Quilting

After a long hiatus including grandkid birthdays, brief vacations, and illness, the 1930’s quilt group is back on track and making blocks. We are continuing in numerical order and still making the biggest blocks.

Block #6 Godey’s Lady’s Book 12×12

This block looks deceptively simple to piece, but as mentioned previously, this pattern uses no “easy” piecing techniques so all the triangles are pieced on the bias causing stretching and irritation. We worked over those yellow star points to keep them from undue stretching and warping. Grr. We strayed from the recommended color way by bringing in all those brights and we love them! We are tired of the pale pink, yellow, green theme and want some diversity so are slowly bringing in other colors. Our 1930’s quilt will definitely be more vibrant than the pattern. [Read more…] about Ode to the 1930’s-blocks #6 & 7

I started the hand-quilting on the spaceship quilt and managed two finishes last week. The first is a Schoolhouse tabletopper. It was the first project of 2015 with my quilting partner, ShaRee. She has a book with a zillion table topper patterns and keeps talking about wanting to make some. Our local quilt shop had kits of this one so I gave her one for Christmas and got one for me so we could work on it together in January and February. She is a retired kindergarten teacher so it’s apropos. The piecing was SMALL so we learned some stuff. I hand-quilted in the ditch around all squares and most elements.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I also finally finished hand-quilting and binding on the Candy Shop quilt. The pattern came from “American Patchwork & Quilting” Issue 79 April 2006 p. 70. This quilt has quite the provenance. I began purchasing fabric in 2008 after my first quilt. Not knowing that 100% cotton fabric isn’t all made the same, it has a variety of fabrics from many manufactures, some of which are of dubious quality, causing stretching and wonkiness. I slowly cut and pieced the blocks here and there until finally last year I decided to get it off my plate. I hand-quilted it with an all-over random swirly no-pattern free-form thing I usually do. I trimmed the sides harshly to make it come out straight and unpicked and re-sewed parts of the binding four times to make it look mostly straight and finally decided it was as good as it was going to get. I’m not thrilled but it’s not too bad and still a fun quilt. Maybe someday I’ll make it again with quality fabrics. Sounds like a good scrap quilt.

Now for the accident portion of the post. After thirty years of sewing I put the sewing machine needle into my index finger on Friday afternoon. Are you kidding me? I was piecing a quilt top and pushing the fabric through and somehow, although I’m not sure exactly how, I pushed my left index finger up under the foot. The needle went into my fingernail and sliced through the end of my fingertip. I managed to save the quilt top and the carpet from the spurting blood. Yay! Got the bleeding stopped and had my nurse friend look at it and help me with how to care for it.

Remember how I said we were considering skipping around on the blocks in order to leave all the applique blocks to the end but decided to just be brave and go in order? Well, that brought us to block #4 and the first of the applique blocks. I had never done machine applique in my life and certainly not with my new machine. Terry and ShaRee had limited experience and honestly, we were all shaking in our boots. It was ShaRee’s turn to be the team lead and she took care of us splendidly. We had previously chosen the fabric for this block so she traced all the patterns and even provided us with a sample tulip on scrap fabric so we could test out our blanket stitch. Those samples all turned out great and all our machines did a beautiful blanket stitch. [Read more…] about Ode to the 1930’s-blocks #4 & 5

After our first block, we were a teensy bit aggravated at the pattern. It’s awesome, but the designer mostly cuts squares into triangles and sews them together. This causes stretching on the bias and wonky squares, and doesn’t utilize all the quick half-square triangle and flying geese methods available. So Terry decided to work through block #2 in scrap fabric in preparation for our sewing day and see if she could identify some easy piecing techniques. It requires some figuring but she did a great job and the block went together much faster and straighter.

We selected a focal print for the centers and fussy cut them so that the flower really showed up and then used the suggested color scheme of yellow, pink and green. This block is kind of a star in a star as the green center pieces form a star and then the whole thing is a star. [Read more…] about Ode to the 1930’s-blocks #2 & 3