Monet UFO

10  or 11 years ago, I started a quilt based on Monet's "Woman with Parasol".  I bought a cross stitch pattern where someone else had worked out the pattern.  I proceeded to buy fabric and sort out the details over the course of the next  year.  2 years later I was in DC and took this selfie at a museum.  My version is exponentially larger. 

I bought an embroidery floss color scale and used it to pick fabrics.

I used and embroidery floss organizer to keep the 1.5" blocks organized

My last post on this project was on May 30, 2010 when I got the body portion of the lady sewn up.

 What I pulled out of the project box this morning was a pile of panels with 1.5" squares fused to a grid, ready for sewing.  It took me an hour to sort out where each piece went. 

 I was able to sort out the bottom left section which is the boy and the left side of the lady's skirt.  In this view, I've sewn the horizontal, but not yet the vertical seams. (photo is tipped 45 degrees off)

The process involves fusing the 1.5" squares onto a fusible web (marked with the grid).   Then a strip of mosaics are sewn in one direction with 1/4" seam.  In this case, I did all horizontal rows

Unfortunately, to avoid bulk at the seams, the intersections all have to be snipped.  The panel I worked on today involved 1200 snips which took 45 minutes. 

So at the end of the day, I have about 1/2 of the vertical seams done on this panel.  And while some of the background pieces don't have to be cut into individual squares, the final quilt top will have the equivalent of 75,000 One Inch Squares.     (Maybe why I lost enthusiasm for the project?)

Betty Jeanne

 I started a quilt for my mom in 2010, when I was also working on the USA quilt using 6" squares when the Farmer's Daughter quilt was all the rage. 

 While on a 6666 mile road trip with mom and my 2 teen aged daughters, we collected fabrics and brainstormed blocks to represent each year of her life (She was 80 at the time.)  The project fizzled out because the blue fabric she picked was an odd shade of blue that I couldn't match with any other blue over the next couple years.  Plus I'd lost momentum & desire for that much piecing.

  The morning of her 91st birthday, I looked at the collection of the 9 completed blocks on my design wall and decided to make a pillow to take to her in 2 days when I was attending a family wedding.  I was informed that she did not want or need a pillow.   I spent 2 hours looking for the file of blocks and list of what we were going to include.  No luck. 

Spent the next day and a half making blocks I could figure out mathematically and/or trim to size.  Then some mad machine quilting.   I failed to take any pictures of the finished quilt as I was up until midnight waiting for it to dry so I could bind it.  Still wasn't dry when I went to bed, so up at 5am to finish so we could be on the road by 7am.

Good news:  she liked it.  And I have another project of my eternal UFO list.

Vizsla

 My friend Stephanie commissioned a quilt to be used as a fund raiser for Vizsla Rescue.
Making a solid brown short haired dog that doesn't look like a brown blob turns out to be quite an adventure.  I collected fabrics on my quilt shop road trip a month ago.  80% were what I felt were the wrong shades of rust when I started pulling colors.

 The dog's face went together relatively easily.  I only needed small pieces and had some in the stash that I thought were perfect.  Like the nose and the end of the muzzle with dots to suggest whiskers.  This face is a composite of 3 of Stephanie's dogs.

The body was far more of a challenge, needing  bigger pieces and subtle gradations to suggest shading and dimension.  Fabrics I didn't like up close, look great at a distance.  To save time/money, I used raw edge applique and free motion machine quilting.  Having learned the hard way from the Octopus quilt, I cut away all but 1 cm around the outer edge of the individual pieces on the body/legs to keep it from feeling too stiff.   I also used machine embroidery thread rather than regular cotton thread.  It is thicker and adds some sheen.  There are 3 shades of rust which I also used for some shading.  Again, only noticeable up close. You can see the suggestion of texture from the wiggly line stitching that I used to suggest fur.  That texture will improve when it's washed & dried. I did some thread painting which for the most part is just a second or 3rd round of thread around the outside edges, But some other details you may notice if you enlarge the face photo. 

Next challenge is to decide on the background quilting.  I picked the fabric to represent a field.  I'm imagining a gradation of plants.  Leaves, grass, shrubs, sky.  Maybe cat-tails.  Stay tuned.

A Tale of 2 Squids

 I finished this pair of squid.  Each finished at 20" x 26"

 Based on this photo by Pat Di Giazomo. 

 I started with this one.  It was started during lock down so I was limited to fabrics on hand.  I found a fat quarter of this fabric and set about fussy cutting the darker grid areas for the top, and lighter sections for the bottom.

This squid was made using my favorite applique method of back basting needle turn.  It was hand quilted.  That makes the whole piece very soft and drapey after washing, and bigger pieces have some poof to them that makes them look very dimensional.  It took about 11 hours to complete.

Quilt shops opened, the week I started this project, which was fortunate as I didn't have a good, dark background fabric.   While at the shop I found this spotted brown fabric. I was sending updates to Pat all along, and she really preferred the brown, so I made a second one.  I made some minor adjustments to make the body a little skinnier, and the pupil of the eye larger.  I used my least favorite applique technique of fusible web.  To further save time, I top stitched it during the quilting process. The squid is much stiffer in the body due to the fusible.  However, it is going to be used as a wall hanging, so that works out OK.  I have concerns about the durability of raw edge applique for quilts that get a lot of use.  It reduced the time to about 5 hours and had the additional cost of Wonder Under and much more thread.

Pat's brown squid will be bound and finished for a wall hanging.  The green one turned into a pillow case.

Furlough Day 29 Just Busy.

 Week 3 of my furlough was spent working on some long ignored applique borders.  It's been slow going, but since this pictures have most of the connecting stems placed and have some leaves on one panel.  I also started the machine quilting of the raw edge applique panels on the Covid Quilt.

It was a great weather week, so ended up on a couple of lunch rides.  

Week 4: Headed to Eastern Idaho to deliver belated Mother's Day gift and to buy a new-to-me car.  Did my 3rd try at recreating an heirloom crocheted lace on the way over, but found that the small scale irritated my wrist, which has already been bothering me with all the quilting and motorcycle riding I've been doing.  Have decided to abandon this project.  When I messaged my friend to let her know, she informed me that her mom had decided to let her have the original.  Win!

Came back via Montana. 

 Retail stores are open in Idaho now and I did my best to support 4 small town quilt shops last week.  I have 3 commission quilts lined up, all of which are out of my usual fabric color choices.

 Making progress on the Covid Quilt.  Here's my corona virus border.

I would have made more progress, but a friend has been bugging me to make him a mask from a Crown Royal bag.  Used the Dhurata Davies pattern which I quite like, but am going to have to adjust for a bigger than "Large" size to accommodate hubby's beard.

The schedule is open this week, so am hoping to finish the covid quilt.  I'm over 1/2 done with the quilting, and have finished the fussy parts, so some background fill and a couple borders should go pretty quickly. I also plan to design a lap sized Vizsla quilt which a friend has commissioned for a fund raiser.

Furlough Day 17 Quilt Prep and Bright Shiny Objects

 Yesterday after getting the flimsy done, I just couldn't bear to go on to my least favorite step of sandwiching the quilt.  So I sorted a BIG pile of scraps and double checked with my NICU nurse friend to be sure they could still use mini quilts.

 By end of morning today, the yellow leftovers, combined with some random reds that have some yellows, looked like this.  It's kind of ugly, but remember that only the center third shows when it's wrapped around a bassinet mattress. I'll quilt it so it looks prettier with texture.

 This one is much more visually pleasing.  The Tula Pink Unicorns were for a dress for my granddaughter a year ago.  I am not entirely sure where the lighter pink scraps came from.  I remember the yardage but not the project that resulted in bits leftover.   The flimsys are 30" wide x 36 long to allow plenty of extra for wrapping without being fussy and annoying for the nurses.

 The 4 I did previously were quilted, but a request was just simple flannel backing and no batting, since thick quilts don't wrap well.  I didn't have any then, but found that Joanne's had Flannel for $4/yard today.  Plus 20% off total order coupon.  Ordered on line for curb side pick up.  My past 2 pick up experiences had some difficulties, but today was sublime.  I should have set a timer, but my guess is less than 10 min from when I parked until I pulled away.

 I did complete the hateful sandwiching process.  Including this background and the process of fairly successfully and fairly easily matching the repeat for the backing.  I used the walking foot to quilt the outlines of each section of the Covid Quilt. De-linted the machine and on to FMQ tomorrow.

AND I found out there's a Quarantine Quilt category at Houston Quilt show this year.  So I'm gunning to finish asap.  Deadline is June.  And the recipient of this quilt lives in Houston.  So I can send it to her when finished and she can walk it in if accepted.

 Meanwhile, I am still obsessed with Sourdough English Muffins.  This is batch 9 and I think I have it figured out.  Bottom left is side 1 and others side 2. 

My goal is to make unbelievably fluffy English Muffins with 100% sourdough (no additional leaveners) with a super sour flavor.  This is my supermodel with big, lovely holes for the butter to drip into.  Made with a Bahrain sourdough, which has amazing flavor, but slow rise. 

Furlough Day 16 Covid Flimsy

It was a very productive day.  I finished the insulin/ CGM block that was nearly done yesterday.  I did all the borders around the individual components of the Covid quilt and got it to the final flimsy stage.   Added a couple more TP rolls, a skinny one and a totally empty. 

The goal was to have the center represent the really dark, hard and frightening experiences Chris had battling Corona Virus.  But including the one positive, that she was in the first wave of recovering and being able to donate plasma for an experimental treatment.  The header/ footer represents what most of the rest of us were experiencing at the same time.

The applique uses multiple techniques including both my favorite: needle turn applique, and my least favorite: fusible web.  The fusible will have some sections of thread painting as part of the machine quilting.  The masks will remain 3-D.  I came up with an idea for an extra surprise here...but you won't know what it is until Chris receives the quilt.

I will be FMQ on my humble Singer.  I will be adding more symbols in the quilting including the evil nasal swabs, and some covid spheres. 

The process of making an art quilt always make it look like a fabric store barfed there.  Fabrics are auditioned, tossed aside.  More found.   I spent a couple hours putting this back away, and reorganizing the small yardage fabrics for future applique.  It was reorganizing a fabric library but changing the Dewey Decimal system. "Seashell" fabrics are now tones of tan.  My "Southwest" fabrics shifted to shades of brown & rust. 

I also sorted the scraps into a dozen potential mini-quilts.  Subject for another post.