5-6 Years in the Making

In an effort to spur myself on to finish some long languishing WIPs, and because I knew that fatigue would also hold me back this year, I joined up with Adrianne at On the Windy Side for her quarterly Finish Along this year. In trotting out the WIPs, I found this one and I am delighted to be able to share it as finished.

 There is a story here. You knew there would be, right? The fabric is the very first pre-cut I ever bought. A Jelly Roll of Fig Tree Quilts Gypsy Rose. The soft, beautiful colors called to me at that time. I pulled the jelly roll apart and played with the strips. I grouped them in color family order. I counted them to see how many there were. There were 7 groups of 5 strips, with 5 leftover that were grouped by default. I sewed the groups together and measured, divided and cut them into squares and set them on point, a first for me too. I played with them on my design wall and finally settled on this arrangement and sewed them together. I bought a border fabric, since back then every quilt still had a border in my world. And the top was done.

 And I was stumped as to what to do next. It hung on my design wall for a while. And then, I gave up and took it down. I folded it and put it away and moved on to other quilts...for almost 6 years.

I began looking at some of my older, unquilted tops about a year or so ago. I began with the smaller ones, so still, this one waited. I finally pressed the wrinkles out and hung it on a hanger to keep it better. I was waiting for inspiration on how to finish it. I finally got it. I have started making notes when the inspiration hits, because I will surely forget later on. I started quilting it in the first quarter, after finally piecing a back. It's hard to tell here, but each square is quilted with a large Mum type flower.

 The half squares along the edges are a back and forth loop in each strip of the square and the border is a wavy sort of zigzag that I have done before.

 One of the hard things was choosing the binding. These colors are so soft, and have a tone to them that is very much a Fig Tree Quilts specialty, in my opinion. I had to work from stash, so I went through everything, looking for a more subdued option.

 And I found one, confirmed by my daughter when I sent her a photo of the two options I thought might work. This beautiful pale green Dear Stella Confetti Dots. I had exactly a half yard and only one little 1.5 inch strip is now left. I love it so much more than I even thought I would.

And the back? Here it is. A big chunk of an Amy Butler print in pale blue, and bright borders of Birds and Berries by Lauren and Jessie Jung pulled from a layer cake that has been hanging around for about 3 years. I have used bits of it before. Now that I see it again, I wish I had more of it.

 Just look at all that crinkly goodness just out of the dryer. My favorite part of every quilt I make.

And so now, a mere 6 years after I bought it, I love this finally finished quilt so much more than I would have thought. Is it time that does that? This beauty is going to live at my middle daughter's house. Being the only female in the house means she needs some feminine touches and this one fits the bill perfectly. A happy ending.

A Softer Place to Sit

My Friday finish this week is my chair cushions. It only took me 3-4 days to get them all done, in between everything else going on in my life.  I am thrilled with the way they came out. I still need to go buy one more foam insert to do my last chair, but for now, I have 5 new chairs.

Text fabrics from a swap

Road 15 by Sweetwater

From a rainbow charm swap

More Road 15

Fig Tree fabrics

 Most of the sides are not too even, but who cares.  They are so cushy and soft when you sit.

 I love looking down the row of chairs like this.  It really is like having new chairs!

Have a great weekend. Linking up with Crazy Mom Quilts for Finish it Friday.

A Charmed Project

I love Charm packs. I buy them to get a good look at all the fabrics in a line I am interested in. I buy them because they are not too expensive. And I have also swapped them. So I have lots of charms.  What do you do with all of those charms?  Well, patchwork of course. And what do you do with all that patchwork? Cushion covers!

These old cushions for my dining room chairs were really worn and ugly. I forgot to get a picture before I striped them bare. I have had them on the to do list for at least 2 years. Yesterday, I started on them with my charm squares. Here is where I am after 3 are finished:

 This is the first one, covered in Road 15 from Sweetwater. I added some poly fill to puff it up a bit. They tend to get flatter over time.

 This one is also Road 15 in another colorway. I had a whole charm pack of this to use. I used 12 charms for each cushion. The strip around the side is made from fat quarters of Reunion and Noteworthy, cut into strips and pieced.

Before you get to thinking they are all going to be the same, the next one is a bunch of text charms from a swap. I did use the last of the strips of Reunion and Noteworthy on it.  The last two are not done, but I have the charms picked out. One is some Fig Tree prints from California Girl and a couple from a newer Fig Tree line that I can't recall the name of. The other one is just an assortment of charms from another swap I did about 3 years ago, so no telling what they are. After that, I have to buy one more foam form, as I have always been lacking one. Such a slacker! Talk to you soon.

What My Spools Quilt Taught Me

I love this quilt, so much more now that it is done, as is so often the case. It took me a long time to finish it, and there was a lot of learning along the way, so that is what I want to share here today. If you are like me, you often admire quilts made by others and think "I would love to make one of those." But seldom do I act on that thought for a couple of reasons. I can't always find the same fabrics or the pattern is complex and I am not one who does complex very often. Or, more likely, I just want to admire it...a lot...but not really actually make it. The Spools pattern grabbed me. The biggest reason I went ahead and bought it, other than the fact that I do love so many of Camille's patterns, is the wobbly way the spools are stacked. It is very different from most spool quilts.

 I bought the pattern on March 17th of this year. Funny, when I checked on that, I thought it had been much longer ago. I didn't have the fabrics Camille used, but what I did have was a fat eighth bundle of Strawberry Fields by Fig Tree. I bought the fat eighth, the only bundle of that size I have ever purchased, because I just needed to have more than a charm pack of those soft, beautiful designs.

 I spent one session cutting out all the pieces for this quilt. I have never done that before. I tend to cut and sew and cut and sew as I go. I was determined to do this in a different way. I bought a plastic project storage container and kept all the parts in there as I made the blocks over time.  I think it was late summer or early fall when I finally had this quilt top finished.  So far, so good. I was pleased with the look of my work.  Now, to quilt it.

 My first thought was to shortcut it and do a loopy doodle all over it and have it done.  But having recently finished quilting a special quilt for my sister which involved 16 hours of quilting (I kept track) I started to think about doing more for my spools.

 I used the patterns on the grey spool ends to inspire me and quilted lines, zigzags and a scribble on the dotted ones, filling them in pretty densely. For the spools themselves, I quilted an oval loop around from top to bottom to imitate the way thread is wound around a spool. It is less dense than the grey areas.

 For the white background, I chose to quilt a figure 8 that ran from top to bottom. I found that I could expand and contract it pretty easily as the white area expanded and contracted.  When it was done, the lesson from the quilting became "less dense quilting comes to the foreground, while more dense quilting recedes to the background". I am sure this is not a new concept, but I didn't think of it before I quilted this.

 Another lesson I learned is about thread. While I was making this quilt and quilting it, I was short on funds and ran low on white thread. I have been sewing with Aurifil for a couple of years now, almost exclusively. It works well with my Bernina. While I did not go buy a cheap thread, I did buy a less expensive thread. I used some Mettler which I had and some Gutermann that I got at Joann with a coupon.

 All threads are not created equal and all machines do not sew well with all threads.  My stitches are uneven and I fought with my machine a bit, but I did manage to finish this quilt. I learned my lesson. If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right, including the supplies.

 The last lesson is that washing and drying, which shrinks and provides the crinkles we love so much does help to equalize the dense and not so dense quilting.  It does look better now.

I love this quilt and I am so glad I followed my heart and made it. I hope to keep the lessons learned in the front of my mind when next I start a project, but this I know about me: I am a hard headed person and I will need to re-learn some of these lessons next time I decide to take a shortcut.  Have a great day and I will talk to you soon.

WIP Wednesday

I am still quilting every chance I get, trying like crazy to finish up some of those quilt tops I have lying around. Much progress is being made.  Here is today's installment.

 I am quilting my Spools quilt. This is a quilt pattern by Camille Roskelly. I fell in love with it when I saw it. The stacked off-set spools are so cute and just a bit different from most spool quilts.

 This one is getting quite a bit of quilting, as seems to be what my quilts are crying out for these days.

 I am doing a swirl around the main spool part, to imitate thread. The ends of the spools are getting quilted base on the fabric in them. Small stripes for this one...

      ...and round doodles for the one with the polka dots.  I am loving this quilt already.

The white sashing is going to be figure 8s. I am about half way done with this baby and hopefully I can have it done in about another week. The fabric I used was a fat eighth of Fig Tree's Strawberry Fields.
Linking up with Lee at Freshly Pieced for WIP Wednesday.

Spoolin' Around

Spent a bit of time working on my Spools quilt top today.  I like how it's coming along.  It's a very easy pattern and so easy to get into the zone and just sew.

 I had to do three complete spools to see how they were going to look.  I need that gratification to keep me going sometimes.  The "thread" is Strawberry Fields by Fig Tree.  For the spool ends I am using 3 different fabrics, in keeping with using my stash: grey dots from Vintage Modern, grey stripe from Sunkissed, and grey tiny zigzag from Reunion.

 Chain piecing is definitely the way to go with this pattern. It's so easy to do too.  It also helps me to remember which way to orient the corner pieces and stitch them correctly.

 Here is a bit of trimmings from the spool ends.  I think these triangles are way too small to keep for any reason at all.  Into the trash they will go.

And neatly put away until next time, there are far fewer pieces in the project box now.  I love when I can see the progress.  Have a great weekend.

Spools

 So I mentioned in my last post that I cannot afford to buy any fabric.  I have been so good for the last 3 weeks.  If you knew me, you would see what an accomplishment this is.  I have been wanting to do the Spools pattern by Camille Roskelly.  I bought the pattern awhile ago.  So since there is no fabric purchasing, it was off to the stash.  I found a lovely fat eight bundle of Strawberry Fields by Fig Tree Quilts.  Perfect.  I had a couple of small-ish pieces of Kona White.  Okay.  Still need more for sashing, but that can wait.  Found 3 different greys to use for the spools.

 So I started cutting all that I had.  I even had a nice plastic project bin that was recently vacated by Swoon.  So now I have all the pieces cut except for sashing, but that is so far off right now, I will find some way to get it later.

 I started sewing all my spools together yesterday.  I made many different combos.  The light isn't great here and for some reason, the flash wouldn't flash.  But here they are all stitched and pressed.

I had just enough time to sew on a couple of white strips.  As I sit here looking, I am noticing that I put two on each spool.  I'm not sure if that's right or not.  Oh well, I will look at the pattern and see before my next sewing session.








The other quick, well, relatively quick thing I made yesterday was a new cover for my sewing machine.  I saw one on Clover and Violet and was inspired to make one of my own.  I had a few scraps from a set of pillow covers I am making for my daughter, and I wanted to make them into something for me.  So this is what I did:

I made a little mosaic of the scraps and appliqued it onto some fabric.  This was a one yard piece of fabric I have had for years...Michael Miller...and was going to put it in my get rid of pile.  I just free wheeled the whole thing based on what I had seen.  Pretty simple really.  And the best part is I love it, even the green.  So it was a good day.
Hope you are having a great day too.

Lots of Show and Tell

I've really been making some progress here this week.  I am sewing a lot to finish some big projects and even squeezing in some smaller things that weren't on the list.  So here is my show and tell.  I have to tell you I cannot always get my pictures to load in the order I want without a lot of finagling.  So today, I'm just gonna narrate them in the order they came up because I'm feeling too lazy to mess with it.

This is my couch with all its quilty goodness on it.  It's sort of an off white and to protect it I have covered it in many quilts and pillows.

 I bought 2 charm packs of California Girl by Fig Tree.  I love to test drive a new line to see which prints I really love.  This line has quite a few, which could get expensive when it comes to yardage.  I had a couple of pillow forms that needed dressing for awhile now, so I decided to drop all else for the day and do them.  The border is a dotted print from the Strawberry Fields line.  See how well they play together?

 Under the green strips is the zipper.  I put the other strips on to add interest and mimic the zipper strip.

 And dig the mitered corner!  I am usually too afraid to miter, but yesterday I was not afraid at all! First a zipper and then a miter! What next?

 Here are my March Bee blocks for the Comfort Quilt Bee.  This was a great block From Don't Call Me Betsy's blog.  Her tutorial is so easy.  These were pretty quick and they are off to the post office today.

 Here is the second pillow cover using California Girl charm squares.  Also a good shot of the mitered corner.

 I like this one sooooo much.  Very cool prints in this collection, I must say.

 I didn't have another zipper long enough, so I did an envelope closure, again using two sets of strips to mimic the look like the other pillow.  The small check print is also from the Strawberry Fields collection.

 Here is another shot of my couch with all 4 pillows.  You can see in the background the quilt on the back of the rocker and the one on the wall.  If you look carefully in the bottom left corner of the picture there is my Irish chain quilt in its hoop.  Still not done with it.  Can you have too much quilty goodness in one room?  You should see the other chairs!

Last, but not least, my sister's quilt.  All that remains before quilting is to add the 2 inch border strip.  Then it will be off to the quilter.  I am so glad this is so close to done.  It is a very big quilt, even if I am not quilting it.  Thanks for coming along today.  Have a great Monday.