Random Acts of Kindness

Another work week past, another weekend to indulge in rampant craftiness!

I started quilting the Rustic HST quilt today. I decided to go with "straight" lines, because I didn't want to complicate the quilt. It is beautiful in its simplicity. By the way, as I'm sure many of you can testify, those "straight" lines never seem to end up quite straight. When I wash the quilt, it should hide most of the waviness. I'm guessing that I have about 20% of the quilting done.

And since one of my readers expressed an interest in the star points on my DaGMT journal, here is my most recent picture of that project.

I also want to express my thanks to those people who engage in Random Acts of Kindness. This morning my car got stuck in the snow, at 6:30 am, on a dark residential street and three people stopped within minutes to help push my car out. Thanks to them I wasn't stranded, waiting for Jack to get there. I hope I get a chance to pay it forward sometime.

Paper Pieced Stars Quilt

Sorry to say that this quilt top hasn't acquired a more creative name than Paper Pieced Stars. I could probably call it Stars and Geese or Starry Geese or Goosey Stars but I digress.

I will admit that I'm not going to make my 10,000 word weekend goal. But look at the sewing I've done.

As it stood a few nights ago, when this quilt top is put together, it will only be about 42" square. I really want it to be larger so I started cutting out 2.5" squares from my scrap box and after putting together over 100 half square triangles via chain piecing last night (I love chain piecing), I have the stars for some stars to go on the top and bottom of this quilt.

These will be six inches across, so I will need twelve of them. And much to my dismay, I discovered that I only cut out enough for 9.5 stars. Nope, no idea why I have 9.5 instead of a nice round number like 9 or 10. I will be cutting and piecing the other 36 sometime tonight or tomorrow, I hope. These blocks with the corresponding flying geese will give me a quilt that is 42" x 58" so a couple three inch borders later and I will have a good sized throw quilt.

By the way, I recently stumbled across an episode of Hoarders: Buried Alive and let me tell you, my little messes are MINOR compared to these disasters. Give me an hour in any one room in my house and it will be clean. Its also incentive to get rid of stuff NOW before you have to have a TV show tell you that things are out of control.

Design Wall Monday

Yes, I am participating in design wall Monday! Because I actually have a design wall now, in my sewing room.

Yesterday afternoon, I got tired of laying my stuff out on the floor, so I moved my bookshelves into the hallway (yes, I now trip over them every time I leave my sewing room) and opened a package of queen size quilt batting, and used pushpins to hold it to the wall. Lots of little tiny holes in the wall but that was a sacrifice I was willing to make in the name of creative genius.

Yes, that is my stars quilt. I have decided to make flying geese for the sashing. And next to it is my OBW quilt in progress.

And in the other room is my Stormy Path quilt, which means all my active WIP's are on display. I highly recommend this design wall thing, it makes life easier.

I now have no space to move about my sewing room, but it matters not.

Linking up to Design Wall Monday over at Patchwork Times.

California

Drumroll please ....

(Thank you to everyone who just drumrolled on their computer table)

My last star for this quilt is now complete. Please meet Ms. California.

I still have some work to do because I would like this to be a throw quilt, so I'm going to add some borders and such, maybe some Lemoyne stars at the top and bottom to make it more bigger. I'm not sure what fabric to use, since I was using FQ for these and I mostly used them up making the stars. This will truly be a colorful creation when it is complete.

WIP Saturday

A few quick updates for some of my WIP/UFOs:

Another block finished for the stars quilt

And I managed to hoodwink my cousins into helping Jack move my desk into the basement, where I can Mechatronics to my heart's content.

You can see that I haven't gotten my stuff quite set up yet, so it promptly became storage for Jack's in-progress weapons ;-p
I have my thinking chair set up next to it and there is a small built in bookshelf to the right I can use.

Plus, I finished the binding on my purple cats quilt, inscribed a label on the back, and it will be all set after a good washing!

This one will go in my stack of finished un-dedicated quilts (its a small stack, but growing), but will probably end up getting donated to Project Linus this fall.

I also made some changes to the Stormy Path quilt. The fabric came in and is beautiful. It is washed and dried, so once I iron it, I can start. This quilt will take approximately 400 individual units and will finish at about full size, so it is my most ambitious project yet. I put the fabric swatches in EQ7, so this is a closer approximation to the finished quilt.

I'm an Evil Genius

I've been a little slow on the sewing this week, but thats okay because I have a new hobby.

It all started a week or so ago when my niece spent the night. Over dinner, she told us that she wanted to develop robotic pets when she grew up, so that people who had allergies could still have pets. She's eight, FYI. Which got me thinking, about Ragnarok, and how cool it would be to have animatronic dragons to guard our camp entrance. Not being about to afford to purchase and transport a large ready-made animatronic dragon, ($25,000) I decided to pick up my Electronic Circuits for the Evil Genius book and see how far I could get on my own next year.

This is what my last couple of evenings have looked like. I also ordered Mechatronics for the Evil Genius and am happy to say that it is in my possession as I type. YAY!

I have no idea how far this "little" project will go, but I'm having fun with it. Ideally, I would eventually like to build two small dragons, one for each side of our gate, which would both move and roar and possibly breath dry ice smoke. They would have to have a power source and a timer, to prevent them from keeping our neighbors awake at night. And I would also want a motion sensor, so that they would "wake up" when someone walked too close to our camp.

Should be easy, especially for someone who knows next to nothing about mechanical engineering and robotics, right?

On the other hand, I haven't completely neglected my sewing projects. Here is the start of Illinois, which is rapidly becoming my favorite block.

Visions are dancing in my head of this block as a fractal, but I don't know it those ideas will ever see the light of day. Something else to add to my bucket list.

And here is a preview of a quilt I designed using EQ7. Fabric selection only, I would like to eventually publish this quilt as a saleable pattern so I'm keeping it mostly under wraps while I work. Missing are the light gray/silver and the black. Use your imagination!

FMQ Friday - Purple Kats Kwilt

Well it has been a nice couple of weeks. Last weekend was a three day weekend and this was a four day weekend, thanks to the extra days I took off of work. I've been putting the time to good use, playing video games and sewing. We even went to see a movie, Iron Man 3. I think it was the best of them all.

Here is the purple kats kwilt UFO that I've been working on. Not only did I get all the quilting completed today, but I started stitching on the binding.

This was quite the adventure. There are puckers and ripples and about 50% of the time, the needle didn't go where it was supposed to go. A learning experience, we'll call it. Honestly, I'm not sure how I'm going to quilt anything much larger than this on my little sewing machine. We'll see what happens.

EDIT: I had some inquiries about the pattern for this quilt. The original pattern was by Patti Carey for Northcott and can be found here.

I also finished another stars block.

 

Two more to go for this quilt top, and then it will be done. I'm still considering doing this as a QAYG.

Well, two more days of my lovely mini-vacation to go!

Maine

Okay, just a short note today. I finished Maine! Here it is, on my wall and up close and personal.

Four more stars to go before this little lap quilt is completed. I've got a big day tomorrow, so I'm off to get some shut eye. TTFN!

The Right Thread Makes All the Difference

After struggling through FMQ with some cotton quilting thread I had, I was about ready to give up. I tried everything I could think of to keep the thread from breaking. I changed my needle, adjusted tension, re-threaded the bobbin. Cleaned my machine. Nothing helped. A last ditch effort involved purchasing some Isacord thread, recommended by Leah Day. If this didn't work, I was going to give up on free motion quilting all together.

I'm extremely pleased to tell you that it worked like a charm. I've been playing around with FMQ for the last two hours and haven't had my thread break once! WOOOO! YEAH! GO TEAM! And suprisingly, I'm having an easier time with the small concentrated patterns than I am with the large sweeping stippling type patterns.

Pebbles take For-Ev-Er to do

Actually, I solved two problems here - I wanted to practice FMQ before I quilted with it, but I couldn't stomach wasting fabric that could be put to better use. However, I happen to have a box of random 9" - 11" squares that I picked up. I can't use this fabric with other projects, because I don't think the fabric has been washed. Also, some of it is the ugliest fabric I've seen yet. Solution: use it for FMQ practice.

When all was said and done, I started requilting the purple cat quilt. This is the one that I purchased clear thread for, which kept breaking. Of course. But I picked a design and practiced it, and now am quilting!

The colors are a little funny due to the fact that it was located under my sewing machine when I took the picture. I still need practice, but I'm finally getting somewhere.

In other news, I picked out five more star quilt blocks to make with white backgrounds. This way I can make a decent sized baby quilt with the nine blocks. After that, I'll be switching to the black background star blocks.

This one is called Maine.

Now that I have hopefully solved my quilting problems, I may be able to get a couple of those UFOs off my list.

Arkansas Revisted

My QB block swap partner this month is kind of awesome. His theme is "Any block in your favorite fabric." How cool is that?

This gave me license to experiment with the Arkansas block. Here is my original:

So, in keeping with his theme, I picked out one of my favorite batiks and went to town.

Arkansas revisited

It doesn't even look like the same pattern! Now my head is filled with a bazillion new ideas.

Arizona & Arkansas

I finished these two blocks tonight. They need to have the paper removed (saving this for TV night) and be trimmed down to size.

Arizona

Arkansas

Of all the blocks, I think I'm least happy with Arkansas. Somehow the pink blender just doesn't seem to go very well.

I'm really dying to try these with different fabric designs, introducing as much negative space  as possible. I'm going to need to pick up a few yards of background fabric before I can get started on that. I think I will do them on black for that particular project. The Ohio design is a good example of the look I'm going for, similar to the block I put together for my block swap.

Ohio Block for block swap

Updates coming soon on my Project 144 and Nana's Quilt.

Oh, and I almost forgot. Please meet Persephone, another one of the kittens that we pulled out of the pallet stacks at work. Two down, two to go. This one was adopted by another coworker, who hasn't named her yet, but I like to call her Persephone after the Queen of the Underworld from Greek mythology. It seemed to fit. She is solid black and malnourished, but I think she'll be ok now!

Arkansas and Twisters

Sneak preview of the Arkansas star...

And I finished all the hand-stitching & eyelets on my purple surcoat, so I can cross that off my list.

Last but not least, I was bit by the twister bug and whipped out these scraps to make a small quilt. All my 5 inch square are cut, I just have to decide on a layout. I have a box of misc 10x10 squares that I'm using for this project.

I wish I had a little bit more of either the red or the jungle print, but I'm working with what I have. I was inspired by the layout of this quilt, by Connie @ Freemotion by the River. According to her, I will lose about 1/3 of my surface area by the time this quilt is all put together, so I will plan on adding at least a couple borders.