FINISHED!!!! The Very Hungry Caterpillar Quilt

"This is MY quilt!"

Yes, I know Ronan is only 16 months old and probably doesn’t need quite so many quilts. But we do storytime every night before bed, and one of his absolute favorites has long been The Very Hungry Caterpillar. So when I saw the full line of the fabulous Andover Fabrics Eric Carle fabrics at Ladyfingers when we did the shop hop last fall, I couldn’t resist. I didn’t think I’d make anything with them any time soon, but when I was reorganizing the fabric in my studio closet I wound up leaving the central panel within toddler reach. Ronan not only grabbed for it, he kept playing peek-a-boo with it and was making his “cute noise” (normally reserved for sightings of furry animals) while looking at it. What could I do but start a quilt?

I had lots of fun with this due to the extremely simple piecing and the bright saturated colors. While there are absolutely gorgeous blenders and tone-on-tone fabrics in the Andover collection, I chose the path of thrift and used all fabrics from my stash for the four-patches. The long vertical mirror-image panels with the caterpillar and the sun were originally joined in the center for making a bolster pillow or door-bottom draft stopper, but I thought they’d look more interesting in the quilt. I originally planned this as a lap quilt, but it finished 53″W x 76″L; I thought about stopping with just the central three panels divided and surrounded by four-patches, but I loved that large stripe and decided it needed to be a part of this top. Besides, that means Ronan will be able to use it on his big-boy bed someday.

The large food stripe had the power to be a deal breaker because it depicts the art from Ronan’s favorite pages in the book, the ones in which the holes in the foods are actually punched out of the book’s pages so that little fingers can follow the path of the caterpillar. I had only bought 3/4 yard of the stripe last fall, as I had no idea what (if anything) I was going to make out of these fabrics and I didn’t want to go overboard. However, it’s also not the sort of design that could be pieced without looking extremely strange. Therefore, once I finished the center of the quilt and all the four-patches, I got on the Ladyfingers website to order two more yards. They were sold out. Trying not to panic, I began searching elsewhere online. I did find a few sites that had it in stock, but they were either a) in England, or b) offering it for the low low price of FIFTEEN DOLLARS A YARD. So Ronan and I made a Saturday morning trip to Zook’s at Kitchen Kettle Village in Intercourse. They had the majority of the line, but not the large food stripe. (I consoled myself by buying a few other fabrics at their fabulous prices.) However, across the street at The Old Country Store, they had it!

Success!

I promptly brought it home, washed it, and cut it the wrong size. The less said about that day, the better.

But I made it work. I had initially planned to have those borders run the entire width of the quilt without being surrounded by four-patches on all sides, so I wouldn’t be limited to multiples of 2″ for the height of the border and could just follow the design. So although having to cut it 12″ finished height meant that there are some little stems and leaves and details peeking up from the seam line, I think ultimately the four-patches gave it a more finished and cohesive appearance. I can’t say I’m glad that the price of gas is tiptoeing towards $4/gallon, but that certainly helped me make the decision to work with what I had rather than jumping back in the car, and I think the final result is the better for it.

In my continuing struggle to select appropriate quilting designs and appropriate threads to quilt them in, I think this project was a solid success. I wanted this quilt to be softer and more pliable than Ronan’s fancy blue and taupe quilt, so thus much less heavily quilted. The batting is Quilter’s Dream Orient, a blend of bamboo, silk, Tencel, and cotton; I thought it would be funny for the caterpillar quilt to have batting made by actual caterpillars. A practical advantage of this batting is that it can be quilted up to 8″ apart, granting me significant latitude in designing the quilting.

I never want to mark or measure more than necessary, so I used the four-patches as landmarks for gridding the unpieced panel areas. I used a simple on-point square grid for the central panels, and a hanging-diamond variation for the horizontal borders. I think grids come the closest to disappearing over heavily graphic areas so as not to distract from the artwork. This also allowed me to use the walking foot for all straight line quilting. I then switched to my free-motion setup, which continues to perform extremely well, with no skipped stitches or shredded thread. Again drawing inspiration from the subject matter, I quilted echoed leaves in all the four-patches. I used a yellow Isacord #40 polyester thread for all quilting. While it did play peekaboo to some extent, I’m happy with the result.

This process was a good reminder that simple quilts can be a satisfying and rewarding experience, that every quilt teaches me something. And Ronan loves it and knows that it’s his, which is reward enough.

I made the label from the only four leftover four-patches.

For a happy dance for a quilt based on the story of a caterpillar’s life cycle from egg to butterfly, what could be more appropriate than “The Circle of Life”? Dan and I were fortunate to see “The Lion King” on Broadway about 10 years ago, and this number left me speechless:

Finished! Quilting Retreat Tote

Christmas is exhausting!

Here we are in 2012 already! How did that happen? Christmas was a delightful whirlwind:  we did a lot of shopping, baking, driving, and visiting. I got some quilting books as gifts, and have plans to spend some gift cards and money on some other quilting gadgetry, but otherwise I hadn’t really been engaged in any quilting pursuits since finishing Ronan’s quilt a few weeks ago. The lack of pressure to finish quilted gifts was nice (I didn’t make any!) but I found myself at a bit of a loss when I actually had some time in the studio on New Year’s Day. I didn’t want to pull out the gigantic Shop Hop Sampler quilt that I started quilting at the guild retreat, as I didn’t know how much time I’d have to devote to it; I knew I couldn’t let myself start anything new; but what small UFO did I have? Fortunately, I remembered my Retreat Tote.

Quilting Retreat Tote, 27" x 19"

During our annual GenCon trip in 2008, I had spotted a shop model at Back Door Quilts in Greenwood, IN for an attractive, functional, large tote designed for lugging rotary cutting mats and rulers to classes and retreats. And (as is so often the case) thank goodness for the shop model, because I never would have given the pattern a second glance. The pattern, “Rotary Cut Border Bag Quilter’s Tote” by The Kentucky Quilt Company, was published in 2003 and the cover shot depicts a bag made to very self-consciously mimic the French Provinicial and paisley Vera Bradley bags that were extremely popular at that time.

Once I actually opened the pattern, though, I saw that the designers had done the work for me on a bag that I’d been designing in my own head for quite a while. One of my favorite things to do at a quilting retreat is to accomplish all the cutting for a project:  having a large, cat- and baby-free space makes the task far easier and far less fraught with worry, and having friends nearby to chat with makes a tedious job fly by. However, rotary cutting mats and large rulers are notoriously difficult to transport. I had thought about how best to make a custom tote to accommodate them, and had looked at (and rejected) a number of other designs, but this one seemed perfect. Inside, one side has a velcro pocket to hold a 17″ x 23″ rotary mat and/or a portable pressing surface:

Mat pocket, Retreat Tote

while the other has zippered pockets to hold rotary cutter, pens, templates, and other smaller items as well as larger pockets for books, patterns, and fabrics.

Accessories pockets, Retreat Tote

On the outside is a long pocket with a velcro flap closure to hold a 6″ x 24″ rotary cutting ruler.

Front ruler pocket, Retreat Tote

Of course, being me, I couldn’t leave well enough alone. The original design calls for a velcro flap closure at the top edge between the handles, and then long pieces of velcro inside to hold the sides closed. I decided I didn’t like the long pieces of velcro and wanted to use a zipper instead. I recognized that this would increase the difficulty of the overall project, but I underestimated by just how much… more on that later.

I started the tote at Kathy’s house the following spring, using fabric I’d bought at Seminole Sampler from Jason Yenter‘s Floragrafix I line. I used to do a lot of rubber stamping, and I loved how these fabrics reminded me of the edgier collage-style stamp art I’d seen. Plus, a color scheme of gray, aqua, red, black, and melon? Sign me up! As the pattern called for prequilted fabric yardage, I had to make my own prequilted fabric before cutting the pieces. I used Sandy Terry’s Hooked on Feathers design, as I had just used that to great effect when making a ridiculous number of Christmas table runners a few months before.

This was where I ran into trouble. I somehow managed to forget that quilting shrinks the fabric. Rather than making my quilt sandwich, quilting it, and then cutting out the pieces, I cut everything to size first and then quilted it, thinking I was using my fabric more efficiently. This resulted in my quilted pieces being slightly smaller than the pattern called for. That this was a problem was not immediately apparent:  I followed the construction steps carefully, and was pleased with the professional-looking, tailored appearance of the various flaps and pockets as I made them. The inside zipper pockets use an interesting technique of joining two 14″ zippers head to head to produce a 28″ zipper with two pulls drawing from the center to open and close all the pockets along the entire width of the bag. All this went very well, except for the fact that my bag was supposed to be 28 1/2″ wide and was now only 28″… which meant there was no seam allowance next to the ends of the zippers. I had chosen nice heavy “sport” zippers for durability, so their end stops were big chunky pieces of plastic. This left me with a beautifully constructed unfinished bag, with no way to attach binding or zippers to the sides. I pushed it into the bottom of the closet.

I definitely suffered quilt guilt over this one, because not only was I upset about my error and about not having finished yet another project, but I actually wanted to use the bag! But the only way I could see to correct the problem was to rip out that 28″ zipper and replace it, which I did not want to do. Fortunately, what this project needed was to be left in the closet for roughly three years to marinate. When I pulled it out and assessed it on New Year’s Day, I realized that the zipper problem was really only a problem for that 1/2″ on either side of the bag. I could attach binding to the rest of the perimeter, just skipping over the zipper stops, then go back and tack those spots down by hand. Once that was done, I reassessed the closing zipper idea. I still didn’t like the designer’s plan to use those long velcro pieces, and besides, the ship had sailed on placing a closing flap on the top. But I couldn’t use a single zipper to close the whole bag without running into those zipper stops for the inside pockets. Instead, my brainstorm was to use three separate zippers:  one separating zipper across the top edge, and one along either side, stopping just before the inside pocket zipper.

Corner zipper detail, Retreat Tote

It’s not perfect; it’s certainly not elegant. But you know what it is? Functional and FINISHED! And once again, most definitely a learning experience.

For a happy dance, I will stay within the accessories category with the brilliant Liam Kyle Sullivan and his hilarious character Kelly in the original “Shoes” (NSFW language.)

Finished! Halloween Buzz Saw

Happy Halloween, everybody!

Ronan the baby dragon at Hershey's Chocolate World

I started this blog with the intention of its being a chronicle of, and a motivation for, finishing my UFOs. True, my life over the last 21 months has been rife with more changes than I could ever have anticipated: getting pregnant, losing a job, traveling the country, finding a job, having a baby, learning to balance the whole job/baby situation. Thus, I really shouldn’t be particularly hard on myself over the fact that this is only the second true, preexisting UFO I have finished since starting this project. But all recriminations aside, the fact remains:

I FINISHED MY HALLOWEEN BUZZ SAW QUILT!

Halloween Buzz Saw, 68" x 85"

I’ve referenced this quilt here before due to the minor fabric miracle I experienced, but I hadn’t told its full story. It’s possible that this quilt was my oldest UFO, as I believe it may have been only the third quilt I started when I got back into quilting roughly ten years ago. To begin at the beginning, I love Halloween and always have. Considering I love theater, sewing, and candy, it’s pretty much a natural. My sisters and I always had homemade costumes thanks to our loving, creative, Bernina-having mom, and as soon as I was able to contribute in any way to the construction of my own costumes, I jumped right in. I was a wizard, a werewolf, the Grim Reaper, a pumpkin-headed Headless Horseman, a witch doctor, and a basket of dirty laundry at various points in my costumed career. At one point, I made an octopus costume for my sister Cassandra. So I’ve been collecting Halloween fabrics since before I was quilting; in fact, some of the fabrics in this quilt were purchased while shopping with my best friend from college, Nichole, who died in August 2000. At the time, I didn’t know what I would do with those fabrics, but I knew I had to have them.

I believe it was probably fall of 2002 when we went to visit Kathy and Doug in Haddonfield, NJ and I saw a shop model quilt I absolutely loved at The Little Shop. They had used multiple dark Halloween prints, and then one light fabric as the background. I bought the book and decided that this would be a great showcase for my collection.

From "Leisure Arts Presents Quick Cozy Flannel Quilts"

Here is where my woeful lack of experience came into play. My previous quilting endeavors had primarily revolved around solids, so I didn’t have much real-world knowledge of how value worked with prints. I laid out my fabrics on the dining room table and realized that I had two distinct piles:  prints with a purple or black background, and prints with a cream or orange background. In large pieces, these two groups definitely read as “dark” and “light,” so I thought that rather than mimicking the book or the shop model in having just one light print, I would get to use more fabrics by making both value families scrappy.

You see where this is going. What I failed to recognize in my naiveté was that when you cut a medium to large print into 2 1/2″ strips, you inevitably cut through some of the motifs. And on a light-background print, those motifs are dark, and vice-versa. So when I sewed my strips together, the competing prints just bled into one another and completely lost the sense of the larger design. Again, my inexperience meant that rather than evaluating the situation as I sewed, I just blithely pieced along until I had the whole thing done. I held it up to behold my triumph and saw– a mess.

Detail, Halloween Buzz Saw

I sought out the advice of Diane and Rhonda, who agreed that the wild mishmash of prints caused the intended swirling pattern to be lost. We all agreed that the eye needed somewhere to rest, so I took the twelve blocks apart and sashed them with an undeniably light fabric, an orange ditzy print on a cream background, with lime green cornerstones. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough of the sashing fabric to go around the outside edge. My plan was to use plain muslin, possibly with an orange stripe pieced into it, as a replacement, but I wasn’t entirely satisfied with this idea, so the top was put aside as a UFO.

This actually wound up working in my favor, as I subsequently found the sashing print on the bolt at Quilt Quarters. But by the time I came triumphantly home with my fabric, I was wrapped up in other projects. Every year since, as Halloween has approached, I’ve thought about trying to get this quilt done in time for the holiday. Unfortunately, October is also the month that guild challenges are due, and I’m usually working down to the wire on those. But this year, the planets all aligned:  I had chosen not to make a challenge quilt, as I didn’t want to start another project when I had so many unfinished; I wanted to get some tops ready to quilt in preparation for quilting higher-stakes projects like Ruby Wedding; and it was, after all, nearly Halloween.

The outer sashing and border went together nicely, despite the fact that my piecing from lo these many years ago was woefully uneven. The blocks finished at an average of 14 1/4″ (?!?) and they varied a good bit block to block. But this was never a quilt for show; this was a salvaging of a fun collection of fabrics as well as a bit of an object lesson. I had to piece my border fabric, especially as I wanted the bats to be right side up the whole way around the quilt, but it made me feel thrifty and virtuous.

I used the bamboo blend batting from Pellon Legacy, and this is the first of their battings I’ve been disappointed in. I’ll have to see how it behaves with wear and repeated washing, but while I was quilting it and the excess was exposed around the edges, it shed like mad. I had little fuzz balls all over the quilt top. It’s definitely softer and better draping than Warm & Natural, but overall I wasn’t impressed. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by all this wool.

I wound up taking a relatively short-notice trip to Pottsville, PA for a military dental event the third weekend in October, and since it’s nearly two hours from my house, I had a hotel room for Friday and Saturday nights. Pottsville isn’t exactly a vacation destination, so Dan and Ronan stayed home. To my mind, the only way to find a silver lining in being away from my family for a weekend was to turn my hotel room into a travel quilting studio! Housekeeping must have gotten a kick out of this:

Machine? Check. Sew Ezi table? Check. Law & Order? Check!

My hotel stay gave me a solid start on the quilting, and momentum carried me through so that the last stitch went into the binding with five full days to go before Halloween! I quilted the whole thing using the Superior Threads Rainbows in Piñata that I had bought at Quilting with Machines, and the only marking I did was to divide the sashing into quarters for the freehand pumpkin seed design (I love using that on Halloween quilts.) I used Sue Patten‘s “Questionable Question Mark” with flames along the spine in the buzz saw centers, and placed strings of pearls and some weird little flaming heart things I invented in the orange corners of the blocks. The lime green cornerstones got spirals, and the outer border was done in piano keys using my Accents in Design ruler. I loved doing the quilting; I had no thread problems whatsoever! I can only hope my luck holds.

Quilting detail, Halloween Buzz Saw

The backing is one of my favorite fabric buys ever, Skull-finity by Alexander Henry. I had bought 6 or 7 yards of it at JoAnn Fabrics (of all places) a few years back, and I used the last of it on this quilt. I put a piece of the selvedge on the label so I can’t forget that name.

Back and label, Halloween Buzz Saw

The binding was scrappy, since I didn’t have enough of the lime green bat fabric from the cornerstones, but I had plenty of similar hue and value scraps from my Tucson Saguaro guild challenge quilt from 2007.

This quilt was a terrific confidence builder in many ways:  1) I really can finish my UFOs, even if it takes nearly a decade. 2) The piecing doesn’t have to be perfect. 3) The quilting doesn’t have to be perfect. 4) My machine and I seem to have reached detente.

I think this quilt deserves a slightly different type of happy dance:

Triumph Over Tension Headaches!

As I’ve posted repeatedly here, I’ve been having a great deal of difficulty over the last year and a half with skipped stitches and poor tension in my free motion machine quilting. I’ve had my machine serviced repeatedly, adjusted tension, changed needles, changed threads, changed feet, and tried every trick in the book, and I was still getting repeated problems with skipped stitches on the top resulting in big loops of shredded thread, and knots of thread on the back of the quilt. These recurring problems had really put me off of quilting my projects, especially as I had limited time to pursue my hobby in the Age of Ronan.

"Mommy, how about you stop quilting and read me a story?"

I wish I could tell you about the single wonderful product that changed all this, or the secret button I found on my machine that cured everything, but instead, as with so many of life’s problems, it took several small incremental areas of change rather than one big revelatory one. The closest things I can identify to magic buttons were threefold: receiving Barbara Shapel’s “Art of Machine Quilting” DVD for my birthday, reading the entire Education section of the Superior Threads website, and absorbing every scrap of information I could from Leah Day’s website.

I had never heard of Barbara Shapel before I put her DVD on my Amazon wishlist, but the reviews were positive and it was the only quilting DVD listed on Amazon that I was interested in (and didn’t already own.) Since watching the excellent DVD and seeing her beautiful quilts I’ve started learning more about her; her blog only just went live, but I look forward to future posts. She makes art quilts, many of them double sided, and frequently incorporates painted fabric and heavy threadwork, so her quilting style is very different from my own. However, she quilts in a very organic style with little to no marking, and as she is self-taught, she brings a different perspective to several aspects of free-motion machine quilting. I haven’t adopted all her techniques, of course, but on her recommendation I have switched to a Schmetz Jeans/Denim needle for machine quilting, and have raised my feed dogs and set my stitch length to zero.

When Diane and I attended the Ricky Tims Super Seminar in Richmond, I enjoyed the privilege of getting to hear Bob Purcell from Superior Threads give his Threadology lecture. He did a very entertaining, audience-participation demonstration of how sewing machine tension works. He also stated what I’ve heard many quilting educators reiterate, that sewing machines simply aren’t designed for what we’re doing with them when we free-motion quilt. Even longarm quilting machines are based on the original technology for sewing two pieces of fabric together in a straight line with a dual-duty type thread. So we have to deviate pretty significantly from “factory settings” to accommodate this utterly different method of sewing. However, recently just playing with the tension (top and bobbin!) hasn’t been enough. I was really getting to my wits’ end.  I studied everything I could on the Superior Threads website and gained further insight into the problems I was having, such as paying attention to whether the knots of thread on the underside of the quilt were top thread or bobbin thread. I also realized that I was using the HandyNets Thread Socks incorrectly: I was using them for storage, but taking them off when sewing. By leaving them on, I eliminated the occasional problems I was having with thread getting snagged on the base of the cone.

But it still wasn’t enough! Thank goodness, enter Leah Day. I found her website last spring when I did a Google search for “skipped stitches quilting Janome.” As it happens, one of her machines is the same as mine, a Janome Memory Craft 6500, so her advice was particularly applicable to my situation, although it is general enough to suit any domestic machine quilter.  From there, I discovered her amazing Free Motion Quilting Project, in which she posted 365 free online videos of filler patterns, an absolute inspiration to anyone who’s struggled to find alternatives to just stippling. In July I was thrilled to see her listed among the winners at the AQS show in Knoxville. Based on her advice, I am using the Supreme Slider on my machine bed, a Little Genie Magic Bobbin Washer in my bobbin case, and have changed how my free motion foot sits on the quilt surface.

With all these individual “tweaks” to my quilting setup, things were improving dramatically. The cherry on top was my realization that my stitches were too short for the thread I was using, so I decreased the speed on my machine so that “flooring it” with my foot pedal resulted in better control. With almost no skipped stitches or thread snarls, I was able to finish this:

Minkee Dragons, 37" x 45": I promise it looks better in closeup

See? Detail, Minkee Dragons

I had started a version of this project last fall before Ronan was born, shortly after blogging about it here, but the mottled dye pattern on the Gelato Minkee was too distracting. I bought the solid Minkee in early spring, but the “quick project” I was expecting turned into anything but, when my thread kept snarling. I’d had this project set aside in a big guilt pile in the corner of the studio ever since. It was supposed to be my warmup for quilting Ronan’s quilt, and instead just set me despairing of ever doing quality free-motion machine quilting again. But now the cloud has lifted! I was able to quilt the remaining 7/8 of the pattern in about the same amount of time as it took to quilt the first 1/8 with all the tension problems. Quilting on the Golden Threads paper for this project was rather delightful. I found I didn’t need to use my Machingers because my bare fingers were quite grippy on the paper. The lines were extremely easy to follow, since they were Sharpie lines. Once the quilting was complete, removing the Golden Threads paper was nowhere NEAR as arduous a task as I was expecting it to be. So in short, I would absolutely do this again. If Meadowlyon Designs is a vendor at Quilting with Machines again this year, I look forward to buying at least one more of these “pictogram” designs, if not more.

My first attempt at Minkee Dragons: poor contrast and big thread knots

This was a fairly short-term UFO, but it is nevertheless finished and out of my physical and psychological space. As such, it deserves a happy dance. We’ve been watching a great deal of Star Trek: The Next Generation on Netflix streaming lately, so this clip immediately sprang to mind. It’s not from an episode (too silly!), but was filmed as a birthday surprise for Gene Roddenberry. Thanks to YouTube, we all get to enjoy it:

Back to the Studio!

Where have I been? I’ve been asking myself the same question!

It’s been a busy summer, especially as I’m still getting used to how much having a baby in my life changes things. Ronan is an absolute joy:  his sunny personality just blows sugar through my soul every time I look at him. He’s crawling now, babbling nonstop, giggling and dancing and chasing the cats, and I’m cherishing every moment. I can’t lose myself in the studio for hours on end the way I could Before Baby — which is a perfectly acceptable tradeoff — but that’s the way my OCD personality works best for creative endeavors.  I’m starting to acclimate to life in this warm messy new country called Motherhood, and am digging in some hand- and toeholds to find my way toward quilting again, albeit in the brief scrambled bursts I can occasionally scrape together. And hopefully, I’ll also figure out how to find time to blog about it as well!

It hasn’t been a total dry spell, though. I finished something!

Double Pinwheel Table Runner, with inevitable cats

Diane, Rhonda, Kathy, and Rhonda’s cousin Cathy (that was confusing!) came for a mini-retreat at my house in mid-July. Dan acted as the primary with Ronan so we could all get some concentrated sewing in. Diane had given me a charm pack (Lollipop by Sandy Gervais for Moda) with my birthday present, so I decided to use it for some relatively brainless piecing. For whatever reason, in my life, “easy” doesn’t usually turn out that way.

I planned to make some simple double pinwheel blocks using the Angler tool. Easy piecing, no marking. Well, first, the Angler just wasn’t working for me. I know quilters who swear by it, but I was finding myself more prone to swear at it. My seam allowances looked like my history with Weight Watchers:  straight and faithful at the beginning, but veering off the longer I went and, let’s face it, getting wider. Since ripping out and resewing was the absolute antithesis of what I wanted to be doing, the Angler came off the machine bed and I started marking my diagonals on the backs of the squares.

I made 2 identical half-square triangle squares from 2 contrasting charm squares, then sewed each of them along both sides of the diagonal to another charm square to make 4 pinwheel units. So far, so good. But those 4 units, put back together, didn’t make a pinwheel! Oops…

As someone who works in a mirror all day, I’m ashamed I didn’t see that one coming. (It works if you cut the charm squares into quarter- and half-square triangle squares and then sew them all together, but not if you use the “quick” no-triangle method..at least not the way I did it.) If I’d been working from fat quarters, I would have simply cut more squares and continued to make my blocks containing only 4 fabrics each. But since I just had the charm pack, with only one square of each fabric, I had to either abandon the project entirely, or find a way to make it work. And let’s face it, one of the central tenets of Sarah Loves Fabric is that more fabric is better! So I ended up with five sets of identical-but-mirror-image blocks containing EIGHT different fabrics each, for a total of ten blocks with only two charm squares left over from the original pack of 42.

As it turned out, I’m glad my original plan fell through, and I’m glad I felt obligated to work with what I had rather than just cutting (or worse, buying!) more fabric. I think the blocks are more interesting with eight fabrics than they would have been with four, but I don’t believe I would have been brave enough to plan them that way. As I mentioned before, when it comes to fabric I definitely believe more is more; I get bored making a two- or three-fabric quilt, or one where all the blocks contain the exact same fabric combination. But until now, I hadn’t taken the plunge into making blocks that each contained quite this many different fabrics. I have to consider this a very successful experiment, and one that I intend to repeat — just so long as I don’t manage to manipulate it into an excuse to buy more charm packs!

Detail, Double Pinwheel Table Runner

I quilted the table runner using minimal-mark designs from Pam Clarke’s “Quilting Inside the Lines” with Lagoon Brytes by Superior Threads. These blocks turned out fairly lumpy in the centers, even after twirling the seam allowances when pressing, so I wanted to choose a design that allowed me to avoid those areas unobtrusively. Also, as I’ll be taking a class from Pam at Quilting with Machines in October, it seemed like a good mental warmup. I used a piece of Pellon Legacy wool batting (yum) left over from another project, and managed to find backing and binding fabrics from my stash that coordinated with the charm pack, rather than giving in and buying more of the Moda fabrics. I am appropriately proud of myself. I even hand-sewed the binding, and finished it in time for show and tell at Guild last week! It’s like I’ve turned over a new leaf.

For the happy dance for this one, how about two late greats of American comedy, Dom DeLuise and Gilda Radner, in the one bright spot in an otherwise dreadful movie:

Baby Quilts

Big surprise that lately, when I’ve had a chance to quilt, I’ve been working on baby quilts. As I alluded to in my last post, I’m making a quilt for Ronan that’s blue and taupe. I had gotten this wonderful Japanese owl print by Alexander Henry several years ago from a vendor at the Airing of the Quilts, with no thought at the time that I would someday have a baby son; I just liked the fabric. It manages to be juvenile-appropriate without being juvenile. Really, the only clue that the designer intended it to be a baby fabric at all was that it was available in pink and blue. My mom bought some too, in both colorways, and has made three baby quilts with it (two pink and one blue) for two daughters of family friends and one of my nephews. In contrast, for me this was one of those fabrics that gave me (bad pun alert!) Quilter’s Block. It was too cute to cut. That is, until I had a good idea– and then made a bad mistake that had the potential to scare me off cutting any “good” fabric for the rest of my life!

I bought the book, “9-Patch Pizzazz” by Judy Sisneros a few years ago as a way to use up some large prints that I always fall in love with on the bolt but then don’t know what to do with. I loved the author’s ideas for combining the large print with both coordinating and contrasting fabrics, but of course, being me, I had to goose up the difficulty a little bit. So while I came up with a basic layout very similar to the ones she uses in the book:

I decided to use quarter-square triangle squares, or hourglass blocks, instead of the 9-patches. This decision also allowed me to use some relatively small scraps (hi, Bonnie Hunter!) left over from cutting the Taupe Winding Ways blocks. Cutting the triangles posed no problems; the trouble started when I cut the big blocks of the owl fabric. I have an 8.5″ x 12″ Omnigrip ruler that has faked me out in the past with that extra 1/2 inch. Somehow I managed to transpose that in my mind into thinking there was an extra 1/2 inch on the 12″ side, too. So all the owl blocks that were supposed to be cut 12.5″ x 12.5″ were accidentally cut 12″ x 12″. And of course I didn’t have enough fabric to recut anything (although I would have had enough to cut them correctly in the first place, grumble grumble.) While there was initially some wailing and gnashing of teeth, I realized that with so many seams coming together in the pieced areas, odds were (knowing how I tend to piece) that the hourglass block sections would measure shorter than the cut size for the large-print blocks anyway. Therefore, I reserved judgment on the cutting error until I had the piecing done.

Wouldn’t you know it? The ONE time in my piecing life that I channel Sally Collins and have my blocks come out exactly the intended size, is the ONE time I wanted them to turn out small! Oh well. I added some 1″ dark taupe strips– another opportunity to add in more fabric!– and I think it actually improved the design. I’ve heard the saying before, it’s not a mistake, it’s a design opportunity, but I think this is the most significant example in my work so far.

To a lesser extent, this phenomenon recurred with the appliqué blocks. I knew I didn’t have enough of the owl fabric for all of the large blocks on my plan, so I intended to make one 6″ x 6″ block and one 6″ x 12″ rectangle out of the blue and taupe leaf print that I used in the hourglass blocks. Several of the model quilts in the book use more than one featured print to excellent effect. However, once I got them up on the design wall, they just blended right into the background. I salvaged the situation with some fused, machine blanket stitch appliqué, and I think the result is more interesting and attractive than if I’d had enough owl fabric in the first place.

I still need to add the borders, but I needed to put Ronan’s quilt aside to start AND FINISH!! Arianna’s quilt. We stood as godparents to Matt and Alyssa’s baby daughter, and of course I wanted to make her a quilt. (Plus, it gave me an opportunity to use some pink fabric, now that I live full-time in the Land of Blue.) I started with some Log Cabin and Pinwheel blocks I had left over from another project, added some borders and some more machine blanket stitch appliqué, and quilted it with Patsy Thompson-style no-mark feathers and freehand Baptist Fans. Considering how down-to-the-wire this project was (I finished putting the binding on at 1:30 on the morning of the baptism) I think it turned out quite well:

Once again, deadlines seem to be my friend when it comes to selecting quilting designs. If I have all the time in the world, I can dither endlessly as to which designs would be best. If I’m racing to finish, I make a command decision and put the hammer down. This was the first time I’ve even attempted, let alone used, that freehand Baptist Fan, which was inspired by Ruth B. McDowell‘s use of it as a background filler on her fabulous art quilts. I was very pleased with the result and will definitely use that again (possibly even on Ronan’s quilt?) especially on another quilt with a lot of busy piecing. It makes such a nice texture. No wonder it’s a classic. (Plus, more fun quilting puns: Baptist Fans on a baptism quilt?? Huh?? Funny?? I’m such a dork.)

Quilting Detail, Scattered Hearts (Arianna's Quilt)

On Saturday Ronan and I attended the AQS Lancaster show. I won’t give you my reviews now; hopefully there will be some new posts on the subject within the next week.  I will say that I was very excited to see that many of the changes I predicted from last year have come to pass. I definitely noticed a significant uptick in positive media coverage of the show over last year, much of it focused on the predicted $10 million it’s bringing with it to Lancaster! Several non-quilters of my acquaintance specifically asked me if I were going to the show, as they had heard about it from TV, radio, and the newspaper. So AQS seems to have come to understand Lancaster, and Lancaster seems to have grasped what it means to have a show of this caliber come to town.  More on that soon!

Finished! Matt and Alyssa’s Wedding Quilt

The baby’s asleep — I can get a post up here!

You know what they say about good intentions… and what they’re used to pave…

When my friend Alyssa asked me, roughly a month before her November 2009 wedding, if I knew anyone who’d be willing to make a wedding signature quilt for hire, I jumped at the opportunity:  “Let me do this as my wedding present to you.”  I was very sincere in this.  Despite having already planned for 2010 to be my Year of the UFO, I thought this project would make a worthy exception.  I love signature/album quilts; they’re such a wonderful tradition, and speak to me so volubly of Why We Quilt — they are literally a way for the recipients to wrap themselves in the good wishes of people who care about them.  Besides, it was going to be a simple quilt:  big blocks, straight-line piecing, nothing fancy.  This wouldn’t take much time.

Ha.  Ha.  Ha.  Because this became Murphy’s Quilt.

Everything started well:  I prepared a basketful of precut 4 1/2″ squares of the JoAnn Fabrics Kona cotton in a nice cream, prewashed and ironed onto freezer paper, with a 1/2″ seam allowance premarked with blue washout marker.  (I figured, mostly correctly, that a marked 1/2″ seam allowance would probably yield a useably empty 1/4″ seam allowance.)  As their wedding colors were dark blue and chocolate brown, I brought along fine-tip Sharpies in navy and brown, which I had pretested for colorfastness.  Dan made a nice sign for the table at the reception, explaining the project, and the guests did a nice job leaving signatures, notes, wishes, and even some artwork on the squares.

I had planned the quilt to encompass 25 Air Castle blocks, measuring 12″ each, as I wanted it to be big enough for them to share as a couch/cuddle quilt.  I chose the Air Castle block because it’s simple, attractive, and  contains 5 solid squares; thus the quilt could accommodate up to 125 signed squares.  Projected attendance was roughly 100, and I made sure I had plenty of extra squares available to allow for mistakes, but as most couples and families signed just one square to represent them all, and some guests didn’t sign at all, I ended up with only 39 signed squares.  This was fine; it meant that I could put a signed square in the center of each block, with a second one in the lower right hand corner of slightly more than half the blocks.  It also gave me room to make an additional square to place in the center of the quilt with their names, wedding date, and details.

I had warned Alyssa when I offered to take this project on that it wouldn’t be finished anytime soon; there was no way I could start it before the new year, and she was fine with that.  I was able to pull all the necessary brown fabrics from the leftovers from Window on Whimsey, but the not-quite-navy of the bridesmaids’ dresses wasn’t really represented in my stash, so it gave me something to look for on the Shop Hop last year.  I then bundled up the fabrics, the sketch, my copy of Marsha McCloskey’s Block Party book, and set them aside.  And then my life got complicated.  I started this blog; I found out I was pregnant; three weeks later, I found out I was losing my job; and two months after that, I lost said job.  Then I started traveling so I could work for the military dental contractor, and next thing I knew, it was the middle of summer and I hadn’t yet started this quilt.  (Hello, quilt guilt!)  I had taken the supplies to the April guild retreat, but didn’t actually work on it.  In fact, I didn’t start the quilt until the weekend before my mini home retreat with Rhonda and Diane; I had started the cutting at my parents’ house during a quilting day with my mom, thinking I’d be able to knock out the whole top the following weekend.

Again:  Ha.  Ha.  Ha.

As regular readers may recall, that was when I mistakenly cut a large portion of my fabric into the wrong size triangles, having forgotten in the criminally long interval between planning and starting that I had changed the block size from the 9″ in the book to 12″.  And I couldn’t just change my mind and make either more blocks or a smaller quilt, because the signed squares were 4 1/2″ and could not be cut down.  All I could do was get over myself and recut the pieces.  Fortunately, I had enough of the brown and blue fabrics, and the cream was a standard solid from JoAnn’s, easy to procure more of, right?  Right???

The first time I looked for more of the solid cream fabric was when my mom and I were in Pittsburgh to hear Bonnie Hunter speak, and we stopped into a local JoAnn’s to kill time before the meeting.  I couldn’t find anything that looked like what I’d been working with, but I didn’t have a swatch with me for comparison so I didn’t worry.  I started to worry, however, when I did take a swatch to my local JoAnn’s and still couldn’t find anything that matched.  I remembered having bought Kona cotton, but I started to second-guess myself and looked at all their solids.  Still nothing.  Could they have discontinued an entire line of solids between November and July?  Could there be a missing off-white that no one was stocking?  I was really puzzled.  I finally bought a yard each of the two closest matches, the Kona cotton and the Egyptian cotton, hoping that one or the other would look significantly different once it was washed.

And surprise, it did!  Turns out, both fabrics apparently have so much sizing and finishing additives on them that they radically changed in appearance once they were washed and dried, and the Kona cotton was indeed the winner as I had remembered.  Washed, it looked lighter in color, much more matte, and with nearly a seersucker texture even after pressing.  If I needed a reminder of the importance of prewashing, this was it.  Another obstacle surmounted.

I finished the top and also pieced the back.  I’d found on last year’s shop hop not only a beautiful blue and brown large-scale Oriental floral perfect for this purpose on the bargain rack, but also a piece of Gail Kessler‘s life-size piano keyboard fabric, which I thought would be very appropriate to incorporate into a pianist’s quilt.  It made the construction of the back somewhat more challenging, but I think it was worth it:

I then basted the quilt and started quilting.  And that’s when the final round of Murphyness raised its ugly head.  As previously discussed here, I had unprecedented problems with skipped stitches and frayed threads, especially every time I crossed a heavy intersection of seam allowances.  In a pieced quilt, there are a lot of these, and it made me nervous about my prospects for quilting both Ruby Wedding and Taupe Winding Ways.  Manipulating tension and needle choice solved most of the problem, but I still had to periodically stop, rip out, and restitch throughout the project, which really ruined my momentum and greatly prolonged the process.  I was happy with my choice of quilting design, though:  a virtually no-mark, Pam Clarke-inspired combination of continuous curve quilting in the blue and brown triangles and in the signature squares, with additional loop and curl embellishments in the solid cream squares and triangles.  The light blue thread created enough contrast for visibility without distracting from the primary focus of the top.  I finished the quilt with a scrappy binding of all the blues, once again using the Sew Precise, Sew Fast machine binding technique.

If this were a fictional story, this whole tale of woe would culminate with my putting the finished quilt in the washing machine to remove the washout blue marker and the water-soluble thread, and having all the Sharpie signatures inexplicably vanish off the fabric, thus ruining the entire project.  Fortunately, this is real life, and I really had tested the markers first, so there was no final tragedy.  I was able to give them their quilt on their first wedding anniversary, and they loved it.  Despite all the roadblocks I encountered, I am happy I made this quilt for them, and it certainly was a learning experience!  Therefore, I’ll leave this happy dance in the capable hands and feet of Mr. Gene Kelly, who danced happier than anyone:

Whoo Hoo!

It had to happen sooner or later:

I finished Convergence Birds!

This is my first completed UFO since I started this project.  I’ve been making gradual progress on several others, so hopefully this summer will be an extremely productive time as far as finishing a whole bunch of quilts all at once.  Instead, lately I’ve been tackling some pretty ambitious projects with an eye toward the quilt show in June rather than working on the easy ones.

Speaking of the easy ones:  I had categorized Windows on Whimsy as being the WIP closest to completion, which considering it was already layered, basted, and had the quilting started, wasn’t entirely crazy.  HOWEVER.  I chose a no-mark, but very dense and ambitious, quilting design for that quilt.  As such, I spent two whole days of the December retreat, and a day and a half of the April retreat this past weekend, machine quilting this quilt.  AND I’M STILL NOT DONE!!!  To be fair, I’ve made a lot of progress; the only area left to be quilted is the panel section, and I’ve already ditch quilted that and done one windowpane with the clamshell design I’ve selected.  I would have done more at the retreat, but the white iron-off pounce powder I brought with me to mark the stencil design didn’t show up as well as I had hoped.  I don’t want to have to use Golden Threads paper, as I hate with a fiery passion having to tear that stuff away, but if that’s the only thing that will get this quilt finished, I’ll manage.  Heck, if walking barefoot across hot coals gets this quilt finished, I’m (probably) game.  I finished sewing the binding on it this evening, so I can see another quilt-finishing celebration on the horizon.

Window on Whimsy -- almost finished!

But back to the one I already finished:  I brought Convergence Birds to the retreat and started working on it right away, starting about lunchtime on Friday.  It was spray-basted and I had ditch quilted the convergence section and along the satin stitched applique bird border, but that was as far as I had gotten when my machine started acting up.  I had also made the binding.  This time, with my newly serviced machine, the free motion quilting went extremely well.

Quilting detail, Convergence Birds

The only problem I encountered was that I hadn’t spray-basted the edges of the quilt top as thoroughly as I might have, so every now and then a fabric edge would catch on the darning foot and create a pleat that I’d have to rip out, but I could deal with that.  I really liked quilting the wool batting; I will definitely be using it for Ruby Wedding.  The fact that I’d had so much time to consider my options for quilting design and thread choice due to all my unanticipated delays meant that I was extremely confident in my final choices, and that combination of confidence and uninterrupted quilting time made the completion of this quilt a thoroughly enjoyable experience.  I love retreat!

Someone at retreat mentioned that next time, we should bring a bell to ring every time someone finishes a project.  We had a full house this time, so even though each quilter tended to announce her successes, not everyone heard.  And although a bell would be nice, the happy dance in my head tends to sound a little more rockin’:

Yes, that is actually what plays in my head when I finish a quilt.  I even wore this shirt for the occasion:

I hope this shirt will get a lot more wear in the near future.