Let The Game Begin (Soccer Quilt)

Put the last stitch into the binding last night!

The bouncy strips came out a bit faint, so I might sew over them a bit more to fill in the strip
Very multi-coloured binding. See the piece of blue heavy construction-zone fabric from the Vampire Quilt?

Time For Some Binding

I'm going away this weekend but am taking the vampire and soccer ball quilts with me to bind. I just have the hand stitching part left, oh, and I guess the label... can't forget that!

The vampire quilt is getting black binding, but for the soccer ball quilt I've pieced all my leftover strips together for a multi-coloured binding. No idea how that'll turn out :)

The Game Is Saved!

Thank you so much for your comments, the foot/leg was an excellent idea and I've whipped one up this weekend. I also liked the idea to use thread and lots of stitching to create the motion "bouncing" bands. I had experimented with black flanelette, but it was to crass and I don't have gray. So I'll use a zigzag stitch back and forth and will outline it with a straight stitch, probably about 3 strips, staggered up and down going in the space between the ball and the foot do indicate direction. I'm much much happier with the quilt now! Now there's a reason for the ball to be on that quilt ;)

Ball of Despair (Help!!)

Ah, the more I look at my last entry, the more I'm horrified about the quilt top. What was I thinking? If you have suggestions how to save this that don't involve undoing the soccerball quilting I've completed already or unpinning the rest of the quilt, they'd be incredibly welcome.

Maybe I could gift it anonymously??? ... ??

The Process Of Going To Bed

So, the little fellow whom I'm making the soccer quilt for has a birthday coming up soon. Therefore it was time... time to get this quilt done and get the quilt to him, especially since his family also just put their house up for sale and will move a 15-hour drive away. So I plonked myself on the couch yesterday evening and finished stitching on the soccerball. Don't know if it just looks wonky on the photo, I thought it looked pretty round yesterday...


I zoomed right along and pinned the whole quilt. Now, I'm not really happy with the top, it's totally empty, and I think I might add some applique, but to be honest, I don't want to make this quilt a year-long project, and I wonder if the little guy will just think it's a cool soccer quilt, anyway? Just because the quilt doesn't satisfy my grown-up feminine aesthetic doesn't mean a kid won't like it, right? I'm thinking about maybe adding a 3 or 4 curved strips to add some flying motion to the ball, you know, like you see in cartoons. But the coolest thing would be a person on the lawn of course, a main player so to say. Oh, but will I get this done on time?


[Wow, I just looked at this entry on my page, and when you scroll medium-speed up and down the soccerfield and soccerball-sky fabric have this really weird effect of coming at me. That indicates to me that it's a bit too busy, so maybe a large appliqued person would calm it down a bit? Oh gosh, the work though... I like machine piecing so much better... Sigh. I guess I have a couple of weeks to add to the quilt, and it can always be a going away quilt instead of a birthday quilt...]

Here's the backing, just pieced out of left over flanelette from all my kiddie-quilts.

Ah, and then the true quilter came through... it was 10:30 pm, and I just wanted to carry the quilt from the living room, where I pin, to the little quilt room I have. It was all neatly folded to be added to the other pile of pinned quilts waiting for quilting. That pile is growing because my machine doesn't have a way to lower the feet, so everytime I want to do free-motion quilting, I have to take the machine apart and remove the whole structure with the feet. Bit of a pain, therefore I try to do as much free-motion as I can at once before switching back to directional sewing.

Now, because of all the pink-quilt sewing and flanelette sewing, there was a lot of fuzz in the machine, and it was time to clean it, so when I put down the quilt, I thought: "Oh well, I might as well clean and oil the machine tonight and switch the quilting foot and then I'll be ready for quilting tomorrow."

Then I thought, maybe I should quilt the soccerball with the machine instead of by hand, because it'd be faster and look the same as the rest of the quilt, and they're straight lines and it's a small quilt so turning isn't as much of a problem. So I went ahead and did that...

I quilted once around the ball, then on each side of the seam using cream-coloured thread that would show up nicely on the black.

My poor camera didn't know what to do exposure-wise with this black and white contrast...

It went pretty quickly, and I'm happy to say that I made some progress on dropping the perfectionism - weirdly enough, quilting is helping me do that :) The lines aren't all the same distance from the seam and not always perfectly straight...
Okay, this ball is really much rounder than in this picture...

I like the effect on the back. (See, round after all)

Then I took the machine apart for cleaning and oiling... look at all this pink fuzz!

Cleaned and oiled:

Free-motion (darning) foot attached:

And I almost, *almost* started to do free-motion quilting around the soccerball, but it was close to midnight, and the next day, i.e. today was a workday, so I refrained, barely dragging myself away, and closed shop for the night...

Yep, and that's the danger of entering the quilting room on my way to bed!

Round And Round

My soccerball is shaping up nicely! (Don't be deceived by the wobbly look of the quilt top on my knees)


In true quilting fashion, I took the quilt top with me to do some hand stitching in the hotel last night (part of that worktrip I mentioned in the last blog entry).


I have 4 patches done (i.e. white-black-white-black), and though I was debating whether it would have been better to pin it for now, then quilt it and THEN stitch on the edges to shape it (to avoid any bunching from quilting-related tugging), I think it will be okay, as I pinned it pretty well


and am planning to hand quilt around the hexagons and pentagons anyway.

So Many Good Blogs!

Oh dear, I just checked out one of the updated blogs on my links (to the right of this), and looked at a comment, and followed that link, and found a new quilting blog, which recommended two good quilting blogs, which had comments and links to more quilting blogs, and now my list of blogs I check out has doubled, oh dear. Soon my quilt blog-reading and -blogging will compete with my quilting :) I'm so impressed by AmandaJean's Crazy Mom Quilts blog - I've seen so many recommendations for her blog on my browsing sprees, and I honestly don't know how she manages those 100+ comments she gets on her entries. The last time she had a question about a quilt pattern idea, there were 183 comments (last time I checked, anyway). That's just so impressive!

Anyway, in terms of quilting, I'm in the process of making the soccerball into a round shape and sewing it to the (very very simple top). I've put a back together also, just from some leftover flanelette pieces - love the colours, and almost like it more than the top ;) Photos to follow.

One Soccerball Coming Up!

I spent last night busily sewing away. My first time piecing, hmm. I think I overdid sewing the corners together for the mitering, but I guess there's no harm in that. I like the result, I think it'll be pretty flat once I iron it, as well.


The plan now is to attach it onto the green soccer-field flanelette I have,


and I've changed my mind on the blue soccer ball fabric, that'll be a border or worked into the back (I had planned to use as the light patches on the soccerball, but I like this realistic version much better).

Some Progress On Owls, Soccer Balls and Vampires

Two of the three small quilts I was planning/working on are nearing completion!

I pinned the Owl Quilt...
The overlap of the backing flanelette will be folded around for a border on the top and bottom, and binding.
I also finished the backing for the Vampire Quilt, as well as the borders around the top, and pinned that all together.
I checked, and the eyes do glow in the dark, it looks pretty cool!


For both of these quilt, I ended up piecing batting together, and I tried CrazyMom's method of stitching the edges together instead of simply overlapping them. It's working okay so far.

A big thanks to turning*turning (Mal?), who responded to my query about hexagon-quilting by listing a bunch of useful sites/tutorials on her blog. I used the paper method to piece a soccer ball. When I was halfway through it, it struck me that I could probably have googled it instead of drawing everything out by hand, each piece individually because for some reason, hexagons and pentagons fit better on a curved object than a flat surface, so none of the pieces ended up being quite the same (so no cutting of multiple pieces at once...). I think it worked though, either way, and hopefully I'll manage to sew them all together properly. My first time piecing...

(If only my former supervisor new what good use I've put my MSc thesis draft to...)

Mason's Soccer Quilt

Here's the beginning of a quilt that I'm planning for my little nephew. He really loves soccer, and I found some soccer-themed flanelette.


I hope it won't be too staticky, but I'd like to make both top and back from flanelette, for a softer, kid-friendly feel. He's probably still young enough to think those flashes of lightning under the blanket at night are fun.

Right now my plan is to make a soccerball with the proper soccerball pattern (a dark pentagon surrounded by light hexagons). The dark patches will be black flanelette, the light hexagons the blue soccer ball flanelette. The green will be the background, so that it looks like a soccer ball on a soccer field. That's the plan, anyway.