 My big accomplishment of the past 2 days was getting Groovy 3 quilted. It took 8 long passes and I only had one thread break. Now I just need to trim it and get it bound and I can take in on vacation. The fabric for the binding is soaking but I will be able to cut and bind Monday.  While Groovy 3 was the biggest accomplishment, my proudest accomplishment is that I did a little cobbling in the old fashioned sense of the word. These are my favorite sandals. I've had them several years and, because of last year's foot injury, I didn't get to wear them at all. Now I can wear them and the last time I did the strap broke on both shoes in the same place. (See the red arrow.) ANNOYING. I could take them to have them properly repaired by a real cobbler but I wouldn't get them back before vacation so I decided to see if I could fix them myself. First I got some old sandals and some upholstery thread and experiment to see if my Juki machine would sew through them. It worked brilliantly with a Jeans size 16 needle.  Next I was off to Hobby Lobby for a $4.50 spool of dark upholstery thread and in 15 minutes I had them sewn back together. It's not a perfect match but no one will notice.  You can see on the inside how the original seam failed. Hopefully the triangle stitching will be strong enough to hold it for another year or 2.
Mom finally got her birthday card yesterday so I'll have that to share with you tomorrow and then we will head to the river for the weekend.  Before I could start quilting Groovy I had to first dye a backing. I used cotton sateen and dyed it with the colors of the Oasis gradient. I feel like it complements the quilt really nicely. It took me three attempts to get it loaded correctly. First there was a pleat then I didn't get the quilt centered well enough. It's been so long since I quilted a really big quilt that I forgot some of my own tips. But I eventually got there.  I thought this Star Swirl panto had kind of a hippie look to it so that's what I chose and I'm showing it off with lime green thread. This is going to be a fun one.  I've also been working on another little project. Last week I found a bag of polyfil and decided that I needed to use it up. I remembered seeing that From The Heart takes seatbelt port pillows and thought I could make a few. I cut out scraps of fabric and got some hook and loop tape from Hobby Lobby for $1/yard. I had enough polyfil to make 28 port pillows!  It's such a simple project that you can make one in about 10 minutes. I did make one change and used 2 attachment tapes instead of one so it would sit more securely on the seatbelt.
These were very satisfying to make but I'm done with them for now. This week will be focused on getting Groovy made so that I can take it on vacation to use.  I hope your weekend was as good as mine! We had sewing days Friday and Saturday and in between I worked on my nephew's wall hanging and made really good progress on all fronts. I took 2 kits to sewing and finished both! Each is based on a panel and I have no idea where these panels came from. I don't enjoy working with panels because they are never square but I do see the appeal. I got two quilt tops made in 2 days! I used a lot of leftovers to finish them so I didn't have a ton of options for coordinating fabrics. This one was really awkward because the orientation is landscape and it was almost to our max width for the quilts so I just had to add strips to the top and bottom to bring it to 60" long. It will have a blue binding.  I added some hand dyed borders to this one to bring it up to size. I'm really please with both of them. It doesn't look it, but both are 48" x 60". The rest of the weekend was spent working on the wall hanging.  After sewing Friday I came home and cut all of the 1" strips for the wall hanging.  I spent Saturday afternoon and evening Preparing the backing and batting. I decided to mark my pattern right on the batting with washable markers. I'll mark the spike lines to follow and will align the middle seam of the strip on the spike lines. I marked the top and bottom edges so that the print part of strips do not run off the edge of the quilt.  I marked the spike lines and then arranged some strips to see if I liked it.  I made a couple of changes to my spike lines and I was ready to go!  I got started quilting/piecing yesterday and I'm 30% done. I sure love the channel locks!
Pretty much every update this week will be on this quilt. I want it done with the sleeve attached by Friday night!  I did my best to make this a complicated and long project but successfully talked myself off that ledge every time. The quilting is done so it's time to cut it into a tree skirt. The binding fabric is being dyed as I write this so I might get this finished next week.  My first going-to-far ledge was a plan to stitch in the ditch EVERY seam in the pieced blocks. If I did that I'd still be quilting this at Christmas. I talked myself into just quilting around each color group and that, frankly, was just right. It would be nice if this think kept some amount of drape to it and stitching ever seam would make it stiff as a board. You can see where I stitched for the opening. I'm cutting it open in the middle of a star point because I want a star point as the center front of the tree skirt.  I practiced a bunch of feather motifs for the background until I realized that feathers don't go with this quilt at all. Simple (and fast) sunburst effects was the ticket to get this one wrapped up in an afternoon.
Next I'll prepare a back for the test flip and sew placemats and I'll get started on those. From my perspective it's actually done! I am so glad I don't have to bind it.  This was my main goal for the weekend and I got it done Saturday afternoon. Here it is on a queen size bed. It's a nice big quilt and I absolutely love the rainbow rings. I think my friend did an amazing job piecing it. She used the Accuquilt DWR die to make this quilt.  Here's a close up of the quilting. I wanted it to be reasonably simple and sparse so that the quilt would be comfortable on a bed. Thanks again to Cindy P. for sending me a photo of one that she and her sister made because it gave me the idea for the block quilting.  I used 3 rulers for the motifs. The Lily Lines rulers from Bethanne Nemesch are so versatile. There are so many great curve shapes on each ruler.  For the main motif I used this heart ruler for the large petals. I use this ruler a lot and it's a shame that it's no longer available but Bethanne's rulers have very similar curves.  For the little petals I used a circle ruler. I have an entire set of circles and ovals from Quilter's Apothecary. It was expensive but I use them a lot and not just for quilting. I used them a lot when I was working on the mosaic wall and I use them for cutting templates all the time. I was able to quilt a continuous path across the quilt without having to stop except when I ran out of thread. The thread I used for the whole quilt was Superior So Fine. I sued a pale gray on the back and medium gray on front.  It's all packed up and ready for my friend's husband to pick up this week and take back to her for miles of bias binding.  To keep myself from procrastinating longer I spent some time Sunday loading this to quilt next.  I've got an outside circle based for the tree skirt edge so that I don't waste time quilting the corner.  I've also stitched the center that will be cut out (the larger circle). Several people commented about the travesty of cutting this quilt up for a tree skirt but you can see the issue here. This quilt has so many seams coming together in the center that it would be almost impossible to quilt without breaking needles or throwing the machine out of timing. Frankly, It's just a bad design and it has really made me appreciate the way that Judy Neimeyer designs her patterns. She pays very close attention to areas where seams might pile up. By making this into a tree skirt instead of a wall hanging it will now actually get done!
Remember that I still have a queen size bed version of this quilt to do and I promise to leave it whole.  Remember when I said that I only quilt for an hour at a time? Well, I broke that yesterday and quilted for over 2 hours. I was listening to a good book and I was on a roll so I kept going and now I'm halfway through the DWR quilt! I'm expecting to have this wrapped up this weekend. I was going to work on vulture borders in the evening but I was kind of tired and decided to sit and crochet instead.  I've been working on the shawl and afghan. I'm at a holding spot with the dark blue duster. I'm finding that the yarn color that I picked is difficult to work with in the required stitches so I'm in search of another pattern for that yarn. This shawl will likely be wrapped up pretty soon. I'm going to keep going until I run out of yarn. I think it will be a good wheelchair shawl. The single crochet section at the top increases over the shoulders and will have a 2 button closure. The patterns section goes straight down. I like how this will look but I'm not inclined to make it again. That collar section took forever in back loop single crochet. I might do some math and figure out if I can do it in half double crochet instead or I'll just try another pattern. I really prefer double crochet for donation items.  The super bulky afghan is half done. This one is going fast. It's folded over here so it's twice this wide. I like how the pattern is looking. This is my first blanket in super bulky and I will probably not be inclined to use that weight much. I find it a little fatiguing on my hands. But the up side is that it works up really fast.
These, and the vulture quilt, are my projects for the rest of the week. But today is dyeing day so I'm not sure I'll get much of anything done today.  I'm a slow quilter. I only quilt about an hour a day on days that I do quilt. I got some quilting in Friday and Saturday on the DWR and I'm 25% done. I love how it's looking and I taught myself something new!  The motif in the center is done with 2 rulers. I start it in a corner, move to the center and then work the rest of the petals. From a distance you rea;;y don't notice the thread build up so much but I didn't like it and I needed to figure out a new way to do it.  It's hard to see my purple lines to mark the center. I realized that I could work the outside petals by stopping just short of the center.  After the third petal I go to the center and work the small petals and them back out to work the last side of the large petals.  This is super close and no one will be looking at it this close, but that's a big difference in my opinion. The second row went pretty fast. I hope to get back down there tonight to do more. If not, I'll certainly be quilting on it tomorrow.  Upstairs I'm adding borders to the vulture quilt. If you look near the bottom you can see the dark brown fabric that I dyed for the sashing. I picked dark brown to pull the dark brown out of the bird feet and feathers. Ever corner will be stripes like these in the colors of the frame diagonally opposite. So on the right side there will be blue and red pieces at the top and turquoise and yellow pieces at the bottom. I haven't decided on the corners yet but I do have some scraps of her stamped borders that I can do something with.
There was a lot of football so there was also a lot of crochet. I forgot to take photos but I'll get some before Wednesday's post. I'm making great progress on 2 of the projects.  You know that when I start a big quilt I usually have it on the frame a couple of weeks before I get up the nerve to start quilting. But I really want to have this one done by the end of the month so I wanted to get started right away. I was working through a few ideas and then I got an email from, Cindy P, one of my blog friends. She sent a photo of a DWR quilt that she and her sister quilted. Her motif was fancier but it told me what I could do. I played around with my rulers and some chalk for about an hour and then I just jumped it. This motif lets me use my beloved rulers but it's also simple. I like it.  This is going to be a fun one to quilt because the fabrics really represent our quilting history. That red schoolhouse fabric on the right is one we bought and used in a collaboration quilt that we made not long after we met. The tomato fabric is one that we laugh about all the time. She bought a ton of this fabric on sale one year and it's been is so many quilts over the years. It just doesn't go away. My weekend will be dedicated to working on this and the vulture quilt.  I've mentioned many times that I have a big stash of vintage napkins. Many are odd one or odd sets and most are dingy and stained. I thought I'd share some that I overdyed in recent dyeing sessions. These two were singles but I wouldn't think twice about using them together as part of a placemat set.  These two started as ugly, stained pink. They are a lot better now.  These were dyed in 2 different gradient bins and they started out really dingy. I love how they turned out and I will make some placemats using orange and turquoise for these.  These are the big winners of the dye session. There are 6 of them and 2 of each filet crochet design. They were very stained so I dyed them with the Midnight gradient and it wasn't until they were dyed that I noticed the cool crochet pattern. The designs just didn't show up well in the natural color that they started with. I'm seeing some placemats in blue and white or blue and browns. I will not be working on placemats this weekend. I'll let that be my reward after finishing the vulture quilt.
I hope you have a great weekend. I didn't get quite as much done yesterday as I wanted but it was a busy day with other stuff. We had our HVAC units serviced and I ran errands for the first time since last week's storm. I found some great new slip-on waterproof boots really cheap at a local outlet store. This week I learned that my 15 year old "basement boots" are split and they leak. I think I payed about $15 for them so I thanked them for their service and put my new $20 ones by the back door. I'm ready to stack more wood in preparation for the new storm coming this weekend. I also called to get the propane tank filled and maybe that will happen before the new storm too. The more fun event of the day was quilt club last night. It's always good to get together with the Country School Quilters. In between I got one major goal accomplished.  This is "Natalie's quilt". My friend made it for her step-daughter as a wedding gift. Isn't it spectacular? All I have to do is quilt it and I'm committed to doing that simply so that it doesn't take a year.  This is the backing. I'm not particularly fond of it but I am assured that Natalie will love it and that's what matters.  I got it loaded and basted yesterday. It's very flat so it was easy to load. I'm going to quilt it with a medium gray on top and light gray on the back. I don't really want the quilting to show much on this one because the graphic nature of the rings needs to be the main focus. On the back I didn't want the quilting to show at all. Light gray is perfect.  I'm trying to come up with a simple quilt plan. I will do continuous curves in the rings and maybe a simple ruler work motif for the gray areas. I'm thinking something like this. But I'm open for ideas! I hope to get started quilting Thursday. It's a big quilt so it's going to take a while.
 I've been thinking way to hard to come up with a name for this quilt. I've toyed with all kinds of ideas (Insanity, 3970, 23 years) but all day yesterday I just kept thinking "Finally it's done!" Of course "Finally!" has to be the name of this quilt.
It's finally done, it's finally on my bed and I finally got to sleep under it. I can report that its really warm and really heavy! Check out more details and photos here. Now I feel a little discombobulated about what to do next. I think I'll just focus on the Christmas postcards while I organize my thoughts about future quilt projects. |
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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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