Quilting

Because we all did some travelling this summer, and not at the same time, we cancelled several weeks of quilt group and got a little behind with our progress. Over the course of three sewing weeks, we managed to get our four houses done. They vary wildly in fabric and color choices, as well as background choices because we are very individual when it comes to this quilt! We cut and sewed the first house on the same day but then decided to cut out all three in a marathon cutting session, start sewing and finishing sewing the next week. Because our houses were all made of completely different fabric, we all cut our own houses rather than each person cutting all the pieces out of one fabric for all of us as we do on the 1930’s quilt. If you’ve ever done any fabric cutting of lots of varied size pieces, it takes focus. We find that repeating the dimensions out loud to ourselves as we check the pattern and then as we cut is very helpful in avoiding mistakes. So a cutting day sounds like this: “two rectangles of cream 1 1/4″ by 3 1/2” “I need to cut three windows out of the same fabric” “Oh darn it!” “the light blue is a triangle with three rectangles while the dark blue is five rectangles” “Wait! Is that three or four green 2 1/2″ squares?” “three strips 1 1/2″ by 12”, all murmured quietly and somewhat continuously, interspersed with louder exclamations of “For the love, I did it again!” uttered by me. A visitor during cutting time would fall on the floor laughing hysterically. [Read more…] about Summer with America the Beautiful

During the spring we got some blocks done on our America the Beautiful quilt. We sewed the mountains blocks which are designed to be purple triangles. We thought they looked like purple pyramids and saw in some reader examples that one quilter had put snow on hers. We really liked that look since we live next to mountains which have snow on them all winter long, so we free-hand cut some white fabric for snow. Then we left them with Terry who kindly did the satin stitching on our snow and used her embroidery machine to give us each a flying eagle. So fun to have that personal touch. [Read more…] about Spring progress on America the Beautiful