It's been a week!

I did have some time to quilt a bit on the small wall hanging. I quilted in the ditch around the patches and will do some filler quilting and something on the borders.















This has certainly been an eventful week. Our 10 year old great grandson had a ruptured appendix and was admitted to the hospital on Sunday. He was a very sick kid and everyone was worried and frusrated.  He is home now with a drain in his abdomen and a PICC line to administer IV antibiotics for the next 10 days. He is staying here at our daughters house (where we live) as their house in torn up and dusty in the middle of remodelling. He is feeling much better and while he is pretty much stationary, because of the drain apparatus, he is playing games and watching TV.

Our grandson in Missouri is getting married today (in Missouri) and our son and DIL were here last weekend with their dog. They live in Pittsburgh and had errands to run here and then left for Missouri  on Tuesday. Jack and I did not plan going to the wedding because of the distance and health reasons. The rest of the Ohio family was all going to go but those plans were changed  when Ben was hospitalized.
So  from our family only John's parents and his brother and his wife will be at the wedding.

We have Buttons (the dog) here with us; fortunately she gets along well with our dog and cat. That is an adventure in itself. Now we have to keep the cat and our son's dog away from Ben because of the drain and PICC line. Kitty is attracted to anything that dangles and the dog jumps and people at times. Tux, our good old black lab with his perfect manners, is the only one allowed in the room with Ben. We are kept busy shutting one door or another to keep the animals away from Ben or keep Lucy from escaping. Lucy is not allowed to go outside but lays in wait for a chance to slip out any time we let the dogs out. We have to make sure Lucy has access to the basement and her litter box.


Late in the week, I did have some  layer up 3 quilt sections to be quilted then joined.
 This is one section; it is 2 blocks wide by 7 blocks long.

This is a 4 block section showing the overall pattern. This quilt  has been sitting around in 3 sections for a few years. It is a different from the one I have been working on recently.

You can see the difference in the two. the one below is an 8 block section.  This one will be layered up and quilted in 2 sections.

I layered the 3 section quilt first because I had an issue with the batting. Lucy had knocked the batting on the floor and had torn through the bag in several sections and tore out pieces of batting leaving several holes. This was a slightly larger batt because of 2 joining seams instead of one and I wanted to make use it would be usable. All the damage was at one end and I was able to cut away the part with the holes.
I have to keep Lucy away from any exposed batting and we have to keep her away from Ben and we have to keep her away from any doors being opened to the outside. I also have to feed her up in the sink counter in the bathroom so Buttons (son's dog) won't eat her food. After her own family left her this week Buttons had stopped eating her own food until I mixed in some cat food. So..... I also have to make sure Lucy doesn't eat Buttons' food. Tux our Lab gives us no problems but would really like to be petted 24/7, walked around the whole yard and the woods out back at least once a day, and given his ration of treats at the usual time in the evening. All three animals line up for treats about 7:30. They all settle down for the night in our bedroom and they have worked out for themselves who sleeps where. No one sleeps on our bed but Lucy uses it for a jumping off place to the top of Jacks dresser.

Yes, it has been quite a week!

Lucy taking a rest .

HST's and Squares

I got a slow start on the HST's because after I made a few and pressed them I really didn't like them. For one thing, I have not added anything much to my box of cut squares for a long time and what was left in the box was mostly rejects that didn't make it into quilts. I seriously thought about tossing the whole box of cut squares. I gave some thought to how I would use what is in the box and looked at the 3 1/2 inch cut squares and the 3 1/2 inch HST's that had been made here and there over a period of time. I have a lot of them from doing demos of making HST's

I made these 2 blocks and decided that I will continue. When I first laid out the squares and HST's  I was looking at colors and that was when I thought about tossing the whole thing. I went away and did something else and when I came back I played around with value. Oh well, this is much better.

Then I worked out what I want to do in Electric Quilt. On the left is the EQ version of the 4 block pattern and how I will probably lay out the whole quilt. I am probably going to cut more 4 1/2 inch squares of some more recently purchased fabrics to liven it up a bit.

I may be working on this for a while. I plan to work on 4 blocks at a time. I will be starting a wedding gift quilt when I can get out to the quilt shops and I will only work on this hit or miss until I finish the wedding gift.

Baby quilt

I have been busy trimming my HST's to 2 1/2 inches and I finally got them all on the wall, all 256 of them. I really made about 40 or so more than that because I needed more color variety as I go to the last few rows. they won't go to waste but they will not go into another HST only baby quilt.
I did a little figuring and if I made 2 1/2 inch finished HST squares, I would only have to make 144 and if I made the quilt with 3 inch finished HST's, I would only have to make 100. Next time I will probably make them 3 inches and I will have a more even number of pieces from each color family. I didn't have all these things thought out ahead of time for this first baby quilt. I don't play to make a lot of these but maybe one or two more baby quilts.

It is hard to spot a mistake sometimes if the  angle Is the same even though the colors are reversed as in the block on the left. Sometimes after undoing the seam it is easy to make another mistake if I am getting tired.
Eventually I get it right. However after the second mistake I usually quilt and come back to it later.

 So....here it is up on the wall I have four 16 patch blocks on the left and I plan to sew the rest of the patches into 16 patch blocks instead of long rows.
I didn't worry about arranging the colors other than not having big clumps of the same color together anywhere.  After I had a few rows up and sat back to look at it I realized that it was never going to matter. There were about 40 different 6 inch squares to start and each made 8 HST's . That is a lot of color and pattern and with that many prints any sort of organized plan was not going to happen.
I used to make a big fuss about placing everything in just the right place and then when I started sewing everything together I would get mixed up somewhere and I couldn't tell where anything belonged.

Now days my plan of attack is random abandon.

After all

Random is Random!!

HST's

Instructions for making half square triangles 8 at a time are all over the Internet and I got an add in the mail for a quilting magazine that had instructions inside the flyer for HST's x 8. Lori, one of the Basement Diva's, showed me a little piece that she is making with only HST's and it started me thinking about making a baby quilt for the closet at church. I am not going to put another tutorial here but these are a few things that work for me.

When I make HST's I do not bother with 3/8 and 7/8 but round up to the nearest half inch or whole number. I am going to square up anyway and for me it is more accurate to have a tiny bit more to trim. When I make HST's one at a time I often chain piece and use "The Angler" and sometimes after cutting between the stitched lines my seam allowance is a bit skimpy. If I am going to make 8 at a time I do not want 8 skimpy seams. I find it easier to sew straight on a marked line so I do not bother with the diagonal cutting line and I don't mark the cutting horizontal and vertical cutting lines either as I will be using my ruler to cut.
If I use my Quick Quarter (blue Marking tool I can draw both the stitching lines for each direction without moving the ruler. Sometimes (when I can't find my Quick Quarter marker) I use my ruler and lay the quarter inch line exactly corner to corner to mark. I like to use a Papermate mechanical pencil because the point is always fine and sharp.


 When I am cutting and trimming small pieces I use a small cutting mat. When my first large cutting mat wore out I saw that it was getting bald in the same few places and it was when I cut and trimmed small pieces. It is much more economical to replace these small mats.

 When I use HST's I almost always press the seams open. I find opposing seams at the corners are just that, opposing, and they push against each other.










This is where I am now. I am trimming the HST's to 2 1/2 inches. that container top left has about 128 that need to be trimmed, next to that is my trimmings and there is my trusty lint roller. I use the lint roller on my cutting mat to pick up the little pieces that transfer to the backs of the pieces I am trimming and then get stitches to them when I sew. In the foreground are stacks of 8 HST's on top of a shoe box cover.




Here is what I have up on my design wall I have 13 more rows to go. When Lori was showing her HST piece she mentioned how she didn't realize show small it would be. Same here! somehow starting with 6 inch squares did not translate to 2 inch finished squares in my mind even though I worked it up in EQ7 and figured out how many I needed.


At least I made enough and I don't have to go back and cut more squares and draw more lines etc. I am thankful that I am not making a large be quilt instead of a 38 inch square baby quilt.

The next one will be larger squares.