 I hope you had a great weekend because I sure did. The weather was beautiful here and I think Spring is in sight! Some yard work will need to commence soon. But not yet. I'm still 100% focused on quilting and sewing. My weekend started off by quilting this quilt for Mom. It doesn't have a specific home yet but will be a donation quilt.  Mom added the tan and brown frames on some vintage feedsack blocks that were donated to our quilt club. She had enough for this 60 x 80 quilt and for a 48 x 60 veterans quilt. I actually have some of the feedsack fabrics that are represented in this quilt in my own collection.  I know that I have the blue print in the lower left block and I think I have the red plaid in the lower right block.  I knew that the quilting wasn't going to show on this one so I used my spiky free-motion Baptist fan - at least that's what I call it. It's fast and easy and makes great texture.  We had to make a trip to Joann to get another yard of the terrycloth so I could make Chris' robe. You can get all the pattern and fabric info in this post. The pattern really does underestimate the amount of fabric needed. For the XL size I needed an extra yard. It makes a HUGE mess but it was worth it. These are luxurious robes.  I even serged all the leftover chunks to make shop rags for my brother, if he wants them. This is not the kind of fabric that you want hanging around in the stash. It's way too messy.
This week I need to start planning another Antelope Canyon quilt for a May wedding gift. I also want to start making some plans for a couple of baskets of scraps. I might get out the go cutter and cut it all up in various shapes. I also need to make the other set of strippy placemats. Lots of potential!  Quilting has commenced on the big green quilt. Cheryl wanted a very lightweight quilt so the batting is thin. To keep it soft and airy I decided on a giant swirl motif. She will use this on their bed so it needs to be cuddly. That's been a hard quilting lesson for me to learn. My tendency has always been to over quilt things but I know from my own bed quilts that I like the feel of lightly quilted quilts better. This one will not be over quilted for sure and it should be done this weekend.  All the fabric that I was soaking is hanging out to dry and I'll fold it and add it to my "safe" stash this weekend. I don't think I'll iron it since I have to iron all the fabric that I take out of stash anyway. There are some really cool fabrics in this batch and I look forward to actually using them.  Yesterday I also got some new knitting looms in the mail! After tons of research and struggle with the Boye looms, I decided to give KB looms a try. The Flexee is adjustable as you knit and I wanted to try it for hats so that the crown can be decreased. The other one can be standard or bulky (by removing alternate pegs). They both have some great reviews on YouTube. It was very cool to find out that this company is only an hour or so away from me in Fork Union, VA. I'll start some projects on these this weekend.
Tomorrow I'll share the new postcard design. Getting those veterans quilt tops done really motivated me and I couldn't wait to get them quilted.  This quilt was made by Becky. The batik fabrics are left over from a quilt that she made for her Grandson and his new wife. She added in the green for a nice bit of color.  I had the perfect green backing for her quilt but since I quilt 2 quilts on one back I've been waiting for another quilt to pair with it. This leaf pantograph was perfect for the nature feeling of her quilt.  My UFO transformation quilt with the green border was the perfect quilt to pair with Becky's quilt. Can you see that it's also bound!  That leaf pantograph really helped out this quilt giving some focus to all that scrappy randomness of the tumblers.
If you are in the US I hope you have a great 4th. We are going to gill with Mom this afternoon but that will leave plenty of time for more quilting!  I will get Lost My Marbles back on FloMo today but I decided to get 2 more veterans quilts Tuesday afternoon first. Both of these were made by Betsy and since they were both blue I could quilt them together on one backing and could also use the same thread.  The fabric that she used is so soft and the Jacob's Ladder block made a really nice cuddly quilt.  She made this one using 2 batik fabrics and the Blockade pattern. She said it went together very quickly.  Here you can see the quilting. I really like this pantograph for the veterans quilts.It's a perfect design and it quilts up quickly.  This blue backing that I dyed last month worked perfect for both of these quilts. I have a huge collection of variegated threads. Some are King Tut and some are Rainbows. I don't use them much anymore on my own quilts so I'm trying to use them up on the veterans quilts.  I've got loads of thread left but I'm finally down one cone! This is all that's left after I finished both of these quilts. How's that for good quilting luck?
 I've been working a bit every day on Mom's quilt and, as of last night, I finished all of the first pass of quilting. That includes the crosses in the narrow white borders and the Terry Twist in the borders and half of the big blocks.  It's so much fun to quilt a scrap quilt and recognize some of the fabrics. There are lots of these fruit and vegetable fabrics in the quilt. Mom and I fell prey to these fabrics many years ago. We both made quilts with them but they multiply in the drawers. She's been trying to get rid of them for ages and I don't know if they are gone yet. But 2.5" squares are a great solution for ugly fabrics. They can hid a lot of ugly!  Here's a close up of the quilting. This motif quilts up so quickly and I always love how it looks and I love the secondary pattern that it creates. There's a lot of ugly hidden here!  Next up is the feathered border and feathered wreaths in half the blocks. I haven't quilted feathers in a long time so I did a little practice last night.
Feather quilting is kind of like riding a bike. It all comes back to you. One member of this family (not me) had a great February plan to leave town and go golfing in Tampa. We had nothing but gray skies and rain this weekend while he had 78 and sunny. But for me it was sunny and warm inside and perfect quilting weather.
I decided to take a break from Lost My Marbles and see if I could get some veterans quilts done. At last month's meeting the members had finished 16 tops! I don't think they have ever brought me more than 8 at a time. Fortunately I'm not the only quilter in the group anymore so I was able to deliver 4 each to 2 quilters last week and I started working on some this weekend. These 2 came from Carol C. who is living in Georgia now but visits here frequently. She mailed these 2 tops to me. She said she was making a queen size quilt but didn't like it. So she took it apart and made these 2 veterans quilts. I love both of these quilts and I love getting quilt tops in pairs because I always quilt 2 at a time.  I went bold and quilted both of these in red thread and used a Woodgrain pantograph.  I think the overall texture looks great on the back. In between quilting sessions I had a lot of cutting sessions. I started Judy Neimeyer's 4th of July quilt last month at the CSQ sewing days and after that weekend I realized that it was a pain to do all of the cutting and sewing there. I had to take a huge back of supplies and try to keep everything in order as I cut and drew 4 blocks at a time.  It took a long time but I got all of the fabrics cut and foundations ready for the quilt.  The standard quilt is 54 x 71 which is pretty useless for me but it would be a nice sofa size for a gift. For now, I just cut out the regular size but I have all of the foundations to do a queen size. I'll see how I feel after I make the blocks I have prepared.
Now I can leave the bag of leftover fabric and foundations at home and all I have to travel with is the smaller orange bag. It was a ton of work and make a huge mess but it was worth it.
 Innes Baby Quilt - 58" square I'm so excited to have a finish for August and it was an easy one! I made this top several years ago when I hosted the Crossing the Drunkard's Path quilt-along. I've just been waiting for the right baby to come along to finish it. Baby Innes will be here in 2019 and baby's parents love the wedding quilt I made for them so they absolutely deserve a baby quilt. This one will be big enough for a floor quilt for baby and guard dogs. I will not tell them that the block is called Drunkard's Path!  These fabrics are from the first time that I ever dyed fabric. This was back when I thought hand dyed fabric was stupid but Anne forced me to do it during one of our craft weeks. It was while dyeing these tone-on-tone fabrics that I learned the joy of mixing colors and got hooked on fabric dyeing. That light background fabric was difficult. I seem to be physically unable to dye light colors.  I quilted it with the new Innovatech thread and, I have to say, I love this thread. I think as I use up So Fine colors that I will replace it with Innovatech.  The back is also hand dyed. It's quilted with the Happy Times pantograph. It was the first time I used this one. It was fast and easy and worked out great for this baby quilt.
I still have to make a label but I have MONTHS until the baby arrives.  Well that didn't take long! It's going to be a baby quilt so it gets a pantograph. I had one called Happy Times that I've never used before and decided to try it out on this one. It's a great beginner pantograph and I love the texture effect.
Now to get on with binding but no this weekend. I'm off to NYC tomorrow with friends. We are celebrating my friend's 50th birthday. When I told my college roommate where I was going and why her response was "You hang out with a young crowd!" I'm happy to say that these weeks of dyeing 100 yards of fabric are almost at an end. I have possibly one more in August and that's it. It's good because it's exhausting. On the positive side, I now have a routine for dyeing high volume, I've gotten some great exercise and I've listened to a lot of good books while ironing. The down side is that I've done virtually no sewing or quilting. Part of that is because of healing my arm but mostly because there's just no time or energy left. It was good to finally be able to quilt and to get Starts At Sea done but last night I was too tired to work on the binding. Instead I wandered around the quilt storage areas to see what I wanted to quilt next.  This is a oldie from the time when I hosted the Crossing the Drunkard's Path quilt along. I never had a plan for this quilt I just wanted to use up those hand dyed fabrics. They are some of the first fabrics that I dyed and they are white-on-white and it was the first time I played around with mixing my own colors. Anyway, the daughter of a friend is having a baby soon and this would be a good play quilt so I might do a quick panto on it. I have the backing fabric ready for this one.  I also have 4 veterans quilts. (I really have 5 but they get quilted in pairs.) I didn't have backs for these so they have been waiting for a while.  But ordered more backing fabric last week and got these dyed Sunday so I'm ready to go.
I think I'll quilt the baby quilt first and then get started on the veterans quilts. I wonder if it's possible to get these done before vacation......probably not, but it's a worthy goal.  Before Mom moved to Richmond she was apparently very busy piecing tops. She had a ton of time to herself when she lived with her sister. So when she moved here she had 3 quilt tops and another QAYG (quilt as you go) quilt underway. Now she has 3 quilts that need binding!  This log cabin is the third of the quilts that Marcy and I quilted for her this summer. I'm pretty sure that this was the oldest of her UFO projects. I think she wasn't sure that she liked it but once I spread it out to see the full quilt I actually like it a lot. I think it will be beautiful on a bed.  As time goes on I'm doing more and more with my arm. So for this quilt I decided on a pantograph with some diagonal movement but short strokes. The Loose Leaf panto worked great and also looks really good on the quilt. If you are a new longarmer this is a great beginner pantograph that also looks wonderful on quilts.  I like that the center of all of her blocks start with this fussy cut motif. I think this will also be the binding fabric.
Next up for me is my Stars At Sea quilt. It's intended to be a booth sample for the AQS show in October so I need to get it done! |
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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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