I Love My Monkey Mechanic!!

Have to say, this turned out to be one of my favourite quilts!!!

I left off in July at this stage:


Wondering what I could do in the in between fields to not take away from the swirly pattern.

Well, after humming and hahing, I just set it aside waiting for inspiration.

It struck.

In a moment of haziness, it seems, because my inspiration was PEBBLES!

Argh. Why??? It took *FOREVER* to pebble all the brown spaces. And it, of course, used a ton of thread, blah blah blah. I have never read a single post about pebble quilting that didn't comment about the amount of thread used ;) It does seem excessive for pebbles, I admit, especially since I go around 2 or 3 times for most pebbles. And in this quilt, in the pointy bits of the 4-armed swirl, I did very tiny, 1/4" pebbles at times. Suffice it to say, I'm all pebbled out now, but I LOVE it! The polyester batting worked really REALLY well for pebble quilting - I felt like I was doing trapunto quilting without actually having to shove more batting in between the layers! But have a look yourself (and don't hold back with the comments :) Doesn't it look awesome? I'm so excited!!!)


Don't you want to jump on the little pebbles and bounce???

And check out the pebbles from the back!


And, oh my goodness, I LOVE the back too!!!


But you probably would like to see the rest of the quilt front? :)


I just want to shrink 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 :)


My puffy swirls are still all there and visible:


Sigh, I could have put another 10 photos of pebbles from all different angles here, but let's not overdo it ;)

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

How Could This Happen???

Okay, so I labelled all my diagonal rows and joined the brown and the green blocks one by one, walking back and forth to the machine because I was worried of mixing up blocks. I did well, no? Monkey Mechanic all put together, looks great, no?

So I made a backing, fairly simple...

Got to basting - I have hardwood floors, so I use masking tape. I hate wasting stuff, so I re-use the bits until they don't stick anymore... I just tape them back on the roll when I'm done - do you re-use your masking tape???


I was out of cotton batting but found a bunch of poly batting that's been waiting to be used up.

And then I started quilting - a very cool pattern, too (I'll show you later).

All went smoothly until I got to this corner. Looks odd, somehow, didn't it? Go back to the top of this post and check out the full quilt and see how long it takes you to notice.

Did any of you spot the mistake in the first photo??? Let me know!!!

I find it hard to spot when you see more than one section of the quilt, but it's a big enough mistake that I didn't want to leave it. Argh, a whole block to rotate!!! Out came the seam ripper.


Here's the same section with the block rotated properly. Are all the little hairs on the back of your neck flattening down again? It just felt wrong before the correction of the block position!


Don't ask me how, but I somehow managed to take out enough basting pins to sew the square back in by machine - the hand-sewing had seemed daunting and I didn't want to applique because the fabric underneath wasn't solid of course, just a 1/4 strip to sew on to.


Here's the block sewed back in. It's not perfect, especially since I couldn't iron the seams flat, and I have a bit of a bump in one corner, but I'll just quilt that flat, no problemo!


And to end on a positive note: here's the quilting I've done so far (all the green is done now, I'm picking a pattern for the brown right now) - I'm loving the effect, and wait till I show you the backing!! (another post ;)


Polyester batting sure make a quilt fluffy!

Mossy Monkey Mechanic

I printed this pattern for a monkey wrench block out AGES ago! Literally within months of starting this blog, which does feel like ages ago :) Well, 273 posts could be ages ago, eh?

I really like the effect of this pattern - rounded shapes with straight-edged pieces, excellent :)

I did a bit of adapting because I didn't agree with the measurements in the pattern - some of the triangles were much too big - I like to avoid cropping when I can and just have the triangles 'fit' to begin with.

I made a test block - yes, I totally learned from that darn cat quilt project that's still 'abandoned' because I cut all the pieces and then realized I miscalculated! - it's in the top left corner of this pictures and worked out well.


So I went ahead and cut out pretty much all the shapes using one brown background fabric and various greens. As I mentioned previously, I've accumulated quite a big green stash and it's time to use some of it up...

... so I can buy more, harharhar!

I decided to build the quilt up slightly different, by making 3 types of blocks. A solid brown one (8" square), a green one made up of 4 green triangles (triangles made from 6" squares), and this pieced block (which is a monkey wrench minus one layer of triangles):


So I got to mass-producing my 30 blocks...


Look at the brown green houses ;)


I carefully avoided having two of the same greens touching in a block. The complete monkey wrench block in this picture was one of my practice blocks.


Truly mass-produced...


Here's my final layout, now you can really see the pattern!


If you want to make this quilt:

For a 5x6 block layout (approx 12" blocks for a quilt ~60"x70"), you need the following:

BROWN:
60 - 2.5" squares
30 - 3.5" squares (cut diagonally to get 60 triangles)
30 - 4.5" squares (cut diagonally to get 60 triangles)
10 - 8" squares (leave whole)
9 - triangles (cut from 8" squares)
2 - triangles (cut from 6" square)

GREEN:
60 - 2.5" squares
30 - 3.5" squares (cut diagonally to get 60 triangles)
30 - 4.5" squares (cut diagonally to get 60 triangles)
30 - 6" squares squares (cut diagonally to get 60 triangles)