FNSI Update

I was able to get a fair amount accomplished this weekend in spite of being severely handicapped by an overly ambitious workout on Thursday night. I really had no idea muscles could be that sore...I could barely make it up and down my stairs!

My weekend project was week two of the Among Friends SBOW.  I decided to try it old school this time with no triangle papers. I finished 15 of the 44 blocks and prepped 8 more.

I checked each of my HSTs with a 1.5" square ruler and trimmed here and there as needed but found that they are coming out pretty accurate and are going together easily.  So far much more enjoyable than dealing with paper.

I haven't tried sewing them into the larger block yet but I am ironing the seams one direction this time so that I am able to nest them when I put them together.  I am hoping that makes for a much more accurate and less frustrating assembly process.

I took a break from the tiny HSTs to try out a few hourglass blocks.  I was planning to avoid the temptation to start Bonnie Hunter's new leader and ender challenge since I haven't made much progress on last year's, but where's the fun in that?

These were a lot of fun. They go together quickly and seem huge (3.5" unfinished) compared to the other things I have been working on.  I have no idea what setting I will use for these but I am thinking that it would be a good way to use the stack of red and cream fat quarters I have had sitting on a shelf in my sewing room for years.  I remember collecting the stack on a trip to the lake - perhaps a shop hop - that included Homestead Hearth. I recall having a plan for them at the time but have long since lost the plot on that one. I really like them and am anxious to make more!

I figured if I was going to start a new leader and ender challenge then I needed to try to make some progress on the old one.  I finished off a couple more rows and added them to the five I already had together. Seven down, forty to go!

I'm just not very disciplined at using them as leaders and enders.  I tend to use whatever project I am working on as my L&Es instead (starting the next block when finishing the last seam on another, etc.).  What is really amazing is how many times I manage to end up with the same fabrics lined up together. I even have places where there are three of the same blocks lined up. Oh well, I'm still counting on no one really noticing once all 2000+ tumblers are put together!

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!

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!

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!

Weekend Sewing

I missed the sign up for the FNSI this month - by the time it was posted I was too busy to remember to look for it. And as it turns out I was completely exhausted Friday and didn't do a bit of sewing that night anyway! I did manage to get some time in the sewing room the rest of the weekend, however, and entertained myself by working on something "new".  Not really a new project, but I had not made any of the stars from my second start on my Stars and Sprigs project. I made nearly all of the stars in Kaffe fabrics before deciding it just wasn't my thing.  My Kaffe collection and my star blocks went in the guild's garage sale and are now part of someone else's stash.   

I suppose it is the effect of cropping photos on my phone, but find it very perplexing that photos posted in their "original size" can be all over the place in size!  Below is the beginning of my next album block.  This one is a little less intricate than the first one but will be tedious nonetheless. We set a target to finish this one by the end of June. Seems like plenty of time, but there are a LOT of little loops to applique!

And then there is the most disproportionate picture of all - the tumblers!  I managed to finish another row while working on my stars and added it to the other three. I was able to add another row after dinner last night so I am up to five rows now.  I still have about 50 rows to go and will not even come close to finishing before Bonnie announces the next one, but I am really loving it.  It is amazing how often I manage to get identical patches adjacent to each other when choosing positions and fabrics randomly but figure it really won't be all that noticeable when I have all 2000+ of them sewn together.

I'm hoping to get a few orange peels done this week.  No way I am making my target this month so my goal is to at least get out of the single digits. I can't believe May is almost over!

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!