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.

A couple of 2013 finishes

Woven Bias, inspired by a quilt seen on a blog, then I found that the block "Riley" is in Blockbase/EQ, and played with the dimensions. There are a couple of version online--one free version with good assembly instructions at windhamfabrics.net called “Fresh Connections”. Their version has the links interlocking, while I chose to make my blocks more random, trying to distribute the colors. Size is 71" x 60"

 

 Crazy giant fish on the back--the largest are 24" long!

This pattern came from the Missouri Star tutorials, called “Amazing Jelly Roll Quilt Pattern by 3 Dudes”. Their versions look much different, using all the fabrics from a jelly roll, while this used only 4 fabrics. It was fun to see the secondary pattern of hearts appear. There are several layouts of the blocks that look very different. Size 50" x 39"

 

This month I've finished two preemie quilts and knitted a chemo cap for a friend (Odessa by Grumperina.)

Projects in progress update – the old

Baby Owls – quilted with a new leafy pantograph pattern. It sat for a while as I stressed over how to quilt the top, and the finished quilt pleases me. It’s currently hanging in my studio. 42.5" x 32.5".

Chevron Strippie - quilted & donated. This was a quilt-as-you-go scrap project, where I pieced the strips onto scrap batting strips of different widths, then assembled the top by zig-zagging the strips together, then layered the backing and quilted  along some of the chevrons, then added vertical sashing strips. An interesting experiment. Approximately 55" x 60".

Dancing Stars - still waiting to be quilted.

Diamond 4-patch - quilted & gifted to the neighbor who had given me the batik fabrics. She had to be talked into keeping it by her cousin, as it didn’t match her décor. It’s in her guest room now. This is the last surprise quilt I will make for anyone. Full-sized quilt.

 

Postage Stamp Blocks?  I don’t even remember what this was.

Friday Update

A weekly update sounds reasonable. It only took me a month to get started!

Here's my first finish of 2014: a lap sized charity quilt, made from leftovers from leftovers. A friend approached me at the end of 2012 with an unfinished quilt that her sister had started...20 years earlier. I finished and quilted a queen-sized Ohio Star and 9-Patch with large center blocks. And the leftovers went into at least one other charity quilt...well I lost track. And the scraps sat together in a box. There were a lot of 4 1/2" squares of the light blue star, smaller pieces of the dark blue rose (plus enough for binding.) Some of the dark squares had to be pieced.

A simple 4-patch alternating with solids, I like how the white and dark blue patches dance across the quilt, layout designed in EQ. Backing is a light blue flannel with moon and stars, from my sister's de-stash gift.  Size: 39" x 48".

Small Things

 
As soon as I started my quick leader/ender project, it was apparent that the homemade template was not accurately cut, as the pieced sections were not square. I checked all my template sets for an appropriate sized square to make it easy to trim, but did not have this size. It just happened to square up as a metric size, so my little odd metric cutting mat saved the day. Moving the block around the mat kept it from cutting too deeply in one spot.

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.