 Fireworks 55" x 72" The last binding stitch is done so, aside form the label, the quilt is done. The bright blue binding worked out perfect. Mom and Becky convinced me not to use black or gray and to try a color. They were right. This quilt is going to my nephew, Patrick. He's a graphic artist and loves bright colors. It wasn't planned for him but the quilt told me where it needed to go as I was working on it. That seems to happen to me a lot.  I like to give quilts washed just to make sure nothing surprising happens the first time they wash it. It also encourages the recipient to actually use the quilt. All I need now is a label and then my Mom can deliver it over Thanksgiving when she visits my brother. It will be soft and crinkly and ready to use as soon as he receives it. You can see more detail photos on the Gallery page. I had planned to start stitching the binding on Groovy this weekend but ti seems that Fireworks gave me a bit of tendinitis in my hand. Instead I'll be working on Christmas postcards this weekend. The deadline is rolling up pretty quickly for Christmas cards so it's good that I change focus a bit.
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 Where in the world is my cat? 36" square This quilt was so much fun to make and I'm not even a cat person! But after making the puppy quilt I felt that the cats needed some representation. The only hard part about this one was deciding where to place the template on the fabric. This is the second quilt that I made for Paula Nadelstern and this one is for her Where in the World fabric line. You can see more photos and get drafting information for the block in my gallery.  I like this quilt so much that I'm going to make a sofa size one for my sister-in-law, a full-fledged cat lady. I've already purchased the blue Marbella fabric for the background.
 I'm Not a Snowflake 36" square Quilt market has finally started and I can now share the quilts that I made for Benartex for Paula Nadelstern's new fabric lines. She has 2 lines this year and this quilt is from one called Artful Snowflake.
It's acutally a quite simple quilt made with 9 9-patch blocks. All of the work is done by the fabric. They have produced that border fabric in other colors in previous lines and it's so wonderful to work with because that's just a simple "slab" border made spectacular with her fabric. If you want to see more details about this quilt you can check it out in my quilt gallery.  "Groovy" is what I've decided to call these quilts. This one will be Groovy #2 and it went together really quickly yesterday. I'll work on Groovy #1 this weekend. I know I fought using a dark sashing but, of course, it was the right answer.
Next week I need to get a back dyed for this one. I'm thinking a tie dyed spiral because I've decided who is receiving this quilt and a tie dye spiral will be perfect.  There still isn't a lot going on around here but I got my sashing fabrics dyed last week and started cutting them last night. The smaller quilt will have this deep green (Jungle).  The big quilt will have this blue. I'll use bright cornerstones on both quilts. These should go together pretty quickly so I will try to get a back dyed fror the green one this week. I already have the back for the blue one.
 I had some time Sunday to iron and trim my ice dyed blocks. These are the ones that I chose for my quilt. It will be queen size and will probably have 3" sashing. Next I pulled out some fabric swatches for what I though would be a fast exercise to pick the sashing. I was wrong about the "fast" part. As usual.  My plan all along has been to use gray for my sashing. I also considered medium purple or medium blue. I didn't like any of these. The gray is particularly horrible. I'm also opposed to black for some reason.  A few more samples later I landed on bright green and pale purple. Still not excited, but closer...maybe.  Then I worked my way toward yellow and orange. I was surprised that I kind of liked the orange! After consulting with friends two of them said "use all the colors". Hmmm  Meanwhile, I arranged the "reject" squares for a lap quilt. While arranging them I though that I might try the scrappy sashing idea on this quilt and see how it looks before I make any decision on my quilt. So this is my next step. Cut some scrappy sashing pieces and see how they look.  There's also this! There no way this is going in the trash.
 Friday and Saturday sewing was a lot of fun this weekend and quite productive. I got to try out the new/used Janome 415 machine and it stitches beautifully. The 1/4 inch foot is more like a 3/8" foot so it's useless. I solved that with a piece of masking tape to mark 1/4" on the base. That worked just fine. The tension is perfect and I got about half of my blocks together. After about 50 blocks I realized that I needed to press the blocks in two different directions (out and up vs. in and down) if I wanted this quilt to go together without too much bulk in the seams.  I didn't plan any color arrangement so I wanted to see how it might looks so when I came home I spent about a hour putting all the blocks on the design wall. I love looking at my blocks through the camera. I think it gives a better perspective on how a quilt will look and I LOVE how this one looks. Even with the total "scrappiness" I think the stars stand out nicely. There will be lots more dark fabrics in the final layout. The dark fabrics are mostly on the bottom of the project box since they were cut first.
Using the GO! cutter die makes cutting and piecing very fast. Everything fits together perfectly since I took some time to verify (set) my 1/4" seam. I did a few other things this weekend with my ice dyed blocks but haven't edited the photos yet. I'll get those shared edited and shared Wednesday.  And just like that I've cleared out another UFO and have 2 more quilts ready to quilt for our veterans project. I do need to dye (or find) some binding but there's no rush. I'm taking a couple of months off from veterans quilts so these tops will just go into the veterans quilt closet and be out of sight (and mind) for a while.
Here are the twins side by side. If you look at the diagram below you can see the breakdown of the sections. I knew what size each section needed to be and added strips to get the size right. There's no pattern at all to the way that I applied the strips.  Today my friend and I will be ice dyeing the fabric that we folded yesterday for our new quilt project! It's supposed to be the last hot day and the weather people promise that fall is coming soon.
 By the time I went to bed last night I had finished the second "Paula" quilt top and also made the back (pieced from leftover fabric), binding and sleeve. I will be quilting starting tonight or tomorrow!
I also got 2 sections of the UFO veterans quilt done. These wen't together really fast and I think I'm going to like it a lot! I'm glad I looked through my UFO projects again last month to see if I could find some easy things to work on while I"m making the "Paula" quilts. On that front the cat quilt top is together and I have the back, binding and hanging sleeve all done. I have made the blocks for the blue quilt so that's coming along too. I hope to be ready to quilt both this weekend. I have an idea for a third one but want to make sure to get these two done and ready first.  Meanwhile I've decided to tackle this pile of sun prints. I've been pondering these for a couple of weeks and I've settled on turning them into 2 veterans quilts. Each quilt will have 6 sun printed blocks.  I know that sun printed fabric can fade so I ran the blocks through a gentle wash to make sure they will not fade too much. Here they are after washing and they actually look better with the fabrics that I set aside to go with them. I could have designed a quilt in EQ but graph paper was actually faster in this case. I followed the basic steps that I used for my Keepsakes Quilt pattern. I settled on a 3" grid so designed it using blocks that are on 3" increments and using 3" strips around the blocks. The blocks worked out basically to be 9 x 9 or 9 x 18.  I had set aside 4 Shades Packs to go with these blocks and I cut all of them into 3.5" strips. I have 4 shades in each of the 4 colors. I don't know if that's going to be enough for 2 quilts or not. I'll get one done and if I need more fabric I'll pull some from my stash for the second quilt.  Sure. This is going to work just fine.  Some of my sun prints aren't quite big enough to cut 9.5" squares so I took some of the waste fabric from my strips and sewed them onto these blocks to get the size I needed. I know, I could have just added one big strip but I think I'm already short of fabric so I chose to use my leftover bits instead.
Now I'll start sewing. I should be able to make pretty quick progress just sewing a few minutes every day. I love that I have 2 sewing machines. I have the Paula projects working on the Brother and this project working on the Juki. I can easily put time in on both every day. |
About Vicki
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 2019
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