Lost in Circles

I have been busy trying to work through the quilting on this monster!

I don’t have the money to send it to a longarm quilter and even though I paid a couple hundred dollars learning the basics of longarm quilting so I could rent time on one at a local shop I’ve never made it over there again… So this quilt sat for a long time until I decided that I was just going to do it, the way I’ve always wanted to do it and I was going to do it on my own machine! The problem? Well I wanted to quilt concentric circles. I asked my husband to make me a giant compass so that I can stitch the circles one inch apart but he got bogged down in school and I never say down to do it myself. Instead I got the crazy idea of using my 1/4 in foot. That’s right I’m stitching quarter inch concentric circles on a full sized quilt on my home machine, I am in fact crazy…

I’d show you a status picture but that would require me to remove it from my machine and I’m not going to do that. All I can say is I’m really glad that I offset the circle because I cannot imagine working the whole thing from the center. As it is I can only work on this for 20-30 minutes at a time because it’s just so exhausting manhandling the quilt around to ensure the circles are generally even (they are far from perfect) and that the stitch length is mostly the same.

I’m hoping to be done with this in a couple weeks. I’ve been trying to work on it everyday but I’ve been distracted by knitting.

I asked my SIL to make me a knit cowl for Christmas and she made an amazing one but as I started looking for patterns I started seeing more and more things that I loved and wanted. I figure she can’t be my personal knit slave so I would have to learn myself. This pillow is my second project. What I really want to make are sweaters and knee high socks but I figured I should try a couple smaller projects first.

I love how the pillow came out, unfortunately my cats really “love” the pillow as well so it only sat on the couch for about 30 minutes before I had to pack it away…

But high on my success I did start a sweater (actually I started another “skill building” project but quickly got bored. I’m not big on learning on smaller projects. Instead I’d rather go big and if it doesn’t turn out perfectly that’s okay). I bought the yarn from a local yarn shop because if you do then they will help you with your projects! Now that’s win win as far I’m concerned. I’m maybe 1/5 of the way throught the sweater so we’ll see how it goes…

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Dream On Dares to be Square

I know that sometimes the fabric can make the pattern and vice versa so I imagine when someone makes a quilt in a pattern that makes people fall in love with the fabric the designers are both very happy. But when someone takes a quilt pattern and goes in the opposite direction of the designers aesthetic I have to wonder if that makes the pattern designer happy or horrified.

This quilt pattern is from Boo Davis’ book “Dare to be Square” and her style can probably be summed up as modern rock and roll with a tagline of “made with hate”. I have to think a rock and roller would not want her edgy mostly solid owl turned into a patchwork of pastel florals copied from vintage sheet designs. But I guess that’s the risk you run when you publish a pattern or release a fabric line.

The designer’s preference aside I think the fabric and pattern work beautifully together. It’s actually not at all my usual style either…. But something about these not to sweet prints were calling my name a year or so ago and I went ahead and purchased a fat quarter set of the entire line! This quilt (in case you were curious) barely put a dent in my stack.

The book was a Christmas present last year and I always knew the first project I would tackle would be the owl. But until now I couldn’t decide on a color scheme and while I like the two-color mostly solid with edited addition of monochromatic prints featured in the book I didn’t have any small scale prints that would suit. So I went to the complete opposite end of the spectrum and fell in love!

I thought about gifting this to my sister if she is having a girl but I think I might just have to keep it instead…

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Working on My Tops and Bottoms

In addition to working on my swap project I also finished piecing a quilt top/back. It’s my first two sided quilt. There is really is no back to it although I suspect the blue side will spend more time facing up on our couch. I love the curry yellow especially during the dreary winter months but it can be a bit overwhelming on sunnier days.

I went back and forth on how to quilt this. Since the two sides are so different I really had to find a design that would work equally well on both sides. I finally decided to do circles radiating from the center of the wheel (which I intentionally offset to the side and bottom). I’m thinking I’ll space the lines about two inches apart but we’ll see once I get started. First TH needs to make me a giant compass so I can draw the lines to follow. I in no way trust myself to freehand or eyeball it!

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Lush Quilt

So my post from yesterday was actually composed months ago when I initially purchased the magazine! I hadn’t actually done anything with it until last weekend when I started cutting out fabric for my long awaited Lush quilt.

I’ve always been envious of those women that post about going into their stash pulling out a bunch of unrelated fabrics and making these fabulous quilts. Well I am envious no more since that’s exactly what I did with this quilt! I obviously purchased the four Lush prints to use together but the rest have been aquired over the past couple years with no specific project in mind. And yet I think they work beautifull together, don’t you?

Don’t mind the large Anna Maria Horner print in the top row, I’m not actually using it. I bought it online never having seen it in person. I knew the scale was going to be large (which I could have lived with) but the color is also too bright. I’m going to use a green Cake Rock Beach honeycomb print instead.

Now I just need to cut 100 or so little squares 🙂 I’m hoping to get this top completed in the next couple weeks but it depends on what I can get done this weekend since I’ll be traveling for work most of the next two weeks…

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Color Trials

So making a quilt twice probably isn’t the best way to decide which color to use for the background but in my defense I would have had to to take this top apart anyway…

I made the ring portion of my quilt three months ago and finally got around to picking the background colors 6 weeks ago. It took nearly a month to arrive after I ordered it so I was so excited to get started I didn’t double check how the yellow would look with the other prints.

Originally I thought the blue would look best with the wheel so I went ahead and cut and assembled it only to realize that the wheel was super puffy in the middle.

I put it away and figured I would disassemble it later and figure out what went wrong. In the meantime I started cutting the squares for the back and I realized I had a lot of prints that were close in color to my yellow fabric. Since I’m making half sqaure triangles I was afraid there wouldn’t be enough contrast to make the prints stand out.

I figured I had to disassemble the wheel anyway so I might as well take that opportunity to switch the colors around. Now the color wheel side will be “Curry” yellow and I’ll make the half square triangles using the same prints and the “Azure” blue on the other side.

In the end it worked out, the yellow pops beautiful against the wheel and using the blue on the back will provide enough contrast to showcase each print.

Just out of curiousity, which do you prefer?

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Slow Stichin’

I finally finished diassembling, trimming, squaring and reassembling my Single Girl quilt top it was time consuming but it needed to be done!

I don’t know that pink goes especially well with the rest of the fabrics but I needed to go with a solid fabric to save money so I wanted to pick something I really liked. Something about the one inch square of Petal kept calling my name so never having seen it in person I went ahead and purchased five yards. I had a minor heart attack when I heard it described as cotton candy pink on another blog but was pleased when it arrived and it was exactly like the one inch square. I can see how someone might describe it as cotton candy pink but it has more purple in it, it’s really hard to describe…

Having invested so much time and money into this quilt i decided to hand quilt it. I’ve been wanting a project I could work on while hanging out on the couch and this will be perfect for that. I’m not sure how long this will take me since I’ve only ever hand quilted a baby quilt but I’m not in a rush.

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Tedious vs. Time Consuming

With my hexagon quilt top slowly chugging along I decided to turn my attention to the quilt back. Originally I was going to piece the leftover hexagons on a mostly solid background, however, there were two problems with that idea. 1) I don’t want to sew anymore hexagons together and 2) I don’t have enough of any one solid to cover the rest of the back.

But I still had the challenge of using the hexagons and solid fabrics that I already own.

I didn’t make it intentionally straight or wonky so it ended up mostly straight and when I had used up all the hexagon fabric I squared it up and added a cream border.

Then I needed to cover the rest of the quilt back. The obvious solution was a single solid fabric with the pieced square placed slightly off center, I thought a dark red would have been very dramatic and made the colors in the pieced square pop. That is if I had enough of a dark red fabric in my stash which I didn’t.

I knew that I had alot of gray fabric left over from my brother’s quilt so I pulled them all out (four in total) and started piecing them together. I was so close to having enough gray to do it too! When I fell short I covered the remaining area with one of the fabrics I used for hexagons. I hadn’t cut it all into hexagons because it was one of the few from the original stack that I really loved and I wanted to keep some of. But it was also the best solution to the fabric shortage for the back of the quilt…

Overall I really like how it turned out, the pieced back adds more interest then one solid fabric. I was also able to use up almost all of my original fabric (since I didn’t really like the fabric anymore this was one of my goals) and pull the remaining fabric for the quilt from my stash. While I found the hexagons tedious to piece, I really had to force myself to work on them, piecing the back was a lot of fun. I put as much time into the piecing half the hexagons together as I did the entire back but only really enjoyed the latter. To me that’s the difference between tedious and time consuming.

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Single Girls and Seam Rippers

I’m not a single girl and haven’t been for awhile now but I fell in love with Denyse Schmidt’s Single Girl Pattern shortly after I started quilting. I spent over a year collecting fabrics but when I finally got to sew it together it looked horrible! I tried to just live it with it and finish it but the Single Girl Support Group was the kick in the pants I needed to pull out the seam ripper and take this quilt top from this

Back down to arcs and then reassembled to this

See how much flatter it lays now? Instead of using the edge as a guide for my stiches I drew a 1/2 in seam allowance and then stiched along that resulting in a much better fit between the blocks that form the rings.

I have 11 of of the 12 rings assembled so now I just need to reassemble the rows. It was a lot of work but it will be much easier to quilt now and I feel much happier with how it is coming together. For a quilt that takes so much time I definitely want to love it when it is done!

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A Story about Brown

Some colors I’ve loved all my life and some I love intensely for a short period of time, brown falls into the latter category. For about a year I loved brown, I started wearing brown clothes, I painted some of my furniture brown, and I bought LOTS of brown solid fabric to make a quilt for my brother. I bought 6 or 7 yards in fact and (you guessed it) never used it. By the time I was inspired to put fabric and thread together and make a quilt for my brother my love affair with brown had long since ended. So this giant chunk of brown fabric has sat in the back corner of my fabric shelves for years. I’ve pulled it out a couple times but always put it right back in favor of blue or gray or cream.

Then 2011 rolled around and my budget tightened up so I decided to use what I’ve got when it’s time to make a quilt. I figure even if I don’t love brown lots of people do including my sister in law. Which works out fabulously since she announced this past Thanksgiving that she is pregnant. If the baby is a girl she wants to decorate in pink and brown and if it is a boy blue and brown. I was going to wait until she found out the gender to get started but I couldn’t wait and whichever quilt isn’t given to her will be donated. So it works out for everyone 🙂

For the boy quilt I pulled out my Philadelphia Modern Quilt Quild Project Pure quilt. I had one charm pack and one yard of fabric of my choosing to make a quilt top. I didn’t really like how it came out, the fabric wasn’t my style and I felt limited in my choices since I was using precuts. On the other hand my husband loves it and it would be a quilt for his sister so I added a dark brown border and called it good. I like it better with the dark brown but I’m still not in love…

The back will be more of the dark brown solid which barely put a dent in my stash of the stuff…

I won’t be able to baste this until this weekend so I started cutting squares for the girl quilt. 240 3 inch squares to be exact.

I wish I had the rest of the fabric on hand since I was motivated to get started but my fabric stash has already been moved down to VA in anticipation of our move so I’ll have to wait until this weekend to get it and bring it back home.

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Stalled

So I started the year with every intention of finishing my works in progress before I started any new projects. I figured I would start from most complete to least complete and knocked two out and then I stalled….

(Sorry for the bad picture, I used my camera phone)

I knew I wanted to try free motion quilting in a sort of large graphic floral design. And I even like how it is coming out

But I’m not enjoying the process and I’m not motivated to work on it which means I haven’t worked on anything in weeks.

This past weekend I decided it was stupid to try and force myself to work on these projects in a particular order. So I rolled up that quilt and pulled out the blocks from my Single Girl Quilt and finished assembling the quilt top tonight. I haven’t decided on the back or the quilting design so I think this quilt top will go back into my “to be completed pile” but working on it renewed my creative spirit and I’m eager to get cracking on some other projects now!

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