Village Faire

June 28, 2013August 12, 2013 Elizabeth E.10 Comments

Village Faire, quilt #117 on my 200 Quilts List

A part of the Year of Schnibbles, hosted by Sherri and Sinta.

This quilt reminded me of summer days, of green lawns that you can lay down in and drift off, and of course, pinwheels that spin with the flick of a finger, or by holding them overhead while running. I was also reminded of local faires and immediately thought of Babe, the Gallant Pig, and Mr. and Mrs. Hoggett, cotton candy, ferris wheels.

I started it on the small machine, as the big machine was set up downstairs, quilting Kaleidoscope.

Here’s the original. You can see I changed up the border.

Given the bold prints of my fabrics, I felt the border was too busy for what I had going on in the center, and as we are given license to modify and create and have fun with Carrie Nelson’s patterns, I indulged and put a series of bars along the edges, with pinwheels for cornerstones. I have a fabrics from the Comma collection from Moda and from Thomas Knauer’s Asbury collection, which has summer-time things like bumper cars and soft-serve ice cream cones.

And on the back? Yep–a tea towel. This one is from Wensleydale in the Yorkshire Dales region of England. We went on vacation there a few years back and as we are enamoured of Wallace and Grommit, we knew we had to head over to Hawes and sample some Wensleydale cheese. (Even though it was raining. And rained all day, which explains why England is so green.)

A scene or two from Yorkshire. I can now get this Wensleydale cheese in Costco, during the holidays. Will wonders never cease.

This measures a little larger than the other two Schnibbles designs, coming in at 34″ square. I think this design would morph perfectly into a baby quilt, or a quilt for a child, by adding another row of the pinwheels.

After taking the outside photos, I gimped upstairs (yes, I can walk around now, but not much, and have that lovely blue boot on my foot) and threw the quilt on the guest bedroom bed. I really like these bold colors. Given that we are heading into a weekend of 100+ degree heat, I declare that summer has arrived!

This summer may you find a Village Faire to attend, and a pinwheel to spin with a quick puff of breath.

Quilts

WIP–Bee Blocks (post revised)

June 26, 2013June 26, 2013 Elizabeth E.10 Comments

UPDATE: I’ve revised this post, because this morning I realized that TODAY is Wednesday, not yesterday (when I’d originally written it: we’re a little foggy on life over here), so today I am linking up with Lee at Freshly Pieced for WIP Wednesday.

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I joined a new bee (newby! newby!). I am honored to be included in the Always Bee Learning bee, and the first block’s fabrics have arrived to be sewn (they have different rules than the Mid-Century Modern bee). But Linda’s blocks for the MCM bee still hadn’t been made, and I like to honor my deadlines.

So I gimped down to the sewing room, pulled out a drawer and put a pillow on it for the left foot, got out my portable iron and pad and put it on the table on the right. I figured it was good to be sewing as long as I wasn’t putting any weight on the foot, right? (I’m really hoping that MY idea of “partial weight-bearing” agrees with the doctor’s).

But had to stand for a few minutes on my right leg while I cut the strips, then I sat and sewed. And twisted to iron, but finished up one block before dinner.

After dinner I finished the other one (normally we only do one, but everyone else was doing two and I didn’t want to be a slacker); I packaged it to mail tomorrow, hopefully making it to Florida by July 1st. That small block in the front? We do signature blocks with our Mid-Century Modern (MCM) bee.

This is what Linda is doing with them: using them to border another set of blocks from another bee. She says she’s stuck about what to do in the corner–maybe a rounded version of the stack?–so if you have any ideas, head over to her blog and leave her a comment. It’s always interesting to see our bee blocks being used. Another quilter in this bee finished up her quilt (scroll down to the Mid-Century Modern quilt in neutral fabrics); I hope when it’s my turn I can be as successful.

As I lay in bed yesterday, I did make a button for that new bee:

At least I can be somewhat productive when I lay around here.

What else am I working on? Well, another July 1st deadline is for this month’s Schnibbles quilt. My husband brought up a camp chair (small chair we use when we go camping) and I could slide it in the cubby hole of my sewing desk, and yes, I did get some of that top quilted last night. While I can only quilt for a short while, it feels good to be productive and to see a quilt take shape.

hanging Kaleidoscope Quilt

Thanks, all, for your nice comments about Kaleidoscope (in previous post). My husband hung it up in the hallway this morning. It brings a smile to my face as I slowly make my way up the stairs. Here it is again:

Final thought: Happy Birthday, Rhonda! You are an inspiration, always.

Quilts

First WIP Post of Summer 2013

June 5, 2013 Elizabeth E.4 Comments

It’s the first post of summer–the first Works In Progress post, thanks to Lee, of Freshly Pieced.

I put together the sections for the Schnibbles block, trimming it up as the pattern recommended (we’re doing Dulcina this month–see Sherri’s blog for more info).

Whoa! Big Shrinkage. (The trimmed up squares are on the right.) If I make this quilt in the future, I’ll try to figure out the dimensions so that the trimmed up block doesn’t lose an inch in each direction.

Final center section, all sewn together. Now the borders. Because I have so much going on in the quilt, I’m looking to build some quieter borders than are shown in the design. But I’m putting this aside for now, to tackle my Big Project: Quilting the English Paper Pieced Quilt:

Click back over to Lee’s blog to see other quilts that are in progress. And happy summer!

100 Quilts

Using the Other Side of Fabrics

June 4, 2013 Elizabeth E.5 Comments

First off, after I finally figured out how to use Mr. Random Number Generator, and making sure that comment included a trip, I’m happy to announce that the winner of the Itsy Bitsy Scissors is Mary, of Needled Mom. Congrats!

I figured since I subjected you to a swath of vacation photos, I needed to get real and get some real quilts back up here on the blog. I started yesterday on the newest Schnibbles for June, Dulcinea, beginning with the background fabric in a navy-blue print:

A high-quality iPhone photo, uploaded, then recaptured as a screen shot. Love technology. Kidding, but it does come in handy.

I filled in with mostly Comma prints, but a few others (I hate doing one line of fabric), but it just wasn’t going anywhere for me, until I turned the background fabric over to the “other side,” not the “wrong” side (shown in pink circle). Why do I not say “the wrong side”? It comes from the era of watercolor quilts, when we tried to blend blend blend our tones across multitudes of itty-bitty squares. We learned to consider both sides of a piece of fabric as possibilities.

Here’s my version: Color Study: Night Infolds the Day. My friend Leisa got us started on this adventure–I think it was her first quilt ever. We cut about a zillion little squares, and since that cool gridded fusible web hadn’t been invented yet, we pieced them all.

So the technique was to smooth the colors across the colorful sections, and sometimes no matter how many little squares you browsed through, it just wasn’t possible.

So you flipped the piece over and used the “other side,” like the middle partial square in the upper row, and the full right-hand square in the second row.

I used an allover celestial print for the back–that was pretty daring for that time — all of 14 years ago.

The label. I exhibited this is a local quilt show, and stitched on their label, too. The best part of this story is that our friend Tracy adopted our six pizza boxes full of squares (we sorted them by value, from light to dark), added about a zillion white squares and made herself a wonderful quilt from our leftovers, another value of getting together in a quilt group. This is #29 on my 100 Quilts List.

Another quilt where I used the “other” side sometimes, was on the quilt I made for my mother (mentioned in last week’s post). We’d gone to a quilt show in Carmel, where I’d picked up a fat quarter pack of blues. This is titled The Blues of Carmel, and is #19 on my 100 quilts list. It’s named not only for the ocean at Carmel’s edge, and that pack of blues from the quilt show, but also because my mother has blue eyes.

The back of this is merely a whole cloth, allover design, which I used as a guide to hand-quilt. Pretty much the only people who machine quilted their quilts at that time were J. C. Penny’s or Sears. It was hand-quilt, or yarn-tie. Quite a range of options, right? Since this was made in my earlier days, it doesn’t have a label. I need to remedy that. This quilt was published in Joen Wolfrom’s book Color Play (page 64). Don’t know who Joen Wolfrom is? Google her. Her book, Patchwork Persuasion is ground-breaking. And just typing “#19 of 100 Quilts” makes me realize how far I’ve come, and how far quilting has evolved, in the nearly two decades since I made this. Of course, I’M not any older.

This was on my melon for lunch, which reminds me I need to get back to sewing that Schnibbles quilt, another one in Sherri and Sinta’s Another Year of Schnibbles!