Pandemic Plaits

There was bright sun on Sunday and I found a good spot to photograph Pandemic Plaits.  I took lots and lots (and lots) of photos.  You've been warned.

I am very pleased with the quilting.  This quilt has so much texture in the sunlight.

The Elusive Feather

 

I've just rounded the halfway point quilting the braid quilt.  Quilting this is still slow going.  I swear I spend as much time staring at is as I do physically quilting it.

I'm still struggling with stitch length.  It's certainly a lot better than past quilts.  I find that I'm watching more closely at the stitches as well as the pattern.  I now have the occasional problem of stitches being way too small.  But that's better than having them way too long (unless, of course, I need to rip them out!).

I'm loving the flowers.  I seem to do well with leafy designs, too, like the ones off this flaming swirl.

Slow Stitching, of Sorts

The braid quilt is plodding along.  I am about a quarter done with the quilting (sans border).  The design is not primarily floral, although I'm adding more of that.  There's leaves and circles, feathers and swirls.  (You might be able to see the stitching if you enlarge the photos.)  I like the flowers I've done so far - I will continue to do more of those. 

I love the thread I'm working with, although it's invisible on the cream fabrics.  The super slider and the new gloves make a huge difference, especially with the large quilt.  It's easier to stitch big patterns.  I still struggle with it, because I can't see the whole area I'm quilting at once.  However, I'm finding I can stitch more of it without having to stop and reposition my hands. 

November OMG: Quilt That Braid!

I'm realizing that a twin quilt is a lot bigger than a throw.  It is smaller than last year's queen... but now I realize why I like working with the wall-sized quilts.  

The plan is to improv quilt this thing.  I'm now reconsidering how to tackle it.  Lots of doodles.  Lots of hours browsing Pinterest and Instagram photos and videos (which look so easy with a longarm!).

I wanted to start quilting it this weekend, but my ideas hadn't quite jelled yet.  Soon, I hope.  I'm mostly fixated on flower designs.  Loopy, leafy, feathery stuff.  In the end, that's my November goal:  get the braid quilted.  I want it done so I can move my sewing machine back to its regular spot and start on some smaller projects.

Prep and Wrap-up

I met my goals this month with days to spare!  

My OMG was to have the braid quilt bordered and sandwiched.  Check.  I have ideas of how I want to quilt it, and picked the thread.  I should start working on the quilting by the weekend.  I've decided to do an all-over pattern (but... over the border, too?  Or do something different for that?).  I still need to do some more doodling so I feel confident when tackling the quilt.

Backed Braid

 

The braided quilt is backed.

It's a very polka-dotty backing, isn't it?  The suns and moons are very blue and gold.  I was tempted to make a stripe with blue fabrics, but it would have ended up more purple than the blue on the front.  So I decided to go with rust and gold.  Not bad.  When it was done, the backing was a few inches bigger than the front all around.  Whew!

I layered it up, everything wonderfully aligned and realized one of the borders was wonky.  I hated to pull it up but I needed to restitch it.  So glad I did.

I Like Thursday: Feeling Accomplished

It's been a busy week.

Making progress on my quilts.  Creekbed is sandwiched and I know how I want to quilt it.  That's on hold as I get the braid quilt ready for quilting, too.  The borders went on without too much fuss (although I needed to tack on 3" to be long enough).  I stitched together the backing - of course discovering it wasn't quite as long as I hoped.  I'm now I'm piecing together a stripe to go across the middle.  I plan to have that assembled, then sandwich and baste the quilt before the sunroom gets too chilly to work in.  Then I can focus on quilting both quilts.

 

October OMG: Braid Borders

It's October already??  I may need to switch gears to Christmas stuff soon.  Maybe start working on my nephew's ornament - I need time to research and sculpt it.  And there's so many sewing projects I want to work on.  What to work on first??

Creekbed is sandwiched and basted; I just need to decide how I want to quilt it.  I suspect that will work itself out this month, because once I figure out how I want to quilt it, I won't be able to put it down.  What I'd really like to do is get the braid quilt off the wall, where it's been hanging all month.  I have batting and backing all set to go - it just needs the borders attached and binding cut.  So my October goal will be to have that ready to be quilted. 

Sharing with Elm Street Quilts - October One Monthly Goal

Squirrels

No sooner do I choose an OMG project than I go off in other directions.  I will get those setting triangles done.  Really.  But in the meantime...

Now that we have a washing machine that doesn't add random black splotches to everything, I washed the border fabric for the braid quilt.  Buying the fabric was challenging - I didn't want to unfurl the quilt at the shop to fully compare.  I threw it up on the wall so I can get a good look at it.  Ideally I was looking for something a little more brown; maybe darker or paler?  But this works - it doesn't fade into the cream colored braid and it compliments the blue and red.

Braid Flimsy

The flimsy center is complete.  I like it.  I hadn't intended to keep this quilt, but now I'm thinking I might.  Need to think where I can use it.

The main purpose of this quilt was to use several yards of border fabric my mother had given me.  They were both beige fabric, one silkscreened with a navy and gold Greek key design, the other with a leaf design of maroon, navy and gold.  I focused on those colors as I dug through my stash.  The quilt turned out more red-white-and-blue than I had intended, although it's more striking in the photos than it is in person (which is more rusty and cream).

It took a while to find a pattern I liked.  I landed on a braided rainbow quilt that made think of doing the stripes, and found this tutorial that helped with size, yardage and piecing.

Braiding

I sewed together my first strip for the braid quilt.  I had to make some adjustments to get the right length (calculations were correct - but I started measuring at the wrong point).

After that, I could see that I needed to reverse the starting point to get the pieces to line up how I wanted.  I'm so glad I didn't sew multiple rows at once or I'd have everything staggered.

The second strip came together just as I wanted.  Yay!  And now I know how I need to tackle the last two rows.  Once they're together, I'll need to assess border, batting and backing materials.  I suspect I won't have enough on hand to complete this.  It's looking pretty good so far.

Sharing with:
Confessions of a Fabric Addict - Can I Get a Whoop Whoop?

Braids and Scraps

With the Switch carrier completed, I'm back to my projects.  Mine.  Not for people or purpose - simply because I wanted to create.  It's funny - I get most inspired by leftovers.

First up is a braided quilt.  This was designed around yards of border fabric my mother gave me ages ago.  They needed to get used or given away.  They look like screen print on cream fabric, two strips between four to six inches wide, each three to four yards long. 

Mess and Masks

The living room floor is a mess.  There's bits of my nephew's carry case, a baggie of 1½" HST, and a lot of fabric I'm hoping to make into a twin-sized quilt.

I lost far too much of Saturday afternoon researching how to use this fabric my mother gave me a while back.

I had intended to make stack and whack hexies or something along those lines.  But in the end was not happy with any thing I came up with.  I changed gears: let's try a braided quilt.  This quilt has interesting color placement.  My current plan is to make braids of blue, red-brown and beige, picking up the colors of the screen print designs (which are blue, gold and red).  I'm thinking a blue braid down the middle, flanked by the beige, then red.  Or vice versa?  I guess I'll figure that out as I start cutting fabric.

Blogger's Quilt Festival - Sunshine

Yay!  It's time for the Blogger's Quilt Festival!  I'm not sure where I'll find the time to browse through the hundreds of entries.  I always add more from each festival of things I need to try and I'm already working on a backlog of patterns.  This isn't helping.  Nonetheless, I'm thrilled to participate.  (I just need to finish my second entry by Monday.  Eek!)

My first entry was completed in January (thus the snowy photo).  My mother requested a twin-sized quilt with rounded corners and picked Bonnie Hunter's Celtic Solstice as a pattern.  Once I calculated the yardage, we met at a fabric store and she picked the colors she wanted.

Shirt with Borders

I need more fabric to do one last border on the shirt quilt to make it twin sized.  I finished assembling the inner and middle borders.  The black and white remained my favorite and I'm even happier with it in place.  Proves that it's worthwhile auditioning even questionable fabrics!

The middle border is a hodgepodge of the smaller scraps of shirts.  There's even a pocket sewn into it all.  Now that it's together, a larger inner border may have been better, or put the middle border as the outside border.  Too late for second guessing - it's together now.  Besides, I don't have enough pieces to expand the hodgepodge border to run along the outside.

I like it with all the blues and browns.  Rob keeps trying to convince me to keep it, but what am I going to do with another twin-sized quilt? 

So this will get put to the side, until I find outer border fabric.

Border Lines

The shirt fabric played nice once I cut the squares; everything looks relatively straight.  One of the easiest pieced quilt I've had.  Once I completed those last four blocks, everything just lined up - no easing or stretching to get corners to match.  Huzzah!  The back of it frays something awful and my living room was covered with dark threads.  That's the worst I have to say about this quilt.  The fabric is so soft and I'm pleased with the way it looks.

In order to make this a twin quilt, it needs a 9" border.  There's still a bunch of shirt pieces, but not enough to make any more disappearing 9-patch blocks.  So I randomly sewed what was left to incorporate this hodge-podge into the border.  I did something like that on my Key West quilt.

Sewing Shirts

This is the third charity quilt I've promised.  I've ripped apart five shirts, cut them all into squares and stitched them into a bunch of 9-patches.  If you look at the bottom row, you can see these blocks aren't exactly whole.  That's because I'm making disappearing 9-patch blocks, and when I ran out of fabric to cut 7" squares I cut 7x3.5" rectangles (or 3.5" squares) instead.

Turns out I had way more blocks than I needed for a throw quilt, but not enough to stretch it to a twin sized quilt.  Right now I'm in the process of scrapping together four more cut-apart blocks so that I can do a full 6x8 block layout.  There's a ton of smaller scrap, so the plan is to randomly piece that together, then see how much of a border it would make.  I'm thinking of filling the rest of the border with a cream fabric, or possibly sash the blocks.  Either would be enough to twin-size the whole shebang.

Not really the color scheme I go for, but this has been fun.  I'm liking how it looks, the fabric is so soft and I'm sure someone is going to love it.

Sharing with Linky Tuesday.

Fussy Plaid

Plaid shirt fabric is difficult to cut.  Well... it's difficult to cut squares that are aligned with the plaid.  I considered starching the fabric first, but that still requires squaring it before ironing with starch.  So I'm just slowly, carefully cutting squares.

I had hoped to have this quilt done by the time I dropped off the other two charity quilts.  Ha!  No chance of that.  I barely started cutting squares by Thursday.  Besides, I must switch gears next week to sew my dress, so this project keeps getting pushed out.  I plan to make disappearing nine patch blocks.  I'm excited to see what it will look like.

The five shirts are yielding more 7" squares than I had anticipated.  I will easily get a throw-sized quilt from this; maybe a twin?  That could be fun!  I'm also generating a ton of smaller scraps; more than I want to throw away.  I wonder what kind of crazy quilt design I could do with them.

Northern Lights: Blogger's Quilt Festival

Northern Lights made it to the Topsfield Fair, which was pretty exciting.  Now I'm submitting it to the Blogger's Quilt Festival.  My friends will get tired of seeing photos of my quilt by the time this is all over!

I stumbled across Night Jewels online and fell in love with the pattern.  I decided it would look great on my spare bed.  The skill level was listed as Intermediate, so I figured I'd give it a try.  Ha!  If I only knew what I got myself in to when I started this quilt.  I guess I'm still a beginner, because this was much more of a challenge than I had anticipated.  Now that it's finished, I'm so glad I stuck with it.

Northern Lights: Off to the Fair

It's really done.  Ta-da!  Isn't it beautiful?  I got the label on last week, just in time to ship it off to the Topsfield Fair.  I love the name my aunt came up for it.  She said the colors against the black made her think of the northern lights, and I said aha!  That's it!  That's its name!

It took a while to photograph it.  First, we had to find a good place to set up to capture the whole thing.  Then there were lighting issues.  The afternoon sun was in the wrong direction and washed out all of our shots.  Thank goodness we were able to get some good photos on Saturday morning, since I delivered the quilt to the fair that afternoon!  (It also helped that I had a very patient photographer, who took dozens of shots, before I had what I wanted.)