Started Quilting Pink and Gray Quilt

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! This was a busy week, but it was good. We started out getting some wonderful snow. It snowed almost non-stop for three days with those large fluffy spring snowflakes. There was a lot of melting because the days were getting up to 40F so it was hard to tell how much we got, but I would say it amounted to 1-2 feet of snow. Things are really green and lovely now! It has warmed up so most of the snow is gone now, but there is some rain in the forecast. Luckily, the snow let up in time to allow me to go to town for the rest of the week. We had our quilt guild meeting on Thursday, a hand quilting class on Friday and a guild sew day on Saturday. It was great to see everyone, but I'm looking forward to spending the day at home today!

I was excited to start the quilting on my pink and gray quilt this week. This quilt was just small enough for me to pin baste it on my kitchen floor. For anything larger, I'll have to have a longarmer baste it for me. On our sew day, I was talking to the owner of the retreat center and she asked me about a larger quilt I had been working on (my Jungle Magnolia quilt top that you can see here). I told her that I had the top finished and the backing planned, but it was on the back burner because I needed to find a longarmer for the basting. She said that they would do it in the center if I wanted. Spectacular! Now I need to get to work on that.... Anyway, back to this week. I got the pink and gray quilt basted and started the quilting. I started with the stitch-in-the-ditch (SID) quilting on the seams between the blocks.

Pink and Gray Quilt - Quilting

You can't see the quilting well on the front (which is what you want), so here it is on the back:

Pink and Gray Quilt - Quilting on Back

Still not much to see, but st least you can tell what I'm doing. I hope to get the SID done on the insides of the frames in each block this week. Then I need to decide how I want to quilt inside the blocks.

Then there was the quilting class we had. It was a hand quilting/big stitch class taught by Katie Zahm. Katie specializes in designing modern quilts and combines machine quilting with big stitch in most of her quilts. She is a good teacher and did an incredible amount of preparation to make our class useful and fun. For the class, she designed a stitching sampler that we could use to experiment with different thread and needle combinations and to practice our stitches both in simple lines and in quilt block mock ups. A couple of our wonderful guild members traced the sampler pattern onto solid fabric ahead of time so we could make a quick quilt sandwich in class and get started with practicing right away. The sampler page was drawn with permanent ink to represent the "block" edges and iron-off ink where we would do our stitching. Then, when finished with the stitching, we can iron the piece so we can really see our stitches. She also gave us a thick and thorough write-up of everything she discussed in the class. 

Big Stitch Class - Full Sampler

Big Stitch Sampler - Left Side

Big Stitch Sampler - Right Side

We started with stitching straight lines using different thread and needle size combinations. For this section, dashed lines were drawn so we could work on our stitch sizes. When we found our preferred combination, we moved on to stitching around shapes. She showed us how she buries her knots and talked about things like how she decides where to start on a shape and what she does as she approaches a corner.

Big Stitch Sampler - My Quilting Around Shapes

She also talked about how she finishes her bindings. She sews the binding on the quilt front by machine, then uses big stitch or simple embroidery stitches to secure it on the back. The sampler includes a section at the bottom of the left side for sample embroidery stitches that are nice to use for bindings. The sampler book is designed so that, when finished with the stitching, we can add a binding using the embroidery stitch technique, then fold the book and sew down the middle to create a convenient record of our stitches. Very well thought-out!

At our Saturday sew day, I got out my Lilah quilt kit designed by Yellow Cat Quilt Designs. This is the quilt I had prepared earlier by cutting out the pieces for the quilt blocks. At the sew day I sewed all of the pieces together to make the units for the first block.

Lilah - First Block Units

Not a lot of progress for a day, but it took me a while to square up the flying geese blocks and I did spend a lot of time chatting with others. It was a fun day!

On the knitting front, I finished my second Frozen Snowflakes Beanie designed by Deja Joy. 

Frozen Snowflakes Beanie

Then I used the leftover yarn to make pom poms for the hats.

Frozen Snowflakes Beanies - Pom Poms

It was nice to use up all of the yarn and I like how the pom poms complete the look of the hats! This is a fun and easy hat that I highly recommend.

Finally, I made some progress on my Rill Scarf designed by Miriam L. Felton. 

Rill Scarf

I've finished the increase section, now have a bunch of repeats to do for the body. With the lace weight yarn, this will be another wonderful lightweight scarf!

Nancy