Leaves in the Forest Finish

With all those seams and intersections, this took a lot longer to machine quilt than I anticipated.  

I used the freemotion foot to stitch in the ditch around all the triangles after securing the rows top to bottom with a walking foot.

I added a 4" border around the original design and created these leaves, 

inspired by Johanna Basford coloring book images. 

I repeated the 2 leaf combination on each corner

I

There's a 6 leaf repeat used twice on each side, but not in the same order

Each side has a different set of filler leaves

I serged the edges and washed the quilt in hot water with color catchers and dried on hot before adding the binding.  The ripple in the photos went away after the second washing. 

I forgot to take a picture of the back in the day light.  The stripes were more of the leftovers.  I had planned on a very pieced back, but decided it was going to be too many seams.  That turned out to be a good decision.

The pattern was a  quilt-along from Twiddletales back in August involving 100 paper pieced squares finishing at 6" each.  The colored fabrics and half the background fabrics were from the stash. As were all the fabrics for the back.  Batting is leftover cotton pieced together to get to size. Threads were 2 shades of cream/taupe from Connecting Threads.   The purchases were 2.5 yards of creams for the second background and outside border, as well as the autumn fabric for the binding.  Final quilt about 68" square.  Sewn and quilted on my cheep-o Singer Patchwork.

This one is headed to my friend Carol as a make-up from the Fall Stripes quilt disaster that became Learning Curve.  You can read about that at this link to that post. 

Training

 

My Granddaughter is Three-and-a-half.  Clearly it's time to start the quilt lessons.  

We started with a lesson on contrast.  Dark vs light.  

That, apparently, is just weird.  But coloring is good. 

Sorting by dark/light is stupid.  But pink/purple is good.

We picked out 9 patch patterns we thought were pretty.

Glue sticks are cool.

TA-DA!!!

 4 is plenty.

I have some videos of her sorting colors, but they won't upload. The synopsis is that everything is Pink.

And time for a break.  1 hour was pretty good focus.

For round 2...

She was a decent pinner and an awesome pin puller.  

She tried guiding the squares during the piecing, but after the warning about don't let the needle bite you, she was not very interested.

After helping me through 1.75 blocks she declared "Grandma Do It" and went to do Play Dough,

Grandma sandwiched it wrong.  Twice.  So the hour of ripping/fixing cost us our planned photography walk.    Next Time.

Making More Work

 
I finishe piecing the bonus quilt from the Fall scraps.  I had imagined this with a dark, olive green stripe as borders for the strip sets, but when I looked closer at the fabric I'd pulled, they turned out to be fat-eights instead of 1/4 yard strips.  Plan B was a similar color I had in the stash, that I discovered I had used up on the Groom's Quilt about 6 months ago.  So lime it is. 

I started designing big leaves inspired by the ones in Johanna Basford's coloring books. The are big (10") but detailed.  I think they will be fun to quilt while not beeing too fussy or needing background fill to make them show up. 

Which reminded me about this flimsy.  I made this a few years ago to use up scraps, but also to use quilting also inspired by the same and other coloring books. 

This was my proof of concept trial.   I love how it turned out, but I totally lost momentum on this project.  Not sure why.  Probably just some bright shiny object that distracted me.

Autumn and Swags

 

Leaves in the Forest is pieced and all the paper backing removed.  I have a 4" border cut out in a coordinating cream/tan background fabric. 

Unfortunately, I didn't make much of a dent in the Autumn colored fabrics I was trying to use up with this project.   So I decided on a pieced background.  Lots of these were already cut into strips.  I decided on a 10" strip.  There was also a sizable stack of 6" wide bits so I started thinking of 2 stripes with a yellow as the main backing fabric color. 

I quickly realized I had way more scraps than would fit on the back, particularly since the front has a million seams from all the piecing, I don't need a million more on the back to quilt through.  So, a second quilt is born.  I had quite a few friends who commented on the colors of the quilt, so I'm thinking that I may sell it for a donation to a Women's Shelter as I did with the Ben Biggs test block pillow. 

Meanwhile, my hand stitching project has been the swags.  44 of them.  36 stitched and the last 8 basted. There are 11 different green fabrics.  Started basting the bows.  First one stitched but am now having second thoughts about the fabrics.  I swapped the middle one to give a little contrast from the others and now wonder if I should have stuck to the one that matched more. 

Leaves in the Forest

 

This turned out to be a much longer project that I imagined it to be. It started in late August as a quilt along at Twiddletails.  I thought it would be a good way to use up some scraps in colors I don't commonly use.  I also thought it would be a good start/stop project that I could work on when I had a few spare minutes.   That part failed to happen.  

I was using some leftover background fabric and figured early on that I didn't have enough.  So I bought a second.  I spent a lot of time remembering to do some of each design on each fabric.  I also found that some fabric conservation methods took me longer, mostly in plotting out how to reuse some cut-aways I'd normally discard.  I also flipped the color schemes on a number of these blocks accidentally, but in this case it just helped to add variation. 

When I was planning the backgrounds to spread them out, I discovered that the block counts on the pattern were off by a couple.   I laid them out yesterday, and am still somehow short by 1.  Also, when I got to the final corner layout, I did not have the same blocks left as indicated on the pattern. 

I sewed together the top 4 rows, with the backing paper still on as that was the way I was taught to do paper piecing as it keeps any bias edges steady.  After removing all the papers from that section, I'm re-thinking the plan and will try removing the papers before connecting the rest of the squares.

Biggs Test Final Answer

 The test block is out of the drier.  After much debate about if was worth the effort, I have concluded that I did learn a number of lessons.  

Background fill was a big question.  White vs light green thread.  One inch basic squares. 

I like it better with the extra 1/4" line.  But do I like this version twice as much as it has twice as much stitching?  If I do, it is much better up close in the light green. 

I had planned to do the shashiko in red, but the dark green won over both the red and medium green.  After washing, I realize the inner circle also needs to be dark green, not the machine stitched white to make it a more intentional circle. 

As soon as I finished the center machine quilted flowers, I wished I'd tried it with red thread. I am still undecided on the direction of the background fill. 

In this trial version, the flowers are fused and topstitching done as quilting.  In my final quilt, I will machine quilt around the hand applique flowers then add the mix of machine and hand quilting. 

It passed the Cat scan.  My friend Carol won this with her generous contribution to my local Women & Children's shelter. 

Biggs Test Block

 

My progress on the test block was slowed this weekend by needing to be an assistant plumber for a sink faucet replacement project.  And a motorcycle lunch ride.  I am happy with the junction squares.  I tried a couple variations of fill direction and thread color on the hand stitching.  Will decide on the final after it's washed. 

I've finished the 4 secondary centers with the Shashiko pattern.  I had originally planned on these being stitched in red, but in the end, the contrast of the dark green thread is my favorite. 

Only thing left is the grid fill between the squares.  Again, trying several variations to see if the complicated ones are worth the effort.    Meanwhile, I did an auction with my Facebook Friends and the winner has to make a donation to my local women's shelter to get her prize.  

More Biggs Planning

I was up at 4 am yesterday because my brain was so full of ideas for quilting the Biggs quilt.  After getting all those ideas out of my head and into yesterday's blog post, I set about making a test block. 

I replicated a typical intersection of the real quilt and made this with fusible.  I was wondering if it was worth the bother as by the time it was done, I had pretty well decided what I was going to do. However, during this process, I noticed a secondary "circles" pattern in the center of each block I decided to focus on as well, so it was worth the effort. 

 I decided on this Shashiko pattern as a background in dark green thread.  

The previous time I did Shashiko in contrasting thread I was very pleased with the outcome.  By making the lines further away (this one was 1/4"), I hope it will have more dimension, as well as taking less time. 

This time, I  had trouble finding the right scale to do this.  And I couldn't get my head wrapped around the repeat when I drew it out with a ruler. After 3 failed attempts, I settled on a 1/2" wide scale (little squares are 1" and the cross lines 1/2 " apart).  I was able to trace that on this section.  But the more densely patterned white on white's I couldn't see through.  So I set about to make a stencil out of plastic.  There was a failed Dremmel experiment.  Today I'll be attacking the plastic with an Exacto knife. 

Meanwhile, I sorted out my greens for the border swags.   The 51 fabrics that made the cut fell into 5 groupings based on the undertone:.  light/grey  dark/blue light/yellow  medium/olive  dark/black.  After auditioning them under 3 different light conditions I decided that the olives looked best with the quilt squares, but I really liked the dark ones best.   So I pulled some from each that I thought would play well together. 

I made a stencil out of template plastic and drew the 44 swags and bows on the 4 side panels for back basting.  Got about 12 of them basted before I lost energy and went to bed early. 

Today's goals are the template and possibly the MFQ on the test block.  Hand quilting and swags the rest of the day while I watch football.