Aunt Emma & Other Progress

I'm still working to restore order after a month of crazy travel - nine trips in five weeks!  I have been trying very hard to stay caught up with Triangle Gatherings although it does really seem like Lisa is plotting against me...she seems to post new blocks the minute I think I'm on top of it. Here are blocks 63-74:

Lisa has said that there will be a total of 90 blocks so we are getting pretty close to the end! It will be interesting to see how she sets them. Several of the participants have added star points to them and they look fantastic.  I'm  not thrilled about the idea of adding that much work to a project that is nearing the finish line but I really, really like the look.  It would certainly make for a large quilt!

Baltimore on the Prairie was a lot of fun this year.  We had a great group in the Open Studio.  I spent the entire three days working on one SLAM block and sadly didn't even finish!  I still have a few flowers and leaves to applique and then need to add embroidery.  I love this project but progress is sooooo slow!

The last trip I took was to Janice's. My plan was NOT to start anything new.  I was planning to work on the rug that I started in July. My resolve was very short-lived....it faded as soon as I saw the new pattern Janice had drawn from an antique rug one of my friends found on Pinterest when we were together back in July.  She named it "Aunt Emma's Garden". Here's a really fuzzy picture of the original:

I thought it would be fun to hook the rug in just red and green.  I was able to get a fairly good start on it while I was there and love how it is looking.  My friend is hooking it in soft pinks.  I can't wait to see how they turn out and how different they look.

I was able to make progress on a couple of other UFOs over the past week now that I am finally home.  I finished hooking my cabins - photo to come later after it has been steamed - and quilted my Disappearing Nine Patch.  I tested my newly-learned skill to attach the binding by longarm and loved it!  It was a bit awkward at first but overall worked out really well and was so much easier than man-handling a queen sized quilt through a regular machine.

I have a lot of binding work to catch up on now...not my favorite part.  I plan to quilt my En Provence top next - I need to have that one finished before the new mystery starts at Thanksgiving!

Back to Reality

Sadly vacation has come to an end...  I feel like I accomplished a lot over the break, but I really wasn't ready to stop!  I am already anxiously anticipating the weekend so I can get back to the sewing room.

Since I was caught up with the En Provence mystery steps I had to switch over to other projects to fill my time until the next clue and reveal were released. I decided to work on my Disappearing Nine Patch. I finished making and cutting all of the additional nine patch blocks I had planned to make and started assembling the final blocks.

I may either need to re-think the size or make a few more blocks as I am finding a few challenges in the block parts that I swapped with friends for this project back in 2007.  I've found a few that were cut a quarter inch short and had to be discarded and am not completely sure what size I was thinking in the first place when I developed my block counts. I need to decide if I will add borders or not, also. My resolution for 2017 is to put better notes in my project boxes and to stop assuming that I will actually remember where I left off when I eventually get back to working on them!

I finished the applique and added embroidery to my SLAM basked block.  This is my third block and it took forever to complete!  

I will be working on an easier one next so that I can feel like I am making more progress.  This one was definitely a pain. I noticed after I took this photo that one of the basket pieces had popped out from under the bottom band so I had to do surgery on my basket to repair it. I am over woven baskets for a while!

I loaded my Allietare quilt on the frame on New Year's Eve and spent a good portion of New Year's Day quilting it.

I had a couple of glitches - mainly thread breaks - and really set myself up for failure by using a mostly black batik back (so everything shows!) but overall I am very happy with how it turned out. It turns out that lots of seams plus a batik back means you have to slow the speed considerably to avoid thread breaks so it took quite a while to finish.

I used wool batting and the quilt has a wonderful soft feel to it. I am almost looking forward to binding it (my least favorite part of quilting)!

The En Provence reveal happened on New Year's Day, so once I had Allitare off the frame I headed to the sewing room to start work on the final step. I am not finished with the piecing but assembled a few pieces to see how my colors look.

I think I am going to be happy with it. I saw one person's version that used solid squares in place of the last pieced blocks (those green/yellow/neutral blocks in the sashing) and kind of liked that look so I may audition that when I get back to it. I have already pieced about 40 of those blocks but will go with whatever looks best.  I also think I need to add another border as the quilt finishes at 86" square which is a bit too small for use on our beds.

I can't wait to get back to my sewing room - I am so inspired to progress existing projects and to start a few new ones. I'm already longing for the weekend!

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.

SBOW Troubles

I couldn't wait for the first SBOW shipment to arrive.  I was SO disappointed when I returned from New York and my package was not waiting for me. And then that weekend when nothing came. Then, on June 20, it arrived.

Even though I knew that the first shipment would contain the background fabrics for all of the projects I somehow didn't expect it to be this large!  It was full of all kinds of wonderful goodies. I was very excited!

Fast forward to the following weekend, when I had already received week two in the mail and was feeling a little behind.  I never expected to keep up with all - or even any - of the projects but figured I would be able to make a respectable dent in at least a couple of them with a weekend of sewing.  I decided to start on Among Friends. Lisa Bonjean recommends starching fabrics - says it is critical - but I am not a fan.  I have previously seen her method of saturating the fabrics with starch and letting them dry and was curious, then saw an episode of The Quilt Show where a "precision piecer" also recommended prepping fabric that way.  I finally tried it with a couple of the 365 Challenge blocks. I saw absolutely no difference in accuracy and didn't feel that it helped in the piecing at all.  I therefore decided I would skip straight to the sewing.  After an entire weekend of sewing I had maybe one or two stars completed and a huge stack of paper-backed pieces to trim and press. Add in another weekend - a long holiday weekend - and I finally finished the first week's blocks. 

Sadly I can't say that I enjoyed it at all!  And there are 12 more weeks to go! I am not a fan of paper piecing (these use triangle paper) and felt that the blocks did not go together well. The instructions recommend pressing seams open and I had a lot of trouble with the intersections not lining up well. I had to rip and re-sew about half of them. I haven't started week two yet, but I am thinking old-school piecing (no paper) and seam allowances pressed in opposite directions. There has to be a better way!

I finished my second album block only one day behind our June 30 deadline. It was a fairly easy block although those ovals in the center wheel started getting old..some are not quite oval-shaped. I am okay with how it turned out, though, and have moved on to block three.

I didn't take a picture of my pathetic orange peel progress for June - only 18 completed after a very strong start.  The new total is 136. I am bound and determined to hit my target one of these months!

I need to decide what I will work on for the retreat this weekend.  I can only attend one day but want to make the most of it!

May Progress Report

I managed to squeeze in quite a bit of sewing time around yard work and cooking over the weekend and made a little bit of progress on several projects. I know it would make a lot more sense to focus my efforts on one project and have more to show for my time, but that's just not how my brain is wired!  It is a lot more fun to mix it up!  I'm pretty sure I have Quilter's ADD if there is such a thing...

I finished a few more stars for my Stars & Sprigs "do over".  This brings the total to 9 complete.  This was my APQ UFO for May (#7) so I can at least claim a little progress. There are 45 stars in the quilt and enough applique to last me 10 years so I've only made the tiniest of dents in the project, but it's a dent nonetheless!

Jenny Doan of Missouri Star Quilt Company posted a video on bow ties last week and got me all excited about working on my little ties again. I had lofty goals about how many I might be able to finish in a weekend but these little guys aren't all that fast to sew.  They are lots of fun, though, and I managed to add 30 to my total.  This is the pattern that calls for 3,024 blocks. I now have 72.  

Between the stars and the bow ties I managed to build up quite a pile of little scraps.  Rather than add them to the two draws of scraps waiting to be cut into "scrap saver" sizes I decided I would go ahead and do the cutting.  I cut everything up into 1.5", 2", 2.5" and 3.5" squares as Bonnie Hunter recommends. I really need to start working my way through the backlog as it would be nice to have all of these scraps organized so that they could be easily incorporated into projects. If only it was more fun to cut!

May was a pathetic month for orange peels.  I might be able to add a couple to the official May total tonight but as of now the May total is 17, bringing the overall total to 118.  I recalculated the total number I need and depending on whether I want to have borders or not I am under or over 10% of the way to the finish line. I will need 1024 peels if I decide to use a border, 1296 if not.  I will be working on peels for a very long time!

I spent some time prepping more orange peels for June as well as doing a little more prep on my second album block. I decided that I wanted my tulips to be blue instead of red like the original block. 

I managed to get a couple of the flowers stitched last night and am hopeful that I can get this block finished by our June 30 deadline. 

That's pretty much a wrap for May.  Perhaps I will try to focus on something with a few less parts in June so I might actually get a quilt finished this year!

April Failures & May Aspirations

I think I can officially consider April an epic fail with respect to progressing projects. I even failed in posting my FNSI follow-up...and I actually made quite a bit of progress that weekend! I finished all of the alternate blocks for Allietare (which also happened to be my APQ UFO for the month).  I still need to go back and finish the other blocks and piece the setting triangles, but I am making progress.

I definitely can't claim nearly as much progress on my orange peel. I was doing so well for the first half of the month but completely dropped the ball the second half.  I can't remember the total now - less than 20 or there would have been another row in the picture - but I clearly did not get to my target of 30.  I will have to count them all again at the end of this month to update my tally.  So far I am behind for May but I am trying very hard to catch up.

And then there is this.  The 365 Challenge. The blocks have gotten more obnoxious difficult, I'm not entirely sure I'm loving the cream/tan and white combination, and I am rapidly losing my motivation. Here are a few blocks I finished a couple of weeks ago, I've only done a couple more since then so I am rapidly falling far behind.  I recognize that this isn't a UFO that I would likely never come back to if I get too far behind, so I will see how it goes the next couple of weeks.  I will give it until June 1 to decide if I am scrapping the whole thing or not.

On a more positive note, I attended a fantastic hand piecing workshop with Mickey Depre last week. She teaches hand piecing the way I originally learned it and it was so much more enjoyable than the method I tried at my last workshop. I am so addicted to hand piecing!  I worked on my class block every spare moment I had and finished it a couple of nights after the workshop. It is killing me not to start another one but I have too many other projects in the works. I love this block!

And here's the project that is consuming all my hand sewing time - my album quilt. I finally finished my first block (except for a little embroider that is still needed - my bird needs an eye!) and started on my second one. We set the target for finishing the second block at the end of June.  It isn't quite as involved as this one was but it will definitely take some time.

My APQ UFO for this month is my Stars & Sprigs. I would so love to get back to that one but may have to pass in favor of continuing to work on something that is a little further along. At the rate I am going I won't have a single finish to show for 2016!

Baltimore Overload!

I've just about recovered from the past couple of weeks on the road - a little fun, a little work, and a LOT of Baltimore!  Along the way I managed to finish the 24th 12" block for my LeMoyne Star - only one more 12" block and 6 more 6" blocks to go!

The Baltimore immersion began with a trip to the sixth annual Baltimore on the Prairie conference in Nebraska.  I was very fortunate to have two classes with Sue Garman, an absolutely phenomenal teacher.  She is my new quilting hero!  She is so incredibly organized and productive.  She shared a number of fantastic tips with us. After a number of years of taking applique classes it isn't often that you learn anything truly new, but that was not the case with Sue. I learned a number of great new tricks. Now that I am home I will have to work up the courage to applique without lines, one of Sue's time-saving tactics. I just couldn't let go of my lines while in the class....

Sue presented a fantastic program on her quilts at one of the evening gatherings. She is such a talented quilter and a very funny speaker!  I was impressed by the broad range in her quilts - style, fabrics and level of difficulty. You would never guess that all of the quilts she shared were made by the same person. Here are just a few of the ones that we saw:

There were a lot of other incredible quilts shared by other BOTP participants during show and tell.

Following the BOTP conference, I headed to Baltimore, MD for a work-related conference. I allowed a little extra time in my travel plans to see a few quilt-related sites. It was a bit disappointing - you really can't see much unless there is an exhibition or event specifically related to quilts. The DAR Museum was a complete dud....nothing quilt-related at all in their regular exhibits, and of course I was too early for the quilt exhibit that begins there in October.  The Maryland Historical Society Museum did have a few quilts on display, but photos are prohibited. I'm sure that there are many people who don't share my opinion, but I have no interest in museums that don't allow photos. It was nice to see the quilts, but in my opinion not worth the $9 admission.

My trip to Baltimore luckily coincided with the September meeting of the Baltimore Applique Society so I was able to attend my first meeting.  I have been a member for several years and drool over the newsletter every month, wishing I could hear the fabulous programs in person. This month's program was presented by Sue Reich, an expert on World War II quilts.  While the quilts for the most part were not beautiful, the program was excellent. Show and tell was fantastic also - there are some very talented quilters in that group!

My Baltimore adventure culminated with a trip to the St. Louis Art Museum with our TAS group for a private showing of the American Album quilt that is part of their collection. The quilt is absolutely drop-dead gorgeous and is in wonderful condition. It is a bit of a mix of Baltimore styles, but really appealed to me in that it has a wonderful balance between the simpler, Style 2 blocks and the more ornate (but not overly so) Style 1. 

Seeing this quilt was the perfect end to my two week Baltimore adventure.   I'm feeling very inspired....if only I had more time to stitch!