Latest finish--quilt for a friend

I've been totally off the blog for over a month, partly because it's been a really busy time at work, and partly because I have been sewing up a storm!

Part of the challenge of meeting my self-imposed goals of finishing old WIPs is that new quilt opportunities keep arising, and I end up making unplanned quilts.

For the quilt I'm going to share today, it was a sad reason that came up. A friend of mine was recently diagnosed with colorectal cancer at a young age. She is actually beginning chemo treatments today, but she has been in my thoughts since she first shared her diagnosis. Other friends of ours helped put together a great care calendar to help her and her husband with meals and childcare for their two children while she is fighting this disease. I am not a good cook, though, so my first thought was to make her a quilt. Other friends who have fought cancer have shared with me that chemo can make you cold, and that it's comforting to have a nice blanket to wrap up in. And when I don't know what to do, I make quilts.

So here it is:

I used this tutorial from the Cloud 9 Fabrics website, and I used the collection of Piper fabrics I bought with a groupon from G Street Fabrics. The background is Kona Smoke, which might be my new favorite Kona neutral. It is a great contrast to the pinks and purples and yellows of the Piper fabrics! At 55x63", this is one of the larger quilts I've made, but it was still pretty easy to quilt on my machine.

What I loved about this quilt is that it was actually incredibly easy to piece. The worst part about it was putting the fabric into order so that directional prints went the right way. 

I backed it with more Kona Smoke with the leftover strips of the Piper fabric breaking it up. It is bound with Kona Crocus, which was a really great match for the purples. And is so bright and cheery.

It is quilted with organic straight lines in the ribbons and a FMQ meander in the backing areas. I adore how the straight lines create a really nice cross-hatch on the backing, and I'm glad I used a solid so that shows.

I also wanted this to be very special, so I free motion quilted my friend's name into one corner. I haven't quilted words since a baby quilt a few years ago, but I was really happy with how it turned out. 

I actually cut, pieced, quilted and bound this in about 2-3 weeks, and was able to deliver it to my friend when she had gotten home from the hospital after her surgery. As I wrote in her card, I hope that when she wraps up in the blanket she feels wrapped in my love and healing thoughts.


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Made by Me Wednesdays

May the force be with you

A fellow quilt guild member, Melinda, designed a GORGEOUS patchwork Death Star paper pieced pattern. It's on her blog: http://quirkygranolagirl.blogspot.com/2014/04/patchwork-death-star-pattern.html?m=1

I have never done any English paper piecing other than my hexies, so this was a huge leap out of my comfort zone. 

I have been sharing my progress on Instagram with Melinda's hashtag #patchworkdeathstar.

Anyway, I finished the handsewing tonight. Now I need to think about how to quilt it. I have never hand quilted so I may try it out. But I am thinking about some machine stitches that might improve the look of my Death Star. 

Here it was before I sewed the two halves together. Sewed together it looks a little stretched out and misshapen but I know it will be fine once I block it and press it .

Creative process-rainbow quilt finish

I have had a few friends ask me how long it takes to make a quilt and how I come up with ideas, so I am going to write a little bit about my process using a recent quilt (that I just gave to the recipient!) as an example.

Step 1: The first step is deciding to make one! 

Then I need to figure out these three things - pattern, fabric, recipient. That usually happens in one of these ways - I see a beautiful fabric collection and must own it; an event/situation is occurring where I feel that a quilt is an appropriate gift; or I see a quilt pattern that I am interested in making. So depending on which one of those happens first, the other steps happen, too (although I occasionally end up with recipient-less quilts which are lurking in my house waiting for recipients).

In the case of my Dark Star rainbow quilt, around November or so a friend of mine was having a tough time while the holidays were drawing near. I wanted to do something to let her know that she has a lot of friends cheering her on and wishing her the best, so I decided to make a quilt.

So in this example, I had the recipient first and then had to figure out what to make her.

She is a Grateful Dead fan, and I immediately thought tie-dye! I started googling and pinteresting tie-dye quilts, and got a few ideas. So I drew out a rough pattern and figured out that I'd need 50-ish squares of each rainbow color, so about 350 total, so I started shopping my stash, and reaching out to fellow quilters/sewists to fill in gaps (I don't have a lot of yellow or purple in my stash apparently). Then I thought about how I wanted it to look and decided to add a wonky black star in the middle. I made two of them because I had an idea about adding a layer of red to one. That didn't look right for the front, but I held onto it.

This first step is my favorite step because I get to think about friends, look at beautiful fabrics and just think about what might be possible. And to be honest, this is where I sometimes get stuck. I have so many fabric collections, and patterns I want to make, and there are always babies being born who need warm quilts to snuggle them.

Step 2: Cutting fabric

Then I figured out the actual dimensions, and started cutting fabric. That always takes a while, but I do it in front of the TV in the evening, usually. I actually love cutting fabric, especially when I'm using up scraps. For this step with non-scrappy quilts, I usually pre-wash and press, which is not as much fun.

Step 3: Piecing

Once I had my stacks of rainbow squares, and my white strips, I took them upstairs to my sewing room and started chain-piecing. I also pieced the wonky black star for the middle. Even though this quilt has so many pieces, it was still fairly straightforward and easy piecing, so it only took a couple of hours of chain-piecing and pressing, but then it was all together. This is my second favorite step, because I love to see how it all comes together. I also start a count-down for seams, so at some point, I'll know I only have 20 seams to go and I race myself to the finish line. I am not a precise piecer at all, and I am a fairly terrible presser, but for something scrappy like this, it doesn't matter that much.

Step 4: Choosing backing/Piecing backing

This sometimes happens in Step 1, but when I'm doing something scrappy, I tend to wait until I see how the top has turned out. For this quilt, I knew I wanted something neutral for the back, so I picked a really nice textured gray. Because the quilt's dimensions are about 50x50, I needed to piece the backing, so I used the other wonky star on the back, along with some of my favorite 2.5 inch strips pieced together to break up the gray. I tried to stagger them and pick complementary colors, and was really thrilled with how it turned out.

This is a step where I get stuck a lot, and I currently have a number of WIPs with no backing chosen/made. Partly because I tend to buy 1/2 yard cuts or fat quarters for my stash, so I don't have a lot of yardage that's enough for backing.

Step 5: Making the quilt sandwich

This is my least favorite part of quilting. I started pin basting this one, and pretty quickly decided to go out and get a can of spray adhesive. My husband hates spray adhesive because of the VOCs, so I only use it when he's out and I can open windows to get the smell out. Once it was done, though, it was time for Step 6.

Step 6: Deciding how to quilt

My fallback quilting is to free motion quilt a random meander. For this quilt, though I was intrigued by the idea of trying out a variegated thread, and had found a nice rainbow variegated thread at the fabric store. So I decided to straight(ish) line quilt following the rainbow spiral. That didn't seem like quite enough quilting, so I went back and did more lines in white thread in the white spiral. The colors disappear into the front, and the difference between the variegated and white shows up on the back so subtly - it ended up looking very intentional.

Step 7: Actually quilting

I know this is a favorite step of a lot of quilters, but I am usually pretty nervous about actually starting. This one went pretty quickly, though, as it was straight line. I had some puckers, but nothing too bad.

Step 7: Binding

Another not favorite and one that often makes me procrastinate. For the rainbow quilt, I picked out a black pattern, but when I started to sew it on, I quickly realized that a) I didn't like it and b) I was a couple of inches short, and had no idea where I'd bought the print to buy more. So I used a black pin dot that was in my stash, and I fortunately had just enough. And now I have binding ready to go for a smaller quilt!

Step 8: Wash and dry

This is pretty self-explanatory, and probably the easiest of all the steps!

Step 9: Bury threads

I don't bury them as I go along because I lose the flow of quilting, so that usually means an evening in front of the TV burying threads. Not a favorite, but it's easy, repetitious and fairly mindless, so not a burden either. However, this is another step where I get hung up, so I now have three recipient-less baby quilts waiting for me to do this. My husband wants them gone, so I need to get to work!

Step 10: Photograph the quilt!

I am trying to be better about getting pictures of my quilts so I can keep track of them, but sometimes waiting for the right day to take pictures can delay getting a quilt to its recipient. With the snowy winter we've had, it's been hard to take photos outside. I usually take photos with both my phone and our nice DSLR, but I am terrible at getting them uploaded from the DSLR to a place where I can access them for this blog, so readers get the iphone photos.

And finally - give to the recipient.

I think this is my favorite step. I don't always get to give them to people in person, but with this one, I did, and it was great.

Third quilt ever - made in 2011

This quilt came from a quilt magazine I bought when I was pregnant or when my son was very little. They had this argyle quilt pattern and I loved everything about it. Looking at it now, it's pretty good for a novice. I like my color choices (although I took a lot of inspiration from the magazine), I definitely didn't do points well, and the ruffling was difficult for me and turned out kind of unevenly, even with a lot of pinning. And I didn't have a free motion quilting foot yet, so I straight(ish) line quilted it.

I remade this quilt pattern a few months later with ribbon instead of ruffled strips and this was the result:  

This quilt actually won a blue ribbon in the county fair in 2012 in the baby quilt category. The judges' feedback was to work on my points and binding (which is fair enough!). I absolutely adore this quilt pattern and think it's such a great, modern-feeling quilt. It was also my first blue and orange quilt!

I have quilty bucket list plans to remake it in boy fabrics - reds, yellows and blues. I have been on the hunt for some specialty ribbon -- trains, construction equipment or rocket ships -- to make it really fun. 

Both of these are now living in my guest room. I don't want to give up the blue ribbon quilt, and the first one isn't good enough to give away. I have contemplated requilting it, because that's the main thing I am not happy with, but it is way down on my priority list.

Blue and orange quilt finished! - 2014 finish #3

In my last blog post, I mentioned that I was working on a blue and orange quilt for a friend who is a big Syracuse fan. It is finally done! This is finish #3 for 2014 (blogged). I have two more finished except for burying threads, and will post those very soon.

I was inspired by the bento box patterns I've seen around the internet, but I modified it by varying the width of the strips. I love the movement it gives to the quilt.

I quilted this with a squared meander. I was having a heck of a time quilting - my thread kept breaking and I was cursing my machine. I finally got through it after changing my needle, rethreading, etc. Then I started quilting another and the same thing happened--so I changed my needle again to a larger size and it was all better. The quilting could have been much nicer if I had thought to do that earlier, but I'm not going back.

I am giving this to my friend tomorrow night - he and his wife moved to the DC area about a year or so ago and we haven't seen each other yet. We all became internet friends more than 10 years ago on a Usenet newsgroup, and met in person a few times. I lost touch with them but found them again through facebook. I'm excited to see them, and hope they like the quilt and the thought behind it.

Front of quilt - they are about 15.5 inch blocks, so it's 46.5 x 62 or so.

Closeup

Backing- I love these giant polka dots by Marrimekko.
The Crate and Barrel outlet usually carries multiple colors.

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Work in Progress--March 19

A friend is fighting cancer and because I am generally helpless about what to do in these situations, I decided to make a quilt. He loves Syracuse and wears a lot of blue and orange, so I looked on Pinterest for inspiration. A bento box quilt came up and I decided to make it.

As always, I'm too cheap to buy a pattern, so I winged it. Everything was from my stash, and the blue plaid I had actually gotten from a freecycled bag of fabric. I love my oranges and they are set off so well by the blue. 

I've made four blue and orange quilts now. The first two were aqua and orange and the second navy, aqua and orange. So using this medium blue shade is new, but I love how it turned out. It turns out I only had these two prints in my stash as I apparently don't buy that color blue;  luckily it was enough (and I have some left).

I am backing it in a giant orange tone on tone polka dot from the Crate and Barrel outlet. And bought a blue polka dot for binding.

I cut and pieced basically in one day. Because I'm a sloppy piecer, my squares didn't line up very accurately, but overall, I love how it looks.

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Sewing while traveling

I am flying to California for work tonight, so I'm going to try English paper piecing hexagons. I'm a terrible handsewer, but I'm excited to try something new!