When we go to Maine in the summer I like to have a "big" project to work on and I like to kit it up ahead of the trip. That's where I worked on the Red Sunset quilt. Last year I did some veterans quilts but I wanted something different for this year. I love Elizabeth Hartman patterns and this one looked fun. I think it might eventually used as a fundraiser quilt for a local organization. I dyed some blue fabric for the background because I'm really tired of gray. I decided to pull the fabrics for the blocks this week and see if I needed anything else. I'm posting the groups here just so I can have it documented somewhere for when I start cutting the pieces. The strawberries. The horses The cows The pigs The sheep The chickens The goats The bees The sunflowers
Now that I've seen them against the blue I am thinking that I might want to have a lighter blue. What do you think?
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Our friends from England are still here and we had a lovely weekend with lots of great food. I got away for a few hours Saturday to take a class in fly tying. It was so much fun and the instructor is a true master of fly tying. He's an Iraq War veteran who has had a fascinating life. He got into fly fishing through a program he was invited to join to help with his PTSD. That was 15 years ago and he's been an avid fly fisherman since. There were 4 of us in class and we each made these 4 flies. The top one is called the Chernobyl ant, the fluffy one is the Bunny Leech, the tiny one is an ant and the pink one is the San Juan worm. I was right in my assumption that sewists would be good at this craft. In the sewing room I decided to finish putting this veterans quilt top together. I started it at quilt club last month and I had the blocks all together already. I hadn't been longarming for a while. All that quilting I did in January and February was a little too much on my neck so I've had to take it easy for a while. It's the process and posture of quilting pantographs that did me in. I decided that I was ready to load a new pair of quilts and quilt them from the front in short sessions. Usually I quilt overall patterns but this one (which is bright lime green) really inspired me to have a little fun. It's still pretty fast quilting. It should be done in a couple of days.
All of the patriotic fabrics that I ordered came in and I've soaked them to remove any bleeding dye so I might get back to cutting some veterans quilt kits before I leave for a little trip Thursday. We've had another couple of good days here with our friends. Wednesday we took advantage of the last sunny day for a few days. We went to Charlottesville to hike Ragged Mountain which is a nice 6 mile hike around the city reservoir. It was windy but a beautiful day. Laura has been doing some sewing for her grandson. His parents are chefs and he's likes being in the kitchen so she made him an apron. Then she made him a drawstring bag and pouch for his car collections. While she's been sewing I worked on more veterans quilt kits. These are the leftover blocks from the big blue bowtie quilt. I decided to do something like this. I had plenty fo blue scraps left to cut out pieces for more blocks. Here are all of the pieces cut and ready to sew together for this quilt and there are still some fabrics left over. I think I'll still need binding but I might just cut a scrappy binding. There's a stack of blue strings and I think there are enough for a string quilt like the one in this post. I cut the foundations and I had this orange/yellow fabric in my stash that I thought would be good for the center strip of the blocks.
I got the notice today that the patriotic fabrics that I ordered should be in Monday. I'll be ready to start on them when I get back from my road trip. I leave Thursday to meet my friend in Lincoln, NE and ride back to Virginia with her in her van. It should be a fun trip. Meanwhile, I'm going to try to get 4 veterans quilts quilted before I leave and today I'm taking a fly tying class and that should be fun. In 2021 I made this quilt for my SIL. I had a ton of fabric left over from it and I found that stash this week. It seemed a prime candidate for a masculine veterans quilt. I liked this quilt when I made it in 2020. I made a couple of versions and decided that it was a good pattern for these fabrics too. The enters will be different prints. The dark brown and ivory fabrics will be the outside edges of the block. There was even more of the fabric left over! I made this Crossroads quilt in 2015 and it was the perfect patter for the rest of the batik scraps. So I have 2 more veterans quilt kits ready! Then I went to the basement and finished quilting Anne's quilt. This quilt is about 60" square and I think it was a kit. The fabrics are all the same print but in different colorways. It's a nice effect. The backing is a hand dyed that I've had in my stash for years. The quilting doesn't show at all on the front but it does show nicely on the back. It's a pantograph called Spin and this is the first time I've used it.
Today we are going to Charlottesville to hike Ragged Mountain. It's a 6 mile hike around the reservoir. We did it last year and it was a lot of fun. Next I'll get back to some veterans quilts. We are having a great time with our guests. So far we've stayed close to home because they mostly wanted to relax and recover from their jet lag. Ian has been doing some yard work with us and we've been taking 5 mile walks. (Ian loves doing yard work. I'm really not a horrible host.) Laura has been doing some crochet and sewing and I've been making veterans quilt kits. The first one another version of this quilt. I loved it when I made it last year and am ready to do another. This was cut quickly on the Go! Cutter. The next quilt is from an idea I got from Cynthia Brunz. She coordinates a ton of charity quilts and I get some great ideas from her. My centers are scrap pieces from the last batch of patriotic veterans quilts that I made and the background is an assortment of blue hand dyed quilt back scraps from a lot of veterans quilts that I quilted in the past year or so. I think this one is going to look pretty cool. The third kit is a double 4-patch block. I've made this one several times. This one will reverse the dark and light positioning and it's going to have a border. The tan and light green are also quilt backing scraps. I didn't have enough of those fabrics to do blocks for the whole quilt so I found a stripe fabric to make a 4" border. Then I found a stack of large tumblers and cut more so I'd have enough for a 48" x 60" quilt. I'll put this together and if it needs some calming down I'll cut it apart and insert some sort of inner border. These are already labeled in rows ready for stitching. That weird piece of green fabric that looks to me flying in from the right is actually on a table. When I go through my scraps to cut them up I tend to cut 4" HST pieces and I cut enough to make another quilt like the one in the paper. I think I made that one about 12 years ago. It was a pretty pretty quilt and I'm ready to tackle another. Next I pulled these fabrics from my Nadelstern stash and I had great plans but just as I was typing here I realized that my plan will not work. I think I have a good idea for a replacement fabric for the sashing so I'll work on that, and some other kits, this week.
Last night we had a friend over for dinner. Today we are going to visit my Mom and my brother and then doing a little shopping and we have a hiking excursion planned for Wednesday. Yesterday was dyeing day so I didn't get much else done except for quilting 2 rows on this quilt. The quilting doesn't show at all from the front. But my friend will be able to see it on her quilt from the back. This a pantograph called Spin that I've never used before. It's quite dense and uses a bobbin every 2 rows but I think it's going to look really good on the back. I picked up 12 more veterans quilt tops at the quilt club meeting Tuesday night so Brenda and I will now be lacking things to quilt this month! I also dyed the backing for the big blue quilt so I'll be ready to quilt that one soon too.
Our friends from England arrive this evening so it's possible that I will not post again until Monday. Activity on the blog is likely to be sparse the next few weeks while we are hanging out with them. I honestly haven't accomplished a lot the past couple of days. We were offered a FREE truckload of firewood so I've been arranging the various woodpiles and adding the new wood. We are almost fully stocked for next winter. We will pick up one more truckload from the same friend and that should finish it off. I did have some time yesterday afternoon to put the binding on the Tucson placemats. I made 2 sets of placemats from some fabric that I bought in Tucson and I used almost every inch of it making 2 sets of 4 placemats. I bought one large scale print, the yellowish stripe and 2 small scale prints. The two small scale prints did not work together so I decided to make 2 sets. One we will keep and one for our friends who invited us to Tucson. They aren't really my style because I rarely work with commercial printed fabric but they do bring up good memories. I found these peachy colored dyed napkins in my stash that work great with this set. The second set have the blooming cactus print and this set has the better quality center images. I cut them out first. I have solid black napkins to go with this set and these are the ones that will be gifted to our friends when we go to Tucson next January. I have one more set of placemats that need binding but I have to find fabric for those. I'm also starting to think about putting some veterans quilt kits together. These are all of the cutoffs of backing fabric for veterans quilts that I've quilted so I'm going to try to use these in some of the kits. While I'm waiting for the patriotic fabric to arrive I can start making some kits with my bins of hand dyed scraps and symmetry fabrics.
This week I have a new Stash Pack for you! Earthworks has 10 fat eighths of fabrics in brown tones ranging from gray browns, to chocolate browns to orange browns. Stash Packs were originally designed for art quilters and applique artists but I love them for my traditional quilts, especially scrappy quilts. The quilt on the left is one I made with two Stash Packs in browns and grays. Each Stash Pack has 5 streaky fabrics and 5 mottled fabrics. Here are larger views of all of them. The fabrics you receive will not look exactly like these but they will be these colors and general textures. Each fat eighth is a gem on it's own. There are so many possibilities for fussy cutting applique or landscape elements. Black is back!Also this week Black fabric is back! This mottled dark black fabric is sold by the yard. Black is a difficult and expensive color to dye and that's why I developed my own recipe several years ago. The commercially available black dyes just don't give a truly rich dark black.
If you look close you can see that these are not the same quilt. I always like it when someone gives me two matching veterans quilt tops. It makes it an easy job to pair up for a backing, thread and quilting pattern. These are the last two I'll finish before the meeting tomorrow. I'm using the heck out of this Woven Wind quilting pattern. The next quilt on the frame is a 60" square picnic quilt for my friend. Then I'll be back on veterans quilts after I pick up more tops tomorrow night. Friday and Saturday were sewing days with my quilt club and I finished this veterans quilt top. I really love it and when I make the next set of kits (very soon), I'll cut more of this one. When I cut this quilt I did cut two of them. The second one has a beige background and will have a dark brown border. I got all of the blocks made Saturday.
I only have one kit left and it's a string quilt that will go together quickly so I went online shopping and found a good sale on patriotic fabrics. I like to make both patriotic and scrap quilts so I'll cut out lots of kits of both and will likely get started this week. Our friends from England arrive Thursday so who knows if anything will get done for the next few weeks! This week's inspiration is Grief by Julie Griffiths. She made this improve art quilt as a way to work through the grief of losing her husband. I think we makers are fortunate to have creative pursuits to help us process many of the difficult and stressful times in our lives. Julie used the Aurora Gradient in this piece.
For sharing, Julie received a 20% coupon for the shop that's good for 3 months! If you have made anything with my hand dyed fabric I hope you will consider sharing it in the Customer Gallery. The only rule is that projects have to be complete. It doesn't have to be made totally from hand dyed fabric, just include a recognizable amount. |
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I'm Vicki Welsh and I've been making things as long as I can remember. I used to be a garment maker but transitioned to quilts about 20 years ago. Currently I'm into fabric dyeing, quilting, Zentangle, fabric postcards, fused glass and mosaic. I document my adventures here. Categories
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