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!

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!

Home from Houston

Work and travel have interfered with my sewing and rug hooking over the past six weeks so I haven't had much to post about. I did manage to piece a back for the star quilt, see the binding on Celtic Solstice and Grand Illusion (another 64 feet of binding to hand stitch!) and finish piecing my Quatrefoil top.  Nothing all that picture-worthy, though.... As much as I usually like Edyta's fabrics I'm not completely in love with Quatrefoil.  I'm hoping the quilting can bring it to life.

Baltimore on the Prairie was a little different this year - new location, split into two groups to accommodate all the requests for Sue Garmin - and left me feeling a bit disappointed.  I usually leave there so inspired but this year that was not the case. One thing I saw that did catch my eye was the sign in the lobby of the lodge.  This tree would be awesome in appliqué!

Although my September trip fell a bit short of expectations, my trip to Houston definitely made up for it!  I was worried that it would not be all that exciting - I'm at a point where I have so many projects lined up that I really want to do that I really am not interested in shopping (awful, isn't it??) and things are so crazy at work that I knew It would not be a true vacation.  As it turns out, spending a little less time walking the vendor floor (although I spent plenty of time there, trust me!) and a little more time listening to presentations and wandering around downtown made for a great trip!

I listened to quite a few of the "Meet the Teacher" presentations. I didn't get pictures of them all, but here's Kathy Dunnigan on stage talking about her appliqué techniques:

It's hard to get a flattering photo of people when they are talking!

The first day I was in Houston - in fact, even on the plane on the way down - several people mentioned the Phoenicia as a great place to eat.  I decided to check it out for lunch on Thursday.  It is the coolest specialty market with prepared foods and groceries and places to sit and eat.

I was really impressed by the pita bread line.

Such a cool place!  I ended up eating there again on Friday.  It was great!

There were a number of really awe-inspiring quilts, including this one made by Barbara Korengold with an insane amount of gorgeous appliqué and embroidery:

And this one that turns out to be this quilter's first quilt (seriously?!?):

The trip ended on a high note with the most fantastic workshop on Friday - needle turn appliqué with Irene Blanck.  She does a couple of things that I really haven't seen before that are a bit intriguing and worth giving a try.  She is such a down to earth person and so incredibly nice! The class was a blast!

I'm back home now after escaping the monsoons in Houston this morning and in between unpacking and doing laundry I've already made the run to Lowe's for my paint chips.

Let the mystery madness begin!!!

Friday Night Sew-in Fail

Unfortunately life got in the way of my plans for a night of solo sewing yesterday.  We are in the middle of having all the flooring replaced in our main floor and nothing seems to be going as planned.  My house is a complete disaster!  I finally wrapped up everything I needed to take care of and hit the sewing room by 9 pm.  My plan was to come up with a layout and get my Quatrefoil center together. I laid out all the blocks on the sewing room floor, rearranged about twenty times and came up this:

I decided to make one more move and switched the light block on the left end of row five with the second block in row six and decided I was happy with it. I carefully picked up block by block and sewed the rows and then laid them out on a bed to keep them straight.  I'm not sure how I managed it, but I ended up with this:

Granted, this picture is upside down (best angle I could get), but I completely screwed up my planned layout.  I somehow managed to flip a couple of blocks and/or rows. I ended up with too many light ones along one side, but it's not bad enough to warrant ripping them out.  That's what I'm telling myself, anyway.  Two borders and it's off to the quilter.  

Being scrappy can be really challenging some days!

Sunday Stitching

I spent the afternoon prepping the next step in one of my many "slow stitching" projects, my compass.  I finally finished appliquing the center - the Broderie Perse is out, replaced by one of the fabrics in the compass - and am now ready to appliqué the compass onto the center square.  This project has been a lot of fun so far because of the challenges it presents.  It wasn't all that easy to appliqué the center on that big piece, especially with all the paper in it, and it was a bit of a challenge to get the circle marked to applique to the center square.  I now have it marked, carefully centered on the background and basted in place for stitching this evening.

The next step is to appliqué circles between all the points.  I decided to play around with prepping a circle using the technique Sara Fielke demonstrated in her You Tube video. 

I cut out a cardboard template and cut the fabric with a seam allowance (a little too small, I think).  I placed it on a square of foil.

 

I then pulled in the edges of the foil and tried to smooth it out.  It's a lot more difficult to get the edge completely smooth than she made it look in her video!  

After getting it as smooth as I could, I pressed it, allowed it to cool, and unwrapped it.  The end result was pretty similar to what I get when prepping using Perfect Circles...not quite perfect.  

I'm hoping that I can take care of the little pokies when appliquing it in place. I think it's a toss-up as to which technique wins as far as prep time is concerned, and really the results for me are equivalent.  I will have to play around with it a bit more, but I think this technique might have a slight edge in that the edges are still soft and there isn't a lot of the flaky, crusty dried starch on my fabric.

Other progress over the week and weekend includes the next guild BOM:

And a few more Quatrefoil blocks.  I am really starting to like how the fabrics are working together - a pleasant surprise!

I definitely need to work on more light blocks!

I'm looking forward to the three day weekend coming up - two day weekends never seem long enough!  Hop over to Kathy's Slow Sunday Stitching post to see what others are working on this weekend....

Very Little Progress...and a State Fair Rant

Okay, so let's start with the rant. I won't devote my entire post to complaining, but I just have to point out what to me is quickly becoming an injustice in the quilting world. I have nothing against digitized embroidery and applique - in fact, I own a machine and a couple of patterns and have done a little of it myself. I do believe that the end result can be fantastic and that there are lots of people out there making gorgeous quilts using the technique. The issue I have is when it seems that the workmanship involved in completing a machine embroidered applique project seems to be judged as equal to that of a needle-turned hand applique project. As someone who has done both, I know the difference - and pretty much no matter how complicated the embroider/applique project is, an intermediate to advanced hand applique project is much more difficult and requires significantly more skill. The two should not be judged side by side as applique.

When looking at the ribbon winners at the Illinois State Fair this weekend it became clear that the judges were big fans of machine embroidered applique. Those quilts seemed to take all the first place ribbons and the grand champion.  I recognize that there are several different categories and that I didn't spend the time to figure out which ones were in competition with each other, but this gorgeous hand appliqued quilt received second place.  The workmanship looked excellent (apologies for the glare - they are displayed in a glass case) and was clearly a lot more work and required more talent than some of the quilts sporting the nice blue ribbons. I didn't catch the quilter's name, but in my humble opinion she deserved first place and the grand champion ribbon!

So enough with the fair...or should I post at least one picture of the butter cow?

It was so ridiculously hot on Saturday that I had a tough time resisting the urge to join the butter cow in her display case. But instead I controlled myself and stayed just long enough to take a few pictures and then headed back to the somewhat air conditioned Hobby Building.  

I really haven't gotten much accomplished since my last post. I did make a little bit of progress on my new UFO from the MSQC retreat (the Quatrefoil quilt).  I finished all of the four patches yesterday.

Here are the blocks I completed at the retreat. I'm not entirely sure that the fabric line I selected - this was a mystery quilt involving a layer cake so I was choosing blindly- is going to work out, but I am forging ahead anyway. The color in the picture is terrible - the one above is closer to reality.

I have also done a little hooking on the pineapple rug. I need to cut more background wool to finish off that left side before moving on any farther on the right. I hate leaving all the background until the end!

I have big plans for getting lots of things accomplished next weekend. I don't have anything planned for the first weekend in a long time.  I am looking forward to it!