Finally, A Label!

I bet you forgot about this quilt! The pink quilt :) It was basically finished, except for threads hanging loose along the seams and a missing label.

Well, I remedied the threads, mostly snipping them, unless I hadn't backstitched.

Then came the search for a label. The quilt is for a friend of mine in Germany, and luckily she's one of those persons you wish had more than one birthday because she's so vocal and clear about what she likes, it's always easy to find something for her.

Anyway, she really likes elephants and I just had some cute elephant fabric arrive in the mail.

So I cut a small patch of the fabric and used that as a label.



I have to say that I really like using printed fabric as label as opposed to plain muslin - might be a good way to use up some of my scraps, too!

Visit At The Quilt Guild

Finally, after months of having conflicting appointments, I've managed to attend a quilt guild meeting in town. It happened to be the last before summer break, phew!

We had a pot luck and a show and share where some people showed us their quilts and home-made bags and explained a bit how they made them or why.

I showed my pink quilt, the baby wheely quilt and the baby pink zig zag and they were all well-received. Some people commented how wonderful it was to have a young quilter among them - I was the youngest by about 10-60 years :)

Here are some impressions:

This table was for a competition they had started in January, about who could finished the most UFOs. Participants sent in photos of the UFOs and in June, the finished objects were tallied. There was a prize for most finished objects (7), most UFOs to start with (23) and the UFO that took longest to finish (60 years, a 4H project started in 1949).

The outgoing guild president (in purple) received a box full of batik blocks in this pattern as thank you. Here they are laid out on the table.

Some other Show and Share items

There were three vendors selling fat quarters - I refrained successfully!


My quilting teachers from last year were at the guild meeting and helped me hold up the pink quilt properly, here it is, the first full view of it!


So, unless I have a conflict of time again in September, I will join the guild at the first meeting. It was a lot of fun to see everyone's work.

Pink Quilt Done, Hooray!!!

Hooray hooray hooray!

I spent 2 hours Tuesday night binding the last side and a half. 7 meters binding in total, phew!
I wanted to get it done before my first quilt guild meeting Wednesday night, for show and tell.


It's big :) though barely big enough for a double bed (i.e. not a lot of overhang).

I love how the quilting looks on the back - some people who've seen the quilt thought it was a log cabin pattern at first glance.


My funky border - I love love love the buzzing-bee-line I quilted along the edge.


I'm very happy with this! Those of you who've followed the whole process of the pink quilt, what do you think about the final result??

One Productive Weekend

Saturday night at 12am on the dot, I put the last quilting stitch into the disappearing nine patches.


12 hours later (with some sleep in between), the border was quilted as well. Miracles happened while quilting the border with a straight in the ditch line on both sides of the narrow, purple border, and bee-lines on the broad border. The miracles being that I swear I never passed more than 3 corners before reaching the start of my quilting round. It was amazing, I just sailed through it. Here's me cutting the last quilting thread!


Or so I thought. Because somewhere along that smooth sailing, I hit an iceberg without noticing, it seams.


How could this have happened again????? I even trimmed the border off before quilting it, as I had pledged to do when I quilted the stacked coins baby quilt. I was so exasperated when I found this corner, of course AFTER I had switched out the pink thread and bobbin to light grey and taken my machine apart to put the feed dogs back in and switched the darning foot to the walking foot. Big *sigh*.

And of course, it was the last corner I quilted that this mishap happened on, the one where I had felt so elated that everything went so smoothly and quickly. I'd like to get my hands on that Murphy and his stupid law - it's not like I was that smug to deserve such pains :) Slight drama-queen here.

So I ripped the stitches back out, as I couldn't just cut away the material in this case as I did before with the baby quilt, because the material quilted in was of course part of my border backing.


I tried re-quilting by just switching the thread back to pink and leaving the walking foot on, but it looked stupid and was a pain in the butt, because of course you have to lift the foot and turn the quilt after every stitch in order to make a loop. So I tore that back out too, stopped being lazy, put the darning foot back (but just set the stitch length to '0' and didn't bother to take the feed dogs back out - I really wish for a button to lower them...) and re-did all the loops.

Then I had to trim the border, because as I had expected, the backing was juuuust too small. The selvage would have shown on one side. So I trimmed it ~1/2 inch all around, no biggie, at least I had foreseen this and wisely quilted to only within 3/4" of the edge, so I didn't have to cut through too many quilting seams while trimming. I was also really careful when I handled the trimmed quilt until I had the binding machine-sewn to the top of the quilt, so that none of those quilting seams would open. What a nightmare that would have been.


Here's a trick I figured out for storing binding: I iron my binding strip in half and roll it onto a used toilet paper roll. When I'm ready for sewing the binding to the quilt, I don't bother pinning it all around - I've tried that and found that the binding shifts. Instead, I just start sewing and let the binding roll do its thing on the ground. The twirling didn't get annoying until the last side of the quilt, and even then, it wasn't really a problem.


I was surprised this week about the strange drive I had to get this quilt finished. It's just under 6 months in the making now, even though the top was cut in a week or so, pieced together in another few week, and quilted in about 4 days, so I guess I could have finished it in less than a month ;)

But hey, the result is the same, and you should be able to see a photo of the finished quilt this week!!! I'm so excited!

Best of all, I may have mentioned that I'm making this quilt for a friend who wished for a reddish-pink quilt. Well, she's been really busy this year and we were hardly in touch at all (she lives in Germany). She knows about my quilting and has seen some photos of my recent work and just sent me an email yesterday saying she really really loves my quilt and couldn't she have one and she'd pay me for time and materials etc. Silly girl :) I wrote her back saying she should start getting excited and what she thinks I've been working on since January (we had talked about me making her a quilt before christmas, I guess she didn't believe that I was serious...).

Long post, phew!

Lots Down, 3 To Go

I've been busy all week quilting quilting quilting (and even more turning the quilt!)


My last pre-filled bobbin emptied this morning, with 3 and a half designs to go! But at least I got to have supper at the table once this week ;) If I don't finish this one tonight, tomorrow will definitely be the day!

It Has Begun!

I've started quilting on the large pink quilt. As soon as my weekend visitor left, I got myself set up and started whirring along.

There was no way I could have quilted this monster in my quilt room on the filing cabinet/ironing board, too much bulk. So I've sacrificed my dining table once again. I'll either have to go out to eat (not), or have couch meals. Great motivation to get the quilt done asap!


And I'm NOT stippling, whoopie! I've been inspired by crazy mom's Jolly Rancher and the spiral squares she did.


I modified them a little bit so that I do a set of spiral squares on 4 disap. 9-patch squares. I happened to start in a direction that doesn't quilt over a whole block, but two block halfs, not that it matters and not that I care ;)

So in total, 16 D9P squares will have 4 spiral squares and they're connected. Gosh, this is so much easier to understand when you look at the quilt. Basically I start on the outside on one set of four squares and work my way to the center, complete the center square of the quilting, and continue down to the center of the next 4 squares and work my way out doing spiral squares.


It definitely gives a nice 3D effect on the large quilt!

I'm using variegated pink Guetermann thread as it's the only pink thread they have on 800m spools at my store. I would have preferred solid, as any bottom thread coming through is not as noticeable, but alas, I doubt anyone else will notice!

The straight lines are relatively quick with the walking foot, HOWEVER, I didn't consider that Amanda Jean's Jolly Rancher quilt is a lot smaller than mine and therefore a LOT easier to turn.

Here you can see my poor old Singer being manhandled to push a double-sized quilt through it!

I ended up rolling the bulkiest part of the quilt up and only doing three sides before turning the quilt back so that I avoid having to push the bulky part through the machine. The safety pins keep getting caught on the shank and thread coming down to the needle when I do that.

I got about 12 D9P squares quilted before the clock struck midnight, and thanks to having a dinner invite canceled for tonight, I should get a bunch of squares done today as well!

Haha, what does this remind you off? Ginormous candy? A strange gift?

More Pink Quilt Progress

As promised, here are some photos of my progress!
Don't you just love a post with lots of photos???

Here's my quilt top, all ready to go and patiently waiting for months it seems...

I joined the two pieces for the back. I think I will JUST have enough material, but really just. In fact, I might have to crop half an inch off the border of the top. I really mean "just enough".

For some reason, I had very little trouble taping the backing to the floor. Either I'm getting better or the material didn't stretch as much as some previous backing fabrics I've used.

The batting was too thick - my quilts are more for looks or summer/spring seasons, not for warmth, and I find it much easier to get the quilt sandwich into my machine when the batting is thin. So I went about tearing the batting in two - the one thing I like about synthetic batting, though once this stuff is used up, I'll probably switch to cotton.


Baby quilt batting is so easy to tear, try doing a queen sized quilt, phew!


I do enjoy walking around on a quilt though... maybe I'll make a carpet quilt some day ;)


And now I'm happily pinning along - it's turning out not quite as bad as I had anticipated - mostly because the taping went smoothly. For my first large quilt, I had to retape so many times because the material kept getting uneven...

I just realized that this will be only my second large quilt that I'm quilting. All the other quilt tops are either waiting for a backing or some finishing touches. How exciting!

As I was commenting on Mal's blog turning*turning that amongst all my chores before work on Friday, I allowed myself to put just one pin into the quilt, even though I was running late already, but I felt like I had "quilted" just a little bit and left for work in a great mood! One pin, so easily pleased, eh?


All ready for quilting!

And The Big One (Pink Quilt)

I've also been working on the Big Pink Quilt:

I've added a narrow border (3/4") of the peacock feather in purple, then a broad, improv-pieced border in light pink. The pink alone seemed to boring, so I took some left over scraps of pink patches and cut strips to add into the border.


Here it is in its full glory (it took 7 photos to get most of the quilt in one photo... I need a cool laundry line outside and someone to hold the quilt while standing on a ladder, too ;) reference to FilmInTheFridge):

I have the backing ready (it's the red pink heart fabric that you can see in a single square in the first picture, in the center, towards the bottom), and the binding cut, pieced and ironed (it'll be the solid magenta that's in the quilt also). Now I just need a few hours to sandwich this puppy and it's ready for quilting! How I'm going to quilt it? No clue yet... I might go for the spirals in the large squares, and free motion loops in between on the rectangles and little squares.

I like it when I don't have to spend a lot of thought on backing fabrics - I always find it difficult to find a fabric that looks good en masse. In this case though, the backing fabric was the first I bought :)

I can tell you one thing after all this pink quilting: I'm all pinked out!!!

Pink Quilt - 1st border and some offspring

Here it is, joined, ironed, and has the first, tiny 3/4" border. I'm buying some more of the solid magenta material for a 2.5-3" border, then it'll probably be binding time, because basically I'm pinked out... [really, it is ironed, it's just crumpled because of limited floor space in the quilt room... the living room floor was covered in other quilting stuff]

[looking at the last post about this quilt, the picture with the squares laid out on the floor actually looks better than this one, oops ;) ]


I say all pinked out... except for this little offspring quilt from the left overs, using AmandaJean's/CrazyMomQuilt's tutorial for no-triangles-zig-zag quilts. I still need a few more pieces, but have started to join some strip-pairs.

Saddling a Horse the Right Way

No pictures today and just a short post...

Finished sewing all my pink rows and have pinned them together in couples - joining them for a complete top is tonight's labour so there should be some nice photos of the quilt top by next week!

About the green quilt: leaving it in plain sight for inspiration seems to work, in some ways. The quilt has been growing in my mind and is now past the baby quilt stage and all green. I might just do that, a twin-sized quilt out of all green charm squares - that should certainly satisfy my love for green :) Anyway, so far it's all a plan in my head; it's exciting to see what that green quilt idea will actually grow into.

I think for the baby quilt with stars, I'll have to start with the stars and match the background fabric to them, instead of saddling the horse backwards!

Sea of Pink

Remember that little tiny pile of cut up 9-patches I showed you a couple of days ago? I couldn't believe it, but all those patches covered a huge area on my floor.


I must have spent a good hour sorting them and laying them out the way I wanted.


Crispy's prediction that my missing three 9 patches would re-appear kind of came true... Three 9-patches make 12 little squares, which turns out to be one row of the quilt, so, the quilt is now one row shorter, 15 instead of 16 rows. The size still works out, since it's a double sized quilt and I can always play with the borders a bit. So no extra piecing for me!

Then I spent an intense time pinning rows, running out of pins, sewing rows, pinning some more rows etc. I'm about 2/3 done, with all but one row pinned, and if I get home at a decent time tonight, at least all the rows if not the whole top will be finished - very exciting!

Pink Quilt Cutting Progress

Once I had finished the Spring Quilt top, I felt the urge to work on the pink quilt again. I had let it rest for many many weeks, trying to decide what to do and work up the guts to do it. In the end, I cut all the 9-patches and will make an entire disappearing 9-patch quilt. This will also allow me to fill in the gaps from the three mysteriously missing (or just miscounted) blocks, as I have enough pieces to make up disappearing 9-patches, but not full 9-patches.

Here's the pile of cut 9-patches. Looks pretty small, but it will make up a full quilt. It was hard cutting them all apart - once cut, there's no way back...


Now I'm going to have to clear enough floor space to lay out the patches in a pattern I like. That'll be a big task!

Some Pink Strategy-Rethinking? Help please!

After a productive Sunday, I have finished sewing 9-patches (or so I thought... either I lost 3 along the way or miscounted...)


Ironed them into a much smaller pile...


And assembled the existing blocks on the floor...


Now, looking at this pre-quilt, I'm thinking that maybe I made the squares too small for a disappearing 9-patch? They're only cut to 4" square so by the time I've cut the 9-patches and sewn them back together, I'm looking at 3.5" squares with 1.5" squares and 1.5"x3.5" strips in between. Hmm. I wonder if it will be too busy?

I've come up with a few options:

1. leave as is, as classical patchwork quilt
2. continue disappearing 9-patch and hope it'll turn out somehow
   
3. leave every second patch a normal 9-patch
   
4. leave just a few blocks as normal 9-patches throughout the quilt

Any comments on those suggestions, or entirely different ideas to make all this work worth it in the end?