So Many Triangles!

I have4 been enjoying a little time at home the past couple of weekends and have been trying very hard to keep up with Triangle Gatherings as well as make progress on this month's UFOs.  The weekend before last I caught up on my 6" block and then thought I would get a start on catching up the 3" version. I finished one block and am not sure I am going to take that one any farther.

I'm no stranger to small blocks - I started out quilting making miniatures - but I am not a fan of the triangle papers for these.  The seam allowances are about 1/8"amd are not at all fun to press open.

The little dog ears were a pain to trim also.  And then the pieces aren't quite as easy to line up - somehow the "bulky" 1/4" seams fight the little seam allowances. I may try another one as I prepped about 8 of them but I did not find the first one to be at all enjoyable!

Lisa posted block 17 at the beginning of the week and thanks to having pieces prepared for several more blocks I was able to finish it that night.  Blocks 18 & 19 posted this weekend and I knocked those out too.

So far, so good!  I am really hoping to keep up through the end so it doesn't become another long-term UFO. Speaking of UFOs, my Mosaics quilt is one of the assignments for this month.  This is how it looked at the beginning of the month (yes, it is in exactly the same spot as it was when the workshop ended last October).

It's hard to tell from the photo, but most of it is not sewn.  The inside of the circle, the bird's head and a little bit of one of the branches have been stitched.  Sadly I have not made much progress since the beginning of the month but am still hoping to at least have all of the center appliqued by the end of the month,

Magic of Christmas is my other UFO for March.  I have made some progress on this one, completing two blocks each of the last two weekends.  I think I have about 10 blocks left to make. These are not at all quick to put together!

I have really been going to town on my 1875 Ship rug - that's part of the reason no applique is getting done.  I took this one with me to Lenexa since it was smaller  (19"x 40").  I hadn't worked on it since the class in 2015 and only had the ship, water, houses and part of the flowers finished.  If I am able to keep up my current pace I think I will have the hooking finished by the end of the month.

We're only halfway through the month - let's see how much farther I can progress my UFOs by then!

Irene Blanck Workshop

Last week we had the pleasure of having Irene Blanck come to town to do a workshop for our TAS group. I met Irene when I took her class in Houston last year and we discussed the possibility of her coming to the St. Louis area to teach when she returned to Houston this year. I was thrilled when everything fell into place to bring her here for a couple of days before she headed off to Quilt Market. 

Our workshop project was Irene's Mosaics quilt from her book with Quiltmania.  It was a great choice for a class as we covered both applique and English paper piecing.  Irene's method for EPP is different from what I have always done and although I am still working to get used to it, I think it is a better technique for ensuring stitches don't show.

Here's a picture of Irene's quilt (part of it, anyway - we had to get creative go we could hang it over the TV mounted on the wall):

And here is my basted center sans dots (which will be added once the rest is stitched). Irene helped with the selection of fabrics for the bird.  He's pretty wild!  I did a little bit of stitching on the circle over the weekend but haven't gotten very far.

We tried to get pictures of everyone's centers.  I wasn't able to get up high enough to get a good angle but you can see the variety.  The dark backgrounds look really striking!  

We are hoping to have Irene back to do another workshop when she is in St. Louis for Spring Market in 2017.  She is an excellent and very fun teacher!

The past few weeks have been a little crazy and I haven't had much time in the sewing room, but I have managed to get a few things done. I caught up on my guild BOM blocks, finished two each of the Magic of Christmas blocks 10-13 (I'm sort of caught up!), and last but definitely not least finally finished quilting this monster!

This was my first large quilt on the long arm. It was definitely the quilt from hell! After taking it off the frame to pull out almost a full row of quilting (which took many, many hours), I reloaded it and didn't get it lined up correctly so I ended up having to rip out more stitching. I finally was able to get everything lined up well enough and quilted down to the last section and found that my backing was not long enough. It was about 2" short. I was so tired of this quilt that my initial thought was to just trim all the borders down to match and be done with it, but after sleeping on it I decided to take it off the frame AGAIN and piece some backing from the site onto the bottom. I reloaded again and once again didn't get it lined up perfectly (I've since learned how to avoid that problem in a class I took at MQX Springfield last weekend) so I have a few places where the quilting overlaps.  I decided that I would just let it go...I was more than ready to be finished with this one!  So it is FAR from perfect but I never intended for it to be on a bed anyway.  It doesn't look half bad folded! I definitely learned a lot from it and am hoping my next one goes much better!