Hand Work for Slow Stitch Sunday

I mentioned on the Weekend Update blog post on the Block Lotto site,  hat I was dangerously close to finishing a couple of things.  Now, I'm even closer :-)

I thought I'd be stitching down the binding of the checkerboard picnic quilt tonight, but with the moral support of the cats–first Johnny Be Good, pictured here, then Grace Hopper, then both of them at once on my lap–I finished last night.

I've added the rest of the diamond shapes needed to fill in the background for my English Paper Piecing project and have begun machine quilting the piece.   If I can finish today, my new plan for Slow Stitch Sunday will be to spend the evening binding the seams for a clean finish.

The timing is good–the weather has cooled off enough, that a hot pot of tea appeals this afternoon.

And then I need to decide on my next handwork project ... more EPP? Hand quilting? Maybe some needle-turn appliqué? Pick up some knitting? As usual, the possibilities are endless ...

Ready for a Picnic - My Lovely Finish for May

 

 I'm not sure that a picnic on a quilt spread on the ground makes as much sense around here, where the ground is covered with rocks and sand, pinon trees, cactus, chamisa and yucca, instead of soft green grass makes any sense, or why I started thinking of this checkerboard quilt as a picnic quilt, but with this Lovely Finish, I'm ready for a picnic.

The quilt is 66 inches square, made of twenty-five 12-inch 16-patch blocks, with a 3 inch triangle square border and a narrow binding.

The quilting design was quite simple: diagonal lines through the colored squares; flowers with echo quilting in the cream squares; and pointy leaves and echo quilting in the cream triangles in the border. I liked the look of alternately densely quilted/lightly quilted areas and after a wash, it's another soft, crinkly scrap quilt.

Despite the landscape, I intended to spread out the quilt under the pinon tree in my back "yard" ... but the high winds today just wouldn't cooperate.

It probably would have been a funny looking picnic on the sand and rocks, anyway ... 

Bloggers Quilt Festival :: Spring 2013 :: Group Quilt

Here's another quilt for Amy's Bloggers Quilt Festival, in the Group or Bee category. I call it Small Comfort.   

 

After my father died, just before Christmas some years ago, some members of an online group sent 6 inch snowball and 9-patch blocks.  Because of the holiday and a very short deadline set by the organizer, I didn't receive many blocks and thought that if I'd made a quilt only from the blocks I'd received, it wouldn't be large enough to provide any comfort to anyone.  

I added some large orphan blocks, and small 9-patches.  I made more snowball blocks and the scrappy flying geese border to make it large enough to curl up in ... and I do. 

The basics: 

• The quilt measures 66 inches square.
• While it was pieced soon after the blocks were received more than 10 years ago, I quilted and finished it in February, 2013.
• It is made from traditionally pieced blocks. 
• It is free motion quilted by me, on a little Bernina 153, using feathers, spirals, pebbles, and flower motifs. (Detail photos below). 
• As usual, both my cats helped in the making of this quilt–here, Grace Hopper perches on the work-in-progress on the sewing table and offers moral support while I am free motion quilting. 

I had such fun quilting this ... once I finally got started :-)

Here are some detail, showing blocks, fabrics, free motion quilting motifs and scrappy binding in this happy, scrappy, very comforting quilt.

Bloggers Quilt Festival :: Spring 2013 :: Wall Hanging

If you arrived at this post by way of Amy's Bloggers' Quilt Festival, welcome to my blog, Sophie Junction, and for considering my wall hanging, Cocka-Doodle-Tea Towel, for your vote. While you're here, be sure to click over to the Freebies tab and check out the free quilt block patterns, project ideas and tip sheets for quilters.

If you are a follower, you know that I blogged about this project exhaustively in March when I was putting it together for the Tea Towel Challenge. Thanks for putting up with me as I blog about it one more time :-)

I wasn't sure which quilts to share for the festival, but after a discussion about this morning in my kitchen with a fine artist who teaches color theory (also the owner of the company repairing the ceiling just out of view in this photo), and her praise, I knew it was the one.

Here's the basics: 

• The quilt measures 40 x 56 inches and is an original design.
• This quilt was begun and finished in March, 2013. 
• It is made from a tea towel, vintage damask tablecloth and fabrics from my stash, including some made fabrics, pieced from crumbs.
• The techniques I used include machine piecing--including improvisational pieced words, foundation pieced sun and traditional 4-patch and triangle squares–hand appliqué, and machine quilting. 

I challenged myself to use only fabrics from stash and to quilt it on my vintage singer 301. It's the first quilt I have tried to quilt quilted on this little workhorse.  I have since free motion quilted two more (larger) quilts on this machine.  I think I'm actually getting the hang of it and improving with each quilt ...  here are some detail photos of the quilt and the quilting. Click the links in the key below the photo mosaic to see the original photos on Flickr.

1. Detail - Cone Flowers, 2. Details - Checkerboard border and Sunflower section, 3. Detail - Sun and Checkerboard sky, 4. Detail - words and triangle sections, 5. Detail - Sunflowers, 6. Detail - Thread Painted Butterfly, 7. Detail - Fill patterns, 8. Detail - Quilted Rooster, 9. Ivan Bartlett design (tea towel)

Moving Furniture and English Paper Piecing

I didn't discover the leak in the upstairs bathroom last month until water came spilling through the downstairs ceiling and onto a piece of antique furniture, creating a lot of damage in its path.

This morning, I was up early and moving all the furniture in the dining/living area to the far end of the room before the repair people arrived to scrape and tape and screw and plaster and paint my "pregnant" ceiling back to normal.

When a test of the matching paint didn't match, the decision was made to repaint the entire ceiling.  Tomorrow morning, I'll be up early again and moving as much of the furniture as I can past the construction mess,  through the kitchen and into the studio to make it as quick and easy for the painter to finish.

While they worked today, I sat in the corner, watched and learned, and made some progress stitching blue diamonds on the star flower tea cozy project.

Eight more diamonds and I'll be ready to quilt it and turn it into a tea cozy.

I"m sharing my progress on Hexie Friday.

If I Had Done the Math ...

If I had thought about into just how many squares I would be quilting essentially the same little flower-fill ... maybe I would have opted for some nice overall design.  The answer  is that in my 25 checkerboard-style 16-patch blocks, half of the squares–200 of them–are cream. Surrounding them are 84 cream triangles in the triangle squares in which I also planned dense free-motion quilting.  What was I thinking :-)

If you find it a little boring to see what looks to be essentially the same in-progress photos ... imagine how I feel. No wonder I am so easily distracted by english paper piecing and my little star flower tea cozy project.

 I have resisted doing an actual count of how many completed/left to quilt until this morning: 151 cream squares quilted, 49 to go.  After all these flower shapes, I'm thinking about something leaf-inspired for the triangle border.

This will be my mid-month check-in for a Lovely Year of Finishes and for Esther's WOW (WIPS on Wednesday) Link list and for WIP Wednesday on Freshly Pieced ...  I promise no more boringly similar photos of this project until I finish the squares and am, at least, quilting the triangle border :-)

Fill In the Blanks ___________

Sunday night is almost always TV night chez Sophie. Last night I started putting my starflowers into a scrappy dark blue background made of hexagon and diamond shapes.

Instead of adding partial star flowers, I decided to use more blue and diamond shapes instead.

I will continue adding scrappy blue diamonds until the pieces cover the paper pattern I created for a cozy for my tea pot.

Here's where I stopped last night–with quite a few blank spots to fill.

These small pieces–each is smaller than 14 inches square–make it easy to use any available space as a design wall.  Even so, last night, I found myself thinking it would be nice to have a small pin board in the den next to where I sit and stitch to put these small pieces on the wall while I was thinking about the orientation of the star flowers and which blues to add where.  I think working on a design wall spoils you ... or, at least, it has me.

Speaking of design walls (or the lack there of), I'm joining the linky list on Judy's Design Wall Monday.

I'm also joining the monthly linky for EPP, Sarah's Help for Hexie-aholics.

Picnic Quilt Update

Lot of quilting done ... still lots of quilting to go.

I'm pushing on and fighting my new found hexie fever. The new rule around here is no hexies before dark :-)

I'm glad I got an early start on this month's lovely project, because at times the number of safety pins in the yet unquilted squares seems infinite ... I'm motivated to finish because I really am looking forward to seeing the alternating minimally quilted and very quilted squares in this quilt after it's been washed and dried.

Do you choose quilting designs based on how they look in 2-dimensions or in their inevitable 3-D crinkled and cozy state?

My Plan for the Star Flowers

Here's my plan for a small project for the English paper pieced Star Flowers - a tea cozy for my everyday tea pot. 

If you're paying attention, you might notice that I put together three more little star flowers last night for the other side.  I wonder how long this Hexie Fever will last?  While I was stitching, I wondered how long it would take to make 500 flowers–my wild guess at how many I'd need for a large bed quilt. 

I also noticed how similar these sweet little blocks are to the little Daisy blocks I pieced on the machine in January, the only different being one was six points and the other eight.  Isn't it interesting how we are attracted to variations of the same shapes and motifs over and over again?

For the curious, the pattern for my tea cozy started with measuring the height and width of the pot, adding some allowance for batting, quilting, shrinking and cutting two squares of newsprint.

I added some curves at the top to follow the shape of the bamboo handle, then pinned the two sheets together for a quick fit check.

Next up: adding hexagons to fill and extend the background ... but first, I need to ignore the siren's call to sit and stitch hexies and make some progress on the free motion quilting in those checkerboard spaces.

Onward!

And Then There Were Three ...

OK.  I admit it.  I am beginning to understand the addictive quality of English Paper Piecing and all those hexie projects I see in blogland.

By the time I had finished stitching the third star flower, I was already thinking about how I was going to go through my scrap bins and cut up all the smaller pieces of fabric into petals and hexie shapes to make a much larger project ... I have wanted to find a project to use up the too-small-for-most-project scraps in there. Maybe this is it.

When I uploaded the photo of the first flower to Flickr yesterday, within minutes, Amy was asking for a peek at the back.  

I'm sure there are neater ways to do it, but here's a look at the insides of my blocks.   Please remember this is my FIRST adventure in English Paper Piecing and don't judge my sloppy first efforts too harshly ... I'm sure I'll get better/neater with practice ;-)  

I printed Regina's template sheets on card stock and used a rotary cutter and ruler to cut them out. I punched a pair of holes near the center. Using one of the paper templates as a guide and an add-a-quarter ruler, I stacked the fabrics and rotary cut them with a 1/4 inch allowance around the template.

As you might guess, I cut and prepared everything for only one star flower at a time–it's just the way my design mind works, focusing on the elements of one flower/block/section at a time. But, I think this isn't the way I've seen most hexie/EPP projects progress and I need to figure out if I can shift to a way of cutting everything (or at least hundreds) of units, preparing them and having them ready to assemble. It's that kind of preparatory step that often slows/stops progress for me.  I'm focusing on that personal challenge this month and I think the blogiverse sent me this prize of an EPP project as a way to overcome it ... or at least make some strides in that direction.

Here is what my hexie center looked like after I attached the fabric. I deviated from Regina's directions a bit, but using the heavier card stock and not stitching through the paper.

I simply tacked the fabric at the corners and skipped to the next corner.

You can see how I pinned the fabric in place by going through my two punched holes.  It distorts the shape less and the pin is just going through fabric, not paper/card stock.

And here is the finished star flower, from the  back.

In theory it seems that once the surrounding pieces are sewn in place, I should be able to clip the basting/tacking stitches, remove the paper templates, and reuse them. 

This weekend on the Block Lotto's Weekend Update, I asked quilters to share their process.  I have found when I share mine here, I learn so much from the comments and discussions that follow.  Since I am just beginning my adventure in EPP, I know I have a lot to learn and would love to read your comments, suggestions and tips.   And if you'd like to share a blog post about YOUR process, please jump over to the Block Lotto and join me at the Linky party.

I'm also joining Billie Bee's Hexie Friday.