Little Bits

 

My daughter & son-in-law adopted a black German Shepard they named Guiness.  So grandma made him a collar scarf. 

This Bernina pattern came across one of my feeds on a day that I was cleaning up scraps from some other projects.   The sewing room clean up quickly became gifts for all the doggos in my world.

I'm making extras for friends and asking for donations to local women & children's shelters in lieu of payment. 

Meanwhile back on the wedding quilt... I've been annoyed with the lack of contrast between these raspberry leaves and the background.   I'd planned on some contrasting quilting.  But I have also spent hours adding some lime embroidery around the leaves.  The little bit of shimmer really looks amazing in person. 

I'm also slogging away on the fireweed.  It's slow going because there are 2 on the quilt.  And each blossom can have as many as 9 pieces.  But I'm on the homestretch with only 3 more flowers on each side and some leaves.  Then I'll be moving on to an equally complicated pair of lupines.

Now that it's cooling down, it's officially "Quilting Season" at my house, so hope to have more frequent updates for the blog!

Awkward

 Wow, how has it been so long since I posted?  

I returned to work last August, so have clearly not been as prolific as I was during the Covid lock down. 

Spring was focused on my physical activity goal.  I worked up to 400-500 minutes of walking per week. Did a distance challenge/ bribe where I designed an Urban Hike with a snack or libation stop every 3 miles. Obviously, I didn't get a lot of fabric time in.

I have been working on some crazy complex applique.  Wedding quilt for Keeley & Chris

Day of the Dead for Boomer.  

Got sidetracked with a quilt for a family friend. 

And now I discovered that I can quickly use up my scraps for doggo scarves.  Which will be an entirely different post.  

Hello friends.  Good to see you again. 

February Projects

 I've had a good bit of quilty progress this month. 

Finished this 70" lap quilt for a friend.  She paid for the fabric and made a sizable donation (equivalent to the time I spent) to a charity of my choice.  We were both very happy with this plan. 

In the end, I only quilted flowers into those center squares and outlined the other boxes.  That kept the quilt super soft with the 50/50 Bamboo Cotton batting.  I haven't been able to find bamboo batting locally for years, but recently discovered I could order this on-line JoAnn's at a discount.  

Those greens really change according to the light so I call this quilt "Yellow" since that's what the recipient saw every time I sent photos. 

My Boomer quilt copped an attitude. 

But behaved by the end of the day. 

A Day of the Dead quilt for my buddy Boomer, a retired clown.

I have the fabrics purchased for my next project.  Which is actually a pair of quilts as a belated wedding gift for my daughter and son-in-law.  They got married in the midst of the pandemic and are planning a family gathering on the 1 year anniversary. 

The theme is Enchanted Forest.  I am allowed to share sneak peeks.   This is a raspberry that I designed which will be part of a center motif.    I am super excited about this project which will involve a lot of big, stylized leaves. 

My other accomplishment of the month was a 6 inch "Healing Heart" square that will become part of a quilt for a quilt designer who's daughter recently passed away. 

Also, I sewed a shirt for myself.  

Stretch lace panel on the back to show off the tattoo that I got in 2020. 

Now that I have a replacement surger, I better start sewing up the tubs of clothing fabrics I've bought for myself.  

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.