Pumping Up The Volume

After getting the Star Flower quilt all quilted and the binding attached, I needed a bit more color saturation to brighten the day. I dug deep into my bin of 4.5" square scraps and after a quick pass through the die cutter I set to work on this scrappy hexagon quilt. It's vibrant and fun. I have half of it pieced as it's shown here on the design wall. It will measure 56" X 72" at completion, containing 280 bright/medium/dark scraps out of the bin. Yay! Waste not, want not! 

So, here's the Star Flower quilt with the binding all basted in place for this evening's hand work. I love this quilt! There's so much to love: the softness, the "Puddles" quilting design, the ultimate binding choice (after load of auditions and consultations!), the pop of color on the backing, the fact that this one has been YEARS in the making! I'm claiming this one and keeping it forever.

Here is a sampling of the binding fabrics up for their audition.  Ultimately, I chose the one on the right.

Once the selection was finally decided upon, it was applied for stitching- a first view of the backing.

Another month has passed and a new one's begun. I'm SO READY for the warmer spring days. A dear friend gave me this Quiltfolk calendar at Christmastime. It hangs right over me desk space in the sewing room and where look at it every day. This month's photograph depicts a stack of stitched squares with this explanation: "my mother, who's battling dementia, finds familiarity in taking stitches on small squares of linen, filling them with circles, sweet meandering lines and and tiny hearts, forming new memories for herself and for her family." 💗

March 1st is my parents' wedding anniversary, this year they've celebrated 69 wonderful years! 💗💗

Star Flower is all ready to curl up under. As winter slips into spring I'm to celebrating with brighter, louder colors! For me, that means back to the scrap bins; I've got well over a hundred more hexagons to cut, that might just make a dent! 😉 Maybe. 

Life is Good!

Star Flower Sew-Along

I took part in a Sew Along back in 2013. Yes, you read that right; it was here, on a Crafty Fox's blog. As you might surmise I didn't keep up the pace. I did find, when I unearthed box #5 (of 8) of my UFO's this week, that I did have all of the star flowers pieced. Why did I ever lose steam on this project? Well, maybe, it could be all those thousands of Y-seams! Anyway, there's no time like the present and being MINDFUL this year, it has been moved to the front burner. Low volume quilts are already timeless, right? 

I still have two more rows to add but I should get them done and added by the end of this weekend. I'm wild about the soft, vintage look of this quilt. After cutting all of those setting hexagons I was left with a pile of equilateral triangles in the bottom of the project box. 

A sane person probably would have tossed them. Well, I know that I'm crazy and I have bins of scraps begging to be combined with these. After a few trials I found just the right shape to run through the die cutter along with a few handfuls of brights out of the 4.5" bin! So, UFO #5 has given birth to yet another UnFinished Object! 

Those background triangles will set off these hexies perfectly!

Yes, this will do just fine. I guess this new, baby quilt, will be need to be numbered #5.1!!

I hope to get this one moved on to the done list too; as well as make a BIG dent in the scrap bin.

We'll see...

Life is Good! 

Retreat Stitching Success

After my fabulous weekend away at the Quiltville Inn Retreat*, even with all the distraction of the beautiful and incredibly accommodating setting, there's more; believe it or not I actually finished quilt tops and have show and tell of my own! This little beauty (quilt measures 45" square) is the 2012 Summer Sampler Sew-along from the Temecula Quilt Company blog. I had half of the 4" blocks done before we left for the weekend, in preparation I had the remaining blocks precut and ready to go. I used scraps that my mother gave me, leftovers from a quilt she had done and decided to set mine with Essex linen. The colors are true in this photo (left), it's a bit washed out in the one below. I believe I will quilt this all over with a small scale Baptist Fan pantograph. But, for now, this one has been relegated to the to-be-quilted queue. There's something new on the rails of the longarm right now.

* (Click here if you missed my previous post)

On day # 2 of the Quiltville Retreat I got this much of the Texas Tears top together. All of the blocks are done, from here it's just a matter of sitting down and finishing up the assembly of rows. I'm not sure about the quilting yet on this one. I went back and looked at the photo I had taken of the antique quilt that was the inspiration for this one and found the hand quilting on that one to be minimal. Well, this won't be hand quilted (!) and I believe I can do better than a minimal job and find a design that will work. My inspiration quilt did not have an outer border but I plan to add one. 

So, with all that piecing going on... guess what else happened? This! If one is retreating for the weekend at Quiltville one MUST be leader-endering at the same time, right? Of course! This tumbler charm will be quilted sometime in the new year and added to the donation pile; I can imagine the recipient finding little surprises here and there hidden in the novelty prints. I do believe this is my fifth tumbler charm quilt, I've lost count, they're made oh-so-easy with the 4" Accuquilt die cutter. All in all it was a very successful time away for those up-until-now UFOs that have been hiding under my cutting table! I'm already leader-endering more tumbler rows for the next quilt top while I continue to set Texas Tears. 

Sew on and sew forth!

Life is Good!

Up next: Triple C

 

Quilt Camp Wrap Up

I posted a week ago about the eager-beaver quilt camper that I had hanging out in the sewing room with me! A week ago-- where does all that flying time go? I am SEW very impressed by this young lady's enthusiasm and focus when it came to creating her very first quilt that I can hardly contain myself. She and I chatted earlier in the year about her wanting to learn and I agreed to help her get started. We all want to pass along the love of quilting to the next generation*; or, in this case, the generation after that! 😉 At almost twelve years old this young lady definitely had in mind what she wanted to do; "make a quilt that she could put on her bed"; she arrived filled with the determination to see her vision through! As her quilt camp counselor I truly wanted her to succeed and decided that she needed a project large enough to be usable and small enough to finish, promoting a sense of accomplishment that might fuel her love of the art. We used the Accuquilt cutter and made quick work of cutting tumblers, enough (323 - 4" tumbler shapes) to make a quilt measuring 52" X 64".  She chose all of her fabrics from my stash, she likes bright colors and strong contrasts, no pastels for this girl! I taught her what I could and from there she worked tirelessly laying out all the pieces, creating her rows and assembling the top, hour after hour.

By Friday morning last week her quilt was layered and loaded onto Snowbird for quilting. She took a few passes following the pantograph, just to get a feel for the longarm, before we turned the machine on. She's a quick study and was done with the quilting portion by lunchtime!

This shot is worth 1,000 words!

She made her binding in the early afternoon and got that attached in short order.

She is shown here learning how to fold over and finish the binding by hand on the backside of the quilt. She's a natural.

I took this picture just before she left out the door to go home on Friday afternoon. She vowed to have her binding all finished and stitched down as soon as she could; "by the end of the weekend" she stated.

Her Dad sent this photograph from their home a few hours later; my heart swelled. Isn't this absolutely the very best we can hope for? For this quiltmaker I am not sure much else comes close. 

Yep, it's a WRAP!!

A quilter is born; I'm calling this Quilt Camp an unqualified success!

Life is Good!

* For what it's worth-- I've posted about this before, the subject of passing on quilt knowledge from one generation to another: When I began quilting I tried to learn every. single. thing. that I could from my quilting "fore-mothers". They were just as eager to pass along tips and techniques as those like myself were to learn. I found myself soaking in everything they could teach me like a dried out sponge in desperate search of moisture. This next generation, those the age of my children, seemingly need nothing from us. We are happy to teach, to give back as payment for all that we received; yet this "YouTube" generation have charted their own path, they're learning on their own and happily designing and creating by themselves. This makes me incredibly sad, on several levels, but the greatest might just be that very basic need to be needed. And, SEW it goes... thoughts?

Bubbly

It all started, as every quilt does, with a stack of fabric. This quilt was to be a special one for our five year old granddaughter's bed. She knows what she wants. The walls of her room are decorated with painted circles: red, turquoise, two shades of green, yellow and, of course, Lynnleigh's favorite color: orange. My daughter-in-law and I selected the fabrics and the background from swatches while standing in the room where the quilt will live. A flax linen was chosen for the background. I knew what Lynnleigh wanted: lots and lots of circles. Circles of every size. I wasn't certain how to execute this one but I spent much time thinking about it and then, suddenly one morning, I awakened with a plan! I had ordered the background fabric wide enough so that there were no seams. I backed the colored pieces with Misty Fuse and went to my trusty AccuQuilt cutter and began cranking the layers of prepared fabrics through.

I gridded off the background fabric with a thermal-ink pen and placed the circles in what appears to be a random-ish (I can't do true random placement, it's not in me!) design within an outline. 

I fused them in place, one at a time with a dry iron. The ironing fixed the circles to the background and eliminated the placement lines at the same time. I left a little additional length as I wasn't 100% sure how long this needed to be. I would take it to the actual bed for a trial before I trimmed anything!

The quilt lay-out before trimming. The quilt top got two-thumbs up from Lynnleigh after the try-out. (Actually, she wanted to keep it, immediately, right there on her bed. I had to convince her to let me bring it back home for finishing!)

The next step was the applique. I used a straight stitch around each raw-edge. The constant turning and manipulation of the quilt under the presser foot caused some of the circles to begin to lift and work themselves loose, I secured them with safety pins. (My pile of safety pins, removed as I went along, revealed that there are 74 circles on this quilt top!

The quilting began! I decided to use "Curls" a pantograph from Beany Girl Quilts. I loved the movement that this added.

Here it is, with the quilting all finished. I am excited to think about Lynnleigh's reaction to it being on her bed for real. It is backed with fabric from a sheet, white background with tiny gray elephants: her favorite animal! 😉 It is twin sized, measuring 56" X 80". 

Yesterday I prepared a pieced multi-color binding from the scraps; it is basted in position and ready for hand finishing. I showed this photo to a friend and she remarked that it will match my granddaughter's bubbly personality! The quilt was named, right then and there! Bubbly? 

Oh yes, the quilt and the girl!

Life is Good!

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

There's a certain urgency about those last, waning days of summer. As Labor Day approached and that fall calendar loomed there seemed to be a much more deliberate effort, on my part, to make every last summer minute count for something! Maybe it's a throw-back to those inevitable "how I spent my summer vacation" assignments of days gone by, or maybe it's that recognized realization that at this time of year, when school begins again, there's that "starting over" opportunity.

Whatever it is, there's been a surge of activity around here resulting in projects seeing new beginnings. One such project is really three in one. The strip pieced quilt blocks (above) and the tumbler pieces (right) are combining to become Chicken Soup quilts #1 and #2 for gift giving at Christmas. This summer I amassed a very healthy low volume fabric collection. I ended up with enough fat quarters to begin construction of not only these two (in the 60" X 80" size range) but also had sufficient leftover scraps for three hundred 60 degree diamonds to stich up this, a keeper quilt too! By the way: cutting all those strips and diamonds took days to for me accomplish, while cutting the 400+  tumbler shapes took about one hour with the Accquilt cutter! Take a look at that little hen piece and the words "she quietly chuckled" printed below, my feelings exactly about using the ever-efficient die cutter! Directions for that Sunday Morning strip-pieced quilt mention acheiving a random look by throwing all the strips into a brown paper bag, and mixing them up well, and simply grabbing them out one at a time for stitching together in that fashion. Well, I'm here to tell you, that random isn't easy for this quilter! I do love the results but I find myself second guessing every single selection!

The dining room table continues to hold the photo archives, what a major project this has become! Each photo triggers a memory and it has taken much fortitude to avoid repeated trips down memory lane and stick to the path of organization. The piles grow taller as the identification and documentation, year by year, goes on. I recently saw some first day of school photos on Facebook with kiddos cleverly holding large ordinal numbers displaying their school grade. Oh, how I wish I had done something similar when our children were younger! I have many "1st day" photographs that are undated and struggle to differentiate third grade from fourth or even fifth! Sigh. The urgency behind completing this project has become the fact that I can't clean any of this up until the task is done; setting this up front and center in our home was the best idea, there's no avoiding this responsibility anymore once it's spread out before me!

That looming fall calendar that I mentioned above signals the return of Quilt Ministry on Thursday mornings at church. The stewardship committee has requested tri-fold information boards from each standing committee and ministry to be on display as part of this years Stewardship Fair for their Every Member Response campaign. I began on Saturday and got this much done, (yes, this has been a long-standing summer assignment!) Hannes would like very much to be a part of our display, I believe he'd be a great asset in recruiting new members; today I will add selected photos, quotes, and the remaining information to the board to round out the Quilt Ministry's presence and plan to get it all set up down there tomorrow. A trip to the local Scrapbooking mecca for cardstock is on today's agenda; it's difficult shopping there while wearing blinders as I am always bumping into things, but that's a necessity! I avoid that place like the plague only because it represents yet one more path that I don't ever need to venture down; but, oh, how tempting that diversionary route appears to be! And so...one more summer is, officially, in the books; and what a wonderful summer it's been. 

How did you spend yours?

Life is Good!

Boiling It Down...

"Light Of Day"

... to bullet points. I've been absent for awhile but only because the summer that stretched out ever-so-lazily before us a few weeks ago kicked into full gear and has left me chasing each day just to keep up!  I'll report a few highlights  from the last few weeks and will, hopefully, be back on track here as well as visiting around blogworld again too!

* You might remember the Centennial Quilts project for my DIL's Daddy's church. The quilts were completed and dedicated a week ago Sunday; one is hanging permanently in the sanctuary and the second one was auctioned off for a HUGE sum following a Homecoming picnic luncheon on the church grounds. I was thrilled for the church and buoyed by the happy realization that the quilt held such value!

* My embroidery machine has kicked into overtime stitching up personalized T-shirts, pillowcases and bibs for little ones. Here's just a small sampling.

* Mason joyfully celebrated his fifth birthday at his neighborhood pool, it was a VERY happy day! Our daughter did a wonderful job decorating for the party with adorable, personalized, buckets filled with pool-appropriate favors for the guests. The food was delicious and a good time was had by all!

* Last Wednesday we were invited to breakfast (at their mountain campsite) by our son and his wife. It was raining when we arrived but our spirits weren't the least bit dampened. Following breakfast we caravaned on down the road to visit Tweetsie Railroad. Gregory loved it; although, I believe, the Tweetsie train was a wee bit bigger (and louder) than he expected! We brought the little ones home with us for the remainder of the week, giving Mommy and Daddy some peaceful time together in the home-sweet-tent.

* The kitchen backsplash tiling project has been completed! Now, onto choosing less obtrusive outlet covers!

* And so it goes; busy days filled with everything good, some sewing related items thrown in for self-preservation!  Those seemingly endless summer days have definitely been numbered after all. The R.A.W. (Row A Week) "Light Of Day" quilt top is growing by leaps and bounds. It is being made purposely to cover our King-sized bed and will measure 115" square at completion; that's big,considering the blocks themselves finish at six inches! I will persevere on this one, begun back in 1997. Now that I have an Accuquilt cutter there are no excuses! Speaking of numering things, I can hardly believe I ever began this project cutting the HST's the old-fashioned way; after all there are 1800 pieces in just the blocks, that's NOT counting the sashing strips! 

*  This is how I begin each morning; stiching pinwheels and mentally planning a schedule for the day ahead as I sew.  This quilt top is growing... this photo shows what half of the quilt top looks like... that's a LOTTA pieces! 

Soon there will be much more to share too, 

Sundance is up to a great big surprise, it's all good!

Life is Good!