Kaffe Circles Backing/Binding Prepared

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! I'm having a good time visiting family in Kansas City right now. It's been very hot and humid, but we're supposed to have a cooler stretch now. It's certainly a switch from the dry air at my house! I haven't been working on any of my projects while I'm here. I've been having a lot of pain at the base of my thumb, so I'm giving it a break. It feels a lot better already!

Before I left, I was able to prepare the backing and binding for my Kaffe Circles quilt. I usually incorporate my scraps into the backing of my quilts. This time, the only scraps I have are circles.

Kaffe Circles - Leftover Scraps

My first thought was to make a backing with a large piece of the solid and a couple of large pieces of Kaffe fabric, then scatter the circles on those. That would be a fun backing, but it would be a lot of work. I would probably have to applique the circles since it would be really hard to wrangle the larger pieces of fabric for inset circles. Especially since the leftover circles are smaller than the circles on the front. In the end, I decided to save the circles for another project and just use a single Kaffe fabric for the backing. I had a couple of fabrics in my stash with enough yardage to create the backing and I ended up choosing this blue pansy fabric.

Kaffe Circles - Backing Fabric

I really like this fabric (which is probably why I had so much yardage) and the little bits of background color that peek out between the flowers matches my solid fabric pretty well.

Kaffe Circles - Backing Background Color

Using the single fabric, I was able to get the backing prepared in just an hour or two. What a nice change from my usual backings! I also prepared the binding for this quilt.

Kaffe Circles - Binding

I'm trying to be better about preparing the backing and binding when I finish a quilt top so I don't have to store a pile of fabric scraps with the quilt while it waits to be quilted.

I was also able to make a little progress on my La Passacaglia quilt designed by Willyne Hammerstein. 

La Passacaglia

I started attaching the units for the final partial round of the second large rosette. I had hoped to get this rosette finished, but my thumb was hurting too much to get very far on this. Hopefully I'll be able to finish this up when I get back!

And I continue to plug away at my Winter Vespers from Bernat. 

Winter Vespers

I still have to hold a needle to work on this, but it's not as painful as hand sewing so I can make progress on this when I get home if my thumb acts up again. 

Finally, I visited a new-to-me quilt shop here in Kansas City. It's called KC Maker Studio & Fabrics. I wanted to look for binding fabric for my Catsup & Mustard quilt, which has colors that I was having difficulty matching. I had heard that this was a large quilt shop and I was not disappointed! It was huge! And it was beautifully organized. They had fabrics galore, patterns everywhere, a huge selection of bag making supplies and everything you could think of in a quilt shop. I had brought a couple of spools of thread that matched the colors in my quilt pretty well and used those to find several fabrics that I thought would work for the binding. I purchased two possibilities and have my fingres crossed that one will work for me. I will definitely be visiting this shop again!

Nancy

Kaffe Circles Quilt Top Finished

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! Things are good here. Although it continues to be hot and dry, we have luckily not had any fires close by. My heart goes out to all of the people who are dealing with the fires and with the flooding. It's certainly sobering when I look at my Watch Duty app and see all of the fires affecting the western states!

This week I pulled out my Kaffe Circles quilt top. This quilt is made with Kaffe Fassett fabrics along with a solid. I wanted to get this top finished because I'm using all different Kaffe fabrics in the blocks so I had piles of my Kaffe fabric around my sewing room so I could keep track of which fabrics had been used and which hadn't. I started this quilt top in a Linda Reinhert workshop at my quilt guild and have made a few blocks here and there since. I had some time this week, so I made the final push and finished the quilt top. The blocks in this quilt are made up of inset pieced circles.

Kaffe Circles - Sample Block

The instructor had us sewing the inset circles using only 8 pins evenly spaced around the circle, but I found that I needed 16 pins. I guess I'm a control freak! It dawned on me this week that it might be easier to use clips instead of pins when sewing the circles because the clips are easier to use and they hold the fabric together only at the seam line, which is the only place on the pieces that you are sewing where the pieces are the same size.

Kaffe Circles - Using Pins

Kaffe Circles - Using Clips Instead of Pins

I found that the problem with using clips is that you have to stop sewing and remove the clip in front of the clip, about 1/2" before the needle, because the foot can't go over the clip. With pins I could sew right up to the needle so the fabrics were held in place better. So I discarded this idea and went back to using pins. After sewing, I pressed all of the seams towards the solid fabric.

Kaffe Circles - Pressing Towards Solid Fabric

I did this because I wanted the solid circles to be in the foreground. It's subtle, but this does make a difference. I wanted the quilt to have 30 blocks and had already finished 17 blocks, so I had 13 blocks left to complete this week.

Kaffe Circles - New Blocks

The blocks were slow to complete (again, I'm a control freak), but once they were finished it was quick work to put them together into a quilt top!

Kaffe Circles

It's nice to have this top finished so I can put away my Kaffe fabrics! I still need to prepare the binding and start thinking about the backing.

I've also made some progress on my Sisters Nine Patch leader/ender project designed by Bonnie Hunter. I made a bunch of progress on these blocks week before last when working on the backing for my Prickly Pear quilt, but forgot to include that in my blog post. This week I couldn't use leaders/enders when piecing the circles, but was able to make a little more progress on the leader/ender project while sewing the circle blocks together.

Sisters Nine Patch - Progress

I now have 112 of the 169 blocks finished and have a start on the remaining 57 blocks. I need to cut some more green squares for this quilt and can use some of the leftovers from my Kaffe Circles fabrics.

In the evenings, I made some progress on my La Passacaglia quilt designed by Willyne Hammerstein. I'm almost finished with the second large rosette and I really wanted to get it finished. This week I was able to finish four of the units for the final round of the rosette.

La Passacaglia - Units

I only have one more of these units to put together, then I can add these to the rosette.

Finally, I also made some more progress on my Winter Vespers needlepoint kit from Bernat. 

Winter Vespers

I'm not sure what I'll do with this when it's finished, but I'm really enjoying working on it!

Before I go, I wanted to share a little tidbit. A couple of weeks ago when preparing fabric for the Susan Cleveland workshop, my iron got really dirty. I starched the fabric, which I don't usually do but it was part of the instructions for the workshop. I used my backup iron, just in case, and I was happy that I did because the iron was coated with cooked starch when I finished. It was terrible and I was glad I used a backup iron! I tried cleaning the iron with the old Faultless iron cleaner that I've had for years (decades??), but it had no effect on the starch. Sorry, I didn't think to get a picture of the dirty iron but it was terrible and I was afraid I wasn't going to get it off. I looked for some iron cleaners on Amazon to try and found Mr. Iron and got some to try. 

Mr. Iron

This stuff was amazing! I barely touched it to the hot iron and the starch just disappeared!

Clean Iron

I wanted to share this because it was so incredible!

Nancy

Prickly Pear Ready To Be Basted

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! It was a nice week here. The temperatures cooled down a bit and we had some rain. As you know, I love rain! We're back to a pretty hot and dry forecast, but I'll still cross my fingers for more moisture!

This week I concentrated on getting my Prickly Pear quilt, designed by Cozy Quilt Designs, ready to be basted. This is going to be the first quilt that I send to a longarmer to baste for me rather than pin basting it myself on the floor. At the beginning of the week I just had the finished quilt top and a pile of leftover scraps. I started by preparing the binding so I could use any leftover binding fabric in the backing. Then it was on to the backing. My backings take a while since I try to use as much of the leftover fabric as possible. Since this is a fairly large quilt (74"x102") and it was a kit, I also had to dig through my stash to find some other fabrics that could also be used. Here is what I ended up with:

Prickly Pear - Backing

It's a bit wild and chaotic, but it'll work. I stay stitched around the outside of the backing and the quilt top, measured out the batting (I have a large roll of batting) and folded it all up and put it in a bag. I've left a message for the longarmer and will wait for a reply. I told her there is no rush on this so it might be a while before I can start quilting this.

I did also make some progress this week on my Winter Vespers needlepoint designed by Bernat. 

Winter Vespers

I like how this is filling in! 

Sorry I don't have many pictures this week. The Prickly Pear backing really took a long time to put together! I'll hopefully have more interesting stuff next week...

Nancy

Catsup & Mustard Resurrected

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well and is surviving the hot summer! It's been pretty hot here, but nothing like what others have been experiencing! There have been some good rains in areas around me, but we've only been able to get some short sprinkles at my house. There's more rain in the forecast this week, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

This week I resurrected a quilt I started years ago called Catsup & Mustard. I designed the quilt myself specifically to use a set of fabric that my mom gave me for my birthday one year. Every inch of fabric went into the quilt top with nothing but little scraps left over! I started quitling it on my old HandiQuilter longarm, focusing on learing to quilt feathers on the longarm. This was the quilt that pushed me to make the decision to get rid of the longarm. This was an early, cheap version of the HandiQuilter and it had a cheap table and came with no support. There were no fine adjustments on the table so I had to deal with the longarm wanting to move down and towards the right on its own. This made it very difficult to quilt smooth curves! So I got frustrated and put the quilt aside and got rid of the longarm. It's been sitting around for a long time, so I decided to get it out and finish it. This week I finished the remaining feather motifs and added some rulerwork. The feathers on this quilt are large and, I have to admit, are the ugliest feathers I've ever quilted! I'm not good at making pretty feathers when they are large. I need to look at more pictures of other's nice feathers to see how you fill the large spaces elegantly! But it looks fine from a distance and it holds the layers together, so it's a win in my book!

Catsup & Mustard

Catsup & Mustard - Back

I decided to use a variegated thread for fun. It's not the best choice, but it's not too bad. I quilted feathered wreaths on each block and large feathers in each of the large rectangular border areas. The worst feathers are in the border areas, but I can't get a picture where you can see the quilting. 

Catsup & Mustard - Feathered Wreath

I had some trouble with the stitching on some of the feathered wreaths, so I'm going to have to pick those out and requilt them. I wanted to get the rulerwork done first so I don't have to pin those areas before quilting.

Catsup & Mustard - Thread Problems

Since I used up all of the fabric on the quilt top, I have to look for some fabric to use for the binding. This has turned out to be more difficult than I expected. In the photos above, it looks like the colors of teh backing fabric match the colors of the front pretty well, but the back is actually a lot brighter than the front. For some reason, my camera and my phone both brighten up the colors of the front so that they appear to match the colors of the back. I've tried playing around with the filters on the phone, but I can't get the colors right. The only way I've been able to get close is to photograph the front and the back together.

Catsup & Mustard - Quilt Colors

Isn't that weird? I bought some fabric that I thought would be perfect using a photo on the phone that I tried to color correct, but I got home and it matched the back instead of the front! It dawned on me that I can find a couple of spools of thread in my vast collection that match the front colors and take them to the store when looking for a binding fabric. That way I don't have to haul the quilt around!

I've also continued to work on my Winter Vespers needlepoint designed by Bernat. 

Winter Vespers

And I attended our monthly cross stitch group meeting, where I made some progress on my Flying Beauties kit. 

Flying Beauties

And, finally, I also made it to the weekly knitting group where I made some progress on my Kallara shawl designed by Ambah O'Brien.

Kallara

It was really nice to make it to knot group! They meet weekly, but I don't make it very often because it's an hour drive for me. It's a great group of ladies, so I'm going to try to get down there more often!

Nancy

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