Showing posts with label WIP. Show all posts

Flower Patch SAL Blocks 6 & 7

Today's the day to link up blocks 6 & 7 in the For the Love of Geese Flower Patch SAL. I had gotten a bit behind on these, but I'm totally up to date now! Well, I still need to work on block 8, but that released today. :)



I chose the embroidery option on block 7. I stitched a chain stitch for each stem. It's a bit wobbly, but I think the overall look is okay. If you stand back, you can't see how uneven my stitching is. It is soooo much easier to embroider on Aida fabric!

Here are all my blocks together. They're a bit cropped; couldn't fit everything in the picture.
I've also managed to get up to date on the Macaron Mystery. 
And I've been squeezing out bits of time over the past few weeks to make some gifts for a quilting friend. I made this little pincushion using the pattern in this month's American Patchwork & Quilting.
I made a covered button and my husband glued it onto this giant paperclip blank for me.
I made several design boards in two sizes and my husband made the coasters.

I was going to quilt one of my oldest WIPs, circa 1999. I needed to make the backing. Back when I started this project, hand quilting was still the thing. I do not enjoy hand quilting, which is partly why this never got done. Luckily there was still enough backing fabric to load the quilt on the frame. You can see the quilt top in the background.

I attempted the pattern matching using glue method as outlined at Suzy Quilts. I didn't have a washable school glue stick, so I used the Sew Line glue pen. It mostly held, but it wasn't great.

I had everything loaded and was starting the pattern my husband had selected for this (for his mom, who used to have wallpaper that matched the fabric, though in a more attractive yellow, back then). My long arm was in a crabby mood and things didn't go well. The quilt is now off the frame for unquilting. 😐

So I did a deep clean and some testing on the long arm and of course everything now works. 🙄

I moved along to the next project, which is a bunny pillow. My daughter selected all the fabrics from my stash (yes! using the stash! awesome!). The paper piecing block for this can be found in EQ8, but I used directions from Threadbare Quilting (Bonita Bunny).

We went with Squatty Squared for the quilting. Fun tidbit: the backing fabric was originally supposed to be a bunny skirt for my daughter many moons ago. I recently used it in a donation quilt and used most of the remaining yardage for the pillow back.


My other accomplishment for the week is getting the test quilt ready for piecing. Everything is cut and laid out and I now need to make time to sew, which will be challenging over the next week. No photos until the pattern releases though.

The only things remaining on my December list that I haven't gotten to yet are assembling the Grassy Creek top, keeping up with the Rhododendron Trail mystery, and making myself a shirt.

I mentioned before that we ordered furniture for the basement, but won't receive it until sometime next year. In the meantime, we have an FTC robot field set up. They use the giant tv (my husband's gift to himself) to display their programming while they work. I guess it's been successful--they had their first league play tournament Monday and the boys placed first! I think they were all surprised.

Have a wonderful week. Happy Christmas to you if you celebrate.


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March OMG and a Custom Quilt

I have so many works in progress right now that I am having a hard time choosing just one as an OMG. I need to buy backings for the two Sunshowers tops and the Meadowland top.  All three need to be quilted and bound.  I would love to complete the Frolic top. If you've done a Bonnie Hunter quilt before, you know it is a ton of sewing.  I have the main blocks made, but need to make all the edge blocks, do the setting, and put on a bunch of pieced borders.  I already have backing for that one.  I sewed together a bunch of leftover HST from another project and I'd like to do something with that.  Right now I'm leaning toward a pillow, but I'm just not sure.  

 I like to have several projects going at once because often I get bored with the repetitiveness and need the mental break/challenge of working on something new.  But sometimes having choices is overwhelming! That's usually the point where I just start something new that is smaller and a quick finish.  But really, these WIP are getting a bit out of control.

 Which to pick, which to pick?  I think I'm going to go with quilting the Meadowland for my March OMG.
Linking up with Elm Street Quilts for One Monthly Goal.

I've been pretty slow-moving the last few weeks.  My back has been pretty sore after the tumble down the stairs.  I did very slowly work on quilting my friend's top.  I'm pretty pleased with how it came out.





 I was privileged to hear Gyleen X. Fitzgerald speak last night at one of the guilds I belong to.  I have been very fortunate to hear and/or take classes with many nationally known speakers and Gyleen is right at the top.  She's a really fantastic speaker.  I enjoyed her so much.  I wish I could have been able to take one of her classes at IHQS.  If you ever have the chance to hear her or take a class, I urge you to do so.  Or you can check out her website here.  I just really can't say enough good things about her.  

 Linking with For the love of geese and My Quilt Infatuation.
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Getting Closer

This month has just flown by.  I feel like I'm having a hard time keeping track of time.  Last week I was a day ahead the whole week and this week I'm a day behind.  Mostly because everyone was home on Monday, so today feels like Tuesday instead of Wednesday.  Whatever.  Anyway, I've been plugging away at the quilt alongs.

I have one of the Sunshowers rainbow tops completed.  This one is 60 x 78.  I have a tentative quilting plan worked out for this one. I usually choose a thread based on the background color.  In this case, that would be the blue, but I really don't like how the blue thread would look going over the rainbows.  I'm not a fan of dark thread on light fabric. I tried a bunch of grays, pastels, and even a 100-wt white, but none of them appealed.  I do have a heavier rainbow variegated thread left from a previous project, so I think I'm going to go a bit away from my norm and make the thread really stand out on this one.  Hopefully it works out!
I have the second one partially completed, but I ran out of the blue fabric, so I need to get more so that I can put the sides on the quilt.  Just in case you wondered, my original fabric pull was different than this and I also had intended to make 12 blocks.  So the yardage I originally bought didn't quite go as far as I had planned.  Honestly, I'm not sure I could have made it through all 12 rainbows.  Curved piecing isn't really my thing.  Tiny block piecing is my love.
I think I'm finally at a point where I'm ready to sew the Meadowland blocks together.  I have been shuffling them around for days and nothing felt quite right.  Getting this top completed is my One Monthly Goal for February, so I have about a week left to get it sewn.  I think I'm going to add white borders around the outside once I'm done.  However, I'm not sure which white I used--was it Kona white or Moda Bella white? Sorry for the lousy picture.  My design wall is behind my longarm and it's right behind the bank of lighting over the machine.  You can see it the colors more accurately in the next picture.
Once I get the tops sewn, I need to get backing fabrics for everything and binding fabric for the Meadowland. I'm hoping that happens this week.

I actually have a quilting queue right now!  I have this giant 90 x 90 top (unknown maker) that I am quilting as part of the Community Quilts program at one of the guilds I belong to.  It is headed for someone receiving a home through the local Habitat for Humanity program.  As you can see, it's loaded up and ready to go.  I had to order in some king sized batting for it, and the batting came Monday.  This one needs to be quilted and bound within the next two weeks.
I have two custom quilts in my lineup as well.  I have the quilting planned out on the first one, so I need to mark it and then get stitching.
Joining concurrent quilt alongs probably wasn't my best idea.  However, since I'm participating in Longarm League discounts for them, I wanted to have experience with both tops.

 In other news, my daughter has finally finished the 50 hours of practice driving the state requires before you can get a license.  A little more practice with the various types of parking and she should be ready to take the test.  That means we are also looking at needing to buy an additional car since my husband has been driving the Prius that we bought for her.  Car payments and increased insurance premiums are in my near future.  But also relief once she actually gets the license.

 She's also back in math class.  The first trimester of Pre-calc was rough on both of us and we'd been enjoying the 12 week reprieve where she didn't have math.  My undergraduate degree is in math.  I had years and years of calculus in college.  I taught math, though it was mostly at a remedial level, so I never really went beyond Algebra with my students.  I cannot remember the majority of what my daughter is studying in math class.  They do not have a textbook, though that may not have been much help anyway based on the lousy ones she had for her lower classes.  Her high school only offers honors or dual enrollment level classes for the fourth year of math.  For the life of me I cannot figure out why.  Not every kid is a whiz in math, but most every college bound kid needs the fourth year.  Why can't there be a normally paced class that actually uses a book?  And doesn't use a really aggressive, insane amount of work for the teacher, grading system.

 Why, oh why, have I forgotten almost every bit of math I ever learned in college?  If you don't use it, you lose it, for sure.

 Let's end this with something happier.  Here's how my baby pineapple looks this week.
Linking with For the love of geese and My Quilt Infatuation.
  
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Progress!

I've been super-productive since last week.  I went to a LQS (local quilt shop) and chose most of my fabrics for the Meadowland quilt along that starts in February.  I added in a few from my stash to round things off (not pictured).  I'm loving this fabric combination and am excited to get started.  
I also messed around a bit with my Sunshowers QAL fabrics.  I just wasn't feeling the love.  I looked through some solid pieces I had that were left over from the Postcard from Sweden quilt a few years ago and decided that peach would look better than having the two pinks.  I changed the order of the fabrics a bit and won't be making quite as large of a quilt as I'd originally planned, but now I like how it looks better and am more excited about working on it. Can you tell I've been in a blue and green mood lately? 😁
I trimmed and sewed all the half square triangles from the Stacy Iest Hsu fabric as well.  I am currently debating adding a border since it's around 10" right now.  The plan is to quilt the top and then make it into a pillow cover with binding.  I haven't done a pillow with binding before.  I looked up a video on how to do it and it seems pretty straightforward.  Just need to decide what my target size is.
The Frolic mystery quilt reveal came last Friday.  This is technically step nine, though I am referring to it as steps 9-15.  It is a lot.  I've been busting my butt to get the blocks done. 

It took me three days to get this far.  Once I got into a groove, it took about 15-20 minutes per block to assemble. Here is a stack of my finished whole blocks.
Then I moved to the next block of instructions and I am like, "What???".  I feel like I missed a direction somewhere.  When I looked back through all the other steps, I didn't see any I missed, but I don't have the pieces sewn that the step requires.  I DO know what I need to do in order to make it happen, but still. What? This is really not a beginner-friendly project.  Good thing I'm definitely not a beginner.  And as I always say, if you're getting something for free, you are getting what you paid for.
Just a random shot of part of my sewing room.  :)
I also have spent quite a bit of time doing some fabric shopping online.  Mostly because I needed two solid color fabrics, one for each quilt along, that I could not find locally.  And if I am ordering something, I need to make sure that I can pay the least amount of shipping for it.  It seems that Kona Blue Grass and Kona Peach aren't all that common.  I finally ordered from Fat Quarter Shop since they had both in stock.  Then I had to add more to the order because it wasn't worth it to pay shipping on that little amount.  Since I had already been perusing Etsy, I made a few orders from there too.  I'm not doing so great at using what I have, huh? LOL.

 I also had to order a spool of thread. I received a quilt made of denim squares from a new client over the weekend and I didn't have the right color thread. I normally order enough to hit the free shipping threshold, but Superior was offering free shipping over the weekend, so one it was. Once the thread arrives, I'll get started on this one.  It's huge!  I'm a little afraid, but I like to try new things and I am so very grateful to have work.
I made this vegetable soup last week.  I cut and measured everything precisely as the recipe directed.  It took way longer than the recipe indicated--isn't that often the case?  Also, I ended up with more like 12 servings rather than the eight it said.  I wonder if my bowls are smaller than average or if recipe creators have giant bowls or something.  We almost always find that soup recipes yield way more than what is stated. Anyway, I froze six servings and have been eating a lot of vegetable soup.  It doesn't have any real flavor other than vegetable, but that is okay.   
I made Banana Blueberry muffins for dinner last night.  I make this recipe fairly often; we tend to get a lot of overripe bananas around here. The only changes I make are to use two full bananas instead of the 1.5 it calls for and to use muffin cup liners rather than greasing a pan.  Oh, and my blueberries are always frozen.  Make sure you use the light yogurt it calls for.  I made it with Greek yogurt once since that's what my husband was eating that week.  BIG mistake.  They came out really rubbery and chewy.  Yuck!  We usually have Dannon Light and Fit vanilla yogurt and that makes a really nice muffin.  Also, my son doesn't like blueberries, so I make up the batter minus the blueberries, fill his three muffin cups, then add the blueberries to the mix to fill the remaining nine muffin cups.

 Finally, in the weird column...a while back my husband was laughing over a meme.  If you have kids who are school-aged, you know that for whatever reason they are really, really into memes.  I just don't get it, but anyway, I digress.  It was a bit odd for my husband to be laughing over one, and he told me to look it up.  If you Google Unmanly Fireworks Guy, you get several images, including these:
The original image, borrowed from the Internet.
Also borrowed from the Internet.
Screen shot from Internet.
I am a bit ashamed to admit it, but the twerking one really made me giggle.  The reason my husband was laughing is that the unmanly guy is someone he went to high school with.  And I went to high school with unmanly guy's wife.  They are very nice people.  How did this image capture the imagination of the Internet to become viral? What a strange world we live in!

 Linking with For the love of geese, My Quilt Infatuation, and mmm! quilts.
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Piles of Stuff

I can't say I've accomplished a whole lot in the last week.  I kind of just took it easy.  Sometimes you just need to do that, right?  I feel like I washed a lot of fabric though.  Ha.

 I am currently completely up to date on the Frolic mystery.  It was nice to take my time and spread the work over several days on this clue.
I'm hoping that we are near the end of the cutting because most of my piles are really diminished and this last clue wiped out the entirety of many of my fabrics.
Here's a fun thing--Bonnie Hunter herself commented on one of my posts!

 Last week my friend and I went to a sale at one of the local shops.  I didn't really need much, so I got a backing for one of my UFOs.  

 Here's a view of my long arm frame with a few quilts laid out that I need to make backings for.  The pile of fabric on the floor is what I bought for the UFO backing.
On my ironing table is another pile of fabric.  This is the base fabric for the string stars from last week's post. The stars themselves are under that.  I have a lot of ironing to do!  I could say pressing, but let's be honest, I always call it ironing.
Near my sewing machine is another pile.  This is one of my Cupcake Mix sets.  I really dislike removing all the papers.  I finally decided to bring them upstairs and tear out the papers while watching TV in the evening. After I trim the dog ears they will be ready to sew into blocks.

The new fabric bins are still in a pile and I have not even begun to tackle that project yet.  

One more fun tidbit:  Corey Yoder liked my quilt on Instagram!  Well, not my quilt, but my friend Denise's quilt that I quilted!  It's always fun when someone "famous" likes something you post.


 Until next week, happy quilting!

 Linking with For the love of geese and My Quilt Infatuation.

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