 I think I should be over the hardest part of the Goldfinch quilt now. All of the fabrics are selected! This was not easy but it was kind of fun. I think you can imagine the mess I made all over my sewing room floor. In the end I identified 3 fabrics that I need to dye and I did that yesterday. Even though my dyeing day is today, I wanted these to be ready to start sewing tomorrow.  While I was in the dye studio dyeing my own fabrics, I decided to play around a little. I'm going to dye some maternity tops for my nephew's wife and I want to do one in an ombre effect. I've never actually done real dip dyed ombre so I did a couple of experiments with a couple of tshirts. I was able to rig up this chain that worked great for keeping the shirt at specific levels. I'll show you how they turned out tomorrow.
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 We leave tomorrow so today is baking/cooking day. With my allergies, I can't eat in restaurants and I can't eat food prepared by others so we have to bring all of my food (or cook it there). Anything that's baked, bread and cookies, I like to do ahead of time. That's what I'm doing today. But I really wanted to finish quilting this quilt before we left, and I did! Ripping out that one long border really tore up my hands. It will be days before I pick up the crochet hook again. Fortunately I can hold a scotch glass so vacation is saved. I'm really happy with this quilt. I'll get it bound when I get back and it will be ready for our guild show in September. It will be gifted after the show. I hope the recipients find out about it while it's hanging in the show.  I even got the table runner quilted!  Since I haven't been able to crochet in the evenings I decided to pull out the Goldfinch Quilt and start picking fabrics.  It's a daunting task because there are this many colors! You can buy these patterns as a kit with Kona fabrics. Of course, it has to be hand dyed for me.  I started by matching fabrics individually and was getting frustrated. Then I realized that I needed to work on them in color sets. This approach is working much better. It's been fun to shop my scraps and gradients and I think I'll only need to dye 1 or 2 fabrics. I'm excited to get started on this project when I get back. I want this one done for the September show too.
I hope you have a great week next week and that you enjoy the giveaway packages. Check in every day to enter!  Yesterday I had hoped to start sewing more little blankets but I had to do a lot of dyeing and by the end of that I was spent. So today I thought I'd show you what in the new pattern that I got after the Mid-Atlantic Quilt show. While at the show there was a new vendor called Legit Kits. I was totally enamoured so I decided to give one a try. They have a lot of different designs and these patterns are in the same price range as the Judy Neimeyer patterns. They come as pattern packs or full kits. I chose a smaller pattern to try out and I got the pattern only because I want to make it with my hand dyed fabrics. On the right you can see that the pattern is pieced in rectangle shaped blocks. For example, A1 is one block. The pattern comes with LOTS of paper....let's take a look.  It comes with a detailed 14 page instruction manual. I need to sit down and read through all of this.  For this small pattern there are 3 pages of fabric requirements! This explains why the full kits are so expensive. I think the fabric included is Kona cotton. I'll be pulling from my stash and from gradients. For example, I'm going to create the background totally from my Jenny Lake gradient. I think it will work great. But it's going to be an exercise to match up all of the fabrics for sure!  For every color there's a chart like this to indicate which pieces are cut from each fabric. 48 pages of the kit makes up the "cut guide". I'll probably attach my fabrics to these pages to keep track of them.  For every block in the quilt there's a piecing guide like this.  Finally, we're at the good stuff, the foundation papers! There are 40 pages of foundation papers printed on newsprint, just like the Judy Niemeyer patterns. I think this pattern is going to be fun for me and I'm excited to get started. But there are a few other projects that have to get done first.  In the evenings I'm continuing on with my crochet projects. After I finished the past shawl I decided to start a new baby quilt. This is some yarn that I found on sale for half off when I was in Maine last summer. It's a very nice and soft yarn and this one is coming along pretty quickly. There's a possibility that I'll need to buy a solid color for the border because I only have 4 balls of the yarn.
I'll worry about that in a few weeks. Today I have loads of fabric to wash out and another truckload of mulch to spread. Hopefully I can get something creative done as well. |
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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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