This is a quilt that I started for a friend’s baby. I decided that another top will fit a little better, so now I have to find a recipient for this one! I have enough blocks to do a column on the back, to stretch the backing fabric out a bit. It’ll either be pink or blue gingham or the green hello pilgrim stripe. Any thoughts?
I’m also working on a pinwheels quilt for my own (queen sized) bed:
And I’ll be posting on Friday about this quilt, finished!
Linking up to:
Two quick snapshots of last weekend’s quilting activity:
I’ve been working on baby quilts lately, but I’ve also finished and ironed my Scrappy Trip Along quilt top, and am ready to send it off to be quilted by someone better at it than I am.
Here’s my question: can anyone recommend a quilter? People you’ve worked with, or about whom you’ve heard good things?
I’d prefer free-motion quilting over pantographs, but I mostly want to go with someone who has pictures of her/his work up that I can look at. Someone in the continental US is best for shipping costs. Someone who could charge me for their batting (instead of me mailing it to them) would be ideal.
Any names come to mind?
Wow. It’s been a downhill race since this May. To finish off the semester, I wrote three (5, 20, 20+ page) papers. Then I went to London (yay!) and did research, went to Spain and walked 300 kilometers (~200 miles) of the Camino de Santiago, from Leon to Santiago and finally spent a couple of days in Lisbon seeing the city and just relaxing.
I got back to the US just in time to spend a week in New Haven with Rare Book School, and then to go to a conference in Minneapolis. Phew.
The rest of the summer will be fairly sedentary compared to that: living in NYC and visiting CT, back and forth, while working on my department’s website and working on learning German, and trying to make time to edit a paper. And making time to sew, because, man, have I missed my sewing machine.
For now, let me show proof that I haven’t been completely unproductive — last weekend, I made four blocks for the INSPIRE circle of do.Good stitches. Now to get them into the mail! (They are STUPIDLY late, and I am so lucky that my circle-mates are so understanding. It’s really hard to sew while you’re walking the Camino de Santiago.)
Here are *cough* May’s blocks: little airplanes!
Here are June’s: wonky stars
I had a lot of fun with the wonky stars, but it’s not a pattern that calls to me for an entire quilt — that’s one of the best things about the INSPIRE circle — it makes me do blocks that I’d never do on my own, which is wonderful. :)
Hello, everyone! It’s been a while. Since I last posted, I (successfully) defended my Master’s thesis (we have a required oral defense for the MA thesis) and am cranking out some serious papers for the end of the semester.
But! A little over two months four months since I finished this, I’ve finally had the chance to take better pictures of my Strip & Flip quilt!
This is a really brilliant, simple, satisfying pattern, and I just love how it turned out. As I said before, I didn’t quite follow the pattern exactly: I cut strips that were 2 1/2″ inches wide, instead of 2″ wide, and I pieced them really carefully, so that the final dimensions of the quilt are about 42″x52″
I decided to echo the white lines on the front in the backing of the quilt, which was just enough to let me use a single cut of Kona cotton (a little under 2 yards) to back this quilt — but it was iffy in places, and if I did it again, I might opt to give myself a little more wiggle room.
I quilted it pretty simply: first I filled the vertical white columns with white stitching, which I think makes them look sort of column-like, and then I quilted horizontal lines more or less randomly across the middle column, which involved a lot of fussing and tugging to get the wider part of the quilt to fit in my sewing machine.
Then I had a dilemma. I considered doing a different style of free motion quilting in each strip, to give the back of it a sort of scrappy, varied look, but I decided it varied too much from the straight lines already present on the back of it. Instead, I picked every fifth strip and quilted across it back and forth.
It leaves about an 8″ gap between quilted sections on the wide side, which makes me a little bit nervous.
So I have a question for more experienced quilters:
Should I run some additional quilting lines down those sections? I know Warm & Natural says you can quilt it every 10″, but those are awfully LONG 8″ sections… (And before you ask, I have no idea who’s going to be using this one, but probably a child.)
I considered doing a scrappy binding, or using one of the prints in the top for the binding, but I decided that would just be too much going on. Instead, I wandered over to my local fabric shop (it is three blocks from my house: let’s just say the owner and I chat when I go in, I’m there that often.) I looked over their solids, and chose a deep blue (Kona Ocean, if I recall correctly). I tried to use Red Pepper Quilts binding tutorial but I have yet to figure out exactly what counts as 1/4″ when I’m using my walking foot, so the stitch allowance was too wide, and I wouldn’t have been sure to catch the folded over binding if I stitched in the ditch. Instead I bound it by hand, while watching the news over the last couple of nights.
Any questions? I really enjoyed this one — it’s a great chance to pick fabrics (I’d consider doing this in all neutrals, or all greys, or all reds (etc) if I had enough of them!). And it comes together very quickly without looking like it, which is always satisfying.
Quilting has really been taking a back seat to schoolwork recently, which isn’t a surprise, but is a bit sad: I miss having the time to sit down and work on something and really lose myself in the process. Instead I have to keep an eye on the clock, to be sure my break doesn’t run longer than planned.
In any case, given my workload, my goals for the first quarter of the 2013 Finish-A-Long were … well … let’s call them ambitious. That sounds better than “insanely unrealistic,” right? (These were my initial goals for the first quarter of 2013.)
Two months into the first quarter of 2013, my more realistic goals are:
1) Finish the Scrappy Trip quilt top and backing and send it off to be professionally quilted, because it’s way too big for my machine at home.
2) Work on one other quilt top: New Wave or Pinwheels and Postage Stamps or the 2012 Block of the Month. Whatever looks like fun.
3) Relax.
Just a brief teaser: this is a small-scale look at what the back of my scrappy trip quilt will look like. I’ll be doing 7×7 12″ squares on the back, in imitation of the scrappy trip blocks. Of course, the cat just had to help:
Happy (early) President’s Day and happy Sunday!
I’ve really been enjoying the Scrappy Trip-Along quilt, especially seeing all the other pictures in the flickr group — it’s great to see the different color and fabric choices!
I’ve been planning on making my quilt 8×8, to be a (really large) queen size with plenty of drape, with a narrow solid border around the edges, and a plain binding. But I laid out the blocks I have right now, all 48 of them, and now I’m on the fence. I think 8×8 might be too large!
I’m considering three things and I would love opinions: please weigh in!
— 6×8 with a 6″ border = roughly 81″ x 104″ Concern: I worry that 81″ x 104″ is lopsided.
— 8×8 and a 4″ border = a neat 100″ x 100″ Concern: I worry that this is too big!
— 7×7 with a 6″ border = 92″ x 92″ Concern: I have an irrational dislike of odd numbers.
I laid the blocks I already have finished and trimmed out on my kitchen floor (after moving the kitchen table out of the way). This is what I had to do to get a picture of the whole thing:
That’s an 8 foot ladder. But from the top of it, I got this picture:
And after moving some squares around a little bit, I got this one:
I tested the layout in black and white, and I think it’s almost right:
This quilt is going to be a gift, and I want it to be something the recipients can really use, not something that’s just not quite right. So I have to make up my mind: 6×8? 7×7? Or 8×8? Let me know what you think — please!
I have the fabric all cut for the other blocks, so the time or work involved in making the next blocks is absolutely not a concern: I want this to be as good a gift as it can be, not something I think about later and wonder “what if?”
We recycle plastic bags, and the plastic bag full of plastic bags hanging on a door handle have been getting on my nerves. So I did a little digging online, checked a couple of tutorials for ideas, and made a plastic-bag holding tube!
I started off with a fat quarter, and backed it with fusible fleece. I picked fleece because I wanted a little extra sturdiness to the bag, and the roughness of the fleece on the inside of the tube should help keep the bags in place better than a smoother interfacing.
I cut off three inches from the long side of the fat quarter, to make a narrower tube. I sewed that 3″ strip into a tube (wrong-sides out) and turned it right-side-out to use as a loop for hanging the bag. Next time I do this, I’m cutting the 3″ strip off first, and then fusing on the fleece. Turning a 1 1/2″ tube that’s backed with fusible fleece inside-out was really exasperating.
Then I dug into my scrap box, cut two pieces of black fabric 2″ x 15″ and made them into 3/4″ draw-string tubes at the top and bottom of the soon-to-be tube.
Two pieces of elastic later, (8″ on the bottom, for a small opening, 12″ on the top, to make putting bags in easier) I sewed the whole thing up the side, and flipped it right-side out, and ta-da!
Now it lives in the coat closet, where it hangs very nicely on one side and is up high enough that we can all reach it easily, and the best part? It doesn’t clutter up the hallway anymore.
Knit-Spin-Quilt 