Training Day

It’s a rare occasion to have time to squeeze in quilting for myself during the week. Treating it as a training day--learning a new technique, testing out a spiral template for my Gammill Workstation was interesting. The quilt that I chose for the spirals is Diamond Box, a free pattern from TimelessTreasures. The finished size is 64" x 52.5"(not including the shoes at the bottom.) The background fabric is a grey and black batik with just a bit of light blue, given to me by a quilting customer. Most of the block fabrics came from stash.
 

It’s a very angular design, and the curves soften it. There is a spiral centered in each block, and overlapping smaller spirals in-between and on the borders. The surprise when I took it off the rollers was that two of the smaller spirals had a definite shape problem—very odd as the template uses a stylus in a groove, and there were no issues with the stylus jumping the track. The squashed shapes were not visible on the top, but on the solid light grey back they stood out. It was worth my time to rip out the stitches, re-load the quilt and re-quilt the two spirals.

Overall I’m pleased with the design. It took a couple of hours to tie off and bury the stop/start threads on each spiral. Spirals are a bit trickier to place than concentric circles. Moving the Workstation  was a bit of a pain, and once I used binder clips to keep the sliders locked in place so it didn’t shift, almost fun. If I ever make the move to a computer-driven quilting machine I would make spirals very often.  

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The Gifts That Keep on Coming

I’ve been gifted quite a bit of fabric and several projects recently from quilt customers:

• A bag of red, cream and tan fabrics, some large pieces
• 900 paper piecing hexagons, 1 1/4" per side
• A bag of assorted fabrics, including a bag of jelly roll strips that were partially cut and sewn and a set of partially pieced feedsack Dresden Plates
• A partially quilted Winding Ways quilt, needing a few repairs, lots of thread cleanup, batting fixed and borders quilted.

I have a gathering of red/beige/cream fabrics in the works for a bed-sized Disappearing 9-Patch, so the red, cream and tan fabrics will be mixed in.

The hexagons will allow me to try out some flowers with 1/3 hexagons as petals. I am too thrifty to spend $24 for a set of 1/3 hexagon paper pieces, so will make a template and cut my own from these.

The jelly roll strips are the Roman Holiday collection from Moda circa 2004. I really like the fabrics and am looking for a project that will showcase them, and also let me work with some partial strips.

 

I've had the Dresden Plates on my studio design wall for a couple of weeks, getting advice on using them to their best advantage. My initial thought is to applique them to a solid background (without any trimming behind) using a buttonhole stitch, and quilting them densely. The dark red pieces look likely to bleed, and there are several pieces where a blue fabric bled on some of the other pieces, so there needs to be some re-piecing. Also the arcs each have 11 pieces, and only 20 are needed for a full circle (the one completed circle with 22 pieces needs to be altered.)

The Winding Ways quilt has been getting a bit of thread cleanup, and I've been adding safety pins to areas where the quilting has gaps. The backing is large enough to allow me to quilt the borders on the longarm, once the batting is fixed (one side has too much and the other not enough.)

Oh - and then I won a set of fat quarters from Quilter's Newsletter!

Last of the Mystery Series Finished

The pull of the garden is very strong right now. My flowers peak in May, which means they want to be staked, weeded, watered. My tomato plants are in, spinach has already bolted, lettuces harvested and re-seeded, squash and beans just seeded and need to be kept moist.

Quilting and sewing is getting the 10-20-30 minutes approach that Nancy Zieman talks about – do a little at a time, even if it is just setting up for the next project. My attic sewing room is adjusting to my foster cat, and although she is an older kitty, she is exploring every shelf, basket and counter, and I’ve already misplaced a few projects that I stuffed somewhere so it wouldn’t become a nest or pile on the floor. Quick projects have included adding the last two borders to the Diamond Box quilt, sewing the binding strips and prepping the backing for same. And finally binding Mystery #3, size is 73.5" x 53.5", the largest of the three Mystery quilts.

Busman's Holiday

What do quilters do when they have a few days off? Quilt of course! Last week I quilted three charity quilts for Oso. One of them was my twin Orca quilt, made from the leftovers of a fussy-cut orca print. It's a simple design from 5" squares and 5 x 10" strips, staggered to give it some motion.

Quilting is a simple wavy design:

Diamond box blocks are coming along, and I've found a shortcut for the bias seams - creasing the strip where it crosses, rather than marking each line with chalk. It took almost 2 hours of pinning the pieces together while watching TV, and that allowed a bit more production line sewing. Six blocks are completely finished, and the centers on the remaining 14 sewn and ready for the final round.

 

The background fabric is a grey/taupe/light blue fabric that a friend gave me. It had been made into a dress, but as it is a batik it didn't have very nice drape, and was never finished.

Pinwheel 9-patch center is finished, and a nice rich purple border finally appeared from my stash, not yet cut and attached.

A large bag of plaid fabrics was gifted to me by my sister, including two large pieces of a bright Madras plaid patchwork destined for a shirt, and at least two lap backings from other pieces.

The Tennessee Lightening quilt new to my queue is a simple 9-patch block consisting of half-square triangles with good contrast. My goal is to make a twin-sized charity quilt from some of my reproduction fabrics, with a brown background and blues, reds and purples as the dark colors.

Plugging Along

Three small quilts have been finished in the past few weeks:
Mystery Quilt #2 72" x 52" - the blue/purple version

Many Trips #1 (blue scraps), 62.5" x 44.5"

and Charity Charms 45.5" x 40.5", made from two sets of Fossil Fern mini charm packs and a jewel-toned print, that contained almost all of the colors of the charms.

For the bindings, I experimented on two of the quilts with binding that is sewn to the back, then wrapped to the front and stitched down by machine. I've found this works best on quilts that have a solid border, as it finishes a bit wider and points could be chopped off.

The backing for Mystery #2 used two purple fabrics that I really liked, and I've already used one of the leftovers in another quilt I'm calling Pinwheel 9-Patch.

At least five new quilts and block designs have been drawn up in EQ, including a block using only 5" squares that has been tested with homely fabric. It's an easy on-point block that is dedicated to my small collection of charm packs.

Retreat Recap

This past weekend I had the opportunity to attend two days of a four-day quilting retreat at our local Senior Center. It was a day-only retreat, and Saturday night all equipment is packed up & stored in a locked room as a local church uses the large meeting room for services until late afternoon.

The projects worked on included Mystery Quilt #3 (the blocks are completed, the center assembled), Arkansas Traveler (the 4-patch diamonds are sewn) and a new jewel-tone 4-patch charity quilt. My goal was to work on things already in progress, and the new charity quilt snuck itself in the mix.

I prefer to cut borders at home, so fabric was auditioned for two borders and binding for the MQ#3. My half-dowel pressing stick wasn't packed, so the 4-patch diamonds still need to be pressed, and the 4-patch charity quilt segments were my to-the-last-minute project, so the irons and boards were packed up by the time they were stitched.

Bonus items: Quilt Lovers Favorites - vol. 5 and two pieces of flannel and a starburst fat quarter from the give-away items.

And, today I won a blog hop drawing from Pat Sloan's website for Nancy Zieman's book Seams Unlikely. I really like Nancy Zieman, have enjoyed her shows and products for years, and will give a review when it arrives.

Something Sweet

 

This little quilt usually hangs in my studio this time of year. The center panel is in one piece, and they are echo quilted around the designs. I learned how to make scallops in Electric Quilt, and like the corner accents and two-color scallops. They are also embroidered to mimic a lace trim.

I came across patterns with clear instructions for what I called "Woven Bias" or the Riley block at the United Notions website, under Free Patterns. They have one version called Surrounded by Love and another called Honky Tonk, both with the same block, using the same 2.5" strips that I used, where the other versions found had much larger strips.