TheCuttingEdgeQuilt

What it takes to get me quilting...

2011-10-13T14:00:00.000-07:00

... a sick friend, apparently.

So it was time for a cheer-you-up little quilt, the motif was chosen based on an insider joke of ours...

I don't think I've done a scene like this before, but it was fairly basic.

I sketched my scene, then layed out scraps of fabric that I had at hand until the image worked for me:

Next, I ironed the small scraps to heat'n'bond and laid them out as I wanted them, as a final check of fabric choices. The larger pieces I cut to size but didn't heat'n'bond them:

I then sewed the background layers to a foundation piece of muslin, ironed the small heat'n'bond pieces on top (I always have a hard time getting them to stick to the base... I might heat them too much when I attach the paper to the applique piece. When the backing paper is removed, the glue is supposed to look milky, and it doesn't always do that, even though I have the setting on silk and only count to 2 seconds as per instructions. Maybe I count too slowly!). Then I outline quilted things like the palmtree leaves, the sun, the umbrella, person and beatch towel. The palm trunk, sand, ocean and sky received matching patterns and the sun got some extra rays:
It finished at around 8x12" which fits perfectly into a large brown envelope with 2 chocolate bars another little gift and a long letter. Started the quilt on Friday, worked on it again Sunday and had it in the mail on Tuesday - hopefully some of the rays of sunshine will reach my friend!

I've been doing a *little* bit of other quilting too. Days are getting colder and darker outside! More about that some other day, I've had enough of slow internet for one day!!!

Triangles and squares

2011-09-22T08:47:00.000-07:00

Playing with some charms (Moda Wonderland) to make an easy-peasy quilt. Sometimes easy does it.

The rest of the charm pack (all the pinks and browns) are going into this HST-quilt. I think I have enough charms in the right colour-line. I'll just have to get creative if I don't. They're sewn together, but I have to press them, and I seem to be very reluctant to pull out the old ironing board! :) Funnily enough, I posted about these HSTs before, when I had "decided" on a layout :) So times change...

That carpet, by the way, is horrific. I miss my old hardwood floors dearly, but that's what you get when you rent ;) Not sure how I'll baste my next big quilt, I've never done anything other than tape them to the floor during basting... a first for everything!

On the workfloor

2011-09-18T08:41:00.000-07:00

I started quilting one of my galactic wall hangings (the set of 3); I just checked an older post for the actual name: Triple Constellation.

I'm trying to blend the 'incomplete' circles so that it looks like a full circle. Have a couple of additional layers of thread to go to blend it better:

I also pulled out a project I started earlier this year - or maybe late last year. I think I called it Warm & Fuzzy because of the burgundy/wine colours. I'm still making matching green blocks; my plan is to lay them out checker-board style, but if that doesn't look good, I'll do something with the individual colour combos...

Let's see how much time I'll get to actually work on these projects. Having them laid out on the living room floor should be enough of an inconvenience, I mean, incentive to get quilting, eh? :)

I'm just updating my side-menu. The Chicks&Elephant baby quilt in white is out of my hands. I gave it to a colleague of mine who had a very difficult pregnancy and basically was prescribed bedrest starting in month 2 of the pregnancy. I was hopping that on her good days, she might be up for making a special quilt for her little one, so I basted the quilt for her and gave her husband instructions on how to hand-quilt since she wasn't up for receiving visitors at the time. No idea if the idea worked, but the baby was born in great shape in July, phew!

Hooray, it's working!

2011-07-26T14:36:00.000-07:00

Thank your for your advice about google reader! It's much easier to follow my favourite blogs now, though as was pointed out to me, I still have to load the blogs to comment, so please forgive me if you don't get many comments from me anymore!

I've worked on a couple of pieces recently:

1) finally started the quilting on Free As A Bird (see sidebar). So far, I'm doing the brainless stitch-in-the-ditch (with brainless, I mean that I didn't have to think about what to do, it's pretty obvious, no marking or designing required :) I still think it's one of the most difficult quilting methods - it's so easy to slip out of the ditch and then it looks pretty sloppy!), but I ideas for the large grey triangles are brewing...

2) I used the rest of the drunkard's path blocks to make 3 wall hangings (they're just stuck together on my make-shift designwall right now. It's not so much a design wall as a 'get things off the floor' method, since my floorspace here is much more limited than before... I think I may have shown pictures of these wall hanging triplets before (pre-sewn together).

Well, my quilting output is still not up to pre-move-levels. There's just so much other fun stuff to do here! Come winter, it'll probably pick up again :)

Bear with me, and happy quilting!

This is the new style

2011-07-10T13:15:00.000-07:00

... of my blogging life. Gone are the days of a post every 2 days. Ah, I never treasured wireless internet as much as I should have while I still had it!

I'm not livng out in the boons, working with a mobile internet stick since there is no affordable faster version here. The next village is supposed to get glassfibre cables maybe this year...

So as I read pages of books while waiting for a quilting blog to load, my patience for uploading my own pictures wears thin. (can someone tell me if using google reader means that all the latest posts of blogs I choose show up in one place, rather than having to load each individual blog with the many photos that come with it (including from old posts which I've already read)... I'd really like to catch up in my blog reading, but right now, it's just not doable! Help!)

On top of the internet handicap, I've just not been quilting as much. The area around here is beautiful, so I spend more time outside than I used to. Maybe that'll drive me to handquilting ;) I did some applique today, out in the sunshine.

I only did that because I had to sew some really weird curved shapes together that I couldn't do by machine, and the reason I had to do that in the first place was to finish this small quilt top:

It's made from two UFOs, my Sunset on Water convergence experiment and my Drunkard's Path experiment. For some reason, this quilt made me think of planets while I was working on it, so it's my Solar System quilt now :) The drunkard's path blocks measure 5.5" finished, making this about 38" square.

There are 4 odd blocks in this quilt top, e.g. the 3rd block to the right and also the 3rd block up from the bottom left corner in the outside row. I was 4 drunkard path blocks short and had used all my fabric, but I still had 12 of the cut out pieces from making the drunkard's path blocks, so I picked the 3 neighbouring fabrics to my 'gap blocks' and cut the pieces up and sewed them back together to make a 6" square. The fabric was *just* enough! No room for mistakes there!

I think this will be a good small starter project to get me going on quilting again. But either way, the days of frequent blogging are over until the internet speeds up around here...

I Found A Quilt Shop!

2011-05-05T10:39:00.000-07:00

I was exploring the area in northern Germany, where I live now, and almost missed this quilt store (the only one around, as far as I can see online). I had, in fact, already walked by it, but noticed the huge patchwork scottie and thought, hey, I need to take a photo for my blog readers!

Then I wanted to see what type of store has a giant patchwork scottie out front, and lo and behold! it's a quilt store :)

I went inside, where a young South American looking/sounding guy was working behind the cutting table/cash register, who said I could take photos if I wanted to - great!

They had a lot of ribbons, buttons and embroidery stuff, and a nice selection of fabrics, though as always, much more expensive than I'm used to buying (would be around 24$Can/meter, incl. tax), yikes!

I only bought a panel, which was about 1/2 or 3/4 yard of the Duck Duck Goose fabric. I already had two prints from that series, blogged about a long while ago, and never new what to do with them... Now I know :) I dredged up the photos of the old fabrics:

I live in the countryside now, and everything is already in bloom here! Check it out, true spring, not something piddly like the one week I used to get in PEI! It's heaven :)

Now Broadcasting From A New Location

2011-04-28T11:30:00.000-07:00

Hello quilting friends! My cross-Atlantic move is done (my part, anyway, all my fabrics, sewing machine etc. just left Canada... what a long wait that'll be!).

After a bit of a stay at my mom's place, I've now moved into my own apartment in the country side. In 3 days, I start my new job at a publishing house 4 km from here, it's a beautiful bicycle commute through green fields and forests in the distance.

Since I have nothing new to show in recent quilting, I present you instead with what might well be my actual first quilt, if you can call it a quilt (it's missing a crucial quilt feature, namely, the quilting!).

I must have made this blanket at a time when I had heard about the art of patchwork.

My mom had bought a sample patch from an upholstery store (you know all the different swatches). I basically laid those out and sewed them together, put an old towel underneath as 'batting' and used some other denim-like, black material as backing and fold-over border/binding. The thread guaranteed was polyester, and I have no clue what fibres are in the swatches... some cotton, but the rest?

Points are not too bad, though, eh??? I have no idea what type of seam allowance I used. Certainly not 1/4"!

Now, if you've ever sat there and scratched your head about how to do binding and borders, do not despair. Just do something, it'll work, as this blanket proves:

The corners are certainly mitered, but I have absolutely NO clue how I did that... let's call it 'unique', shall we?
Here's the back, and you can see: it's not quilted. I guess I didn't know that part about quilting.

If I'm bored one afternoon at my mom's place, I might tie it. I've never tried that before. You just take wool and poke the needle through and right back up again, then tie the ends, right? Might make it a bit more usable. I'd use grey wool, I think, to make it blend in...

Well, unless I find another old project (I have some photos of recently (i.e. March) finished tops floating around somewhere...) to report on, that's it until my stuff arives (3 weeks or more?). I've heard horror stories of container goods being delayed for months because of customs, but worse, someone mentioned yesterday that "containers often have problems with vermin and bugs... perfect conditions in there!" - except, what do they eat??? My fabrics are all well packed, so I'd say nothing can get in there, but I won't say that because of Murphy's law - my one superstition :)

You guys quilt some quilts in my stead, okay?

Quilt Raffle Winner!!

2011-04-02T10:30:00.000-07:00

Today was the big day of the quilt raffle draw! I was set up at the Farmer's Market by 9am, sold another 60 or so tickets before 1pm which brought me to a grand total of $1565 raised, awesome!

My display at the Farmer's Market - I managed to get the same wonderful spot again, right by the entrance!

Good thing I started folding the 900+ tickets early, it took about 2 hrs and a young woman from the cheese booth next to me helped out :) (she also took all the photos that have me in it)

A lot of tickets...

The manager of the market, Roger, agreed to draw the winner at 1pm. Here he is shaking the tickets up.

No peeking while he drew the winner

Here it comes... Roger drawing the winner of the raffle quilt

And the winner is... someone named Angela, who according to my records bought her tickets at the market 3 weeks ago. I can't believe someone I don't know won the quilt, after so many of my tickets were bought by people I know! I can't believe that our former summer student, bought 100$ worth of tickets, didn't win the the quilt!

A shot for the memory book!

Calling the winner with the good news... I got an answering machine!

So hopefully, I can track Angela down soon and get the quilt to her! I feel back for all the nice people (known and unknown to me) who bought tickets but I'm very happy to send 3x more money than I had hoped to Doctors Without Borders on Monday!

I've updated the Raffle Quilt blog if you want to see the final progress of my fundraising!

I'm not sure what to do with my life now... I have no more tickets to sell, I feel lost. Oh well, as soon as I get home the cardboard boxes will remind me of what to do with my life :)

Jen's Tree All Grown Up

2011-03-29T10:59:00.000-07:00

It was a big project, now it's a big quilt and that means this will be a big post! Lean back and enjoy :)

The quilt was presented at my March guild meeting, but unfortunately, I didn't get any good pictures from that, so what follows was taken at night, on the floor of my apartment :)

One thing I will point out is that I changed some things from this photo: 1) see the zig-zag line to the left of the trunk? I didn't like the look of that falling leaf, too unnaturally straight, so I took it out and did a softly looping float-to-the-ground line. 2) not/or barely visible on this photo, there was unquilted space around the crown of the tree - I filled most of that in and even quilted over the edge onto the border and am happy I did - I didn't want batting to float around the edge in 5 years!

On my home floor it looks like this:

To start the story at the beginning, my friend Jen asked for this quilt and picked some photos of the net, one of which happened to be a wall-hanging from Anne of Film and Thread, one of the blogs I love to keep up to date with. I used her tree shape and the fallen/falling leaves as inspiration but chose a different (simpler) leaf shape since I appliqued instead of Cherokee printed, and I added a border. Anne had pebbled the ground around the tree trunk, and I knew I needed to pebble something because when Jen first asked for a quilt, it was in reaction to my Mossy Monkey Mechanic, which is pebble-central. So to not copy Anne entirely, I pebbled around the leaves/crown of the tree. Oof, lots and lots of pebbling (I calculated that I used roughly 1.5 km of plum thread doing the pebbling, based on the # of bobbins I used (I went through 1 and a half spools of 1200 m thread of the plum colour alone, but that includes other quilting and some piecing).

I knew from the beginning how I wanted to quilt the trunk:

Next came all the pebbling - a loooooong time quilting those! My foot got so hot from the pedal some days, I had to stop because it burned even through the sock (luckily, no meltdown of wires in the pedal!)

I quilted in the ditch around the squares in the border and it looks really puffy when you bent down to eye-level (does a quilt have an eye-level??) - more so than in this photo!

I was stumped about what to quilt in the empty space between leaves and ground. I considered flowers (too cheesy), a mountainous horizon (too clichee) and ended up putting in what I consider the best compliment in the world: "Stay as you are"
To not have that be too cheesy, I made the letters organic, so to say, by having them sprout leaves, flowers of different shapes, have roots penetrate the ground etc. I figured it wouldn't be quite so obvious and would have to be pointed out to most people, so it's a little code-compliment to my friend. Plus it gives her something to discover everytime she looks at the quilt (though I stopped before I started having raccoons poke out of the letter A or woodpeckers chopping away at the T... :)

Then I had some leaves falling, either quilted or appliqued, also inspired by Anne:

The leaves are rough-edge appliqued, and I bet they would look a lot nicer hand-appliqued since I like clean edges, but I figured rough edges are more natural and I would still be appliqueing leaves now if I'd done it by hand.

The backing shows the quilting nicely in the eggplant-coloured space, and the leaves puff out against the pebbled background.

I used up almost every scrap of fabric Jen gave me! Hence the patch-worked, random backing :)

I delivered it last Friday and wow, was she happy! That's the best about quilting, next to finishing a quilt... when the recipient really really likes the quilt and appreciates the work and shows interest in how it was done... makes me absolutely happy :)

So, between this quilt and the raffle quilt (I'm at 1364$!!!!!!!!!!!), I've been busy, and on top of all that, I'm moving across an ocean in less than 2 weeks, so my fabrics are packed and there won't be any quilting (or a bare minimum if I manage to squeeze a small project into my hand-luggage) for the next 6 weeks (shipping things by freighter takes a long time!).

Please stay tuned, I'm sure I'll come up with something to blog about :)

Oh, and I know someone will ask: I think it's around 75" x 100", which is supposed to fit a queen-sized bed with 1 foot overhang all around. I used polyester batting to get the fluffyness - I always buy the thick/high loft stuff and tear it in two. This is my first quilt using Connecting Threads thread for the whole thing. I had a lot of breakage and was warned correctly that this thread is very "dusty", but I do love the many colour choices. The breakage got less when I slowed down a bit... my my, you should see me pebbling, I'm just zooming around in circles! :)

A Handy Case (Tutorial)

2011-03-21T05:40:00.000-07:00

A little project of mine required 3" x 5" Q-cards, 100 of them. I looked at the cases available in the store and didn't like any of those plasticky, made-in-China things. Why buy something like that when I can make a beautiful, quilted case myself???

So here it goes, without any math to figure things out, so I'll leave it up to you if you want to make something similar :)

I picked 4 charms from a MODA Neptune charmpack

Sewed 3 of the charms in a row for the outside of the case, scant 1/4" seam on everything, I finger-pressed all seams open (in fact, I didn't turn the iron on once in this project). 1 charm was left for the closing flap. I also cut about 3" of a velcro strip and a little scrap piece to extend the width of the clothing flap (about 5" x 2", the dark khaki in the photo below).

I found some batting scraps (strips cut off the edges of previous quilts), zigzagged two strips together to make them 5" wide and about 14.5" long (longer than my 3 charms in a row; if you're outside fabrics are light, make sure you use a thread colour that blends in with the batting or it will show through!). I placed the outside of the case face up on the batting, then quilted parallel straight lines to give some structure (I had the batting facing down while I quilted - don't know if that makes a difference). You can mark the lines with a ruler or just go wild, like me. I also sewed the scrap piece onto the flap-charm (top left corner in picture below) so that the flap piece is now about 5" by 6.5".

Next, take the hook part (rough) of the velcro strip and sew onto the right side of the flap piece, about 1/2" below the center line (I folded the flap in half lengthwise, then placed the velcro strip below the fold. Next, take a scrap piece of batting to cover half of the flap piece (when folded lengthwise again). Fold the flap piece lengthwise, right sides facing (i.e. velcro on the inside!), place it on top of the batting piece and sew down each side (v. scant 1/4" seam) so it looks like the photo below, where I'm holding the flap piece open. Also sew the soft part of the velcro onto the cover piece. To place it, fold the cover in half, batting side together, then place the flap piece on top, slightly off-center towards the folded edge of the cover (if it's slightly off in the end, it'll still work just fine since the strip is long enough!). Regarding the height of the strip, adjust the soft velcro according to the placement of the hook-velcro on the flap, then move it about 1/4 to 1/2" up towards the top of the case! Oh, how to describe this better...

Turn the flap piece right side out. I quilted some horizontal lines to give it structure.
Use some scraps to make a backing that's at least as big as the cover piece of the case.

Now for the part that made me sit and stare for a few minutes while I got the 3-D thinking wheels going inside my brain...
Layer as follows: 1) lay down the outside cover with the batting down and the velcro strip edge away from you (i.e. the future opening side up).
2) place the flap piece velcro side facing up on top of the outside cover so that the velcro strip is on the other side (see photo). Line the velcro strips up by placing them on top of each other, then folding the cover in half and pinning the flap to the non-velcro side (i.e. the piece of the cover you just folded over) - undo the folding and it should look like below.
3) place the backing face down on top of everything else.
now sew a scant 1/4" seam along the top edge.

If you now flip the whole thing so the batting is on the inside, it should look like this:

Now for the part that gave me a little bit of a head ache (hadn't greased those 3D thinking wheels enough :): Open the thing back up so that you have outside cover with velcro and batting on the left and lining on the right as below, fold it lengthwise as you see me doing in the photo (i.e. velcro strips closed up):

Below is the folded package (don't get confused that it's flipped over from the last photo!). Sew along all the seams indicated by pens and the green seam ripper, i.e. everything except the short edge of the lining (bottom left) - leave that for turning inside out. Use a very scant 1/4" seam on the batting part or the seam will be very bulky! Use a generous 1/4" seam on the lining (also to make it slightly smaller than the cover to avoid bulky fabric on the inside. (Note: my lining bottom edges weren't cropped yet, so I just sewed straight across, then trimmed it to 1/4" later, it's okay in the lining since some of my pieces were wider than 5" when I started... I'm just not big into trimming.)

Here's the hole for turning! Now comes the caterpillar part! (I'm always amazed how this ugly, raw-edge mess metamorphoses into a beautiful butterfl- ah, Q-card case!

Oh, and halfway through turning, you should remember to trim the corners for nice points!

Lastly, handsew the opening in the lining shut by folding the edges inwards and using a slip stitch or ladder stitch (my preference, absolutely hidden stitching! See tutorial in my quilty links on top of this page).

Shove the lining inside the cover piece.

Breathe a big sigh of relief that all the pieces are where they're supposed to be and the velcros are facing the right way :)

Place Q-cards inside...

... and admire!

I wish I had known this when I was a student - studying from Q-cards would have been soooo much fun!

Disclaimer: no guarantees - as I said, I didn't calculate anything, just forged ahead - took random pictures throughout and wrote this from memory 2 days later :)

Inspiration

2011-03-14T10:16:00.000-07:00

Alissa of Handmade by Alissa just posted pictures of her guild's Kona Solids Quilt Challenge and a couple caught my eyes. Trust me that it's worth the click!

Birch trees
Awesome coloured pebble-quilting

PS: Can you believe my raffle quilt has raised exactly $1100 to date??? 3 more weeks to go!

Bobbins Without End

2011-03-10T10:44:00.000-08:00

You know you're pebbling when...

... you prepare this many bobbins and know they still won't be enough to finish the quilting on a quilt that's over half done!

In quilting every free minute I have, including time before leaving for an appointment, I've figured out that it takes me about 16 min to quilt one bobbin-worth of pebbles :) No idea how that compares to anything, but there's a random fact for you!

Quiet in the Quilt Room

2011-03-07T12:09:00.000-08:00

Not much going on at my sewing machine. Well, I'm pebbling a quilt, but that takes so long that really, not much new is going on :) So instead, here is some eye candy from my last quilt guild meeting.
This next one was very very cool - it's by a friend of mine who is very skilled at landscape quilting. She did this from a photograph, which she showed as well - it was done very true-to-life!

Woot Woot!

2011-02-28T11:08:00.000-08:00

Hey all - great news! I'm up to 503$ raised by selling raffle tickets for the Disaster Relieve Quilt for Doctors Without Borders! I started selling on February 16th, so I'm stunned that I reached my goal (500$) so quickly.

This photos was taken at my guild meeting the night I started selling - here you can finally see my unusual borders :)

You can read more about the story behind those borders here and more about the benefit raffle here!

Jen's Tree ready to quilt

2011-02-25T08:49:00.001-08:00

Phew, top all done, added a leaf (burgundy) to the right side of the tree to balance it a bit more and one more that is tumbling down from the tree on the right - I'll add a "falling" line during quilting.

I used almost every last scrap of fabric on the back to come up with this random assortment of squares and stripes (not ironed in this picture).

I then had to buy more safety pins as I didn't have enough to baste this monstrosity - now it's ready for quilting, and I just need a bit of a stretch of time to get going on it, then I can chip away at it throughout March!

Circular Grid

2011-02-21T10:13:00.000-08:00

UFO #2 and #3: How about using up two UFOs at once? (I got this idea from Crispy, who put orphan 9-patch block around orphan house blocks ;)

I didn't have anything good for a border to my convergence experiment. I also didn't want a whole quilt of circles with my drunkard's path blocks, but together, I quite enjoy the result:

I will piece some scrappy blocks for the spare places as I've used up all the fabric pieces for the drunkard's path block. I love how I managed to match some of the border blocks to the convergence fabrics, e.g. the yellow on the right, so that it looks continuous!
I guess the blocks are no longer used in the drunkard's path pattern, so this will be "Circular Grid". I'm going to have fun quilting this!!!

Wallhanging

2011-02-19T09:49:00.000-08:00

Time to deal with some UFOs!

I put some very simple, yet perfectly matching borders around the sample I made for my beginner's quilt class two years ago.

This Hawaiian fabric matches wonderfully and loosens up the symmetry of the center disappearing 9-patch pattern. I highly suspect that the fabric isn't 100% cotton (I bought it at a liquidation sale for 2$/m), the weave looks weird. It also ran like crazy when I pre-washed it, but this might be a nice wall-hanging to spice up a dull room :) It makes me dream of going to Hawaii (there are island scenes printed in black lines on the red background), so I'm calling it Hawaiian Dream. It's about 30" x 40".

Jen's Tree quilt (see right panel for picture) is ready for quilting, yay! I had to buy extra pins to baste it... another biggy at 75" x 100".

Disaster Relief Quilt

2011-02-15T10:06:00.000-08:00

So, as mentioned in my last post, my plans for the Disaster Quilt have changed, from crumpling it into the garbage bin during the piecing process to loving it so much after the quilting was finished that I've decided to raffle it off with all benefits going to Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontiers/MSF.ca). So the Disaster Quilt is now a Disaster Relief Quilt!

I've always admired MSF's work, sending doctors and other medical staff to conflict zones around the world to bring medical aid to people in need. I love that this organization is independent and helps anyone in need. I donated to them last fall for the Pakistan Flood Appeal, so now I'm getting their newsletters, of course. One of the stories I read really pointed out how limited some places are regarding the available medical equipment.

In brief, a doctor from Ottawa, Canada, went to an African country with MSF, while her husband started a residency in pediatrics on Baffin Island, in Canada's north. She wrote about an emergency case of her husband's, a little kid that was helicoptered to Ottawa and put on a respirator to survive. Around the same time, the MSF doctor had a very chick child in her care, but couldn't even determine what the problem was since no x-ray or ultrasound machine was available, so they had to treat one of several possible afflictions, hoping that it was the right one. The child died not long after. So here we are, complaining about wait times at the doctor's office, while in some countries, there might not be a doctor, or you have to walk twice as long as we spend waiting here, just to get to the doctor's, plus some wait time on top of that.

Well, suffice it to say, while I can't work for MSF as a doctor (since I am not a Dr) and can't give all my money away to charity (not the type), I *can* and love to quilt and I'll gladly spend the time selling raffle tickets.

So two weeks ago, as this plan was taking shape, I started power quilting the quilt to get it done. Then last week, I contacted MSF with a proposal, set up a blog (msfquilt.blogspot.com) to promote the raffle and went all around town setting up sale dates. I'm also now the proud owner of a lottery license :) My goal is to raise 500$, which means I have to sell 250-300 tickets.

I know that none of this applies to any of my readers, since you're all far away and won't be here to buy tickets, plus you all have tons of your own beautiful quilts :)

I guess I just wanted to share, since that's what a blog is for, and also because this raffle is taking up most of my time these days! :)

The Tables Have Turned!

2011-02-12T10:26:00.000-08:00

I am SO glad I didn't stipple my Disaster Quilt! It's actually growing on me again and I now have a very special plan for it - I've been working on that plan for the past 2 weeks and will let you know soon what it is!

Here are some progress shots from the quilting progress. I started by quilting a straight line down the center of each diagonal purple chain in the triple Irish chain (sorry, I don't have any new whole quilt shots), just to hold everything together. That was hard work, because of my small machine and the long straight lines (done with a walking foot of course).

Then I started doodling to come up with a fantastic design for the white spaces, something a little less intense but along the lines of what Joan does (e.g here and here) and the awesome doodles by Jill (e.g. here and here). Well, I got pretty frustrated, because my own doodles didn't look awesome like Joan's and Jill's on the first try (go figure, haha!). I thought, there must be a better way, so I went to my little quilt stop around the corner and found a stencil, which likely was the right size - I found that out at home as I hadn't thought to measure my space *grins*. Sound familiar???

I started marking the circle with my water soluble purple Singer pen. I was scared to used it at first, and couldn't find the exact fabric I used for piecing to test it, so at first, I used a chalk pencil, but I don't like using those, they are slow for marking as the colour grey I have is so light, I have to draw a line several times before it's visible.

To add a little bit of an improv and personal touch, I added some plumes to each corner of the white space, free-hand:

Then it was off to my little Singer and the free-motion foot. I have to admit, that I found the quilting of the feather circles very easy. The shapes just flowed, good size for free-motion quilting shapes! This video tutorial by Green Fairy Quilt really helped, I think it made the big difference between success and frustration, because the order in which I quilted the feathers before wasn't working for me).

I started getting pretty confident with my stitch length too, yay!
As before, when I sprayed the finished design with my water bottle, the purple pen just jumped right out, scary moments, and they were still scary 12 blocks later! :)

The result is well worth the scare though!

I varied the center fill in every block - almost ran out of ideas in the end. I only quilted this design in every second block as I wanted to have the quilt a bit less uniform.

For the second block, I did design my own stencil, just using cardboard. I quilted a 3/4" grid behind it, and now wish I hadn't, but because it was easier to quilt the grid in one motion with the design, and I did a few blocks before I decided it may have been a bad move, there's no way I'm going back to opening all the grids up again... But who knows, this might grow on me too, and the grid runs in the same direction as the Irish chain, so that might work. I did the quilting in about 4 intense days, "power-quilted" you might say! In fact, my marking pen is nearly empty, yikes!

The back, especially the purple, shows the quilting really well:

I'll leave you with wintery pictures from earlier this week in PEI:
Is snow removal done like this where you live too? Here on PEI, the snow is pushed to the center of the road, then a snowblower comes along (you can see the snow shoot out in the photo above) and a truck slowly drives along next to it, getting filled up (the one above is full, so the snow-chute is turned back to the center). Then the full trucks (about one ever 2 min) car the snow out of town (to a field??? Not the harbour anymore, I think, because of pollution concerns) and comes back empty.

Pitch for a Benefit Auction

2011-02-10T16:12:00.000-08:00

Amy over at Diary of a Quilter posted about a good cause the other day: an auction to help her friend Jenny pay for medical bills of her leukemia treatment.

I read the post and thought, well, that sucks, but I don't know the person, have no connection to her and many people need help in the world, where does it stop? I also do quite a bit of charity work already, foster children in Africa and South America, Global Parent with UNICEF, fundraising for Doctor's Without Borders and occasional donations to WWF - it adds up.

For some reason, I clicked on the link to Jenny's blog and started reading the recent posts. Then I went to the archive and looked at the first posts. I discovered that this blog is not an "illness only" blog - Jenny started it years before she was diagnosed with leukemia. That was the first thing stopping me in my tracks (in addition to her being a young woman like me) - cancer can happen to anyone, anytime. Reading Jenny's regular posts about her plans, travel dreams, sluggish progress with her PhD thesis and having fun with friends made me think that it's not much different from my personal blog for friends and family. What if starting tomorrow, there'll be a 5 month posting break on my blog and the next blog talks about visitation rules at the hospital and how the first round of chemo is going? That is a scary and sobering thought. One thing that really struck me was Jenny's attitude: she's always smiling, no matter how tired and sick she looks - I know, I know, blogs are edited to keep the negative stuff out, but something shines through, a tough spirit that is fighting to the last. Gosh, I don't even know this person... I guess I'm trusting my gut feeling.

I browsed/read through almost all of Jenny's blog and by the end of it felt compelled to contribute. So I'm donating my pink zigzag baby quilt to the auction which will be held on Feb 14-15 (very soon!). People can still donate items until Feb 12th (Saturday!) and it can be anything as long as you're willing to ship it to the winner (you can restrict the destinations).

There are very interesting prizes up on the auction blog (no pun intended, though it's a neat one - auction block/blog) already, including photo sessions, quilts, food, jewelry, knitted hats and a cool 4 person trip to a hot destination...

If this cause interests you/moves you, hop on over to the auction blog, donate an item or bid or not, whatever you feel like! Hopefully, should I ever be in such a situation, I will have friends to help me out, as well...

And the winner is...

2011-02-09T12:19:00.000-08:00

Random.org picked Free Indeed, who commented

As a child, I thought I was going to be a scientist and be one of the first to colonize the moon...when I dreamed, I dreamed BIG!!!! Now, I don't think so....:)
I have a nephew that worked in Alaska for a year with sled dog teams. He loved his time there...this fabric would make a great keepsake quilt for him.

Couldn't be more fitting, eh? There were a few entries with connections to Alaska - which is great - I love when fabric goes to such good use :)

Thanks everyone for entering! Without you, I'd never have reached 10,000 page views (though I'm aware that many of you probably only stopped by for the give-away and will never come again - no harm done :) I appreciate the visit, and who knows, maybe some of you will be back another day...).

Interestingly, only 21% of you would want to go to the moon! I wouldn't have expected that...

Try Leslie's Fudge Balls!

2011-02-08T09:25:00.000-08:00

Did any of you see Leslie's recipe for Fudge Balls the other day? I copied it down and finally had time to make them - they turned out perfectly! I didn't believe they'd stay round while baking, but they did! Awesome! I made sure they turned out okay by tasting 3, ehm, 5 balls. And one more before bed, in case they changed since coming out of the oven. Oh, and a couple this morning, cause you never know...

Make these, they're awesome!

Oh, and this is a quilting blog, so I'll include a quilt, too :) I was actually super productive on Saturday, doing something with quilts that have been waiting forever to be... well, made into quilts. I'll just show you one today, since you're probably already drooling allover your keyboard from the Fudge Balls.

When I made the brown Chicks and Elephants quilt,
I had planned to make a copy with off-white sashing. I ended up not doing that but had some pieces cut, which I turned into this on Saturday:

I had thought about adding another white border, but was happy with the current look, and the size is my usual baby quilt size (30"x40").

Oh, gotta go, I see some fudge balls in front of me :)

10,000 visitors, wow!

2011-02-05T10:10:00.000-08:00

***Thanks for your comments! I already have a couple of entries without email addresses (noreply-comment) - if you're not sure whether your email is activated in your blog account, view your profile page, you should have a "Contact: Email" link somewhere on your page - if not, please follow Anne's great instructions on how to fix that (see menu on the right)!***

As promised, here's my give-away to celebrate my 10,000th visitor since June 3, 2009!

One lucky winner will receive 2 yards (4 half-yards) of coordinated fabrics purchased in Alaska! Quite the travelled fabric, eh? The turquoise fabric was hand-dyed in the store.

To enter, leave a comment telling me whether you would travel to the moon in a space shuttle if you had the opportunity! If you want to, go ahead and spread the word to your blog friends :)

I will draw a winner on Wednesday, February 9th!

GOOD LUCK!

Pant-skirt and Horrid Dress

2011-02-03T07:57:00.000-08:00

Right-ee-o - here are the pants. 50% linen, 50% cotton. I bought them when I lived in Italy 8 years ago and in Italy, red pants are great. (Also, for my body-shape 8 yrs ago, these were great). On PEI, Canada, not so much the right style - they just weren't working for me here.

So I put them in the charity bin. Then I started thinking that I really liked the look of the belt (three strings with the wooden loop, you just pull them through and knot them). And that I always thought of my fun time in Italy (I was an Au Pair there, the equivalent of a short-term nanny).

So I decided to keep them and turn them into a skirt!

Out came the seam ripper! They were serged, so it was quite a lot of work opening up the inside leg seams. I had an audiobook running in the background and that made it more fun.

No turning back now :) I cut of the pants below the knees, opened up the side seams on those pieces and cut triangles, which I then sewed back into the front and back opening of the pants. I used two more triangles and sewed them into the outside side seams of the upper pant part (more seam-ripping!). And because I like my skirts swirly, I then used those pieces left over from cutting triangles out of the bottom of the pant legs and pasted them in the front left and right and the back left and right. Then it was time to hem the skirt (with all the folds, I didn't have to worry much about everything being straight, phew) and to zigzag along the seams, tada!

It's so nice not to have to worry about the waistline and a zipper, those are my least favourite part of making skirts, generally.

The day I started was a beautiful sunny day here, and I must have felt like summer ;) (in fact, the sun beating into my living/sewing room was so warm that I kept having to take of layers!). Now that it's -28C with the windchill and my skirt is ready, I'm really *REALLY* craving summer :) Soon. Only about 5 more months in this part of the world... sigh.

Now for the dress: you'll probably all say it looks fine etc, but trust me, I have photos of me wearing it, and it's aweful. It makes me look like Miss Frumpy and soooo plump, which I like to think I'm not. It's about the most unflattering thing I've put on my body in a while! And there's no way I'll put those photos of me in the dress on the web - they might be used against me at some point in the future, hahaha!

Here's the big problem: the ruffles in the skirt didn't quite work out, they're not spread out evenly, so I have very unflattering bulk over my hips (which I'm generally NOT trying to emphasize) and over my butt, which also doesn't need *any* more bulk, believe you me!

So let's just forget about that little failed experiment (unfortunately -or fortunately?- it's polyester, so I won't be making a quilt out of this despite Nanci's great suggestion that every failed dress is a quilt waiting to happen :), and instead, I'll enjoy my cheerful red skirt....

How come a red skirt is okay but red pants are weird??? I must have a strange view of clothing ;)

Give-away for the big 10,000

2011-02-01T07:51:00.000-08:00

Well, fewer then 50 more visitors and I will have had 10,000 visitors since I put the counter on in June 2009 (I think???). Pretty darn exciting! So I'm going to have a give-away this week. As always, it'll be a simple one, comment and that's it. I'll post pictures of the goodies right after I get those skirt/dress pics up! Stay tuned :)

Thanks to all of you for visiting and the many of you who comment! I generally reply to all comments, especially first timers, so if you never had a reply from me, it's because of the no-reply blogger thing. [Please fix it (see right menu), because I'd love to get back to you!!!] Blogging has been such a fun experience since I started in late 2008. What a way to connect with global quilters... I sure appreciate sharing ideas with all of you, getting feedback and positive vibes! Happy quilting and blog-browsing/blogging to all of you!

Random pic of PEI last summer to make this post more enjoyable :)

Skirt and Dress

2011-01-31T08:32:00.000-08:00

So, I kind of finished my dress, the one I started 2 summers ago... it's a disaster (not sure what the "easy" was meant for... it had pleats and ruffles and linings and fitted busts - I found it hard!). I'll post pictures of that soon... After that low, I turned some pants I was sentimentally attached to into a skirt and that turned out great! I'll post photos of that this week as well, just have to hem it first!

So clothes from patterns, I'll leave to the professionals, but remodelling I'm quite happy with :)

Thread-Heaven

2011-01-26T19:15:00.000-08:00

Ah, check out my recent order from Connecting Threads... isn't it beautiful?

Jen's Quilt - A Big Tree

2011-01-23T07:46:00.000-08:00

I had another request from a friend to make her a quilt as a commission. We started picking out fabrics together at the store, and the she bought a bunch more and mailed them to me.

Originally, she wanted a copy of my Mossy Monkey Mechanic, but then she found another pattern, and another and another ;) One of the quilt pictures she sent me looked really familiar and turned out to be a quilt made by Anne of Film and Thread (my friend found the photo on someone's photo collection site and it took me a while to figure out where I knew the quilt from)

In the end, my friend let me decide whether to make her a tree similar to Anne's or a Lonestar (the one with diamond shapes, 8 pointed) as long as her aubergine fabric was the main fabric.

I picked the tree and made a bigger version of my Tree of Hope. A much bigger version. Queen-sized, to be specific :)

I started by laying out two strips of background aubergine fabric and playing with the layout of the tree trunk and leaves I had cut out.

When I liked the layout, I used safety pins to fixate all the pieces.

Then I took the 2 background pieces apart to have less fabric to maneuvre around the machine while I free-motion straight-stitched around all the leaves and the trunk pieces.

When that was all done, I joined the background pieces with a straight seam across, and sewed down the rest of the trunk (that went across the seam).

I also started playing around with borders. I had figured out measurement to use 3" (final) squares in rows of 4 all the way around. I forgot that I had cut the background fabric a bit bigger, for safety (not sure what kind of safety... where could I have possibly lost fabric in one straight seam???) Anyway, because of that, the number of squares I cut wasn't enough to reach all the way around, and 4 rows in the border would have made the quilt bigger than my friend wanted it.

(Looking at this layout now, I think I will add some more leaves to the right, the heaviness on the left bothers me a wee bit :)

So I downsized to 3 rows, still okay, and maybe less overpowering for the centre...

Here are the squares of the border sewn together - I love how quilts look better and better when the seams are completed - raw edges sometimes really make a layout look bad, but I've learned to trust that finished seams will make layouts and even colour combinations look better!

In between joining border blocks, I zigzagged around the leaves and the trunk. I only did the original seam to hold everything in place and not run into problems with shifting fabric. I didn't use any glue, interface or fusible webbing to hold this shapes in place, and didn't have any problems.

The border is now attached to the quilt center - looks great! Just didn't have a chance to take a photo yet. I'm also still waiting on a recent thread order to finish zigzagging around some leaves for which I didn't have a matching thread colour... I have 2 more months to finish this quilt, my own deadline, and since I'm planning some elaborate quilting, that'll be just enough time!

I love making a quilt for someone I care about, especially when they were involved in the design process!

Last Disaster???

2011-01-19T11:10:00.000-08:00

Okay, big breath! It's ready for basting! That thing. That disastrous quilt top I've only been working on for 2 years. Geesh.

After my post the other day, highlighting this - hopefully - last disaster of non-matching corner patterns,

... I pulled this quilt back out and fixed my mistake. Two unnecessary seams later, the top is complete. And it looks good. It's growing on me again.

[A little voice in my hand is whispering frantically that certainly many more things could go wrong with this quilt... I'm ignoring it!]

I do like the effect of the purple corners, it gives the quilt more dimension, no? Like someone took a purple triangle and shoved it between the light and green layers...

Haha, here are the middle wedges, when I had made the side borders too short... see, I can laugh about it now!

And the more I look at these wide open spaces, the more I'm drifting away from my vengeful stippling quilt-plan and am moving instead to diagonal lines through the "chain" and old-fashioned feather circles in the white, in white thread. I love the look of those, white on white, and I feel confident enough to try feathers like that on a proper quilt, yet still small-scale!

First things first though! Basting :)

I'll leave you with a fridge-magnet quote - this purchase was a direct result of some fun email-conversations about books I've had recently with my name sake from Bella Linguini. We both like Kurt Vonnegut books a lot, so this magnet caught my eye - though I'd never known before what the guy looks like :)

I think he sums it up very well...

Disappearing Marker

2011-01-17T11:13:00.000-08:00

I've read a few reviews on marking pens over the years and even bought one myself last year. It's a pink water soluble disappearing marker made by Singer (like my machine - I'm such a loyal customer :)

I decided to personalize the Red & Aqua quilt for my friend's baby boy named Jack. So I wrote his name across the top and his birth-time, -date and weight at birth across the bottom.

The marking pen has a fine point and a broad tip, and I find that the fine point often doesn't show up or disappears so quickly, that I can't quilt fast enough to keep up with it. So after a moment of hesitation, I took the broad tip and started writing. It showed up well, though the writing was quite fat and I was *hoping* it would go away afterwards! (I'm not one for testing swatches. I never test cremes on hidden parts of my body, I never knit a gauge - no wonder things don't work out in the "knitting of garments" department... luckily, I've not had any disasters with cremes yet!)

Here's what it looked like about 10 min after I marked the text; you can see that the writing is relatively faint.

So imagine my horror when I sprayed it with water and the paint just intensified 10 x!

There I was standing with my water spray bottle (I wanted to mail the quilt the next day, so didn't want to put it in the sink or through the wash...), going pffft, pffft, pffft in rapid succession to get as much water on that section as possible!

*Luckily*, the pen label wasn't lying, and after a few more squirts to soak the fabric, the writing did go away, phew!

Maybe someday, I'll even dare use the pen on white fabric :)

Another day

2011-01-14T11:22:00.001-08:00

... another snow storm!

Supposedly all 10 Canadian provinces had snowfall on the same day, even the city of Vancouver, BC (they of course have snow in the Rocky Mountains of BC, but normally it just rains in Vancouver in the winter - their record is something like 43 days of rain in a row - I couldn't do it... even if parts of the province are called Sunshine Coast). Some of the territories (farther north) had blue skies at the same time, but -35 degrees; maybe it was too cold to snow there?

In miscellaneous news: As I replied to some of your comments, I found something other than my laptop to fit into the "too-small" sleeve I made. Having this pretty cover around my statistics book somehow makes me feel better about statistics. And that's a good thing, because my head is already buzzing with the analysis of some data sets for work!

Remember my blue and aqua quilt?

It's being packed up this afternoon to start a long journey all the way to Australia, where one of my friends finally smartened up and had a baby so that I can start giving my many baby quilts away :) She lives far enough south of Queensland that floods aren't a problem, luckily. Not sure what the point of a quilt in the summer is, but hey, it must get cold there sometime ;)

And lastly, I thought I'd share my Disaster Quilt misery with you. This latest disaster happened back in December, but I've been oppressing all thought about it since then...
Well, the disaster itself happened even earlier. Here's the full story:
I had my triple Irish chain quilt top center finished since early 2009 or something horrendously long ago like that. I finally gathered my will to add borders, but didn't want just blah-solid borders and also didn't want to add more than two strips per body. Strange determination, but there you have it.

So I came up with this fancy 45 degree angle corner pieces on the outside border (the purple in the above photo; the green is the main border). I had a few problems with my calculations - or is that "lack of calculations"... here's a hint - do not eyeball the length of strips when you're attaching them with diagonal seams! After piecing and adding and adding some more, and then adding another strange contrasting fabric in the middle of the border because everything was too short, I finally got it right, or so I thought!

I put the quilt away for a while to recover from all my measuring head aches, then took it back out before Christmas to see if I couldn't baste this quilt to at least meet some of my 2010 goals (remember my sidebar?). Well, I had it all spread out on the batting, ready to sandwich, when I took a step back to admire my handiwork and saw this:

Good thing there are no small children Miss Manners around my place :) Corner on the right is how it's supposed to look. Corner on the left side, not so much. I could have cried! I guess I must have been working late at night once again, to make such a mistake. Argh! This quilt has been disastrous from the start (apart from picking the fabrics, that was super easy...) - all my fault and laziness of course, but frustrating nonetheless!

On some "good" day in the future, I will sit down and fix this corner, then baste the quilt and do some extra large meandering all over the quilt to be done with it with minimum effort! No more fanciness on this quilt!!!

So, do I get snickering and "silly you"s or does anyone out there have a load of sympathy they'd like to send my way????

MadMind Quilt

2011-01-05T07:47:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I've worked on this quilt:

I called it BrownBlueART - but no longer!

I ran out of steam and variegated thread - but both problems have been remedied!

I finished quilting this thing last night. I call it 'thing' because I look at it and shake my head in wonder at what I was doing :) Hence the new name, MadMind - I think only a mad mind could have come up with that kind of quilting!!!

Yup, told you it's crazy!

Here are some details. First off, my actual hand-print - I outlined my hand, quilted around it, then sketched in my "finger print" and the palm-reading lines. I like this one, and I like the wavy-net background that makes the hand stand out.

Next, my actual profile (hard to see, it got a bit too busy around it, but that's okay, I'm okay with my face being mysteriously hidden in the quilt). For this, I outlined the shadow of my profile on a piece of paper stuck to the wall as the sun was setting. Let me tell you, that was DIFFICULT! I used a mirror, but had to draw at quite the angle, which was awkward.
Quilting the hair was a lot of fun; I simply eye-balled the eyes, nostril and lips.

The eye in the dead center was one of the first things I quilted. I used to love drawing eyes, especially ones showing different emotions. I took drawing lessons for a year and a bit when I was younger, and I enjoyed the eye-sessions a lot even then. The spider web is also one of my favourites on the quilt.

Besides feathers, I played around with a lot of shapes and filler designs and also practiced echo-quilting. I like the look of echos, but the quilt gets a bit too sturdy for a functional quilt, in my opinion.

Here's the back of the quilt. I started out with dark blue bobbin thread so that it wouldn't show up so much on the front and the blue thread was bought on sale. But when I ran out towards the end, I first used up a bobbin with brown thread, then dark green and lastly light gray - I was simply too lazy to wind a new bobbin, whereas I usually switch bobbins without cutting the top thread... Since this is an artsy, display type quilt, I didn't care if the thread on the back looked good. The back is certainly the more 'calming for the eye' side!

I did have some tension problems throughout quilting, e.g. seeing the bobbin thread on the top of the quilt, and especially bad tension on the back, when turning tight corners quickly. But again, doesn't matter, the back won't be on display :)

Nonetheless, I find the back side an interesting study for my plans of "whole cloth quilting" parts of my Free as a Bird quilt. I really like the look of matching thread on medium to light-coloured fabric.

Now I'm off to binding this quilt. I do seem to crave the silent nature of hand-binding these days. Unfortunately, none of my other quilts are anywhere near ready for binding... maybe that will change in this month :) Fingers crossed!

Laptop Sleeve

2011-01-03T07:23:00.000-08:00

***edited***

Happy New Year everyone!

Right now, the view from my window looks like this:

A proper snow fall, the first of the year (2011!), and it just started this morning...

I spent my new year's eve - no, not finishing up the many projects from 2010 that were left behind, but sewing up a little laptop sleeve following Anne's (of Film and Thread) tutorial. She had warned me to make my first seam and then checking the size of the laptop against the sleeve before turning it inside out. Well, of course I didn't do that, but I also think that the 2 layers of batting I sewed in took away quite a bit of the space, leading to the sleeve being so tight on my laptop that I'm worried it'll damage it (too much pressure on the electronics or something...).

Unfortunately, my laptop is very small, so it's not like the sleeve will fit a slightly smaller laptop... oh well, I'll find something else that fits inside, cause I think it's a pretty pouch! :)

I used fabrics that I won at the quilt retreat last fall, coupled with a reddish-purple solid.

It's reversible, though I'll probably never reverse it. I had planned for the flap to be the opposite, i.e. pattern against the purple and solid against the pattern, for contrast, but my 3D thinking failed me somehow...

I quilted all sides with wavy lines before I put the interior and exterior layers together.

I had originally taken this project with me for hand-sewing during my christmas trip (12 days all over Ontario with lots of time on the bus, and I mean *lots* of time - one trip was 10 h long. Dang, that province looks so much smaller on the map!), but I've realized that (a) I've been spoiled by quick machine-sewing so much that hand-sewing just takes way too long, and (b) with all the batting, the layers were quite thick, making hand-sewing plain cumbersome.

The tutorial itself was super easy and I recommend it! I love that Anne hand-wrote and -drew it, gives it such a nice personal touch!

Bargello Tutorial

2010-12-24T05:17:00.000-08:00

Ready to get a CuttingEdgeQuilt-style bargello tutorial??

For the size bargello I did (sorry, I never had a chance to measure it - I estimate that it would fit a single bed), you'll need 20" of 16 different fabrics, plus border, backing, and binding (though I used leftover strips for a scrappy binding).

Pick 16 fabrics and sort them by colour. Can be prints, solids, small or big patterns. I picked half brown and half yellow/orange.

Cut 2.5" strips from each fabric. I'm pretty sure I cut 5 strips per fabric, but since I did my bargello without a plan or pattern, I added sets as I went along...

Lay your strips out in border and align the selvedges on one side (the left in the picture above). Sew the strips into pairs, starting your seam at the left, with the aligned selvedges.

Now sew the pairs of strips together, starting at the other end (where the selvedges are NOT aligned). To save fabric, I held the fabric strip pairs together so that the selvedges on the left were still aligned and then just pinned the other end (where the edges don't align) and started sewing there. That way, the selvedges on one side of all the strips are lined up, but not on the other (see below).

Lastly, I sewed the brown and yellow set together (right sides facing of course) to form a tube that's half brown and half yellow:

To make the joining of all the pieces easier, I worked with two strip tubes at a time. I pressed one one way, the other tube the opposite way (i.e. iron one light colours to dark, the other dark colour to light). Depending on how organized you are, my method will work for you, or you'll need to pin numbers and notes to identify all your strips. I'm much too lazy for that and would rather trouble shoot later than do all the planning work.

Trim the selvedges off one edge of the tubes to straighten out that edge, then start cutting strips off the strip tubes. Cut two strips of the same width at a time from tube 1 (pressedone way), this will be the mirrored strips on each side of your quilt, so they need to be the same width to match seams later! The cut two strips of tube 2 (pressedthe other way) of the same width.

I cut strips between 1" and 3.5" in width. 2" and 2.5" were easiest to work with, gave a nice wave and made the quilt grow quickly. Adding some 1-1.5" and 3-3.5" strip sets in between gives you a pointier (skinny strips) or shallower (wide strips) shape to the curves.

In the picture above, you can see that the bottom 3 strips are laid out with the seams pressed in alternating directions. That's important for matching up seams!

Because I did my first section of this quilt as an experiment, I matched all the seams when joining the strip sets. Big mistake! It looks fine but is a lot of work! I've since been told that you can also offset the strips by half a square (in this case offset by half of 2" (the final width of your 2.5" strips when sewn together)). Instead of ripping open a seam, you cut your strip loop in the middle of one colour. I've never tried this, but I imagine that sewing the strip sets together will be much easier and you don't have to worry about which way seams are pressed since they don't meet!

Here are my sections being sewn together...

I decided on my pattern/layout by turning the strip-loops right side out and arranging them to my liking (bottom of photo below). When I was confident that I liked the pattern, I cut them open at the appropriate seam for a final visual (at this point you can move strips or sew them back together to get a different layout) (see top of photo below).

So eventually you'll have all your strips for each half of the quilt laid out. Number them somehow! Whatever your system is, pins, pins with numbers, pieces of papers pinned on. Know which strip goes on which half of the quilt etc etc. Mind you, I had a few mishaps and they're easy enough to fix - hello seam reipp

Start sewing strips together, matching seams as shown below. Sew into pairs, then pairs of pairs etc. I like to abutt the seams and then pin through them diagonally to catch the raw edge on both sides. I remove the pin when I get to the seam. Watch that seams don't flip over while you're sewing over them - that gets bulky!

I sewed the strips into about 6 large sections (3 on each side of the quilt), then sewed those together to make the big quilt.

One thing I did different on this quilt, were the borders. Instead of attaching them to the center and then basting/quilting, I did it in a quilt-as-you-go style. I did that because of all the seams and the associated stretchiness of the quilt as well as being fed up sewing pieces together and feeling the urge to quilt instead :)

To do this, baste your quilt as you normally would, but leave enough backing and batting around the quilt center to accommodate a border or your choice. I left about 5-6" on all sides.

I then quilted the center right up to the edge. Then I measured the quilt top, cut borders to the right size, pinned them generously (i.e. lots of pins) wrong sides together to the quilt top and sewed through border/top/batting/backing all in one go with my walking foot. It meant that I didn't have to quilt the narrow borders I added and had a nice frame motif on the back. It was more bulk to maneuver through the machine, I have to admit, but I did save me a second set of seams (one to attach the border, the second to quilt them in the ditch or similar.

The borders turned out okay - no major puckers or waviness and it was a lovely feeling to add the borders and be ready for binding, instead of having the whole quilting business still ahead.

I added 3 borders: a narrow brown one, a narrower yellow one and a wide brown one. I added extra quilting to the wide border (the orange floral/leafy print is the back of the quilt):

Now you're ready to bind and label to your liking! If you need help with that, check out my Quilty Tutorial page above!

There you have it, one striking mirrored bargello quilt:

Merry Christmas everyone!

Crinkly

2010-12-21T06:15:00.000-08:00

I washed the Chicks and Elephants quilt before sending it to its new owner. It shrunk just enough to bring out the quilting more and I had a chance to take a photo of the missing spiral block :)

After the original problems I had while making this quilt at quilt retreat, it did turn out to be a fun quilt :)

Fabric Art x 3

2010-12-19T06:11:00.000-08:00

#1: A Quick Pillow
I'm visiting some friends for Christmas, and one of them has a birthday just before the holidays, so I whipped up this pillow with my half-pillow tutorial (see Crafty Tutorials).

#2: Fabric Art
I have a two foster children through PLAN International - you foster a child with a monthly sponsorship and the money is used to improve living standards/safety/education etc. in the child's village.

One is a girl in Kenya and I sent her some colourful fabric art for Christmas:

As you can see, I practiced some more feathers ;)
It's also reversible!

Hope she likes it and that it adds a bit of colour to her room - in all her pictures, everything is brown, clothing, landscape etc.. it was fun to make and I hope she likes it.

Oh, it was also my first time making round corners... well. I guess bias-binding makes a big different on rounded corners!!! Next time I'll be smarter... strips cut on the grain just don't stretch well around the corner!

#3: Framed Fabric
And another fabric-gift for my bird-loving friend (same recipient as the magnetic message board):

This used to be a framed mirror, but the mirror broke and I kept the frame for about 4 years thinking I could use it for something "some day". Well, it was time to make true on that promise, so I glued fabric around the backboard, plopped it back into the frame and tada - how much simpler yet effective can you get?

Browngellow Finito!

2010-12-17T07:18:00.000-08:00

Thanks for all your lovely compliments on my BrownGellow quilt! Many of you asked how I would quilt it - it's time for the big reveal: (drum roll)

Can't see much of the quilting there, can you? Good thing there are close-ups below!

I think I was inspired by a bead-curtain, 70s style :) Maybe because of one of the fabrics in my Chicks & Elephants quilt?

This is the backing fabric - I bought it on sale last year, 3$ a yard or so - I really love those types of colours and I could even abide the large floral print which usually isn't my style.

Meandering on the brown fabrics:

And a leafy, ranking vine all around the border - I went out of my usual comfort zone and used a thread that definitely didn't blend in! I concentrated hard when quilting and am happy to say that there are no major kinks in the vine, so I'm happy to show off the distinct quilting!

I know I marked this quilt done in my sidebar, though I admit that I have about 3 feet of binding to do. But technically, it's done :) Yay! All for me, too, harharhar!

I'm almost done writing up the tutorial for how I made this quilt! It's a bit more work than my usual quilts, though patterns are hard to compare - definitely worth the effort though, I'd say :)

A Magnetic Message Board

2010-12-14T06:08:00.000-08:00

The Moda Bake Shop (in my reader list) recently published 8 things to make from a layer cake or something like that. One crafty item was a magnetic message board made from a stove cover. It worked pretty well - I craft-glued fabric to the cover, folded the fabric over the edge and was generous with glue on the inside of the rim. Made a bunch of matching magnets and attached a loop (ribbon glued to the inside of the rim) to hang the whole contraption. Fairly quick! Though I learned to make sure to use good magnets or they don't hold anything up!!

End Of Year Challenge Progress

2010-12-10T07:09:00.000-08:00

Well, if you've followed the changes in the list on the right, you'll see that I've made some headway in the end-of-year-challenge I set myself this fall.

3 quilts are done, phew...

... and I recently had a spurt of basting motivation, which means after basting the BrownGellow, I also whipped up a backing for the Free As A Bird quilt and basted it.

I had planned on basting the Disaster Quilt as well, since I finally finished the borders on it, but ran into yet another disastrous problem; so it's once again out of sight out of mind in a corner. I was close to getting rid of that quilt twice now! More about that later (when I'm in a really good mood, so that after writing it I'll still be in a mediocre mood)!

I'm still staring at the Sunset on Water piece, figuring out what to do with it. I'm pretty sure it'll stay a small size, but that's all I know for now :)

Oh, and I can guarantee that the blue string quilt won't be done, and I probably won't tackle quilting the Free As A Bird quilt this year either. Oh well, it was an admirable goal, haha!

And I did of course start 3 new quilts and finish one of them, so maybe that'll make up for the unmet goals? :)

How are your plans for finishing up projects before 2011 going?

Fabric, My Love

2010-12-08T10:58:00.000-08:00

Indulge me in another post about my current favourite fabric!

I've put all the poppy fabric I posted about the other day through the wash. It's lovely to see it all unfolded!

These Michael Miller fabrics are awesome quality. They dried very quickly after coming out of the wash, and I looked at them, wondering if I had somehow ironed them already and forgotten about it! They smoothed out beautifully again. There was barely any stretching of the fabric (i.e. the cut-lines still matched up!!!) and the colours didn't run. (I used a shout colour catcher but it's as clean as can be.. (if there's no colour on those sheets, can I reuse them??? Does anyone now? I feel wasteful)).

Now I'm tempted to buy a ton more yardage of this print series, before I've even cut into it ;) I won't, but I want to!!! Just look at these fresh colours!

PS: Hah, "I won't but I want to"??? I just did!! 8 more yards from FabricFlair - I've been having an absolute wonderful experience with this Etsy store! Go and visit Christie yourself, she's so accomodating and extremely fast at getting orders out! (Shipping same day or next!)

Here, Chicky Chicky

2010-12-05T10:49:00.000-08:00

Looky here! It's pretty much ready! (Binding still to do)

I once again couldn't get myself to do an overall-quilting-pattern, so it's turned into more of a free-motion sampler :)

Thought I'd share the different styles I used with you:

A free-motion grid! I didn't do too bad with the lines, eh? I did mark them with a disappearing marker (pink, from Singer - it kind of disappears faster than I can quilt, actually), but I only had that idea *after* I started the first line and didn't want to take the quilt back out and start the line again, haha! So I marked the grid very awkwardly and somewhat haphazardly with a ruler while the quilt was in the machine (meaning I didn't have a very even surface underneath). The lines are about 3/4" apart. I kind of like the grid look, though this block reminds me of an oven mit - they must use that pattern a lot! :)

This was the easiest block, I just outlined the printed squares...

Feathers and loops (easier to see on the back, which means this was a great piece for practicing! Who says you can't practice on a real quilt????)

McTavishing on the opposite side:
And of course: PEBBLES!!!

I love this fabric, the bead curtain - so 70s! I went along with the pattern and did some connecting lines between beads of the same colour.

Concentric circles around these green rings that fell in the brown water:

This one was fun - I kind of just put the needle down, get an idea and go for it. So maybe these could be invisible plumage on the chickens???

And I guess the brown dotted block didn't photograph well - it has one big spiral on it, but didn't show up well in my lighting.

I love being at the binding stage of a quilt again. I love hand-stitching the binding. I know many people don't. Too bad, we could trade off unwanted tasks!

Bargello Update - Are You Ready???

2010-12-05T05:10:00.000-08:00

Well, my little brown yellow bargello is now called BrownGellow and is not so little anymore...

It grew from this little experiment:

To this bedsized quilt!

I'm very happy with how this turned out, and I took lots of photos of the process, so will put up a tutorial soon for those of you who'd like to try a bargello of your own!

For not having used a pattern, I ran into amazingly few problems :) (mostly to do with me mixing up colours, sigh, here comes the seam ripper!) I also discovered that when I make one section of a seam-heavy quilt in the summer and the other sections in the winter, my 1/4" seam allowance is quite difference - which totally sucks when trying to match seams. I was pretty inventive with my cosmetic quilt surgery! :) And in the end, no one can tell! Hah

I've decided to quilt it first and then put the borders on, since I'm expecting a bit of shifting during quilting, so it's basted to an oversized backing and batting right now!

Last Quilt Class and Banquet Night

2010-12-03T03:46:00.000-08:00

Booh, my quilt class is over!

It was a lot of fun to do this again...

Here, the ladies are busy quilting on their last night of class - they're all aiming to have their quilts ready for the banquet night "Show and Share"!

And here's the picture from our closing night - 3 students couldn't make it, unfortunately...

Don't the quilts look fabulous??

President's Block

2010-11-29T10:39:00.000-08:00

Here's a very brief post to show you my completed Hen and Chicks block for the President's Quilt!

Quilt Show 7

2010-11-27T16:40:00.000-08:00

That's it, the last quilts from the quilt show are posted below... Hope you enjoyed the viewings!

Poppies

2010-11-24T15:15:00.000-08:00

I saw this beautiful fabric on the The Fabric Shopper recently, called Poppy by Laura Gunn for Michael Miller - my mother loves Poppies, so I decided to buy some of it and make her a quilt.

I saw the post on Wednesday, contacted Fabric Flair that same day to figure out a custom order - Christie was great and stuffed 8 yards of fabric into a regular envelope to Canada for me, yay for saving on shipping! On Thursday, I paid the order and it went out Friday - the next Wednesday it was in my mailbox, wohoo! I wish all my online orders would go that smoothly!

I don't know what pattern to use yet, but the fabric is here and there'll be some focal piece with the poppy print on it as I don't want to chop that all up ;) I also don't remember if I ever gave my mother this blog address, so hopefully she doesn't read about it now :)

Whatever it'll be, it's going to be fantastic (can you tell I'm excited about this fabric??)! And I even have Shout colour catchers now, so no more surprises in the wash, though I doubt that these fabrics would run, I love Michael Miller fabrics...

Holy cow, I'm giddy - I've been like this all day. That giddiness also made me spent a fortune on a fused-glass bowl, but it was just so so beautiful.... here's a photo of it:

Sometimes a gal just has to treat herself, and the fabric is technically for my mother :)

Guild Meeting

2010-11-18T10:18:00.000-08:00

Last night was our last quilt guild meeting for 2010 and I wanted to share a picture of a very cool quilt that one of the ladies made!

It's a charm quilt, so every fabric only occurs once in the quilt, and it's English paper pieced.
The maker said that there are over 1500 pieces in this quilt, hard to imagine, but I've been surprised in the past, so I believe her :) It took her 4 years (picking it up and putting it away in between) to make. She cut a 1 foot wide strip for the border and appliqued the top to it. Quite something, eh?

We guild members also received instructions for the President's Quilt we make. The guild president serves for 2 years, then she (no men in our guild) gets a quilt made from blocks donated by the members (everyone's supposed to make one block). The president gets to pick the block, colours, size, etc.

This year's president chose the Hen & Chicks block, looks like this:

Her colour choices are Civil War Era and we were shown some examples of hues.

Picking the right colours was the hardest bit, but I got to work last night after the meeting and my block is almost done...

Quilt Show 6

2010-11-14T16:39:00.000-08:00

Second last post about the quilt show :)

I've seen a few of these charm bracelet type quilts around blog land recently...

2010 Quilt Retreat II

2010-11-12T14:07:00.000-08:00

Okay, here's what I made at quilt retreat!

While sorting fabrics, I started picking out prints that I had bought or received individually and that didn't seem to go with anything else. I did some searching and found that I actually could mix and match quite a few prints together, and they all had something burgundy/wine red in common.

For some reason I keep thinking Warm and Fuzzy when I look at these blocks, so that'll be that name for now...

So I'm in the process of making log-cabin style blocks with a large central focus fabric and 3 layers of logs around it - none of the blocks are at that stage yet. I have a similar stack of fabrics in green and will make the same blocks in green to see if they go together, alternating the blocks or something like that. If not, I'll think of something else. This is a No-Plan-Quilt :)

Next, I was busy busy busy sewing drunkard's path blocks. I asked for some tips re: getting both ends of the curves lined up, and Crispy sent me some tips too.

However, I must have done something wrong when cutting out the pattern, or else, something is off. I pin at the start, middle and end, and I always end up perfectly in the middle, no extra fabric on the convex or concave side, but at the end of the curve, I *always* have 1/8 to 1/4" left over. I find that because I can't hold on to anything there, I can't make the ends meet. Oh well. I've resigned and will trim the blocks to size later...
I've got almost all my pieces sewn together. Some of the colours and pairs aren't my favourites, but they'll probably go well with the completed quilt in the end. I don't actually know how many blocks I'll have or what kind of layout I'll choose, yet.

The third and last project I did at retreat was actually the first one of the day. I had purchased these fabrics online quite a while ago after seeing them on someone else's blog. It was time to cut into them. I decided to make a miniature filmstrip, figured out my measurements to make it turn out about 30x40", my usual baby quilt size, cut all the people and took them to the retreat.
I didn't bring the pattern though, so when I started this project as my "instant gratification project to start the retreat weekend", I promptly cut a strip that wasn't supposed to be cut - I was lucky and it still fit. I ended up having a whole bunch of headaches with this quilt though, so it didn't end up being quite as quick or satisfying as I'd hoped. Plus, I'm really not happy with the 1" inner sashing - it's too narrow for my taste. Maybe it'll grow on me.

I'm calling this one "Chicks and Elephants"

I had cut out pieces and sashing for a second quilt, identical except using off-white sashing. I decided against that and am turning it into a different layout now.

On the last morning of the retreat, at breakfast, the quilt guild members were discussing charity projects for this year. We will make a quilt or two for the animal shelter (to be raffled off by them, not used as bedding for the cat cages!!!), and we decided to make it scrappy and have at least one animal print in a 12.5" block. We were also asked to bring some example blocks for the other members to the next guild meeting (next week).

Because I was still on a motivation/adrenaline/quilting rush from the weekend, I promptly started on some elaborate blocks when I got home. What the quilt executive didn't realize, I think, is that some people (like me), use their scraps until only tiny pieces are left. So my blocks are quite seam-heavy. We'll see how that goes over :)

Here's what I made, anyway:

The bottom four blocks are done log cabin style, in the broadest sense of the word. I'd almost lean towards calling the style "add-pieces-to-the-edges-wherever-you-can". I sorted my scraps according to colour, though that wasn't a prerequisite.

The last block I wanted to make a bit faster and use some narrower pieces, so I found all kinds of strips that are almost to narrow to be used for my taste (a few 1" ones in there), and I guess it's pretty obvious how I made the block :)

Well, I haven't done much quilting since that Sunday - no I lie, but the quilting I did do I'd rather forget. What a headache I had Tuesday working on the Disaster Quilt, one of my QUIPs in the right side bar - more of that later. Suffice it to say, I should have expected that debacle with a quilt called disaster quilt. It's living up to its name!!

Either way, all the sorted fabrics are still on my floor, I just covered them up to protect from sun (ahahahaha, what sun????) and dust (yup, lots of THAT around!).

People have learned not to come by my place unannounced, as they would have to dig a path through my quilting projects to get to the couch ;)

2010 Quilt Retreat I

2010-11-08T09:43:00.000-08:00

We have had soooo much rain here, yikes... the weekend weather forecast for the retreat was "Rain". The weather man actually paused after that and said: "That's it, there's nothing else. Just rain and more rain. There isn't even the chance of anything else." Must be tough to fill up a 30 s allotted time spot with one word ;)

However, on Thursday, all that rain combined with one teensy break in the cloud layer created a rainbow in front of the the drabbest, greyest sky I've seen in a while :) it felt slightly miraculous to see this:

Okay, rain is the perfect weather for a quilt retreat of course - you wouldn't want to miss a beautiful day - well, actually, if the choice is quilt retreat vs. a nice day outside, I'd probably still pick the retreat :)

To make a short story long, I recently went through a phase of not being interested in quilting - shocking, I know. I discovered, however, that sorting through one's fabric stash can wake the quilting interest like nothing else (other than maybe seeing an inspiring quilt or a quilting retreat).

So in the midst of all my sorting, I picked several fabrics that I wanted to make quilts from and started cutting pieces for the quilt retreat (not in either of the two pictures next to this statement).

I'll start with some pictures from the retreat, held in a beautiful Victorian B&B, then I'll show you my progress from the retreat.

Let's start with the two retreat organizers getting ready for strip poker. I love that game! Especially when you find out that we all had to bring ten 3" strips for this game. But it's just so funny to think that the older ladies (the two organizers are the youngest of the bunch besides me) are getting ready for strip poker! The young lady reading the magazine is my friend, who doesn't live here and isn't in my quilt guild, but started working on a quilt last year and came to (almost) finish the project and visit with me.

Here she is working on her gorgeous quilt. It was her first own work and it turned out beautifully!

I helped her with the design and getting started, but she plowed on by herself quite a bit, which led to interesting techniques, like attaching the binding to the top of the quilt before the sandwiching, cutting the corners or the binding (but luckily leaving enough overhang that we could make it continuous again and do mitered corners), and pin basting with about 10x fewer pins that I would use :) I think that having the binding on before sandwiching might actually be a benefit because it gives something to hold on to and keep the fabric taut when stippling close to the edge... just means you have to sew around the whole quilt twice...

A former quilting teacher of mine was playing around with free-motion filler designs by Leah Day on this quilt (and I think I got her onto that blog, so I take some pride in showing this quilt, too :) Each blue square has a different filler design in it. This lady is an excellent free-motion quilter already, so this was just a way to try new patterns rather than practicing her skills.

One of the organizers was working on this beautiful batik quilt. The temperature rises a couple of degrees from just looking at it, don't you think?

The guild's president brought back a quilt she was working on last year at the retreat. She added a border and some more quilting since then... Rumour has it that the son this quilt was made for didn't want it - he liked another one better. His loss, I say ;)

My friend also brought a quilt that was hand-pieced (very meticulously!) by her great-great-aunt. We figure it was pieced before 1950. It's made of old shirting materials amongst others, and it's a bit scrappy. As in, one section has one type of blue, then she seemed to have run out of the material and switched to another blue print. My friend is hand-quilting this one, after she found it in a cardboard box in her parents' basement.

Here we all are with our projects!

I think, I'll leave you in suspense for a couple of days as I don't have much else to report this week, so I may as well save the detailed view of what I'm holding up (I'm on the bottom right :) for Friday!

Quilt Show 5

2010-11-05T17:07:00.000-07:00

Are you ready for some more quilts from the quilt show???

I'm off to my annual quilt retreat tonight! Yay! I've got 5 projects all prepped to work on, probably much more than I'll ever be able to tackle, but I should get quite a bit done :)

2010 Fall Blogger's Quilt Festival

2010-11-02T10:01:00.000-07:00

I tried to decide which quilt to feature for the 2010 Fall Blogger's Quilt Festival, and I have to say, I still think my Mossy Monkey Mechanic is pretty darn cool! It's really the quilting that gets me every time! The polyester batting I used added such dimension to the pebble quilting - I never would have expected it, and I actually used the poly stuff in a "don't-really-care, it's just an experimental quilt" way, trying to use it up and switch to cotton/bamboo batting entirely.

Now I'm not so sure I won't go out and buy more poly stuff for whenever I plan to pebble quilt!!!

I made this quilt because ever since starting to quilt, I wanted to make a Monkey Wrench quilt - I'm intrigued that a bunch of triangles can make swirls!

I cheated a bit, though I consider it a wise choice to use a shortcut, and used a slightly different block design/arrangement (the brown sections are solid squares instead of triangles from the adjacent blocks). Hey, it worked for me and saved a bit of piecing time! Plus, I love figuring out the math for stuff like that :)

As I mentioned in my original post (and I don't think I can say it any better, so I will copy some of these descriptions ad verbatim): Don't you want to jump on the little pebbles and bounce???

They look just as lovely from the back!

I've already raved so much about this quilt in other posts, and shared my little mishap in the piecing progress, that I'll just leave you with pictures of all this quilty goodness!

I just want to shrink (yes, just like in "Honey, I shrunk the kids") and bounce on it, from pebble to pebble, and then run and hop along the swirls... I've never had a quilt make me feel like that before - it's a teensy bit scary :)

I'm off to push my fingers into pebbles again and giggle at the puffiness :) (Better than that bubble-wrap!)

Progress and What the HECK??

2010-11-01T08:25:00.000-07:00

I've made a bit of progress on my Blue String Quilt QUiP! Originally, I had only 9 blocks done, now I'm up to 24 and it's starting to take shape. I like it!

Of course, this scrap-using project is producing new, smaller scraps. Sigh.
I just can't bear to throw fabric out if it's wider than 1/2" in at least one direction. So I started a new project and that's taking on a life of its own, literally!

I'm admit I'm kind of scared of where this is going.

What I did was layer brown cotton with batting and light blue cotton. I didn't even tape it to the floor, just smoothed it out and pin-basted it. Then I laid out blue scraps in random arrangements on the brown side until I was happy with the layout. Pinned those down and started free-motion quilting about 1/4" inside each shape, somewhat like the Ticker Tape quilts that have been going around blog land.

I thought it'd just be an artsy baby quilt, but like I said, it's starting to grow out of proportion . Because I started quilting, without a plan. This is like doodling on a sewing machine. Things just happen, my hands just move, my brain just comes up with ideas.

Here's how far I've gotton.

I started with an eye in the center, then I tried to remember some quilting I'd seen on Diane Gaudinsky's blog, but I was too lazy to turn on the computer, so I tried to do some stuff from memory. There's a bit of Diane-Shiko to be glimpsed on the right edge of the quilt.

Next, my hands wanted to do a double feather, with two rows of feathers along the shaft. Okay. I also wanted to leave my mark on this quilt, so I outlined my hand, not sure what I'll quilt inside it yet. I'm considering doing the actual lines on my finger prints etc. That wasn't enough though, so in the setting sun, I outlined the shadow of my face on a piece of paper taped to the wall and quilted that with some wild and flowing hair in the top right corner. Once the quilt is done, I'll show you some detail shots.

I just took the photo above quickly the other night to have a record of this quilt before it totally gets out of hand. It now has enough quilting on it to classify as wall-hanging, since it's getting too stiff for a quilt.

Who knows where this is going next... I'll be as surprised as you, that's for sure. It feels strange when a project gets a life of its own like this. Next, my quilts will grow legs and take over the world, uhoh!

Happy Halloween!

2010-10-31T05:11:00.000-07:00

We have a great farmers market in town - it's held every Saturday, and yesterday I saw the most amazing and cute cup cakes with eyes! I bought one of each kind with eyes - they're adorable!

So let me introduce you to the Mummy:

The Blue Monster:

And the Spider:

Look at his cool legs!

I can't decide which one's my favourite, the mummy (so cute behind all its bandages) or the monster :) I saw the monster first and thought it was the grouchy garbage can dude from Sesame Street - that shows how much I'm into halloween, right??? *Grins*

On the way home from the market, I was thinking I might just keep the cup cakes and look at them forever (so cute!), but I figured the cup cakes might grow mold. Then I thought I could just keep the tops with the decorations and let them get hard for eternal gazing at the cuteness - the cup cakes themselves would be quite happy to reside in my stomach.

However, I made that plan without considering the Blue Monster!

Look, he ate both his buddies within minutes of me taking the group photo! Gasp! I guess he didn't like liquorice - he left the spider legs behind...

So no display of cute monsters in the next few months...

Now, before I go and wipe some icing off my chin (how did that get there, anyway????), I need to announce that Prince Edward Island, Canada, yes the far north (*smile*) has had its first snow of the winter yesterday! I took pictures to prove it!

See those white specks against the blue house??? Yep, that's snow, take my word for it! *So* exciting!

It turned into a gentle hail (does that exist??? It looked like hail but it drifted instead of falling and hitting things at high speed) not 5 min later (and then sunshine 10 min after that), but I'm pretty pumped about winter right now anyway.

Yeah, I know - that'll last just until the 2nd good snow storm and the 3rd morning of scraping my car...

... but hey, the days are getting pretty cozy starting around 5pm! Candle light just warms the heart, doesn't it?

Discovering Batiks

2010-10-28T10:01:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, I bought 4", 5" and 6.5" pre-cut packs on etsy, and recently I added some 5" charm packs from Connecting Threads to the mix. I do like the look of batiks, though I'm still trying to figure out how to mix and match them.

The pre-cuts have quite a mix of plant prints and tie-died fabrics, which is nice - all patterned would be a bit much for me.

Can you tell I can't get enough of these? :)

I decided that these batiks would be handy to try a larger curved-piecing project, so I printed out Crispy's 6" block for a drunkard's path, and lo and behold, once I added the seam allowance to her template, the pieces fit perfectly onto charm packs and the 6.5" squares I have :)
I did one practice block to make sure the seams are working - I'll redo this one though, because I have a near-pucker in the center, must practice the curved-piecing a bit more!

I played around with colour matches for a while - I'm going to have to spend some more time on this, because some of the combinations don't have enough contrast...

This will be my main project for the quilt retreat which is coming up in a bit more than a week, hooray! I'm so very much looking forward to the retreat! (Same as last year).

Quilt Class!!

2010-10-26T11:24:00.000-07:00

Here are some photos of a recent quilt class. I'm teaching my whirly quilt (see the quilty tutorial page above) in different sizes. It's wonderful to see all the different colour schemes my 7 students chose for their quilts!

We've got blue and pink...

... camouflage...

Yellow and blue...

(as you can see, we're working in a library! It's in a small junior high school, cute place out in the country)

... and a few other combinations.

This lady wasn't quite happy with the pattern, so I showed her a few other layouts possible with HSTs. Boy, what a can of worms I opened! Too much choice can be a problem, we found out, but I think she enjoyed trying all the different layouts!

One of the ladies has this neat needle cushion ring - check it out!

It consists of a plastic bottle cap with two small holes drilled into it and a rubber band (hair elastic type) protruding from it (your finger goes through the loop). Into the bottle cap, you glue the bunched up edges of a fabric circle filled with batting (green plaid here). The lady edge covers up the bottle cap. Pretty handy!

A couple of my students are getting close to finishing their quilt tops. Soon we'll put on borders and start sandwiching! 5 more weeks to go... It's all so very exciting!

Tickle Feather

2010-10-24T06:43:00.000-07:00

My disappearing 9 patch variation has a name, thanks to the quilting I chose: Tickle Feather :)

I decided that all that white space around the quilt was primer property for some feather quilting practice.

I don't like marking patterns very much, so I just outlined a wavy line that was mirrored on both sides of the quilt and free-hand quilted the feathery loops. It's quite obvious it was done free-hand, but hey, it's a cuddly baby quilt and not a show quilt!

In the narrow strips, I quilted a doubly-looped vine, there wasn't that much space for anything bigger.

I also quilted-in-the-ditch around the large squares in the D9Ps - at least turning a baby quilt around and around is manageable!

Here's the quilt before washing:

And after (note that this is the crinkliest of all the pictures I have - lighting makes a big difference...)

All the pink chalk markings came right out of the white (PHEW!!).

One more project checked off on the QUIPs list!

Quilt Show 4

2010-10-22T14:16:00.000-07:00

At the quilt show, there is always a Merchant Mall with local and regional fabric stores represented. I restrained myself (you should have seen the batiks!) and only bought three 1-yard cuts (which I don't need, but hey...).

Because it's tradition by now that one fabric bleeds, you know what's coming. To my surprise, the red fabrics turned out lovely, but the grey ran like it was being chased! Right onto some Wonderland fabrics, boohoo. I should just stop being so lazy and do separate loads. I know. I thought I had prewashed it enough, but I guess I didn't take the fabrics out of the machine quickly enough after the spin cycle.

Alright, more quilt show pics!

This next one I had seen at show and share at a monthly meeting before. It was neat: the lady who made it fussy-cut the flowers out of the fabric used for some of the circle quarters and then appliqued them exactly on the fabrics in the circle, so effectively, the flowers were growing out of the circle onto the surrounding fabrics.

This photo was taking looking straight at the quilt, though when you look at just a section of it, it seems that I was taking a slanted photo of it, eh? Neat optical illusion!

This one was part of the mystery quilt we made. Mine is in the right side bar titled "Mussel Mystery" if you want to refresh your memory. However, I chose a different layout. I have to smile everytime I look at this quilt, because the quilter also didn't follow the pattern, though from what I've heard her say, it was unintentional. Suffice it to say that the pattern was quite symetrical in its block arrangements! ;) I think it's a cute quilt and is quite quirky thanks to the non-traditonal layout.

I love how visible the quilting is in this quilt! If I remember correctly, it was quilted by hand!

Let's end with this impressive quilt: At least part if not all of the blocks were inherited by one of the quilters in my guild from her grandmother, made with the fabrics of the time. It's handquilted, and even the practice block (has a different background fabric but it took me forever to find it since it blends in so well) is included. Don't you love old quilts with a story?

Granny Square Endeavours

2010-10-20T16:47:00.000-07:00

When I had strep throat last month and was off from work several days, I was so bored that I started a whole bunch of new projects: quilting, knitting and crocheting. Apart from the quilting, which is of course ongoing, the crochet project has taken off the most. I'm making a granny squares blanket. Not sure how big yet, these things tend to get heavy. It might just be decorative for the back of the couch.

I chose warm colours, red, pink, purple and brown - I guess I was craving comfort ;) I bought the wool at a store around the corner; it's Island-made and dyed here as well. The store also sells fantastic knitwear, made right in front of your eyes at the back of the store on big machines.

Here's my progress to date, about 45 squares. I have another 45 squares in preparation at various stages. I'm making all possible variations of pink, purple and red in the center, with a brown outline. Amazing how different the squares look just by changing up the colours in each layer, isn't it??

Imagination at the Show

2010-10-18T07:16:00.000-07:00

My Imagination 1 quilt was one of the ones I submitted to the show, so here are some photos of the (pretty much) completed quilt. It's not absolutely finished, but I'm tired of working on it and it's perfectly functional, so let's call it usefully-finished :)

I was only slightly upset that they draped this quilt after I painstakingly sewed on sleeves, hrumpf! *grins*

I'm glad I put the orange/red and purple zinger circles on the quilt, imagine it without them!

Here's a section that's not quite finished - something will go between the circles in the light green border, some kind of connecting motif...

The lighting at the show wasn't ideal, it was also already dark out, but you can just make out the outline quilting around the square shapes/strips.

What does this make you think of? Lilypads that a frog just jumped on to cause the concentric circles? Planets?

Here you can see the creative vine ranking along the border, it's growing square flowers with squares inside them.

Circles, circles, circles...

Who knows, I might be stitching on this quilt in years to come, adding to it when I feel like it :)

It's such a super soft quilt (thanks to the fabrics, some kind of special weave), I'm guaranteed to use that one when I feel under the weather and want to be cozy!

Quilt Show 3

2010-10-16T14:10:00.000-07:00

This is the setup at the quilt show, narrow rows with frames parallel to each other. It was hard to take photos until I realized I could peak in between the quilts in one row to take photos of quilts in the next row...

These squares were tiny!!! Check it out:

Another "convergence"-themed quilt!

Drunkard's Path - that's next on my list! These ones are of course arranged in circles, not a path, but I think the block is still called the same.

Isn't it amazing how 3-D this quilt looks?

This next quilt was made by a lady who was at quilt retreat with me last year. It's a PEI beach scene done as a bargello. From the bottom, you have grass, lupins (inasive here but much loved by tourists and post-card-photographers), algae washed up on shore, sand, water, a sunset, and the sky. In every colour strip the quilter did a different free-motion quilting motif. Sorry, no close-up, I was on a roll at this point, zooming from gap to gap and trying not to miss any quilts :)

Tree Of Hope

2010-10-14T12:32:00.000-07:00

A professor I know from my post-graduate years and who helped me a lot when the going was rough has been fighting cancer for several years. He's about to get a bone marrow transplant and more chemotherapy in the coming weeks. I've stayed in touch with him since my graduation almost 3 years ago, and when I heard about the transplant, I decided to send him a little something to show that I'm thinking of him. I'm not all that good with words when it comes to sad occasions (you should have seen me struggle with a condolence card I was writing for someone else yesterday), so I did what I'm good at: quilting.

I opted for a small wall-hanging - if he likes it, maybe it'll brighten up his hospital room for him!
I zig-zagged around each leaf and the stem to hold the pieces in place.

Next, I added a bit of swirly quilting for some movement in the quilt - could be wind swirling around the tree?

I used black backing fabric...

... with the different colours of thread I used, the quilt is almost reversible :)

Because of the light background fabric, the quilting really stands out from the shadows that are created - I like that effect a lot!

Often such trees are called trees of life, but he already has life, so I'm calling it tree of hope, since that's what I hope he has lots of!
I hope he likes it and that it adds some happiness to this tough time. While I was making the quilt, I also mused about the connection of transplant and tree. I think I chose a good metaphor for the whole situation, wouldn't you say?

Filmstrip Cafe Open For Business

2010-10-12T16:47:00.000-07:00

So, I didn't lie about having two finishes on my QUIPs list!

I've been busy binding my Filmstrip Cafe quilt - loving this quilt was enough motivation for me!
I was too lazy to clip it up to my quilt display, so I tried taking a picture of this quilt on my bed - it was difficult! Here's the best you're going to get ;)

The quilting on this puppy is straight, all of it. I did lines 1/4" from the seam on the brown sashing, then about 1" in on the printed fabrics because the 8x8" squares seemed too big to leave unquilted.

A few more parallel lines on the border...

... and quilting in the ditch for the stripy part of the quilt.

I like the picture above because the blue-brown fabric is my favourite in this quilt (and it's not even from the Bistro line of fabrics ;) I think it's tranquility...
I'm proud to say that I did an excellent job on the quilting in the ditch. I hardly ever slipped up and crossed the seam, phew!

I really enjoyed working with the binding fabric - it was a bargain purchase in a general fabric store last year and it handled really well - it ironed flat, the sewing threw it went smoothly and it felt amazingly cool and smooth.

This quilt has been done for about a week, and I've just been staring at it. I think it will migrate to my couch soon to get some usage ;)

Northern Solitude

2010-10-10T07:03:00.000-07:00

ASIDE: Isn't today an amazing date? Can you imagine how many people are getting married today??? 10-10-10! :)

2nd ASIDE: Ah, you should know me by now ;) Of course I went and googled my question. I didn't find out how many people are planning to get married, though something might be in the news tomorrow - instead, I found out quirky stuff about this date from this site. For example:

--> In mathematics, the date of 10/10/10 or 101010 is divisible by the number of days in a week, which is seven (7), which is considered to be very lucky. However, the date also appears to have a yin and yang situation where the date is also divisible by the number six (6), which is considered to be very unlucky.

--> It is even more significant that the date 10/10/10 at 10:10am (10:10) or 10:10pm (22:10) to be a very lucky time. One reason for this comes from the story of George Inmad who had been deaf since birth. On 10/10/1910 at 10:10pm (22:10) he suddenly was able to hear with no explanation from the doctors. It was a medical mystery and the only conclusion they had was that he was very lucky. From then on, it is believed that you will have good luck if you touch your ears at 10:10am or pm.

Back to your regular feature: quilts!

Only 1.5 years after I started it, this little quilt is finished! What pushed me in the end??? Someone I know wanted to buy it for his first grandchild :)

I added a label and a bit of extra quilting on the squares, and two days later it went to its new home.

In the end, the quilting consists of outline quilting on the squares:

... some motives being outlined in the squares and something I saw on Dianne Gaudinsky's blog (see my blog list on the right) in the narrow light blue border:

(This photo makes the quilt look huge with the background glimpse, doesn't it? It's only the regular 30x40" I use for baby quilts...)

In some squares, I quilted along lines of the print, e.g. along the green vines in the dark square below:

This border seemed like a good idea when I started, but was very intense - when I finally finished it, I was in no mood to do anything in the wide border, so it's left unquilted - incidentally, having finished the blue border quilting was also when I put the quilt away until last week.

Tsh-tshing, Finish #1 on my "QUIPs To Finish in 2010" list on the right! :)

PS: I wonder why I put the dark green square next to the brown square in the centre... hmm. Must not have known the trick of taking a photo of my layout and then checking that out instead of the actual quilt - photos give a much better impression of the overall layout, I find. Do you have a trick like that?

Yesterday, I baked a lovely apple cake with caramel sauce that Leslie showed on her beautiful blog:

I thought I had a bundt pan but couldn't find it despite searching and searching - only then did I realize that I thought about buying one and then ended up not to ;) Senility is setting in!

Also, I went to a National Park yesterday to go for a hike. I had a kite along that I bought this summer. I've realized there is no easier way to recapture childhood than to go and fly a simple kite (i.e. nothing fancy, just the regular diamond shape with a tail!).

Go ahead, try it!

Quilt Show 2

2010-10-08T10:11:00.000-07:00

Let's do 10 quilts today! Just photos! We'll start off with something familiar :)

Quilt Show Part 1

2010-10-06T07:13:00.000-07:00

Alright, here come the quilt show installments. I'll show them to you in small groups to avoid overload, and this way, you'll probably get to see almost all the quilts in the show without feeling like you just spent 3 hours in an art gallery and your head is bursting! :)

Here are some of the small ones:

Drunkard's path - I liked the colours in this one. I really want to make a curvy quilt! I probably just have to sit down and start is all.

The cream quilt on the bottom left won best of show - a quilt guild award for best craftsmanship in a quilt done entirely by the same person (a lot of guild members have their quilts quilted by another hand-quilter or a long-arm machine-quilter).

Detail of the hand-quilting and applique. The quilt is "Anne of Green Gables"-themed. In case you're not familiar with this book - it's written my L.M. Montgomery who lived on PEI. It's quite a famous book especially among young girls and even more so among Asian (Japan!) young girls but also women (not sure if they just all read the book when they were younger). According to a newspaper article for the 100 year anniversary of the book's publication, Anne's popularity in Japan is explained by her red hair (rare among the Japanese :)), her perseverance in the face of difficulties (a trait highly respected in Japan; Anne is an orphan that had a pretty crappy childhood in Nova Soctia until she is adopted by an elderly couple in PEI), and her free-spirit and imagination. So the hand-written part between the two figures (Anne and Gilbert - her sweet-heart in later books after she cracks a writing tablet on his head when he calls her carrot-head in the first book) just states their names and the book's anniversary.

The round quilt in the picture above (2 up) was pretty neat-looking: a round bargello:

In the next few pictures, you can see several convergence quilts

(bottom middle in the pastel colours)

(bottom right, purple and black curves)

(Top left, grey and white)

Itwas neat to see what type of fabrics other people used compared to my example I'm working on (see sidebar). I think this lady used the same book by Ricky Tims and tried all the different versions described in the book. Here are some close-ups of the appliqued versions she did:

I liked the border on this quilt because it wasn't straight. The quilter tried to explain to me how that was done but I didn't follow her at all...

This next one is a neat idea but I don't think I'd ever make one, wouldn't know what to do with it. I think you make two quilt tops (very small), then cut them in strips and alternate the strips from the two pieces onto some firm (interfaced?) fabric. Then it is sewn onto a background like an accordion and depending on which side of the quilt you stand on, you'll see either the first or second quilt top. A bit like those images you tilt and something in the image moves, e.g. a frog leaping...

And funny enough, I just had a conversion with Crispy about New York Beauty blocks, asking her if there are more complicated ones that the one she was showing on her blog - well, here I had a picture of some variations all along!

Left-over Decision

2010-10-04T13:43:00.000-07:00

Hmm, I'm about to post about a project that I didn't even include in my QUIP (QUilts In Progress) list the other day. Dang.

Anyway, the left overs from my WonderChain quilt are still kicking around. I've decided on a layout:

There'll be grey strips between the corner blocks as borders.

Now I'm thinking I should make it at least lap sized! I feel like something other than baby-quilts - I'm getting too many of those.

I guess I'll add it to my list now that it's not just a pile of HSTs!

Year's End Challenge

2010-10-02T16:10:00.000-07:00

So, as I mentioned the other day, I have a lot of QUIPs - to help me keep track of progress and share that with you, I've put the images of all the quilts I'd like to finish before 2011 rolls around in the sidebar with those tasks that remain to be done. You'll notice that I have (nearly) two finishes already since that post :)

Quilt Show

2010-10-02T14:03:00.000-07:00

I'm slowly getting my photos from the quilt show organized. There'll be some photo-heavy posts coming up :)

Here are 3 to start you off - some of the small quilts, wall-hangings etc. and one of me demonstrating (i.e. work on a project of my choice so interested people can watch and ask questions about quilting).

As you can see, I was working on my blue string quilt. Made a little bit of progress, but it took long enough just to set up and pack everything up again - the two hours I was there flew by!

Who, Me???

2010-09-29T19:22:00.000-07:00

Remember the massive give-away Sew, Mama, Sew! had a few months back in May?

Well, of course I browsed around and found lots of cool blogs and lots of things I wanted to win. I don't know how many give-away's I entered, but hooray, I won one, at http://corvidarium.blogspot.com. This is weird for me, as I rarely win compared to some people out there.

I think my odds were slightly improved by only having 2 other contestants. Hmm.

Either way, after emails getting lost in cyberspace and one parcel getting lost in the mail (within Canada, not even international mail!), I finally received my winnings the other day: these supercute home-made magnets:

They have fabric glued below the glass and look quite nice on my fridge. I'm not off to send my thank you photo to Wendy!

Seal watching...

2010-09-28T09:06:00.001-07:00

... and getting paid for it!

The other day during a field work trip (I do aquaculture research), we came across a seal colony on a sandbank. The boat scared them off the sandbank, but they came really close to the boat in the water - some of them were whopping huge!

This guy's head would have been bigger than mine. He was massive (I'm assuming it was a he).

There were lots of babies for some reason - I thought they're born earlier in the year.. hmm..

In the end, there was this ring of seal heads bobbing in a wide circle around us, that's the last image above. It was strange being watched like that!

This little baby stayed behind till the end; it was either really young or sick. There was another one that barely lifted its head. Don't think that one will last long.

See how close there were to our boat? They made many big splashes, presumably showing us how strong and dangerous they are.

We also saw some bald eagles, adults and juveniles, but there were far up in the sky of course - too far for the camera.

So sometimes work is pretty exciting.

Quilt Show Last Minute Prep

2010-09-25T13:46:00.000-07:00

This weekend is my guild's quilt show!

I was there yesterday, "demonstrating". It was really quiet since I had the supper time slot, but I didn't get much done in the 2 hours I was there. By the time I had set up my machine, laid out my fabrics (plus made 3 trips to the tea room for cookies since I didn't have any supper) and chatted with a few guild members and visitors, it was already time to pack up again! I think I sewed about 15 seams max :) I was working on my blue string quilt though, so that's at least something! (Yay, working on my QUIPs.)

But let me tell you about getting ready for the quilt show (there'll be more posts about the show later)! I finished sewing on all my sleeves on Monday, hooray. (Turns out two of my quilts didn't need sleeves because they were draped over things instead of hung, hrumpf).

I had a tiny problem regarding the drop off, because it was scheduled during working hours. Luckily, the lady who chaired the show committee parks in front of my house on work days, so I could do a drop-off with her at 7:20 in the morning. That was Wednesday morning. Tuesday night, I packed up the quilts - all 10 of them. That's when I discovered that I never removed the chalk markings on the border of my WonderChain quilt. Uhoh. I had been told to remove them by washing and drying the quilt. Well, that wasn't about to happen at 10pm.

Pink chalk markings still here :(

I tried rubbing the borders together, but that didn't seem to do anything. Next, I took a moist rag, still not much luck, plus the quilt was getting damp of course.

Then I had an idea: a brush. I didn't want to use a used toothbrush and also didn't want to sacrifice a new one, but I found a potato brush in my kitchen (I never used it for potatoes, it was one of those purchases).

Salvation

So I scrubbed, scrubbed, scrubbed all around the border of my quilt. I felt pretty silly doing that at 10:30pm, let me tell you. But it worked :)

No more chalk! :)

With that crisis averted, I continued rolling up quilts until I got to my Imagination 1 quilt. Uhoh. Did I ever finish quilting that? Of course not *grins*. Well, there was no short cut to this one. I found three seams that were obviously unfinished (e.g. a circle stopping halfway around) and sat down to stitch those up in a hurry.

See where I'm pointing? That's where the green line ended - too obvious to leave as is.

There is more to be done on this, but it's filling in spaces and since there's not rhyme or reason to this quilt, no one but me knows that, so it's hanging in the show right now, officially finished, but you and I know better :)

Revelation

2010-09-23T12:47:00.000-07:00

At last week's quilt guild meeting, I was talking to a fellow quilter about my bargellow attempt.

I was huffing and puffing about the tedious alignment of all the seams, and she said "You aligned the seams? But you don't do that in a bargello, you have all the seams in the middle of the adjacent squares."

Oh?

OOOOHHH?

So I went online and googled Bargello quilt, and my quilter friend was right!

It's quite obvious, the rows of the bargello quilts are all offset 1/2 square. Do you know how much work that would have saved me? Plus, I was a bit baffled about how steep the curved line turned out to be. Big *SIGH*!

Maybe using a pattern has its advantages to just winging it from having seen bargellos on a few internet photos???

I'm chuckling quite a bit about this new-found knowledge and my own bargello version!

Maybe I will do a full-sized one now, I just have to start fresh - can't really do one section with the seams aligned and all the others off-set!

Have you done something funny but dumb like this recently?

Pakistan

2010-09-21T05:07:00.001-07:00

***Warning: this is a plea for Pakistan donations - I don't mean to preach, I'm basically stating my view points and making an appeal to consider helping out - if you're not into that kind of appeal, better not read this post :) ***

Well, we've all heard enough about the flood disaster in Pakistan in the news this summer.

I finally got off my butt and donated money to the relief effort.

I'm not sure if the US government has a similar program, but Canada is matching private donations until October 3rd - what a great way to double my impact!

Image from geogteacher.wordpress.com

I looked at the different relief organizations that work in Pakistan and participate in the "Government Matched Donations" program and decided to support the following:

Medecins Sans Frontier

SOS Children's Villages

UNICEF

I chose these 3 organization because I really support their work (MSF: independent medical help in sometimes scary places, SOS CV: support for orphans, abandoned children and families and UNICEF: child protection, survival and development) and because in the case of SOS CV and UNICEF, I grew up watching my grandmother and mother support these organizations, so they feel familiar.

I would like to encourage all of you to look at some relief organizations and see if their causes interest you and maybe donate some money or time to them. Some of you might already have done this, and I'm grateful that you did - I know that my contribution won't move and shake the world, but add yours and everyone else's to it, and we might just make a difference in some lives.

I just hope that if I ever need emergency relief, someone like me who can spare the money easily (I won't starve or be homeless next month after making my donations) will donate and make a difference in my life. And in some way, I feel like I'm paying my dues for having had the pure luck of being born where I was, with sufficient food (well, maybe excessive food? More than I need, anyway ;) ), shelter and education.

As a final note, this post is in no way meant to make anyone feel bad for not donating to the Pakistan Relief Fund. I know that especially quilters are extremely generous, and many of you donate quilts to local or international causes! And even if you decide against any kind of donations, that is entirely up to you - I'm merely posting this to draw attention to one of the many problems in the world!

To Do This Fall

2010-09-19T12:44:00.000-07:00

Okay, once this quilt show is over, I need to tackle a few quilts-in-progress (hmm, that could make QUIPs, I almost like that better than WIPs :) Not so much into black leather, haha!). Mostly, because some of these projects are starting to be a tad embarrassing...

So here goes, my 2010 Fall To Do list

The two biggest culprits:

(1) Disaster Triple Irish Chain (started ~ January 2009)

This quilt came together so quickly and has been collecting dust while waiting for a border and finishing ever since. At some point I considered foregoing the border, but I think that would look weird... So, onwards!

(2) Northern Solitude Baby Quilt (started ~ May 2009)

I'm not sure how much is actually left to do on this *hand-quilted* quilt, but it's not on my completed list. I might be as simple as adding a label, but first, I have to dig it out and decide to finish what ever needs finishing on it!

LESSER CULPRITS (i.e. much more recent starts, meaning started at least in 2010!)

(3) D9P Variation

To Do: easy peasy: quilt and bind - I already have the backing picked out!

(4) Free As A Bird

To Do: work up courage to try intricate whole-cloth-type-quilting in the grey background triangles. Oooh, it's on the bias, ooh, it'll stretch and puff?!? Scary!

(5) Blue String Quilt

To Do: everything, yikes! No progress on this since this picture was taken...

(6) Bargello in Yellow and Brown

To Do: decide what this will be: a baby quilt, a wall hanging, something BIGGER?

(7) Sunset on Water

To Do: same as above, but worse - it's not even baby-size yet :)

(8) Filmstrip Cafe

To Do: Decide if I like my choice of backing, then quilt and bind!

Now, the million $ question for you: Do you think I can do this before 2011 is here? Well, I hope so! It would feel so good to have all these quilts done. My only obstacle will be that I'll have about 10 more quilts started in 2010 by the time I've finished all the old QUIPs ;) And of course that working under pressure isn't half the fun...

Hmm, I like seeing all these quilt photos in one post, maybe I should do a year in review post this new years... they seem popular, anyway!

Sleeves! Doh!

2010-09-16T05:01:00.000-07:00

One thing I hadn't realized about the quilt show (one more week to go!!): the quilts have to be hung somehow - duh!

So for the past few weeks, I've been cursing while hand-sewing on various scraps of fabric as sleeves.

Now I wish I hadn't entered so many quilts into the show ;) (12 or so?) Luckily, many of them are baby-quilts, so they don't need sleeves, wahoo!

So Many Stitches

2010-09-14T12:21:00.000-07:00

As promised, here's Finish #2, the Love U in green quilt. Concentric squares take a long time to hand-quilt, I found out. I don't know how hand-quilters do the intricate patterns (on traditional quilts), which must include thousands of stitches! (Hundreds of thousands? Millions?)

There's something about hand-quilting that just looks more traditional, isn't there???

Or maybe I just choose square quilt-patterns that I wouldn't do with free-motion (wobbly straight lines for me) or a walking foot (too much turning) machine quilting.

I find that printed flanelette on the back makes the quilting and any mistakes disappear, but you can see the pattern even on this small picture.

As mentioned, I did concentric squares in the solid green blocks. The prints are MODA Love U, I picked all the green and yellow prints and substitute a few from my stash to reach the right number.

For the border, I tried another stencil out of my collection - I'm usually more a fan of wavy lines, but the straight edges of this braid seemed to suit this quilt.

Now that I look at it on the photo, the briad reminds me of a strand of DNA ;) Such a science geek, hahaha!

I might yet stich in the ditch around the little yellow squares in the 4 corners, they look a bit lonely right now, and that wouldn't take too much effort.

Overall, despite taking quite a while (4 or 5 months, I think), I'm glad I hand-quilted this quilt and even more glad that it's done!

I won't even show you a picture of my pour right middle finger (the one that I use to push the needle through). My ring finger is starting to have the same hole in it, because I switched over when the middle finger was too damaged to touch a needle ;) It'll heal, and it better, because I still have about 3 circles to quilt on my BIG hand-quilting project, the Imagination 1 quilt, and that must be done for the quilt show! (Though I bet no one would notice a half circle in among all the concentric circles! So the pressure to finish is only moderate - apart from my pride!)

Soon, I'll be ready to baste and quilt the Filmstrip Cafe quilt, still debating quilting options. I might do parallel straight lines on it, as I've seen it on other quilts and liked it. Oh well, time for another anti-strep-throat pill, ugh.