Another top to the pile

About 2 weeks ago I went into Cool Cottons while Marie was there, searching for background fabric for the blocks I got last fall in the Nubees block swap through Flickr.

I was trying to set these blocks, primarily in blue, aqua, yellow and grey, bordered by a blue and grey Aneela Hoey coordinate from her Sherbet Pips line.

After auditioning several possibilities, we landed on one of the Alexander Henry Heath bolts. And it is PERFECT!

Now it's just a matter of figuring out how best to quilt this puppy, and actually getting it done! One more quilt top on the pile of unquilteds.

Never too late (I hope)

As a periodic blog reader I undoubtedly came across all of the WIP Wednesday posts (hosted by Lee at Freshly Pieced) during 2011. As a novice blog writer, I wasn't ready to take on such a commitment.

It's a new year, right? Is anyone else feeling the magic of January 2012?

So, I know I missed the first installment, but I figure better late than never, yes? So, here's MY first contribution to the list-making, track-keeping, over-sharing of WAY TOO MANY things on my plate!

I'll begin with the UFOs. One of my goals this year is to address several (if not all) of the projects that were begun in years past, then shelved indefinitely, primarily because they were either from classes I took but didn't follow through on, or simply because the gift-making and etsy-friendly projects took precedent.

A partial quilt top and blocks from a class with Lee Fowler entitled Encapsulated, which I took from her over 5 years ago, easily (back when StoryQuilts had a storefront in Beaverton, OR, where I had the pleasure of working for an all-too-quick year+)

My Summertime Stars quilt using Amy Butler's "Love" – discussed in detail in this post from yesterday.

A quilt top awaiting quilting for the past 2-3 years. I pin-basted it on Tuesday. Honestly, it is one of about 7 tops that need to be quilted, but I'm only going to address them a little at a time (I hope that's within the rules!!)

Half of my blocks for my second version of the Warm-Cool Quilt Along, hosted by Jeni at In Color Order.

NEXT on the list are projects that are in process, but begun *relatively* recently:

Must finish piecing (and then quilting and binding) the November quilt for the Bliss Circle of do.Good Stitches.

A set of placemats cut out and awaiting stitching/quilting.

Started quilting the I-Spy quilt top I finished last week. Still have a fair bit to go, though! Hopefully by next week it will be among the "Completed" list!

Got the majority of my bee blocks from the Seams Perfect Modern Scrap Bee pieced into a completed top, now I just need to piece the backing and quilt it (though this one I MIGHT farm out... we'll see!)

I've been adding to my received blocks from September's Nubees block swap on Flickr. I now have as many as I want, with the sashing fabric around each one. I think I might need to audition another background possibility, but if I DO end up going with this Michael Miller fabric, I'll still need to get a bit more.

And finally...

Another quilt top that's been hanging out on a shelf for quite a while, which I finished quilting this past week, and am just in the process of binding.

So the tally?
Completed - 0
New projects - 0
In progress - 10 (and that's a conservative estimation)

So, what is everyone else working on??
Now go get inspiration, as I did, from all of the other creative folks linking in at Freshly Pieced!!

First of many

Lately I have been so concentrated on trying to bust out these smaller items that it has actually been ages since I have completed a quilt. When I moved into the studio space, it gave me an opportunity to reorganize, and pull focus to some of my UFOs, including finished quilt tops that have been hanging around for years waiting to be quilted. Some of them are so simple, and ones that I hope to be able to show at craft fairs, or at least to be samples of patterns/formulas that I work with.

Yesterday I basted my first quilt in many months.

An alternate color way to another that I have up on my etsy page

Today, another will get basted. The backing and batting are already spread out on the floor just a-waitin' for me to return...

Limited Palette I-Spy

It's been several years since I have made an I-Spy quilt. The fact that my stash of novelty fabrics doesn't seem to have diminished at all recently confirms this. Over the years I've enjoyed putting these guys together, keeping the parents of the recipients in mind as best I can. Here's a little evolution of some of the I-Spys I've done:

(original design by Ami Simms, in her book Picture Play Quilts)

(please excuse the picture quality.... these were done long before I took much care in documenting)

and then a couple of years after that one:

and most recently (for a little tike who is about to turn 2 in just a couple of weeks!):

(another design from the Ami Simms Picture Play Quilts book)

Now, I'm about to start a new quilt, and I've decided I really want to do another log-cabin style I-Spy, but instead of using the whole spectrum of brights out there, I am leaning toward a limited (and rather subdued) palette for this family. I started pulling some focus patches the other day and decided to just get started on a few of the blocks to see if I like where it's going. This is all I have so far, but I think it will work...

I'll be posting more as it develops. Happy Saturday!

NEVER say "never"!

Wow. I can hardly believe that half of the month has gone by without my posting anything at all. I guess it's been one of those months so far.

I've fallen behind on the bees in which I participate - well, not exactly BEHIND, just running up against the latter part of the deadlines. So today, after spending the morning at home doing some homework while I was waiting for my appt. with the "tree guy," I decided I needed to take advantage of this gorgeous, sunny fall day. How could I not take my bike to the studio?!?

Oh yeah, I've been battling this stubborn old cold for about 3 weeks now. I forget how much that can take out of a person, even if you just think the worst symptom is the runny/red nose. I made it to the studio alright, a little out of breath, and had to stop a couple of times more frequently than I have in the past, but so it goes - time to do some sewing!!

I started by whipping up samples for next month's BLISS circle blocks for do.good Stitches - a project I volunteered to take on when our little circle lost a quilter.

(I'll expand on these in another post dedicated to the group and these blocks)

Once I got that out of the way, it was time to attack the block for THIS month's BLISS circle. Becky asked us to make blocks using this tutorial from Lily's Quilts. It's a stunning block, but OH MY GOODNESS!! As I was trimming all of those very very little HSTs, I was thinking to myself, "never again!" And then it hit me as I started laying the HSTs... I had only cut out enough for ONE STUPID BLOCK. Which means I will need to do it all over again, but it will have to wait for another day. But at least I have something to show on the group page:

I also have blocks to do for the Seams Perfect Bee. For some reason, the October hosts on both of these bees decided that lots of precise cutting and many, many seams was the way to go. Okay, so Becky (different Becky, coincidentally) chose a block with only semi-precise cutting,

but then you have to go back and trim the seam allowances before pressing...

I have plenty more work for both of these projects, but I am glad I at least got started. Which can also describe my ride home tonight... I only got started, but was too wiped out to make it very far, so I ended up dumping my bike at J's apartment (about a mile or so from my studio, as opposed to the 5+ miles for me to get home) and taking the bus the rest of the way. It was fortunate that I had that option, otherwise it would have taken me much longer to land and pour my glass of wine, and I would have been REALLY cranky! But thankfully, I arrived less cranky than I was when I got to J's, and have been enjoying that glass of wine. So, how do you all like to unwind after a long day, or feeling like you didn't accomplish all of your goals in the manner that you'd hoped?

Monochromatic project, next installment

As promised, I'm going to fill in a few more details on my journey through this challenge, which I have since learned I did not place in, but one of my fellow Portland Modern Quilt Guild members, Jill, did! See her fabulous entry here and here.

The design process began, as most do for me, with a piece of graph paper and a pencil - oh, and the original theme of the challenge, of course. The first design was in my awesome graph paper composition notebook, but as I was playing with ideas I realized this quilt wanted to be based on 60 degree triangles, which meant switching the type of graph paper I was using. Thank goodness for the options we have!


I've talked about the fabric selection process a bit in previous posts, so I won't go too much in depth here. Plus, there's nothing too complex about it. Bluntly, this challenge came about at a time when I was making a concerted effort to limit my fabric purchases to specific projects, and knowing I was going scrappy for this, I started out in my stash. Choosing from a color that I seemed to have a fair amount of fabrics in a variety of values made the most sense to me, and so that's where I began.

And then I just started making strip sets, selecting sub-sets of gradients within the full "spectrum" of values with which I was working. Those strip sets got cut down at 60 degree triangles and from the dozens and dozens of such triangles I started laying them out and sewing them back together according to the layout in the sketch.


Now, one of the new techniques this project introduced me to was binding the serrated edge. When I have a bit more concentration (admittedly, we are watching "Dangeroud Liasons" while I am doing this - an excellent film that neither J nor I has seen in YEARS) I'll try to put together a tutorial on the binding process, but for now I'll just load several of my photos from the experience.








and like my little "binding cozy"? Just a swatch from an old knitting project and a safety pin, and it keeps the long bias binding roll in check, while allowing it to unroll as I use it. Yay for scraps of all kinds!

Monochromatic challenge

So, I guess I've been holding out on sharing much about my first major entry to a quilt contest. Some might say I play by the rules, and those same folks would also say that I take thing rather literally. And both are more or less true.

I did, once before, enter a quilt into a contest, or rather a juried exhibition. It was only a couple of years after I had started quilting, and though I still stand by the inspiration and theme of the quilt, I acknowledge that the technical aspects were not exactly museum worthy. I was looking for ways to combine my relatively newly discovered love of quilting with my more steady, consistent love for photography. It is a black and white "Trip Around the World," both literally and figuratively.



I designed this quilt using photographs I had taken while traveling. I printed the photos onto ink jet printer fabric (NOT Printed Treasures... in fact I don't even remember the brand) which ultimately discolored and became more charcoal and mauve than black and white,

plus I hand quilted the piece, with little to no experience. (Experience now tells me that my hand quilting will NEVER be jury-worthy!)

And enough with the tangent... Back to the matter at hand - the Modern Quilt Guild's Project Modern 2 Challenge. The theme, as you most likely know, was "monochromatic" with a bit of discussion about how stringently they would be sticking to that definition. I tried to do my best, though I battled with WHITE and the family of TEAL just a bit. However, I was happy with what I came up with. I started out with these guys
and started building out from there.



My first step was playing around in the sketchbook, and the first design I came up with, I figured was both more complex than I wanted to try for this, and would perhaps not be best realized as a monochromatic quilt. So I played some more and came up with a quilt based primarily on scrappy, string-pieced patches. After much playing around and adding to the fabric pool, I landed on what worked best for me.


Over all, this process took about 2 and half months, a few pieces of paper, and a fair amount of fabric. The quilting and binding of the quilt are something else entirely, and I shall devote another post to them, but for now I will stick with the overall picture and just say that I am glad to be in the game (even though I don't know the results just yet...)