Quilting

Well here I am again. It’s been a while. I have been pondering starting this blog again, then I talked to a friend last week who needed help with hers, so I had to log into mine and you can see where this is going. The last few years have been rough on everybody. We are several years older, hopefully a little wiser, albeit a lot more tired it seems. I am starting to get ideas for new quilts, more than I can sew honestly, and that is a good thing. The well hasn’t run dry completely.

I don’t know if I will write weekly or not. I don’t want to put too much pressure on this. I feel a bit like I am dealing with a wild animal, if I am too loud and make too big a deal, I will scare it away. So instead I will quietly go about my business and see if it decides to settle in and stay a while. We shall find out together.

I started this blog because I like to quilt and I like to write and I like to write about my quilting, and well here we are. It started as a regular Monday thing, then after a year I decided to switch it up to be a Wednesday thing, and now I’m finding that the weekly thing is a lot to keep going.

I’m seeing patterns in my quilting habits, how things ebb and flow, and I’m seeing patterns in what I write about and that turns into repeats in my blog posts, which bothers me. I had the perhaps naive expectation that every week would be about something new. I’m also feeling a lot of fatigue from the last year, and I wanted all my blog posts to be funny or at least positive, and lately that hasn’t been what I wanted to write about.

You may have noticed that I’ve been posting about every other week lately. Some of that is because no matter how hard I try to keep up, time gets away from me and my brain seems to only register every other Wednesday and that’s when I’ve been getting a blog post up. I need to be ok with that for a while instead of beating myself up for the weeks I missed.

Last year was wildly productive for me. Oddly so for me. I used all the time at home to sew up a storm and then it all kind of fizzled in March. The anniversary of things shutting down was somehow jarring to me. It was fine when it was less than a year and then suddenly when it had been a whole year, that’s when my brain fell apart. I have said that about myself for years, I’m good in a crisis, then I turn into a blithering idiot when the immediate danger is over and here we are. Immediate danger apparently equates to a year in my brain so welcome the blithering idiot.

I will get past this. I have completed a few things this year. I am working on a lot of UFOs and have some of those completed. I will get to where there are things to write about and things to sew and things I am excited about. I will find a new rhythm in this year, and if it is every other week I will be ok with that.

We are all going to have to figure out what our rhythm is going to be. I have read a lot of discussions on social media about “getting back to normal”. A lot of us don’t want to go back. A lot of us found some beauty in the last year and want to keep that. Figuring out how to forge a new rhythm and a new normal is going to take a little time. In the mean time I will keep sewing and keep creating, even if I am changing my pace a little bit.

Ok at this point we all know I have a lot of UFOs (unfinished objects). A. LOT. I started counting one time and stopped when the number got too big. That was a long time ago. I’m better now. I’m guessing there’s less than 50 at this point. Guessing.

I know I’ve written here about being surprised at how many of my UFOs are actually fairly close to completion, then just packed away at 80 or 90% done. I was talking about it with Jack and he pointed out something I hadn’t considered. He noted that for a long time I was not happy with the long arm computer system, and probably figured I wouldn’t be able to quilt things the way I wanted to, so it was easier to just pack things away, than to have a disaster with the long arm. He might be on to something there.

This weekend I worked on two UFOs – one is the Scrappy Trip Around the World that I posted about a couple of weeks ago. Got that finished and it’s a whopping 72×96” which will be awesome on the back of the sofa. Then I dug out the quilt that is the cover photo for this post. I think I got this back in 2008 – the pattern does not have a date on it, and some poking around on the internet did not yield a definitive date either. I saw it hanging in the window of the quilt shop in Granbury, Texas and I knew I had to have it.

It was a kit from Moda but I didn’t care, I loved the colors and I figured it was just a bunch of nine patch blocks and some sno-balls. Yea. All of those big blocks are double 9 patches. That was a lot of little tiny pieces. When I pulled it down on Saturday, the sno-ball blocks were done and 15 of the 25 double nine patch blocks were done. I got right to work and to my surprise, got the entire top pieced while on a zoom sew day with friends.

Sunday morning I decided to go ahead and load it on the long arm and get it quilted. Jack’s words kept running around in my brain at how I stop just short of having a finished top because I know I won’t be able to quilt it the way I want. I don’t have that problem any more. The IntelliQuilter system is fabulous and I got the whole quilt done on Sunday. The binding is attached, just need to stitch it down then this one moves to the completed pile. I’ll get the Scrappy Trip UFO loaded some time this week.

I’ve set myself a goal this year – two UFO’s have to get finished before I can start something new. I’m honest enough to know that I will always be attracted to new projects, not going to cut myself off completely, but at a 2 to 1 ratio, I should make a sizable dent into the UFO pile this year. I’m finding that I am gravitating to projects that take much longer to complete, so that should help the situation as well, maybe only one or two new things a year as opposed to 10 or 12….or 15. I wouldn’t know what to do with all the space in my sewing room if I finished all my UFOs. That’s something else to ponder.

Progress on anything is a tricky subject. From a distance, progress can be easily noticed and measured but when very close to the subject, it is much more difficult to see. Quilting is no different.

I have been quilting for a long time. Over 30 years now, and there are still a lot of days where I feel like I am maybe an intermediate quilter at best. It is difficult for me to see the growth in my abilities as a quilter when I am sewing every single day of my life. Then enters the UFO.

I’ve been making a point over the last year to dig out some of my UFOs that have been languishing for a very long time, and turn them into SOMETHING. Maybe not the project they started out to be, but at least something that is in a state of completion that can be put to some use around the house. Some things become table toppers or wall hangings. Some things actually get completely finished but either way I’m getting those UFOs up and done and out of the box.

Over the weekend I dug out another (this makes the 6th or 7th) Scrappy Trip Around the World quilt that I started. I’m pretty sure this got started around 2010, because I remember sewing in my kitchen that winter. I’m sure if I dug around in my photos I could find a dated photo but who has the time for that. Let’s just go with 2010. That means this project is 11 years old. Oh my goodness have my skills improved in eleven years. There has been enough time since I last touched this project, that the difference in my accuracy and ability is striking.

This got me to wondering how many other things in my life do I not realize that I’ve gotten better at over time. I know I’m better at polishing my nails because I don’t have to do as much clean up, and that one also got better with doing it. Makes me think that the key to a lot of things is to just do to get better. I dislike the word practice. Practice makes it seem like you aren’t really doing the thing. You have to do the thing to get better.

I’ve assembled all the blocks that were finished in my scrappy trip bin and I need to complete six more blocks that were in pieces. I’m going to put this one completely together, it deserves that. It is going to be my reminder to Do The Thing. Do The Thing to improve.

The first time I saw the pattern cover for Jen Kingwell’s Small World quilt, I recognized the iconic facade and Mary Blair’s design for the Small World ride at Disneyland and I knew I would end up making this quilt.

I was asked to teach the quilt over a series of months for my local quilt shop and that seemed to be the perfect excuse to dive right in. I knew I wanted my small world to be very scrappy and very colorful, much like the ride I remembered from my childhood. You see, this was my all time favorite thing to do at Disneyland. I remember the summer we lived in LA, my mother went on that ride multiple times with me and every time, I was just in awe of the colors and the music as our little boats followed the lazy river through the ride. I still can hear the music in my head.

The quilt is actually put together in sections, then those sections are joined so that you can focus on one area at a time. That fit nicely into a class setting, we devoted each month to a different section in the quilt. The sections are numbered right to left, so we worked the quilt in that order with the upper left corner being the last section to complete.

As happens with that kind of class, I kept up with the students, and after our last class, I did not go back and join my sections, rather it all languished in a box for a few years. Last summer, some friends started talking about the pattern, and I spoke up, noting that I had one that was almost completely finished. That was the prompt I needed to get it out, get the sections assembled and quilt it.

The quilting is nothing elaborate, I chose a pattern that would look like clouds and wind in the sky areas, but would rather disappear in all the intricate piecing of the building section. I am not a custom quilter, I never will be, and I was much more interested in getting this quilted so that it did not spend another 4 years in a box in my sewing room and I’m so glad I made that choice.

The quilt now hangs on the wall in my sewing room behind the long arm. It is the first thing I see when I open the door and turn the lights on, and every time it brings back some wonderful memories of my mother. I am so glad I made this quilt and while it is not a bed sized quilt (very out of the ordinary for me) I’m so very glad I made it and have it on display to enjoy.

Next week, I’m going to take a look at another mystery quilt that I did in 2020.

You may have noticed there were no blog posts the last two weeks. In shades of March 2020, I have not been able to keep up with what day it is. Monday disappears, Tuesday feels like Monday, Wednesday is a blur and I wake up Thursday and realize there has been no blog post. Oh well. It is what it is. I could give you a billion cliches about letting that go. What I will do instead is work on some new material, and tee up several posts so that I can get ahead of things again. That’s the plan anyway.

I have really enjoyed posting about quilts that I’ve made, so I’m going to keep going with that theme a little while longer. Lots of ready material there and the consensus seems to be that you, my dear readers, are enjoying it, so here we go.

This month is a very different quilt for me. This is the result of friends. Friends with ideas. Friends who can talk me into just about anything if it looks fun. I had a group of friends in 2018 who were all doing the Kaffe Fassett Mystery quilt, and it seemed like a spiffy idea. I got myself signed up, and got stuck in making blocks. This is one of the first projects where I mostly kept up with the monthly kits and put the whole thing together in early 2019.

The mystery was offered in two different color ways – light and dark. I chose the dark and felt like I hit the lottery with that choice. The deep plum fabric really makes the jewel tone colors pop, and it has a rainbow color progression from the outside ring to the inside of the quilt. The binding is the same dark plum for a nice finished frame around the quilt.

In typical fashion for me, it’s a large quilt – 82×82 and very different from anything I’ve made in a long time. I had forgotten how saturated the colors are until I took it out to photograph it for this blog post. I think this will end up on the back of the sofa this summer.

Next week I’ll take a look at the quilt that hangs on the wall in my sewing room….

This week I am featuring the quilt that started me writing patterns. This goes all the way back to 2003 I think. This fabric line from Robyn Pandolph came out and I loved it. It was supposed to be a Christmas line and I remember thinking how daring it was to have teal in with the red and green – now we see that all the time.

I purchased the whole fat quarter stack and wanted a quilt that used the whole fat quarter but still wanted some kind of pattern to it. I have always liked pinwheels, and that seemed to be the most logical place to start. So the fat quarters got cut up, big pinwheel blocks were made, and the scrappy border is pieced from leftovers from the fat quarters.

One of the things I like most about the pinwheel block, is how, when you put them together with no smashing, they merge and blend in with each other and secondary patterns emerge. Depending on where your eye lands, broken dishes blocks will show up. There’s always something to look at with this block and the quilt seems much more detailed than it actually is.

The colors in this gave way to the name – Strawberry Wine. I wrote it up and it was my first pattern that I sold to a quilt shop. What I really need to do is update the pattern and make it an electronic pattern in my shop, but you know, all this free time on my hands….. We all have that problem.

I still hang this quilt up in my house every year around the holidays. It makes me smile and it reminds me that I really do love to design and write patterns. There are just so many ideas in my head!

I’ve mentioned several times in my writing that I have a group of friends who frequently organize quilt related swaps. One year, after a particularly tricky swap, we decided that the best thing to do was sets of 5” squares – 2 light and 2 dark that coordinated. Several in the group wanted to make a pattern called Tilly’s Treasures, but I knew going in that was going to be way too detailed for my taste.

I let my 5” squares marinate for a while, mostly because I was busy cutting sets of squares, but I came to the conclusion that I wanted to do something simple that would get me a finished quilt that I could enjoy. My favorite block is the pinwheel (big surprise there, right??) and the sets of 4 squares were perfect for pinwheel blocks.

This quilt is everything I love about quilting. My friends are in this quilt. It is a riot of color – nothing goes together and yet everything goes together. Each pinwheel is a color story, and when I put the quilt on the bed, I see different things in it every time I look at it. I am always amazed how such a simple block can make such an intricate looking quilt – sometimes it turns into a broken dishes pattern, other times the pinwheels come out strong. Another thing about this quilt is how much orange there is. Orange is not one of my favorite colors, and I don’t really remember seeing that much orange when the squares were being swapped, but when I look at the finished quilt, goodness gracious there’s a lot of orange in there. I’m learning to like orange.

The quilt does hold a surprise – there are at least two pinwheels that have glow in the dark fabric in them. I found this out the first time I put the quilt on my bed. I got myself ready for bed, turned off the light and was very startled at a glowing pinwheel in the middle of my bed. I crawled in bed, and when I looked down I saw the second one. I lay in my bed, in the dark, laughing at my friends. To this day, none of them have admitted to supplying the glow in the dark fabrics, but I have my suspicions.

When people ask me what is my favorite quilt, this is it. It’s not fancy, it’s not an example of intricate piecing or technique, but it’s still my all time favorite quilt. I pull this one out each year to put on my bed, and it’s a tangible reminder about the group of amazing women I know and how they have impacted my life in so many ways.

Last year I started seeing posts about the Knitted Star quilt from Lo and Behold Stitchery. It’s a lovely quilt, big stars that reminded me so much of the stars on my dad’s ski sweaters from the 60’s. Very Nordic, very winter, very lovely indeed. Last fall the designer announced that she was going to host a quilt along on InstaGram and I decided I was in.

I bought red fat quarters at my local shop Stitched with Love, and distinctly remember a conversation with several of the ladies there. I hadn’t gotten the pattern yet but figured 14 fat quarters should do the trick. I think I ended up needing 18 so I wasn’t too far off, I had the extra 4 in my stash.

I did want to change the single background in the pattern to be scrappy, using a fat quarter for each star block. If I needed 18 red fat quarters, then that meant I needed 18 background fat quarters, but I had those so moving right ahead.

The first block was tricky. There weren’t cutting instructions for doing a single block, other than the wall hanging but that had more cutting than just the block and was cut from yardage. I had to figure out how to cut the needed pieces from a single fat quarter. That first block has got two pieces that are seamed but you can’t really tell that in the finished quilt. That first block took ages and I was worried about getting the whole quilt done in the eight months of the scheduled quilt a long.

I spent two weeks working on blocks and telling myself that I would be just fine making the smaller lap sized quilt. I wasn’t fine with that but I wasn’t sure I was ready to commit to the full 18 blocks needed. Something clicked in the third week and I started cranking out the blocks in a speedy fashion.

This is the first project in my life that I started and completed within the span of the quilt along. I am still amazed that I got it done and quilted and had it on my bed in December for Christmas. I love the bold red and white and I love the subtle shading I got from using different fabrics in the background of each star. I’m very glad I pushed myself to get this one done and get it out where I could see it and enjoy it all in the space of 3 months. Miracles do happen!

Next week I’m going to take a look at what is possibly my favorite quilt I’ve ever made, another swap quilt from the group that swapped the nine patch blocks.

I belong to several groups of quilters, and it’s an aspect of my quilting life that I really like. We are similar and yet diverse, we all enjoy quilting, and we encourage each other in our projects. One group in particular participates in regular swaps. Exchanges of blocks or fabric, so that we can then create a quilt with a little bit of our friends in it.

This particular exchange was in support of a quilt called Tumalo Trail from Bonnie Hunter. We swapped sets of small 3” nine patch blocks and squares of matching light and dark fabric. We decided this gave us more options as a group than swapping the actual blocks for that specific quilt. I decided early on in the swap to take this in my own direction so that method of exchange suited me just fine.

We swapped blocks over the period of a year, good golly I’m not even sure when at this point but I’m guessing somewhere around 2016 give or take a few years. I had an idea of a simple quilt on point with the nine patch blocks and decided that rather than making the background one single fabric, I could use the light background squares from the exchange for those. I had to cut some out of my stash to make up the layout but I liked the scrappy look I got rather than a single fabric look.

The big experiment in this quilt was making the setting triangles around the outside edge out of scrappy red fabrics. The idea was to really emphasize the on-point setting of the quilt by making the edges dark rather than just repeating the light background fabrics. I am very happy with how that turned out and I’m planning to use that technique on another UFO that I’m working on now (more on that later).

Going into 2020 I had about half of the quilt top pieced and all of the other stuff in a box and it had sat there for a couple of years. I decided it was high time I got it done. The borders are both out of my stash but I thought the colors suited the quilt top fine. Honestly there are so many colors in the nine patch blocks that I could have used anything in the border and it would have been fine but I’ve always liked this red print so that’s what I used.

The last piece of this was to use the same red for the binding, I didn’t want the binding to distract from the border or the rest of the quilt, and luckily I had enough of the red for both the border and the binding. One of the upsides of having a large stash.

I’m very happy with how this turned out and how it looks in my home, but the best part of all is how I can see my friends in this quilt every time I look at it. Up next week is a look at the Knitted Star quilt I did last year during a QAL on Instagram.