Dia de los Muertos

I'm finished with the flimsy for Boomer's Day of the Dead quilt.  

It is full of symbolic details.  Traditional marigolds.  The leaves are different styles of knife blades.  Boomer collects knives.   The funny shaped leaf is a pork chop.  Because of that time on the motorcycle trip before he got hearing aids.  I said I wanted to get to a location in time to get to the Quilt Shop.  He looked confused and said "Pork Chops?  You just ate. "

I love how the lights and blinkers turned out.   And those screws on the spine & neck are normally only visible on an xray. 

He's holding his Heart of Gold.  A Henry rifle and a version of my Pavona. 

His AR and a 44 Magnum

A clown faced skeleton in the tipping the hat pose from his professional clown picture.  Cap has his motorcycle logo on it.  The t-shirt is the one he was wearing the day he survived a Widow Maker MI.  

Now to quilt it.  

 

Benjamin Biggs Flimsy Finish

 

It's been a long time coming.  The applique on the Benjamin Biggs reproduction quilt is finally done. 

My first post on this was January 2014. 

I kept up with the block of the month pretty well for the first year, then other things became more interesting I guess. 

Fall of 2020, I pulled out the finished, or mostly finished blocks with a renewed commitment to finish.  I pushed through and got the blocks finished and sewn together by the end of the year. 

While also working on the monotonous swags, I worked out how I'm going to quilt this, by making a test block using raw edge applique with a clever plan I stole from another quilter to manage the "stupid flowers" that are in the corner of each block. 
 

I've decided on a mix of FMQ and hand applique. 

A friend bought the test sample pillow in exchange for a donation to my favorite charity.

I ordered backing fabric this weekend and found a pure white batting in the stash.  

Last night I finished the very last of the red petals on the swag borders.  I'm not sure how my swags ended up with an extra swoop on the corner from the original.... but adaptation is always good. 

Hoping to get the top marked and sandwiched this weekend!

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.