Progress on the plus-quilt

(Linking up to WIP Wednesday today :-)

Inspiration struck me, and I grabbed it by the neck and wrung a quiltbacking for the Pluses Galore Quilt out of it :-) I came up with this echo pattern of the plus theme, using a leftover block I had made by accident.

So here you have the finished back...

... and the finished front. Right now it's about 71"x85".

Here it is pin basted and ready for quilting.

Have you noticed the odd thing about it? I basted it with the backing face up. Simple reason for this: I had no clue how to quilt it based on the front, but the back inspired me to do echo quilting around the plus shape!

Here is what the echo quilting looked like. Note the tense... Yup, I hated it. But I kept going. Don't quilt with a deadline, it sucks! The quilting did not grow on me. 

Yes, you guessed it. I'm undoing it all and have switched to mussel shell quilting. This feels right. I'm quilting it from the front now. Just make taking out the pins a bit trickier... My guess is that I'm about 2/3 to 3/4 done. Hard to tell under my 33 year-old Singer :-) everything is bunched up right now...

Plus quilt layout

I finally settled on making a 5x6 block layout, and after trialling a gazillion differrent arrangements, I'm happy with this one. It was unavoidable having several similar prints together because otherwise I had too much of the same colour in one place, which looked worse. I took photos of all the layouts so that I could scroll through and make a gut decision :-)
Now I could finally press the blocks so the seams of the blocks nestle... Maybe I'll get to make all the rows today!

Pluses galore

I've seen plus-quilts (sometimes called crosses instead of pluses) all over blogland and decided that this would be great pattern to showcase a bunch of Moda Wonderland fabrics I bought ages ago.

I liked one blogger's design of having one reverse plus in the pattern, to shake it up (see here http://kindaquilty.blogspot.de/2014/09/finish-it-friday-final-purge.html). Most pluses will be a wonderland print on blue background, except the one you see here on the bottom.

A couple of days after, I now have a huge pile of block components ready to sew into 30 plus-blocks. 

I'm already looking forward to free-motion-quilting all this background space!

Diamond Dash

A finish!

This babyquilt was finished in February. I've left the borders unquilted to either add the name of the recipient-to-be (this quilt was not made for any specific baby) or some random stitching.

I'll try to take some photos of the back and the quilting. I basically stitched with a walking foot about 1/4" from the coloured diamonds in the gray areas, to emphasize the diamond pattern. I stitched-in-the-ditch along the brown strips holding in the diamonds.

I painfully noticed my long break in finishing a quilt. I cut my binding strips 2" instead of the usual 2 1/4" I do to get a nice tight binding. In this case, binding this quilt felt more like adding piping. It was a very tight job, and I had to crop the outside seam to almost 1/8" to make the binding strip reach below the seam on the back! But I've learned, 2 1/4" binding strips to be cut next time!

NaturalFeel Babyquilts

Those baby quilts I mentioned the other day will be following this single Irish chain pattern and will be hand-quilted just as this quilt from a few years ago:

I felt like using natural colours and picked some left-over charms. Can't remember the name of the pattern, MODA something :)

There'll be a dark version (brown background with beige chain) and a light version (beige background with dark brown/green/orange chain).

It'll be lovely to be working by hand on a small quilt again; I'm really quite looking forward to the handquilting! My finger tips have gotten awfully soft :-)

Another start...

A while ago, I posted about the idea of this quilt - part of the top is finished now! And has been finished for a while. To be a baby-quilt, it'd need something along the side, but I think I want it to be at least lap-quilt size, so I'm playing around with ideas for the frame.


I intentionally laid the colurs out to be dark-light-dark.

These are all left-overs from a MODA Wonderland quilt, mixed with solid gray to make about 4.5" HSTs.

Triangles and squares

Playing with some charms (Moda Wonderland) to make an easy-peasy quilt. Sometimes easy does it.

The rest of the charm pack (all the pinks and browns) are going into this HST-quilt. I think I have enough charms in the right colour-line. I'll just have to get creative if I don't. They're sewn together, but I have to press them, and I seem to be very reluctant to pull out the old ironing board! :) Funnily enough, I posted about these HSTs before, when I had "decided" on a layout :) So times change...

That carpet, by the way, is horrific. I miss my old hardwood floors dearly, but that's what you get when you rent ;) Not sure how I'll baste my next big quilt, I've never done anything other than tape them to the floor during basting... a first for everything!

Hooray, it's working!

Thank your for your advice about google reader! It's much easier to follow my favourite blogs now, though as was pointed out to me, I still have to load the blogs to comment, so please forgive me if you don't get many comments from me anymore!

I've worked on a couple of pieces recently:

1) finally started the quilting on Free As A Bird (see sidebar). So far, I'm doing the brainless stitch-in-the-ditch (with brainless, I mean that I didn't have to think about what to do, it's pretty obvious, no marking or designing required :) I still think it's one of the most difficult quilting methods - it's so easy to slip out of the ditch and then it looks pretty sloppy!), but I ideas for the large grey triangles are brewing...


2) I used the rest of the drunkard's path blocks to make 3 wall hangings (they're just stuck together on my make-shift designwall right now. It's not so much a design wall as a 'get things off the floor' method, since my floorspace here is much more limited than before... I think I may have shown pictures of these wall hanging triplets before (pre-sewn together).


Well, my quilting output is still not up to pre-move-levels. There's just so much other fun stuff to do here! Come winter, it'll probably pick up again :)

Bear with me, and happy quilting!

Tickle Feather

My disappearing 9 patch variation has a name, thanks to the quilting I chose: Tickle Feather :)

I decided that all that white space around the quilt was primer property for some feather quilting practice.


I don't like marking patterns very much, so I just outlined a wavy line that was mirrored on both sides of the quilt and free-hand quilted the feathery loops. It's quite obvious it was done free-hand, but hey, it's a cuddly baby quilt and not a show quilt!

In the narrow strips, I quilted a doubly-looped vine, there wasn't that much space for anything bigger.


I also quilted-in-the-ditch around the large squares in the D9Ps - at least turning a baby quilt around and around is manageable!


Here's the quilt before washing:

And after (note that this is the crinkliest of all the pictures I have - lighting makes a big difference...)


All the pink chalk markings came right out of the white (PHEW!!).

One more project checked off on the QUIPs list!

Filmstrip Cafe Open For Business

So, I didn't lie about having two finishes on my QUIPs list!


I've been busy binding my Filmstrip Cafe quilt - loving this quilt was enough motivation for me!
I was too lazy to clip it up to my quilt display, so I tried taking a picture of this quilt on my bed - it was difficult! Here's the best you're going to get ;)


The quilting on this puppy is straight, all of it. I did lines 1/4" from the seam on the brown sashing, then about 1" in on the printed fabrics because the 8x8" squares seemed too big to leave unquilted.


A few more parallel lines on the border...


... and quilting in the ditch for the stripy part of the quilt.


I like the picture above because the blue-brown fabric is my favourite in this quilt (and it's not even from the Bistro line of fabrics ;) I think it's tranquility...
I'm proud to say that I did an excellent job on the quilting in the ditch. I hardly ever slipped up and crossed the seam, phew!


I really enjoyed working with the binding fabric - it was a bargain purchase in a general fabric store last year and it handled really well - it ironed flat, the sewing threw it went smoothly and it felt amazingly cool and smooth.

This quilt has been done for about a week, and I've just been staring at it. I think it will migrate to my couch soon to get some usage ;)

Northern Solitude

ASIDE: Isn't today an amazing date? Can you imagine how many people are getting married today??? 10-10-10! :)

2nd ASIDE: Ah, you should know me by now ;) Of course I went and googled my question. I didn't find out how many people are planning to get married, though something might be in the news tomorrow - instead, I found out quirky stuff about this date from this site. For example:

--> In mathematics, the date of 10/10/10 or 101010 is divisible by the number of days in a week, which is seven (7), which is considered to be very lucky. However, the date also appears to have a yin and yang situation where the date is also divisible by the number six (6), which is considered to be very unlucky.

--> It is even more significant that the date 10/10/10 at 10:10am (10:10) or 10:10pm (22:10) to be a very lucky time. One reason for this comes from the story of George Inmad who had been deaf since birth. On 10/10/1910 at 10:10pm (22:10) he suddenly was able to hear with no explanation from the doctors. It was a medical mystery and the only conclusion they had was that he was very lucky. From then on, it is believed that you will have good luck if you touch your ears at 10:10am or pm.

Back to your regular feature: quilts!


Only 1.5 years after I started it, this little quilt is finished! What pushed me in the end??? Someone I know wanted to buy it for his first grandchild :)


I added a label and a bit of extra quilting on the squares, and two days later it went to its new home.

In the end, the quilting consists of outline quilting on the squares:


... some motives being outlined in the squares and something I saw on Dianne Gaudinsky's blog (see my blog list on the right) in the narrow light blue border:

(This photo makes the quilt look huge with the background glimpse, doesn't it? It's only the regular 30x40" I use for baby quilts...)

In some squares, I quilted along lines of the print, e.g. along the green vines in the dark square below:


This border seemed like a good idea when I started, but was very intense - when I finally finished it, I was in no mood to do anything in the wide border, so it's left unquilted - incidentally, having finished the blue border quilting was also when I put the quilt away until last week.

Tsh-tshing, Finish #1 on my "QUIPs To Finish in 2010" list on the right! :)


PS: I wonder why I put the dark green square next to the brown square in the centre... hmm. Must not have known the trick of taking a photo of my layout and then checking that out instead of the actual quilt - photos give a much better impression of the overall layout, I find. Do you have a trick like that?

Yesterday, I baked a lovely apple cake with caramel sauce that Leslie showed on her beautiful blog:


I thought I had a bundt pan but couldn't find it despite searching and searching - only then did I realize that I thought about buying one and then ended up not to ;) Senility is setting in!

Also, I went to a National Park yesterday to go for a hike. I had a kite along that I bought this summer. I've realized there is no easier way to recapture childhood than to go and fly a simple kite (i.e. nothing fancy, just the regular diamond shape with a tail!).

Go ahead, try it!

Left-over Decision

Hmm, I'm about to post about a project that I didn't even include in my QUIP (QUilts In Progress) list the other day. Dang.

Anyway, the left overs from my WonderChain quilt are still kicking around. I've decided on a layout:

There'll be grey strips between the corner blocks as borders.

Now I'm thinking I should make it at least lap sized! I feel like something other than baby-quilts - I'm getting too many of those.

I guess I'll add it to my list now that it's not just a pile of HSTs!

So Many Stitches

As promised, here's Finish #2, the Love U in green quilt. Concentric squares take a long time to hand-quilt, I found out. I don't know how hand-quilters do the intricate patterns (on traditional quilts), which must include thousands of stitches! (Hundreds of thousands? Millions?)

There's something about hand-quilting that just looks more traditional, isn't there???


Or maybe I just choose square quilt-patterns that I wouldn't do with free-motion (wobbly straight lines for me) or a walking foot (too much turning) machine quilting.

I find that printed flanelette on the back makes the quilting and any mistakes disappear, but you can see the pattern even on this small picture.


As mentioned, I did concentric squares in the solid green blocks. The prints are MODA Love U, I picked all the green and yellow prints and substitute a few from my stash to reach the right number.


For the border, I tried another stencil out of my collection - I'm usually more a fan of wavy lines, but the straight edges of this braid seemed to suit this quilt.


Now that I look at it on the photo, the briad reminds me of a strand of DNA ;) Such a science geek, hahaha!

I might yet stich in the ditch around the little yellow squares in the 4 corners, they look a bit lonely right now, and that wouldn't take too much effort.


Overall, despite taking quite a while (4 or 5 months, I think), I'm glad I hand-quilted this quilt and even more glad that it's done!


I won't even show you a picture of my pour right middle finger (the one that I use to push the needle through). My ring finger is starting to have the same hole in it, because I switched over when the middle finger was too damaged to touch a needle ;) It'll heal, and it better, because I still have about 3 circles to quilt on my BIG hand-quilting project, the Imagination 1 quilt, and that must be done for the quilt show! (Though I bet no one would notice a half circle in among all the concentric circles! So the pressure to finish is only moderate - apart from my pride!)

Soon, I'll be ready to baste and quilt the Filmstrip Cafe quilt, still debating quilting options. I might do parallel straight lines on it, as I've seen it on other quilts and liked it. Oh well, time for another anti-strep-throat pill, ugh.