Changing gears

The first 6 months of this year were my time for piecing. I put together 5 tops, 2 more are very near completion. Then there are the growing stacks of blocks -- disappearing 4-patches, pluses, geese, bow ties, HSTs & medallions at various stages of growth.

Now is my time for quilting. I recently basted 1 mini & 2 medium-sized quilts. The mini was done in about an hour, one of the medium-sized ones took half a day, the third one took some time -- the quilting was not complex but was pretty dense. All are done now, binding machine stitched on & ready for some quiet time hand-sewing them in place.

After that, I want to move to completion a few quilts that stalled mid-quilting: a jelly roll race that will be for donation, my Laura's Lightning -- do you remember that one!?! -- in spite of how much I love it, it somehow it fell off the rails. Then there is one that is so embarrassing that I may not even tell you about it -- an incredibly, shamefully late gift. After those are done, there is my scrappy Arkansas Crossroads! I'm nearly breaking out in hives I'm so eager to get to it!

But while I sit & quilt, I am thinking of new projects -- Anna Maria Horner's feathers, made with a friend for another friend; more nail polish bottles for a young woman turning 16; big chunks of my & Mom's dresses pinned to my design door.
Etc.
Etc.
Etc.

Plugging & chugging

You would think I would learn, but I never seem to: the problem with having so many on-going projects is that nothing proceeds very quickly. Out of my maaaannnnnnny stacks of parts, I've been working 2 scrap projects & 2 with scrappy-ish flying geese. As you scrap-sewers know, there are no quick methods for scraps, just pulling 2 pieces, sew them together, sew them to another pair & repeat. I've got all of these projects out on my sewing table so that they are all leaders & enders for each other & in spite of proceeding slowly, they are all proceeding.

In between times, I made & quilted something I plan on entering for consideration for a display of modern quilts at the Texas Quilt Museum. The piecing was crazy simple & the quilting was simple but dense & took some time. It is done except for the binding; for the first time, I'm planning on trying a facing-type binding. I'll give you a little peak at this quilt.

The lies that lying liars tell

Do you recall me saying that I was not going quilt with my wiggle-y walking-foot zigzag for a while?

Well, I lied.

To date, I have 5 quilts I've kept & a few I've given away that I have quilted with this manipulated programmed stitch. The first time I used it was in combination with straight stitching around oval templates -- the result was a braid-look. After that I did parallel lines, the others have all been grids of varying widths, some parallel, some perpendicular to the quilt edge. I LOVE the look I get with it -- especially after the quilt has been washed & dried -- so cozy & crinkle-y.

But I worried I was over-using it, getting in a Wiggle-y Zigzag Rut, so to speak, so I "vowed" to leave it behind. I should have waited to make such a sweeping statement. I quilted all the + quilts with it. With 3 quilts made assembly line-style, I wanted quick, easy & utilitarian quilting -- the wiggle-stitch is perfect for this & I think it looks a little fancier than it is. It is also great for in-the-ditch quilting, hides any wobbles away from the Straight & Narrow. I also like it with very perpendicular patchwork, kind of softens & counterbalances the look. Now that the Christmas quilts are done, I'm using The Wiggle Stitch on my dotty 16-patches. As soon as I began piecing them, I saw them quilted with this stitch -- more blocky patchwork calmed with snake-y stitching.

Never say never, right? :-}

Just curious

Are you an in-y or an out-y? Not your bellybutton, but how you fold your quilts.

It is my theory that there are 2 kind of people in the world: those who fold their patchwork to the inside &  those who fold their patchwork to the outside.

I fold my patchwork to the outside -- from blocks to top to finished quilt. In the unfinished stage, to my way of thinking, it reduces stress on the raw seams & protects them from fraying.
As a finished quilt, I just like seeing the finished patchwork folded along the edge.
But I can appreciate that someone else might fold their patchwork to the inside to protect it from harm & keep it clean.

Which kind of person are you?

Busy weekend

Some cutting & playing.



Some quilting.



Some basting.



And thinking about this.

What to do first?

After the Quilt Festival, I was -- & remain -- starry-eyed with the wonderful experience of seeing beautiful quilts, beautiful fabrics & talking to talented people. I was so full of ideas & idea fragments that my mind was bouncing around like a pinball! I had to force myself to be practical & focus first on what was on the downhill-side of being finished: finishing up some lap robes for the HMQG charity sewing & quilting my low volume quilt.

Done & getting done!

Weekend Update

I love my Guild! (The Houston Modern Quilt Guild, in case you don't know.)

We met on Saturday, talked of the Quilt Festival, QuiltCon, next year's retreat. Then show & tell: the challenge for this month was to quilt our jelly roll race tops from retreat. There were lots of terrific quilts. Mine was only half quilted -- & I worked hard to get that much done. I had thought to free-motion quilt it but my eyes were bigger than my free-motion ability, so I picked it out & tried a method I learned in a class with Mary Mashuta. I love the way it looks, think it is elevating a pretty ordinary little quilt. But I am going to take a breather before I get the other half done -- I've been quilting fairly feverishly for a couple of weeks.



On Sunday, I made a sleeve for my quilt, you know, THE ONE THAT WILL BE HANGING AT THE QUILT FESTIVAL! (Sorry, still a little excited about it.) I got out the pattern pieces for the shirt I'm going to make for Shug. I'm leaving at the end of the week to go visit my Mom & thought some garment construction would nicely fill the evening hours. I've also been obsessing on a quilt from the book Bold Improvisation. There are many awesome quilts here, one in particular I've wanted to make for a long time -- I did a fabric pull about a year ago, but other things pushed their way in.

 

Recently nifty quilts & The Root Connection have both been working on their version of this quilt & mine is burbling to the surface again. My pull -- all from my stash (well, almost all) -- was kind of primary colors with kind of a 1940s, 1950s feel. But I love the wild exuberance of my friends' quilts & was thinking of making a trip to Goodwill, the source of their fun fabrics. But I sat myself down & had a serious talk. Not only do I have miles & miles of yard goods (does anyone still call fabric "yard goods" anymore?), I also have lots of fabric from thrifted clothing. I pulled a stack from Laura Ashley & Laura Ashley-style dresses, the ones from the late 80s, early 90s -- over-the-top floral prints, big puffy sleeves, full -- really full -- skirts. They are pretty but I think the grouping might be a little vapid in a quilt, they would need something to give them a spark, but I'm not sure what. So they may have to continue to wait.

Something old, something new

I've been plugging away at the HST quilting. It seemed as though I would never be finished, but then, suddenly, I was! Now I need to order fabric for binding before the Big Reveal.

I began quilting my jelly roll race top. I tried free-motioning it & hated what I was doing, picked it all out & regrouped. This evening, I've been trying something new & really like how it is going. But it is our HMQG challenge this month, so I can't reveal it yet either. (I'll show you the backing fabric -- I've had it for years; it reminds me of the artwork of Charley Harper.)



My Low Volume squares are idle on my design door; my Low Volume calicos are waiting for a brilliant idea to strike me -- I've been focusing my attention on the Jane Market bags & quilting.
I got a box of fabric in the mail this week -- I needed that like a hole in the head, but, hey, they were on sale.




And my Big News: Skirting the Circle has been accepted to hang in the IQA -- Quilts: A World of Beauty at this year's Quilt Festival!!!!! I am really excited -- I've never seen any of my quilts hanging in any kind of show. This will be quite an experience. The credit for it even being considered goes to Shug -- he was the force behind it & did most of the work, as the deadline came while I was last out of town visiting my Mom.
Thanks, Shug!!!!

Steely-eyed Quilter Woman*

A bit of sewing -- 2 Jane Market Bags finished, one in French General's Petite Odile, the other from Tula Pink's Nightshade.



 


 
A bit of quilting -- my Stitched in Color HST quilt is about half quilted.





* a reference to Apollo 13 -- though there was no danger that I was even going to be late for dinner.

My very long weekend

American Independence Day, the 4th of July, is one of the few holidays that cannot be made into a 3-day weekend. This year it fell plunk in the middle of the week -- not the best for celebrating -- that is unless you gave yourself the rest of the week off, like I did!

Wednesday we spent the whole day at our sail club: hamburgers & hotdogs for lunch (I tried a version of the "Kiwi burger" (our club has quite an international membership & the current Social co-Commodore is a New Zealander -- aka, a Kiwi -- besides the usual burger stuff, they add sliced beets & a slice of pineapple; I skipped the pineapple but added the beets & quite liked it); lots of fun & games for the kids; Shug & I got in a pretty good sail; then resting & chatting & snacking & reading until dinner; then waiting for it to get dark for the fireworks, shot from a barge in the Bay. A very nice day.







Thursday, I was up to my butt in quilt backs. Just FYI, there are 336 5-inch HSTs in a 42 fabric layer cake -- I used all but 10 from my Stitched in Color cake. There is almost as much piecing on the back of this quilt as there is on the front! I also prepped & pieced the back for the jelly roll race top I made at the HMQG retreat. The Guild challenge this month is to get those quilted. Both were then ready to sandwich & baste.

On Friday I did laundry, dusted, vacuumed, etc. But I managed to work in some layout & assembly time with one of my projects for the Low Volume QAL. I also got 2 more Jane Market Bags cut out -- these will be gifts.


 

Saturday, Shug helped baste 2 quilts; outside, he set up a couple of saw horses & the plywood work surface he made me. In a VERY fortunate turn of events, as I basted, I found my "humility block" in the Stitched in Color quilt -- but not being prone to humility, I later fixed it. It wasn't so very hot but it was pretty humid & I was very sweaty & a little cranky by the time I finished the second one. Shug also cut some templates for me so I can experiment with them with my low volume, granny calicos.





It was thunder-y & rainy on Sunday. Luckily we had done errands on Saturday, so didn't need to get out. I could spend a much time as I wanted stitching! And I got quite a bit done: more low value work, prepped the Jane Market bags & began quilting one of the basted quilts!





I hope you enjoyed your weekend as much as I did mine. What did you do?

12 in '12 -- a leaner, not a ringer

OK, it is another obscure sports reference! This time: horseshoes!

I am not going to have a finish this month. I have a nearly-finished -- ABB, All But Binding. And the binding is machine-stitched on, but not hand-sewn down. I didn't think that I would be done with the quilting, but that went super fast. I am chipping the rust off of my free-motion "skills" & am fairly pleased with the results. You can sure tell what I did first & what I did last -- my stitches are a bit more even, the movement a bit more fluid. And I bet the boo-boos will get lost after I wash & dry the quilt.



Sorry Amy, Liz & Saf. But the good news is that I will already have a finish -- in just a few days -- for next month!

Addendum:
The good folks hosting the 12 in '12 Challenge said I could include it as a June finish (well, one of them, Saf did & I took it & ran). It is done now, washed & crinkle-liscious from the dryer!

Quilt me a river.

From very early on, this postage stamp quilt reminded of the township and range plating system so much in evidence in Kansas. When I was in college, I spent one summer working for the Kansas Geological Survey measuring gravity across the state. (If you stay in one place all day and measure the gravity, you will see 'tides'; when the measurements are plotted on a graph, there will be two high points and two low points each day -- solid earth tides, just like ocean tides, caused by the pull of the moon. The data we collected helped reveal the Kansas sub-surface.) We drove the country roads of rural Kansas and they mostly follow the grid of the one mile squares of the township and range. This may be the source of my love of the geometric and rectilinear! Anyway, I love the tidy order of these crisp postage stamp squares, but they seemed to want some.... geography.

So I am quilting a river system on them! Well, sort of. There will be a diagonal line with two 'tributary' lines coming in from either side. Then, I will just sort of echo-quilt the rest of the space.

We'll see how this works out....

Looking back, looking forward

As have many of us quilty bloggers, I have been looking back on the old year and looking with anticipation and hope at the new year.

I didn't have many completions last year -- only 6. I am pretty pleased with all of them, but, well -- six.



I hope to up the ante this year. My HMQG amigas Amy, Liz and Safieh have started the "12 in '12" Challenge. At first I thought "NO WAY!" But then I thought this just might be do-able. I already had my first finish: I put the last tie into my corduroy quilt and while it isn't strictly *my* quilt (OK, it isn't at all my quilt, I just finished a completed top), I *am* counting it. It took a while because all of the cats LOVE it and one of them is nearly always sleeping on it. I ran it through the washer and dryer and it seems to not be as jewel-bright as it was and the ties have lost the "crows flying over paddocks" (thanks Rachael Daisy!) look that they had -- now they look more like night crawlers -- it is still a wonderfully cuddle-y quilt.



I've got FIVE quilts ready to be quilted or tied. One is already 'under the needle'. And once I free up some of my safety pins, the others are ready to be sandwiched.



I have partially assembled parts for FIVE more quilts. I may have all of pieces cut for the Shirts and Slacks quilt (made with my Mom's shirts) and I have been working away on it recently. It still makes me a little melancholy working with them, but I really want to see them turned into a quilt. Also here are those hexagons from the beginning of 2011, a more-than-half completed lemon-y zigzag top, the indigo stars that I began last summer and a new project, just begun, inspired by a painting by Sol Lewitt.



And I have stacks of fabric that have been tugging at my sleeve, saying they are tired of being just yard goods, all wanting to be quilts. There are SEVEN incipient quilts here -- a few I even have ideas for how I want to use them! Those goofy, really old-school calicos that I just can't bring myself to get rid of, I am thinking of using them with Jenny's Quick Curve Ruler (or maybe some of the Japanese prints that I have stowed away -- or maybe BOTH). My quilter's eye has been taken by i'm a ginger monkey's Swoon-Along. Perhaps the Marcia Derse prints would work for that. And elegantitus is doing a Gentleman's Fancy man-quilt -- I am thinking about those browns that I got at the beginning of last year for that. I want to make one of those jelly roll race quilts, the Just Wing It roll would be perfect. The Modern Quilt Guild will be having a juried show at this year's Quilt Festival -- I have an idea for those Stonehenge prints that I hope will be awesome. The charm squares and text-y prints came together just recently, maybe something inspired by Rex Ray? And there are the gorgeous Echinos that my Mother-in-law gave me for Christmas.....



So with the things that are more than a pile of fabric: 1 finish, 5 to quilt, 5 pile of parts -- that is 11 quilts right there. Then the 7 more that are just fabric and glints in my eye -- that's 16. And the many more that I'm sure will grab my attention this year, shoot, I could probably finish 20 -- or MORE!

Easy peasey, right?

You're Invited

Oh my gosh! The Quilt Festival is less than one month away!

This year, after trying for the last three years, I finally got into Hollis Chatelain's class, "Quilt Line as a Third Design Aspect". I am very excited, and perhaps a bit apprehensive, about it. (I had a dream/nightmare that I was very late and didn't have any of the right materials for the class.)

I can't believe that this will be my 20th Festival! In 1991, I flew down to Houston for the very first time. This was when I bought my Bernina; I guess she has an anniversary too! While in town, I called up an old friend from college who I knew had recently moved here for a job. Fourteen months later, Shug and I got married and I became a permanent Houstonian! It is not quite as special going to the Festival as a "townie" -- no plane trip, just a drive into town; no hotels or restaurants, dinner and chores await when I get home -- but it is a lot cheaper. My discretionary spending can all be on fabric, books and bright shiny things!

In case you don't know, there will be a couple of meet-ups of all the branches of the Modern Quilt Guild and the Houston Modern Quilt Guild is hosting them. One is during Market and one is during Festival. (Check the link for locations and times.) I'm looking forward to putting faces to the funny blog and flickr names that I know so well and for internet friends to become IRL friends!

And to my blog friends who are not in the Modern Quilt Guild and are planning to go to the Festival, please let me know! I would dearly love to make plans to meet you and put a face to the kind comments I receive on my blog.

The Story of Wonk

When I made my very first wonky stars, I went to the source: Gwen Marston's Liberated Quiltmaking. For the liberated/wonky star points, her directions say to cut squares larger than your base, then cut the squares diagonally and stitch onto the base fabric. But I planned to use plaids for the star points and being the anal, control-freak that I am, I didn't want the plaids to be going every which way. So rather than cut squares, I cut strips and sewed the star points diagonally onto the base fabric along the outside edge of the strip so that the plaid was parallel to the seam.



I kind of liked this method because it let me go really crazy with the points -- some are slender, some are big & chunky, some are more triangular. So when I began my own project with wonky stars this was the way I built them.





I am now quilting my Constellation Wonkulae. I am trying to be more free with my machine quilting, trying something I haven't done before (thanks Bobbidink!). I had to hold my breath and close my eyes as I started quilting through(!) my pieced blocks but I have to tell you that I am loving how it is turning out! I am almost half-way done. I'll show you the back, but save the front for a big reveal!





P.S. There is glitter EVERYWHERE.