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.

OK, Just One More...For Now

I can't get over how much I love this fabric! I can't wait until next week when I can go out and buy a quilts worth of it! It's from the Kaleidescope series from Calico Keepsakes. It's very eye catching, don't you think. I showed it to my mother and she said that my Aunt Andrea would enjoy it so I think this is the first step towards her quilt. I still have no idea on what I want to do for a pattern for her though! . Something to ponder over the weekend I think.

What's even better about this is that it comes in a great collection of coordinating patterns. All are different variations of paisley, sunbursts or just dots.

I continue to fret about my quilt that I know I want to make for my mother but have no clue what kind of pattern or style she would want. So many things speak to her character that it's hard to pick just one. One thing is for sure - it won't be a horse blanket!

give me half a minute to call myself a dumbass

After a full 24 hours of attempting to get my old email account and blog up and running again I finally had success. That success quickly turned into horrible horrible failure. Realizing that I had my old blog back I went to it and lovingly reviewed it. It was all there, perfectly fine. I went off to put the backing on Aunt Sue's quilt and came back thinking I would just delete this blog. What's the point of having it if I'm going to continue to use the old one.

My trigger fingers got the best of me. While reviewing what I thought was the settings page of my new blog, I found the delete button, scoffed at the "Warning, you are about to delete your blog" pop up and hit delete. The page then refreshed to my profile page.

The profile page connected to the old blog.

Normally losing three weeks of blogging wouldn't bother anyone too much. The thing is that I post two, sometimes three times in a day. All of those posts were about planning and production of at least four different projects and they are all gone!

Not even an hour ago I came to terms with the idea of not getting my old blog back and did my best to recreate the process I went through with Auntie Pam's quilt. The growing excitement and then lightning quick dumbassery on my part has me a we bit crushed at the moment. So over the next few days I'm going to figure out how to best go about reposting things about Uncle Jim's pillow, the fabric I found for Auntie Andrea's quilt, general pondering about my mother's quilt, and the elation of finally handing over the great star quilt to Tim this weekend.

Toasted Petals

Title: Toasted Petals
Created Sept 2010
For Auntie Pam

For Christmas of 2009, my Aunt Pam sent me some beautiful fabric that she found out in New Mexico. The fabric came with the idea of 'do whatever you want with it' but it was clear to me that she wanted to receive something hand made. Not wanting to deny her I decided that I would add to the three patterns that were given three more of similar scheme. They spoke very strongly of her style and personality and reminded me very much of a couch she had in a house when she used to live in Massachusetts.

First Section

I was very pleased to see that the log cabin style was easy to master and quick to complete. I found myself completing several blocks a night without breaking a sweat. And the fabric was so pretty! I was very pleased to see how it all came together. It's a little modern, a little pretty and a whole lot of pink for me to be using. I'm usually one to shy away from lots of bright colors. Not for fear of not being able to match them but simply because I didn't have a quilt that I was ready to have sit on someone's couch that calls out, "Hey, I'm really freakin' pretty! Examine me!"

All Done!

I think what I learned most with this quilt is that you have to stay consistent with everything you do in sewing to come out with a finished product that looks nice. Your sewing, your cutting and even your pressing all has to be done with the same technique. This was the first time where I had made a quilt, worked hard for it all to meet nicely at the intersections and actually have it happen.

Auntie, when you read this, I hope you know that I really enjoyed making your quilt. The colors are very you!

Epic Sad Face

It has officially been 24 hours, the predesignated time that Google said they would get back to me about my poor hacked account. Alas, not a word to be heard! I guess that means that there isn't much to be done other than attempt to recreate my old posts to show the progress that I've made. This will probably make some peopel feel jipped because it will mean I'll be posting one project in a post rather than progress over real time. I guess this is the best that can be done for now.

A New Purpose

I'm fairly certain that my old Gmail account has been hacked. Worse case scenario is that it has been lost forever. With that taken into account I'm hoping that I can reproduce my efforts with this blog. At least this one doesn't have ancient posts from when I was in college in the history! lol.

What I'm hoping is that I can create a running diary of the learning experience of a new and self taught quilter. It is all very new to me and this blog will act as much as a place to publish new ideas to the public as a resource for me for all my favorite tutorials. The internet is a fabulous resource for teaching yourself new things. Who needs expensive classes when there is YouTube and professional quilters out there with their own blogs?

The second purpose for this blog will be to show the progress I make on all the projects I intend to finish and give as gifts for Christmas. It is my hope that by choosing their label name family members can see the full production of their gift through the stages of design, fabric selection, building and completion here.

With a little hope I will hear back from Google about my account and will be back at my old blog. If not, I will continue to use this place as my new blogging home. :D

<3 heb