Blogger's Quilt Festival

Blogger's Quilt Festival is here.

 I didn't have to think too long about which quilt I wanted to enter this year.This is my favorite quilt of those I have made this year, a spiral log cabin quilt or the Gigi (GG) quilt, as my husband calls it. He thinks the blocks look like G's.
I started this quilt last spring after seeing the blocks on Beth Shibley's blog, Love Laugh Quilt; where she has a great tutorial. I finally got around to finishing it in September. The fabrics are mainly floral or botanical from my box of 1 1/2 inch strips that are mostly from the years when I made color wash quilts. The best fit for category would be Scrap Quilt.




To make this more manageable on my domestic machine, I quilted it in sections.   I ditch quilted the body of the quilt first and later I quilted and then added the borders, first the side borders and then the top and bottom borders with the corner blocks added. I couldn't decide on border fabric and that held me up a while but I finally settled on piano key borders. I liked this quilt before I added the borders but after the borders were on, I loved it! The center of the quilt just seems to glow. 

For the back I used a vertical row of leftover spiral log cabin blocks between 2 sections of the backing for the body of the quilt and 

back

then added random size sections of piano keys to stretch the rest of the yellow backing fabric to fit as the backing for the border sections.

I live in an apartment and one bedroom is my sewing room the other room has a king size bed, that is one bed total, for which I have 2 quilts already. This quilt is  about 64 x 75, hardly king size. Both Jack and I like it so much I didn't want to relegate it to the closet or cedar chest.

so here it is on the bed. It covers the top of the bed from the foot to the pillows and from side to side. I have a  kind of furry/fuzzy white blanket under it and it works. We take all the extra pillows and the quilt off for sleeping and because it is not so big and heavy as a full king size quilt it isn't a lot of trouble.

 
If you are interested in seeing my posts about this as I was working on it, click on spiral log cabins and log cabin quilts on the side bar.



Don't forget to check out the other quilts on the Blogger's Quilt Festival. Amy does a great job of organizing this event and there are many wonderful quilts.  Click on this link here or on the Bloggers's Quilt Festival button my my side bar.

Productive Tuesday

The first thing I did this morning was take everything out of the small coat closet just inside our apartment door. Jack told me it was gong to rain on Tuesday and it would be a good day to work on the shelves he promised to build. I have a very small kitchen and have been putting extra pantry items on the floor of the closet and in various unhandy places in the limited kitchen cabinets.

There are 4 shelves 12 x 24 inches and 14 inches apart. They fit under the hanging bar so we can still use it for our coats. This may not impress anyone who has lots of space but it sure makes me happy. I rearranged my kitchen cabinets also since I made some space there. Jack used my cutting table for a while while he was putting it all together so I took the opportunity to clean up in my sewing room and vacuum the  floor.

I have been working on the borders for the spiral log cabin for 3 days and they are finally on. I only accomplished a little yesterday. Today I finished the hand stitching on the back where I added the top and bottom borders. Then I trimmed off the batting along the edges to prepare for the binding.

This is how I decided to deal with the corners; I made 6 inch blocks with the green fabric squares making a diagonal line, I added a 2 inch strip to one side to make it fit the border and after I squared off the inner green border. My seam ripper is pointing to the strips I added.  

In this last picture the seam ripper is pointing to the corner that didn't fit right. I measured and pinned and unpinned and and trimmed and fitted and I still came out almost 1/4 inch short. At this point it is what it is. Tomorrow I will add the binding and then I will be done.  When it is all finished I will show pics of the front and back. Maybe I will also get the binding done on the placemats.

More Progress

I was rattling around yesterday waiting for Jack to get home. I didn't want to drag out anything to start something new because I am getting  things together to take with me this week end for our church quilting group retreat. I have stacks of things I want to pack and I don't want to get them mixed up with other things.

I decided to quilt a few blocks on this spiral log cabin quilt.It has been layered up and pin basted for months.   I have not been eagerly anticipating quilting this; I thought it was going to be tedious. My reasoning was that I would do a few blocks here and there and eventually get it done. In reality, it was a breeze to quilt, I just followed the inside line of the dark spiral to the center and then kept going on the other side from the center out to the edge of the block and moved on to the next block. All my ditches are quilted. Why did I think this was going to be hard? I have 24 blocks quilted and 16 more to go.

I started this last summer using Beth Shibley's tutorial from Love Laugh Quilt. I loved the looks of her baby quilt and the tutorial is very easy to follow. I had decided to quilt this in sections with the body of the quilt as one section and then quilt the borders and add them. I had done the usual agonizing over the borders and finally decided on piano keys. I was not looking forward to getting out all the strips and making the piano key borders. Then I remembered something! Last week when I was cleaning EVERYTHING I came across something that had a little strip of selvage tied around it. I didn't really pay any attention to it but I knew it was something to keep because I had bundled it up. I set it aside and didn't even think about it until I was looking here.

These baskets are on the top of my bookcase and I put things there I intend to work on soon. I was really looking to a pattern I thought might be there.

I saw this in the basket and once again it registered as something to keep. Today I remembered it and looked at it and YESS! It is my 7 inch piano key border strips. I made them when I made the blocks.

 I will add them to an inner border strip and layer them with that yellow mottled backing fabric that was also in the basket. After they are quilted I will add them to the quilt.

I think I also have the batting set aside; I came across that when I was cleaning and I bundled and labeled all my batting odds and ends and I had these long narrow strips. I am glad I was too busy at the time to sew because I was thinking of cutting them for mug mats and other small things.

Should I say it again?

Sometimes

 things turn out

 Just Right!

Quilt back flimsy

 Is a pieced back that is ready to  be layered up a flimsy? Well anyway, I finished the rest of the spiral log cabin blocks for the back and put it together.

The color here is not quite right; the yellow is not so bright. I wanted to take a  pic and get it out of the way quickly before Jack came back in the room to watch the news. I had to move his chair a little to lay this out.
 I thought this would be quick to put together but I had a lot of interruptions when I was making those blocks. I got started in the wrong direction on that green one and it spirals in the opposite direction  from the others. Because it was different I kept sewing logs to the  wrong edge as I was chain sewing and then I had to rip them out.  I knew it would spiral different from the others but I really don't care that it is different. It probably wouldn't even be noticeable if they were not all oriented so the light strips on the one edge of the blocks wouldn't be against the yellow. Tomorrow I will layer it up and I will rearrange my tables for quilting.

The next photo is one  I took today during one of my sewing interruption's. We took a drive through the Cleveland Metroparks to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park to see the Blue Herons. There are 5 trees and over 100 nests total. The herons were busy building their nests; some of them were just starting a new nest with only a few sticks. Lots of comings and goings as one of the pair would bring a stick to its mate and she(I am guessing it was a she) would take it and arrange it with the other sticks. We watched for about 30-40 minutes and then stopped on the way home for an early supper and I came home and finished my quilt back. 

On the way there we had to take a detour for some road work which took us past the Polka Dot Pincushion quilt shop. We stopped for a quick look and a small purchase before we went on to see the herons. All in all it was a very good day.

A few blocks

Monday I layered up the sections for the T shirt quilt and I was going to layer up the Spiral Log cabin quilt but I have to piece the backing. I thought that since I had to piece the backing I would make it more interesting by putting a row of blocks between the 2 sections. So, I got out my strips and started to make 8 blocks, I ended up with 9 just in case I don't like one of them. Maybe I will but the extra block in the border backing. I am going to add the border after the body of the quilt and the borders are quilted. That will make it all more manageable for me.

This is as far as I got today (Tuesday) but there is always tomorrow or the  next day. Jack came home from his motorcycle ride and said that there were tree blooming everywhere since yesterday and we should go back to Holden today. It is amazing what happened since Sunday. I took lots more photos of flowers but these two photos are of a really interesting tree in the Conifer Collection. I got Jack to stop today so I could take some pictures. I don't know what it is because i couldn't find the little sing with the name. It is 6 or 7 feet tall and looks like a fountain or waterfall and the branches on the ground remind me of the water bubbling up at the base of a waterfall. There are 3 of these weeping conifers on the drive near the exit to the arboretum and I love to look at them. I love all the interesting shapes of the trees before the leaves come out too. There are a lot of magnificent weeping trees at Holden and I took a lot of photos today of the bare trees but I won't post them because they are probably not that interesting to most people.
For anyone who is interested in Holden Arboretum click here.