Quilting........Finally

Yesterday, Mr Spontaneous decided to put u some shelves here and there, which I have been waiting for. We spent some time in the basement looking for shelf hardware and we moved lots of boxes looking for it. We both got kind of cranky and when Jack sat down to rest I came upstairs to look for the hardware. My daughters friend was here and when they didn't hear Jack making any noise the friend wondered if I did something to him. I think she was joking. Anyway when I got back downstairs he told me that while he was sitting there thinking he remembered where he had put the stuff when he took it out of the box weeks ago.  So the shelves are up and some more things have been put away, which means they are out of the sewing room. I had set up my space for quilting but  I never did get back to the sewing room, except for getting things out of boxes to put away. 

Today I got the thread box out and decided what I want to use and I started quilting my Basement Diva, Mary Ellen Hopkins challenge quilt. I am still not sure exactly how I will quilt everything but I have started quilting in the ditch and I believe I will be changing some things when the pattern changes. Mary Ellen named this Metamorphosis and I think I will keep that in mind as I quilt it. 

We'll see how it goes.

Almost a Flimsy

The body of the Mary Ellen Hopkins challenge is finished. I finished all the blocks and sewed them together but the border is not on yet. This where I am stopping for now. I have other things that need to be done and I probably shouldn't have taken a week to play with this but I needed to see how it would develop.
This is a side view, the pattern (3 rows) on the left are a change from what I intended.



When  I was starting to make
  the blocks with the small square in the center I thought that having what I intended interrupted the pattern. These 2 EQ shots show my original intention on top and the change on the bottom.







I changed a quite a few things as I went along. This fabric on the right was my inspiration and I chose all the fabrics to go with it. The two test blocks I made next to it quickly changed my mind about using it. No matter which way I turned the blocks they were not going to work. The fabric would have worked for a border but there was only a 2/3 yard piece.

 
 
 
This is the border fabric I will use; although it is a smaller scale it looks good. 

This last shot is all my  parts that are left over due to my mistakes. I had  many interruptions that stopped me in the middle of something. When I returned to what I was doing, I either cut more strips or made more of something I already had.

I think that when there are many changes in colors as there was with this project it would be best to figure it all out ahead of time and then do all the cutting at once. I was well on my way to doing exactly that until I changed the colors completely and I just didn't want to do it all over again switching back and forth between EQ and Word, copying and pasting and resizing etc.

 

Well anyway.... it all worked out. I didn't run out of any fabric and I will use all the leftover pieces on the back of the quilt. I plan on using my inspiration fabric on the back as well. For now it is all going to be put away while I tend to other things.

 

Birds of Ohio Challenge etc.

Our group from church met today and we had the revel of our challenge quilts from our Birds of Ohio challenge. Elaine printed up some photos from the Internet of birds that are native to Ohio and we blindly picked a photo from a bag to be our inspiration. We could interpret that any way we wanted. there was a size limit of 120 inches around the perimeter.

Five of us brought something to show today. Guess who forgot their quilt at home. I did however have a photo of it to show here.
Top row on the left is Kim and she picked two birds but decided to make only one quilt. Her birds were the Purple Finch and Black Throated Warbler; she use their colors for her inspiration. In the center is Kathy with her quilt inspired by the Blackburnian Warbler. Elaine, our challenge originator, is on the left with her Black Throated Green Warbler quilt.

 In the bottom row on the left is Dorine with her paper pieced Hummingbird. She enlarged the pattern on her computer and printed it. The original was a much smaller bird. In the center is Debbie's quilt. Her bird was a Red Breasted Nuthatch. As there is no red in the quilt, I am assuming that her inspiration for the birdhouses was perhaps their nesting habit. It is a fun quilt with pretty fabric and we were free to interpret our bird any way we wanted. The last quilt is mine that I forgot at home.  My bird was a Blue Winged Warbler. Kathy's and Debbie's quilts are still  at the flimsy point, Elaine's quilt is hand quilted and the others are machine quilted.

We had some other show and tell as well. Kathy has a beautiful quilt for a graduation gift that she has almost finished. I wish I had taken a close up of the fabrics because they don't show up well when  I enlarge the photo. the darker of the block fabric is zebras and the other has gnus and  either tigers or leopards or maybe both. The quilt on the right is a hand quilted baby quilt for Elaine's soon to be born grandson. The fabric is just too cute and she has made some other items from the fabric as well, including a darling bib with the monkey fabric in the center.

These are some blocks that Gail is working on for a Quilt of Valor. I am not sure of the size but they I think they are larger than 12 inches.

 

 

Same old story

 Yesterday we cleaned up the quilting closet at church and  put everything back in place. We consolidated and purged and hung some things with command hooks. Everything we use often should be easy to get out and more important easy to put away.  

  So......Here I am again organizing my own sewing space. It seems like I just did this last month. Oh wait, I did do this last month. Actually this time it is different; Jack took one of my shelf units out to the garage. That means I have to be serious about deciding what I can realistically keep and what has to go. This picture shows my one shelf unit loaded with what I am keeping. I was able to hang 11 quilts (no bed quilts) in the closet using some skirt/pants hangers that hold them securely and are not bulky so the hangers themselves do not take up a lot of space. I am going to buy some more like it for my clothes closet and to hang a few more quilts in this closet. It is also time to let go of a few more quilts.  I am not going to post a picture of the rest of the room right now because it is a mess and who wants to look at another mess. There are a lot of things that need to go in other places and that means I will finally have to tackle the hall closet and do some purging there. I will not be posting any photos about that either.

I had a lot of wall hangings rolled up together around batting covered cardboard tubes. That worked pretty well but I ran out of space to store them conveniently. The last time I cleaned my sewing closet I took out 3 large rolls of quilts and I have been moving them around from the living room sofa to my bed, depending on whether we expected company or not. They are almost all hanging in the closet now. I unrolled them on my bed to put them on the hangers and Jack was sitting at his computer watching me. I likes this cat quilt and said I should hang it. He jokingly suggested the ceiling as there is really no more available wall space. It is 24 inches square and I am going to hang it in my sewing room. I have some things on my bulletin boards that I can change out.

This is a quilt I made for a guild challenge. We blindly chose a crayon from a paper bag and that was the predominate color we were to use. Tan is not my favorite color; it is a color I would never, ever choose. Guess what, I really came to like this quilt and the way the colors came together. I guess we all need to stretch a bit now and again.