Wild Women Blocks Assembled

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! Summer is definitely here! It's been warmer than usual, but we have had some of the thunderstorms that are common this time of year. As usual, I appreciate any rain we can get! I bought a bunch of flowers that I put in pots on the deck. Probably too many, but I love them! And the hummingbirds love them, too! It's nice to have something that I can put out for the hummingbirds without worrying about attracting bears!

After putting the binding on my pink and gray quilt, I decided to assemble the blocks for my Wild Women Don't Get the Blues quilt designed by Karen K. Stone. I'd been wanting to get these block put together so I decided to do it before setting my sewing machine back up for ruler work.

Wild Women Don't Get the Blues

Wild Women Don't Get the Blues - Close-Up

I used regular copy paper for the paper foundations, rather than something easier to remove like newsprint or vellum, because I started this in one of Karen's classes and that's what she gave us. Paper piecing leaves you with lots of bias edges so they usually suggest that you don't remove the papers until everything is sewn together, but I wanted to get those papers out now when it would be easier. So I did a couple of things to be gentle with the bias edges. First, I removed the papers immediately before sewing each block together so I wouldn't take the chance of stretching a bias edge during normal handling of the units. Then, when sewing the units together, I reduced the presser foot pressure from the default 50 to around 25. This still allowed the feed dogs to control the stitch length, but reduced the pulling on the fabric especially when sewing over thick seams. For this pattern, I was sewing over six layers of fabric at the intersections. I also used a stiletto to help guide the fabric under the needle so I wasn't pulling on the fabric with my fingers. After sewing a seam, I was very careful when pressing it over. I first folded over the seam and carefully creased it with my thumbnail. For me, this works well to get a crisp seam without stretching the fabric. Then, I carefully pressed the seam, moving the iron up and down rather than sliding it around, and used a lot of steam. I feel like the steam helps correct any small stretching of the fabric. Finally, once the block was sewn together, I stay stitched around the outside of the block to help prevent stretching until I get the blocks sewn together. I plan to do some hand embroidery in the center of each block before assembling the quilt, so there will be a lot of handling of these blocks. The stay stitching should help keep them from stretching.

I also decided to make a quick bag before going back to my pink and gray quilt. I made the Sew Essential bag designed by Cheryl Von Ruden and Rosemary Wissink. I wanted to make a bag for the host of one of my sewing groups as a thank you. I looked through my patterns and chose the Sew Essential bag.

Sew Essential Bag

Sew Essential Bag - Large Pocket

Sew Essential Bag - Smaller Pockets

For the main fabric, I used a really cool batik that I bought in her little quilt shop. I never would have guessed this was a batik if it wasn't in the batik section of the shop! I know she really likes this fabric because we talked about it and she showed me where she used it in one of her quilts. I picked this bag pattern because I liked the way it would highlight the fabric. This pattern is well-written and easy to follow. I decided to make the inside pockets as suggested in the pattern. They say the large pocket is good for scissors and rotary cutters; the upper small pocket for bobbins and needle packets; and the lower small "pocket" (this pocket is open on the bottom) for spools of thread. If I make this bag again, I'll probably use lightweight stabilizer instead of Shape-Flex. I think the Shape-Flex made the pockets a bit too stiff. I might also try it with regular batting rather than the Soft and Stable suggested in the pattern. The Soft and Stable makes these smaller bags a bit stiff, although the regular batting might leave the bag too floppy. I think it's worth a try.

Finally, I started a new knitting project. I decided to start working on my Kallara shawl designed by Ambah O'Brien. 

Kallara

This is a good project for knitting group because it's mostly just garter stitch, so not much thought is involved. You just have to wrangle two balls of yarn, which is easy for me sitting on the couch at home but is a bit more difficult sitting at a table at knit group. I like the dramatic shape of this shawl along with the subtle striping.

Nancy

Added Binding to Pink and Gray Quilt

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well and had a wonderful Memorial Day holiday! Life here is good. I made it to the nursery last week to pick up some flowers for the deck. I got them potted and am enjoying them. I plan to pick up some more tomorrow. I like to keep adding to my collection as we move into summer!

This week I mainly worked on my pink and gray quilt. I continued to work on the quilting. I decided to do some simple ruler work in the centers of the blocks. I decided to quilt curved lines around the edges of the center block and also across the middle of the block 

Pink and Gray Quilt - Center Block Quilting Design

This should be simple to do and also provide the needed stability. The curves around the outside of the block allowed me to do this quilting without any extra starts and stops. I have a bunch of arc-shaped rulers to choose from. To figure out which curve would work best for this, I drew a 6" square on a piece of paper in pen, then drew the quilting in pencil using the different rulers and a 1/4" spacer that I got years ago. I can put my pencil tip inside the center hole on this spacer and run it along the edge of a ruler to get the stitching line that I would get when using that ruler.

Pink and Gray Quilt - Quilting Ruler Spacer

With my chosen ruler, I concentrated on quilting all of the blocks on the outside edges of the quilt. I wanted to get these done so that I could bind the quilt because the gloves I use for quilting really pick up the batting fluff and that drives me crazy so I like to get the binding on the quilt as soon as possible. Once I got the outside blocks quilted, I could concentrate on the binding. I had thought that the fabric that I have with the pink and gray stripes would be the perfect binding for this quilt.

Pink and Gray Quilt - Auditioning Striped Binding

Pink and Gray Quilt - Auditioning Striped Binding

I tried the striped fabric both with the stripes at a diagonal (which I thought would be perfect) and with the stripes straight up and down, but didn't like either. I felt like this fabric was too light and bright and would draw attention away from the center of the quilt. Next I auditioned one of the polka dot fabrics.

Pink and Gray Quilt - Auditioning Polka Dot Fabric

I thought this was better, but was still too much for the binding, so I tried a more subdued polka dot fabric.

Pink and Gray Quilt - Auditioning Subdued Polka Dots

I liked this a lot better and decided to go for it. I then spent this weekend applying the binding. I like to sew the binding to the front of the quilt with the sewing machine, then fold it to the back and hand stitch it. It's a lot of work, but looks the cleanest to me.

Pink and Gray Quilt - Finished Binding on Front

Pink and Gray Quilt - Finished Binding on Back

Pink and Gray Quilt - Quilting Close-Up

Now I can go back and finish the quilting in the rest of the blocks.

This week we also had the first meeting of a new cross stitch group in one of my quilt guilds. The organizers didn't know if there would be much interest in the group, but we had thirteen ladies show up for the first meeting! I did some work on my Flying Beauties cross stitch.

Flying Beauties

It was a really great group and a lot of fun to have others to share my cross stitch with! The only down side was that I found out about a Web site that has some really cute downloadable cross stitch patterns, so I did end up spending some money! 😁 I look forward to our next monthly meeting!

Finally, i was able to get a little bit more done on my sampler from the big stitch class.

Big Stitch Sampler - Left Side

Big Stitch Sampler - Right Side

I would like to finish the sampler to get more practice at getting even stitches, but I'm getting annoyed with the pleats in the sandwich. I didn't have any painter's tape when we did the sandwiching, so I wasn't able to stabilize the back and get everything flat. One helpful thing I learned this week is that I probably don't want to use Valdani thread for big stitching a quilt. I used Valdani thread for the grid at the bottom of the right side of the sampler and had a lot of problem with the thread fraying. It just didn't stand up to all of the fabric and batting layers like the other brands of perl cotton I tried. It's still a lovely thread for embroidery, but doesn't work for me for this application. A great thing to learn from a sampler!

Nancy

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

Pink and Gray Top Finished

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! We had a beautiful, warm week here, but another little storm is on the horizon. It's supposed to start snowing tonight and should continue for the next couple of days. No word yet on how significant it will be, but crossing my fingers for a good snow!

This week I got the top for my pink and gray quilt finished.

Pink and Gray Quilt

One of the things I did while piecing the top was to twirl the seams at each of the block intersections.

Pink and Gray Quilt - Twirled Seams

If you look at the corner between each block you will see the twirled seam.

Pink and Gray Quilt - Twirled Seam Close-Up

What twirling the seams mean is that the seams are pressed in a circle around the intersection. If you look at the picture, the seam on the left is pressed down, the top seam is pressed to the left, the right seam is pressed up and the bottom seam is pressed to the right. When you do this, you get the mini 4-patch block at each intersection that you can see in the picture above. The reason for doing this is to even out the thickness of the seams. With the twirled seams, you have four layers of fabric in each square around the intersection. If you don't twirl the seam, one of these squares could have as many as eight layers of fabric while another square will only have one layer of fabric. So, the twirled seam will feel flatter and be easier to quilt. It's pretty easy to twirl one seam (although it takes a bit of thought the first couple of times to remember how to do it), but takes careful preparation to twirl all of the seams in a quilt because every other seam has to twirl in the opposite direction. But it really makes a difference in the final quilt top! I was also able to piece the backing for this quilt.

Pink and Gray Quilt - Backing

I like to piece my backings out of leftover blocks and fabric. It adds some interest to the back and keeps me from having all of these miscellaneous blocks sitting around. Some of the fabrics I used on the back weren't used in the front, but were included in the pile of fabrics I collected for this quilt. It was fun to include some of these extras on the back!

I also got a bunch of knitting done this week. First, I finished my Pluma Morada shawl designed by Joji Locatelli.

Pluma Morada

I made my shawl larger than Joji's because I had a bunch of yarn and I want to use this as a scarf.  I also did my normal "lazy" blocking, where I didn't take the time to stretch the shawl out and pin it in place. Doing that can open things up and make lace really pretty, but I'm usually fine with the results I get from a simple block.

Pluma Morada - Close-Up

I finished the edge they same way Joji did in her pattern, She said you could just bind off, but I liked how her couple of extra rows cleaned up the edge of the shawl.

I also went through my stash and pulled out a couple of new projects. First, I knit a Frozen Snowflakes Beanie designed by Deja Joy.

Frozen Snowflakes Beanie

I haven't done much stranded colorwork, so it was good to play around with this. I had trouble deciding which color to use for the background and which to use for the design. I decided to use the blue as the background since that seemed the more classic look for this hat. But when finished, I had enough to make another hat with the colors reversed, so I started that one, too.

Second Frozen Snowflaes Beanie

It'll be fun to see how swapping the colors changes the look.

I also started the Rill Scarf designed by Miriam L. Felton. This is a fun scarf that has a narrow lace band and a wide wavy edge.

Rill Scarf

You can't see the waviness yet, but that will show up on the right side of the scarf. It is achieved by using some thing called short rows, where you knit part way across the row, then turn back around and knit back. This adds extra knitting on one side of the scarf which will cause that edge to wave. There are already a couple of short rows in the piece providing a slight wave to that edge, but it will take a lot more length to make that noticeable. This is a bit of a difficult knit because it is knit with very thin, lace weight yarn on small needles. But the results will be lovely!

Nancy

Wild Women Units Finished

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! We finally had a big "winter" storm last week. It was great! We got about 2 feet of heavy snow! Now we're back to warmer than normal temperatures and most of the snow is gone, but we still got the moisture and I appreciate that.

This week I was able to finish the paper pieced units in my Wild Women Don't Get the Blues quilt designed by Karen K. Stone.

Wild Women Don't Get the Blues

This completes my 100 units required for the 25 blocks in the quilt. Now I need to pick my fabric for the centers. I know that I want a solid and it will probably be a brown (although I could get wild and use another neutral like a red., shoutout to Freddy Moran😉....). One of my quilt guilds is starting a cross-stitch group that will be meeting at one of the local quilt shops that also carries a lot of solids. I'm planning on joining the group so will look at solids when I'm there.

I've also been working on my Pluma Morada shawl designed by Joji Locatelli. 

Pluma Morada

You can really see the pattern now. Maybe it's just the good lighting this morning.....

Pluma Morada - Close-Up

I'm in the last section that I'm going to do so I should have this shawl finished soon. I've been looking at several projects to start next.....

Finally, we had out monthly UFO (UnFinished Object) group meeting yesterday. We meet at the home of one of the ladies in the quilt guild who has a little quilt shop and teaching area in her home.It's a really nice space where we can even bring our sewing machines. I've been going through my stuff and organizing my UFOs. I found one that I could easily take to the UFO meeting, so I resurrected that project. It's a simple block that just has a black or gray frame around a pink and gray fabric. The quilt will just be these blocks, alternating between the black and gray frames. My project box had a bunch of completed blocks and a pile of center fabrics. There wasn't any of the black or the gray framing fabric in the box, so I think I used all of that up. Given that I can't make any more blocks, I now know the size of the finished quilt.  So I brought the completed blocks with me to the group and started putting them together.

Pink and Gray Quilt

The final quilt will be 8 blocks across by 9 blocks down. When the blocks themselves are sewn, you end up with two seams on two sides of the blocks. When sewing them together, I first thought that I would always position the black blocks with the seams on the sides and the gray blocks with the seams on the top and bottom, but then I realized that it would really bother me if the directional fabrics weren't all oriented correctly in the final quilt so I had to sew a bunch of the blocks together with those seams hitting, but they don't seem to be creating much bulk when pressed so I'm okay with this. When I started sewing the blocks into 4-patches, I also realized that I forgot that while the black block is on the left and the gray block is on the right in the top row, the positions are reversed in the bottom row. So, the fabric that was right-side-up when in the top row, became up-side-down in the bottom row. So I had to divide the paired blocks into piles with and without directional fabric, and then use the pairs without directional fabrics as the bottom pair in each 4-patch. Luckily, I had enough of those so I didn't have to do any unstitching! Now that I have the 4-patches, the geometry is such that I don't have to worry about having a block that can't fit into the quilt without a fabric being upside down. That makes things a lot easier! Now I'll put these blocks up on my makeshift design wall (I temporarily hang a picnic table cloth on a photographers quilt stand and stick the blocks to the felt side of the tablecloth), decide on the layout and sew them together. I also need to think about the binding. Since I don't have any of the black or gray fabrics, those obvious choices are out. I could use a different black or gray fabric. Or I could see if I have enough of one of the striped fabrics. Who knows. I have plenty of time to think about that!

Nancy

Lots of Progress on Pluma Morada

 Hi all -

I hope you are doing well! We're starting to get the winter weather here that we missed earlier in the year. We had a bit of snow last week. We expected more than we got, be we still got several inches. This week it looks like we could get as much as a couple of feet of snow. Here's hoping!!

I got a lot of work done on my Pluma Morada shawl, designed by Joji Locatelli, this week. 

Pluma Morada

I'm knitting this bigger than it is in the pattern because I have a lot more yarn than Joji used and I think it'll be wonderful in a larger size. Joji's pattern tells exactly how she made it and encourages you to make it larger if you want to.

I also picked an old quilting project back up again. This one is Wild Women Don't Get the Blues designed by Karen K. Stone. I don't believe the pattern is available anywhere, but it is the cover quilt for this collection of quilts for EQ8. I was able to paper piece nine units this week.

Wild Women Don't Get the Blues

These units are sewn together with a central square to create a block that looks something like this:

Wild Women Don't Get the Blues - Block Layout

I have 19 more of these units to piece before I can start constructing the blocks. These units are a bit slow to make because I make them one at a time and stand up after each seam to iron the piece and cut the fabric to prepare for the next seam. I could streamline this by piecing multiple units at once and putting an iron and rotary cutter next to my sewing machine, but I like to pick the next fabrics after finishing the unit and standing up after each seam to keep from getting stiff. My plan is to use a solid fabric, probably a brown, for the center of each block and then do some hand embroidery in that square. 

I've also continued to play around with EQ8, the quilt design software that I just got access to again. One of the things I've been working on is getting my idea for the backing for my Jungle Magnolia quilt on paper.

Jungle Magnolia Backing

The idea is to have a checkerboard that mirrors the checkerboard on the front, using the same fabric. Then I will scatter stars from the Haystack Cookies pattern from QuiltWx around the back. We were given the Haystack Cookies pattern in our Jungle Magnolia Block of the Month kit so I thought it would be fun to put them here. I'll probably play around with this a little more before piecing it, but this gives me a good idea of what I want.

Nancy

It's a Boy!!

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! I'm visiting family right now, but driving back home tomorrow. My nephew and his wife had their gender reveal party for their new baby and -- it's a boy!! He will be a wonderful addition to his sister and cousin! Now to start thinking about the baby quilt.....

Since I'm visiting family, I didn't do much crafting last week. I just made a little bit of progress on my Tula Sunrise quilt designed by Tula Pink. This is an English Paper Piecing (EPP) kit that I'm leaving at my sister's house. EPP is all done by hand so is the perfect project to work on where I don't have a sewing machine. Last time I was visiting, I started the quilt and found out that the kit was missing a couple of the solid fabrics. I brought some replacement fabrics from home and cut out and basted these pieces so I could take the rest of the fabric back home in case I need it there.

Tula Sunrise - Basted Solid Pieces

I also found that the fabric in the kit that was meant for the corner pieces didn't have what I needed. In the quilt photo, the corner pieces were fussy cut from the monkey fabric, putting a monkey in each corner. This fabric was also fussy cut for one of the sun centers.

Tula Sunrise - Corner Fabric From Kit

The way the piece of fabric in the kit was cut, there weren't the needed five monkey motifs. So I also looked through my stash at home for a replacement. I found a couple that I thought would work, and thought that this would work best:

Tula Sunrise - Corner Pieces

The skunks are from a different line of Tula's fabric, but I think they will still match and they're fun. I also like that there were motifs facing both directions so I don't have to put any of the skunks in the quilt upside-down. Not a lot of progress on the quilt, but I did do everything I needed to do with my stash fabric so I can take all of that back home with me.

Nancy