Blue Stars (Frivols #12): All Finished, Completed & Done, and an Encore!

December 10, 2018November 24, 2018 Elizabeth E.21 Comments

FrivolsButton

Frivols 12_12 front with toys
This is the final Frivols, a table runner for my holiday table, shown here with my wooden toys from Sweden, Copenhagen and Germany. I’m calling it Blue Stars. I almost called it Christmas Stars, but what if I want to use it in July? (Just trying to be practical here.)

Frivols 12_7a

I left you in the other post with all the stars and their backgrounds cut out, and tucked away in their little tin. My first step when I got them back out, was to group them together, stars and backgrounds, making sure I had enough of each part to make the block.

Frivols 12_7b

First up was to make the Flying Geese, then trim them up. I rarely make geese that aren’t slightly wonky. I’ve learned to live with this terrible character flaw, as when it is sewn up, no one knows.

Frivols 12_8

(Apologies for the nighttime lighting.)

Frivols 12_8a

Trim it all up to 5 1/2.”

Frivols 12_9

Arrange the stars, obsess. Decide it’s okay. Decide to add little strips of color around the outside edge so that some of that extra fabric in the tin is used up.

Frivols 12_9a

Sew together.

Frivols 12_10

I layered the finished runner with some Christmas fabric from the stash, some batting, put on my walking foot, and stitched in the ditch. At some point I want to come in and do some echo quilting around all the stars, but hey–it’s December and I’ve got Stuff To Do, so that will have to wait.

Frivols 12_12c back

The backing. More beauty shots:

Frivols 12_11 front

Frivols 12_12b

Frivols_all_12XDONEs

Can I just say this again? Here they all are, back again for their encore:

Frivols 2018_1 — Frivols #1, Caitlin’s Baby Quilt

LifesDilemma_3 — Frivols #4, Life’s Dilemma

ChildsPlay_Frivols5_7 — Frivols #5, Child’s Play

Frivols6_PracticeMakesPerfect5 — Frivols #6, Practice Makes Perfect

Frivols 7_28 front — Frivols #7, Bread with Every Meal

Frivols 8_7 front — Frivols #8, Baby Bear

Frivols 9 _13 — Frivols #9, Walk Around the Block

Frivols 10_11 — Frivols #10, Christmas Corner

Frivols 11_12 — Frivols #11, Stars of Night, Lend Their Light

Frivols 12_12 front with toys — Frivols #12, Blue Stars

I have some thoughts on this experience (surprise!) in the next post.

Frivols Quilts

Frivols 12

December 1, 2018October 27, 2018 Elizabeth E.15 Comments

This is my last introduction to the series of small-tins-with-fabrics, called Frivols. Although the other day, one of my non-sewing friends asked me how my Frizzles were doing. I think she was about right. The little freebie with this tin is a couple of fabric quilt labels, seen in the lower center with the sleigh.

This is a line of blue-toned traditional fabric by Edyta Sitar, before she left the Moda hive and jumped over to Andover. This design doesn’t call for any extra background fabrics, and makes a smallish table runner, 15″ by 35.” More can be seen on the Moda blog. They manufactured these tins about two years ago, but I have it on good authority that if you are resourceful, you can find them on Etsy, Ebay and other places.

Frivols 12_4

This fabric line, Blue Barn, is beautiful, and can easily blend into my holiday decor, since it’s December. I’ve always loved blue with Christmas decorations. Frivols 12_5

I cut up all the stars and their backgrounds, labeling each stack…

Frivols 12_6

…and tucked them in their own tin until I could get to the sewing.

Frivols 12_7

The one disappointment in this tin was how much fabric I had leftover/wasted. I’ll have to see if I can augment the design some way to use up what I can of these extra scraps.

Okay, we’re launched! Get out your last Frivols tin and get cutting!

Frivols Quilts

Frivols Finish #11, the Penultimate!

November 12, 2018November 5, 2018 Elizabeth E.23 Comments

Frivols 11_11b — *The Cactus Garden photo*

And here we are–almost completed with the Year of Making Frivols, with quilt #11, titled, Stars of Night, Lend their Light (quilt #213). It’s the largest Frivols yet, finishing at about 55″ square. And yes–it used up all the fabric. I supplemented it with white Grunge Dots from Moda.

Frivols_all_11Xs

Look at those Xs! And we’re done early this month!!

Frivols 11_10 — *The Quilting-in-Process photo*

After pinning up the quilt, I knew I wanted to do star points in the stars, but what about the background? I decided to experiement, making a circle, then stitching around it three times, then echoing it and rolling off into another center circle. Headphones are for listening to a Bruno, Chief of Police book; this time it was The Resistance Man.

Frivols 11_10a — *The How-Much-More-Do-I-Have-To-Quilt photo*

Frivols 11_11 — The Biological Sciences Building photo

Realizing that all my quilt pictures are around my house, and in my garden, I took it over to the Universide of California-Riverside, where my husband-quilt holder works as a professor, jumped out the car and we quickly took several photos while I was in the Passenger Pick-up Zone. The motto for UCR (how we abbreviate it) is Fiat Lux, or Let There Be Light, so I springboarded off that idea to arrive at the title for this quilt.

Frivols 11_11a — *The sort-of Sea-Urchin-in-the-Tide-Pools photo, even though it’s a quilt with stars*

I really really like the back, with those pointy stars floating among all those bubbly circles.

Frivols 11_11c — *The one-more-back-shot-on-the-other-side-of-the-sidewalk photo*

Frivols 11_11d — *The Artsy Laying-on-the-Ground photo*

Because I wanted the setting sun to provide the light, it also meant that our streets were clogged with traffic, spilling off the freeways (welcome to Southern California). So in meandering home, I spotted this perfectly turquoise Chevrolet pick up: perfect place for a quilt photo. It’s fun to step out of the garden and get some different photos of quilts.

Frivols 11_13 — *The just-one-little-garden-snapshot photo*

Frivols 11_13a — *The Check Out my Quilting on the Border photo*

Hope you’ve enjoyed the quilt show of the penulitmate Frivols quilt!

Frivols Quilts

Frivols 11

November 1, 2018October 27, 2018 Elizabeth E.16 Comments

Frivols 11_1

It’s Frivols time, since it is the first of the month, so here we go with Frivols Tin #11: a line from Chloe’s Closet, filled with tape measures and cute floral fabrics. You can find out more about this on the Moda blog, where they introduce this.

To explain for new readers, about two years ago, Moda put out a line of small tins, filled with 7″ squares of one fabric line, directions for a quilt, and a small giveaway treat. I purchased all the tins, but they sat in my closet for a year. This January, I vowed to make all the quilts, one-by-one, and here we are on the eleventh of twelve quilts. You can find them by searching one of the tags on this post, or by entering “Frivols” into the search box on this blog.

Frivols 11_2

On the back of the tins, more info–and no, I didn’t buy more of that fabric and the Way Back Machine isn’t working today, so I added Grunge Dots in white to fill out the requirements.

Frivols 11_3

That little tin is the Frivols treat from this group.

Why yes, I do spend a lot of time working at night so that’s why all the photos are slightly pink. I thought I’d bought better bulbs for the lamp, but it’s an old one, so there you go.

Inside the box, I was instructed to divide some squares into piles of four, then save the rest of the squares for an inner border. In the above lower left, everything including the Grunge dots are cut up: triangles, strips and borders. And in the above lower right, you can see how this one won’t fit back into the tin. No matter. I got right on it, and started sewing it up.

After sewing up the first one (L), I vowed to do a better job balancing things, but haha, joke’s on me. When you are working with a defined set of fabrics, in a defined range of colors, and you have to only use a certain amount, that limits how fine you can tune the block/quilt. I just did the best I could, yielding this:

Frivols 11_7 Frivols 11_8

I seamed the cut strips together and put on the inner border, then finished it up.

Can I just say I really don’t like gray in quilts? Unless it’s meant to be the design choice? But all these designers including gray as one of their “colors” (for we all know that gray is the “no-color”) always strikes me as odd. Bleh on gray, she rants. (That shows you her age. All the 40-somethings love gray in their flowered quilts.)

Frivols 11_9

So I used the kitchen-counter method of pin-basting the quilt, getting it all together, all before the first of November!!

Frivols Quilts · Quilts

It’s Fall–Time for a Christmas Frivols (#10 is finished!)

October 16, 2018October 20, 2018 Elizabeth E.14 Comments

Fall Food Pumpkin Spice

What does fall mean?

It’s fall, when — if you live in the Northern States — leaves turn colors and fall off the trees. Here in Southern California we know it’s fall because all the pumpkin spice food shows up in grocery stores, even though the temps are still in the 80s.

Carrot Cauliflower Soup

We pretend it’s fall, and serve fall-colored food, like this Carrot Cauliflower Soup, and we’ve gotten out the fall-colored placemat and napkins, and you can bet there are pumpkins on my table.

Frivols 10_10d

And if you answered “Christmas!!” in response to the prompt, you — unfortunately — are also correct. So to take photographs of Frivols #10 finish, done up in a Sweetwater Christmasy line of fabrics, I headed to Costco for the photo shoot. I’m calling it Christmas Corner, because all those quarter log-cabin shapes remind me of street corners.

Here are the finishing up photos for this little quilt, finishing at 32″ by 36″: arranging the quarter-log cabin square, pinning, then quilting it. I didn’t have any red fabric for the binding, but in my Christmas bin, found a piece of an earlier Sweetwater Christmas line, and yes–it works quite well.

Frivols 10_10

So I’m tucking and arranging, and a woman comes by and says “They sell quilts at Costco?” Turns out she’s a quilter (takes one to find one in Costco) and she agreed to hold up the quilt for me next to the ribbons and bows. I never did find out her name, but we had a great chat about quilting groups, how beginners would be more successful choosing simple quilt designs, the advantages of working with a complete line of fabric in quilts. It was one of the best conversations I’ve ever had in that giant warehouse store.

Here are couple other photos:
Frivols 10_10b Frivols 10_10c Frivols 10_10f

Almost looks as if the snowmen are helping me. Interestingly enough, aside from the quilter, nobody else thought it was weird that I was taking photos of a quilt…or at least they didn’t say anything. Here are some photos of the quilt in my garden:

Frivols #9, Christmas Corner

I especially like the look of the stack on that last one.

Frivols_all_10Xs
Ten done — two to go — so onto Frivols #11!

FrivolsButton

Frivols Quilts

Frivols 10

October 1, 2018 Elizabeth E.5 Comments

FrivolsButton

It’s the first week of October and has been my tradition this year, I announce the next Frivols I’ll be making for that month. (Only three more months to go.)

Titled The Cookie Exhange, box #10 inclues a Christmasy set of fabrics, recipe cards for the extra, a quote about cookies, and directions to a cute Bento-box type quilt called (what else?) “Sugar.” More info can be found on the Moda blog.

Frivols 10_4

I had put all of the Frivols tins in two cloth bags in my closet, and one-by-one I had been drawing them out to use. What a nice surprise it was to find extra fabric tucked in next to this box. See? I was being kind to my future self (for once).

AND, I’d like to announce the winner of the Paint by Numbers quilt book, a digital copy sent out by C & T books.

Random Number 5.png