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!

50 Fabulous Paper-Pieced Stars - Alabama

This weekend marked the official start of my paper-pieced stars quilt. I've decided to do them in order (I'm a little OCD like that) and I'm currently trying to determine whether to do two sets: one in the traditional coloring, as they are described in the book and one in an unusual coloring.

Fabric selection for "Alabama"

One of the nice things about this book is all the sizes for each piece are included, removing the guess work that often comes with paper piecing.

Pieces, stacked and labelled

The first corner put together

All eight pieces

I haven't stitched it together yet because I'm trying to decide whether to take out that piece at the top in the purple section that is half green. I'd hoped that I would see more of a blending between the purple pieces and the green/blue ones but it didn't happen.

Next is Alaska - which set of colors to use?

If you have the book and are working on this set, I'd like to see your blocks.

Thursday Threads

I think the reason I spend so much time daydreaming about new projects its because I can't work on them! Until after Ragnarok, all my sewing is falling into the necessity category. And I'm fighting the urge to start new projects until I complete a few.

I finished my purple sucoat, mostly. Except for a little hand work, its done! WOOOOOO!!!!!
One project off my UFO list.

 

 I also decided I want to make a sampler quilt. Again, I'm not a huge fan of most traditional blocks. I recently acquired a copy of 50 Paper Pieced Stars by Carol Doak and I think I will make my sampler quilt from that book. I'm planning on using my red/white/black fabrics for this quilt.

For the block swap this month, I'm going to do my swappee's teal and lime block in the Ohio Star pattern. I don't have a picture handy, but if you visit Wombat Quilts there is a great picture of it!

And last but not least.. finished the quilt top for Nana's Quilt! I'm only a month behind schedule on this baby. The angle is a little funny on this picture, but that is okay.

Paper Piecing Extravaganza - Sort Of

This weekend didn't go exactly as planned, but I did have great time on Saturday. I ended up working overtime (not fun) but then I got to attend my cousin's basketball game, spend the afternoon with her goofing off, and chilling with my friends. And on Sunday I was fighting with my FMQ. It seems my sewing machine is determined to give me a hard time. Back to piecing until I can come up with a solution to my quilting problems. Right now the lightweight invisible thread is wrapping itself around the spindle as it comes off the spool, getting caught, and breaking.

 My first English Paper Pieced block! Hand sewing is slow but its very relaxing. Wouldn't recommend it if you are in a hurry though. I'm thinking about picking up a pack of apple core or tumbler templates for use with my scraps.

Check out this stack of batiks and blenders I purchased from ebay for a steal! I'm so thrilled but I can't decide what to do with them. Maybe a stained glass window quilt? Or Mariner's compass, or paper-pieced stars.  Oh the choices! Its about 8 yards of fabric.

And last but not least, the stacks and stack of pieces for Nana's Quilt. This took several hours to cut out and I'm not quite done yet but I'm getting tired of cutting. I think I'll paper piece for a while and finish cutting as I go. Keeping my fingers crossed that I have enough background fabric. It looks like its going to be a tight squeeze to get all the pieces cut.

Inconceivable!

"Humperdinck.....

Humperdinck! Humperdinck! Humperdinck!"

Yes I just watched The Princess Bride again.  I love that movie. So many priceless lines that are applicable in everyday conversations.... such as "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." and "You mean you wish to surrender to me? Very well, I accept"

Anyway, my venture into Princess Bride was spawned by a desire to see how much work I could get done in a specified period of time and a movie is the perfect timer. The trick you see, is to not get distracted by all the projects I want to do but haven't started yet, or to get distracted by all the new and cool projects (like this great Quilt of Valor idea I have, or the English Paper Piecing method I want to get set up to take to Rag with me) that are out there, but instead focus on sewing for an hour and a half. Its tough being chronically creative.

So what did I accomplish in an hour and half? Not quite as much as I would have liked.

Let me first start by saying that this paper-piecing project turned out to be a little trickier that I initially anticipated. I think it has to do with some of the odd shapes of the flowers. I would stitch a piece on, open it up and find that it didn't lay at all where I intended. Oops. So here is my method for eliminating that little problem. Also, reduces waste!

1. Print a cardboard template and cut each piece out.

2. Use a little rolled piece of masking tape, sticky side out, to tape the template to the WRONG side of the fabric. (This seemed to be where most of my mistakes happened while cutting, so be careful)

3. Cut 1/4 - 3/16 of an inch all the way around.

My stack of pieces. This will make 8 quilt blocks.

So, this is where I started (two blocks partially started and one finished) ....

.....and an hour and a half later I had cut all the pieces for 8 blocks and started stitching them

Next up is Prince Caspian, another one of my favorites. I'm also very familiar with it, so I don't need to watch the movie to see it play out in my head! That makes it much less distracting.

Oh and FYI, although I'm probably the only person silly enough to actually do this... spray starch is bad for paper piecing patterns. It makes the ink bleed. Wait until you remove the paper to starch the block.

... I'm not left-handed...

Linking up to Building Blocks Tuesday (see my sidebar for a link), even those these blocks aren't complete yet! 

Birds in Paradise 2.0

Hey everyone, don't have much time, just wanted to post a quick update.
I didn't like the center block of the Birds In Paradise by Nancy Bell (found in one of Carol Doak's books) so I drew the basic blocks in EQ7 and redesigned it slightly. I like it much better and this is the design I am planning on completing.

I'll be making each block 6 inches square. I especially love the secondary looping pattern made by the leaves.

Hodge Podge of Projects

I continued quilting the bargello quilt but my machine was acting up. I got through about 3/4 of the quilting but the thread kept breaking. I'm finally getting the hang of the sunflower pattern (thanks much to everyone who left encouraging comments on my previous post!) I replaced my needle, cleaned and oiled my machine and fiddled with the tension. And after a few hours gave up in frustration and move on to less irritating projects. Oh the things we love the most can be the most frustrating can't they? I'll try to finish it in a couple days. I've been working on a hodge podge of different projects today instead.

So I started working on a quilt for my Nana, from Carol Doak's Easy Machine Paper Piecing Book. It has three different paper-pieced flower blocks and can be found on page 85 of the book (Birds of Paradise by Nancy Bell).

And continued working on my Kool Kats Kwilt.

Somehow one of my setting squares is 3/4 of an inch too short on one side, so I'll be tearing it out and replacing it. Not sure how that happened! Good news is I can fix it easily. The border will be about two inches wide when stitched on. However, next time, I hope to be able to do this braided border pattern that I found:

It was actually on TLC's website (go figure), here's the link: Braided Quilt Border Pattern
I hope everyone had a great weekend!

Project Linus: Day 1

By Kaelyn Angelfoot

So we had our first Project Linus day. Things didn't seem to go quite as smoothly as last year, but we still made some great progress. Rune made a no-sew fleece blanket with teal on one side and a really nice owl print on the other side. And I started my crochet-edged fleece blanket and worked on finishing my log-cabin triangle quilt.

The log cabin quilt is already quilted (I kept it basic, just traced the outline on the hexagons) and only needs the binding put on, which will be the same cream color as the background fabric. 

The crochet edged quilt is proving to be tricky. I seem to have overlapped my holes on occasion, which makes me glad that I placed them 3/4" from the edge as it give the edges a little more strength. I'll have to figure out a way to cut the holes more accurately next time. The skip-stitch blade worked very well, but I think the dense pattern of the fleece is what lent to the difficulty in cutting the holes.

JoAnns has their fleece on sale this weekend, at 2.99 a yard, so I'm hoping to pick some up early tomorrow and be able to experiment with it more.

So, just a quick update. I'll post the finished projects when they are done!

More Hexagons! Log Cabin Snowflake

 By Kaelyn Angelfoot

Quilt in a box!

Since I'm never satisfied with just one project, I've started yet another quilt. This one is another paper-pieced log cabin variation. The pattern was downloaded free from CompuQuilt, and is copyright them. I've provided a link to it as I cannot repost without risking copyright violations.

I actually started this quilt prior to the kaleidoscope one, and I ended up using fabric I had on hand. It was just luck that I had purchased all thirteen fabrics for a couple of different quilts that never made it past the planning stage. I had exactly enough in each color to make a jewel-toned log cabin. I also find it amusing that I can fit an entire quilt into a shoebox. It took a decent amount of experimentation to find the correct strip size for each piece. I ended up erring on the generous side, see the table below for the sizes I used.

There are several different choices for block arrangement. I chose what I have come to call "snowflake." This quilt would be gorgeous with the two matching sides in blue and the third side in silver to make a winter themed quilt.

Close up of block arrangement

The finished block will be approximately twelve inches across. I will need a minimum of twenty blocks to make a decent sized lap quilt, or 120 triangles. The only question is whether I have the patience to make a quilt that large. As you can imagine, its a very time consuming block to make. The pattern has thirteen pieces per triangle.

Layout of final quilt

Paper Piecing: Tips for Funny Angles

By Kaelyn Angelfoot

My newest project is paper-piecing. I love the space quilt I'm working on so much I decided to experiment with the fabric a little further. I choose a pattern from "101 Log Cabin Blocks" published by DRG. The pattern I selected was named "Vertigo" and can be found on page 26.

First of all, I had to make copies of the pattern. Because the pattern was in a bound book, I decided to cut the pattern page out of the book so that it would lay flat in my copier. The next thing I noticed is that the copier was feeding paper at an angle, so my blocks were printing slightly crooked. I was eventually able to compensate for this. It is very important to check your printed patterns against a square before you begin sewing.

The first thing I learned was that it is nearly impossible, due to the unusual angles of this block, to line up your fabric strips by sight. I ended up developing an easy system to compensate, which greatly reduced both fabric waste and time needed.

As you can see from the picture, once I got to a certain point, it was very difficult to determine where to lay the next strip.

To help me line up your fabric strips, I flipped the pattern over so the back was showing and placed a pin at either end of the pattern line that will be stitched.

Then I flipped the pattern over to the front and placed two pins in the top of the pattern where the pins from the back were showing through and removed the back pins.

Finally, I laid fabric strip so that it lined up with where the pins enter the fabric, then shifted it up to cover the pins by approximately 1/4", pinned in place and stitched!

The final block is 7" x 7", with a half inch seam allowance. I will trim the seam allowance down to 1/4" before I stitch it to other blocks.