HUGE yet AWESOME setback

Here is the good news: Moms quilt is done. And Grampa's table runner is all machine stitched together. It just needs the bindings sewn on and the center piece to be cut, folded and pinned. So about a days worth of work left there.

Here is the bad news: Uncle Jimss totally awesome super mario bros pillow has been put on the back burner for so long that I almost forgot that it wasn't a completed project. That certainly isn't for lack of love for my totally awesome, techno savy uncle! But it would seem that these projects wont be completed until the xmas deadline is staring me in the face.

Here is why, and this is the awesome part that makes up for this ( I hope).

Awesomeness part I - im going on vacation to St. Johns (USVI) for the first time in my life this Saturday for a whole week. The primary objective of this vacation is to spread the remainer of my grandmothers ashes and celebrate my fathers 50th birthday. I think, just to be a nerd, I will bring grampas project with me to do on the plane on the way down. He is flying separately from us as he is coming from FL and not the far north. Ill just have to hide it while im down there.

Awesomeness part II - I am moving out of my dads.
Some may think that this is not a big deal. I would say "nay nay this is huge!" However, with everything getting packed away it will sadly mean that Uncle Jims pillow will be the last thing I finish this year even though it was one of the first that I started. Again, not for lack of love for my wonderful uncle but for lack of love for those frustrating little squares! Tee hee.

I've gotta say, im so excited could throw up!

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Nearly Done!

In light of the fact that the holidays are fast approaching, not to mention my week long vacation in the caribbean, I am cutting some projects short. I did a quick evaluation of my mother's quilt last night and found that, in it's current state, it will just barely drape over the edges of a queen size mattress. I had intended to make it larger however she had mentioned to me that she really just wanted something to snuggle with in front of the tv so there is really no sense in going larger. So I tossed on the inner binding, which really brings the whole thing together. I still think that the stars are a little eye twisting to look at because they are constructed from very heavily concentrated patterned fabric. With the backing cut now I just have to sandwich the whole thing, which I am hoping to get to tonight.

This means that I should be able to do most of the quilting over the remaining week and weekend and bind it all up next week. Possibly even before the holiday. Wow, that would be nice. Then I can use the majority of the holiday to whip up grampa's table runner and center piece. Once Grampa is all complete I can put the finishing touches on the nagging SMB's pillow...

and then I'm done! :)

I have learned over the last few months that quilting massive amounts of projects with a deadline as hard as Christmas hanging over you really doesn't make for enjoyable quilting when you start coming down to the wire. Considering that I don't have every weekend off to quilt I have just odd hours on either end of my most hated job to work on my projects. I will, of course, continue to quilt, but I think once the holidays are over I'll probably spread projects for next Christmas out over a whole year. Though a serious chunk of next year will be taken up with Dragon Age II, which comes out March 8th. I'm a geek, I know. :)

Even though, at the moment, I don't have a single comment on my blog I am hoping that people will come to this blog once they have been given their gifts to see how they were constructed from start to finish.

A Quilt Top Update

This is mom's quilt top so far. It's about a third of the center of the quilt itself. It is massive and I'm wondering what to do for quilt stitching on it. The piecing is coming along great though. As you can probably imagine the center stars take a lot of time. I can probably bang out three stars, four max, in my limited quilting time in a week day. I think I did the majority of the Irish Chains in one night! Thank god for easy blocks or this thing would take forever.

The Great and Powerful Mac is sharing this chair with me. He has suddenly decided that he wanted to sit and cuddle but thought being wedged behind me would be comfortable. Cats are so weird.

a new kind of post

So this is a slowly typed entry from my Droid. Its by first time using a qwerty keyboard so things are still in the learning stage. Though I do need the practice so I can be more efficient.
I do love this phone though.

Quilt update: Mom's quilt is slow going. The star blocks are time consuming with each taking about 45 minutes each. Im thinking I will stop at 16 and assemble the center of the quilt. Im thinking that can be completed before St. Johns in 26 days. I think it would be optimistic. To the point of foolishes to expect more than that given the OT I want to pull this coming month.

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Bit of a Break

God may have rested on the seventh day but it take a little bit more to get me to put my scissors down. Today is one of those days. Previously I had been the unhappy owner of a Blackberry Storm 2. I have never, ever, been so disappointed in a phone in my entire life. The thing did better as a paper/fabric weight. After months of frozen screens, short outs and frantic calls to customer service I decided to go out of my way to get out of this telecommunication hell. Today, I have walked out of the land of dispair and back into a field of bright happy apps and more features then I had ever dreamed imaginable on a phone.

I got a Droid.

I had thought that I would pick it up in the morning before work, take a few hours to play around and then settle into a happy groove of having my new toy. It wasn't until I realized that it was 12:03 that I realized that I should have already been at my desk and not in my car in the parking lot of my office. I loudly cursed the clock and whined over the fact that I had been tinkering for two hours and still had hitherto unforeseen fantastic abilities to figure out.

It wasn't until a full day at the office and getting home did I have the time to sit down and realize that the little microphone button in the menu bar while writing a text message would actually let me speak to the phone and it would write the text message to me. Given that texting and driving is becoming illegal throughout the north east this is going to be fantastic. At the very least it will allow me to write my 90 ETA warning to Tim easier when I go south. Texting on the Tappen Zee Bridge...not a good idea.

In my systematic run through of the phone I have discovered so much. I have yet to get to the google run star map or any of the gps navigation programs. Today was mostly social networking, texting, syncing contacts correctly and playing around with the voice command options, which are extensive. I will admit that the qwerty slide out keyboard is a little awkward even though the keys have some definition to them. The top row is just a wee bit too close to the upper face of the device so it can be a little cumbersome.

Such distractions have made me realize that I have yet to clean my room or hallway. Tim is coming up this weekend and my room is a bit cluttered with laundry that needs to be done.

So, good excuse for not completing todays 2 alloted stars in order to meet my goal? I hope so. :)

A Star is Born

Up at 6, drive for 5.5 hours. Work 8.5 hours (really only about five of those :p), errands to run, people to talk to...and finally after all that I get to take some time to put together the first block of my mother's quilt.

This is my first realization that I need to put a little more planning into the scale of the patterns I choose. Looking at this block and knowing it's going to be along side 31 of it's identical fellows and several irish chains I can see that there is going to be a serious problem. It is going to look far too busy! you can barely make out any definition in the white bits of the outer and inner stars. The backgrounds for the Irish Chains is a little more plain but it does have red pattern on it. I'm hoping because it's a smaller scale pattern that it will help to balance all this out but I'm starting to worry that it will be insignificant to the issue.

New thing learned with this block: Flying Geese
The triangles are part of a Colonial traditional pattern that when arranged appropriately they resemble geese flying in formation. Doing geese on this block involves drawing lines on the wrong side of the fabric in pencil or chalk over the diagonal and using that line as a guide. Drawing that line adds time to the whole process but it's worth it to maintain accuracy.

Here's hoping this quilt doesn't turn out to be pattern vomit!

Weekend in Jersey was nice. Went to go see Red...which is a DC comic flick about retired CIA black opps. It's not bad - certainly entertaining, but it's not a thinking movie. More of a "all my favorite actors are in this movie save Samuel L Jackson so what can go wrong" kinda movie. John Malkovich was fantastic! We also had a bonfire on Sunday and I got sunburned. Toasted! In October!

Pretty Stacks of Pretty Pieces

I set a goal and met it. All the pieces to my mother's quilt are all cut and ready to be pieced together. Now I just have to hope that all that cutting goes together the right way and that the instructions aren't crap. Considering it's coming from Quilt Sampler magazine I sure as hell hope that it comes out alright.
For a while there I thought I was going to run out of that red and white paisley but I thought I had a lot more to do.

Now it's time for a nice weekend off and enjoy the last vestiges of warm weather down in Jersey. :)

When I return...let the sewing begin!

A Good Night's Work

BAM! Stacks like woah :)

Like I said, the cutting instructions for my mother's quilt is mind boggling! Usually I quit at midnight for fear of screwing up royally (though sometime even that is too late). But tonight I was feeling a bit ambitious. After a few solid hours of cutting I have a good chunk cut. If things go this smoothly tomorrow night I could have the whole thing cut out before leaving for Jersey on Friday and that would feel really good. There's nothing like coming back from a nice weekend and being able to start a fresh stage of the production process.

I will admit that looking at the cutting instructions was daunting to say the least. Especially when it comes out and says 148 of this. Other times it hides how much cutting there is by saying make 32 sets of 8 of these. Lies, I tell you! Just come out and say 256 of x and I'd be a lot happier.

 I'm totally in love with the white and black paisley and I'm so glad that there is about a yard of it left over. Whoever wrote these cutting instructions did so with the idea of giving you plenty of goodies to put in your stash. I can't complain. I have next to no stash at all and I'm pleased to say that all these quilting projects for Christmas this year is really helping to build up a good stash. I have some nice blues to pick from and this quilt will produce some nice red leftovers. Terry's table runner made for some nice pinks too. I'm hoping that by the end of next year I'll be able to create something decent from my stash.

Cutting Rage II

feeling a little special tonight...when i say special, I mean short bus kinda special

when you cut 15 strips of fabric each a half inch too short...it's time to put down the rotary blade for the night

this, ladies n' gents, is why you always buy more fabric than you need and not cut that fabric before bedtime. 

durp-a-dur *facepalm*

Last Quilt Before Christmas?

I had only planned on doing four quilts for this Christmas, one for each of my aunts and one for my mother. Being worried about time I had deliberately picked simple patterns. But, because she's my mom, I wanted to do something special for her. So with it being just about half way through October and I have a few weeks to get through this one I'm now starting to plan how I'm going to tackle this project.

I got the pattern out of the Fall/Winter 2010 Quilt Sampler Magazine. The original project is entitled "Mint Chocolate", which made me think of Tim...but since he's already got a brand new quilt to cuddle up in he's out of luck for now. So I'll be taking this quilt and changing the color scheme to red, white and black. I think it will look really sharp when I'm done with it. And everyone loves a good stripey binding! :)

I haven't taken on a pattern this complex before. Even the pattern I did for Tim, which was self designed, wasn't as complex as this. This quilt incorporates a Rising Star block with an Irish Chain block to connect the whole thing. Just looking at the cutting directions is a little daunting. It's going to take me several days to just to cut everything out. I'm tempted to take it all down to the quilting studio in Amesbury to try out their press cutter. They say they have one member that can cut a whole quilt in 8 minuets using the press. That is insane!

Another One Off the List

Despite having spent all Saturday and Sunday with Tim, I managed to finish Andrea's quilt and completely start and finish the gift for his mother, which is a double sided table runner with matching center piece. The little fabric balls are made of two inch square pieces double folded and pinned to a Styrofoam ball. They look sort of like artichokes. I lake good lighting and space to take pictures of them at the moment so here they are on my fabulous cutting table.  The darker side is made from scraps of a previous project I did for Auntie Pam last Christmas while the brighter pink side is from a jelly roll I picked up in Maine two weeks ago. I'm...not entirely pleased the way it came out but I do like the concept. Thinks got a little crooked here and there but I still need to do the quilting on it. Save that the entire project is done and I post this now simply because I have no idea how I want to go about quilting this yet. :)

Autumn Stroll

Special thanks to Dad for 'modeling' this for me

Quilted for: Aunt Andrea
Started: September 23, 2010
Completed: October 11, 2010


This quilt started by just browsing the fabric wall at Joann's and seeing a pattern that really jumped out at me. With the rest of the collection being fully of busy patterns I wanted to keep the pattern nice and simple so I chose Eleanor Burn's 'Don't Fence Me In' pattern. The pattern was simple but allowed me to get some practice in on squaring off the corners of my blocks before assembling which made for a much squarer quilt than I have previously constructed.

I had been worried about how I would go about quilting the sandwiched pieces together and thought I would do straight lines following the cream and dark brown lines that traverse the quilt. I was more impressed about how cool it looks on the back of the quilt when I was finished. Since the whole back is one pattern it break it up a little with the geometric pattern.

All n' all I had fun making this quilt. I think I would definitely do this pattern again. It is so quick to bang out that it would be great if I needed a pattern for a last minute project but it's still aesthetically interesting. I think it could also be made into a great baby blanket if you back in it warm fuzzy type stuff. Auntie, I hope you enjoy your quilt.

the great and powerful mack doesn't like it when you take his sun away during nap time

Flooding

With every change in the season my sinus decide that it is time to make a fresh attempt at drowning me. Needless to say it has allowed me to do some serious planning for Mom's Quilt, Terry's Table Runner, look for a halloween costume (Tim and I are going as Bonnie and Clyde) and come up with a snazzy idea for a birthday cake for Kota. I have a vision for Kota's cake...vanilla cake with raspberry reduction filling with cream cheese icing. What can I say, he's my little brother and deserves awesome cake. 

Other than that I'm planning on sandwiching Andrea's quilt Friday night while I await Tim's arrival and finish it off after he leaves over Columbus Day. With a little luck I'll be adding another picture to the finished project gallery by Monday night. 

In the mean time, here is Auntie's binding roll :)

Night Off

Quilty Weekend Continues

When you wake up in the morning with that fresh attitude and know that this would be a great day to get a whole bunch of stuff done it's easy to be off like lightning and that's exactly what happened today. After a leisurely cup of tea and oatmeal with dad while watching Sunday Morning I was off and running.
The drive up to Maine was gorgeous. The foliage is coming out nicely there, though it's not at peak yet. That won't be for another few weeks.

Fabric Dept

What I was told about Mardens is that it can be a little intimidating at first. This is an outrageous understatement.  The fabric department was about the same size of selection that you could find at a smaller Joann's and not nearly as organized. Marden's is similar to the Christmas Tree shops. You walk in and you never know what you're going to find. The fabric department works on the same idea. There aren't any real complete collections that you will find. It's all sort of mashed together and I feel lucky that it was all at least sorted by color though I'm not sure they have a clear concept of the differences between red and orange. :-p

The prices were just as they said it would be on their website. Dirt Cheap! They are so cheap that it may be worth it to me to wait until I have a few projects in the cue and then take the 45 trip north to get all my supplies. Sure, it's the chocolate box of fabric stores but I find that sort of fun. I took and hour and fifteen mintues to find fabric for my mother's quilt and while agonizing over color and pattern scale I kept seeing things that had me going "ooo...that's super pretty!". So, for this trip here is what I walked away with: 

1 Jelly Roll

1 Fat Quarter Roll

Wicker Basket

2 Candles

2 Decorative Ball Things

Fabric for my planning boards

and 

about 18 yards of fabric for my mother's quilt

GRAND TOTAL

$118

I'm fairly certain I couldn't have gotten the fabric for my mother's quilt for $118 bucks if I went somewhere else. 

But the Quilty Weekend didn't stop with just that shopping trip, no sir. A quick stop at Lowes on my way home and I finally had my planning board Styrofoam. They came out great and are just wide enough between the two of them to let me plan out a twin sized quit top without boarders. So it was on to cutting out Andrea's quilt top blocks and I thought it would be nice to pin them up to see how they look. The pattern is called "Don't Fence Me In" and can be found in Eleanor Burns' book "Still Stripping"....and as my father and cousin have pointed out, that is a highly misleading title and has led to some serious disappointment. Even still, it has some great tips and ideas for patterns. 

This is why I don't quilt for myself

I become torn. I find beautiful things that I want to make and they are all so freakin' pretty. I found this one, randomly. But you know what? Screw you, Pottery Barn. 250 bucks!? Oh, how I laugh at you! 

Topsfield Fair Inspirations

Topsfield Fair in Massachusetts is the oldest agricultural fair in the nation having been originally established in 1818. Over 192 years it has blossomed from local farmers meeting to discuss better farming methods to your typical fall fair with rides, rabbit barn, horse and live stock shows and food (omg food!). This year was a little different for me because I went with a new interest. There had always been quilts in the textile and craft exhibits but I had never gone with much of an interest in them. I now find myself browsing with great interest and finding wonderful inspiration. Many of them were of the older country-esque style that I don't personally care for but were inspirational nonetheless.  

As always, click for larger

Paper Piecing...Amazing Work

Good Night, Moon
:)

Best in Show 2010

While at the show I also met two lovely ladies. Jensi Rogers from Crafters Quarters in Amesbury, MA. She had a lot of great ideas and was piecing together a great quilt for her dad on a 1936 Singer Featherweight. She said it was an absolute tank - nigh indestructible and will last for forever. It was really great to see her working on it. She was super fun to talk to and I look forward to swinging by her studio to get some more ideas. I also met a nice lady from a studio in Kingston NH that is called Sitched in Stone. I'm stoked that these places are local to me here in Statham. Now that I know these places are here I may end taking sometime to look at them to see if I can find myself a new quilting home!

The fair wasn't all quilting. Oh no. Aside from the italian sausage, hot apple cider, honey sticks, corn on the cob and fried dough that was consumed between my mother and I we also perused through the little vendor stalls there. I won't lie. Most of it is crap. But there were some pretty sweet hats and we couldn't help but have a little fun. 

*rawr*

Also, I'm super excited about tomorrow. I'm going north to Sanford Maine to take a look at a fabric shop that my other mom mentioned to me called Mardens. Their website says they start at $2.99/yrd. That is almost unheard of! I can't wait to go. I don't have a whole lot in mind but I'm thinking I might, at the very least go and get fabric for the table runners and fabric cones that I want to make. It's a very quilty weekend. 

Transitions

I was so pumped to go into the home stretch on the Super Mario Bros pillow. I was certain that I could finish today and put little tiny squares out of my brain for a while. hahaha. Sadly I could not accomplish that today as I ran out of black flannel. I reached into bucket of black squares to find only the bottom. It was a sad moment as is means that I'll have to buy another eighth of a yard to finish it. The 1Up mushroom is competed and I think it looks great.

*Click for larger*

Not wanting to waste any time I ironed out Auntie Andrea's fabric and stripped it out and arranged on my chair in the order I think I want them to go in. I ended up buying what was left of the bolt of the blue that is second from the right. so that might end up as the binding. But I do like the way the scrappy binding came out for Sue's quilt so I may got with that.

On an unrelated note, my little Jetta nearly had her butt smashed in when a Prius rear ended me. It happened right before work and I was sore all through my shift. Thankfully I got up this morning and felt fine. The car also got the green light from my car dude. (as if a prius could hurt a jetta! lol) So all is well! I would have been super pissed off had it kept me from work or worse - quilting!

Good Lord! It's October!

Progress! How I love it!

However if you are concerned with the fact that he has a gap in his head, fear not! I'm just too damn tired and grew frustrated when I realized that the top line of the large green blotch is crooked and will need to be taken apart to fix at some point. But such are the mistakes common with sewing late at night and are to be expected.

It has been pointed out to me on many occasions that I have yet to quilt something for myself. This is true but only because I think that crafts should be shared and not hoarded. A college roommate of mine has nine of my hand knitted scarves. What started as a request to make her a Harry Potter scarf turned into "hey, i just made this. want it?" time and time again. Until recently I have not found a quilt style that I loved. I enjoy modern themes and whimsical patterns because it makes things fun. And I adore red tones. My whole room is done up in reds and golds. With that in mind it took me a while to find a quilt idea that I would like enough to make my new comforter.

Gorgeous, isn't it?

 
I love it. I found it while using StumbleUpon. Aside from being down right addicting and being the bane of all bedtimes it does bring me new and exciting new ideas for quilting. This was found here, in a sort of tutorial and comes with a link for a book that can be purchased to teach the techniques of color transitions necessary to make this quilt. Surprisingly enough, this quilt was done entirely in batik patterns, which you would most commonly see in island dresses or sarongs. I think they are so ugly on the bold when I see them in stores that I often forget that their garish colors and patterns are lost to small scale pieces. When used in a piece such of this you can hardly tell. Once Christmas is past and have recovered from what I will assume will be a total burning out from sewing I will make this my own personal project.

986!!!!

Half a mushroom

I began to ponder while I was working today as to why it felt like I was moving abysmally slow on this project. I think I know why now. Previously I had waved a hand and said "bah, they are only 22 inch pillows. how hard can that be?"

I failed to remind myself that a 22" square pillow comes out to nine hundred and eighty six squares.

986

I find myself relieved to think that never before have I ever considered how many little bits go into a project. Now that I have foolishly looked into the matter I'm quite daunted. I don't think I'll ever do that again with the project in front of me. Maybe once I get beyond Christmas and my sewing endeavors for this year have been completed I may reflect on it. But at the present I will limit myself to the idea that one quarter of a mushroom has taken more time than I believed possible or necessary. Maybe I should have done the red mushroom rather than the green. It would have been a little more energizing.

Got Lucky

Fabric for Andrea

I was a woman on a mission this morning. I went online, found all the images from the Kalico line that i wanted, printed them out and headed down to Joann's. They had almost the entire series that I wanted to use! I couldn't have been more excited. The bag of fabric was in my car all day and my brain stayed in the car with it.

Explains why I was feeling a bit fried by lunch time.

But buying the fabric and having the pattern settled doesn't mean I'll be jumping into this one any time soon. I still have yet to finish Uncle Jim's Super Mario Bros. pillow. Sadly, this is another item that lost it's history in the Great Blog Deletion catastrophe of 2010. But like all projects it has a beginning that started on graph paper and trolling the internet for ideas.

You wouldn't believe the stuff you come up with on the intewebs with the right set of key words. "Quilting" and "Mario" alone came up with so many things!. After flicking through some images and realizing that I'm going to have to make a set of these someday, I picked some images that I liked and doodled them out. I really dig the invader from space.

I chose to do the project in flannel. Everyone loves flannel - it's soft, cuddly and, most importantly, machine friendly. I had just finished backing Tim's star quilt with blue flannel and wrapped myself up in it for a test nap. I love flannel!

The general construction of anything that comes for the 8 or 16-bit era of computer games is ridiculously simple. Pixels with pixels and off you go. There's hardly any thought process to it which is why I think I'm going to end up making a series of these to line my couch while I'm still at an age where I can get away with that.

I thought I would start with the most boring part first. The GAME OVER side is just black and white. It's a really bad picture...despite the fact that they are smart phones they are still no great shakes at photography. This is when I realized that camera phones just don't cut it and it was time to actually go dig out my camera.

All the pieces are cut to 1.5x1.5" squares. I think it's the smallest box work that I've done so far. Despite that I'm pleased with how it's coming along. Aside from one major earthquake down there on the bottom I can look at this and see how but better I've gotten. Those lap quilts that I made last Christmas for some co-workers were just...well, fabric and bile thrown together. Such is my judgement now. Had you asked me last xmas I would have said that I was immensely proud of them.

By the second night I had all the lettering done and had to continue to the filling up the corners with black.
ZzZZZZzzzZzzZzzzz.....

But that is where the project stands now and over the course of this weekend the weekend I'm hoping to put a serious dent in it's overall progress.


On a sort of related note, I have a list at my desk of all the stuff I am making. There are a few blank spots on my list. Dad, Grampa and Decker are always tough. But whilst day dreaming at my desk I thought of a tutorial that I saw not too long ago - this one doesn't even involve a sewing machine! I guess you could call them little fabric pine cones. They are adorable. Previously I had also thought of giving table runners that I had seen in a tutorial I found through Amy Smart's Diary of a Quilter Table Runner Tutorial but giving just a table runner would be kinda lame. I think the little cones will make a great addition to give along with the table runner.

Go Read It. ....NOW!

An article has been going around Facebook among my friends. It is a very good reminder that reality is not always what it seems to be. Please, take a few minutes and go read it.  If you have ever hung your head or shed a tear because you thought you just weren't good enough take a moment to remind yourself that you're not alone and that you are an incredible work of art.

:)

A long, long time ago...

...on a quilting table not to far away, I made a quilt for my boyfriend. In this particular situation allow me to define "long, long time ago" as about seven months. 


I don't remember why I wanted to start quilting, but boy, I'm glad I did. And right around that time I thought I would be nice to make something for the wonderful guy that I've been with for four years. I guess, then, it should be said in all honesty that the first two quilts I made were sort of "warm ups". I wanted to make something that had movement. That was warm and comfortable yet durable enough to take out for an afternoon picnic out by the blackberry bushes in his back yard. So based on something he had said to me at one point I made my own design and jumped head first into the world of make-it-up-as-you-go. I call it Heebz Theory. I've done well by it almost my whole life and I didn't see why it would fail me now. 

I seem to remember making a test square to make sure that he wouldn't hate the idea. After all, the colors didn't match anything in his room, or furnishings, or stuff in general. always good to muck up some fat quarters to come up with a concept.  Luckily, he liked it and he gave me the green light to plunge into the project. 

The Great and Powerful Mack: He swears he's helping!

With all new projects you have that running start with all the excitement and anticipation. I had just come off of completing my first two quilts after all and did them both in a weekend each! This will be a breeze. How very wrong I was. I was dealing with new concepts here that I hadn't even comprehended at the time. On top of all that - guess who still hadn't bothered to learn or teach herself how to cut accurately? Oh yea. In a pattern that called for quite a few 90 degree angles it was an adventure realizing fundamental and elementary concepts such as "rulers move as soon as you touch them". But I cut along on my merry way and did my own thing using the Heebz Theory. 


"Winter changed into spring, spring changed into summer, summer changed back into winter, and winter gave spring and summer a miss and went straight on into autumn..." such is the weather in New England. 

You'll notice the kitty bed in the lower left side: The Great and Powerful Mack prefers the comfort of the projects of his subjects rather than provided fleecy comfort. 

I did have to take a break for a bit on this one because my grandfather came around as spring started to wake up in my neck of the woods and all sewing projects were put on hold during his stay. I tend to make a fair bit of mess while working and such things cannot be seen. :-p It was good to take a break because there did come a time when I wanted to run screaming from the house. Quite a lot of effort was going into this quilt and as the weeks went by I learned more and got better with each star completed.

 I quickly realized that this is a a craft of precision. For those of you who know me very well, precision is not something that goes along with my personal idom. For Christ's sake, I don't even have numbers on my watch! Needless to say, the 'p-word', took some getting used to. But as I learned, and cut, and practiced and toiled over every single thing I remembered that somethings will be looked at under a magnified glass: cell structure, the health care plan, immigration reform, the dishes. This however, was not.  The rule taught to me by my friend Lola was the general rule of crafting costumes for theater. "If they can't see it from 12 feet away...who cares! Only you will know." And as this piece will only be judged by me and loved by another I decided it was okay to relax and say "it's okay, the sashing will save you". 

It took several months and much toil but I'm certain that I wouldn't have wanted to learn how to quilt any other way. And for all intensive purposes, it came out the way I wanted it. It's warm, fluffy, and the pattern has some twinkle like movement to it. I am pleased. 

And Tim is too. :)

Thank you, my love, for being my guinea pig. The next one will be for all the tomorrows.

Third Star on the Right

Made for: Aunt Sue
Started : Sept. 14, 2010
Completed: Sept. 27, 2010

The concept for Aunt Sue's quilt began with her flipping through the pages of one of my larger quilting books. She seemed to be more drawn to star images or patterns rather than anything else and was also inspired by the star patterned quilt that I made for Tim. Under the star image and generous amounts of stippling it is a fairly simple log cabin quilt much like the one I made for Aunt Pam earlier in September. (Well, more like 13 days ago really.)

There are some new things that I sought to learn in this project. Stippling for one, as I have mentioned in other posts. I also incorporated some other ideas that I had not previously added into a project. The back of the quilt has several different parts to it, mostly because I didn't have the foresight to purchase enough fabric to complete the back in all one pattern. So there are seven different parts to it. I also did a scrap border. The initial stitch was done by machine and then whip stitched by hand once folded over.

I have not done anything by hand to a quilt thus far save for repairing split seams or small corrections. This was entirely new to me and was a wonderful way to wrap up the project with a little personal TLC. Previously I had been doing bias tape and machine stitching all the way around or at least for the final closing seam at a time when I had to turn my quilts inside out to sandwich them.


Auntie, I liked this one! It kept me up till all hours of the night sometimes but only because I kept telling myself "I don't want to stop yet!"

I Fold

Hand sewing is time consuming and tedious - that much is obvious. But when it comes to completing a quilt and finishing your binding I am certain that there is no other way to produce as fine a result. After all the speedy stitching on the machine and super fast cutting the rotary blade you don't really get a sense of what kind of effort it would take without those things. Taking a few hours to hand stitch the final stage in a project makes you reflect on the vast need of time and energy if this processes had to be done entirely by hand. Someday I would like to do an entire quilt by hand. I'm sure I would quit less than half way though once I realized the grandness of the undertaking.
I'm only about a third of the way done with the final stitching of the binding and there it will stay for the remainder of the weekend. After a solid two weeks of working and sewing on six hour sleep I have decided to give myself the weekend off to not even think about fabric, pins and if my scissors are getting dull.

I'm off to New Jersey! <3

Le Sigh

I need friends who quilt. My father and Tim don't have any clue what I'm talking about though I think they understand why it excites me so much.

A Post at 1am! What a surprise!

Maybe I should change this blog to The Twilight Quilter...

nope... that could mean vampires in my quilting. this cannot be allowed. Just for the record...i'm not on team edmond or jack or whatever their names are. I'm on team "Vampires Don't Freakin' Sparkle".

Aunt Sue's quilt has been an on going project for some time now. I started planning it on Sept 12, just as I was finishing up Aunt Pam's quilt. Moving from one log cabin to another would be easy but with Sue's I thought I would play with color a bit. Often times when you see a log cabin quilt on the interwebs you can see they making pictures or large scale patterns with the color. I thought this was a pretty neat idea. And when Sue kept pointing out star quilts in my quilt bible I thought it would be a good opportunity to play with color. I think she got the idea for a star quilt when she came over one night and saw Tim's freshly completed quilt in the living room.

I also wanted to tackle something new. Free motion quilting. For all you non quilters out there, this is when instead of making boring old straight lines you feed your fabric through your machine in wonky patterns. People who are really good and have an eye for it can make all sorts of things. Grape vines, willows, flowers, leaves. But the interwebs told me I should keep it simple until I got the hang of things. So I dropped 6 bucks on a free motion quilting pressure foot for my machine and off I went! I expected to remove the fabric from my machine and have had produced pretty little swirls that where whimsical and adorable. Sadly this did not come to pass. In fact, it was more like an epileptic decided they wanted to quilt during an earthquake. It took me a few tries before I felt like I had made a little square worth showing that wasn't a total embarrassment.

Considering that I was going to take up some serious time on a new technique I didn't want to go too crazy with color. I kept it to one color family and tried not to make it too feminine. After all, my 17 year old cousin wouldn't want to curl up on the couch under something that was bedecked in florals or paisley, nor do I think my Aunt would enjoy something that screamed "lets have tea and talk about shoes!"

Taking from what I had learned from Auntie Pam's log cabin quilt, I took from the good and learned from the bad. I found how I can press with the most accuracy and consistency. An hour of YouTubing tutorials got me a few tricks on cutting and some reading the differences between "pressing" and "ironing" came in handy. Simple distinctions to some but reminders are always helpful.

Overall it came together very quickly. What started as a doodle on graph paper on Sept 12 turned into a complete quilt top by Sept 19. Over the next few days, while I wasn't practicing free motion quilting, I cut batting to each of the blocks. This was an idea that I got from another fabulous quilter (also named Heather :D) from Alamode. Her idea of quilting your blocks individually was fantastic to me and my tiny little sewing machine. Most times you'll see quilters with these big long machines that can quilt and entire project without breaking it up into pieces. I like to say that those machines have super powers. My little Brother NS-40 does not have super powers in the slightest nor can my wallet handle the cost of super powers which comes upwards of a thousand dollars.

Once they were all pined to their batting I had no excuses. It was time to put my free motion quilting to the test. It was scary at first putting it to a real project that I had little left over fabric available for replacement blocks. So I put on my big girl panties and off I went. I found that if I listened to music I could find a comfortable groove and I suddenly found myself listening to waltzes. I had read somewhere that if you made your mouth into the shape you were making it would help....but that just sounded ridiculous. It is all to easy to imagine the riotous laughter of my father if he were to come up stairs and see me making fishy faces to my quilt.

Last night as I was finishing up sewing all the blocks together I realized that I had not decided how I was to bind the project together. The idea of a scrap binding caught my attention in a different pattern I saw and given the mountain of scraps this project produced I thought it would be a good use of materials not to mention save some time. I had previously hoped that I would complete the quilt by the evening of the 23rd. By the 20th I had accepted that this was possible. Mom always said "do it right or don't do it all" and there is no sense rushing through a project for a silly dead line with Christmas months away. All those scraps made for quite a bit of tape. They look kinda cool all wound up together.

This brings us to the present for this project. And here it is...1:30 am. The quilt has been backed and pinned. This is something I haven't done before - the idea of sandwiching your layers together and then either quilting or a technique called "stitch the ditch". Given the multitude of swirlies on the star I think straight lines would look pretty ridiculous so I'm going to try to employ this stitch the ditch idea. It entails just as it sounds, stitching in the "ditch" between the top quilt blocks so that your stitches are not seen . They will be seen on the back of the quilt though and to achieve this effect you must keep the needle in the ditch. So tomorrow morning I will tackle this idea and hopefully by tomorrow night I will be ready to sew the binding tape on. I found a great little tutorial to show me how to do this and it even goes on to tell you how to miter your corners.