RUH ROH!

After playing around with a few charity quilts and a blank piece of fabric I decided it was time to try a "real" quilt.  I figured I would start on my Quatrefoil quilt because I like it less than the other one that I have ready.  It was definitely not as easy to load this one as it is the smaller ones but after a few course corrections we (thankfully I had help) got it onto the frame. 

I decided to fire up the machine on a Saturday night when I could spend the evening in the basement keeping an eye on it and advancing it along. My husband decided it would be a good night for us to watch the new Star Wars while the machine ran. Not that being distracted by Star Wars has anything to do with what happened next... Everything was going along well.  I had quilted three complete rows and advanced on to the fourth. It was looking great.  And then the thread broke. I re-threaded, restarted, and noticed that the tension looked a little odd. Then the thread broke again.  Re-thread, restart.  The tension started looking really bad.

When the row was finished I rolled the quilt forward to see how bad it was. And it was BAD. Very, very bad.

I will have to rip out the entire last row of quilting, reload the quilt and try to line things up to begin where it left off. And figure out what the heck happened and correct it. So far I have taken the quilt off the frame and made a start on ripping. I started at the end before things went bad and it is not going well. It may take a month - or longer - to get all the stitches out!

I've been distracted from making progress on any of my UFOs by my SBOWs and Panama Pyramids.  I didn't touch my Rising Sun this month (the APQ UFO selection for July) and didn't even do enough orange peels to warrant a count.  I did finish two more Pyramids (I love those stamps!) and two more Clara's Stars.  

And then another shiny object came along and grabbed my attention....

Kathy over at Kathy's Quilts shared that she decided to use this year's leader and ender project to make the Clarissa Quilt. She shared pictures of the quilt and it is very cool.  She's planning to host a sew along of sorts to make it.  So of course I want to join!  I ditched the red and cream hourglass blocks I made last weekend and made a few smaller ones using fat quarters from a collection I have that I think will be perfect for this quilt. I will have to do some planning and cutting to have this ready to use for leaders and enders.

I have a couple of other projects I'm itching to start but more on those next time.  I'm quite confident I will give in and start them very soon. In the meantime I have been making progress on my basket.  I replaced the pear and like it better now.  Quite a few of the pieces below are only basted but I am loving how it is coming together.

That basket was a bit of a hassle but I am pleased with how it turned out. I'm still a bit hung up on the fact that the basket is see-through and looks empty with stuff floating on top. Yes, I definitely have issues!

Summer Slow Stitching

It seems like I have spent quite a bit of time sewing over the past couple of weeks but I don't have very much to show for it! I am overwhelmed with projects right now and love every one of them so much that I can't make myself focus on just one!  I always go a little overboard during SBOW season but this year I have completely lost my mind.

I haven't really done much with the wool SBOW. I've prepped a few blocks but I plan to change out many of the applique motifs and so I need to draw patterns and pull wools that will work for them so that one is on the back burner for now. I have prepped the first four freebie blocks and have stitched the first two:

I am enjoying stitching all of the pennies and have been working with my already vast collection of threads rather than ordering the recommended colors and am finding I can match them pretty well. 

I was able to attend one day of a local retreat and started prepping Clara's Stars.  I was able to get all of my background yardage cut into 5" squares and to start playing with the week one fabrics.  I have always thread-basted my English paper piecing but decided I needed to go with a quick prep method if I was ever going to get any of these sewn, so I tried both starch and glue. I liked the starch method when I started with it but found that it was really easy to get the paper wet and then you had to be really careful not to lose the shape when you pressed the seam allowance. Not a bad way to go, though. But then I tired the glue method and I was completely hooked! I am not a fan of working with glue but it goes so quickly and holds so well!  I might regret it when it comes time to remove the papers but it sure speeds up the prep process!  I haven't gotten very far but have a few stars sewn and completed one triangle. 

I find EPP very addictive - it is hard to resist working on this project!  But then there is the album quilt - we started the third block for that one and we have a deadline - or perhaps target is a better word. We decided to knock out one of the basket blocks next as there are several in the quilt. I have made a fairly strong start on my block (note that quite a bit of the pieces below are only basted but most of the basket is finished. I am tweaking the pattern a bit, skipping the big knife that is supposed to be next to the pineapple and replacing the mystery item that was next to the pineapple with a pear (it looks somewhat like an apple in the original quilt, but looks like a part of the male anatomy in the drawn pattern).  I also did my basket in brown rather than the traditional Baltimore album red.

Looking at this picture I think my pear is too pale...perhaps I should switch to something a little more green. There's a lot of green in the pattern, though, so I really wanted to go more gold. I will have to give that one some thought.

Although I already have more than enough projects in the works, I am completely obsessed with all of the Panama Pyramids I am seeing posted on Facebook.  I am really trying not to be sucked in - to leave it at the one block - but they are so tempting!  And then I saw that Cindy Blackberg released a stamp for them.  I have been wanting to do a hand piecing project with stamps for a long time so I had to order them!

I stamped my first block - clearly I need a little practice!  What an awesome way to prep hand piecing, though!  There's a little more cutting involved since you can't get them right next to each other but I started sewing them last night and love the precision of the seam allowance and the strong sewing lines. They are great to work with!

Last, but definitely not least - I got a new toy for my birthday this year!  I have been looking at longarms for a very long time as I have always hated not being able to make my own quilts from start to finish.  I've tried quilting on a domestic machine but I usually make large quilts and clearly don't have the talent to make it work. I spent quite a bit of time noodling over which one to go with and finally landed on a Gammill. The thing is HUGE!  It occupies a big part of the basement just outside my office.  

I have a very long way to go in learning how to use this beast but am just about ready to put a "real" quilt on it.  Luckily I never got around to mailing the last two I finished to Missouri Star.  I'm very excited about doing them myself!

Oh - I almost forgot!  This week is the Friday Night Sew In!  I have quite a few things lined up....perhaps even some machine work. Read more about FNSI and sign up to join in the fun on the Sugarlane Designs blog here.

Recent Travels & FNSI Update

The weekend before last I took a little mini-vacation to the Ozarks and Kansas City for some quilting and rug hooking fun. We started the long weekend down at the lake with a stop at Renee Nanneman's open house. Renee's studio is located just a few miles from our lake house but this was the first time I have been able to go there.  We were very surprised when we turned onto the road to her house and ran across three zebras and an emu.  We had to stop for a picture...

We later found out from Renee that there's a camel that lives there too. He must have been hiding as we never saw him.  

Renee's place is absolutely gorgeous!  The photo below of the outside was borrowed from her last newsletter as it never occurred to me to take one.

The studio is beautiful and there were gorgeous fabrics everywhere! I don't seem to have taken many pictures of the actual fabrics, but she had a great selection of fabrics (mostly or all Andover) and some great fat quarter bundles.  There were quilts hanging everywhere.

The windows along the back of the studio overlook the lake - what an inspiring place to work! It would be a wonderful place for a class or retreat but unfortunately fabric and quilt designing keeps Renee too busy to host those kinds of things so we will have to settle for open houses.

I have been admiring Renee's basket and tumbler quilts in her last few newsletters and was very excited to see both in person.  Although I am not a fan of pink there is something about the colors in these that I absolutely love!  I had to have the kits even though I have no plans to make another tumbler quilt.

Everything was staged so beautifully that it was impossible to leave there without a healthy addition to the stash....

After the stop at Renee's we headed over to Blue Springs/Lee's Summit for lunch at the Salty Iguana (the Iguana dip is awesome!) and a visit to Quilter's Station.  I managed to find a few more pieces for my stash there - all intended to become orange peels.

Then it was time to head to Janice's. This is definitely my happy place. The wool is gorgeous and Janice and Jim are incredibly wonderful hosts. 

Every direction you turn there is more beautiful wool!

I had planned to work on one of Janice's designs that I purchased a year or so ago but within minutes of arriving I had changed my mind.  Janice tempted me with an enlarged version of her "April's Floral" design.  It is 50"x 62". Yes, I have lost my mind! 

Janice has fantastic color sense. Here she is working with Betsy on a modified version of her "My World" design in which the cats were replaced with a horse.

Leah was working on a Maggie Bonanomi design.  She hooks really fast - she was even farther along than this when we wrapped things up on Monday.

Jeannette was hooking her "Cat of Many Friends",a fun design that she hooked with wool scraps she had collected from many hooking friends at camps and workshops over the years. He is so cute!

I got a solid start on my rug, even though it doesn't look like much when spread out over a giant pattern. I love the colors we chose! I need to get back to it soon so I can make sure I have sufficient notes to be able to remember what we decided.

I spent the rest of last week in New York after returning from Janice's and was anxiously awaiting the arrival of the first BOW shipment from Primitive Gatherings. I was planning to spend the whole weekend playing with the new BOWs. Unfortunately, though, I came home Friday to find it hadn't arrived. It didn't come Saturday either.  I was SO disappointed!  I am hoping it comes today but that likely means I won't really get a chance to play with it all until next weekend.

So, because I didn't have my BOWs to play with I decided I would dip my toe in the water and make one - just one - Panama Pyramid.  I love hand piecing so much! I really don't have time to start this now but I don't think I can stop here. I think I need to prep a few more.

I decided to spend my FNSI and other weekend machine time working on my Allietare blocks. 

Amazingly although I wasn't all that inspired to work on these I managed to finish all the rest of the blocks and the setting triangles.  I'm ready to assemble the top now. Perhaps a good objective for my upcoming retreat?  I would love to check this one off my UFO list!