Ultimate Travel Bag Started

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! Things are good here! As I mentioned last week, Grace is now three years old. Hard to believe it! Buttercup, my cat, had her semi-annual vet visit this morning and everything went really well considering she's 17.5 years old. She's one tough little girl! Tomorrow is my great-niece's first birthday. She's getting so big! And my second great-niece (from a different mother) is due sometime next month. The family keeps growing!

As I mentioned in my last post, I spent last Friday and Saturday at a retreat with one of my quilt guilds. This time we went to Twisted Stitches in Superior, CO. This is a new sewing space that was just opened by a member of our guild. We were her first official event. It was a really nice space. Each person got their own table, with the tables arranged in groups of six. The tables are very stable, each had a little bank of electric plugs and the chairs were comfortable. There was an iron and ironing board at the end of each bank of tables and there were large design walls that could be rolled to different spots in the room. She also has HandiQuilter longarms in the space that can be rented and theres a kitchenette with a full size refrigerator to complete the space. I also brought my Gidget sewing table and was able to position it perpendicular to my table to make a nice workspace. Even though the table is heavy, I like to bring it because I like to have my machine sunk into the table. I worked on my Floral Bouquet quilt from the book "Jelly Roll Quilts" by Pam and Nicky Lintott. I'm calling my quilt "Tulips Are Blooming."

Tulips Are Blooming

I already had 25 blocks finished before the retreat, so at the retreat I pieced the other 14 blocks and sewed them together to make the main body of the quilt. I also got a very small start on the borders, but lost my steam and ended up going home a couple of hours early. I'm happy with what I accomplished! I don't like the borders in the pattern, which are a background border followed by a 2" border made from the leftover fabrics from the flowers. It makes sense for a jelly roll quilt, but I found it boring. I'm planning a plain background border, then a border of 2" squares of the flower fabrics on point, and then another fairly narrow background border to separate the squares from the binding. I figured out the math for the border of squares and got a few of those units prepared. I'll make a bunch of those squares and then will eyeball things to figure out how wide I want each border to be. But I've got other stuff I'm working on at home, so this will be put aside for now.

While I was looking through my collection of kits to prepare for the retreat, I came across a kit I picked up years ago for making the Ultimate Travel Bag designed by ByAnnie. (The kit is for the original version of the pattern; there is now a 2.0 version of the pattern on the Web site.) Since I don't like to work on complicated bags at retreats, I decided to get this kit out of the closet and start working on it. I got this kit years ago from Craftsy/Bluprint when they had a store along with their online lessons (and they used to have incredible sales). This kit came along with an online class so the written instructions frequently refer to the video, but I don't feel like spending the time to watch the video so there have been a few places that were confusing, but I also own the 2.0 version of the pattern so I can look at that to quickly verify some things. (I decided to stick to the original pattern rather than just making the 2.0 version because I wasn't sure if I would have the right supplies for the new version which has slight differences in the materials list.) Here's what I have done so far:

Ultimate Travel Bag

A lot of the time-consuming stuff is finished so I should have this bag finished by tomorrow.

One other little thing I've worked on this week is preparing pieces for my second rosette in my La Passacaglia quilt designed by Willyne Hammerstein. I wanted to get started on the next rosette because I spent some time catching up on unwatched episodes of TheQuiltShow.com and I came across one (episode 3705) where Tina Craig talked about English Paper Piecing (EPP). She shared a technique she has for positioning things for fussy cutting units. She makes a template out of card stock with a cut-out for the piece and uses that to position the paper EPP piece on the back of the fabric to get perfectly matched images. I don't want to go into any more detail here because I couldn't find a video of her technique on YouTube so I don't think she's sharing it publicly. Here's the units I prepared using her method:

La Passacaglia - Prepared Pieces for Rosette Center

I highly recommend this episode of TheQuiltShow.com if you like to EPP and you are a member of the site. She has ways of using this same technique for creating perfect mirror-image units from fabric that has mirror image motifs and for positioning images in the fabric that span multiple EPP pieces. I'll be trying that second method soon so will share a picture then to better show what I mean. While I was playing with the fabric, I also picked the fabric and did some prep work for the next couple of rounds of this rosette.

La Passacaglia - Second Rosette Center Rounds

I probably won't sew these together until our next EPP small group meeting since I've got other things that I want to work on first.

Nancy