Quilting on Saturday

My Friday Night Sew-in was a success ... although the progress I made isn't exactly eye candy-worthy. 

I managed to find enough yellows in my scraps and stash to cut 680 triangles.

It doesn't look all that impressive in the photo, but there are 340 light yellows, 170 medium yellows and 170 dark yellows.

And ... I paired them up and chain-sewed into the night until I had 340 Half-Square Triangle units, a little more than I 'll need to make 21 blocks.

I didn't manage to push on and actually press them ... and so this effort ended looking like this–light+medium in one bin and light+dark in the other.

It's not pretty, but it is progress on a Scrap-Happy Saturday.   Check out the list to see some beautiful yellow scrap projects ...

I couldn't face the iron last night, but I did decide to play with some random liberated star blocks I made in February (from Pink scraps) and work on the North New Mexico Guild's charity effort this month: placemats for Kitchen Angels.

(The placemat has square corners, only the photo is skewed.) 

Each fall, around Thanksgiving, Kitchen Angels puts together Holiday baskets for each of their homebound clients including a new placemat, made by members of the guild. I hope someone will enjoy my little scrappy, wonky stars. Since I seemed to be having a little tension problem when I was free-motion-quilting the Cotton Robin quilts, I decided to try again and see what happened ... and, for whatever reason, this time, everything went well. Here are a couple detail photos of the quilting.

  

Since my placemat was made,  I didn't have to lug my machine and equipment to the meeting and stick around and sew ... which is probably a good thing since I was up, happily sewing at home last night, far too late and barely dragged myself out of bed in time to make it to the guild meeting.  I am glad I did because ... the raffle quilt has been finished and we got our first look. 

Clearly, I wasn't the only one snapping photos.

The pattern is Misty Mountain Pond by Judy Niemeyer ... you can find it here:

Misty Mountain Pond

I love the colors and the variety of fabrics the organizers chose.

Nicole Dunn's quilting design is exquisite and feels just right for this quilt.

I'll let you know when I have tickets to sell ...

The Last of February's Scrappy Pink Projects

These are  bits of string fabric that were left after I made the pink string-pieced heart pins I shared a week ago.

Most of the rectangles were in the neighborhood of 2 by 2 1/2-inches.

Maybe if I had tossed them right away, they wouldn't have kept calling my name until I DID something with them.

I used them as centers for these scrappy pink liberated star blocks.

I have some ideas but no real plans for these–suggestions welcome.  For the moment, they are just decorating my design wall while the remaining string-pieced scraps continue to call to me and say, "let's play" ... and I cannot believe I seem to have started yet another new project.

I'm joining Angela's list for the Last Pink Saturday and, a little burnt out on pink, waiting to read what color scraps I'll but pulling out and playing with in March.

Scrappy Heart Pins for St. Valentine's Day

Earlier this week, I cleaned out my pink scraps of the smallest bits, made the string pieced fabric that I shared when it was on my design wall, cut it up and made these.

Each of the twelve hearts has a few pale pink lazy daisies embroidered on the front and a pin back sewn to the back. 

The hearts are small, each about 3 by 4-inches. Small enough to hold in your hand, pin onto a collar or bag or use as a small pincushion.

I pinned them onto Thank You notes and sent them on their way in the post a few days ago.   I keep thinking about making these 5 or 6 times larger and using them for pillows. 

If you would like to make your Valentine a little heart pinnie, here's how they are made. 

1. Trim fabric to create heart shape, 2. Sew the 2 halves together,

3. Press seam open, 4. Lay the heart face down on back fabric,

5. Stitch, 6. Trim back to match, 7. Clip corners to reduce bulk,

8. Turn inside out, 9. Stuff with polyfill or left-over batting strips,

10. Stuffed and ready to stitch, 11. pin the opening closed and stitch,

12. Ready for embellishment and hardware

This will be my update for Scrap Happy Saturday.  I'm also joining the lists for Finish It Up Friday, Richard and Tanya's Link a  Finish Friday  and Whoop Whoop Friday.

I'm Counting Down

Thanks to Olympics TV watching, I'm getting close to finishing the first of two redwork pieces that will become pillow covers.  I have begun counting the elements that are left: I have four flowers, two buds, two tendrils, a leaf and Morning left to stitch before I move onto Good Night.

It's unlikely I'll finish today/tonight during Slow Stitching Sunday, but I will be working on it and I think I might finish sometime this week. The redwork is designed to fit in an 18 inch square. I will add a pieced border to make a 24 inch square pillow cover.

I planned to leave the text for last, but couldn't resist stitching that crazy-looking G earlier this week.

I'm sure it's based on a very old style font ... can anyone identify it?

I may take a break from the redwork,   More hand stitching will be required as part of my plan for the string foundations I made yesterday. The string rectangles were made from some of the small pink scraps that were left over after making the blocks I posted yesterday.

Each of the four rectangles measures 4 by 12 inches.

I'll share more about the string project later this week. They are intended for a small gift.

Updated Monday morning to share that my design wall still looks like this EXCEPT ... I got a little obsessed yesterday and finished the redwork for Good Morning. It might take an Olympian effort to start and finish the second piece before the closing ceremony of the Olympics, but I am going to try.

Most of the images on my blog posts are posted on Flickr ... and lately, Flickr is having problems.  If you get the "Bad, bad panda" or other error message, refreshing the page usually fixes the problem.

Scrappy Pink Blocks for 4 Projects

I went to bed last night wondering how I suddenly find myself making four quilts from blocks from the Rainbow Scrap challenge this year and wondering how did that happen?

Two were existing projects, but for some reason, that wasn't enough ... and I started two more quilts last month.

The Bead-on-a-String blocks are for one of the two quilts I am making as part of the Mod-Mod Quilt-Along.  Each month I am making the Block Lotto block of the month in the designated Rainbow Scrap Challenge (RSC) color. 

I used Dale Fleming's 6-minute circle technique to piece the pink "beads."  If you google Dale Fleming 6-Minute Circle you’ll find links to Dale Fleming demonstrating her technique on Simply Quilts (on the HGTV website) and a longer version (with other shapes and examples)  from her on The Quilt Show (if you are a member).  

The book contains a lot of information on color and design principles and how to use the technique with different shapes. It was published almost 10 years ago, but I noticed that Amazon has it available on Kindle.  Clicking the book image will take you there. 

Last month, I also started making a single, large (10 x 15-inch) scrappy oak leaf block each month.

The Briar Patch blocks aren't a new project ... in fact, it's a very old–almost 10 years old– scrap-busting project that was packed away and forgotten, not long after beginning it in a workshop.

I blogged about the origins of this project with links to the pattern here: It was a dark and scrappy Saturday night.

The RSC color-of-the-month will be combined with black and white prints in these blocks.  I have now made 16 of the 80 blocks needed for this quilt.

Pink purists probably noticed that there are some red triangles mixed in with my "pink" broken dishes on my design wall.  Because I had included pink fabrics in my "red" blocks when I started making these blocks two years ago, I decided to mix in some of red triangle squares I had left over in these.

When mixed together with the existing mostly red blocks, they play nicely together.

These four blocks make a total of 21 of the red/pink blocks.

I plan to make a total of 126 of the 8-inch blocks from rainbow scraps.  I'm a little over half-way with 67 blocks made from red/pink, green, blue and purple.

I'm joining the other tickled pink quilters for the Scrap Happy Saturday party on Angela's SoScrappy blog.

Pink!

I couldn't resist pulling out my bin of pink scraps and getting started on the February color for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.

I'm not sure how far they will stretch this month because I used up a bunch of pink scraps in the background of my little Double Dare quilt last month.

Making made fabric squares has been my go-to method for cleaning out the mostly too small scraps.  I have always loved scrappy backgrounds in quilts, but only in the last year or so considered the possibility of making scrappy background "fabric."

I found enough pinks to make another large 10 by 15 inch oak leaf block.  Here are pink and blue together.  The slow nature of making one block each month gives me a lot of time to think about how I will use them in a quilt at the end of the year. I already have some ideas ...

I hated the photo I took after dark and posted last night and have replaced it with something with a pink leaf that looks more pink than red (it's still more pink in real life than it appears on my screen ... but this is better).

I'll be joining the RSC Scrap Happy Saturday link tomorrow.

Speaking of Pink, here's a sunrise from earlier this week. 

When a Project wants to be something ELSE

When I read that the AAQI quilt-a-month club challenge for June included Winter theme, I thought about a pair of old unfinished challenges pieces in my UFO/WIP collection. Originally begun as part of another challenge, I thought the 8 x 16 inch pieces of my winter diptych could be re-worked into the 9 x 12 format.  I removed some of the sky and could have chopped off the snow at the bottom of the piece, but I didn't think I'd like the proportions and the more I thought about it . . . another idea emerged.

I started to see a great place to start for a winter-themed round robin quilt.  Maybe it's the fact that it's been 100-plus degrees hot-hot-hot here and I'm starting to wonder if a little winter in my life would be such a bad thing.

If the ladies in charge will accept me at this late date, I'll be joining the in-progress Liberated Round Robin . . . if I'm too late, I'll likely play along with this nested round robin group on my own.

To see more design walls/tables and work-in-progress, check out the links in  Judy's Design Wall Monday post.

No longer on the work table at my house, is the pillow I made for the pink portion of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge last month.  I like those pale-ish baskets so much more with their yo-yo "blooms" planted in them.


 

I sewed the quilted back and front sections together with the right sides on the outside and then bound the edges.

The Zipper Experiment

I finished the quilting on the front of the 3 Baskets pillow and ... found the courage to unzip the quilted back and slice through the batting and backing. I trimmed the batting, folded in the raw edge of the backing and stitched it to the zipper tape.

In the detail photo, you can see 3 of Leah Day's designs from her free motion quilting project: loose weave (on the basket), sea oats (in green, masquerading as vines for the yet-to-be-added yo-yo "flowers," and bed of roses in the background.

I probably could have finished the back of the zipper application more neatly/evenly, but it works . . . and I rationalized that no one except me (and now, you) will ever see the inside of the pillow and my wavy edge.



After this photo was taken, I added more filler-quilting to continue the quilting to the zipper.

I had a little brainstorm today about a project that won't need too many yellow scraps for the Rainbow Challenge, so I'm anxious to finish up this pillow and move on.

What IF . . .

When assembling and quilting those pink pieces, I asked myself that dangerous question, what if . . .

What if I assembled the back of the pillow cover, sewing in the zipper BEFORE I quilted it?

I've quilted the back with some flower designs from stencils (the yellow chalked desisngs), filling with a couple of filler designs (inspired by Leah Day) and avoiding the zipper area.

My plan is to unzip the zipper, slit the batting and backing and finish the cut edges with bias strips.

Probably there's a better way to do this . . . and I'm sure someone will leave a comment so I'll know better the next time.  I probably could have done some research on the "right way" to insert a zipper into a quilted fabric, but I couldn't resist just running with the what if that was in my head. 

Before I take the next steps and see if my crazy idea will work, I plan to quilt the front and add all those pink yo-yos.

To see more work in progress (and maybe a few other crazy ideas), check out the Design Wall Monday links on Judy's blog, The Patchwork times. 

Pink Progress

My basket blocks have been trimmed and sewn together with a narrow border and I've sewn a couple other rectangles from large pink scraps.

With two days left in May,  I hope to finish this small (but very scrappy) project in time so I can start thinking about the color of June . . . and get a much earlier start on playing with those scraps ;-)

Check out Judy's Patchwork Times blog o see more work-in-progress on the design wall.

Working by Hand

When I fall out of the habit of handwork, I forget how calming and meditative it can be ... until I have a reason to sit and stitch.

I labelled the recently finished tote as a "knitting bag," in part, to inspire me to pull something out of my yarn stash and knit something.

This is a rugged version of Evelyn Clark's Swallowtail shawl. The yarn, Reynold's Mandalay, is an Aran weight silk (which, for non-knitters, is a pretty chunky yarn). I am thinking the finished silk shawl will be the perfect summer wrap for movie theaters and other over-air conditioned venues. You can see photos of finished Swallowtails and get an idea of how this might look when it's finished and blocked on this Knit-a-long blog. 

I was enjoying the knitting so much that I wanted to find something to hand stitch and decided to add some Yo yos-as-flowers to my pink basket blocks. The Clover Yo-Yo makers make it easy to sit and turn a handful of scraps into delicious little circles. I used the African porcupine quill to arrange the folds in the small yo-yos–a tip I learned years ago in a ribbon flowers workshop with Candace Kling.  It's a great tool to use for manipulating fabrics when fingers are too fat.

All the positive bio-feedback from hand-work had me thinking about what's next . . . until I remembered the pre-printed "wholecloth" pillow-sized project I bought from Sew Batik at the Dallas quilt show a couple months ago.  It's been years since I picked up any hand-quilting.  I'm long overdue and looking forward to it.

An Eleventh Hour Start

I had a couple pink projects in mind but haven't been able to find the time and inclination until today.  The stress of the job hunt is beginning to wear.

Today–with only four days of May left–I finally made a start. These basket blocks are approximately 6 by 11 inches. I started with some more of the leftover bits of string fabric (that I just can't seem to toss) and some pink scraps. I have a plan and . . . a deadline.

Last weekend, as I was making the light string blocks for Strings & Chocolates quilt, I noticed that quite a few of them had pink fabrics and then in a light bulb moment, I saw that I could use them as the basket in a liberated basket block.

I've become such a silent participant in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge that I had to post this meager beginning, if only to let my rainbow friends know that I'm still in the game;-)