I am looking for something else.

Since I had been researching the Cross Block’s real name, Flowering Snowball, I had found EQ’s version of the block in their database and had saved it to EQ6. I decided to try and print templates from their block to see if it would work with the piecing I have already done.

There were a lot of ifs in this little escapade. Since my printer was moved down to the laundry room, I haven’t been able to print from my computer. I thought I would need to get some boosters for my wireless network before printing would work again. In the meantime I have been saving to a flash drive, running downstairs and printing that way.

I forgot to change the printer to PDF and printed out templates in the correct size. I didn’t get an error message and that surprised me, so I went to the printer and, lo and behold, there was a template printout waiting there! What luck.

Daring not to hope that this could work, I went back to my work table, hauled out the other templates I have been using and measured the corner template against the printout. Yippee! The size was perfect! I was in business.

I made the template and cut out a couple of the middle squares and sewed them to a couple of the corner pieces as a test. All worked perfectly!

A Variety of Quiltmaking


Here are some Flowering Snowball blocks (Cross Block) in progress. Some of them you have seen before (many times?), but I put the new fragments with them to see how the piece can get away from the murky look. I felt it was a bit murky with the chocolate in the striped fabric and that particular orange.

I have lost the middle template for this block, which is holding up progress a bit. I looked at my EQ6 files and can’t find the project file, which means I have to recreate it somehow. I can cut most of the pieces and sew the corners to the middles, but at some point I have to deal with the loss of that template.


These are the fabrics from BatkisPlus and Quiltfabrics.com. I think that the batik on the right is the same one I used on Sharon’s quilt.


Here are Pineapple blocks 9 & 10. They are the first one using my new system of organzing the strips. I can’t really see much difference, except, perhaps, that these blocks are a bit darker. I think it was the way the strips fell. In the last rows I skipped over the dark blues and stuck with turquoise.

Pineapples are Pretty

The title was inspired, for no particular reason, except that it struck my fancy, by a poster at the Castro Theatre advertising Pretty in Pink, the 1980s movie. Molly Ringwold’s hair was precious.


I finished two more Pineapple blocks for a total of 8 now. I feel like I should have more, but I don’t. As I keep reminding myself this is an ongoing project with no deadline. I am enjoying seeing the evolution of the piece.

The blocks, all together, look pretty good.

I notice an interesting secondary pattern developing. I knew i would, but am just surprised at how much I like it.

A Monkey Finally Off My Back


When I got to my workroom this morning the back of the Nosegay was glaring at me and I could only sigh. I didn’t want to work on it. I had, somewhere in the back of my mind, wished that it would just be done. I thought about taking out Sharon’s quilt blocks and just ignoring the back of the Nosegay. It seemed too big, too much, too old, too depressing. I felt like I just couldn’t do it. Still, I knew that if I didn’t just do it, it would glare at me forever. Since the thing has been hanging around since 1998 and I wanted it done in my lifetime, I decided to just do a couple of rows. After all, if I did a couple of rows every week, it would eventually get done.


I arranged some 1930s scraps that were laying on my cutting table into a largish block and sewed them together. That kind of warmed me up and I sewed on a row of the blue and a row of the 1930s fabric and laid it out. I found that I had sewed more than half! Halfway done! I couldn’t believe it. How did that happen? That spurred me on.
I sewed entire FQ pieces into long rows and sewed them to the back. Each strip took about 2.75 yards of fabric. It took me about 3-4 hours, but I finished the entire back. The back is done. Whew!

I had been wondering if I shouldn’t just take Thoughts on Dots and Serendipity Puzzle to the quilter and bring the Nosegay later. Now I don’t have to. I will call the quilter and see if I can bring the quilts over, then I will be free of them for a time.

I am so thrilled!


I didn’t get through as much of the 1930s fabric as I had hoped, but I only have about 1/2 a bin left. I think I may put the fabrics with each color family rather than segregating them.

I have to say that the colors depress me a little bit with their muted tones and sweet little designs and I am tempted to just send them off to someone.

Cross Block Redux

By the time this quilt is finished, I will probably have named 137 posts Cross Block Redux n.1…..n.137. We’ll see how interesting this quilt stays.

In response to the post Quiltmaking is a Journey Not a Destination, fellow quiltmaker and blogger, Laume wrote:

“There is a third option – make each block scrappy, but not planned so that the colors in each secondary “stretched out square” is matched. You would get rid of the matched “X’s” in the second option you think look unfinished. Whether the background circles would still come to the fore like the second option, or whether they secondary pattern of dark stretched out squares would come to the fore like the first option, I don’t know. You’d have to try it on paper and see.”

I had no idea what Laume was talking about. I knew it couldn’t be terribly complicated, but I am visual person and the words just didn’t translate. I sent Laume a line drawing of the quilt and she was kind enough to color it in.

Basically, she was saying to make the Xes totally scrappy and just match the curved background pieces. I was leaning in the direction as I had just realized that I used a piece of fabric for the back of Serendipity Puzzle that I really wanted to use in this quilt.

Laume’s idea is an excellent one, because the parts of the Xes really do take up quite a bit of fabric, which means I can’t use as many scraps as I would like. However, I will still have to cut into yardage, regardless, so perhaps it doesn’t matter?

Stay tuned!

Nearly Done! HOORAY!!!!

In between many other tasks related to house, children and work, I am thrilled to say that I have finished the back of Thoughts on Dots. I really buckled down and took every spare moment to work on it. HOORAY!!!!!!

The back is even larger than the top, which made it harder to photograph, but here is an image anyway.

The squares are the reject dot squares which I did not use in the top. The lavendar and beige square in your upper right hand corner is the label. I decided to use the beige for three reasons:
1) I did not want to piece together 100 FQs of dots;
2) I had large-ish pieces of beige (bought them at a time when I thought I might use them as backgrounds); and
3) I decided I did not want to take away from the front. I wanted it to be clear that the front was the main showcase.

I did piece the back, because I have a enough fabric to do so and because I wanted it to be unique. I do see the attraction of buying 107″ wide fabric and just sewing one seam to make the back, however.


Above is a detail of the top of the back.

Above are a couple of details of the other side of the top including the label. Take the term “detail” with a grain of salt!

I made the label by creating a Word document and then print the ‘document’ on fabric.


Above shows the only problem. I think that I may have to take off the beige piece on which I have drawn a line, because it is too wide. I think it would work better if I put it on the outside. That way, I can trim the back after it gets quilted. I don’t want to hack of part of the block that has the label in it or any of the squares. I know it is just the back, but I still want it to look good. I don’t remember right at the moment whether I pieced that beige as all one piece or if I will have to unsew multiple pieces.

And finally, below, here is a better (not great, but better) image of Thoughts on Dots:
Part of the day’s chores involved moving furniture form one room to another. While my workroom does not look fantastic and I lost some shelf space, I do have floor space, once again. YAY! I was able spread the quilt top out on the floor. It nearly fits. Unfortunately, I didn’t actually fit in the room so the image is still a bit wonky. Hopefully, however, faithful readers, you get a beter idea of how cheerful it is.

Quiltmaking is a Journey Not a Destination


I found this quilt somewhere, drafted the block and am now trying to decide if there is a color layout scheme that I prefer. I don’t remember where I saw the quilt, which is a shame because I would like to document it better than “I don’t remember.”

There are two color layouts for the Cross Block quilt that appeal to me:

I like this one because the circles really stand out and you can really see the fabric. I don’t like the way I would have to plan out a bunch of the fabrics in advance (like Spiky Stars, which worked out well in the end). The other thing that bothers me is the half blocks on the edge. On one hand, they look unfinished. On the other hand they could comprise a self bordering technique border, again like Spiky Stars, that is so effective.


In the option above, the blocks would be a lot easier to piece. The crosses really stand out, which is nice, in a way. It looks a lot less interesting than the one above…a lot more regular.

So, does this count as another project or a way to get some more sewing done when I am not at the machine? Quiltmaking is a journey and not a destination, so does it matter?

Am I Really Cut Out for Strip Projects??


The Pineapple project requires lots of strips. I am not sure I am cut out for managing such supplies for this project. They are everywhere and I can’t seem to find good combinations of strips. I have seen curtain rods that people have set up on which to hang their strips, but I don’t have anything like that at the moment. Bleah!

Still, I soldier on and I seem to be making progress. I finished the strip part of the second two blocks. I still have to put the triangles in the corners, but will do that later.

Top Complete; Borders and Back to Go

I don’t usually sew during the week. It is a habit I got out of some years ago due to general evening chores, preparation for the next day, etc. Tonight I just decided to sew 3 more seams and now the top of Serendipity Puzzle is complete.


Here is the entire piece. It is very busy and the reds and brown do stick out. It is cheerful. I could just make the back and have it quilted, but will try out some borders before I do that.


Detail of one of the blocks.

First two Pineapple Blocks Finished

Learning to do something new makes the first two blocks or parts of a project practice. For this project, and, yes, it is now on the project list, I am pretty pleased with these two blocks. The blocks are fairly flat, there is no paper to rip or muslin to quilt through.

I spent some time yesterday putting the last two rows on as well as the corners. I may have to remove the corners and put others on, as they need to be a bit bigger, but we will see.

I am very pleased with how the fabrics look together.

I am still cutting strips, which is a drag, but I will be happy when I have piece of all of my dots cut.