A Finish

I finished sewing the facing on the second HST quilt.

Here are the two quilts laying on my bed side by side. The one I finished today is the one on the right and it is much more graphic;  it is easier to see the block. Both quilts are 16 patch blocks and both have an equal number of HST patches and plain square patches and they are laid out the same way with alternating HST and plain square patches  The quilt on the left does not have any light plain square patches and therefore the block is harder to identify.

























I like them both but I think I like the one on the left better. That is probably because all of the plain squares being dark give the quilt more color. For me, the more color and pattern the better I like it. My guess is that someone who does not like so much busyness would like the other one better.

I ended up with a lot of left over HST's and 3 1/2 inch squares so I will most likely be making another quilt.  I won't be  doing that soon but I am mulling over the design options. I will be playing with it in EQ7 while I work on some other things.

Hutch mat #2

I finished the second hutch mat and this will be it. I decided that the coffee table will remain bare and I will dust it more often.

The reds show up here as brighter than they are; these fabrics are all darker and antique looking. The top mat is the second one I made. I decided to finish out the ends with strips instead of triangle corners.
I didn't want them to be the exactly alike; the center 2 inch square and the red binding are the same in both of them and many of the strips are used in both. Most of them are from the same box of strips left over from a quilt in made either 1990 or 1996. I wrote on the back with a Pigma pen but I can't read the last digit. That quilt was a pineapple log cabin and you can see it at the bottom of this post here.


When I opened this box of scraps I really opened a can or worms. I could probably make another RW&B quilt with what I have.  I had everything sorted by size and color and each wrapped with a piece of muslin with the length of the strips. Much of that is not longer nice and tidy as I combed through everything looking for strips that I wanted to use. I don't think I want to make another quilt with these RW&B 1 1/2 inch strips but I don't want to throw them away and I don't think I can get away with giving them to my friends as prizes again. As it stands now I am contemplating what to do with all of the other scraps I have  recently discovered hiding in various places.

OH WELL

 

I  am going to start  by putting away all my rulers etc. and clean up a little. then I will do a bit of hand quilting that I have committed to on my big UFO.

Tree update and a flimsy

This is my view today while sitting at my desk looking out the window. It is a rainy, gloomy day but look at that bright green grass and the water droplets hanging off the tree branch. In real life they sparkle, a little bit of  bling; that cheers me up.



 Here are some more tree pics.
Top right was yesterday, top left is today.Maybe the difference is not noticeable in the photo but I can see the difference in how the filling out of the leaves is filtering my view of the other buildings. The bottom left is a close up from another angle. The leaves are not so bright green now; they have more of a bronze color than they did a few days ago. I can see the little maple seeds starting to grow but it is hard to gt a good shot of them. The bottom right is the oak tree that is closer to our bedroom window and I can see the leaf buds. I am happy to see this tree thriving as several years ago the whole top of the tree broke off during a storm. It seemed like the tree could not survive but it compensated by growing its lower branches veeeeerrrry wide and in the last few years it has been growing a new top. In the summer there is not much to show that anything happened to it.

So.... here is my flimsy! I finished the piano key borders and sewed them on this morning. These are the real thing not virtual borders. There is a 2 inch inner border strip that really doesn't show but it made easier the task of sewing on the piano keys. I'm not sure how I will quilt it but I will use Kona bone for the binding.

Now it is time to clean up the sewing room. For the last two days every time I put something down it got lost in the mess. I had to resort to putting the quilt on my bed to pin the borders because both my cutting tables are pure ordinary disaster.

I always feel

more energetic and ambitious

about cleaning

when the sun is shining

but this

is not going to wait for the sun.

 

 

Made fabric quilt

I have not had much luck in getting my sewing room in order because I have all my bags of scraps out and I kept dragging some scraps out to play. I even got them them all put back in their respective bags and I still couldn't leave them alone. I decided that the  only way I was going to get them put away would be to make a quilt. I have had a quilt in mind since last week so I went ahead and got it together. I showed the blocks up on my wall  in my post yesterday. I sewed the 2 1/2 inch strips of Kona Bone on 2 sides late yesterday. Today it is a partly done flimsy; I still have to make the borders.

This is a pattern from the Missouri Star Quilt Company called Falling Charms. Click on the link for the Your Tube video. The quilt in the video is so pretty made with a nice soft floral charm pack and that is what really caught my interest. After I started to play with making fabric I decided to make 5 inch squares and use them in a small quilt, maybe a baby quilt.

 In the quilt picture shown here the body of the quilt is a photo of the actual quilt that I sewed together today. I imported the photo to EQ7 to audition a virtual piano key border in EQ. This is a new feature in EQ7 and I dicovered it about a year or so ago; it makes pieced border decisions easier. It was either piano keys or prairie points. I have a lot of bright strips cut but not very many bright 3 inch squares so the piano keys it will be.

Of course that means

I will not be able

to put those bags of scraps a way yet.

I better get busy.

Scrappy Trips

I finished my 24 block for the Scrappy Trips quilt. At first I found them tedious but after the first few I didn't feel that any longer.  I would probably continue to make blocks in these colors but I really don''t know what I will do with this; one thing I know for sure I do not need another quilt for my bed.
I have a fair number of short pieces left from cutting the 16 inch x 2 1/2 inch strips; I am leaning toward a piano key border. I'm not sure if I want to make another as I think I put piano keys on a lot of quilts lately. It just seems to work so well for scrappy quilts. Maybe I like it because I'm lazy and it is so easy. I will have to think about it.

I keep odds and ends of things up on my design wall. If I am trying think of what to do with something I can look at it until inspiration strikes. If nothing comes to mind and I get tired of seeing it I take it down for a while.

I've had this panel up on my design wall for a while. My friend, Kathy gave me this fabric and I cut out this section which is one repeat. It was up on my wall when I started making the scrappy trips blocks and putting them up on the wall. After I got about six blocks made and they were right above the panel, I looked at them one day and it struck me how well they went together.

 

I am thinking of cutting the framed motifs apart and fitting them into a bargello quilt using many of the same fabrics. I will  have to add some others in the smae colors. Here it is set on top of the blocks and it really blends in more than this photo shows. It really is yelling at me and demanding to be used with this pallet.  

Long time no post etc.

I got an email from a friend today wanting to know if I was OK as I had not posted anything for a while. There is really not much going on and what is happening is not very satisfactory. Who wants to post or read about something that is not going well.

I am not happy about the baby quilt I have been working on  for church. The poly batting is very slippy, slidey and a pain to get pin basted, with many more pins than I usually use. and the quilting looks a mess. I am not sure what I will do. It is ready for binding and I need to buy something but I am not sure anything will make this good enough to give away. 'Nuff said about this.

I have one quilt top that has been hanging behind the sewing room door for several years. It is in 3 long sections ready to layer up and quilt and then put together. This picture is of 2 sections, that is all I have room to lay out.
I think the reason I never completed this when I made it is that I was intimidated by matching all those seams after quilting it. I am not worried  about that anymore. I have made a lot of quilts that I quilted in sections and it is no more difficult to match seams than when the whole top is put together before quilting.

I get this out from time to time and think about finishing it. Today I am looking at that bottom row and I think I need to make 6 more 12 inch blocks to go on the bottom of the 3 sections to  mirror image  those triangles to make them squares(that is 2 blocks for each section).  I made this after I had cut all my scraps into squares of various sizes and I know I have some of these same fabrics in my box of squares. I gave away all my 4 inch squares a year or 2 ago but I have cut more. There seems to be no end to all of my older pieces of fabric. I still have an over abundance of 3 1/2 inch squares cut. Maybe I will do this.....soon. I would really like to get his one done and gone. We'll see.

I  love making scrap quilts but sometimes you have to make something with all new fabric and maybe that is what I need to do. The Basement Divas will be starting a new challenge this month and I am thinking about doing it with all new fabric.

In the meantime while I am rolling all this around in my mind I will make my Friendship blocks for September and October.

Quandary

I am in a quandary; I just can't decide what to do about the borders for my all scrappy DNP (you can see more of it here). The body of the quilt is quilted and I will add the borders after I quilt them. I thought I had decided to use my picket fence borders that I didn't use on another quilt but they didn't look right on this one either. I think there is too much white/light fabric in them for this quilt.

I had considered both the blue and the brown fabrics. I am not wild about either one but I lean toward the blue a little  more.



Brown border

Blue border?

I  thought about just putting a binding on it but I know I would be sorry I had not done something more.

 I am still thinking about prairie  points (the black here has nothing to do with this quilt it is the inner border on the quilt that is on my bed where I am auditioning all of these options).

If I use Prairie Points I have to work out how to add them to a quilt that is already quilted to the edge with out having the edge of the quilt feel like it has  steel  band in it. I think I know how I would do it but I  am not sure how it will  look if I  don't do a  good job of sewing a straight  line.

 Then there is the piano key border which would  have a narrow inner border. I guess I like this best but I was hoping to find a different border that was less work. This border is for my spiral  log cabin and if I want one for this quilt I will have to make another one. Too bad that  I decided to put all those strips away and cleanup the mess if I had kept going  I would have it all done by now.

I have to make up my mind and get this done. When I am wavering about what to do, I do one of two things, I either clean or eat. I have already cleaned and cleaned again and I just bought 2 new pair of pants and I don't want to grow out of them.

New look but old quilt

 I decided I need a new look but I don't have a new quilt that I want to look at every time I open my blog page.

 Here is a photo of the whole quilt, front and back.This is one of my favorite quilts. It is all scrappy except for the sashing. I had cut squares of various sizes from all of my scraps that were stuffed into large popcorn cans and pretty much unusable in the mess they were in. I ended up with  about six boxes of squares in increments of 1/2 inch and sizes from 2 1/2 inches to 6 inches. This was one of the early quilts I made from those squares; the block was not so much my own design as it was inspired by a secondary pattern that came together in another quilt. This was also one of the first few quilts that I quilted in sections. First I quilted the center and then made the borders from sashed blocks and quilted them and added them around the outside. I think I  added the prairie points before I added the borders to the body of the quilt.

 I like the scrappiness of it, all the floral fabrics, the yellow and pink in the sashing, the prairie points, and the pieced back.  This is my kind of traditional quilt.

I ran out of thread that I need for my iris but I will get back to that tomorrow. Maybe today I will work on a new traditional quilt.

I have a Quilt

My flimsy is no more; it is a quilt.

I have been busy working on this all week. It was too big to layer up on one table and very cumbersome to move everything and set up 2 tables so I did what I used to do and pinned the backing to the carpeting in the living room and layered it up there. It has been 2 years since the last time I crawled around on the floor pinning a quilt but I thought it was worth a try. I thought I would not be able to move the next day but all that working out at the Y has paid off.  I was stiff and rather uncomfortable in pain after I finished but the next day I didn't feel  it at all.

I did not quilt this the way I intended. I planned some rather fancy (for me) free motion quilting but after spending a whole day picking out little  tiny piled up stitches on one small area I adjusted my thinking. It is all done with the walking foot. some of it is in the ditch and other places across the  blocks or along masking tape to mark straight lines. I am not up to free motion quilting on a large piece. I convinced myself I could do it after quilting some small pieces but I was kidding myself. My thinking about this has always been to stick with what I can do well but I have seen what some of my friends have been doing and I thought that I could do it too if I was patient and careful and took my time. Not so!

Anyway....... I like it; it is bright and cheerful and I used up a lot of scraps and learned a few things  along the way.

I needed to buy a backing fabric and I stopped at Joann's (with my coupon) on my way to the quilt shop. This is what I found. The pattern is just right for this quilt and it has a nice hand. It is not  flimsy or coarse and washed and ironed nicely. I think it will play well with other bright fabrics. I have a nice 86 x 22 piece left over to play with.

This is the corner block  I used to replace the one I cut off. After I removed the other block I couldn't find the wide strip of the  dotty fabric I need to fix it so I just made a new block. Of course, I found the fabric just as soon as I finished the new block.

I still need to sew the binding down on the back and I will do it by hand because I like the way it looks and I am not in any hurry. Maybe I will have some girlfriends over to do some handwork and visit. Sounds good?

Flimsy

I have a Flimsy, I love that term. Calling it a Flimsy makes it sound like I have something finished, and so it is, the top is finished. Saying the top is finished indicates that there is more to do and of course that is true but I like the idea of having reached a completed stage of the project. I frequently become impatient with people who get hung up on rhetoric over things that don't really matter. Sooooooo...... if you feel the way I do over what to call things just ignore the above statement. 

Here it is! I like it!

Here are two of the corners.

I think I will fix the one on the left.  I had to  retrofit the corner blocks because I  sewed  the pieced borders to the inner border strip before I sewed it to the quilt. That seemed to me the best way to handle what might be stretchy borders. For some reason instead of removing the light pink strip I trimmed the corner block. I will only have to take out four 6 inch seams and replace the narrow dotty pink strip with a wide strip on the left side of the block. I would probably leave it if that light pink floral didn't bother me it is  OK in other places but right there it stands out like a sore thumb. The lesson here is "if the hour is late and you are tired and find a mistake, QUIT and fix it tomorrow because if you fix it right away you will probably fix it again tomorrow anyway".