[Arcadian Meadow] Finished

I am glad to finally call this quilt finished. When you consider that I started cutting the fabric for it a year ago and it is a gift for my brother (and now sister-in-law) who got married in January, it’s about time!

We are in Florida visiting family so I was able to hand deliver the quilt to my brother and sister-in-law as well as take pictures of it in my folks’ backyard garden.

For this quilt, I used the pattern that Moda released with Tula Pink’s Nest collection. The pattern calls for pre-cuts (layer cake + jelly roll) and I had only a layer cake + FQs. I had to modify the pattern slightly to make it work with FQs instead of a jelly roll. And I upped the total number of blocks from 16 to 24.

Combing Arcadia and Modern Meadow prints was a happy accident after the two collections were placed next to each other on my sewing table last summer. I discovered that most of the Sunny Day palette of Modern Meadow works with Arcadia. I did not include the Modern Meadow prints with a lot of aqua (“pond”) because it is brighter than the Arcadia aqua. And the other colors – orange, ochre/yellow, taupe/brown, white/ivory – aren’t an exact match but are close enough that I felt comfortable using them together.

I had to piece large cuts of the Arcadia prints for the backing. When I showed my husband what yardage of Arcadia is going for on etsy, he thought I was nuts to use it for the backing. But I bought the fabric awhile ago with the intention of using it as a backing, so that’s what it became.

I once again pieced my label into the back and am still happy with the results.

And I used the Modern Meadow Herringbone print in timber for the binding.

Before sitting down to free motion quilt, the first thing I did was modify my darning/free motion foot. Doing so makes such a huge difference in my ability to FMQ. I have better visibility, more control and I am not distracted by a jumping foot. Why didn’t I do it sooner?!

For the quilting, I am continuing to push myself, albeit slowly, to expand beyond stippling. I am most comfortable with all-over stitch designs; am not comfortable travel stitching yet; and for this quilt I wanted the stitching to resemble plants/nature in some way to mimic the motifs in the fabric. Given all of that, I felt a little limited by what I could tackle.

I searched through Leah Day‘s archive of free motion quilting stitches and thought I might attempt the “Wandering Clover” design. After trying it out on a test quilt sandwich, I simplified the design even more into a two-leaf clover, instead of three.

The quilting design is a little more dense than I intended. I went through nearly 8 bobbins of a 50wt Aurifill thread (which is a thinner thread)! The thinner thread practically disappears in the quilt but leaves a nice texture. I do like the result and am excited to tackle a harder FMQ design next.

I used Soy Soft by Luna (Moda) batting for the second time and am much happier with the results this go-around. I did not experience any bearding and pilling like I did the first time (the bearding and pilling might have been a result of me washing, and not drying, the quilt several times trying to get rid of chalk lines. Maybe I agitated it too much??). Soy Soft is a 50/50 organic soy cotton blend, is naturally anti-bacterial, has a really nice drape and is also lighter than the cotton batt I normally use (Warm & Natural). I would definitely use it again.

And now, some other notes and lessons learned from this quilt…

• I broke more needles than I would care to admit while quilting (AKA watch out for safety pins!).
• I learned to always check my tension before sewing (apparently my girls like to play with the tension dial which meant I had to unpick stitches twice).
• Layer cakes are not accurately cut by the manufacturer.
• I prefer designing and drafting my own patterns as opposed to following someone else’s pattern.
• Better ergonomics + large even surface area around my sewing machine + modified darning foot = a much more successful and pleasant FMQing experience

Oh, and you would think that my WIP count would have gone down by finishing this quilt, right? It turns out it didn’t. I somehow managed to start yet another project as I was trying to complete this one, so my WIP count remains at 11.

[Blushing] Finished

My brother recently got remarried and his new stepdaughter just graduated from high school. I decided to make a quilt for her graduation gift. My hope is that she will take the quilt with her to college (which happens to be my alma mater).

To make this quick-ish quilt, I used Blush pre-cuts (a charm pack and jelly roll) plus 3 yards for the backing and half yards of two Grunges for the inner border and binding. The quilt finished at around 48″ x 72″ (prewashing).

To make the top, I paired a charm square and a jelly roll strip, making sure there was contrast between the two (I used 40 charm squares and 40 jelly roll strips). After framing each of the charm squares, I had about 14″ left on each jelly roll strip. I used those leftover strips to make the pieced border and a pieced strip for the back.

I want to try something new with each quilt I make, to expand my skill set and hopefully learn something new. Seeing as how the top was pretty straightforward, design-wise, I decided to try something completely out of my comfort zone for the quilting: oversized pebbles or what I started dubbing sloppy circles. And as a result, this may be the first quilt that I think I ruined with my quilting. :/

I thought the large circles would look nice since several of the Blush prints have circles or dots, including the fabric I picked for the backing. I also thought the circles would be a nice juxtaposition to the square-in-square design. Well, it would have been a nice juxtaposition had the circles/pebbles been executed cleanly. Or maybe I should have made them smaller and limited their placement to the borders of the charm squares. Argh.

Overall, the quality and scale of the quilting is distracting and takes away from the quilt top.  By the time I realized this, it was not worth my time to go back and pick out all of the stitches, so I just kept chugging along.

As much as I do not want to show any close up pictures of the quilting, I will; but only in the hope that it helps someone else avoid doing what I did.

I probably should not have tackled a project this big for my first time trying pebble quilting. The resulting quilting looks pretty bad. There are a couple of okay spots, but overall, it is just not good.

I do not have control of my machine yet when I free motion quilt. I struggle with my stops/starts and end up with jagged-y uneven stitches when I do. Therefore, I try not to stop in the middle of the quilt as much as possible. I usually try to work my way off to the side of the quilt when I need to rest. Since I am trying not to stop, I think my brain/foot just think GO! GO! GO! so I feel the need to rush through the process.

I wish I could embrace the sloppy circles (the worst ones shown above) but I just cannot. I want them to be tidier – not necessarily perfect – just more even and less rudimentary.

When I was more than half way done quilting this, I realized that I was moving the fabric way too fast and if I would slow my hands down, the quilting stitches would be smaller and I could control the look of the circles better.

As always is the case with me, I did start to get the hang of the circles just as I was about done with the quilting. One corner has cleaner looking ones (see photo above).

I used a chalk pencil (made for quilters) to mark where the circles would go because I knew I would not be able to do a decent job of spacing the circles on the fly while quilting. I also tried a pencil and another colored marking pencil but they did not show up on the variety of Blush fabrics. I thought the chalk would easily wash out. It turns out that it does not (it gets trapped in the fabric/stitches where it is sewn over). Three washes, two soaks and a couple of stain treatments later, it is almost completely out. I can still see chalk residue in some of the stitch lines, but I doubt anyone else would notice unless I point it out.

Another disappointment with this quilt, is my binding choice. I should have picked a Blush print instead of the brown Grunge. The semi-solid brown Grunge is too dark and contrasts too much with the border. Now, to give me a little credit, when I picked the binding fabric I had not planned on doing the pieced border. I think the brown Grunge would have been a fine choice if there was not a pieced border.

Aside from my disappointment in how I finished this quilt, I am quite pleased with my new labeling method which I used for the first time here. The label is inconspicuous and yet provides a lot of information.

I washed a pink Grunge jelly roll strip (which was leftover from piecing the top), let it air dry, ironed it, stamped my labels on it using a mixture of black and brown ink, then heat set the stamped labels with my iron. I then trimmed the fabric and added the three label bits into the pieced strip for the back.

For the personalized part of the label, I used some alpha stamps leftover from my scrapbooking days. I wish I had number stamps the same size so it would be easier to put a date the quilt. Instead, I used a date stamp which worked fine in this instance since I could use the date of the graduation. Generally though, I like to list just the month and year to date a quilt.

Since I washed this quilt several times already (trying to get the darn chalk out), I can see that the ink does fade a little bit. That makes me think that I should only use black ink so as to start with the darkest stamped image possible, in case it fades any more.

I used a new-to-me batting (a soy-cotton blend) and generally was happy with the results (lighter than 100 percent cotton and great drape). I did encounter a bit of fluffy debris (bearding?) while basting, binding, and post-washing. I am going to write more about my experiences with different types of batting and hope to get that post published later this week.

Ok, that is more than enough about this quilt. We will be traveling to visit my extended family in less than a month, so we will get to deliver the quilt in person. I do hope she likes it (I am sure she will not see all of the issues that I see in it)!

[Baby Boy Blue] Finished!

It is amazing how quickly a quilt comes together when the blocks are already done. That is the case with this quilt.

Back when I created Small World, I wanted to include a wide variety of fabric. I believe the final quilt had nearly 100 different prints in it. That, combined with the construction method I used (a variation of Quick Sticks by Kate Conklin), I ended up with a surplus of blocks. I was ok with the extra because one of Jonathan’s co-workers is having her first child — a baby boy — and I knew I could turns those extras into a baby quilt for her. To make this quilt look different from its predecessor, I alternated the orientation of every other block for a rail fence pattern.

I find that I do a lot of thinking while my sewing machine is running or I am pressing my seams; I am sure this is the case with most quilters. With this quilt, I got to thinking a lot about the quilting process. I am amazed that I truly enjoy nearly every aspect of making a quilt. I have not always felt this way though. I used to dread putting on the binding. Now, I even enjoy hand sewing it to the back (my technique has improved and I am faster now too). How about that?! I also like cleaning up my sewing space when it becomes a wreck in the midst of creating. There is one step though that I do not necessarily love and that is cutting fabric. I have one WIP in my stack that has been stuck at the cutting stage since last July; I got bored cutting out all of those little pieces, so I started other projects!

Anyway, back to the quilt at hand…

I do love making baby quilts (this one measured 35″ x 42″ prewashing). There are not that many blocks to make, the quilt is fairly easy to maneuver under the machine and putting on the binding does not take too long.

For the quilting of this quilt, I moved outside of my comfort zone again to get more comfortable with FMQing beyond stippling. I attempted square corner meandering — I know, advanced, right? Ha. You can see that not all of the quilting stitches have right angles, but I feel like I got better the more I worked at it. I used a slightly variegated grey thread and I like how it looks in the finished piece.

Related to the quilting, I am back to having problems free motion quilting on my machine, a Janome 6600P* (top thread shreds/breaks frequently). I thought the problem had resolved itself (Aurifil thread did the trick, or so I thought), but midway through quilting this, it started happening again. I think my thread broke a half dozen times while I quilted less than half of the quilt. It is so frustrating because I have FMQ’ed many things on this machine using economical Coats quilting thread and it worked just fine for a long time. I have read on some forums that it might be a bobbin tension issue. The machine is due for a servicing so hopefully that will fix it for good.

For the backing, I used some leftover pieces of flannel from the backing of the first Trudy quilt. I really need to use flannel more on my quilt backs. It makes the quilt so cuddly.

And once again, I pieced together two large batting scraps for the batting and the seam is undetectable in the finished piece.

For the binding I used the same Michael Miller navy pindot that I used in Small World, plus I added in one little bit of a Hope Valley print.

This quilt will be gifted to the mother-to-be on Sunday at her shower. I hope she likes it!

*I am mentioning my machine specifics in case anyone else is having that same problem with this machine.

[Planely Pink] Finished!

My parents’ best friend’s son (and his wife) are having their first child in a couple of months and this (semi-commissioned) quilt will be my parents’ gift to them.

Planes + pink is not a usual combination, but for this project, it is perfect. Both parents are/were commercial airline pilots and they are having a little girl.

This quilt first started out as a sketch in my notebook.

The planes are free pieced and I referenced Amy/Badskirt’s tutorial to construct my blocks. And this quilt also served as inspiration to the final design.

The color palette was pulled from the pink colorway of Cosmo Cricket’s Girl Friday fabric collection. I used several of the Girl Friday prints then added in a mix of coordinating prints. The binding and inner border is the stripe from Girl Friday and I just love the colors in it (the stripe was actually my starting point and I knew it would be the binding from the get-go).

Most of the fabrics were sourced specifically for this project. In addition to gathering fabrics that matched the color scheme, I wanted to incorporate the couple’s interests into the quilt with the fabric motifs.

The mom-to-be is a great chef (fabrics: recipe cards, 30s repro chefs) and she was on the ski team growing up (fabric: snowflakes). The dad-to-be played soccer growing up (fabric: silhouette soccer players). He was a teacher and his mom is a retired teacher (fabrics: ruled-paper, graph paper, rulers).  They are recently married (fabrics: wedding cake) and have bought and renovated their first house (fabrics: household items, house with a quilt hanging outside). They live near the beach (fabrics: seashells, sand dollars, sun) and are vocal in their support of the environment (fabric: reduce/reuse/recycle words).

I pieced almost all of the airplane blocks at a quilting retreat back in February. Angie and Michelle were kind enough to let me look through the fabrics they brought so I could fill in some of the gaps I had in order to finish my planes (thank you, gals!).

I had a heck of a time finding fabric with a subtle soccer print and during my search, I was reading a blog-friend’s blog and I spied a soccer print in one of her quilts. So, I messaged Riel and asked her if I could swap/buy some of it from her and she just sent it to me because she’s a nice person. Thank you, Riel!

I am happy to report that this quilt is proof that I am growing and improving as a quilter. My points do a pretty darn good job of matching up. As I put the top together, I discovered that my pieced borders actually ended up being the exact length they were supposed to be (hooray for consistent 1/4″ seams!). And as I hand stitched the binding to the back of the quilt, I noticed that this binding work may be my best to date (not that other recent binding work has been bad, it has been great; but for some reason this binding just seems to lay extra flat and my mitered corners seem extra crisp).

Other notes about this quilt…

For the first time ever, I pieced together two large batting scraps by using the multi-stitch zigzag stitch (not sure of the name of the stitch, but it’s not just a plain zig zag) and butting two freshly-cut straight edges of batting together. I was really surprised how flat the seam lays and how strong it is. In the finished quilt, the piecing is undetectable.

In order to expand my FMQing horizons, I am challenging myself not to meander/stipple quilt everything I do (I see conflicting definitions for these words, but I am referring to the curved/rounded/wiggly quilting stitches that generally do not touch or cross over another). I would like to branch out and become comfortable doodling with my machine so I can try more complicated freehand designs. This quilt is a first step in broadening my horizons.

I asked for ideas on how to quilt this, and Amanda suggested clouds. Using a slightly variegated pink thread, I made cloud-like lines around the airplanes. Surprisingly the pink thread looks fine on the mostly-green back. My “clouds” are somewhat like haphazard clam shells, but I think the overall look of it works (can you see the quilting in the picture above?). I also straight-line quilted by outlining the inside of each plane.

The backing is mostly a green airplane print from the Traffic Jam collection by Allison Jane Smith. I added the label into the pieced strip in the quilt back.

I created the label by typing out what I wanted the label to say on my computer, then I taped the fabric to my laptop screen (DIY light box),  and finally I used a fabric pen to trace the words onto the fabric (I read about this technique somewhere in blogland, but I can’t remember the source). I really like how the label turned out and will use that method a lot more in the future.

This quilt (which finished around 42″ square) is already washed and ready to be wrapped and mailed to its new recipients. I hope they use it and enjoy looking at the quilt and seeing all of the elements just for them.

: : : : : FOOTNOTE : : : : : : :

Today was not the best day for quilt pictures (crazy wind, hazy), but it is what worked with our schedule. In keeping with the theme of the quilt, we headed to a nearby small airport to see what we could use as a backdrop. We happened upon a fighter jet (it looked to be a USMC plane, a F-18 possibly?) and several other smaller planes (trainers?) that were preparing to depart. They had their engines going and were really loud. Our three year old wanted to watch them after the photo taking (despite how she looks above, she was having fun), so we hung around for a bit while our other girls were napping in the car. When I told her that Gramps used to fly a plane like the fighter, she said, “WOW!” We ended up leaving before the planes took off (it was past lunchtime and our tummies were growling). It was neat to happen upon them there though. 

[Sugar-free] Finished!

This quilt is a study in freehand cutting (not using the straight edge of the ruler to make cuts) and improv piecing; and it was born out of a need to calm my fears and a want for a stack of pretty quilts in our home.

I realized not long ago that our household lacks quilts. How did that happen? I see stacks of quilts piled high on Flickr and on quilt blogs. And I feel like I am missing out. I want a stack! Most of the quilts I have made have gone to others. So I am now on a mission to make some quilts for us to use, wherever and whenever.

But a big reason that this quilt came to be is a bit of a convoluted story.

I was asked to demonstrate a block at the last DMQG meeting. I decided to demo a technique that is new-to-me: cutting and piecing gentle curves without pins. I pulled out my stack of Hey Sugar (by Cosmo Cricket for Andover) prints + Kona solids (that I had planned to use for one of my bees) to make a couple of sample blocks incorporating freehand cutting, gentle curves and improv piecing (did you catch all of that?!).

The first couple example blocks I made, I loved. But as I continued the process, I started to doubt my vision. After getting a few more blocks made, I placed them side-by-side and they just looked messy; kind of like I did not know what I was doing.

Following the meeting and over the next few days, I quickly worked on more blocks, hoping that the more blocks I saw together, the more they would make sense as a whole.  I made three to four blocks at a time, utilizing chain piecing as much as I could. Since there were only 24 (12″) blocks to make, the top came together seemingly quickly.  I put all other projects on hold — projects with deadlines — to work on this impromptu quilt-for-no-reason.

In the back of my mind, I kept telling myself, it will look good in the end, it will look good in the end…

Even though I tend to avoid quilt designs that involve a lot of precise piecing and matching points (like here), my block corners do a pretty good job of matching up in this top, enough though it is not crucial to the design (hello, run-on sentence!). So, apparently my piecing skills are improving in all of the sewing I have done lately. Maybe that is a sign that I should try some designs that incorporate more intricate piecing??

And now, the back… the back began as an exercise in thrift. I started putting the back together using the leftover Hey Sugar pieces. Once I was about halfway done with the back, I hated how it looked. It was too patchworky. Too many pieces. Too busy. In thinking about the time and heart I put into the top, I felt like the hobo-style back would ruin the entire quilt. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love the look of the pieced backs I see out there. Somehow though, when my backs incorporate too many prints, they look amateurish.

So despite trying to resist the urge to buy more fabric, I decided that it would be more than worth it to fork over a few bucks to get a Kona solid to use on most of the back (Aloe, I believe?). A large area of solid + a little print + a little piecing = a much happier me.

For the quilting, I did horizontal organic “straight” lines that were irregularly spaced. The wavy lines mimic the feel of the improv piecing in the blocks. And for the binding, I loved that I was able to use the print with the diagonal stripes, so my binding only looks like it was cut on the bias. And I used a new-to-me method to join my binding that Juanita (of Settler’s Peace and fellow DMQG’er) posted about.

I have not washed this quilt yet only because I fear that those chunks of red may bleed over all of that ivory. I did not prewash any of the fabrics and I will soon find out if that was a mistake or not. I have a box of Colorcatchers ready for the inaugural laundering. Here’s to hoping that I have a smile on my face as I pull it out of the washer!

[Harper's Birdies] A Quick Finish

This little quilted mat was a gift for Miss Harper (who was born yesterday!). I wasn’t able to make it to Jenny‘s shower so I gave her the mat at our last DMQG meeting.

I used some of the new Victoria & Albert birds (from the Venice collection) plus coordinating prints and made up the design as I went (although I wish I would have sketched first!). For the batting, I used a double layer of Warm & Natural to make it a little softer because this quilted mat is intended to be a portable diaper change pad (for the car/living room/on-the-go). I backed the mat in a laminated cotton in case of any accidents.

This was my first time working with laminated cotton and it wasn’t as hard to deal with as I expected. I had to rethink a couple of things and I skipped on doing a binding to make for a cleaner edge (I think; I couldn’t work out in my head how to easily and cleanly bind it by machine. I’m sure it can be done though).

Congratulations Jenny on the arrival of Miss Harper (and welcome to the three-girls club)! I can’t wait to meet her.