Alignment trials

Electric Quilt templates give you cropped corners on templates for alignment, which I generally like for angled quilt block pieces. The tricky part is cutting them accurately. When possible, I use Marti Michell’s acrylic templates for cutting pieces as they include the trimmed corners and make it easy to trim them at the same time that your pieces are being cut. Not having acrylic templates sized for the Diamond 4-patch project, I was putting off starting to piece because of the alignment issue. Once I was ready to sew I tried a couple of techniques.

Stacking the many bias-edge pieces of fabric to do the trimming at the points was difficult both due to the stretch of the bias and not having a template that could be used with a rotary cutter (paper or plastic eventually get shaved out of shape.)

On a group quilt project with similar angles, our leader made templates for aligning the pieces for pinning, so I printed out a paper template from EQ, cut the points off just two pieces, aligned the first triangle on top of the paper template, lined up the 2^nd triangle and drew lines on the paper. I tested a few blocks and found this to be fairly accurate. I spent some quality TV time with a lap board pinning all of the sets. After sewing more sets together I found that it worked better to take another look at the alignment and adjust them by eye for a more accurate fit.

Once the block halves were sewn together, the intersection of the batik and black were leaving a very scant seam allowance. I didn’t think of it right away, but found a fix by taking a slightly wider seam at the intersection of the block halves. Designing your own block creates some challenges, but also the flexibility to make changes to sold problems.

 

Dancing Stars blocks are coming together nicely, after printing out part of the quilt in EQ to figure out how to press the seams for minimal bulk. I’m using Eleanor Burn’s trick for spinning the center seams at the sub-sets and the center seam so that all of the outside seams on each block are pressed clockwise (as seen from the top). This way the will nest together with all adjacent blocks without any twisted seams.

Right Turn

The “Banner Quilt” in progress was looking less than exciting in the original layout, which at one time had looked fresh and new. All the blocks in the same alignment. 40 different fabrics, 4 each. Then I came across a layout for a quilt online that used the same alignment of half-square triangle blocks, and something dull became more interesting.

Original layout:

 

New block:

 

Wall-o-stars or Star Dance:

 

Quilting is fun again! On the wall I have used two colors per star, using the sets of 4 of the same fabric, mixing a dot with a stripe. I may change it before sewing them together.

My son recently asked me if I would be interested in the book “Crafting with Cat Hair” for Christmas.  Um, no thanks.  I’ve heard of the book “Knit Your Own Cat”, which I also don’t need.

Christmas projects are piling up – son asked for a pair of warm knitted socks (I checked, he was not running a fever), husband asked for a waterproof bike helmet cover and a tool roll-up for a set of chisels.  I’ve yet to make any of the cute folded stars, or dust off the snowflake kit from several years back (I made quite a few snowflakes on my own before purchasing the kit, making some forms of my own with wire and glue gun, then found pre-formed wire forms.) I think the kit just intimidates me, it should be fun, I love snowflakes. Today I found a new tutorial for small crochet stars, They look like TV crocheting, if I can make the conversion from English to American stitches.

Big and Small Quilts

It's been a long while since I've piece a queen-sized quilt. My friend J asked if I would be interested in looking at a quilt that her sister started and didn't finish. From the receipt, it looks like it was started in 1992. 34 blocks were finished, alternate sawtooth stars and 9-patch with a large center. Lots of fabric: soft blue with stars, navy with small roses and a white-on-white background. J thought she would like the finished quilt, as her favorite color is blue. I had her measure how large she would like it to be, drew up a layout in EQ7, and started cutting.

65 more blocks later, and the challenge of pressing the seams open to match her sister's blocks, I had her top put together with a 9 x 10 layout and a double border. We discussed patterns, thread color and backing and batting over the phone, and as I had an open date, was able to quilt and bind it less than three weeks after she brought me the project. I do work more steadily if I have a deadline, in this case the unexpected quilting opening.

Also in the box of fabric she gifted me were 64 4 ½” squares of three different green fabrics. I found a forth green fabric in stash, and a new charity quilt project is ready to sew.

The twin-sized quilt in progress is the Banner Quilt, consisting of half-square triangles sewn in sets to resemble flags or banners. 40 different bright prints from a long-ago online sale of fq’s with my favorite white-on-white swirl fabric that I’ve been hoarding saving for the right project.

The small quilt is Baby Owls made from drunkard’s path blocks. I originally saw it on Cindy’s blog, and she included a link to the tutorial for it. All the fabrics are from stash, including the border with owls. I may do a combination of hand and machine quilting on it. I finished the assembly at a local weekend quilt retreat.

And finally the fabrics for the Diamond 4-Patch have been cut. I’m trying to avoid cutting off the points per the EQ7 templates for alignment, and think I’ve found another way to get good alignment for the seams. I’ll post pictures if the test pieces work.

Not Quite Yet...

The nice stack of ironed batiks is still waiting to be cut into diamonds.  In the meantime, a few other projects have been completed:

Quilted 3 charity quilts: Earthy Coins, Sunbonnet Sue Panel, and 4-Patch and 16-Patch. Bound them too.

Tablecloth – hemmed with a mitred hem.

Stitched 70 blocks for an American Hero Quilt

Cut out 29 Christmas stockings for charity, and decided to focus on fabrics that didn't need to be pieced to be large enough for a stocking. Sorted smaller pieces into give-away and keep.

Re-fashioned cuffs on my new dog-walking jacket, removing the odd flip-over the hand flap and thumbhole.

Finished knitting the Marin shawl by Ysolda Teague.

Knitted 1½ charity hats.

Kept a very dry garden in bloom (and vegetables!)

And some new patterns caught my eye:

• Candy Coated from Sunday Morning Quilts book (great stash-buster quilts)
• Russian Rubix by Prairie Grass Patterns
• Owls designed by the Tulip Patch Blog  using the Drunkard’s Path block
• Kitty and Rabbit from Sew4Home (I do not have any Minkee in my stash, but they are adorable!)

Start of a new quilt - Diamond 4-Patch

This pattern had been in my mind for a while, and after a neighbor gifted me with some lovely batiks, I had the right fabrics.  She had been wanting me to make her a quilt for some time, and since she picked out these fabrics I thought she would like them together in a quilt.

Drawn out in Electric Quilt, I played with the sizes, at first thinking I would use a Tri-Recs ruler, then decided on larger blocks.  EQ gives rotary cutting directions, and I played with the block size until the size for cutting was simple (5” x 8.5”.)  The finished block size isn’t quite standard, but it doesn’t really matter if the finished quilt size works.  I sized the quilt to fit the backing fabric I purchased, 73.5” x 110”.

I also played with the fabric selection – there were more fabrics, but they didn’t all play nicely together.  The photo shows half the fabrics, as they were folded into pairs for the diamond blocks after washing and ironing.  I dropped out two brown fabrics as they really stood out when laid out together, and that also simplifies the cutting, as there will be 42 blocks (3 in halves for the offset columns), and there are 7 pairs of fabrics.

The sample block is for a pressing sample, so the seams of the blocks will nest nicely when assembled.  I also realized that I can simplify the cutting by keeping the pairs of fabric right sides together and can cut all the angles the same direction without needing to mirror them. 

Learning Curve

I bought a triangle ruler on sale, the type that doesn’t come with any instructions.  No problem – just draw up a quilt in EQ7 and start chopping.  For a one-patch triangle quilt in EQ, there are a couple of layout options, and you plug in the width and height of the triangles.  My goal was to make a preemie quilt and a lap quilt from one of my 2-yard cuts of flannel as backing.  Starting with the preemie seemed logical. Except—I didn’t measure the ruler.  It’s not an equilateral ruler, and the quilt I drew up in EQ was, so the size was off.  No worries – it was a bit long, but still wide enough for the suggested size.  At some point I made the choice to cut the triangles a bit shorter than the full height of the ruler, which meant the leftovers, intended for the lap sized quilt, made it necessary to cut the remaining triangles the same size.   (I am getting better about writing down what I do with each quilt on paper as I go.)

Isn’t it funny how stash fabric is always different in your memory than in reality?  I thought I would be overloaded with green fabrics, but once it came down to comparing my greens to the light green check, they didn’t all play nicely together. After a bit of digging in some of the fabric bins, a nice green print with a bit of orange brought the right “pop” to the other greens.  A couple of pale scraps filled out the “light” triangles and mix it up a bit. 

One thing I discovered with this triangle ruler that I didn’t like at first was that only one of the points had the tip cut off.  I like the way that templates from EQ automatically cut the extra tips off, so it’s easy to align angles when piecing.  With only one tip cut off, I found it really easy to keep the grain in the right orientation when sewing, as the pieces were all cut with the straight of grain perpendicular to that cut-off tip.  On the preemie quilt, some of the light triangles ended up being twisted.

The preemie quilt was initially sewn like an envelope – stitched around the eges and turned, but it was so lumpy that I took out the seam and serged the edge instead with woolly nylon (after quilting along all the seam lines). The preemie quilts don’t require a batting, but the lap quilt will have batting, and I’ll quilt it on my longarm.

Quilt Obsessions

Every week I fall in love with at lease one new quilt top design. I start playing with the block construction and layouts in Electric Quilt. Sometimes that’s as far as I go, other times a stack of fabric starts accumulating.

Recent obsessions:

Japanese X – I first saw it at StitchedinColor.com , and she had a link to a tutorial at Badskirt. There is a Flickr group so you can look at what others have done. My first block gave me a bit of trouble to start, then I ripped and fixed one bad seam and everything lined up nicely. This is slow quilting for sure. I have 12 blocks finished, and plan on making 20. I pulled some of my favorite Asian prints, indigos and shirtings in navy, grey, purple and white to make them. After putting them on a design wall, it was surprising to see how the design pops when sashing is added.

Sparkle Punch quilt along at the Oh, Fransson! blog. This looks like a great pattern for a collection of Jan Mullen fq’s in bright dots and stripes in my stash. There is a bit of waste in the star points, and I haven’t quite been able to cut up my favorite white swirls on white fabric, so I may break down and buy some solid white or bone Kona cotton for the background.

One-third hexagon paper piecing: the Interweave store has a sale on a puzzle with this quilt pattern. I haven’t seen the book yet, but love how the “flowers” look like they have petals when the outside 1/3 of each hexagon is the background fabric. Paper Pieces even sells 1/3 hexagon foundations, but I’ll most likely make my own from cardstock. There is a collection of butterscotch fabrics in my stash that wants to become this quilt.

Binding Trials

Lately I’ve been testing various ways to machine-finish bindings on my own quilts. Occasionally, on a special quilt or a small quilt, I’ll still do them by hand, but charity quilts, gift quilts and some customer quilts are finished by machine. My goal is to have a binding that is attractive on both sides.

Here are a few results:

Sew binding to the back, and then pin to the front side and machine stitch down. The quilt I tested this on had a pieced outer edge, and just the thickness of those additional seams gave too much variance to the finished width of the binding. This technique can be a bit messy on the back side.

Sew binding to the front, and then use a button-hole stitch from the front. This catches the binding readily on the back side, and looks tidy from the front. I had to do some testing with my studio machine, as it doesn’t mirror stitches, so not all options were easy to use on a binding. Some of the likely stitches had multiple stitches in the straight section (more decorative, also takes longer to stitch and uses more thread.)

Stitch the binding to the front, then wrap and pin, and use an edge-stitch foot instead of the walking foot on the top. End result is pretty, though there is some bunching because of not using a walking foot.

Zig-zag – this is a nice strong option for charity quilts and graduation quilts. I’ve thought about using a twin needle, which would give a zig-zag just on the back side, but I find the price of these special needles a consideration.

Fixing a sloppy wrap: though I usually test the wrap on each binding by stitching a few inches and adjusting the needle position to fit, a recently finished project had excess binding flapping on the back side. It had been stitched through the binding from the top, rather than in the ditch. I solved this by stitching a second time in the ditch.

I’ve tried various ways to use an edge guide for stitch-in-the-ditch, and haven’t been very happy with the consistency of the results. My best solution has been to use an additional, position able light on my machine and just visually align the needle with the edge of the binding. Along with the testing of the needle position at the start of the quilt, this gives me a clean look on both the top and back of the quilt, though I check for occasional gaps on the back where the binding wasn't caught.