WIP–Ready, Start, Resew!

September 7, 2011September 13, 2011 Elizabeth E.8 Comments

Thanks to Lee at Freshly Pieced Fabrics, who allows us to totally reveal what clutzoid quilters we can be on her WIP Wednesdays. Read on.

Okay, so this is the plan. (I think I say that a lot.) I saw this Rubik’s Crush quilt a year or so ago and it finally came out in a magazine (photo above) and I finally got it cut out, and tonight (roll the drums) I finally found an hour that someone hadn’t asked for and sat down to sew. Usually I’d sit down and read blogs (because usually I’m tired at night) but it was either sew or read.

I should have read.

I got out my trusty-dusty quilty book, with all its pages and laid out the squares and the little rectangles that go in between. I sew. Somewhere in the back of my mind was a nag: check your seam allowances. I promptly ignored that little voice because I was listening to RadioLab’s podcast about Games and it was way more fascinating than what was going on in my head. Sew sew sew.

Then Ashley, of Film in the Fridge Fame (love that alliteration–we’ve been doing poetry in my classes) says in her instructions to press open all the seams.

What A Pain. A Royal Pain.

But I’m good at following directions, so I do this with eight billion little seam allowances because I want to be a Modern Quilt Artist when I grow up. Oh yes, and whatever Ashley says, I’m gonna do.

I lay out all the cross-strips and all of sudden I realize that I’m a good half-inch longer in my block strips than is the cross strip. I measure the cross strip. It’s cut accurately. This is not what I wanted to realize. Because that leads to the conclusion that I now have to resew all those seams. I’m only off by a thread or two. I can restitch those seams. That’s not hard. (Yes, there is another solution, but I don’t see that there is, so I charge ahead. Keep reading.)

I start resewing. And if you think I’m unpicking the first seam so I can press everything open again, you are pretty much nuts.

So I press them all to one side. I know what this will do to the look of my quilt, because I wrote about pressing/ironing/sculpting seams and all that in the post just below (go look if you want to see an unclothed ironing board). My blocks will have definition. They will have some ridges. They won’t be flat, modern-looking blocks. I won’t be cool like Ashley.

So I have three inner-parts sewn now. I have to make 17 of these and I have probably have nine squares in transit. I’m really seriously considering disobeying Ashley’s instructions and making my centers 8″. The quilt will probably recover from this gross error. I may not recover if I have to sew eight billion (minus three blocks) teensy little seams again. I have discovered the other solution: recut the center strips.

What would you do? Cut new center strips and move forward? Restitch? That sound you hear is me banging my head against the wall as I grade student quizzes, so there’s just no room inside my brain for solutions to serious quilt dilemmas. I could really use your advice.

WIP–Halloween Quilt

August 31, 2011September 3, 2024 Elizabeth E.4 Comments

So this is the plan.

Our little Quilt Group (Good Heart Quilters) wants to do an exchange of fat quarters in October of Halloween Fabric. I’ve already got mine ready to go, but then I thought–go where? So I got out my quilt program and cooked up this little house quilt. This is digital–I’ll be working on mine for the next month, but I can see someone appliqueing ghosts coming out of doors, embellishments, witches riding in the sky.

I made up the plan for this quilt. I call it “The Plan” because I couldn’t figure out how much bigger to print it out to make it real, honest-to-goodness templates. So, in case you want to make yourself a quick little Halloween House Quilt, here is a free PDF file for download:

halloweenhouseCORRECT Download

Warning — it’s an oldie (but goodie)! I also envisioned using this paper as a place to lay out your cut pieces, so you know you’ve cut the right ones.

Please use the dimensions given to cut your pieces, as believe me when I say I doubt very much it will print to the right scale. Forgive me, I didn’t take that class in college. This post is to get you thinking about what fabrics you’ll use, and how you’ll use them.

I’ll have more later on about construction, but tomorrow I’m getting on an airplane and going to my nephew’s wedding in Salt Lake City, Utah and plan to celebrate some newlyweds. I will have a post on FSFriday, so you can see what I finished this week, and when I return I’ll start into the fabric cutting and piecing for Halloween House Quilt.

I used to link in to this WIP every Wednesday. This post was one of them.

Quilts

Checkerboard Border

August 27, 2011August 27, 2011 Elizabeth E.3 Comments

Been one of those weeks when I’ve felt more wobbly than usual for some reason, so everything’s been on Slo-Mo. That’s slow-motion. But today I woke up without a headache and headed to Free-Mo. That’s Free-Motion Quilting.

I’m working on the table runner for the Red/White Challenge hosted by Temecula Quilt Company, and the deadline is September 15th. All the blocks came in from local quilters and from around the world, so I put it together in a quilt sandwich and went to town. It went quickly, and it was good to just dig into something to get it done.

I’ve had this idea to put a checkerboard border on it, as this will be used at Christmastime and during the patriotic holidays, and I wanted to jazz up that edge a little.

Okay, while I was trying to put away the box of French fabrics (it goes on the top shelf, and I’m a shortie), this quilt fell down. It’s a seaside quilt that I stated long long ago. And abandoned. It is NOT on my list of lifetime quilts, as it’s sort of in this limbo of that place whether or not I want to finish it or not. I mean, I LOVE the background fabric and the turtle (raw-edge applique) turned out well. But I know to really make this quilt something else, it will require digging into that drawer marked “Coral Reef” and cutting and sewing and appliqueing a whole host of creatures. I even have a child’s picture book in that drawer, purchased after I took the class, because oh my! the teacher’s quilts were so incredibly cool and I wanted to learn from her.

True Confession: I also have a Ricky Tims quilt in about the same stages, but it’s a square-within-a-square quilt. I went down the night before the class to hear him speak at our quilt guild and loved every minute of it. So I showed up for class and . . . didn’t love every minute of it. I felt he was distracted and just punching a time clock that day. We all have days like that but it taught me one more truth about the quilt world: some of the famous personalities we see are fabulous in front of the camera and some are terrific teachers and sometimes you have both. But not always.

One teacher I’d take again in a New York Minute would be Roberta Horton. I’ve had several classes from her (is she even teaching anymore?) and I’ve gone away from every one of them amazed at her ability to gently, yet firmly, bring her students to the place of creativity. I’ve finished very quilt I have started in her classes. Two other honor roll teachers are Jane Sassaman and Katie Pasquini-Masopust. I’ve finished all of their class samples, but by then I’d learned to make a small quilt–less than 15″ on the longest side–in order to learn the technique and to have a “finishable” piece of art. I have also taken a class with Ruth McDowell, and she ranks right up there as well, although after a 4-day class, I don’t know how she kept us motivated and going. We were all exhausted! It took me more than a year to finish that quilt, as I wanted it to be nearly perfect. I think you’ve seen it all before, but to contrast with the unfinished seaside quilt, I present Heart’s-ease.

One of pansy’s other names is Heart’s-ease, as it was thought to be involved with the affairs of the heart. It actually refers to the “viola tricolor” which is an ancestor of our modern-day pansy. Now you know more than you ever needed to know about these sunny little flowers that bloom around here in Spring. And which, because of Ruth McDowell and this quilt, I have blooming on the guest-bedroom wall all the time.

100 Quilts · Quilts

Lyon Carolings

August 5, 2011July 11, 2019 Elizabeth E.5 Comments

The mad summer of sewing quilts has come to an end. I found the list of quilts I’d made at the beginning of my time away from the classroom, and “French Quilt” was on the top. I’d remade this–or as I like to say–I made this twice, just trying to find the right way to show off these fabrics from France.

I just couldn’t decide what to quilt in the center of the yellow squares, but went with a floral motif from the border. I had to rip out one block when it turned out I hated that particular thread. I have picked out a lot on this quilt. I’d originally stitched the green borders with a swirling design from that same outer border. Wrong. So I unpicked that, and channel/echo stitched it to mimic the blue X’s in the center of the quilt.

I chose to quilt one of the flowers in the center of the yellow blocks.

Does anyone else hate marking? I don’t want pencil, although that is the easiest. And since I don’t plan to wash this quilt (it’s for display), I don’t want something I have to wash to get out. I don’t trust the disappearing markers, so that only leaves me with chalk and my ragged eye to get the job done.

And the back, with its four colors of toile. Make that five if you count the hanging sleeve at the very top.

How did I come by all this fabric? Like Miss Carrie of Schnibbles fame, we had traveled to France. The first few days were touring around the south of France before we were headed to Toulouse for his scientific meeting. We’d traveled far that one day, arriving at our B & B late (8:45 p.m.) just outside the town of Aix-en-Provence, after getting lost. They did serve us our dinner, and the part I remember was having a chilled melon soup in the dark in their courtyard. It was lovely, and served in a hollowed-out cantelope half that had been frozen. The French do food right, I must say.

Aix-en-Provence, painted by John Horsewell

The next morning, we ate breakfast with the white mountain in view, an oft-painted mountain, then glancing at the darkening sky, checked out and drove to into Aix-en-Provence. We were hoping to catch a market day. As soon as we parked the car (in the carpark on the outskirts of town), the skies opened up and a huge torrential downpour kept up trapped in a deep doorway for ten minutes. Of course we had only one umbrella between us (!), so we ran from doorway to doorway to the center of the town. The market was closing up, even though the rain was ending–it was still quite drippy. We caught a few photos of the newly washed melons, berries, tomatoes, when the downpour started up again. We dodged into a shop that ringed the market square, peering out at the rain. We were pretty discouraged.

Then my husband leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Turn around. I think you’ll be happy.” I turned and looked. We had ducked into a fabric shop and although tiny, it was filled, floor-to-ceiling with glorious fabrics printed in the traditional manner of old France. Those were the days when an extra suitcase was no problem and weight limits had not been heard of yet. I had brought along a soft-sided suitcase and between my purchases here–and the ones the next week in Toulouse (for they had a lovely fabric shop as well)–I filled that suitcase full.

I have purchased these fabrics in other places, but this shop, found while dodging the pouring rain, was the genesis of my collection.

If you want to start your collection, I can recommend French Connections, here in North Carolina in the US of A. They have a wide range of choices (that’s where I bought that fabulous yellow border) and I think given the cost of importing, the high price of cotton and the weak dollar against the euro, they have reasonable prices.

Happy Sewing!