Ultimate Travel Bag Finished

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well and had a wonderful Halloween! As usual, the time is flying by! As much as I like having the mornings lighter after the time change, I'm dreading the dark evenings. I did get a new Cricut floor lamp last spring that lights up my sewing area really well so maybe evening sewing won't be so difficult this year. It worked well last night.

This week I finished my Ultimate Travel Bag designed by ByAnnie. 

Ultimate Travel Bag - Front

Ultimate Travel Bag - Back

The bag has a bunch of pockets on the outside and has one of those straps on the back keeps it secure on the handle of a rolling bag. There are some mesh pockets on the inside, too.

Ultimate Travel Bag - Inside Mesh Slip Pockets

Ultimate Travel Bag - Inside Mesh Zippered Pocket

I'm planning to put the supplies that I take to sew days and retreats in this bag since my sewing machine is in a rolling case. I should be able to just secure this bag to the top of the case when taking things to and from the car.

While I had my suff out for making the travel bag, I decided to also make a Clam Up bag also designed by ByAnnie. I had a cheap kit for this bag, too, that I'd picked up years ago, but I decided to use my own fabric for this bag since the fabric in the kit was boring for a bag, but good semi-solids for use in other projects. I found a fun water drops fabric in my stash to use instead.

Clam Up Bag - Fabric and Quilting

The pattern says that you can either quilt the outer fabric and stabilizer or you can leave it unquilted. I like the stability of the quilted fabric better in my bags so I quilted it. I had fun playing with a special stitch on my sewing machine. I thought this stitch had a water drop feel. I used painter's tape to mark straight lines on my quilt sandwich 2" apart and sewed a line of the special stitch along each. Then I did another line of the special stitch halfway between each stitched line. Finally, I felt the fabric needed more quilting to get the stiffness that I wanted, so I added a line of straight stitching between each special stitching line. The result was exactly what I wanted. Here is the finished bag:

Clam Up Bag - Outside

Clam Up Bag - Inside

This little bag is easy to make, but has some nice features. The flat bottom makes the bag stand up easily on its own. The pleats on the sides will keep things in the bag and add a nice finishing detail.

I also did some work on the diamond border for my "Tulips Are Blooming" quilt from the "Floral Bouquet" pattern in the "Jelly Roll Quilts" book by Pam and Nicky Lintott. I had said last week that I was going to leave this for another retreat, but I have a bunch of white solid fabric in my project bag for this quilt and I decided that I want to get that back into my stash. I also felt like working on the math I needed to do for this border. So I cut a bunch of the fabric and started sewing pieces together. 

Tulips Are Blooming - Diamonds Border

First, I had to figure out the size of the squares of background fabric I needed so I could get the quarter square triangles needed for this border. I needed quarter square triangles to get stability along the length of the border, especially since the squares are on point and so have bias along the length of the border. You can't use the formula for cutting quarter square triangles for quarter square triangle blocks because these quarter square triangles are used differently. I also know that I am terrible at precision cutting quarter square triangles, so I did the math and added a good buffer for trimming and came up with needing 4.5" squares to make the triangles that I needed. I made a couple of test units and saw that this would work for me, then sewed multiple units together so that I could measure the final size of the diamonds in the border to calculate the number of diamonds I need for each border. Now that this part of the math is done, I can make the borders. Then I'll measure the final size of the borders and use the dimensions of the center of the quilt to figure out how wide to make the white borders that are between the center of the quilt and the diamond border so that everything will fit together perfectly. Luckily, I really enjoy playing with numbers!

Finally, I did some evening work on my Kalme Throw designed by DeBrosse. 

Kalme Throw

As usual, it's hard to see the progress, but I did get several more inches done. Someday, I'll have another soft blanket to cuddle under when watching TV!

Nancy

Ultimate Travel Bag Started

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! Things are good here! As I mentioned last week, Grace is now three years old. Hard to believe it! Buttercup, my cat, had her semi-annual vet visit this morning and everything went really well considering she's 17.5 years old. She's one tough little girl! Tomorrow is my great-niece's first birthday. She's getting so big! And my second great-niece (from a different mother) is due sometime next month. The family keeps growing!

As I mentioned in my last post, I spent last Friday and Saturday at a retreat with one of my quilt guilds. This time we went to Twisted Stitches in Superior, CO. This is a new sewing space that was just opened by a member of our guild. We were her first official event. It was a really nice space. Each person got their own table, with the tables arranged in groups of six. The tables are very stable, each had a little bank of electric plugs and the chairs were comfortable. There was an iron and ironing board at the end of each bank of tables and there were large design walls that could be rolled to different spots in the room. She also has HandiQuilter longarms in the space that can be rented and theres a kitchenette with a full size refrigerator to complete the space. I also brought my Gidget sewing table and was able to position it perpendicular to my table to make a nice workspace. Even though the table is heavy, I like to bring it because I like to have my machine sunk into the table. I worked on my Floral Bouquet quilt from the book "Jelly Roll Quilts" by Pam and Nicky Lintott. I'm calling my quilt "Tulips Are Blooming."

Tulips Are Blooming

I already had 25 blocks finished before the retreat, so at the retreat I pieced the other 14 blocks and sewed them together to make the main body of the quilt. I also got a very small start on the borders, but lost my steam and ended up going home a couple of hours early. I'm happy with what I accomplished! I don't like the borders in the pattern, which are a background border followed by a 2" border made from the leftover fabrics from the flowers. It makes sense for a jelly roll quilt, but I found it boring. I'm planning a plain background border, then a border of 2" squares of the flower fabrics on point, and then another fairly narrow background border to separate the squares from the binding. I figured out the math for the border of squares and got a few of those units prepared. I'll make a bunch of those squares and then will eyeball things to figure out how wide I want each border to be. But I've got other stuff I'm working on at home, so this will be put aside for now.

While I was looking through my collection of kits to prepare for the retreat, I came across a kit I picked up years ago for making the Ultimate Travel Bag designed by ByAnnie. (The kit is for the original version of the pattern; there is now a 2.0 version of the pattern on the Web site.) Since I don't like to work on complicated bags at retreats, I decided to get this kit out of the closet and start working on it. I got this kit years ago from Craftsy/Bluprint when they had a store along with their online lessons (and they used to have incredible sales). This kit came along with an online class so the written instructions frequently refer to the video, but I don't feel like spending the time to watch the video so there have been a few places that were confusing, but I also own the 2.0 version of the pattern so I can look at that to quickly verify some things. (I decided to stick to the original pattern rather than just making the 2.0 version because I wasn't sure if I would have the right supplies for the new version which has slight differences in the materials list.) Here's what I have done so far:

Ultimate Travel Bag

A lot of the time-consuming stuff is finished so I should have this bag finished by tomorrow.

One other little thing I've worked on this week is preparing pieces for my second rosette in my La Passacaglia quilt designed by Willyne Hammerstein. I wanted to get started on the next rosette because I spent some time catching up on unwatched episodes of TheQuiltShow.com and I came across one (episode 3705) where Tina Craig talked about English Paper Piecing (EPP). She shared a technique she has for positioning things for fussy cutting units. She makes a template out of card stock with a cut-out for the piece and uses that to position the paper EPP piece on the back of the fabric to get perfectly matched images. I don't want to go into any more detail here because I couldn't find a video of her technique on YouTube so I don't think she's sharing it publicly. Here's the units I prepared using her method:

La Passacaglia - Prepared Pieces for Rosette Center

I highly recommend this episode of TheQuiltShow.com if you like to EPP and you are a member of the site. She has ways of using this same technique for creating perfect mirror-image units from fabric that has mirror image motifs and for positioning images in the fabric that span multiple EPP pieces. I'll be trying that second method soon so will share a picture then to better show what I mean. While I was playing with the fabric, I also picked the fabric and did some prep work for the next couple of rounds of this rosette.

La Passacaglia - Second Rosette Center Rounds

I probably won't sew these together until our next EPP small group meeting since I've got other things that I want to work on first.

Nancy

First La Passacaglia Rossette Finished

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! Time definitely keeps marching along. Believe it or not, Grace turns three years old tomorrow! She got her Halloween picture taken on Friday:

Grace

You can tell how much she loves her photo shoots! 😀 

This week I put in some time on my La Passacaglia quilt designed by Willyne Hammerstein. I was able to finish my first rosette, which is Rosette #2 in the pattern:

La Passacaglia - Rosette #2

The last round of this rosette is a partial round because surrounding rosettes overlap this one. There are three of these rosettes in the quilt. I'm excited to get to start on the second one! These are the largest rosettes in the quilt so I'm knocking them off first.

I also spent some time this week making more of the 16-patch Quilts of Valor (QOV) blocks for out quilt guild. This set of blocks is made from the 1.5" squares.

QOV Blocks

I turned in all of my blocks at the meeting this week. I plan to make more to turn in at our next meeting.

Finally, I've been preparing for the "no frills" retreat that I'm attending this Friday and Saturday with the quilt guild. The no frills retreats are daytime-only retreats with no meals or anything besides the venue provided. This time we're going to a new retreat center just opened by one of the guild members. It's called Twisted Stitches and is located in Superior, CO.  They just got their certificate of occupancy last week so we'll be the first group trying it out. I look forward to seeing what the center is like! I've heard a lot of good things from others who have stopped by to check it out. To prepare, I spent some time looking through my collection of quilt kits that I have in the closet. I have a bunch of quilt kits that I've picked up through the years from the incredible sales that Connecting Threads and Craftsy/Bluprint used to have. I like to take quilt kits to retreats because the quilts I work on at home are generally scrap quilts where I figure out the fabrics I want to use from my as I go along. I never know what fabrics will end up in my quilts. This doesn't work well in retreats! It was really fun to dig through the closet! There's a lot of good stuff in there! One of the projects I found was a quilt that I started in another retreat years ago. It's the Floral Bouquet pattern in the book "Jelly Roll Quilts" by Pam and Nicky Lintott. I'm calling my "Tulips Are Blooming." Here's what I made at the last retreat:

Tulips Are Blooming

I had forgotten all about this quilt, but I really love it and look forward to finishing it! If I get this one done, I've got another project to start. It's the Bubble Plus quilt designed by I Am Luna Sol. This is one of the kits from Connecting Threads. To prepare this project for the retreat, I prewashed all of the fabrics and I created the needed templates. Creating the templates was fun because I used my Brother Scan-n-Cut that I got for my birthday. I was able to easily cut perfect templates in no time!

Bubble Plus - Templates

I labeled the templates not because the shapes were hard to tell apart, but to keep the templates from disappearing on the table top. While I was digging through my kits, I ran across a kit for the Tula Sunrise quilt designed by Tula Pink. I picked this kit up at the going out of business sale from one of our local quilt stores. I realized this would be a perfect project to leave at my sister's house to work on when I'm there. So I prewashed the fabric and ordered the plastic templates for this quilt. This is an English Paper Piecing project and I like using the pattern-specific plastic templates for cutting out the fabric when making the quilts. I haven't decided if I'll take this project or one of my wool embroidery projects to the retreat. I like to have a hand project at retreats in case there's a problem with my sewing machine or something while I'm away from home. Now I just have to go through my supplies to make sure I don't forget anything.....

Nancy

A Slow Week

 Hi all -

It looks like fall is truly here as the weather has cooled down. I had a bit of a slow week this week. The mojo just wasn't there. But I do have a few accomplishments to share.

A week and a half ago the Colorado Quilt Council had their annual quilt show called Quilt-A-Fair. It's a bit of a strange show since the floor is filled with vendors and the quilts are hung in the rafters. So it's a bit hard to see the quilts. I actually went to the show for about 10 years before I realized it was a show and not a vendor event! Anyway, I went again this year and bought more than I had planned or needed! At one of the booths, I picked up a couple of precut applique kits from The Whole Country Caboodle. This company has applique kits for a bunch of different dog breeds. I picked up a kit for each of my sisters to represent their dogs. This week I prepared the appliques for each kit.

German Shepard

Dachshund

I still need to pick background fabrics and put everything together, but this was a start. I'll probably try to get these finished by Christmas, but it's okay if they don't get done until later.

We also had our monthly English Paper Piecing (EPP) meeting last Friday. I use that time to work on my La Passacaglia quilt designed by Willyne Hammerstein. This month I finished basting the pieces for the last part of my first rosette and started sewing the pieces together into units.

La Passacaglia

The units I'm working on are the purple star units on the right in the picture. In the quilt, this round of the rosette is partially obscured by other rosettes so there are only six of the double-star units in this round. I accidentally prepared enough of the purple triangle units to make a full round of the units, but that's okay since there are a lot of other star rounds in other rosettes so I can use those extra units in another rosette. This is the final round of this rosette so I'm excited to get this finished and move on to the next rosette!

Finally, our quilt guild has asked us to make a bunch of 16-patch units to be used in Quilts of Valor (QOV) quilts.  They want us to use red, white and blue as well as gold, gray, tan and cream for the blocks and they want the blocks to be scrappy. They want blocks made out of 1.5" squares and blocks made out of 2.5" squares. So I spent some time this weekend going through my scraps and cutting squares to use for the blocks. When I needed a break from cutting, I put together a few blocks.

QOV Blocks - 2.5" Squares

It was fun to use up some of the scraps! They are collecting blocks through the end of the year so I'll keep adding squares to the pile and making new blocks. They plan to use the blocks as centers of churn dask and star blocks. 

Nancy

Modern Flowers Baby Quilt Finished

 Hi all -

Well, we had our first snow last night. We got about 2". It felt weird to shovel the front porch again! I have an appointment to get my winter tires put on tomorrow so I'll be ready for whatever decides to come next! We always hope for a lot of snow up here to help stave off the fires!

My biggest accomplishment this week was finishing my Modern Flowers baby quilt. I finished the quilting, added the binding and washed the quilt to get out the markings I used for the quilting.

Modern Flowers

(Looking at the picture now, I probably should have trimmed a little more off of the left side of the quilt to center the applique better, but oh well....) I added a few more quilting motifs. The motifs are harder to see because of how the unquilted areas puff up after washing.

Modern Flowers - Unnamed Quilting Motif

Modern Flowers - Paisley Leaves Quilting

Modern Flowers - Simple Curls Quilting

Here's the back of the finished quilt:

Modern Flowers - Back

It's good to have this finished even though I'll be holding onto it until Christmas when I can gift the quilt in person (the baby is due in November).

To fill out my gift for the baby shower which is this Saturday, I also crocheted a Hearts Summerhat designed by KreaSoul designs to include in her shower gift. I wasn't sure what the yarn for this hat should feel like so I decided to order the same yarn that was used by the designer. Unfortunately, this yarn is only sold by the company that makes it and that company is in Denmark so I had to pay a 30% tariff and, even though the package was shipped immediately and made it to the US in no time, it sat in customs in Louisville, KY for over two weeks so I had to crochet the hat as quickly as possible. Luckily it was a quick pattern! I received the yarn on Monday afternoon and was able to finish the hat in time to take the gift to FedEx on Wednesday morning. 

Hearts Summerhat

Hearts Summerhat

The yarn is a softer green than it appears in the pictures. I actually ended up making the hat twice since my gauge was too big when using the suggested hook. So I had to pull out what I'd done and start over with a smaller hook. But I really like the size it ended up being! My sister let me know that the package arrived at her house over the weekend so it will actually be there for the shower! This is exciting for me since the gift I sent for my great niece who was born last year was sent USPS and after it arrived at the Kansas City distribution center the post office sent it back to the Denver distribution center who then sent it back to KC so the package arrived the day after the shower even though it was mailed in plenty of time. I really want to support our USPS, but I've had such bad luck with them that I really can't anymore. Sorry for the rant.....

Finally, I made some more progress on my Kalme Throw designed by DeBrosse. 

Kalme Throw

The progress is slow on this, but I love to see it grow! Grace wanted to get in the photo, too, but the clothes line was too tall for her!

Grace Trying to Photobomb

It's hard to believe that she'll be three years old in a couple of weeks! Boy, does the time fly!!

Nancy

Autumn in the Rockies!

 Hi all -

Autumn is here and the Aspen are showing their beautiful colors!

Fall Colors

I wish the photo showed the glow in the colors. They are so incredible!

I've continued to work on the baby quilt for my great niece who is due in November. This quilt is from the Spring Baby Quilt designed by Pat Bravo in the Bernina WeAllSew blog. I've finished most of the quilting on the quilt.

Modern Flowers Baby Quilt

Each section of the quilt has a different background fill in it.

Modern Flowers Baby Quilt - Flowers Quilting

Modern Flowers Baby Quilt - Nemeshing

Modern Flowers Baby Quilt - Meandering

Modern Flowers Baby Quilt - Paisley Quilting

Modern Flowers Baby Quilt - McTavishing

Modern Flowers Baby Quilt - 3's and E's Quilting

Although some of the quilting is pretty bad, overall I'm very happy with it so far. The 3's and E's quilting is especially bad, but luckily it doesn't matter because the texture is good and nobody else will know what I was going for. I needed to practice this design on paper in an odd-shaped area because I kept getting confused about how to get over to the next space I wanted to quilt. This demonstrates two good lessons about free motion quilting -- practicing on paper is a good way to learn how to move around in the design and in the end it doesn't matter if your quilting is "right" as long as it provides the right amount of texture and you do it consistently, mistakes and all. Here is a view of the back with the quilting so far:

Modern Flowers Baby Quilt - Back

I just have three more areas to go! I look forward to getting it finished so I can soak out the marking lines to let the texture shine!

I also have a finish this week. I was able to complete my Scarfscape designed by Laura Nelkin. I also blocked the scarf, but I didn't take the time to pin it out to open up the lace.

Scarfscape - Blocking

Scarfscape - Close-Up

The lace would be more even and open if I had pinned it, but I'm really happy with it the way it is and it feels wonderful around my neck! The bead placement in this design is wonderful. It enhances the knitting design, but also provides weight in the right places to make it wear well.

I also made a lot of progress on my Kalme Throw designed by DeBrosse. It looks like I've doubled the size of the blanket since last time.

Kalme Throw

These stitches are small, so it takes a long time to make progress on this blanket! But it's moving along!

Finally, I started a new project. Laura Nelkin is having her annual Mystery Knit-A-Long (MKAL). This year her design is called Into the Hoods. It's a collection of three different hoods (a balaclava, a dickey style and a hooded scarf), each of which can be knit in one or two colors. I picked out yarn this week and knit the gauge swatch.

Into the Hoods

I plan to make the one-color balaclava version of the hood. I've had this yarn in my stash for a long time. It's a bit hard to knit, but I think the resulting hood will be beautiful! Hopefully there won't be too many fancy stitches in this project!

Nancy

Started Quilting Modern Flowers Baby Quilt

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! Time sure is flying by! Can you believe we're over half way done with September??? We even have rain possibly mixed with snow forecast for this Tuesday! We've been getting a lot of short rain showers recently which has been great for keeping the fire season at bay. No fires anywhere near us yet this season. Gotta love that!!

I've continued to work on the baby quilt for my great niece who is due in November. It's a modern flower quilt design based on a post in the Bernina WeAllSew blog. I love to add interest to the back of a quilt by piecing it from the leftover fabrics from the front. I love the fun this adds to the quilt. And my niece once said that she loves my pieced backings, too, so I wanted to make sure to make this quilt back interesting! I also had some leftover stabilizer pieces that I cut for the applique on the front, so I wanted to add applique to the back using these. Here's what I ended up doing for the back:

Modern Flowers Baby Quilt - Backing

It's a little crazy, but I love it! Now I was ready to start the quilting. I mentioned before that I was thinking about dividing the quilt into random polygons and quilting each with a different background fill. The more I thought about it, the more I liked it. For this design, it was important that the lines dividing up the quilt be as straight as possible, so I needed to mark the lines on the quilt front before doing the basting.

Modern Flowers Baby Quilt - Marking the Lines

I taped the quilt top to the floor before drawing the lines to make sure that everything would be straight. I used a very long ruler to draw the initial line, then used a shorter ruler that also has measurements marked to draw another line 1/4" away from the first. Then I added more lines in places that looked pleasing to my eye. I drew the lines disregarding the applique even though I won't be quilting the lines over the applique to make things easier for me to see. I also crossed out the little lines that appear where the long lines intersect to remind myself while I'm quilting to not quilt there.

Modern Flowers Baby Quilt - Close-Up of Markings

Now I was ready to baste the quilt. I tend to have the best luck with pin basting. So I got back down on the floor and pinned the heck out of the quilt. I started the quilting by quilting all of the dividing lines and quilting around all of the applique shapes that touch the lines.

Modern Flowers Baby Quilt - Lines Quilted

Modern Flowers Baby Quilt - Close-Up of Quilting

Now I can start choosing background fills and filling in the different areas. I'll quilt around the rest of the applique shapes while doing the background quilting.

In the evenings I've been working hard on the Scarfscape scarf designed by Laura Nelkin. This is the second project in this year's N Club. 

Scarfscape

I've made some really good progress on this project this week. The white marker shows where I was in my last blog post, so I've completed most of the border lace this week.

Scarfscape - Close-Up

I've been really looking forward to getting to the orange section of the yarn, and now I'm there! The pattern is designed so that you make the most of your skein of yarn. So, when getting near the end you start weighing your yarn after each wrong-side row and when you have a certain amount left you move to the final rows and the bind off. I'm to that point now, so the end is in sight! I wish I could somehow put the feeling of the yarn in this post. It feels light as a cloud and so incredibly soft while doing the knitting! That makes it a little harder to knit since it can slide around on the needles, but I keep imagining how wonderful it'll feel around my neck when it's finished! 

Nancy