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.