Frosty border

Those of you who are buried under feet of snow probably aren’t very interested in snowflakes right now, but I’ve been thinking of how to pair my snowflake blocks with other pieced elements.

Lara over at Buzzin Bumble posted about some very pretty mini Delectable Mountain blocks a few weeks ago, and shared a free tutorial and paper foundations.  At first glance it doesn’t seem that this block could be paper pieced  but Lara uses a very clever technique to make it work.  The paper foundation can even be printed double-sided so that you have guide lines and sewing lines on both sides of your paper.  No more guessing where to place your fabric!

Here’s my sample block. It is 2 1/2” x 4 1/2” to finish at 2” x 4”.

Here’s one way I’m thinking of using more of them with snowflakes.

The problems begin when I try to figure out how to find the time to fit in another project…  Oh well, what’s one more project on the list of planned quilts?

Baby needs brights!

“Baby” would be the Scout leader’s new daughter, not me!  Though playing with some bright fabrics this week has lifted my spirits, so maybe I needed brights too.  There isn’t any big reason for the blahs I needed lifting out of, just assorted small annoyances and winter in general.  Oh, and shattering the plastic casing on the car’s tail light and finding out you can’t replace just the casing, you have to buy the whole assembly.  Sigh.

Let’s not dwell on that, shall we?  Back to the cheerful brights.  Here’s what I have on my design wall right now.

The owl is only fused on right now.  I need to go buy purple thread to stitch it down.  Still, I wanted to see if he worked with the blocks the way I hoped he would, so up on the wall he went.  I like it!

I didn’t like what I started out with.  I saw this quilt by SewCraftyJess on Moda Bake Shop and liked the blocks.  I made a test block to be sure I liked it before cutting into my stash.

It took only an hour to get all my cut pieces sewn into units. The large squares with the white strip get cut down the middle to make the rectangular units below in the lower left, so I was able to substitute two rectangles for the square when my scraps wouldn’t yield the 5” square the pattern called for.

Clearly, it’s not a good idea to be too excited about quick progress.  Progress slowed down to a crawl when I started putting pieces up on the design wall to decide which fabrics to put together in each block.

Ummmm.  Nope.  This wasn’t working for me! I stared at the wall. I moved things around. I stared some more.  Two hours’ worth of staring and shuffling pieces around yielded this.

Better.  Did I really need to unpick my sample block to match the block center to the block frame?  Maybe not.  I went to bed and let it simmer a bit.

When I came back to it in the morning I decided that in the grand scheme of things, taking a few minutes to rip a few seams was not a  big deal.  The result was good enough to encourage me to assemble all the blocks.  Of course, assembled blocks were bound to look crisper and therefore better!  Once I had them assembled it was easier to play around with block orientation, too.  I decided I liked them better going in all one direction, instead of the varied directions in the original pattern, and that vertical pleased my eye more than horizontal.

I had intended to piece a butterfly block to insert in the blank place.  I found a good tutorial at Four Wise Monkeys for a pretty pieced block, but in the end I decided it wouldn’t pop.  Then I thought I could do a reverse image, with a white butterfly over a colored block background.  I tried it in EQ first, and it wasn’t looking quite as I hoped.  How about a heart?  I looked at pieced heart patterns, then decided I could applique a heart, since I learned to do that over Christmas.

Well, if I’m going to applique…I just had to make the owl from Five Sprouts Stitching again, because he’s so gosh darned cute.  It’s a baby quilt.  Cute is good!

I enlarged the pattern to fit the space and spent an hour dithering over what colors he should be.  I decided purple would work best and held my breath as I rooted through the small pile of purples in my stash, hoping to find a piece large enough for the owl’s body. Success!

 

I’m pleased with how it is working out!  The owl seems less lost in person, trust me.  Now I need to go add sashing and decide if this quilt needs borders.  I suppose I need to choose backing fabric too.  Time to step away from the computer!

Just a little push

My son’s bed quilt is wearing out.  When he told me there were new tears, I asked him to mark them with safety pins so I could find them to mend them.  I was taken aback at the number of pins.  He said he stopped counting at 15.  I looked the quilt over and added more.  I think I stopped counting at 40.  And I found more while I was fixing the marked ones. Sigh. 

To be clear, he has loved and used but not abused his quilt.  There were just a few questionable fabrics in there.  Also, as I was advised not to prewash precuts (these were from a jelly roll), fabrics shrank at different rates.  Batiks didn’t shrink at all, so they just folded over at the seams and those folds wore out and the fabric shredded.  Some of the batiks were more affected than others.

I spent the afternoon stitching decorative stitches over the shredded bits to try to extend the quilt’s life a little more.  Here’s what the back looks like now.  Those aren’t worms, but lines of stitching. 

That’s a lot of worn spots, and just a little push to start hand quilting a bit more diligently on the replacement quilt!

Here’s the progress on that:

I do have a tiny bit of border done on the left side too.  I tried to take a picture of what I’m trying in the border, but the lighting wasn’t very good to take a picture of quilting in black thread on black fabric.

Enough chatting! I need to go make more progress!

Once again in 1930s prints

When I started quilting I always intended to make a quilt in 1930’s reproduction prints.  It’s only taken me 15 years to get there!

I usually gravitate to bright colors, and working with these more subdued prints was a bit of a challenge because they don’t pop in the same way as the fabrics I usually work with.  That said, I love how this version of Sparkling Trail worked out!

The colors are better in person, and obviously this still needs to be quilted.

Initially I planned to make each star monochromatic.  Even taking into account the poor late-night lighting in the picture below you can tell it looked a bit bland. I tried centers in one fabric and points in a matching fabric.  I tried mixing points and centres.

In the end, I concluded that these 1930’s prints work best in truly scrappy mode.

That’s why I opted to make the border from small squares rather than longer scrap chunks as I have for other versions of this quilt.

Reaction in the household was mixed.  Hubby loved it.  He said it made him think of front porch swings in the summer and picket fences (not that we have any such things, but I know what he means).  My son, on the other hand, commented on how these were not my usual fabrics and he wasn’t sure he’d like to look at them all the time.  He’s a teen boy, of course he wouldn’t!  His room is safe.  The quilting of the black and bright kaleidoscope quilt for his bed is coming along.

Linking up with

Main Crush Monday at Cooking Up Quilts

Let’s Bee Social at Sew Fresh Quilts