Jungle Magnolia Month 4 Started

 Hi all -

Summer is definitely here! I hope everyone is staying cool. It's been a really hot couple of weeks in the US! I'm getting back into the groove of things after visiting my family for a week. I like the drive better mid-week so I generally visit from Wed to Wed, like I did this time. It was a really wonderful trip!

When I got back from my trip, the latest fabric pack for my Jungle Magnolia BOM designed by Judy Niemeyer had arrived. I'm always really excited to get the next pack and there are only a couple more left! This month had a lot of prep work, even though I had already prepared the paper templates at our BOM small group meetings. At this point I have all of the fabric pieces cut except for the applique pieces. Here are the prepared pieces that haven't been sewn yet:

Jungle Magnolia - Prepared Pieces

The pattern includes laser-cut pieces of stabilizer for the applique shapes. I cut the little slivers holding the templates in the sheet and put them in the baggie you see in the upper-left of the above photo. It will be interesting to try this stabilizer. It's a leave-in stabilizer with a sticking side so you just pull off the paper over the sticky side and press the shape onto the back of your fabric. Then you cut around the shape, leaving a 1/8" to 1/4" seam allowance, glue the seam allowance to the wrong side of the applique piece, then sew the piece on the unit. It will be interesting to try this product. I believe the teacher said the product was from Bosal, but I'll wait to investigate this until after I try it out. I did also get some sewing done on the first units:

Jungle Magnolia - Partial C1 Units

These units will have white circles appliqued on top and a dark piece added to the right side of the unit.I think it's going to be fun learning the Judy Niemeyer method of applique with this month's units! I'll also get to sew my first S-shaped seam with one of the units this month. Wish me luck!

Nancy

 

Painted Pots

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! In this post, I'm sharing the flower pots that my family painted for me. I just got back from visiting them for a week and while I was there they had a painting party and worked on these pots. I didn't join in the painting because I wanted stuff that they had made and because I really don't need another hobby! I told them to paint whatever their hearts desired.

The first pot was painted by my niece, Kelsey. She is pregnant and I was in town for her gender reveal party. Spoiler -- It's a girl! She painted a pot representing her family.

Kelsey's Pot - Side 1

Kelsey's Pot - Side 2

Kelsey's Pot - Side 3

Kelsey's Pot - Side 4

Charli is their dog, who is definitely a member of the family!

The second pot was painted by my nephew's wife, Liz. They had beautiful baby Adeline at the end of October. She put paint on Adeline's hands and stamped hand prints around the sides of the pot then added cacti.

Liz's Pot - Side 1

Liz's Pot - Side 2

Liz's Pot - Side 3

Liz's Pot - Side 4

She also painted a sweet message on the bottom of the pot.

Liz's Pot - Bottom

Note - "Untie" is not misspelled.

My sisters worked on the larger pots. Sue painted a fairy house on one side and a cactus on the other.

Sue's Pot - Fairy House

Sue's Pot - Cactus

Sue has been painting rocks the longest and has learned some really cool techniques!

My other sister, Linda, painted modern flowers and lots of dots on her pot.

Linda's Pot - Side 1

Linda's Pot - Side 2

Linda's Pot - Side 3

Linda's Pot - Side 4

I love the texture that the light coat of yellow in the background creates! She also painted dots around the rim and painted the plate underneath.

Linda's Pot - Dots Around the Rim

Linda's Pot - Painted Plate

I love the dots and really appreciate the time and patience she put into putting all of them on. I definitely wouldn't have had that patience!

I really love all of the pots that they made! I plan to go down next week to find some lovely plants to put in the pots. I'm going to love looking at these on my deck all summer!!

Nancy

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

Some More Bags

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is having a wonderful Memorial Day weekend! We've been having rainy weather here. It's been raining and foggy off and on for a couple of days now and it looks like it is supposed to continue throughout the week. Unusual for us, but very welcome! We also had a visitor in the yard this morning. We had a beautiful bull moose munching away when we got up. I had to keep Grace in the house until he left, but he only stayed about an hour. I was lucky enough to look out the front door as he was walking by the house so I got to safely look at him from about 6 feet away. I just love living up here!!

I was able to make a few more of the Twice As Nice Pouches designed by Aneela Hoey. These are the little bags I'm making for the ladies in my English Paper Piecing (EPP) group. The first one I made was for myself. I've been wanting to make this bag for myself for a while and I'm in the EPP group, too, so it was the right time!

Twice As Nice Pouch - For Me

I also decided to make one of these for a friend of mine who has a birthday in early June. She's not in the EPP group, but she's a quilter and a knitter, too, so can always use a bag. I choose a fabric that depicts an underwater scene because she and her daughter just finished their entries for the 2025 Cherrywood Challenge. The theme this year is The Abyss.

Twice As Nice Pouch - For A Friend

The final bag I made is for my good friend who is in the EPP group. I gave her a Twice As Nice Pouch for her birthday in February so I wanted to make a different bag for her. I decided to make the Peek-a-Boo Bag designed by Terri Staats.

Peek-a-Boo Bag

I used a firefly fabric since she loves fireflies. I made one of these bags for myself years ago and I keep a small EPP project in it. I think it's really cute and hope she likes it, too!

Since I'm making these bags, it makes sense that I should also make some progress on my EPP project. So I did some more work on my La Passacaglia quilt designed by Willyne Hammerstein.

La Passacaglia - Rosette 2

After I finish this round, I just have one more round and the rosette will be complete. The next round is another star round (like the green and pink round after the black round), so it's a more complicated round. I'd decided to use solid fabrics for all of the star units in this quilt so I'll probably use a solid darker purple for that round. Then I'll find matching printed fabrics for the pentagons and diamonds in the round. Although this is "rosette 2" in the pattern, it will be my first finished rosette for the quilt. I started with rosette 2 because it is one of the larger rosettes. There are four large rosettes in the quilt. I'm planning to make them first because I think that'll give me a better idea of how everything is looking when picking out fabrics for the smaller rosettes. This rosette is now too big to fit in my project bag without folding it. I'm thinking that after I finish the rosette, I'll probably make a new project bag that is big enough to fit the rosette flat so that I can keep all of the units together nicely while I'm making them. Any excuse to make another bag, right!!

I've also been thinking about another quilt that I want to work on. My Jungle Magnolia BOM is getting me excited to work on another Judy Niemeyer quilt.  I purchased the Amazon Star pattern from my quilt guild's online auction a couple of years ago. Someone had the pattern in their stash and decided that they weren't going to make it, so they donated it to the guild and I picked it up in the auction. I had been scared to start it since the Judy Niemeyer patterns are so complicated, but now that I have some experience with them I realize that they really are easy once you figure them out. Since I'll need to purchase the fabric for this quilt, I installed PhotoShop on my computer and started playing around with fabric colors. The pattern includes a schematic page that you can use to audition colors, so I scanned the page and opened it in PhotoShop. Then I had to remember how PhotoShop worked (it's been several years since I've used it) and figure out how to do the things that I wanted to do. There was a lot of fumbling at first, but now that I have everything set up, I can just pick a color from the top of the image and change the color and it will change that color throughout the quilt image. Here are the colors that I deicded to use:

Amazon Star - Chosen Colors

There are several "repeated" colors. These will be fabrics with very similar color and value, but with different pattern to make the quilt sparkle. I'm planning to use all batiks. I'm visiting the family in Kansas City next month so I'm planning to make a trip to Missouri Star while I'm there to pick up my fabrics. If you're a sewer or quilter and have never been to Missouri Star, it's definitely worth a visit if you're in the area! It's basically a small town that is also a quilt shop. The entire main street is shops that are all parts of the store. There's a batiks shop, a baby fabrics shop, a Christmas fabric shop, and so, so much more! I'm always excited to go there (although my bank account isn't so happy about it....)!

Finally, I made some more progress on my Peach Sorbet Throw designed by Janine Myska.

Peach Sorbet Throw

I'm getting so close on this one! Just a couple more stripes and I'll be done with the body of the throw. Then I'll just have to add the border. It'll feel good to have a big finish!

Nancy