Springy

My spring quilt is done-done-done! Last stitch in! (Well, the last-last, because I thought I was finished already, then I found a few small squares I missed during quilting, haha!)

It fits a double bed quite nicely, with sufficient overhang! And doesn't it brighten up a room?


Check out the quilting I ended up with:


The loopy stuff in the squares you already know from my other posts. I've also added quilting to the white sashing, though, just a random design, done free-hand in every sashing strip.


You can just make the pattern out a little bit on the back (a vineyard print in pale khaki-green).


I had a couple of ladies at the quilt hold it up to finally get a nice shot of the full quilt ;)


Yay, quilt number two for me!

Updates

Thought it was time for a miscellaneous update post...

Raffle Quilt
First off, if any of you are interested, tickets for my quilt guild's (Kindred Spirit Quilt Guild of Charlottetown, PEI) raffle quilt are now on sale for 2$ each or 3 for 5$ (or 30 for 50$ as I like to advertise *grins*).


If any of you are really interested in this quilt (it's King sized, about 8.5 feet square, is my estimate - I'm standing there holding one corner, my arm is up above my head and you still have the overhang past the stage. A long-arm quilter is quilting it right now, and detailed photos of individual blocks are in this post), we can figure out how I could get you some tickets - if you're outside my general travel route, shipping would be an additional cost.

Everyone is also invited to our Guild Quilt Show, held Sep 24-26 in Charlottetown (quilt will be raffled off at the show)! PEI is a beautiful place that time of year... maybe worth a visit???


President's Challenge
Next Wednesday is the day of the President's Challenge at the quilt guild, it's amazing how long excitement will last! ;) I'm planning on taking lots of pictures of the other entries!


Spring Quilt
What else have I been up to? Well, I've been quilting on the spring quilt - came up with a design for the white sashing - between that and the loops on the blue-green leave squares, there's enough quilting on this quilt to hold it together ;) Ready for binding!


Free As A Bird Quilt
I'm ITCHING to keep working on the Free As A Bird Quilt...


However, I have run out of grey fabric for reasons that will be revealed later ;) Remember, this quilt will not look like this in the end!
It's driving me crazy to not have enough fabric to keep going when I really want to be working on this quilt! I'm trying to match the shade of grey right now, as the original store (Fabricville/land of all places!) doesn't have that grey anymore... I'm going to try the Nova Scotia Fabricville next month, hopefully they still have this solid stocked, it's usually one of those staples, but the manager of the local store is as always a pain in the butt with vague answers like "Maybe we get it in again, maybe not, we're not sure". It's a solid grey fabric, it's like having butter and sugar and flour in the house :)
The little patch below is the only grey carried at my local Fabricville these days, and I tried another fabric store and they barely had ANY solids, that was a bit embarrassing, I thought ;)


Sunrise Wallhanging
And lastly, the curved piecing wall hanging embellishments...


I'm really not that happy with the beads, apart from the red ones. I'm thinking of taking the others off and adding some quilting instead! It's on the back burner...


Speaking about the back, mwahaha, here's the back of the wall hanging - all you see are the seams holding down the bias binding, the zigzagging is done on the muslin foundation on the front.


I have also been helping a friend with a quilt she's making, but it's secret because I don't know if the quilt's recipient is reading this blog...

That's what's keeping me busy, and you???

Quilting The Spring Quilt

So I've hinted before that the quilting of this quilt was giving me some trouble...

Here's the behind-the-scenes story!

What I wanted to do was quilt-in-the-ditch around all the blue-white leafy fabric to get diagonal chains of different-sized squares.

However, I had bad luck with the quilting/free motion/darning foot and the walking foot.

The tension was off, and horrible things happened when I turned corners - especially on the back.

See these lumps of thread-loops in the corners, that happened a lot. You can also see the bad tension, sometimes it was okay, other times the bottom thread did not go into the quilt sandwich.


So I ripped it all back out - about 2 hours of quilting undone.


Then I came to my senses and decided that a double quilt (I think that's the size of this one, it's been so long since I pieced it...) had to be done by free-motion on my little machine, and since the ditch didn't work, I went back to loops and came up with this:


I'm quite happy with that pattern! I'm figuring something out for the large spaces in between, but no rush ;)

Just In Time For Spring

I don't know how, but I totally missed that it was National Quilt Day on Saturday - is it a US thing only?

Well, since it was the weekend, I was working on a quilt of course, so all is safe ;)

I figured: T'is the season for pulling out year-old projects!

Like my spring quilt from 2009! Between this one and my "Apples and Owls" fall quilt, a kind of pattern is emerging: Make a seasonal top, then let it rest for a year and finish it the same season a year later!

In that spirit, I've finally jumped in the cold water and put a border on this quilt - that's really what the hold-up was: the border.

You may have noticed that I generally use fabrics from the quilt center in the borders. I've seen many quilts with totally different fabrics in the borders, but never had the guts to try that. Pick the wrong pattern/colour and the whole work of the quilt center is ruined.

But this time, I reached that point of thinking "just do SOMETHING"!

So I found some fabric that matches the light blue in one of the theme fabrics (the bluish leaves in the diagonal lines) and threw that on as border. You can see the pattern of the border print in the bottom of this photo: dark blue squares on light blue background.


I was worried it'd be too busy with the rest of the quilt, but I think it will do - too late now, anyway :) I'm not taking it off again!

I chose a green print for the backing - it made me think of spring even though it depicts wine and grapes, i.e. more fall-ish. I bought this fabric when it was on sale for 2$/m, what a steal (that's $ Can!).


See now, I always think it's outrageous how much fabric I bought in my first quilting year - meters and meters of fabric at once - but you make up a backing for a large quilt and woosh, 5 m are gone, just like that! (Imagine sound of snipping fingers).

I'm playing with some quilting ideas for this one, but I'm starting to believe that it'll actually be done in time for this year's spring (which has not arrived in Prince Edward Island! I'm so jealous of the budding flowers I see on blogs from down south!).

Spring Quilt Top Done - Yay!

[Oops, I forgot to actually upload one of the posts about the spring quilt, it's from the week before the festival, check it out here to see the progress of this quilt!]

I was very frustrated that I was too ill to even quilt, I could have been so productive, but alas. As soon as I came back from a trip to Montreal, though, I finished the spring quilt top (minus the borders), here it is:


I'm really happy with how it turned out, especially with the different block centers. Now I will put a couple of borders around it and think about a backing and the quilting.

I've been so spoiled by the convenient small size of the children's quilts I made recently, that I'm not looking forward to hoisting the bulk of a double-bed-sized quilt around under my tiny Singer sewing machine... will probably have to take over the dining table again for a while :)

It's Coming Along!

Much progress on the Spring Quilt! I was busy last weekend and the past evenings adding edge after edge to the 30 blocks in this quilt. I tend to do the same step on all blocks rather than completing individual blocks, so you'll probably rarely see "growing quilts" on this blog :)

The one completed block is my sample block. I'm just strip-piecing and cutting the last edge, I half consider it the sashing, even though it was part of the block pattern rather than an additional border between blocks. I took all these pictures at night or before the sun rose properly, hence the weird flash effects or dark blocks in the back rows...

Piecing Progress (Spring Quilt)

Thanks for all of your lovely comments of motivation for this quilt!

I've strip-pieced as much as I could, though I cut some strips lengthwise off the bolt, so I can't strip-piece, but otherwise I would have needed more material than I have... It'll be okay, just a bit more stopping and starting on the machine :)

Here are some of the yellow/oranges I picked:

I had an involuntary break from quilting yesterday, because my machine had started making a weird clicking sound inside the machine near the stitch length regulator. I took it to the shop, but the repair guy had no clue what it was, he took everything apart, oiled it up a bit, put it back together and said it's nothing to worry about. But it still doesn't sound nice, so I'll do some investigating what it might be...

Spring Quilt Is A Go!

I took the plunge and cut out the pieces for one block to get a feeling of what it will look like:


I liked the result, but decided to sew the block together to make sure that I didn't mis-calculate a strip size somwhere.


Luckily, it all worked out, so now I'm in the process of cutting all the strips for the quilt and get busy on welcoming spring!

Squares and Oblongs

Another quilt in the planning/soon-to-be-started phase is the Spring Squares & Oblongs quilt. It's also from a block featured on Marcia Hohn's site The Quilter's Cache, and again, I just noticed now that she gives instructions. Too late yet again :)

The only difference in my planning here is that I'll be strip-piecing and that my blocks will be 16" instead of 12".

I played around with some colours, which is always my greatest challenge in making a quilt, as it's the only step (apart from designing a pattern variation and quilting patterns) that requires creativity and can't be undone if it turns out ugly. Well, it can, but that'd be a HUGE waste of time and effort.

I like the blue-green leafy fabric tying the other colours together. I bought it at a quilt show and have been wondering ever since what I could possibly use it for... I matched the green and turquoise/blue, and once again opted for a non-pure-white variation: muslin. I had first envisioned a gradient of greens or similar, going from a dark center to a light outside, but the fabrics in my stash didn't really work for that. I was also missing a bit of a kick in the block, with just blue-green-white as colour scheme, so I played around with some orange-yellow colours, and that really gave it a boost. I didn't want to use the same fabric throughout, so I've scooped out 9 different yellow-oranges that'll be the center on the different (30) blocks. I think I can picture that in my head and like the final product. And because all the colours are so fresh, I'm calling it my Spring Quilt. Here are just three examples of the different centers, and I'll decide later if I'll use the second fabric, as it doesn't pop as much as the others (which might be nice in the final quilt, we'll see...).


Finally, I have to admit that I find it very difficult to start a quilt, i.e. make the first cut. I usually buy fabrics I like, so if I use them up, I won't have them any more if I really want to use them for another quilt. It's a dilemma, and probably explains why I hoard and never use. That has to change though, because I tallied up how many meters of fabric I've bought since September, and I'm approaching 300m. Someone else can figure out how many quilts I could make from that ;)

Cheerios and thanks for visiting my blog!!! I appreciate all your comments!