Before I show you Becky's beautiful quilt I want to thank you for all of the kind comments about my shop retirement news. The comments, orders and orders with comments have been wonderful and I really appreciate them! I'm working to get all of the orders process by tomorrow but if there are fabrics you have wanted for your stash, there's a lot still available. This is Becky's awesome quilt that I quilted last week. This is going to be donated to the Montpelier Center For The Arts to be used as a raffle quilt. As part of our "rent" for our meetings there, we will provide them with one quilt each year that they will raffle for a Christmas fundraiser. This will be the quilt for 2024. My farm quilt will be the quilt for 2025. Becky mostly hand quilts her quilts but we agreed that quilting would not show on this particular quilt. The blocks are the focus of this quilt and a pantograph was the perfect quilting treatment. I love quilting her quilts because they are always flat and square. But she also does a lot of fussy cutting so it's fun to find the little treasures throughout the quilt. I quilted it in gold thread using this feathered curls pantograph. It's one of my favorite pantographs but I don't use it often. I feel it's too feminine for the veterans quilts. I was glad to be able to use it on this quilt. My camera refused to photograph the backing correctly. Imagine this is a pretty forest green done in a gradient with light in the middle and dark at two edges. It looks a lot prettier than this photo in real life. I returned it to Becky and she had it bound in a day! Now I just have to make a label this weekend and it will be ready to donate. I think this quilt will generate a lot of ticket sales!
My first task yesterday (after visiting with a friend) was to put together the placemats for my nephew and his wife. They wanted grays and these were the two best fabrics I had in my stash. I had just enough fabric, with the black, to put 6 placemats together. There are only small scraps left. I've got a backing fabric pulled and these will go on the longarm tomorrow. The placemats will get quilted after I finish these 2 quilts. I finished the first one last night so I only have to do the other one today. I picked a bright orange variegated thread for this one. This year I am trying to use some of my "most unique" colors. Wit each new quilt I try to start with the bright and odd colors first and I've been pleasantly surprised with the results. I'm loving this thread on these 2 quilts. All in all, it was a very good day! This is going to be a very short post because I'm writing it right after the Super Bowl. The big news is that the quilting on Red Sunset is DONE! I'm really happy with the motif I settled on for the background filler. It ties to one of the interior motifs and, once it's washed it will kind of disappear. I love how the feathers turned out. Here's the back. I'll have lots more (and better) photos after I get the binding on.
Now I'm on to veterans quilts. I have finished 2 of them but I haven't trimmed or photographed them yet. One of the things I love about blogging is that, sometimes, it makes me do something just so I can post a journal for the day. Yesterday was almost a no-accomplishment day but the blog motivated me to do a little quilting. I didn't get much done because I needed to shop for clothes and that's something that I detest. We have an event coming up soon and I need one of those universal wedding/funeral outfits. I haven't bought clothes like that in at least 10 years and it shows. I mentioned it to my friend and she agreed to guide me through a shopping day. It was somewhat painful, especially for her, but we found a lot of good bargains and I now have some nice enough clothes for events. I'm grateful for her help and guidance. I will say that there was one casual dress on sale at Free People that I loved and she hated and I can't get it out of my head.....I might go back and get it. I'd wear it the next time I see her. After shopping I stopped by Mom's to do her monthly extermination treatment. I bet you didn't know that I do extermination services! I got home around 6 and after dinner I realized that I didn't have anything to blog about so I decided that I'd go downstairs and, at least, quilt around the gold triangles. I mimicked the spikey motif from around the flower spikes on the inside. That didn't even take 30 minutes. After finishing that section I realized that I could use the same motif as the background and I got started on the last part of the quilting. I got it about 25% done and I WILL finish this quilt today!
Then we are going to cut down some trees on the property. I love chainsaw day because our property has turned into a jungle in the 20 years we've been here. After that I can spent the weekend on veterans quilts until Super Bowl kickoff. I was very happy to get back to quilting yesterday and tackled all of the gold quilting. There were only 3 areas and I really struggled with quilting plans. My friend, Brenda, visited Monday and she helped me devise this simple motif for the center. I'm really struggling to keep the quilting from being too dense because this is definitely a bed quilt. I did some simple quilting in the star points and repeated a circle motif in the diamonds. It's just enough quilting. Something similar in the triangles on the outside border. Now I just have to do 2 background areas with some sort of filler. One of the areas is the top edge of these triangles all the way to the edge of the quilt. My nature is to do a really dense filler and I've got to talk myself away from that. I think I will have this done by Friday and can them tackle some fun and fast veterans quilts. Here are the cactus fabrics that I bought to make some placemats as a remembrance of our trip. I also have 2 other sets of gift placemats that I need to make. I think that while I'm quilting veterans quilts I'm going to try to make some placemat "tops" and get them ready for quilting in a week or so. I also got a really cool postcards in the mail from Nancy S. Isn't it cute?
Today is dyeing day and I might have some quilting time in the evening. Tuesday evening it was time to start quilting the big wide open spaces of the Red Sunset quilt. I decided on feathers. My feathers aren't perfect but each time I do them, they get better. I just can't emphasize enough how much Bethanne Nemesh's Feather Fiesta class helped me. I learned how to do feather branches and really improved my feather shapes. When the quilt is on the bed I don't think this quilting will show so much. That's how I want it. I felt like having bold quilting thread would compete with all of the pieced elements. Here it is from the back and the feather quilting really shows up a lot more than the photo implies. The thread is maroon colored and really shows on the back. The next time I quilt feathers I want to work on making better spines. Looking up close, my spines are a little messy. No one sleeping under this quilt will notice, but I do.
All-in-all, I'm really happy with it. I think I'm about halfway done with the quilt now. I'll make some more progress before we leave for vacation and should finish the quilting the week we get back. I keep a crochet bag with hat materials ready by the front door for any time that I think I'll be out somewhere sitting and waiting. I mostly take it to quilt club meetings and appointments and that's what happened yesterday. I took Mom to an appointment and had a good hour or so to relax, listen to my book and do some crochet. This one will be a chemo hat for a man. In the afternoon I went to the basement and started making some decisions about the quilting on the Red Sunset quilt. I do that by spending hours on the internet looking at the beautiful quilting that other people do and then I take a lot of chalk to the quilt to work out some ideas. In the end I generally revert to the stuff I like doing: feathers, some ruler work and a little free-motion. I think I have the plan set, more or less. Because I've stabilized the quilt with all of the SID quilting, I can start the design quilting anywhere. I decided to start with the areas where I want to use blue thread. I've decided that I want all the spikey areas to really stand out so they will get minimal quilting like this. It's not much, but it's a start. I have officially stopped procrastinating. Since I finished the big blanket project I decided last night that I'd start a new donation baby blanket so I've started swatching.
This weekend we're going to watch football with a friend one day but otherwise I'll be quilting, crocheting, working on the blue quilt and stocking wood. This certainly took a lot longer than it needed! I spent way too much time stressing over the quilting plan instead of just quilting. I probably spent more time thinking than actually quilting, like usual. I started in the middle with the blocks and worked my way out with each border. By the time I got to the yellow and blue borders it went really fast. It's now trimmed and ready to deliver to Becky for binding and label. This one started as a quilt kit that one of our members bought so you might recognize the pattern or kit. It will be donated to out local food bank and they will use it for a raffle fundraiser. We make a quilt for them about every other year. The quilting doesn't really show on the quilt very well but I was able to get it to show by laying it in the foyer and opening the front door for some side light. I used white Wonderfil Master Quilter in the top and Superior Bottom Line in the bobbin. I didn't have one thread break on the whole quilt. I dyed the backing for this quilt and tried my best to match the blue in the background of the outer border. My fabric turned out a little more purple but I'm still happy with it. The back is the main reason that I wanted to do some custom quilting. I knew it would show on this side. Here's a close up of the back. I can say that I have finally reached a point where I am happy with my feather quilting. For once, it wasn't stressful quilting feathers. That's a big win!
Now I'll return to the regular programming of quilting veterans quilts. I have a really bright one loaded to quilt this weekend. The weather here was spectacular this weekend so I got a lot of leaf blowing done. We're expecting the wind to kick up today and tomorrow and hoping that it blows a lot of leaves to the edge of the yard for us. It was lovely to be outside but I also spent some quality time inside working on the quilt. It's really close to being done. This is a peek at the back of the floral border. You can't see the quilting at all from the front. Most of the quilting will only be visible on the back and I'll share that when I get it off the frame. This is pretty much the only quilting that will show. I'm pretty proud of those feathers! I'm working on piano keys in the last, wide border. To make sure I'm staying square I draw some square-up guides about every 6 inches. If I get off square it's only a tiny adjustment that isn't noticeable. One long side and 2 corners are done. This one is only a day or so away from completion! I said that the weather was beautiful and I took advantage with a long walk in the neighborhood Saturday. I think I mentioned last week that the red trees (bushes) are the most spectacular this year. They are all bright red but the golds are beautiful too. This lovely bunch was along the road in front of our place. Then I came home and got out the leaf blower. We also watched a lot of football and I finally finished these 4 hats that I've been working on for a while. These might look ugly to you but they are the elementary school colors for my brothers grands. I will gift them at Thanksgiving and I hope they fit! I also hope they like them. The pattern I used is Crochet Baby James Beanie from Daisy Farm Crafts. It says baby but it's for all sizes and is a really nice pattern with video instructions too. The yarn is Herrschners Worsted 8 MVP. It's a 4 weight in school colors. It's not my favorite style of yarn but the school colors I needed were there and it's really nice to work with. I use a 5.5mm (I) hook. Speaking of crochet, my brother made me this yarn bowl on his 3D printer. Pretty cool, huh? Yesterday afternoon we had the windows open and hear a lot of birds. It was a giant flock of grackles migrating through. It was a perfect scene for Halloween week.
Today we are going to vote and then run some errands but I hope to have time to finish the raffle quilt. Yay! The blocks are quilted! I finished the last 6 star blocks yesterday and today I'll move on to the floral border. I expect it's going to involve feathers. Whatever I do, it will not show.
The only other thing I accomplished yesterday was blowing more leaves. That will be a daily chore for the next few weeks. We have 10 trees over 50' tall in the yard and they drop massive amounts of leaves. I work at it a little each day and eventually I'll have a 4' wall of leaves at the edge of the woods. This weekend is about watching football (crocheting), quilting and sewing blue blocks and that's about all. I hope. |
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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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November 2024
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