Amazon Star Part 2 Finished

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! It's hard to believe that summer will be here soon! We are in my most miserable time of year right now. It's pine pollen season here. The yellow pollen is EVERYWHERE! I park my car under a tree and it was just covered this morning when I went to the grocery store. I have to drive for a little while with all of the windows closed to shed most of the pollen, then I have to use the wipers to clear the rest of the windshield. If you start with the wipers, you get a bunch of the yellow pollen where the wipers end and it won't fly off on its own. I trimmed Grace's toe nails this morning and she still has some pollen on her back from having to lay on her back on the porch. She was completely yellow when I was done and the pollen is waxy so I couldn't brush it off with my hands. I also had a window open in the kitchen yesterday and every surface is covered in a light coating of yellow pollen even though there was no wind. Crazy stuff! And I'm allergic so I've been coughing and sneezing and fighting a headache and itchy eyes. Luckily this only lasts a couple of weeks and I'll be in Kansas City for a week. I'm hoping for a quick season so all of the pollen is dropped before I get back! Then I'll just have to do the clean-up. It's a pain, but it's beautiful enough up here to make up for it!

This week I concentrated on my Amazon Star quilt designed by Judy Niemeyer. I was able to finish part 2 of the instructions. Part 2 consisted of making 8 of these units:

Amazon Star - Part 2 Unit

Amazon Star - All Part 2 Units

These units took a lot long to make than I expected because I had to first understand the directions and make the units. Then there was a lot of time removing the papers. I used glue on the pieces when sewing because I was having trouble with the fabric shifting, and then I had some trouble releasing the paper from the fabric.

Amazon Star - Paper and Glue Remnants on Back

I removed as much of the paper as I could, but I couldn't get it all. While I'd rather have everything clean on the back, it's not worth putting in too much effort on this since the glue will dissolve in the wash and any paper that doesn't disappear will just sit in the batting. After making the units, they were attached to the part 1 units:

Amazon Star - Completed Units

I also gat a start on part 3 of the instructions:

Amazon Star - Part 3 Units Started

The part 3 units are 4x4 Lone Star units. They will go between the part 2 star points, with some other units in between. As the dark fabric in the next units are added to the quilt, I think the light star points from part 2 will really start to glow. 

Nancy

Jungle Magnolia Month 3 Finished

 Hi all -

We've continued to see a lot of rain here. Boy, is it green! And I have a lot of beautiful wild flowers in the yard! The weather is just now starting to move into our normal June cycle of dry, clear mornings with some thread of rain and thunderstorms in the afternoons. I love that mix!

I'm excited that I'm staying up-to-date on my Jungle Magnolia BOM (Block of the Month) designed by Judy Niemeyer. I don't usually keep up with things like this, so I'm pretty happy with myself right now. To finish it, this week I finished putting together the D units:

Jungle Magnolia - D1 Units

Jungle Magnolia - D2 Units

Then I had to attach the D units to the other finished units:

Jungle Magnolia

You can really see the quilt coming together! We had our monthly BOM small group meeting today so I finished the prep work for next month's units and started on the prep work for the following month. Since I have the entire pattern, I can do the prep work (which consists of cutting apart all of the paper foundations and the unit templates, which come on large sheets of newsprint) early so I can get right to piecing when the fabric arrives each month. There's a lot of prep work for Judy Niemeyer patterns!

I found it a little confusing starting up again on Jungle Magnolia after the time off between fabric packets, so I decided to go ahead and buy the fabric for my Amazon Star quilt also designed by Judy Niemeyer and get started on that one.  I started by purchasing the fabric:

Amazon Star - Purchased Fabric

The pattern calls for 17 different fabrics. Since this isn't a perfect world (why not???), the store didn't have colors that matched exactly what I was looking for. Luckily, they had a table where I could set the bolts out as I tried to figure out which fabrics would work for each color. I then had to load those in the shopping cart carefully to keep the order intact and then had to make the clerk cut the fabric in order and keep the stacks in order. I like to prewash my fabrics, so I bought a little extra of each one to account for shrinkage. When I got home, I took the fabrics out of the bag in order and wrote the fabric number in the corner on each piece with a Sharpie. I could then wash the fabrics without having to worry about the order. I could also have clipped a little square from each fabric and pasted them to the sheet in the pattern that is designed for this, but some of these fabrics are pretty similar so using the Sharpie ensured that no mistakes were made. When the fabrics came out of the dryer, I carefully folded each piece and put a numbered clip on each so I could keep everything organized.

Amazon Star - Washed and Folded Fabrics

Amazon Star - Numbered Clips

I bought these clips years ago and they really are useful. I can write whatever on the tabs with a wet erase marker and then wipe them clean with a wet rag when I'm done. Now, as with Jungle Magnolia, it was time to prepare the pattern pieces. Did I mention there's a lot of prep work in a Judy Niemeyer pattern?? Luckily, this pattern is a lot less complicated than the Jungle Magnolia pattern! I was able to get the prep work done in just a couple of hours. First, I had to cut out the paper foundations and put them in the designated bags to keep thing organized:

Amazon Star - Foundation Papers

Then I had to cut out the cutting templates. After cutting out the templates, I clipped them to the appropriate fabric so I can easily find them when I need them.

Amazon Star - Cutting Templates with Associated Fabric

The pattern then has you do all of the fabric cutting at once, but I'm going to just cut the fabrics needed for each part as I do the piecing. I'm hoping this will allow me to audition the fabrics for each unit along the way to hopefully catch any colors that aren't working. I was able to piece the units for the first part of the quilt:

Amazon Star - First Units

These are the center units for the quilt. They are just laying next to each other as they aren't sewn together until later. I'm liking the colors so far!

I've also continue working on my Flying Beauties cross-stitch kit. You can now tell that I'm working on the first butterfly:

Flying Beauties

I love watching the picture come to life when doing cross-stitch! 

I also did some work on my Flower Pincushion designed by Sue Spargo:

Flower Pincushion

I'm now done with the embroidery. The next step is to applique a length of ribbon to the bottom piece and then I can put everything together. Then, of course, it'll be time to start a new project (or 2 or 3....)!

Finally, I started another crochet blanket. This one is the Kalme Throw designed by DeBrosse.

Kalme Throw

Kalme Throw - Stitch Pattern Close-Up

This is an even simpler blanket than my last one. It is just the same stitch repeated for 190 rows.! There's no border on this one so I can easily add extra rows if I have extra yarn and want a longer blanket.

Nancy

Jungle Magnolia Month 3 Started

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! We continue to have a lot of rain up here. Everything is so green! I've been having fun buying flowering plants and putting them in pots on my deck. They are so cheerful! And so far they don't seem to be tasty-looking to the moose, so that's really good! I hope it stays that way, but if not, it was a fun experiment.

This week I received the month 3 fabric for the Jungle Magnolia BOM designed by Judy Niemeyer. I had a long wait to receive my package this month because the post office in Denver decided to send my package out west to Kremmling, CO instead of sending it to me. So what should have taken a day (I'm only an hour from the shop that sends it), ended up taking a week. I have a lot of trouble with the post office in Denver sending my packages all over the place before they come to me. Very frustrating! But I got my fabric on Friday and got started on it this weekend. This month's bundle included two "chapters" - E and D (the chapters are named from the inside out, but we are constructing the quilt from the outside in). I was able to finish the E units:

Jungle Magnolia - E1 Units

Jungle Magnolia - E2 Units

These units look the same, but they are slightly different and they are mirror images. I got these units attached to the previous units. Here is how a corner of the quilt looks so far:

Jungle Magnolia - Corner Units So Far

This quilt really is pretty spectacular! I also got a start on the D units:

Jungle Magnolia - D1 Unit Components

Jungle Magnolia - D1 Unit Components

I was hoping to have this month's units finished for this blog post, but all of the trimming, gluing and removing papers takes a lot more time than you would expect! But I'll be finished with this part soon enough.

While waiting for my Jungle Magnolia package, I was able to finish my Peach Sorbet Throw designed by Janine Myska.

Peach Sorbet Throw

It didn't take too long since I only had a couple more stripes to add and then the border.

Peach Sorbet Throw - Border

The border is thin, but it stabilizes the edges of the blanket and looks pretty.

I've also been wanting to do some cross stitch again. I looked through my stash of kits and pulled out the Flying Beauties kit. I did all of the prep work and got a small start on the stitching.

Flying Beauties

It doesn't look like much yet, but that yellow blotch will grow to be a beautiful butterfly's wing. I wanted to try using knitCompanion (the software I use for keeping track of my place in the pattern when knitting and crocheting) to keep track of my progress on this, but I couldn't get the chart to scan in square so I could set it up in the app. I was too lazy to learn how to clean up charts so I just went ahead and started working on it the old-fashioned way with the paper pattern. But I do want to learn how to do this so I'll have to spend some time on this sometime.

Nancy