Here Comes Batman!

This must have been the easiest quilt I've ever made.

It's made from the batman fabric I got at Christmas time.

I had a front panel and backing fabric with the batman theme.
So all I had to do is put the two together with some batting - then I outlined batman and the writing and put black binding on it.


Here you can see the three-dimensionality from the outline quilting:



And here's an outline of the back.


The little boy whose mother gave me the fabric to begin with got this little roll on the weekend and was over the moon! A batman quilt, whoa :)


What a pleasure to work on this quilt after the struggle with the spring quilt!

New Fabric At Easter

I tried so hard to refrain from buying fabric this past weekend when I was hunting for purse handles, but I couldn't resist - the sales once again got the best of me!

Here's Haul #1 (the large chunk of blue fabric underneath is double-width fabric, 108" wide in fact, that was on sale for 10$/m, what a steal!):

And #2:


And here are all the beautiful fabrics in their glory. Some I have ideas for, others I just liked or knew I had been missing that particular colour in my stash at some point.


And the actual purpose of the trip! I was successful! I bought the last black plastic handles in the store, and the last semi-circle bamboo handles, but best of all, the clerk said I could call them and order them, yippie! I also decided to give the D-shaped handles a try.


So for me, the Easter weekend was a full success! Anyone else got fabric from the Easter bunny (via your own credit card :) ?

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 ;)

Did You Know...

... you're not supposed to quilt on Sundays???

At the last quilt guild meeting, one of the sew-and-tellers mentioned that she bought the fabric on Mon, pieced the quilt on Tuesday, basted it by Thursday and then quilted it Fri, Sat, and Mon, but not on Sunday - because one of her clients once told her:

"Every stitch you put in on a Sunday you pull out with your teeth in hell"

WOW!

The whole room went quiet and then burst into laughter, because the notion is ridiculous of course! For example, I only have time to really quilt on weekends when I don't have to work, so my productivity would be cut in half if I followed the above motto.

It was such a stunning, somewhat scary prediction to hear, especially amongst those lovely quilt ladies, I think we all laughed to release the pressure ;)

Great Wisdom In Blogland

I found this list on Gert's blog:

You know you are a quilter if...
There's more fabric in the house than food.
"Fat Quarters" are not the heaviest part of your body.
Your ironing board is always set up, but you never iron clothes.
You think of your job as an interruption on your quilting time.
You pet fabric.
People are always picking threads off of you.
You can measure a scant 1/4 by eye.
"Featherweight" doesn't mean boxer.
Your "UFOs" are not from outer space.
You clean up your sewing room and they think you are leaving.


My personal score - I'm an 85% quilter :)

Fabric vs. food - check
Fat 1/4 - check
Ironing board - check
Job - check(+ I see sleeping and eating as similar interruptions :o)
Pet fabric - check
picking threads off - check
1/4 inch measure - check
Featherweight - nope, my machine isn't one, at least it weighs a ton, and I'm not familiar with "Featherweights"
UFOs - check
sewing room clean-up - nope, I don't clean it up, which kind of makes it double-check, no? I give myself half-marks.

A Mussel Mystery

Haha, I thought there was a deadline for this mystery quilt that my quilt guild arranged. So I crammed and crammed to get this thing done by last Wednesday, and it turns out there's no deadline. But it's finished, and that's great!

Just like the mantra we had at the guild that evening: Better finished than perfect!

Here's the familiar front:

And the simple back:

Below are a bunch of pictures showing the quilting. After trying to figure out how to quilt a quilt that's so puffy in places from those unsquared blocks, I decided minimal quilting targeted to safe, non-puffy areas was the way to go. Because there was nothing to lose on this quilt, I also decided to play around with new quilting motives. I hate practicing free-motion and wasting good fabric on those pieces, so I use quilts that are already less than perfect (*grins*) and make them into guinea pigs.

I tried feathers in the center, but got tired of those.


Then I tried blossomy-loops in the white hour glass shapes, those were okay.


What ended up giving this quilt its name, Mussel Mystery, was the mussel-shell like McTavishing I started and kept going with in all the white triangles and some of the multi-coloured ones.


In the end, and despite my expectations, I like this quilt - it's quirky! But I'm staying away from triangles for a while...

New Fabric

***Addendum: I did so well fabric shopping that day, you know, old fabric, second-hand prices, exchanging thread for fabric. But I just got lured in by this store-section: http://greenfairyquilts.com/catalog.php?category=49... there goes my fabric budget, I've got about 7 charm packs coming my way now - oh, but they're beautiful!!! ***

I'm trying really really hard not to buy fabric. I need to use up some first.

To my defense, I haven't been to any fabric stores, except when I returned 4 useless spools of invisible thread after my disastrous attempts at quilting with the stuff. In exchange, I got these two fat quarters:


The top one will become a purse most likely, the bottom one I want to make into a lap quilt for work - wouldn't you love to dream of vacation on an island while typing away on the computer in the office?

Then, I was on the hunt for purse handles. It appears that PEI does not stock these, none of the stores that sell crafty stuff had any or any that I liked. Lots of bamboo full circles, but they don't work well with my style of purse. I also saw some with plastic beads on metal wire - gaudy! So I'll have to shop in Nova Scotia for the bamboo semi-circle ones that I used for my own purse, or I have to shop online. I know Joann's has a huge variety of them, but they only ship to the US. Now I need to check whether there's a Joann's where I'm going to a conference in April...

Anyway, I checked in the second hand stores to see if I could find a cheap purse with handles I like - nothing. But I found these sheets and pillow cases that'll come in handy as quilt backings and placemats (a project from my quilt guild for the local soup kitchen.).


So I didn't really spend a lot of money on fabric... does that count??? :)