Amazon Star Top Finished

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well and is enjoying their summer! It's hard to believe that August is just around the corner! Time sure does fly!!

This week, I was able to finish my Amazon Star quilt top designed by Judy Niemeyer. 

Amazon Star

I was amazed at how easily this quilt went together! The only "difficult" part was wrangling the quilt when insetting the large squares in the corners. The quilt is 104"x104", so there was a lot of fabric to wrestle with while sewing these Y-seams! If Judy were writing this pattern today, it would be even easier to put together. Last week I mentioned the smart corners that she uses now, but her newer patterns have also made the Lone Star units easier to make. In this pattern, you sewed each strip of diamonds separately. In newer patterns (like the Jungle Magnolia I'm also working on below), you sew strips together and then cut them into the needed rows of diamonds. So much easier! We got our next next packet for the Jungle Magnolia Block-of-the-Month (BOM) on the day I finished piecing Amazon Star, so I put this aside to work on the BOM. When I catch back up on the BOM, I'll prepare the binding for this quilt and then put it in my to-be-quilted pile. I'll need to find a longarmer to baste this quilt for me before I can quilt it. But I know this quilt will be really fun to quilt when I get to it! Except, of course, for having to wrangle the bulk of it! 

As mentioned above, this week I got the next packet for my Jungle Magnolia BOM also designed by Judy Niemeyer. I've made this my highest priority because I'm usually so bad about getting behind on these things. So I started on it right away. I got the first couple of units finished this weekend.

Jungle Magnolia - B5 Units

Jungle Magnolia - B6 Units

Jungle Magnolia - B7 Units

These units will be put together like this:

Jungle Magnolia - Unit Placement

And a Lone Star-style unit will be slipped into the bottom of these units. After I assemble the block, I'm curious to see how it will be added to the rest of the quilt!

Nancy

Amazon Star Assembly Begun

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! I've been working like a crazy person on my Amazon Star quilt designed by Judy Niemeyer. I'm not sure why, but I'm really driven to finish this one! (Or, at least, the quilt top. It'll be a while before I can do the quilting....). 

First, I had to finish making all of the units. There were quite a few left to do, but some of them were pretty small. The part 5 units were pretty quick:

Amazon Star - Part 5 Right Units

Amazon Star - Part 5 Left Units

The part 6 units were also pretty quick.

Amazon Star - Part 6 Right Units

Amazon Star - Part 6 Left Units

With those units, I was starting to see the quilt come together.

Amazon Star - Units Through Part 6

This was getting me excited! Now I just had to make the outer units.

Amazon Star - Part 7 Units

Amazon Star - Part 8 Right Units

Amazon Star - Part 8 Left Units

As the spikes got longer, the units got more difficult to make. For the final units, I found that I had to use pins to hold the fabric pieces in place while sewing.

Amazon Star - Part 9 Right Units

Amazon Star - Part 9 Left Units

Whew! With all of the units finished, I was able to start the assembly. I got the center star put together, then got the side pieces assembled. Here is everything laid out on the floor:

Amazon Star - Current Progress

Now I'm starting on the assembly of the corner units. The sewing itself goes pretty quickly, but I have to take the time to pull out the papers from the units when instructed. The hardest part about the sewing is that this is an old Judy Niemeyer pattern so it doesn't have the "smart corners" integrated into the pattern pieces. On current patterns, Judy has you cut off the extra fabric on the corners so that you can just line of the edges of the pieces in the corners to get things to fit properly. In the older patterns this isn't done so you have to figure out how to do that yourself. This can be difficult when the pieces have very sharp corners. This is hard to explain in words, so let me show you an example. Here is a place where I'm connecting a sharp spike to another piece. Here are the pieces from each side:

Pieces From Spke Side

Pieces From Other Side

I had to figure out how far the point of the spike needed to protrude in order to get a straight edges from the spike to the yellow piece. It look completely wrong! But, as you can see, when you press the seam, you get a straight edge:

Resulting Straight Edge

The trick to getting the straight edge is to line up the pieces so that the point of the "v" created when you lay the one piece on top of the other is exactly 1/4" from the raw edge you are sewing. This can be difficult to get right. In the newer Judy Niemeyer patterns, the pattern piece would have the tip of the blue piece cut off so that you just line up those edges to get perfect matches. I hope that makes sense!

Anyway, that's all for this week. I'm guessing I'll have this top completely assembled by next week. Cross your fingers for me!

Nancy

Amazon Star Part 4 Finished

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well and staying safe! We continue to have evening thunderstorms here. I'm very thankful for the precipitation! It's hard to say that when so many are getting excessive precipitation right now! My heart goes out to all of them!!

I've been concentrating on my Amazon Star quilt designed by Judy Niemeyer. I was able to finish the eight Lone Star units for part 3:

Amazon Star - Part 3 Units

And I was able to finish the 16 units for part 4:

Amazon Star - Part 4 Right Units

Amazon Star - Part 4 Left Units

Here's what these units look like when put together:

Amazon Star - Current Progress

I've started working on part 5, but haven't taken any pictures. 

This was my week for having my monthly quilt guild meetings, so I did also spend a day helping to make Quilts of Valor for veterans and I spent an afternoon working on my English Paper Piecing project, but I don't have any pictures of either of those. It's always so much fun to get together with my quilting friends!

Nancy

Jungle Magnolia Month 4 Finished

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well and had a great Fourth of July! 

I was determined to have this month's part of the Jungle Magnolia BOM designed by Judy Niemeyer finished for this blog post so I had some marathon sewing sessions this week. It was tiring, but I achieved my goal! There were four units included in this month's section.

Jungle Magnolia - Finished C1 Units

Jungle Magnolia - Finished C2 Units

Jungle Magnolia - Finished C3 Units

Jungle Magnolia - Finished C4 Units

As I mentioned last week, this month had the first applique of the project. The circles on the flowers and the veins on the leaves are all applique. The pattern includes laser cut stabilizer pieces for the applique. I liked the stabilizer because it is stiff enough to keep good edges when you are folding your fabric over the edge to prepare the applique. It is supposed to break down when the quilt is washed to leave the applique soft in the final quilt. I'll know better about that once finish the piecing and quilting, which will be some time down the road! But I decided that I wanted to get more of this stabilizer for my own use, but I had trouble figuring out which stabilizer it was. I ended up ordering Bosal Stitch-n-Peel. I'll see if it's the right stuff when it arrives. The other new technique for this month was sewing an s-curve. An s-curve has a concave curve that transitions into a convex curve. To sew it, you sew each section separately. You can see the s-curve in the C3 unit on the left in this picture:

Jungle Magnolia - C3/C4 Units

This curve was a bit of a pain to sew. The bottom portion was easy because of the gentle curve, but the top portion is fairly tight so more difficult to sew. They had us sew the bottom portion of the curve first. I feel like that's the easiest way even though I didn't try the other way to make sure. The top of the curve was so tight that I had to fold the piece over on itself just to glue the seam. 

Jungle Magnolia - Glued Seam

It was hard to get a picture to demonstrate this, but this at least shows it a bit. This picture is actually after gluing and then flipping the direction of the curl since you glue it with the fabric on top, but sew it with the paper on top. Then you have to get the piece under the foot of the sewing machine and keep the fabric curved around to keep things flat under the foot while sewing it together and keeping everything flat. My first try, I got a long pleat where the fabric folded over itself a small amount for about an inch (sorry, I forgot to get a picture). So I learned to pull on hte fabric on the bottom while peering around the side of the piece to see the paper under the foot with the bulk of the piece folded over on top of the sewing area. Awkward, but I didn't have any problems with the rest of the seams! I got everything sewed together and here is my current progress:

Jungle Magnolia - Current Progress

This is just 1/4 of the quilt since I don't have enough space to display the entire thing. Just two more months and I'll have a finished quilt top!

I spent most of my time on BOM, but I did take a few small breaks to work on other stuff. I made some progress on my Kalme Throw designed by DeBrosse.

Kalme Throw

I also finished the stitching for the first butterfly in my Flying Beauties cross stitch:

Flying Beauties

Well, that's it for this week.

Nancy