Hoop It Up!

I love Bonnie Hunter. I so enjoy her blog Quiltville's Quips and Snips and the real and creative life she leads. It inspires me. She has been doing some hand quilting and showing it lately. Even though her business also involves a lot of long arm work, she still likes that cozy, slow stitch feeling too. It made me want to go back to my quilting roots.

Around 2010 I found the modern quilting movement on line. I learned how to machine quilt and I was hooked. It was so much faster, and the possibilities were endless. I pretty much gave up hand quilting. These days though, I find myself drawn back into the slower pace of hand work. I have been doing tons of embroidery and crochet. Now, I wanted to start hand quilting again. But not on a large quilt.

I am quilting along with Rachel at Stitched in Color on the Pas de Deux quilt this year. She showed a photo of some fabrics she had pulled for a project that included this Heather Ross print of the moths. I love that print and happened to have a little. I wanted to use it. So I chose several fabrics to go with it, wanting a spring colored vibe. I edited the colors and then pulled out my Tula Pink's 100 Modern Quilt Blocks, looking for ideas. I wanted that soft purple to be  focus of the piece, so I made 5 blocks identical. The other block I wanted to feature the supporting fabrics. But I didn't like this. Too much too much.

So I chose my favorite and settled on this. I added the green back in as a very narrow 1 inch border, and had just enough of the purple to make an outer border, which is wider at the top and bottom than the sides. I am very pleased with this.

Then pieced together a backing from some long held fabrics that weren't getting any use. I pulled out my old quilting hoop and hooped it up, after thread basting the layers. I had to kind of relearn that thread basting too. It's amazing what you forget.

And now, for however long it takes, I am going to hand quilt this piece. It is 24x27 inches, so not too big.

I am going to let it lead me, and show me how it wants to be quilted. I took the first few stitches yesterday, and let me tell you, my hand quilting needs work. But, the only way it gets better is to do it. Practice, practice, practice. So that's what I will be doing for awhile. And I couldn't be happier about it.

Talk to you soon.

It's Thursday and I Have Pillow Covers to Show You

So my daughter got her pillow covers in the mail this morning, so now I can show all of them to you.

 Okay, so Blogger re-ordered my pictures, so in no particular order...This is the quilting on one of the pillow covers. My daughter and I exchanged lots of photos via text, so she could choose fabrics from my stash.

 I just had to buy some fabrics for the backs, and I bought these tree on sale. They are similar in color to the colors she chose for the fronts. All have zippers, also from my stash, and a zipper covering flap that is one of the fabrics on the front of the cushion cover.

 Here are all five together. Some fabrics repeated in each pillow, to make them a set without really being identical. That was the goal.

 I did this one so I could play with hexagons again. On such a small scale it was really fun. That was also the point of this project. Fun stuff on a small scale.

 This was the first one I made. I have been wanting to do some more Dear Dottie blocks since I made the first quilt. I had bought some of Tula Pink's Monkey Wrench fabrics because I fell in love with the bananas and then a couple to go with the bananas, of course. My daughter fell in love with these fabrics too. These were the colors she chose.

 I had been wanting to do some little houses in something with a smaller scale and again, this fit the bill perfectly. That is almost the last bit of Squared Elements fabric I have from when it first came out and I bought it in almost every color.

 This pretty Art Gallery yellow is a Maureen Cracknell design. I didn't know that when I ordered it, but I fell in love when I saw it.

 This cutie was made with a Fabric Mutt pattern tutorial. I showed a pillow cover I made a few weeks ago with this pattern in different colors. I couldn't not make another one. This one has some hand quilting on it as well as some machine quilting. It just sang out for some hand work.

 This is the one from the picture with the machine above. Coincidentally, the turquoise dots is a Tula Pink fabric I had forgotten I had.

 The rest of these are the backs of the covers. I wanted them to be as pretty as the fronts were.

And now, my job here is done. They have been put on the pillows, and the pillows are on the couch. And I made my daughter pretty happy. And that makes me happy.
Talk to you all soon.

A Big Finish

I finally finished my 100 blocks 100 days 2018 quilt. Bound, washed and dried, and photographed. This is such a big sense of accomplishment for me you guys. I bought Tula Pink's book  about 6 months after it came out because I saw it everywhere on the internet. And then, it sat on my shelf. I was completely overwhelmed with all the blocks in this book.

I mean, think of it. It's 100 different blocks. Each cut out separately. No fast rotary cutting multiples here. And I know that there have been other 100 blocks sew alongs, but finally, last year I was struck with a great desire to do this. I saw lots of great inspiration on Instagram. And I figured out a way to make this a bit less overwhelming. Every 10 blocks I made in a particular featured color. So much easier for me to decide on fabrics.

 I took the blocks with me to North Carolina last spring, and my daughter helped me to figure out a nice arrangement for them. That was another sticking point for me.

      And I loved what she came up with.

 I took a couple of pictures outside, but it was way too sunny for great colors.

 With all the color on the top, I decided to put on a border of grey to frame it. I quilted the quilt in off white thread, but did the borders in red thread, just for fun.

 And I had two long-ish pieces of leftover binding in my stash, so I put them together to bind this quilt.

And for the back, I used some Bonnie and Camille fabrics that I love, but had been in my stash for a number of years, along with a couple other fabrics to make it large enough.

And there you have it. My big finish. Have a great rest of your weekend friends.

Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Stash???

I have been working on a project for the last couple of weeks. It is the 100 Blocks 100 Days challenge using Tula Pink's City Sample book. It is being held on Instgram if you want to check it out. I have decided to use only my stash for this challenge and so far, so good. But, it has led to a lot of thinking while I am pulling fabrics and scraps from my stash and pressing them to be able to cut them.

Do you do that too? Let your mind wander while you cut and sew? I do much of my best thinking and soul searching at my machine or at my ironing board. Anyway, back to my question about too much stash.

 When I first started making quilts, around 1990, I would figure out a quilt to make, try to figure out how much fabric I needed and buy just that. I over estimated sometimes, and my stash was started, because I save everything. I kept all my scraps,no matter the size, in an old chest of drawers that traveled with me from house to house, state to state while my children were growing up.  They were all thrown in ther, jumbled together.

 Once we settled in North Carolina, I became more serious about quilting. I still mostly shopped for fabrics for specific projects, but for the first time, I lived near a local quilt shop. The proprietor would hold an anniversary sale every year, 35% off all cuts of 1/2 yard or more. That was when I really began buying fabrics I really liked just because. The second or third year of this sale, I remember a woman came into the shop while I was waiting to get my fabric cut, and left her credit card with the instructions that she wanted a half yard cut of ever single solid that was in the shop at that time. I was stunned! Do people do that?

I attended that anniversary sale every year for about 20 years, until sadly, the proprietor retired and closed the shop. But, beginning in 2010, I found the on line quilting community and I began to buy fabrics on line, that my LQS didn't have in stock, because, hey, there isn't room to stock everything, right? This was when quilting blogs were really ramping up in popularity and there were so many of them. They showed new lines and it really drew me in.

 There were tons of new designers, the colors were brighter, the Modern Quilting movement was really taking off. This spoke to me...loudly! I bought more fabrics without a plan, feeling a compelling need to build my stash.

 I would take breaks from buying, but inevitably a line would come out that I couldn't resist. I cleaned my sewing room. I reorganized my stash...multiple times. I seldom got rid of much. I couldn't bear to part with it.

 But then we move across the country and I purged, big time. I got rid of a big box of fabrics that I just new I would never use. Some just weren't my style any longer. I got rid of books and tons of other sewing things too, and tried to keep only what I really loved. It is still a lot of fabric.

 One of the things that working on this block challenge has done, is showed me bits and pieces of fabrics that have been around for years. Really. Ten years and sometimes longer. I thought I had gotten rid of most of those. I was happy to see some of them, and I was able to look at them and figure out a way to use them, when I hadn't been able to before, and that feels great to me. I put together combos that I might not have in the past. My style and tastes are still changing. This surprised me.

The other thing I noticed, and that was what led me to this post, is that some of my older fabrics have been folded in my stash for so long, that despite not being in direct sunlight, have faded along the fold lines. This too surprised me. I wondered how people who have much larger stashes than mine deal with this type of thing. Do they even know it is occurring? We tend to use our fabrics as decor in our sewing rooms, maybe this isn't a good idea.

I have learned from this experience that I truly do have more than enough fabric to last me for quite some time. I know I cannot live forever. But will I quit buying fabrics? Probably not. But I would like to continue with projects I can sew from my stash. It would be sad if all that pretty fabric went to waste.
If you feel compelled, comment here and let me know how you feel about your stash and how you take care of it. Is it big enough? Are you still adding to it? How do you try to use from it? And do you have any great stash busting quilt patterns that you have made and loved? I would love to know.
Talk to you soon.

Pushing Myself, Creatively Speaking

How do you push yourself to continue being creative? I love sewing, it's a really big part of who I am. But sometimes I feel like I am just churning things out and not being terribly creative. Or it begins to feel same ol' same ol' to me. So I started thinking about this yesterday. And in the last year or so, there are a couple of things I started doing to keep things fresh and new for myself.

Now, I have never been a big joiner when it comes to quilting. No quilt guilds, and only a few classes back in the early days. I love working on projects, but I hate packing everything up to go work on projects. I am a bit of a solitary maker. And then I love to show it off when it's done. I stayed away from many techniques that seemed too hard. And then I realized that that is what was holding me back and making me stale. I had to get over it and do something.

One of the first things I did was to make this set of tiny blocks to work on my precision piecing. These all finished at 2 inches square. I found that while they weren't tooeasy, they weren't too hard. Slow it down and do it right.

The next thing I did was to take the Penny Sampler quilt class on line from Rachel. I love her classes for their content, but I was also able to work on this at a pace that worked for me. The other thing about it was that there were some techniques in this class that I needed to learn and master. Like paper piecing. I came away knowing how to paper piece. It's still not my favorite technique, but when it's called for, I can do it. Also, this was a 12 month class. I have NEVER taken that long and slow to make a quilt and I found I really liked that slower pace, with time for other projects as well.

The next thing I did was to make this quilt for my niece. I used only fabric from my stash, except the background fabric. I have never done that, and only blues, which is also the first time I have made a quilt using only two colors. It wasn't that it was hard, just different and helped me to stretch myself a bit creatively.

I am currently working on an English paper piecing and applique piece, also hosted by Rachel of Stitched in Color and Jodi at Tales of Cloth. I never had any interest in EPP when it was all the rage a few years back, but now I cannot seem to get enough of the slow hand stitched pace of the hexies.

And now I have joined in on the 100 blocks in 100 days 2018 on Instagram. I bought the book for inspiration, the year it came out and then it sat on the shelf. This 100 day project is really pushing me creatively. I am doing every 10 blocks in one color, like a rainbow of sorts. I added pink, teal, dark pink and split the violet into red violet and blue violet to have enough for ten sets. It is all coming from my stash and scraps and choosing the colors is tough, but oh, so satisfying. I do a happy dance for each one I pull.

So that's what I am doing to keep moving forward as a sewist, quilter and maker. Tell me, what to you do to keep it fresh for yourself?
Talk to you soon.

So Many Irons in the Fire

Do you limit the number of projects you have going at any one time? Or do you let yourself go and flutter from project to project as the spirit moves you? I like to flutter. Sometimes I feel like hand work, sometimes I feel like machine work. For me it keeps it interesting to have many projects to choose from. Usually when I complete several and am down to one, I start adding more into the mix again. Here's some of what I have going on right now:

 These are my balls of cloth "yarn" to crochet into a small oval rug. I made one for my side of the bed in reds and pinks and now I am going to make one for my hubby for his side of the bed. They are quick and easy and a great way to use up string scraps. Amanda Jean at Crazy Mom Quilts has the tutorial for how to crochet or knit these up.

 I just finished another mini quilt using a pack of mini charms and all I have to do is stitch down the binding. This little sweetie is 12" x 14".

 On the larger project size, there is my Kingfisher Stitch Along quilt made with lots of EPP hexies and appliqued onto diamonds. I still have to make My three borders, one of which includes some EPP triangles, which I am almost half way through making.

And because I love a challenge, and I have had this book for a few years now, I am joining in the 100 Blocks, 100 Days 2018 challenge. I have a plan and I hope to keep up and put this beautiful book to good use.

I also have some fabric that is destined to become clothes for Miss N. I haven't started on that yet. Soon. Have a lovely week. Talk to you soon.

WIP Wednesday...Buzz Buzz Buzz

Hi! It's been awaile since I have participated  in WIP Wednesday, but as I was perusing the blogs this morning, I realized I had something to share. I started this last year, just before Christmas and then it sat until January. It is moving along slowly now.

 I bought a yard of Tula Pink's wonderful bees in this light aqua and pink colorway. It really called to me. Then, I pulled a bunch of coordinating fabrics from my stash and just looked at it for a few weeks.. I saw a snowball and ninepatch on someone's blog and knew that was it. So I began.

 As is typical for me, I began without looking up to sse what measurements were to be used for the pieces. I made a couple of blocks and the size was off, so they will end up on the back of the quilt. My next attempt was better.

 I love the way this looks. It will be a fairly small quilt, either a baby size or a wall hanging. This photo is with the camera flash. While still not true, the colors are a bit darker and closer to true than above.

My daughter and I decided that this needs a border. I have ordered and just received some Gail Kessler Dimples in a sort of peacock aqua. I plan a one inch finished border followed by one more row of 2/5 inch squares like the nine patch blocks. I think that will look perfect. Linking up with Lee at Freshly Pieced.