Quilts

So Here We Are–Tiny Envelopes

February 7, 2014 Elizabeth E.13 Comments

I started here at the beginning of the week–the layout of the blocks with some turned and twisted.

I ended here with a very random quilt. I bordered the envelopes with different solids, interspersed Kona Snow and Kona White blocks, then added colorful strips. I separated the rows with more Snow/White strips and sewed it together.

What is it? you ask. No clue, I must answer. but it will give me a field in which to practice some FMQ, and that will either make it more random, or pull it together. It might need a border. It’s too soon to tell.

Tonight is our Quilt Group Get Together, coupled with watching the Sochi Opening Ceremony while we chat, eat, sew, quilt, and I need to cut some strips out of my Kaffe Fassett fabrics because I’m determined to have some sort of quilt top with those fabulous quilty designs on them that I see on every athlete’s vest, on the officials, and on the flags and banner. Here’s a website describing the origins of this design.

Enjoy!

‘Twas the Week Before Christmas

December 15, 2013 Elizabeth E.7 Comments

Well. Almost the last week before Christmas (ten days to go, says the Advent Calendar on our fridge).

Given that I’ve been >>sick<< with ick and asthma and blah for too long, and that I have TONS of stuff to do, I leapt into action and made my bee blocks for December for Mary at Molly Flanders. I mean, that is the prudent thing to do, right?

It was actually quite restorative working with old-fashioned prints and calming neutrals. A whole lot more fun than trying to get the last of the Christmas decorations up (but I did finish them today, thank you very much). I enjoyed the process. One thing that our bee does, which I like, is that we make each other a signature block with our name, our blog name and our location and send it along with the blocks. I have a row of signature blocks on the back of my Santa quilt (which has been idling all these past couple of weeks on my sewing room floor while I have graded and rested) which makes me smile when I see them.

And maybe it’s because I have signatures on my brain. Here are all the blocks for my signature quilt put up on my pin wall. They lack the sashing and the borders, but what fun to see a flower garden of my friends!

Whoops. I had to fix one of them. Mind you, that block has been like that for nearly eight years, and I’m just now noticing it. What’s fun about working with signature blocks is that you think about the person who’s name you are holding. Kendy would have a fit if her block were wrong, as she was always perfectly put together and perfectly modulated in all comportment. (Look it up–I kid you not.)

I had one more signature that I had to get, and I couldn’t just contact her and get it lickety-split (more on Toni in a later post). So I found her Christmas card from a few years back, enlarged her signature and traced it onto a prepared fabric square (a square of fabric that had freezer paper ironed to the back of it).

Toni’s square, all bordered in greens. She would be pleased.

Often at Christmas, all the relatives gather, or we go to their houses. If you want to start a signature quilt, have a stack of squares ready for them to sign. Choose a block with a wide open space for writing, and a simple frame for that signature. Then cut the center square about an inch larger than you’ll need it, back it with freezer paper. I drew the 4″ center square directly onto the freezer paper, so that it would show through and give people an idea of their boundaries.

I used a Micron .05 pen for people to sign their names. Those who I couldn’t get (who lived too far away), I sent the block to them and had them write their name lightly, but legibly with pencil, and then I traced it in the Micron pen when it came back to me (I included a SASE so the blocks would come back). I only had one that never returned to me, but then that woman get could get her dander up quickly, and she carried a grudge longer than anyone I’ve ever seen. She was still wonderful to me, though, and I loved her. I’m sorry she didn’t return the square.

Yes, all this quilt is women. Relatives, friends, mentors, and the latest batch of my granddaughters. At some point, I realized I had to cut off the additions, otherwise it would never be done. So, with the exception of my granddaughters, I stopped adding, even though there are still people who are important to me without their names on my quilt blocks. I love looking at it. I drop it at the quilter tomorrow, and since my granddaughters are coming for Christmas, she has promised to have it done by the 23rd. (I’ve already made the binding!)

Why did I start this? Because of Toni. I’ll tell you more about Toni, and why she was the inspiration for this quilt in another post–probably after Christmas, after all the company’s gone home!

Quilts · Tutorial

Y-Seam Tutorial

November 26, 2013November 26, 2013 Elizabeth E.7 Comments

During Thanksgiving Week, I thought it was time to re-post this tutorial from Leanne’s blog, from the Third Quarter Finish-A-Long Tutorials. As background, I’ve been sewing and quilting for more years than I should admit to, and during that time have completed over 120 quilts. So I’ve faced down more than my share of the Dreaded Y-seams.

In June of this year, I made this quilt for my sister. As you can see there are lots of peaks and valleys in this thing–lots of Y-seams going both ways (some people call them Y-seams and V-seams) but really, let’s keep it simple.

They are called Y-seams because the V-part of the letter Y usually has fabric with no seam, and the tail of the Y has a seam. I’ve marked the Y for you in red in the picture on the left. The picture on the right is the other type of Y-seam. I’ll show you both.

Let’s start with the first type of Y-seam, where the “tail” of the Y is facing toward you and the “V” of the Y is underneath. Place a pin at the 1/4-inch mark through the seam, and into a spot that would be the peak of the 1/4″ seamline, if you could draw it on and imagine it.

Most beginners want to pin that seam to death. Run screaming in the other direction. The success of the Y-seam depends on the “float” of the fabric.

I sometimes will place one pin on either side of the seam, just to anchor it as I get going, then another pin or two along the starting point. Then I take out the (above) pin. I want my fabric to float — don’t want to anchor that second half of the seam too much, as I need it to pivot.

Start sewing from the left edge, as the seam faces you, using a 1/4″ seam allowance. Fold the seam toward you, and as you approach the seam, slow down and use a bit smaller stitch. You are trying to anchor the stitching a bit.

When you get to the seamline, when you are on top of the thread marking that other seam, STOP. Make a tiny stitch on top of the one before to anchor, but DON’T GO OVER THE SEAM LINE.

Lift your needle out of the cloth. I pulled it away to show you what I mean, but you don’t need to do that. Just give yourself a little room to smooth the (green) seam allowances out of the way, and to find the place to insert your needle again.

Re-insert your needle just on the other side. Then line up the next two raw edges, smoothing the fabric away from the needle and your presser foot. Sounds more confusing than it is. Take a few tiny stitches to anchor, then change your stitch length back to normal.

Another shot of my needle placed just on the other side of the seam allowances (which I flipped to the back of my presser foot).

Depending on the amount of cloth in your Y-seam, and if you just feel better about it, go ahead now, and pin those raw edges together and stitch the rest of the seam.

When you are through sewing, clip the thread if it is restricting the ability of the seam allowance to open up and lay flat. If you left a bit of thread there (pulled it away from the needle as in my photo above) there should be no problem.

Press, keeping the tail of the Y-seam open.

From the front, it looks like this.

Now we’ll tackle the other kind of seam–where the seam of the Y’s tail is underneath, and you see the “V” part of the Y.

First locate the valley of the one-quarter-inch seamline and put a pin there.

Snip to within a couple of threads of the pin. Leaving the pin there insures that you won’t cut too far. If that happens, curse a little. You can sometime rescue the piece with a bit of fusible interfacing. Better to not cut too far. Half of the seam (1/8″) is all that’s needed.

Find the 1/4-inch peak of the seam below, and poke the pin in to anchor. You can leave in that center pin to hold it, and if you are afraid it will slip, it’s okay to put one pin on the backside. If you can, try to avoid that pin on the right. Again, the success of a Y-seam lays in the ability of the fabric to move and pivot.

Just as in the first type of seam, start stitching from the left side of the seam, towards that center pin.

When you get to the pin, STOP with your needle down in the fabric. Remove the pin, then pivot the fabric so that you can match raw edges. Move the first seam out away from you, as you align the new sides. It may feel a bit bulky under your foot, but smooth any excess fabric out away from you.

Here you can see that I’ve pivoted, repinned the new raw edges together and am starting down the other side of the seam.

This is what it looks like from the back. That deep fold is the V part of the Y-seam.

The front. Give it light press. Resist the urge to saturate it with your pressing goo and mash it flat with your iron.

Sometimes your seam gets a little jig-jaggy. As long as it’s not too bad, it will be fine. I did the same kind of stitching process on this one: shorten your stitches as you approach the point, then lengthen them out on the other side.

A better point. All of these work fine in the quilt, because you haven’t a) stitched it to death, and b) murdered it with your iron.

You can see one type of Y-seam where I joined the green roofs to the yellow houses. And you can see the other type where I joined the purple roofs to the sky.

Now you know all my dressmaker/quilter tricks: never be afraid of Y-seams again!

One more time, thanks to Leanne, of She Can Quilt, for hosting a series of guest tutorials for the Finish-A-Long Motivational Program. (Just kidding on the name of it, but it does help get those UFOs out of the closet and onto the bed. Or wall.)

200 Quilts · Four-in-Art · Quilts

Childhood’s Wide Avenues

November 1, 2013November 1, 2013 Elizabeth E.20 Comments

4-in-art_3

Childhood’s Wide Avenues is a quilt about memory, of fixing in time a place and a feeling. I grew up in the mountain west, in Provo, Utah, a town laid out in a grid of wide avenues, criss-crossed with streets that seemed to me to be wide as the sky, although I’m sure if I went back there now, they would be reduced in size and dimension. But that feeling that I could ride my bike to the top of the street near our house and see all the way down to my elementary school, or across the valley, or to the other side of the world has remained in my memory.

The possibilities were infinite.

A few weeks ago, as I was thinking about this quilt and how to express the theme of Urban/Maps, I found myself traveling down another very wide avenue through the middle of a town very unlike where I grew up: San Bernardino, California. But the boulevard was so wide and so straight and I could see it head in a straight line for miles, up into the foothills, that I felt as if I had been transported in an instant back to an earlier place and time. But it seemed impossible, until I learned that Mormon pioneers, a branch off the same tree that laid out Provo, had also laid out the wide avenues of this town two states away, in the early 1850s. Asked to settle this place far from their original homes in the Utah valley, they laid out a grid of wide avenues, and gave them names like Salt Lake Street, Kirtland Street, Nauvoo Street, and Utah Street. These have all been renamed, but those early pioneers left their stamp on the valley not only by naming the cemetery Pioneer Cemetery, but by etching long, wide avenues into the landscape.

I had heard about memory being triggered by sounds, and by smells, but never had experienced memory being triggered by a sense of space, of a geographical series of landmarks making headway into my childhood memories. For days afterward, I thought of the family I grew up in, and found pictures to place on my quilt that evoked a sense of that time (that’s me, above).

Who populates these fictional houses on my quilt? The large pink house is my parents’ and the block below contains houses for my husband and I, and our four children and their families, while the blocks surrounding that central block are where my sisters and brothers might live. And because all of their spouses will want their own families, I scattered the grid of avenues with more houses, so that the circle of family would have place and space. A dream, of course, as none of our children, nor any of my family live near us. But in my world, in my memory, we are all there: gathering Easter eggs on the front lawn, jumping in piles of leaves, finding tarantulas in the fissures in the hillside, cracking open walnuts, and smelling the lilacs at the end of the driveway — lovely, amber-colored scenes.

Tomorrow I’ll deconstruct the quilt, describing the technical side of how I put it together. But for now, more quilts depicting this theme of Urban/Maps can be found at: