Category: WIP

WIP

Roses Bloom on a Wednesday

Elizabeth E.6 Comments

Last week we were all hosting the Leap Day Thread Giveaway, but today I’m back in the saddle with those Works–in–Progress (WIPs) and linking up to Freshly Pieced.  Thanks, Lee, for hosting us all!

Today’s WIP is both a finish and an acknowledgement that I’ve got miles to go before anyone sleeps under this quilt!  It might soon be morphing into a wall-hanging, and let’s hope I finish it before I run out of good televison and movies to watch.  Now that Downton Abbey‘s off-season, I’ve resorted to The Big Bang Theory.  Which is pretty funny, considering I’m married to a scientist and we both work in academia.

Here’s block two, all finished up.  I left the papers in the outside pieces as I don’t know what I’m going to do with it yet.  I did put block one as the wallpaper on my laptop, and I smile every time it pops up.  It’s both digital and tangible–digital on the screen, yet the satisfied feeling I get when I see it, is tangible.  (I have another quilt on my phone as wallpaper for that device.  I’m populating my universe with my quilts.

And here they are–the twins.

I looked in Brackman’s Encyclopedia of Quilt Patterns to track down the real name.  In 1935, The Old Chelsea Station Needlecraft Service, a mail-order company, published a variant of the block as the “Rose Star One Patch.”  Later on, other names were “Canadian Conventional Star,” the “Colonial Flower Garden,” and simply “Hexagons.”  I trend towards calling it the Rose Window Block, only because it reminds of. . . what else?  Rose windows.

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Here are some from our travels in Europe and Canada. (With a couple of others you’ll recognize.)

I wanted to focus in on one shown in the slideshow above.
While not technically rose windows, the sweet little rounds on this wall of windows in Santa Croce (in Florence) are quintessential Italy.

WIP

English Paper Piecing, continued

Elizabeth E.6 Comments

I’m leading with the same photo I did yesterday, the very first English Paper Piecing Block (EPP) I’ve ever done.

But here’s the beginning of my work in progress: block two, all looking like a set of green and blue flower petals, waiting to be joined into a rosette-like flower.  It has  a different background border.

Block Three is in progress, as I cut my fabric full of swiss-cheese-like holes.

And it’s only as I begin to work on Block Four that I’m beginning to see that it’s really no use to get too much of a blender series of kite shapes there at the outer edges.  Otherwise you might as well cut a giant triangle and piece into place.  What makes this form of patchwork beguiling is the ability to incorporate different fabrics to get a mosaicky look to it, like it’s a kaleidoscope or tumbling pieces of glass.

I realize that some of it is the fabric I’ve chosen.  If I’d gone more the color route, drawing different colors form here and there and making them into a rose, I wouldn’t have had to worry so much about getting too much blending.  Typical of me to think of a hard way to do something easy and beautiful.  But I like this challenge, and how the project is teaching me as I work through it.   And in searching for different darker borders, I found two one-yard pieces of this fabric, but I don’t know how many more flowers I want to make.  The first took me about two weeks of TV and conversation time; it measures over 17″ from point to point.  Jumbo.  That small center hexagon on the desk is out there to remind me of Block Two as I work on 3 & 4, as Block Two is usually tucked away in the basket downstairs, waiting for conversation with my husband.

Or  a good show–like the Academy Awards, which is coming up this Sunday. (Go *here* to How About Orange to download the Oscar Bingo cards and Ballots. Her photo, above, is used with permission.)

What else on this WIP Wednesday?  Finishing up the label for the red/white quilt I’ve been working on.  Which is less than wonderful (more on that on Friday), but I love love the quilting.  So isn’t that how it goes?  Sometimes you love the whole of something, and other times you only love parts of it.  Just like toddlers.  Or teenagers.  Or teaching.  Or just like life.

Many thanks to Lee of Freshly Pieced Fabrics for hosting WIP Wednesday.

Head back over there to see other works in progress.

WIP

Bits & Pieces

Elizabeth E.11 Comments

WIP Wednesday–here we are again.  This is a good mid-weekly progress check every week, and many thanks to Lee of Freshly Pieced for hosting us all.

Well, I met a goal.

For two months, goals have been something to hide from or add to a already-too-long list or wistfully stare out the window while contemplating goals.  But yesterday, Valentine’s Day, I met my goal of getting this quilt quilted.  And had I not had to stop to read 50 pages of the novel I’m teaching (Moon Over Manifest), I probably would have had the whole thing done.  But sometimes it’s okay to leave a project at the cusp of completion as it will draw you in for tomorrow.  So, I guess you could say, this is still in progress.  But in a good way, not a moaning way.

UPDATE: I drew up some loose instructions and have it for you at its new home: Revisiting the Red & White Pinwheel.

And under Krista’s enthusiastic encouragement, I tried my hand at English Paper Piecing.  You know I had an English great-grandmother, who I’m named for (Elizabeth).  So I called up my mother and asked her if my gr-grandmother ever did English paper piecing.  “No,” she said.  “She was a gardener.  She spent any free time she had in her garden.  It was my mother — your grandmother — who was the sewer in the family.”  So, in homage to them both, I’m making something with flowers.

I finished the middle, sewed some more together and attached them to the central flower.  Kind of a stuck space for knowing where to go from here in terms of sewing things together, but IF I can imagine myself as a young bride in the late 1800s far away from my mother and hometown of Bloxwich, England, and IF I were a quilter, carrying forward my mother’s traditions, I’d either have been doing this since I was a child, or I’d figure it out.

I’ll figure it out.

I hope you noticed the new notice on the side of the blog: On Leap Day, check back for multi-blog giveaway.

Now head over to Freshly Pieced and see some more fabulous Works In Progress.

WIP

WIP–Valentine Quilt

Elizabeth E.5 Comments

Many thanks to Lee of Freshly Pieced Fabrics for hosting this Works In Progress posting frenzy, commonly known as WIP Wednesday.

So last week I was unpicking this quilt.  The thread was too skinny on top (although I like a thinner thread on the bottom–Bottom Line by Superior is my favorite), I was using PolyNeon on top.  I have sewn many quilts with this thread, but it just wasn’t cutting it for this Valentine Quilt.  I’d picked up a spool of tone-on-tone red that I had in my thread stash, and thought it might work because King Tut is a heavier thread.  I like that look.  [Wait.  What?  You don’t have a thread stash?]

I overlaid some of my trusty-dusty wax paper on the quilt, sketched an idea–liked it.  Now how to get that design onto this quilt.

So I cut out a punch of petals and pinned them on, and while listening to This American Life proceeded to stitch around this little shapes, impaling myself on the pins.  This wasn’t going to work.

I mean–it worked because I liked the design with the thread, but it wasn’t going to work being pricked to death.

I realized that all the petal shapes were merely overlapping circles, so I cut out a circle, did some research on marking pencils.  I went to my pencil stash (don’t tell me you don’t have one of those, too) and grabbed Quilter’s Choice in silver.  I also pulled out a soapstone marker, for the deep reds, but ended up using the silver most of the way through.  Apparently it will wash out.  Stay tuned.

I finished teaching today, and fairly skipped to the parking lot.  It is one of those days that makes people in Wisconsin want to move to California–warm with a slight breeze, but not overly hot.  A lean-your-arm-out-the-window-while-you-drive sort of day.  I teach Mondays and Wednesdays and one of my friends and colleagues coined the term WedFrinesday for what we feel.  We generally work all week long, but it begins Thursday morning with our stacks of grading, continues through the weekend, and ends on WedFrinesday, when we yes, skip to the parking lot.

So, working on the red and white is going to be on this sunny day’s agenda–listening to a new book on the computer (my mother and I listen in tandem, although she’s always faster) and stitching away.  I keep calling this the Valentine’s Quilt.  I think I’d better get to it!

UPDATE: I drew up some loose instructions and have it for you at its new home: Revisiting the Red & White Pinwheel.

What else is on my list?  Too many things!  I received some Malka Dubrawsky’s fabric that needs to be washed up, ironed and caressed.  I have a stack of things from my purchases at Road.  I still haven’t spent my son’s Christmas Gift of a Fat Quarter Shop gift certificate, and that certainly needs to be taken care of.  Quickly.

That same son gave me the gift of my own web address, so if you want to reach this more quickly, type in opquilt.com. It refer back to here.

Thanks, Peter!