Could have been an 'oops' (or Why I pre-wash my fabric)

Boy, do I love these batik flannels! Totally love them. As Woody Allen told Annie Hall, it's more than love -- I lurf them. They are gorgeous! I bought some for the back of Jocelyn's African Coins quilt and more for the back of Val's Ocean Waves Monkey Wrench quilt. When Sew Sassy put all the batik flannels on sale, I bought a little of each of them because I knew I would use them eventually. Eventually is now.


Flannels can shrink. Actually, they DO shrink -- they are more loosely woven than quilting cottons and when you wash them, well... they shrink. With all the dye in these batik-like flannels, they also bleed. When I prewashed the flannels I threw in a Shout Color Catcher, as I always do when I wash new fabric. Sometimes they get a faint tint, sometimes a more noticeable one, sometimes you can't tell they've been through the wash. But look at this! The blue sheet was washed with the flannels. The unused white one on top of it shows what it looked like when it went into the washer. Nuff said.

Cookie cutters

I started collecting cookie cutters in the 1970's. For a few years I was semi-serious about it, but later I realized that I didn't make cookies that often. I just can't eat cookies all the time and I didn't want my kids to grow up feeling deprived unless they had a cookie. But I did love the cookie cutters!

Eventually I pruned my collection, but I still have quite a few cookie cutters. They came in handy on Make A Blanket Day (Feb. 17). A snow storm prevented me from attending the Big Event in Forsyth, so I decided to spend the day putting together one of the Linus kits the guild has (and which I store in my sewing room). This one had lots of cute fabrics, but there were also several solid, pale peach squares that forced you to look at them and really detracted from the quilt. I wish I had taken a photo so you could see that. So after the entire quilt had been assembled, I decided I just had to do something. I found one applique pattern in a magazine (the flower with the center) and then wham! Suddenly I remembered my cookie cutters. They were the perfect size to use as templates. I traced them onto fusible web and made some appliques. It's definitely easier to applique the squares before assembling the quilt, but this wasn't too bad.

It's a cute top and I think the appliques add that extra something special.

Animal panel

Here's a Linus quilt made from a simple panel (the squares and the yellow dotted border surrounding them). Someone added the blue/green/yellow striped border and turned it in for a Linus top. I thought it was still too small, so added some green dotted fabric of my own as an outer border before quilting and binding it. You may recognize the fabric from Cool Brian (California Dreamin' s first incarnation).


I tried quilting this a new way, and it was wonderful. Whenever I have stitched a long, anchoring seam down the middle (as I was taught to do), I inevitably pull the fabric on the back and it gets puckered. I have tried several ways around this problem but have been unsuccessful. This time the quilting worked out great. I quilted the edge of each square, making it look pieced. This also kept me from having to start off with a long anchoring line of stitching. When I stitched in the ditch in the borders (and I must say I do a mean stitch in the ditch!), it still looked great. It's a baby quilt, so was easy to work with on the machine and I felt really good about how it came out. Nothing fancy at all, but it worked. Yay!

Quilts everywhere!

Again, behind in my posts. The problem is with iPhoto -- I have it waaay too full, so it takes forever to download photos, edit them, and get them to the desktop for uploading to Blogger. I need to move photos out of iPhoto and just use it for downloading and editing, but that will be such a long task that I haven't started...so I keep adding photos...making it a bigger task when I do get around to it. But I have now moved several photos to the desktop and will get a few posts done soon. Here's a picture taken in my family room.

The pile of quilts on the chair is donated Linus quilts that I brought home from guild the other night (you can see them on the Hearts for Linus blog, link to the right). On the couch back are two Linus quilts I contributed to making. The quilt on the bottom normally resides in the family room -- it's the first quilt I ever made, which goes with nothing and is too small and has too big a border, but I like it anyway.

Below is my design wall (sorry, I forgot to rotate the photo and there's no way I'm going back into iPhoto to do it!). The green strips are Laurel's I Spy and other is a table topper I made in my Quilt University class. I haven't decided whether to join the red and yellow triangle borders to it or just be done, so I'm leaving it up to look at it both ways. I don't much like the piece, but I learned a lot making it.

"Mountain majesties"

Oh, beautiful for spacious skies
For amber waves of grain
For purple mountains' majesty
Above the fruited plain.

We all know the words -- or sort of know the words. How many people get the "purple mountains' majesty" part correct, with all the right plurals and possessives? I grimaced when I saw the title on the block lotto directions, but I know I am more particular than most when it comes to orthographical niceties. Fortunately, Google is uninterested in the apostrophe and I was able to find out more about this block online.


In any case, I made this block as part of our monthly block lotto at the guild. I like it okay, although I doubt I would ever make a quilt based on this block, but I was intrigued by the construction. You make two half-square triangles, cut them apart in strips, and stitch them back together. I was intrigued enough to look for layout possibilities online. Quiltville, one of my favorite sites, has instructions and some very intriguing designs using this block. Click here to take a look. By the way, this is all prelude to my next post, coming soon, about tesselations and symmetry.

Snow sculpture

Brian opened the back door from the garage to get to the patio to shovel that big snow drift against the family room door (I posted that photo a few days ago). This is what greeted him when he opened the door.

The indentations in the door made a lovely mold for the snow!

More pieces!

Remember the green and yellow checkerboard I posted a week ago? This goes with it! Next week I should join everything and you'll see what it is.

PublishThese are photographed on the spiffy table-top gridded ironing board I have. It's wonderful!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Blizzard!

Snow! Last I measured, the drift against the patio door was 43" higher than our carpet (don't be ridiculous, I didn't go OUTSIDE to measure it!). And that was about 5:30 this evening, and it's now 10:15 and it's still snowing.
It's a very odd storm -- bitterly cold and windy, with very dry snow. So the tree branches are all bare and forlorn looking, part of the grass is visible, and then there are drifts that measure several feet. The University was closed today and will be again tomorrow. Incredible!

Lost & Found

When I organized all my I Spy paraphernalia, I put the magazine with the pattern in the big Rubbermaid tub along with everything else. Somehow it crawled out all by itself to play hide and go seek. I was not amused. I finished Teresa's I Spy without it, but the top had already been pieced. It became more critical when I started to work on Laurel's recently. Just how many hexagons??? Finally this evening I sat down with a huge pile of quilting magazines and went through them until at last I came upon the right one. I guess the magazine knew that the best place to hide a needle is in a haystack. But I am so glad to have found it!

How do you like my temporary design wall? I felt pretty clever with this one. It's batting stuck to the wall with painter's tape, which doesn't harm the wall and peels off easily. (I just wish that painter's tape wasn't so blue.) I stuck up all the hexagons I had put triangles on and they came to 70. I need ONE HUNDRED FORTY-SEVEN! But seeing what I had made it easier to avoid duplicates as I rummaged through my stash. I'm now up to 95. This time I'm cutting the hexagons with a rotary cutter around the template rather than tracing and using scissors. My accuracy should be much better, making piecing easier this time. I'm on my way!

What's this?

Well might you ask! It looks mighty daffodil-ish if you ask me. While I would definitely like to see a daffodil outside (what a relief from the vast expanses of white that will only get whiter when it snows again on Tuesday), I am not such a daffodilish quilt person. I must say I was surprised when I made this border for my Pressing Basics class at Quilt University. I trust that when the quilt is complete, you will not be thinking of daffodils. I will say no more, but continue to post the other parts as they are made. (If it looks weird, one strip is right side up and the other is upside down so you can admire the pressing.)


This block was another extra project for the Pressing Basics class. I madeit with Linus fabric and will work it into a Linus quilt. We have several extra blocks, and I'm making them all with the same fabrics. Then I'll do some applique apples and make a quilt.

'Twas the night before Christmas

Well, no, it was February 10, but if it had been the night before Christmas, someone would have been using this pillowcase!I bought this kit in November 2005 because I wanted to learn to make a pillowcase with a cuff and no raw edges inside. In my effort to finish up UFOs, I stitched this up. It's a really clever construction method in which the cuff, edging and body of the pillowcase are joined in one seam that leaves no raw edge. Then the side and bottom are stitched twice, once to join and once to enclose the raw edges. Now that I know how to make these, I'll make many for gifts. I think kids will love them. This one is my contribution to the guild bazaar (everyone needs to contribute for the quilt show).

I've been doing lots of stitching recently -- sent Teresa's I Spy once I figured out how to make a decent label (I printed it up in a fancy font, then traced over it onto fabric using a Pigma pen), am working on Laurel's I Spy, and of course have been doing lots of Linus stuff. Check out the Hearts for Linus blog if you haven't been!

UFOs and other strange sightings

We see way too many UFOs around my guild -- and no, we are not in Roswell, New Mexico. A UFO is the quilting term for Un-Finished Object. It is so easy to get excited, start a project, and then ... somehow ... never finish. The guild has a challenge this year to finish up some of our UFO's -- I put down several projects on my list.

Just for fun, here's a list someone shared from a Yahoo quilting group:

UFO Un-Finished Object. A project which is started but not yet finished.

WIP Work In Progress. A project on which you actually do work. (The dividing-line between UFOs and WIPs is highly personal.)

PIG Project In Grocery-bag

prozag PROject in Zip-lock-bAG

PIGs and Prozags are those bags / shelves / boxes / whatever, where you have all fabrics and a pattern. Thread and batting is not necessarily included. Numerous PIGs have been known to be called my herd of swine.

BOB Bag (Box / whatever) Of Blocks. Often swap-blocks that are put aside for "later". Also the odd "test-blocks" where you have tried out colour-combinations, or a new technique, or the blocks of projects that were started, and is now stopped without any intention of every doing more about that project ... but there are anything from 1 to 100 blocks that are finished.
BOB-projects usually need serious executive decisions ... such as setting, use, size etc.

The 3 above categories can be DOA, Dead On Arrival. Something you know you will never finish anything from. If that is the case, get rid of it! Donate, toss, sell or recycle into stash.

Quillow

I love containers. It's hard for me to get rid of boxes and I keep far more storage containers for the kitchen than I need. There's just something about things fitting nicely inside that really appeals to me. (This must be some ancient genetic thing because it makes no sense otherwise.) It's not surprising, then, that I've wanted to make a quillow -- a quilt that can be folded up and stored inside it's own pocket to make a pillow -- ever since I first heard of them. When Fons & Porter printed instructions in their December 2006 issue, I had to make one.

Fortunately one of Brian's colleagues cooperated and had a baby shortly after the magazine came out. I made a minky for the baby and decided to make a quillow for her older brother. Here it is as a pillow.

And here it is partly folded out. When completely open (drat, I didn't take a photo!), the pocket (the exterior of the pillow) is attached at the base of the blue side. The red dotted side is a soft flannel. I think these are fun for keeping in the car or just having for whenever. The recipient seemed very happy with his.

I was thinking I would make a whole bunch of these for gifts for kids, but I'm not sure now. They are easy to sew, but I really don't like working with big pieces of cloth -- it's cumbersome and tricky to get them exactly the same size. Most of the time is spent on that, not on the fun parts of construction. Fons & Porter's instructions were not the best, either. They say to purchase 2 yards of fabric for front and back, but the measurements when you are cutting are for pieces wider than standard widths of fabric! They do give instructions on how to make a quillow of any size, but still their purchasing directions should have indicated that standard quilting fabrics are narrower than they suggest using.

Design fun

Project Linus has been taking most of my quilting time the last few weeks -- most of time in general, in fact! But I do enjoy it. Putting together kits from donated fabric really pushes me to be creative. While I'm making quilts for those who need them, I'm also improving my skills. Today I had a great time with this panel:

(Sorry about the angle of the photos, but I didn't have a way to hang this.) I think it's adorable, and it was donated along with a fabric panel of a world map that I planned to put as the back of this quilt. But the map is bigger than the panel, so I had to add to the panel to make it large enough. I rooted around our donated stash and found some fabulous fabric that really picked up the colors of the quilt:

The problem was that there wasn't a lot of this fabric, and I wasn't sure I could get enough to make big enough borders. Plus, if that was all I used, the borders at the top and bottom would end up much bigger than at the sides in order to make the panel fit with the map backing. So clearly I needed something else, but what? I finally hit on adding a row of 4 patches out of blue and yellow to the top and bottom. Alas, the width didn't come out evenly for a simple measure, and I didn't want to futz with odd measurements, so I decided to put green strips between the four patches and then put larger green blocks on the ends:

Well, OK, but it made the top and bottom a little heavy on the greens and blues. So why not add a strip of the red border fabric?
Yes! That worked! And the measurements were good enough that all four borders would be the same size and I would have enough fabric -- hoorah! Looks pretty cute, no?

So this "kit" ended up being a pieced top. I can't let myself get that involved with all the quilts, but every now and then it is very rewarding to come up with a quilt from the fabric on hand. This is hardly a great design feat, but it was fun, and I'm learning!

Inspiring photos

Liz Plummer posts some wonderful photos on her blog, Dreaming Spirals. She draws inspiration from things we often see but don't notice. Her spider webs are fabulous! Most recently I got a big kick out of her salad collage. (Scroll down the salad page to see the spider webs, both the fake and the real ones.) It made me realize that I have started to take photos of things just because they are aesthetically pleasing to me. Of course, artists and "real" photographers do that, but I always took photos so I could remember people and places. Having a digital camera freed me to take pictures just because I wanted the image. Here's one I took of the roasted vegetables I made for dinner awhile back. It's yummy visually as well as gastronomically.

I will probably never make a quilt out of this photo, but thinking about what I see has definitely sharpened my sensibilities.

Quilt Droppings

What was I thinking, wearing black? Brian calls these tiny, clinging threads by the too descriptive "quilt droppings," though others use the more elegant term "quilter's jewelry." (If you can't see it, click on the photo to enlarge.)

Something that occurred to me as I looked at this photo is how much like Cruella DeVille I look -- I hope not in expression (or action!), but definitely in the hair!

Yellow I Spy DONE!

Hoorah! The yellow I Spy quilt I started last summer is finally finished. I had finished piecing the top in July, but was terrified to cut off half the outer hexagons to add the border, then when I finally did that, I was afraid I would ruin it by quilting it. But I figured if I never tried, it would sit there forever. It's done and I love it!

I put a big US map on the back and borders around it. I tried to center it when I based the quilt, but was afraid it would be lopsided. Didn't turn out too bad. Sorry about the photo -- the light on the right (sun reflecting off today's snowfall) has washed out that side of the quilt, and you can see the front hexagons shadowing through.

This quilt is for Teresa's kids. I'll get it in the mail this week!

When it's cold in California

There's no cold like California cold, because those warm-weather types are totally unprepared for it. That's when the savvy student warms her minkee in the dryer for a few minutes before going to bed. Just ask Valerie, who came up with this idea.

Stay warm!

Linus Quilting Blog!

You know all those Project Linus quilts I keep talking about? Well, now you can see them! I started a blog called Hearts for Linus for the guild. Right now we only have 5 quilts posted, but I'll keep adding as they come in. I also hope to post easy patterns.

Enjoy!