Searching for Me

 I am once again home. I have been going between my daughter's house and mine for the last 2 1/2 months. We are done there, she is moved closer to us now. Hopefully the healing can truly begin. For me, that means finding my new normal...again. My sewing room waits for me. Quiet. Projects stopped in time. I am waiting for motivation to come to me. I am trying to be patient, knowing it will come.

While I was traveling back and forth, I carried hand projects with me. I had crochet and embroidery to work on as time permitted. Here is a little of what I worked on.

I'm sure many of you have seen these embroidery sheets from Lecien. They are available many places. Snuggly Monkey has them, although every time she gets them in stock, they sell out super fast.

These are the 100 Ladies. Each one is a line drawing that you can "dress" with embroidery. Or you could use colored pencils or fabric scraps.

For me, it remidns me of when I was young and we played with paper dolls all the time. I love deciding how to dress my ladies.

Each time I do one, it becomes my favorite one...until the next one comes along.

I usually pick out one of the ladies, and then I just look at her until inspiration strikes. Many times I start with color, but sometimes I have a style of dress in mind.

I have to say that so far, this one is my most favorite of all. She was just a line drawing with no dress shape at all. There are several of those.

So this is helping me keep creatively busy while I transition to my new normal. I have one other thing that keeps me busy.

This is Jon Snow. He is my daughter's cat and he is living with us for now. It took him about a week to acclimate here, but now, as you can tell, he is King of the castle.

And he likes to steal my chair. But he is sweet. And after two weeks we are getting used to each other. My last post that I made about quilting was January 12. I hope that the next time I am here in this space, I will be back to sewing again. Have a good week.

Quilt Memories

 Quilts are memories. They are sometimes made from fabric that brings memories, but sometimes it's the quilts themselves that make the memories. That is the case here. This post is to document the quilt memories surrounding my grandson, who passed away suddenly 5 weeks ago at age 15. I had so many more quilts in me to make for him and it makes me sad that they will go unrealized. So I am going to post pictures of the quilts I made for him during his short life.

This was the very first quilt I made for him. The top image is a bag that the folded quilt can fit into to be taken along with the baby. I thought that was such a clever idea. I don't remember where the pattern for this quilt came from. The fabrics were from my LQS.

This is the best picture I could find of this quilt. I remember when I found this farm fabric at the LQS and I was so excited to make matching quilts for J and his cousin V. They were only about 2 and 3 years old at the time. I called the quilts Neigh and Moo. These quilts were so much bigger than they were at that time and they made such an impression. They got lots of use too.

These are not a quilt, but one year for Christmas I made bath mitts for the boys. The minions were fairly new on the scene and someone put out a pattern for this. I am still trying to use up the rest of that terry cloth to this day.

One year for Christmas I made J and V these tic tac toe bean bag toss quilts, hoping to give them a useful quilt. I can't remember which one was J's.

This was a quilt I made from some fun airplane fabric. I was learning how to make little boy quilts. I found it challenging to find fabric colors and patterns that weren't too girly, but were also fun. I loved this one.

This was the last quilt I made for J. He couldn't have been more than 8 or 9 years old at the time, but for some reason he fell in love with the periodic table of elements. When this fabric line came out, I had to have it for him. I worked so hard to make a big enough quilt for his bed with this and I was so proud of how it turned out. I think he loved it. Partly because it was cool and partly because his Grammie made it for him. It still rests on his bed.

I cherish these quilts and the memories they bring. It is painful now, but some day it will just bring me a warm feeling and a smile to think of them and how much they meant to J and how much he means to me. So, sew up those memories, that they may comfort you whenever you need them to.

I love you sweet boy.

TA DA!! Perfect Pineapple Quilt Is Done!

 This quilt has been a year in the making. Amber, at Gigi's Thimble ran this as a quilt along. There were 36 blocks, one per week. The blocks are all machine paper pieced. Papers are available at Gigi's Thimble. The blocks finish at about 12 inches. My finished quilt is about 76 inches square.

Here it is on my bed, fresh from the wash. What made me want to do this quilt along was two things. The paper piecing, which I used to hate, makes such crisp blocks. Also, Amber showed a picture of one she'd done in pink and green like this and it really spoke to me. Most of this quilt top is made from my scrap bins and stash. I did have to buy some neutrals. I never seem to have much in the way of neutrals.

These are some images of the quilting, before I washed the quilt. I cut a 12 inch half circle out of cardboard (thank you Amazon) and marked each square's design on the front of the quilt before I quilted it with my walking foot. There is one block you can see here below, that is not scrappy. That was a deliberate choice.

The straight lines through the center of the leaves run on the diagonal, from edge to edge. It seemed to need the extra anchor of this long stitching from edge to edge. And it worked well within the design.

I used a Hera marker for a lot of the inner blocks, but after awhile, I found it harder to see my lines. So I tried chalk, a marking pencil, and finally, a graphite marking tool I bought at my LQS probably 15 years ago. That was the tool that helped me bring this over the finish line. There were several times when I thought I must be crazy for quilting this on my Bernina 440. It has such a small throat space. But, I was patient, or tried to be, and got through it all. It took me 7 days to get it quilted and bound.

And of course, today I had another small issue when I was attaching the binding. Oh, my goodness, I was never so happy for a finish.

For the back, I bought 2 1/2 yards of Bungalow in green and 2 1/2 yards in pink, by Amy Gibson for Windham Fabrics. I found it on sale somewhere, and the two colors were perfect for the backing, being green and pink.

And, as a bonus, I only had to seam it once! Hurray! I trimmed off all the extra and saved it to use for the binding. I ended up only using the pink, as I thought that would look best.

         This is another picture with pins in it as I am still quilting it at this stage.

                         I used another one of my new labels on this quilt.

And, you can see how nice the binding looks on the quilt. The four corner blocks have these little stamens, or antennae on them. I had thought to put them on every block, but when I saw them on one, I changed my mind. And, rather than rip them out, I put them in each of the other three corners for balance.

It washed and dried up so nicely. It is so soft. And that's what I wanted, a soft drapey kind of quilt. There are lots of seam lines in this quilt, so a little less quilting made that happen. Thanks to Amber for a wonderful QAL. I had two quilts on my bed, but I added this one too, because after all, it's still winter.

Ringing the Old Year Out

And ringing the new year in. This is my last finish for 2022. My husband works for a non-profit and they are having a fund raising Gala in February. One of the things this involves is a silent auction. He asked me if I'd like to make a quilt for the auction and of course I said yes!

I immediately knew I wanted to do stars. I love stars, but I sometimes shy away from them because they can be difficult to do. But when I searched for wonky stars, I found Elizabeth Hartman's tutorial for her Sparkle Punch quilt. I didn't want to do that exact quilt, but it got me started.

I don't have any pictures prior to the pin basting, but this is how it looked at that point. I chose not to make quite as many stars as Elizabeth did, but I do love the way the wonkiness makes them appear to twinkle a little bit. For the background I used Kona Pacific. I didn't want too dark of a color blue, and this one was just what was needed. I had some fabrics in my stash and bought some more to make the stars.

 

I was looking for a way to quilt this so there would be an illusion of movement. My first idea was swirls, but when I quilted swirls on my Christmas quilt just before this, I decided that wasn't the look I was going for. So I then decided to do organic soft waves, horizontally. To me this gives the feeling of a gentle breeze.

These pictures are before the wash and dry crinkle part. I decided to bind this quilt in the same solid color as the background. This is how it looks where there are partial stars. Where there are no stars, it disappears.

The backing is a wide back of cross hatch by Caroline Friedlander for Robert Kauffman. I wanted a wide back to make it easy on myself, and so it would have a very cohesive look. I gave it a name, and a label with all the information, since I don't know where it will end up.

Here you can see how the binding just disappears on the edges of the quilt. I think it is such an elegant look for this quilt.

And here I also included one of my new woven labels on the quilt. It is really my signature.

Here is the beauty shot of the whole thing, taken outside under cloudy skies. This is as true to color as we could get. I love the way the stars are so random on this quilt. I could happily love it and hang it on a wall in my house. Well, that's it for today and for this year. I wish you all a very happy new year. I hope this new year is better for all of us.

One Last Thing

 I decided this morning to post one last thing before Christmas. I have been madly sewing and baking every day almost. I really love having the time to do that since I no longer work. My one last thing is that I finished my Pas de Deux quilt top. This has been a year in the making. It is a pattern by Rachel of Stitched in Color. We have been having a sew along for the past year and now...we are finished.

What made me fall in love with this quilt pattern was the colors and all the different block styles. Rachel has a wonderful sense of color and these blocks are amazing. Some were easy, some were difficult. All were wonderful to see finished. As with many of her other classes and sew alongs, I learned so much by doing this.

I chose to mostly follow Rachel's color choices to the best of my ability, with my stash. I did not buy any fabrics for this quilt top. That made it challenging for me in some of the colorways, but I like to be pushed. It makes me more creative sometimes.

Some colors I didn't have enough scraps of, so I had to slightly alter the plan. That's good, though. I son't need to have an exact duplicate of her quilt. (Notice the rainbow on the yellow block?)

There are a lot of partial seams in this quilt top, which I have done before. I can't imagine Rachel trying to figure all this out. It seems very complex to me.

The hourglass blocks at the bottom are another example of having to adapt my color plan. Rachel used a dark burgundy with her oranges. That is a color I don't really have and I didn't like the purples I did have, so I found some dark blue to set off the oranges. And it works!

Now this quilt will sit in the queue waiting to be quilted. It is number 3 in the queue. I also have one other quilt that is getting a bunch of hand quilting before it gets machine quilting as well. I have a busy 2023 coming up I guess. Have a very Merry Christmas and I will see you soon.

Christmas Quilt is Done!

 So, after baking off a bunch of cookies this morning, I finished quilting and binding my Christmas quilt.

I decided to quilt it in a swirly design, but I tried to make the swirls bigger than I have in the past, so that the quilt would be softer for snuggling under this winter. The sweet little Tomte just made the quilt for me. I had the pattern from Moss and Lotus a few years back and with this little bit of green in a mostly red and white quilt, they stand out.

Look at all that crinkly goodness. And it is pretty soft too. All of the fabrics in this quilt came from my stash. I usually buy a few Christmas fabrics every year, but I don't always do anything with them. This year I decided to pull them all out and see what I could come up with.

It's hard to see, and it doesn't photograph well either, but I quilted some words in the quilt. I like to do that sometimes. This quilt says: Merry Christmas, Joyeux Noel, Feliz Navidad, and Buon Notale.

This is as close as I could get, to a picture of the entire front of the quilt on this dark, cold, rainy day.

The backing is Tinsel, by Rashida Coleman Hale from 2015. I bought a bunch of it from Cindy at Live a Colorful Life last year when she was destashing.  You can kind of see the letters from Buon Natale here, but they are backwards.

This shows how weird the light was this afternoon. This looks more blue, than the minty green that it really is.

The binding you can see here is the same fabric in white background as the backing. Again, I bought this from Cindy. It turned out to be the perfect binding. I didn't have a good green, which was my first thought and the reds and whites would get lost.

     The quilting here almost makes it appear that the wind is going to blow his hat away.

This is the first use for my new labels that I got from the Dutch Label Shop. It is a woven label, and the first time I have had a colored label instead of black and white. I wrote the year on the back.

These are the four color catchers I threw in the wash with the quilt and a couple of towels. I knew with all that red fabric there might be an issue. But they did their job. Have a great weekend and I hope to see you soon.