Night Howler Finished

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! I had an exciting morning. This morning I had a bird in the house. It must have come in through the broken screen on the sliding glass door in the bedroom. Grace ran through the screen some time ago and I haven't gotten it fixed since I don't know how I'll fit it in the car to take it down to town. Because I'm afraid of animals getting in the house, I only open the door at night to try to cool off the bedroom when I sleep. (It's the only window in the bedroom.). Otherwise, I keep the door closed. I figured no animals would come in at night since the door is only open about a foot, I have a fan in the opening to pull in the cooler air, I'm sleeping in my bed right by the door and I have a dog and a cat (some of the time) sleeping in the room. But there was a bird in the house this morning and that's the only way I can think that it could have gotten in here. Anyway, the bird was in the sewing room when I heard it. The sewing room has a vaulted ceiling and lots of windows and skylights that don't open. I opened the sliding glass door in that room for a while, but the bird never flew down low enough to find it. After thinking for a while, I realized that I have another window in the loft that doesn't have a screen (that I never open because it doesn't have a screen). The loft is up by the ceiling so I figured the bird would be more likely to find it. It must have found the window soon after I opened it because I haven't heard the bird since. I was really happy that it found its way out before the cat found it! Now all is well and we seem to be critter free! Anyway, on to the crafting.....

I was able to finish Night Howler designed by Art East Quilting Co this week. I used straight line quilting and I marked every line because it bothers me when the lines are off and my lines tend to skew when I just line up the walking foot to quilt them. I'm really happy with the results!

Night Howler

Night Howler - Back

Night Howler - Quilting Close-Up

When I finished, I shared this quilt with some friends on a machine quilting forum. A couple of them pointed out that the pattern name might not be a good one for a baby quilt -- hopefully this baby won't be a night howler!! 😂 

This week I was also lucky enough to attend Susan Cleveland's Dynamic Dresdens quilt class. Susan spoke at our guild meeting and then provided a class the next day. I feel so lucky to have been able to take this class because Susan said she is retiring. I've always wanted to take a class from her but never had the opportunity before. It was wonderful! We worked on Susan's Seven Ringie Dingies pattern. I've completed one Dresden ring.

Seven Ringie Dingies - First Ring

Susan uses her precision piecing techniques along with a fabric foundation in order to keep her rings flat.

Seven Ringie Dingies - Back of Ring

She includes full-size patterns for the foundations in her book. She also uses her Prairie Point pressing tool to get good points on the Dresdens.

Seven Ringie Dingies - Pressing the Points

The class was so fun! Susan is an incredible teacher and her enthusiasm is contagious! I wish I could take more classes from her, but am so happy that I at least caught this one!

Finally, I came across a really old project when cleaning out one of my closets. It's a needlepoint/half cross stitch kit from Bernat called Winter Vespers. I can't believe I found one for sale on Etsy so I can share a picture of it! I started this sometime in the 1980's when I was living in Lawrence, KS.

Winter Vespers

I made some progress on this this week after pulling it out. I've been wanting to do some needlepoint, so this was a fun find. This kit is needlepoint, but it uses the floss that you use for cross stitch. I had kept everything organized, so was able to pick it up and get started again fairly easily. The masking tape around the outside edge has dried out and the canvas may have yellowed a bit with age, but I can easily replace the tape and the canvas will be covered by the floss when the piece is finished so no big deal.

Nancy

Started Quilting Night Howler

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! Things are good here. I've been busy and have been getting a lot done. The weather has been pleasant at my house. There have been storms down in Boulder and that area, but unfortunately not more than a few sprinkles up here.

This week I made some really good progress on Night Howler, designed by Art East Quilting Co. This is the quilt I'm making for my great nephew who is due in October. I started by preparing the binding. I always prepare the binding before making the backing to make sure I have the binding fabric that I want. Then I start using leftovers to create the backing.

Night Howler - Backing

This backing is more chaotic and took longer to make that most of my backings because of the pictorial nature of the quilt top. Because of the way the top was made, the leftovers were all odd sized pieces and half-square triangles. So a lot of time was spent adding small bits of fabric to other leftover bits to get pieces that would fit together. The result is pretty chaotic and not very pretty, but I think it's still a lot of fun. While making the backing, I also made progress on one of my leader/ender projects -- Sister's Nine Patch from More Adventures with Leaders and Enders by Bonnie Hunter.

Sister's Nine Patch - Progress Made This Week

It took me three days to piece the backing! Once the backing was done, I proceeded to pin baste the quilt and start the quilting. I decided to do straight-line quilting on this one. 

Night Howler - Quilting Progress

Night Howler - Quilting Close-Up

I really like how the quilting is turning out! I'm not good at keeping my straight line quilting even and straight, even though I use my walking foot, so I'm drawing several lines using a ruler and a yellow chaco liner, then sewing the lines. I like the chaco liner for this because the "pen" uses a wheel to apply the chalk to the quilt so it doesn't push the fabric around like a pencil does when doing the marking. And I've never had trouble getting the chalk out of the quilt when the quilting is finished. The drawback of the chaco liner is that it is just dropping chalk on the fabric so it wipes off fairly easily so you can't mark too much of the quilt before quilting. Even with this, the quilting is going very quickly and I got over half of the quilting finished yesterday. I hope to get the rest of the quilting finished today and the binding sewn to the front of the quilt so I can take this project to my UFO group tomorrow to work on sewing the binding to the back.

I also made some more progress on my La Passacaglia quilt designed by Willyne Hammerstein. I finished basting the pieces for the final round of the second rosette and started putting them together.

La Passacaglia - Current Progress

The progress is slow, but it's always fun to see the pieces!

Finally, I picked my knitting back up and made some progress on my Kallara shawl designed by Ambah O'Brien.

Kallara

This end of the shawl decreases more slowly than the increase portion of the shawl, so there's still a ways to go before I get this finished, but it's simple knitting so is a nice project for when I need to relax.

Nancy

Grand Illusion Finished

 Hi all -

I hope everyone had a wonderful 4th of July! I didn't do anything special for the 4th. We're always under high fire danger this time of year and, although people in our neighborhood are generally really responsible, I like to be home on the 4th so I can get the pets out if there's a problem. It was quiet around my house, but I did hear that someone else in the neighborhood heard someone shooting, which is prohibited under the current restrictions. And, of course, it's nice to relax and avoid any crowds!

I spent most of this week finishing my Grand Illusion quilt designed by Bonnie Hunter. This was Bonnie's 2014 mystery quilt. I did the piecing in 2014/15 and started quilting it some time ago, but got frustrated and put it away. I finally pulled it out a couple of weeks ago, determined to finish it. And now it's done!

Grand Illusion

"Grand Illusion" is a good name for this quilt because you can see the pattern from a distance, but up close it just looks like a jumble of shapes.

Grand Illusion - Close-Up of Front

It's so chaotic, it's hard to see the quilting on the front of the finished quilt. As usual, I used left-over units and fabric for the back. I love how it turned out!

Grand Illusion - Back

You can see the quilting on the back. I used what I'm calling "stream of consciousness" quilting. I saw this somewhere a long time ago, but can't remember the artist's name or what she called it so I have to just go with my name for it. I just quilted whatever motifs I felt like doing that I thought would look good. I ended up using a lot of common background fills and sprinkling in every flower shape I could think of. 

Grand Illusion - Quilting Close-Up 1

Grand Illusion - Quilting Close-Up 2

Grand Illusion - Quilting Close-Up 3

Some of the motifs aren't as smooth or pretty as I would have liked, but I think they look good in combination. It was really difficult wrangling the large quilt through my sewing machine, especially with the dense quilting and the puffy wool batting, but I got it done and I love the result! And the added bonus is that I get joy every time I look at all of the different fabrics that I used. 

When I was tired of quilting, I turned on the TV and worked on my La Passacaglia quilt designed by Willyne Hammerstein. I'm trying to finish up my second large rosette for this quilt. I'm on the last round of the rosette, which is a partial round of star units. I picked the fabrics for this round and started preparing the pieces.

La Passacaglia - Second Rosette

I laid out some of the chosen fabrics so you can see how the unit goes together and how the colors look. I didn't get much done on this because I put the binding on Grand Illusion this week. I like to sew the binding to the front using the machine, then turn it to the back and hand stitch it. It takes a long time, but I really like the look and feel of this method. It took my all day Thursday and a couple of hours on Wednesday and Friday to finish the hand sewing. I had to stop before finishing on Thursday because the joint at the base of my thumb hurt too much to continue. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to continue on Friday morning since I haven't found anything that really relieves this type of pain, but I have some DMSO cream that was recommended by an online friend. I hadn't really had luck with this in the past, but I decided to try it again and this time wrap my hand in a microwave heating pad with it on. That really seemed to work for me. It felt pretty good right away and it seemed to be all better the next morning. I don't know if it was a fluke since this is the first time it has worked for me, but I thought I would share it with you guys just in case.

Finally, after putting in the last bits of quilting on Grand Illusion yesterday, I was motivated to work on my Tulips Are Blooming quilt. This quilt is based on the Floral Bouquet pattern in Jelly Roll Quilts by Pam & Nicky Lintott. I used the pattern for the center of the quilt, but changed the borders to something I like better. Last time I worked on the quilt, I had added a squares-on-point border, but was thinking that I might want to add another narrow white border to add some space between the squares-on-point and the binding. This additional border would make it easier to keep the points in the squares from being cut off. And, if I use the flower fabrics for the binding creates a separation between the squares and the binding. I looked at it some more and decided that I did want to add that border.

Tulips Are Blooming

I think this space looks good whether I use a white or colored binding, but I'm leaning towards the colored binding. I think the colored binding will look better and will be more practical since the binding is where you're most likely to get dirt on the quilt since that's where you touch it the most.

Well, that's it for this week....

Nancy