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