Winter 2025 Quilting Retreat

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! I just had a great time over the weekend at our guild's winter retreat. It was so much fun! This retreat was at a retreat center in Allenspark, CO, with beautiful mountain views. The retreat ran from Friday afternoon through Monday afternoon, although I ended up leaving in the middle of the morning on Monday. We had a large room where tables were set up for us. They had two people at each buffet table, with the tables pushed together in pairs making stations for four people. Then other tables were positioned around the room to use for cutting stations and for arranging blocks, and irons were positioned around the room. When I first got there, I was very concerned about the tight space at the work tables, but it ended up working really well with the other tables available around the room. And I had a great time with my tablemates, who I had not met before the retreat. I brought my camera intending to take some pictures of the set-up, but only thought to take pictures one early morning when I was there before everyone else. I took this picture showing a few of the cutting tables and our view from the room:

Retreat Work Areas

You can see in the picture that the lighting in the room is very yellow, but the center is in the process of replacing all of the lights with LEDs, so the lighting will be much better the next time we go there. I also took a picture of Mount Meeker this morning because it had a beautiful alpenglow:

Mount Meeker

I was able to sign up for a single room at this retreat. That was really nice for me since I tend to be an early riser, but also often end up working later in the evening. I also don't tend to sleep well and get up frequently in the night to use the restroom. I ended up being the last person working on Friday evening, by several hours, and I was the first or second person to start working every morning so I was very glad to not have to worry about disturbing others! I will definitely try to get a single room for the next retreat!

The first project I worked on at the retreat was my Prickly Pear quilt designed by Cozy Quilt Designs.

Prickly Pear

I had pieced the center this summer, but then put it aside to work on the quilts I made for Christmas. All I had left to do at the retreat was to add the borders. I was able to get all three borders added on Friday, but had to work until 11:30 to do that. 

My second project at the retreat was a Potato Chip quilt. The "potato chip" block is a fairly recent craze. It is a block that can be made any size and is constructed so that there are no seams to match in the block. Like the log cabin block, you can play with the coloring of the pieces and the orientation of the blocks to create a lot of different designs with this block. There's a free PDF booklet that gives a bunch of sample layouts for the block. I couldn't find the URL for the booklet, but if you follow the link I gave above for the potato chip quilts, you can click on a link to instantly download the booklet if you want to take a look. I'd seen this block talked about in several places and had been thinking about doing something with it, and then some people on a quilting forum that I participate in had a potato chip quilt challenge. I wanted to join the challenge, but they did it right before Christmas and I didn't have time to participate, but I did think about what I would want to do. I had a couple of half yard fabric collections that I had picked up some time ago. They were both from the same fabric line, but one was in reds and the other was in greens and blues. I really loved the colors and decided that I would make a potato chip quilt out of these fabrics. For this block, every unit making up the block is the same size and just has to finish as a rectangle that is twice as long as it is wide. So, for example, you could use units that finish at 2"x4", which would mean you would cut the units 2.5"x4.5". I wanted a lot of movement in my blocks, so I decided to make smaller units that finish at 1.5"x3". My first step was to cut units from all of my fabrics. I put the green units in one paper bags and the red units in another bag so I could pick my fabrics fairly randomly when I was sewing. The cutting took a lot of time, but I got a good selection of fabrics into each bag and was then able to get a lot of sewing done. Here are the blocks that I was able to finish at the retreat:

Potato Chip Blocks

The finished blocks are all laid out in the pattern that I'm going to use to sew them together for the quilt and the partial blocks are just laid out along the bottom of the quilt.  I really love how this is coming together! I didn't expect the pattern to show up very well in the quilt because there isn't any value difference between the red fabrics and the green fabrics, but it shows up really well in the picture. And I can enhance that when I do the quilting. I left the retreat a little early without finishing the blocks along the bottom because I had pretty much depleted my green units and was going to need to cut some more to get a good variety before I could sew any more and I didn't feel like switching to more cutting at the retreat center. And I was pretty tired of sitting in that chair!

Finally, I took a small amount of time to do some work on my embroidery for my second Posy Pocket Handbag designed by Crabapple Hill.

Posy Pocket Handbag - Embroidery

It's a small start, but it's a start! I didn't work on this project much, but I was glad that I brought it.

Before I left for the retreat, I was also able to get some knitting done. I was able to finish the knitting on my Stitchscape Shawl designed by Malia Mae Joseph:

Stitchscape Shawl

Stitchscape Shawl - Close-up

It felt really good to get this finished! Those last rows took forever! The ends are all woven in and now I just need to block it so I can trim the ends. Then I can wear it!

I also made some progress on my Cuentas Scarf designed by Laura Nelkin:

Cuentas Scarf

I completed one repeat of the pattern, now I'll continue to do this until the yarn runs out. This will be a fun scarf!

Finally, I also did some sewing before the retreat. I was able to make two more blocks for my circles quilt:

Circle Blocks

I now have 11 of the 30 blocks finished. I'll continue to plug away at these as I have time.

That's it for now. Even though I have all of these projects to work on, I'll be shifting my focus now. I found a pattern for a quilt that is perfect for my sister and ordered all of the fabric. The fabric came while I was at my retreat, so I washed everything yesterday and am ready to start the piecing. I think this will be a fun one to work on!

Nancy

Holidays Are Over

 Hi all -

The holidays are over and winter is starting to set in. I hope everyone had a great holiday season! I had a wonderful time visiting family, including the new great niece. She's beautiful and such a content baby! It was warm and rainy in Kansas City while I was there and we had perfect weather for the drive home. I'm sure glad we missed the current storm! Now we're back home and getting back into the normal swing of things.

Even with the holiday, I've been fairly productive. Before I left, I finished my first Posy Pocket Handbag.

Posy Pocket Handbag

I did a bit of stumbling while making this bag. I mentioned last time that this was a kit that I purchased from our quilting guild's online auction. The kit was donated by the estate of a crafter and it included the fabric, except for the stitchery background, and the pattern. There were supplies for two bags, so both of the bags pictured on the pattern can be made (they are the same bag, with just a different stitchery on the front pocket). My first confusion was with the fabric choices. I could easily see which fabrics went together for each bag, but there were three fabrics in the kit for each bag and the pattern calls for two fabrics. For each bag, there was more of two of the fabrics than there was of the third. In the bag above, there were large pieces of the light and dark melon and a smaller piece of the dark green. The bag would be boring without the dark green, but there wasn't enough of the dark green to just use it as the contrast color so I had to figure out which fabrics I wanted to use for each pattern piece. 

Posy Pocket Handbag - Side View

I also didn't like some parts of the pattern construction. For example, the pattern has you sew the front pocket on by hand after finishing the bag. That seemed tedious to me and less stable than sewing the pocket on by machine, so I sewed the pocket on the front by machine during the assembly process. The biggest change I made was the closure. The pattern has a string closure that you tie in a bow. That didn't appeal to me so I changed it to a snap closure. I had to do some finagling to get this to work since the inside pockets were too high up and interfered with the snap.

Posy Pocket Handbag - Inside

I like how this bag turned out, but there are still some other changes I plan to make in my next one. First, I'll plan for the snap ahead of time and move the pocket down further. I'll also sew a line of stitching down the center of the big side pockets to make them more useful (they tend to flop to the middle of the bag as is) and sew another line of stitching at the bottom of the pocket, where the side of the bag folds under to the bottom. (The inside pockets currently open all the way down to the center seam in the bottom of the bag.) This will make the pockets flop less and will keep the contents from sliding down into the bottom of the bag. If there's enough of the contrast fabric, I'll also put a strip of contrast fabric at the top of the bag inside so the contrast strip along the top of the bag will match the other contrast strips on the outside of the bag. I might also change the contrast fabric used for the inside of the handle, but I still have to think about that one.

I've also made some progress on my circles quilt. I got five more circle blocks completed:

Circles Quilt

With the four blocks I made in class, I now have nine blocks completed for the quilt. These blocks are 14" unfinished, so I think I'll make a total of 30 blocks to make a good size lap quilt. I'm excited about this quilt because I already know how I want to quilt it. Using thread that matches the solid color, I plan to first stitch in the ditch between the blocks and around the circles. Then I'll stitch straight lines from corner to corner in each block and echo those lines in the triangles that are created, skipping over the solid circles. Finally, I'll use bright perl cotton to do big stitching in the centers of the solid circles. In my head, this looks pretty cool! (There's no telling how it will look in real life.... 😉)

I've also been doing some knitting. I took my Mimizan Hat project, designed by Tess Young, with me to Kansas City and did a little bit of knitting on it there, but just got a few repeats of the body finished there.  But I was able to finish the hat after I got home:

Mimizan Hat

I really love how this turned out and am definitely keeping it for myself! Although the knitting was fairly easy, I'd probably rate this pattern as intermediate because you have to do some more complex maneuvering of the yarn on some of the rounds. And there is one decrease round at the top of the hat that took me a while to figure out. But the final effect is stunning, IMHO.

I've also continued to make progress on my Stitchscape Shawl designed by Malia Mae Joseph:

Stitchscape Shawl

The shawl continues to grow and it's up to about 675 stitches per row, so each row is now taking about an hour to knit. So it was a real bummer when I knit a fairly complicated row the day before I drove to KC and when I got to the end of the row I realized that I was off by one stitch. Looking at the stitches, I had made a mistake at the beginning of the row and I would have to take out all of that stitching. I put the shawl aside until I got back from KC! When I got back, I spent a couple of hours removing those stitches and another hour reknitting the row and now, I'm happy to say, I'm back on track and making progress again!

Stitchscape Shawl - Close-up

I just have one more row to knit to finish this section, then one more section of the yellow and I'll be finished with this shawl.

I also started a new knitting project. Laura Nelkin is having her annual first quarter knit-along (KAL) for finishing up her projects and I have a bunch of her projects lying around! Because of the clubs I'm in, I get six new small project kits and three large project kits each year. I love the projects, but have trouble finding the time to make them! So I decided to start this KAL with the Cuentas Scarf:

Cuentas Scarf

This is a cute little scarf with beads (I'm just to the first beaded row) that will be perfect for cool days. It's been a lot of fun to knit so far!

Finally, I'm getting ready for a quilting retreat next weekend. One of my guilds has a mountain retreat that runs from Friday afternoon to Monday afternoon. These retreats are always a lot of fun! We sew together in a large room with a large window looking out at Mt. Meeker, which is a beautiful mountain peak that is just under 14,000 ft. The retreat center supplies the food so we can concentrate on sewing and community. I've gathered more projects than I can possible finish in a weekend (because it would be a bummer to run out of things to do!). I'll be bringing mostly machine sewing projects, but I also prepared the embroidery background for my second Posy Pocket Handbag:

Posy Pocket Handbag - Embroidery Background

This will give me something that I can work on while sitting on the couch when my back gets sore from the chairs at the retreat. I'll also bring my English Paper Pieced hexagon quilt so I have choices in my handwork, too. I hope to have a very productive weekend!

Nancy

Some Small Christmas Presents

 Hi all -

Time is flying and the holidays are fast approaching! But since we're doing Secret Santa with my family, my holiday gift making has been severely reduced. I have to say, it's really nice to not have all of that pressure! I had finished my "required" gifts in my last post and I had some extra time, so I decided to make a few small gifts for the sister who I stay with when I visit. The full family Christmas celebration isn't until 12/28, so this sister and I will be hanging out together on Christmas day without anyone else around. And she loves to cook so I know she'll be cooking special meals and snacks for me on Christmas day and throughout my visit. It's only right that I should have some fun stuff for her to open on Christmas morning!

The first thing I made for my sister was a silicon trivet. I had picked up the base for the trivet at a local quilt shop last year, intending to make it for my sister, but hadn't gotten around to it yet.

Hot Stuff Trivet package

I pulled out the package and started work. First, I picked out my fabric. The fabric shows through the trivet, but is muted, so I wanted a beautiful large-scale print that was bright. I found a perfect flower print in. my stash! I quilted one piece of the fabric for the bottom of the trivet and fussy cut another piece of the fabric to show through the front. Then, following the included instructions, I added a border and binding.

Hot Stuff Trivet - top

Hot Stuff Trivet - bottom

This was really easy and fun to make, and I think it will be really useful. My sister hosts all of our family get-togethers so often has a large table full of hot dishes!

One of the crafts I've been wanting to try for a while is making rope bowls. I had picked up some different rope in the past, but always got busy with other stuff and put it aside. One of the ladies on the quilting forum that I read had shown some bowls that she had made, and that piqued my interest again. So I ordered the book that she suggested (Zigzag Rope Sewing Projects by Katherine Lile) and got some of the rope that she had used for her bowls and started playing. To get the feel for things, I decided to make some trivets. That way I could get the feel for the sewing without having to worry about the shaping. And I could play with the different ropes I had to see how they worked. I started with the rope that the lady on my quilting forum had suggested and made this trivet for my sister:

My Sister's Trivet

To give it color, I grabbed some small scraps from my scrap bin and wrapped them around the rope as shown in the book. I started with a red and a green and then realized that these colors matched the fabric that I had used for my sister's silicon trivet, so I picked through my scraps and added scraps from the trivet fabric and other matching colors to make a trivet that went with the other trivet that I made for her. This rope worked really well. Next I used some cotton clothesline that I had in my stash and made this trivet:

My Neighbor's Trivet

I went monochromatic with this trivet and played with colored thread. I was originally making this one for a friend, but ended up giving it to my neighbor instead because she loves purple. This rope also worked really well. The next trivet was for another friend. This one used another rope that I had in my stash:

My Friend's Trivet

This "rope" was really a cotton piping that is designed to be covered by fabric, but I used it uncovered. It makes a sturdy "fabric" where it is coiled, but the hanging loop isn't as nice as the loops from the other trivets. For this trivet, I did all of the sewing with white cotton thread and then splattered the finished trivet with some bottled inks that I found on my shelf that are designed for stamping. I really liked how the colors look different on the threads that on the cotton base. Finally, since I gave my first friend's trivet to my neighbor, I made another one for my friend. Unfortunately, I didn't get pictures of this one since I made it the evening before I gave it to her. For this one, I used variegated thread, a narrow zigzag and added matching fabric scraps for a trivet with a lot of color. These were definitely a lot of fun to make and they work up very quickly! I'm moving on to other stuff, so will come back sometime in the future to start learning how to do the shaping for bowls and other objects.

Next, I decided to also make a bag for my sister. I looked through my patterns and decided on the Huntington Hobo bag by Pink Sands Beach Designs. I looked through my fabric stash and found an old Hoffman Challenge fabric that I really liked. Since I like to make bags and I do everything on the spur of the moment, I had a large stash of zippers and other bag-making supplies to go with my fabric stash. Here is the bag I ended up making:

Huntington Hobo Bag - front

Huntington Hobo Bag - back

Huntington Hobo Bag - Inside

I think my sister will like this bag!

I decided that I had made enough gifts so I went back to some of my own projects. Back when I was making the Baby Elephant quilt, I had quilted a panel to use for the largest size of the Project Bags 2.0 pattern from ByAnnie so I decided to finish the bag:

Project Bag - Front

Project Bag - Back

I like this style of project bag for my English Paper Piecing (EPP) projects because it keeps the smaller units flat, so I'll be using this bag for my La Passacaglia quilt.

Speaking of my La Passacaglia quilt, I added another round to my first unit in this quilt:

La Passacaglia - Unit 1

I'm finding that with this quilt what is taking me the longest is deciding what fabrics to use everywhere. This is a very chaotic-looking quilt and I'm not one for doing a lot of planning for my quilts. I do know that I want to use only Tula Pink fabrics for this quilt, so that narrows down the choices. I've been looking at my fabrics and pondering what I want to do, and finally forced myself to just go for it with the black fabric so I could work on this project at our monthly EPP group meeting. There are some other shapes like this in the quilt, so I'll repeat the same black fabric on some or all of the other similar shapes, while varying the colors and designs used for the stars inside the shapes. This should reduce the chaos a bit while keeping the scrapiness. We'll see how it grows!

A couple of months ago, one of my quilt guilds had an on-line auction to raise money. The auction included finished quilts, unquilted tops, kits, collections of fabric and smaller quilted items. I picked up several items from the auction, including a couple of kits. One of the kits is for the Posy Pocket Handbags pattern by Crabapple Hill. This kit was donated by the estate of an obviously highly prolific crafter and included the pattern and fabrics for two bags. I finished the embroidery for the first bag:

Posy Pocket Handbag - Embroidery

The kit didn't include the fabric or thread for the embroidery, so I pulled those from my stash along with the buttons. I'll put this bag together before starting the embroidery for the second bag just in case I want to make any changes to how I make the bag.

I've also been doing some knitting. I've continued to make some progress on my Stitchscape Shawl designed by Malia Mae Joseph:

Stitchscape Shawl

Stitchscape Shawl - Close-up

As I've said before, I really love working on this shawl! It's just so squishy and wonderful, and the colors take my breath away! But the rows are getting very long (close to 400 stitches per row now), so it'll take a while to finish it.

Finally, I started another knitting project. The Stitchscape Shawl is getting pretty big and the current section has you working with three colors of yarn at once, so this isn't a good project for traveling. I had some yarn that I wanted to play with and I wanted to see how I liked using Addi FlexiFlips needles, so I decided to start working on a Mimizan Hat designed by Tess Young.  So far, I have the ribbing finished:

Mimizan Hat

I learned from the brim of the hat that you definitely need good lighting when knitting with black yarn! The body of the hat will be worked with a green yarn as well as the black yarn, so should be a little easier depending on how difficult the stitch pattern is to figure out.

That's it for now. Sorry for the long post! I didn't get around to posting last week, so the projects added up. I'm not sure if I'll get another post in before I go to Kansas City to visit the family, but I don't tend to do much crafting while visiting so the next post should be of reasonable length no matter when I make it.

Nancy

Oak Leaves Finished

 Hi all -

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday! I had a quiet holiday at home and was able to finish my quilt for my brother-in-law. It feels so good to have everything done! This year the family decided to do a Secret Santa Christmas, so that's the only gift I have to make. It's been nice not to have the pressure of having to make so many gifts!

As I mentioned, I was able to finish my Oak Leaves quilt this week:

Oak Leaves

I love how it turned out, even though the quilting is far from perfect! If you look closely at the photo, you will see that the quilt has that scrunchy, soft finish. I don't usually wash quilts before gifting them because I love the crisp feel of a new, unwashed quilt and I want the recipient to enjoy that feeling, too. But I used a thick wash-away stabilizer for the applique and I wanted to soak out that stiffness before gifting the quilt. To remove the stabilizer, I soaked the quilt in the tub and periodically agitated it to help the stabilizer dissolve. Then I moved the quilt to the washer and ran it through a light soil cycle. I had put a sheet under the quilt when I put it in the tub so I wouldn't have to worry about the weight of the water distorting the quilt when I moved it to the washer. It all worked really well! For the quilting in the brown squares, I used a ruler to quilt straight lines emphasizing half square triangle nature of the log cabin blocks.

Oak Leaves - Quilting

While this was an easy quilting design, I found that I kept quilting the lines to the wrong end points. When your nose is that close to the quilt, it's really hard to distinguish the vertices! I spent a lot of time removing errant lines, and I made the decision to leave some in that I didn't think anyone would notice but me! Another thing I realized after doing several blocks is that the two possible diagonals of the brown-only squares are not the same and it's hard to see which diagonal is the one that matches the diagonal in the half and half squares. By the end of the quilting, I was doing a lot of marking to keep myself on track! But, like I said, I think it looks good and nobody will notice the problems but me. I used a Quilter's Select ruler to do the straight line quilting:

Quilter's Select Ruler

I purchased this ruler several years ago when they first came out, but had never used it before. It is a really nice ruler! Quilter's Select rulers have a kind of sticky backing designed to reduce slipping. They have this coating on both their rotary cutting rulers and their quilting rulers. I find that this coating works really well! I didn't have any problem with this ruler slipping through all of this quilting, regardless of what awkward position I had things in to do the quilting. These rulers are, however, fairly expensive. But I will still keep my eyes open for sales on these rulers and pick up some other shapes when I have the opportunity.

When the quilt was done, I dug through my collection of Christmas fabrics and I made a gift bag for it:

Oak Leaves - Gift Bag

This is a bigger gift bag, so the cording I've used in the past for smaller gift bags seemed too light for this bag, so I've ordered some 3/4" red ribbon that I will run through the casing and tie in a bow to hold the bag closed. In the past, I've spent a lot of time making very polished gift bags that were lined with a slick lining fabric and had all of the fabrics stabilized. I decided that this gift bag would probably not get much use in the future and I didn't want to spend that much time on the gift bag or make it as heavy, so I simplified my process. I decided not to use any lining and instead used an overlock stitch on my machine to finish the raw edges on the inside of the bag to prevent fraying. I also didn't use any stabilizer. I thought about sewing some handles, like you would have on a tote bag, to make it easier to carry the bag, but decided that would look funny and would be overkill. I made a similar gift bag for the Baby Elephant quilt:

Baby Elephant - Gift Bag

So now I'm completely ready for Christmas!

During my TV time (it's NFL and college basketball season!), I've continued to work on my Stitchscape Shawl designed by Malia Mae Joseph:

Stitchscape Shawl

I continue to love working on this shawl! It's so squishy and the colors are so beautiful! The first part of this shawl has really gone swiftly, but things are slowing down as the rows get longer and longer. Each row is now over 300 stitches long! Good thing I'm enjoying it!!

I hope everyone is enjoying their winter (although it's not officially winter yet...) and things aren't too stressful getting ready for the holidays!

Nancy

Happy Thanksgiving!!

 Hi all -

Boy, is time flying! I can't believe it's Thanksgiving week already! I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday!!

I've made great progress on my brother-in-law's quilt. I started working on the quilting. I started by just stitching in the ditch (SID) around the cream areas in the log cabin blocks. At this point, I wasn't sure how I would be quilting the quilt, but I knew that I wanted definition between the cream and brown areas so I started with that. I didn't want to stitch around each separate block in case I did some kind of quilting that flowed from block to block. The SID quilting gave me a good backbone for the quilting so I would now be able to quilt wherever I wanted without worrying about anything shifting. Next, I stitched around the edges of the applique in the top panel and then did a simple meander in the background:

Oak Leaves - Top Panel Quilting

Since I did a meander in the panel background, I decided to continue that in the cream parts of the log cabin squares. This quilting ignored any block boundaries so I was glad that I hadn't done SID between the blocks. With the curvy meander in the cream parts of the blocks, I knew I wanted straight line quilting in the brown areas to provide some contrast. I decided to quilt lines from the corner of each block to the corners in the centers of the blocks. This is hard to describe in words, but here are some pictures to help explain it:

Oak Leaves - Brown Block Quilting Front

Oak Leaves - Brown Block Quilting Back

I hope you can get an idea of how this quilting looks from the pictures. For these areas of the blocks, I'll also be doing SID around all of the edges to define everything I think this will give a cool texture to the quilt! Because of the way the blocks are situated, this means that none of the quilting in the brown parts of the log cabin blocks will touch the edge of the quilt so I could add the binding to the quilt before finishing this part of the quilting. So I moved to the binding after quilting those two sample blocks. I decided to use a scrappy binding to match the scrappiness of the rest of the quilt. Because some of my strips were fairly short, I sewed together enough strips to bind about half of the quilt and shifted things around until I was sure that none of the seams between the strips would land in a corner. Then I sewed that long strip to the quilt leaving a long unsewn tail. With that part secure, I sewed more strips together and positioned them to make sure I wouldn't have any seams in the corners, sewed that strip to the strip already attached to the quilt and then finished attaching the binding to the quilt. This method worked really well for me and I'll definitely use it again when I do another scrappy binding! Now I'm working on hand sewing the binding to the back of the quilt. I make pretty small stitches so this part of the process can take a while for me. I was able to get half of the binding finished yesterday and I'll continue to work on it today. I'm trying to be mindful, also, to not strain my thumb while I do this. When I do a lot of hand stitching, I get some pain in the joint where my thumb attaches to my wrist. I've always just ignored this and powered through, but I'm realizing that I'm getting older and don't want to do any permanent damage to my joints that would preclude me from doing the crafts that I love, so I'm trying to take breaks and also apply some heat to the area. It's not a bit deal now, and I hope it remains that way for a long time to come!

I also went back to my Olney St. Scarf designed by Betsey Sennott. I wanted to finish it this week and I accomplished that goal.

Olney St. Scarf

It always feels good to finish up a project! This scarf will be nice to wear in the cold winter months! Now I need to decide what other crochet project to work on next. I'm not sure if I want to finish up another project or start something new. We'll see how my whims steer me!

I was also able to make some more progress on my Stitchscape Shawl designed by Malia Mae Joseph:

Stitchscape Shawl

The rows are getting long so it's taking longer to finish each section, but this knitting is really enjoyable! I really love the textures I'm getting!

Stitchscape Shawl - Close-Up

Stitchscape Shawl - Another Close-Up

I look forward to spending more concentrated time on this shawl once my brother-in-law's quilt is finished!

Nancy

Started Quilting Oak Leaves

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! I've made good progress on my Oak Leaves quilt. This is the quilt that I'm making for my brother-in-law for Christmas. First, I finished the applique on the top panel of the quilt. I used machine applique for the panel. I used C&T Wash-Away Applique Paper for the leaves. I cut the applique shape, fuse it to the fabric, trim away the excess fabric leaving a scant 1/4" seam allowance, then glue the seam allowance to the back of the shape. This gives me a nice, stiff shape that's easy to place and prevents puckering when you stitch around the shape. I used 3/8" bias tape for the vine. I drew the path for the vine on the panel, then glued the vine in place. I had used a long piece of freezer paper to draw the path for the vine and I drew the leaf shape on the freezer paper in an orientation that looked good to me and drew a short stem to the vine. I then used my lightbox to position each of the leaves in the same orientation and also glued a short piece of 1/4" bias tape to make the stem. Once everything was in place, I sewed the applique pieces in place using smoke-colored invisible thread and a narrow zigzag stitch. I then did some free-motion stitching to create the vines in the leaves.

Oak Leaves - Applique Close-Up

The leaf appliques were stiff enough that I didn't need a stabilizer on the back of the panel for stitching those, but there would have been a lot of puckering from the vines and stems without a stabilizer. I used a wash-away stabilizer from /FilTec for this. This stabilizer was really easy to use because it is very sticky on one side so you just cut it to size, peel off the protective paper and press the stabilizer in place. It's a very heavy stabilizer so the stitching was really easy.

Oak Leaves - Back of Applique Stitching

With the finished applique panel, it was quick work to add a narrow border and the panel to the quilt top.

Oak Leaves - Finished Top

Since I'd already pieced the back, now it was time to sandwich and baste the quilt. This is my least favorite part of making a quilt! This quilt is small enough that it fit on my kitchen floor, so I pin basted it there. It only took a couple of hours, but pin basting on the floor is really hard on this old body! But I did order some knee pads that they use in construction so my knees didn't get as sore, but it's still killer on the back and the hands. But I got it done and was able to start the quilting this morning. I'm not exactly sure about how I want to do the quilting so I'm starting by stitching in the ditch on every seam that is between a brown piece and a cream piece. No matter what I end up doing, I know I want stitching there and that stitching will allow me to remove most of the pins, reducing the weight of the quilt for the rest of the quilting. I'm thinking that I want some sort of straight line quilting on one of the colors and curvy quilting on the other color. The applique panel will have quilting around the edges of all of the applique pieces and then will have some sort of background quilting. While doing the quilting, I'm getting to enjoy all of the diverse fabrics that I used in the quilt. I love to make scrap quilts and generally push the envelope when picking the fabrics to use. You can see in the above picture that you get some sparkle from the variety of fabrics, but the colors look fairly uniform from a distance. When you get in close, like I am while I'm quilting, you can really see the diversity of colors and patterns that make up the fabrics in the quilt.

Oak Leaves - Fabric Close-Up

Oak Leaves - Another Fabric Close-Up

Looking at these pictures, you can see that there are a lot of different shades of brown and a lot of different shades of cream. They really don't go together when you look at them this closely. Especially that fairly deep yellow fabric in the creams. But when you step back a little, I think it looks incredible! This is one of the things about quilting that really makes my heart sing!

I also did a little work on my Olney St. Scarf designed by Betsey Sennott. 

Olney St. Scarf

I'm getting really close to the end, but am getting tired of the splitty yarn so haven't been motivated to work on it as much as I should. I'll try to get this done by next week.

But I did go ahead and start a new project. I've had the kit for the Stitchscape Shawl designed by Malia Mae Joseph since last spring. This kit was part of the 2024 Stephen West Yarn-A-Long and I fell in love with it immediately, but didn't have time to start it.

Stitchscape Shawl

The colors just glow and I love that I have this beautiful pink leather project bak (not part of the Yarn-A-Long) to put it in! I love projects like this one with easy shaping, lovely colors and a variety of fun stitch patterns:

Stitchscape Shawl - Close-Up

And the yarn is so soft and bouncy! Since it's getting close to Christmas, I decided to get in the holiday cheer with my Christmas tree needle stoppers:

Stitchscape Shawl - Needle Stoppers

Needle stoppers are used to keep the stitches from sliding off the needles when you put the project in your bag. They are completely necessary, but can save you from a headache and are really fun to boot! This will be my new travel project since I'm to the point with the Olney St. Scarf where I have to periodically weigh the yarn to see if it's time to start knitting the top border.

Nancy