After my mom looked at the quilt, I folded it and placed it on top of the built-in cabinet in our living room. I planned to take it back downstairs within the hour.

And within an hour of their leaving, I found this:

This is how I interpret the look on his face:

“So, I see we both like quilts!”

My sister Sian had her third son, Alexander Jackson Bailey, on September 26, 2011. As they live in Massachusetts, I didn’t get to meet him until they came down for Ronan’s birthday party in November, but I sent him a set of little fleece pajamas with pumpkins on them and a pumpkin hat with matching booties. She sent me these wonderfully styled photos of him wearing them:

(By the way, both of the pretty pretty quilts in the above pictures were made by my mom.)

I had made wallhangings for each of Sian’s older sons when they were baptized, incorporating photos of them as infants.  Here’s Bruce’s, from 2004:

And Luke’s, from 2009:

As the youngest of three boys, I imagine Alexander will have quite a few hand-me-downs of clothes, books, and toys. I wanted to make sure that, even though my life circumstances have changed quite a bit since his older brothers were born, he still had a quilt from me that was made just for him and was at least the equal of the ones I’d made for his brothers.

Alexander’s Quilt, 38″ x 38″

It’s nice to have a reason to make a little quilt from time to time. My projects tend to suffer from gigantism, as regular readers well know; if I hadn’t wanted to conform to the same general size range as the other two wallhangings, who knows what this might have grown into? Especially because the block technique I had wanted to try anyway, Anita Grossman Solomon’s Unbiased Block from the April/May 2012 issue of Quilters Newsletter, turned out to be so addicting that I might have just kept going. She has you use strips of fusible interfacing on two identical squares of striped fabric to create this handy-dandy hourglass/pinwheel block that does not distort, despite the bias edges on the outside. It’s way too much fun. If you, like I, have a big collection of striped fabric, this technique is an excellent excuse to spend an afternoon playing. One pleasant surprise was that the wiggly, uneven, painterly stripes created more successful blocks to my eye than the traditional, regular stripes.

Corner detail, Alexander’s Quilt

This was entirely a stash quilt. The only purchase I made was the batting, and only because I didn’t want to cut up a queen-sized piece. Inspired by the fall colors in the photo, I pulled all the autumnal stripes from my collection and decided to make nine blocks from five different fabrics. I did have one nonstarter; while I loved this corn fabric (and it really is functionally a stripe):

No. Just no.

it was WAY too busy when I put it up on the design wall with the others. In a bed-size quilt I might have gotten away with it, but not in a small quilt like this. I wanted to use the gold fossil fern fabric for the sashing, but I didn’t have enough of it, so I used it for cornerstones and chose the orangey stone-veined fabric to pad it out. As with virtually any other instance in my quilting career where I’ve made a decision to include more fabric in a project, I think it is an improvement over my original idea. I will make it a point to use low-contrast cornerstones in future projects where I might otherwise have just used straight sashing.

Center detail, Alexander’s Quilt

Once everything was pieced, I fused the transferred photo and some simple leaf shapes and appliqued them down with a machine buttonhole stitch in a variegated heavy thread. (I’m purposely skipping over the step where I obsessed over leaf placement for multiple evenings in a row, consulting Dan to the point of exhaustion, then accidentally let the fan blow half of them off onto the floor.) I quilted an overall design of leaves and tendrils over the entire top, ignoring seam lines but tying in the appliqued leaves as if they were part of the edge-to-edge quilting design. This was the first time I’d ever done anything like this, especially freehand, and it was a fun puzzle challenge to decide on the fly what I should quilt where. It was also the first time I’d quilted details into my appliques, rather than just quilting around them or going over them with a filler pattern, and I was very pleased with the faux-trapunto result. The photo also looked much more defined with some simple outlining quilted in.

I’ve been handstitching more of my bindings lately, but this quilt got a Sew Precise, Sew Fast machine binding out of the fabric I used for the center square, and with a sleeve and label attached, it’s done in plenty of time for his June 10 baptism:

Label detail, Alexander’s Quilt

I’m still plugging away on the shop hop sampler quilt, but barring major upheaval or disaster in either the quilt or my life, it should be done for the show without necessitating any sleepless nights. I’ve also been tapped to demonstrate freehand feather quilting at the guild quilt show, so I need to gather my samples and my thoughts to prepare for that. And the guild challenge is impatiently tugging at a corner of my subconscious, asking for attention to be paid to it. The beat goes on…

I WANT TO TOUCH ALL YOUR FABRIC

Five quilts down, one to go:

“Spumoni Spring” 2012, 72″ x 72″

I have submitted my entry forms for the guild quilt show, now only a month away, and I am entering six quilts:  Welcome Ronan, AKA Ronan’s Quilt; The Very Hungry Caterpillar; Dragons Galore, AKA Minkee Dragons; Halloween Buzz Saw; Spumoni Spring, AKA Pink and Brown; and the shop hop sampler quilt. That final one is still on the sewing table, still being quilted. BUT! It’s mostly complete, I know what I’m doing with the rest of it, and I already have the binding made. AND! The other five are completely finished, including hanging sleeves. I think that’s a personal best; I’m usually sewing on hanging sleeves into the wee hours of Wednesday morning before the show, when we have to bring our quilts to the fairgrounds.

So, back to Spumoni Spring. The title presented itself once I added that green:

Block detail, “Spumoni Spring”

The blocks are quilted in a Pam Clarke-inspired design, for which I used her Basic 8 stencil and a blue chalk pounce to just give me some temporary guidelines to work with. This was a really satisfying technique:  no blue marker to wash out, but definitely more consistent results than I can achieve by just eyeballing it. The blue chalk was highly visible on all my fabrics, but it brushes off very quickly, so I couldn’t mark more than one block at a time. I was also trying to use as few thread starts and stops as possible. Therefore, as I prepared to enter each block, I had to use my big 16 1/2″ square plexiglass ruler as a table to slide under the quilt and give me a surface on which to mark my blue chalk asterisk. Not the most graceful technique in the world, but I’m not arguing with the finished product.

Border quilting detail, Spumoni Spring

The two center vertical strippy borders were such a busy print that I knew nothing would show up, so I just echoed the print to create the appropriate quilting density. The two outer vertical strippy borders were not quite as busy, but with that large floral, I still didn’t want to exert myself particularly; if I’m going to do something fancy, I want to be able to see it! Therefore, I selected a design I’d been meaning to try:  Onions and Garlic from Megan Best’s “Spinal Twist” book. It’s simple but creates a beautiful texture, which (like many of my favorite freehand designs) benefits from being somewhat imprecise. This is one I will definitely use again.

The outermost pinwheel border was the area I selected to get the least dense quilting design. I’ve mentioned before how I like Sue Patten‘s principle that a quilt should have three densities of quilting to create depth and contrast, the same way the top should have three values of fabric. Since this is definitely a lap/cuddle quilt, rather than a wall quilt, I thought having a nice soft poofy border where your face would go might work out well. We’ll see, because currently I feel like it needs something more. Oh well, it’s a learning experience! I just did a looping continuous curve variation, following the seam lines as if they were hourglass blocks:

Feather quilting detail, Spumoni Spring

In contrast, the densest quilting was in the green border, where I did one of Patsy Thompson‘s feather wave borders. I broke down and mail-ordered the 40″ flexible curve ruler, which made marking the spine VERY easy. I used a variegated pink thread from Fil-Tec that behaved beautifully; I will definitely be exploring more of their threads.

Label detail, Spumoni Spring

The binding seemed to need to be green as well, and I used a spare pinwheel block as the label. And after five years in the UFO box, it’s finished! It feels so good to be racking up a list of these. Of course, the next “Finished!” post will be about a new (though small) project that I’m taking to Show & Tell at guild tonight, and I’m already mentally making my challenge quilt for next fall, so the UFO completion rate will probably slip a bit in the near future. But at the same time, the confidence I’ve built over the last several projects is really encouraging me to take a deep breath and quilt Ruby Wedding. Now THAT would alleviate some quilt guilt and free up some brainspace!

This quilt’s happy dance really couldn’t be to any other song, and Gerard Darmon’s version of it for this video made me smile:

“Summer’s just around the corner!”

On a recent weekend I attended the spring retreat for my quilt guild. I’m determined to get my 2007 Shop Hop quilt finished for our guild show in June, so I didn’t bring any other quilts to work on. (More on that shortly.) However, I knew that it’s not good for me to sit in one position for too long at a stretch, and I wanted to have something productive to do while I pondered any quilting decisions. Therefore, I also brought my scrap bag:

Do you like my “Coach bag”?

As I’ve previously posted, I’ve been trying to implement Bonnie Hunter’s Scrap User’s System. I’ve been doing pretty well with cutting up scraps as I cut fabric for new quilting projects, but I still have a huge backlog from before I started. Every time I felt like I needed to stretch my back or walk around, I’d meander over to the cutting table and cut scraps for a while. I estimate that through the course of the weekend, I probably spent 3 hours sorting and cutting up scraps. I had a nice collection of strips, blocks, and squares to show for my efforts by Sunday afternoon:

Strips, bricks, and squares from above

It looks like a lot of fabric, doesn’t it?

And here’s an “after” shot of my scrap bag:

Really. No tricks, no photoshop.

Yeah. Really. No kidding. I did not stage this in any way; I didn’t fluff up the scraps, or pick up anyone else’s. Either the fabrics were extremely compacted in there and I just relieved some of the pressure on them, or I have some sort of bottomless, loaves and fishes scrap bag. And that’s a miracle I do NOT need in my life, thanks! So, my “Coach bag” will be a presence in my studio for a while yet.

Anyway, I did spend the majority of the weekend quilting the Shop Hop sampler quilt. At the December retreat, I had completed all the stitching in the ditch and had quilted freehand feathers in the plaid setting triangles of the center strip:

At this retreat, I finished the setting triangles and quilted all 18 sampler blocks. This presented an interesting challenge, as nearly every block required me to come up with an entirely different quilting design. There were a few piecing doubles that gave me an intellectual rest. (As an aside, do we have a term for that in quilting:  two blocks that are identical in the piecing, but appear different due to different value placement? If not, I’m thinking of something along the lines of the homonym/homograph/homophone terminology, but I don’t know who gets to determine these things. It’s not cut and dried like paleontology where the person who discovers the new fossil species gets to name it.) But with very few exceptions, each new block I came to was a new puzzle to solve. This added to the difficulty level but also kept the process much more interesting; repeating the same design 18 times would have gotten monotonous.

I still have a significant amount of work to do in the remaining six weeks before the show, but I know I can meet the deadline without pulling a bunch of sleepless nights. And if I have to eat those words, I promise to do it publicly.

And as always, I had a wonderful time at the retreat. It’s such a renewing experience to be surrounded by other quilters. And when you’re eating, sleeping, and breathing quilting, you start to see quilts everywhere. This was the floor in our bathroom:

I see square-within-a-square and on-point four-patches.

Monkeying around at the quilt show

I can’t believe more than a month has passed since the AQS Lancaster Quilt show. Spring is apparently when time gets away from me more easily:  I had actually started to write a post about last year’s show, but got busy and never finished or posted it. So I’m going to beg your patience and try something a little different:  let’s call it a time travel post! Starting in the past:

On Saturday, March 19, Ronan and I attended the AQS Lancaster Quilt Show. We met Diane and Lisa there, and spent from 10 am to 4 pm on the premises. The crowds were decent, but not unmanageable; although it was the only weekend day the show was open, it was also the last day of the show. Quilts were viewed, stuff was bought.

So far, everything from last year applied to this year’s show as well. I reiterate my frustration with AQS’s policy of running their shows Wednesday – Saturday rather than continuing to Sunday the way the Mancuso shows do and Quilters’ Heritage Celebration always did. The rationale that’s given at my father-in-law’s model railroading shows is that vendors who have brick-and-mortar stores can be open on Monday if they have Sunday to travel and unpack. Yet at the same time, I frequently hear representatives of both hobby communities lament the increasing average age of hobbyists and bemoan the difficulties of attracting younger people. Talk about unclear on the concept! Younger people work, or attend school, or have young children. In this economy, I see plenty of people who are afraid to take a day off work for dental treatment, let alone to attend a quilt show; child care is also frequently easier to arrange on weekends. To me, having the quilt show end on Saturday is saying to young quilters, “We are not at all concerned about making your attendance easier, because we don’t need you.” Not exactly the message I’d expect.

"Blue Rhapsody" by Carolyn Rider. Breathe, Sarah, look at the pretty blue quilt and calm down...

Hey, who left that soapbox out? Anyway, back to 2011:

Based on a rereading of my blog posts from last year’s inaugural AQS Lancaster show, I’d very much like to claim to be a great predictor of the future. However, my March Madness bracket hanging in the office lunchroom puts the lie to that. So I’ll have to settle for believing that the powers that be at AQS must be very perceptive, receptive, and willing to fix what doesn’t work. I’ve been impressed with the organizers of Quilting with Machines on the very same counts, which gives me hope that the future of organized quilting is with people who are open to change.

First, and most important, it was all under one roof this year– no more silly Liberty Place nonsense. And as if that weren’t triumph enough, they utilized the space they had in the convention center far more effectively for displaying the quilts, placing them in the most brightly lit areas of the main exhibition hall. The displays are still chained off, making it difficult to see details on the center quilt in each group of three, and AQS policy is still that no turning of quilts is done by the “white glove angels” to show quilt backs, but overall the quilt viewing experience was vastly better this year.

Again, nothing to add. They’re still playing with the layout of the competition quilts on the main floor, and I think this year was the best yet for traffic flow and lighting.

"Princess Argiope" by Martha Lorshbaugh. She made an arachnid quilt. I love this hobby so much...

I can’t talk about my show experience without discussing how different it was to walk a quilt show with a four-month-old. He was in his element:  there were colors, lights, and lots of people smiling at him. He’s a little ham, and quite the extrovert, so of course he was smiling and showing off his dimple and generally flirting with everyone in sight. He was mostly well-behaved, only fussing when he needed to be fed or changed, and was willing to ride in his stroller for most of the day with just one interval mid-morning of needing the Baby Bjorn. That was when I had my big moment of starstruck quilt geekdom, when Rachel Pellman (!) came over to me (!!) to confirm that I was the pregnant woman she had talked to at a guild meeting last August and to see the baby!!! So Ronan made Rachel Pellman remember me! I can live with that. Far better than if she’d said, “weren’t you the one who told that cat vomit story at a guild meeting?”

It was even different again to attend with a 16-month-old. Ronan was very well behaved in his stroller, smiling at ladies and even reacting to some of the quilts!

"Out On A Limb" by Ann Horton, Joyce Paterson, & Renee Gannon. Ronan reached out for this quilt with both hands and jabbered away about it!

I tried to be as considerate and unobtrusive with the stroller as possible, and while the multilevel nature of the convention center required me to spend a far greater fraction of my day waiting for elevators than I would ideally have liked, I can’t fault the facilities otherwise. There was a lovely “family bathroom” in the main exhibit hall that made changing Ronan very easy and convenient, and the third floor had clever little banquettes built into the wall that made for a quiet, private place to feed him. Overall, good baby and good environment made for an excellent experience.

That quiet area on the third floor also worked out this year as a place for him to run around and burn off some energy after having been in the stroller for too long.

A well-deserved break in the quiet 3rd floor hallway

As I’ve been trying to do at most quilt shows I’ve attended lately, I kept fabric purchases to a bare minimum, just a panel for a gift and some interesting salesman samples still on their cardboard hangers. I did buy a decent amount of thread, hitting the Superior Threads booth as anticipated but also getting some to try from Fil-tec, which is located right in relatively nearby Hagerstown, MD. I also fell victim to my usual Achilles’ Heel, intriguing notions and gadgets, with the purchase of a set of strip pressing bars that have already made themselves very useful in my studio.

But of course, as always, the stars of the show were the quilts. I’m always looking for inspiration for quilting designs, as well as just enjoying the beauty, especially the unexpected. The official show website has better pictures than I could ever take of the top ribbon winners, but here’s a sample of some of the others that stood out to me:

"This is MY quilt!"

Yes, I know Ronan is only 16 months old and probably doesn’t need quite so many quilts. But we do storytime every night before bed, and one of his absolute favorites has long been The Very Hungry Caterpillar. So when I saw the full line of the fabulous Andover Fabrics Eric Carle fabrics at Ladyfingers when we did the shop hop last fall, I couldn’t resist. I didn’t think I’d make anything with them any time soon, but when I was reorganizing the fabric in my studio closet I wound up leaving the central panel within toddler reach. Ronan not only grabbed for it, he kept playing peek-a-boo with it and was making his “cute noise” (normally reserved for sightings of furry animals) while looking at it. What could I do but start a quilt?

I had lots of fun with this due to the extremely simple piecing and the bright saturated colors. While there are absolutely gorgeous blenders and tone-on-tone fabrics in the Andover collection, I chose the path of thrift and used all fabrics from my stash for the four-patches. The long vertical mirror-image panels with the caterpillar and the sun were originally joined in the center for making a bolster pillow or door-bottom draft stopper, but I thought they’d look more interesting in the quilt. I originally planned this as a lap quilt, but it finished 53″W x 76″L; I thought about stopping with just the central three panels divided and surrounded by four-patches, but I loved that large stripe and decided it needed to be a part of this top. Besides, that means Ronan will be able to use it on his big-boy bed someday.

The large food stripe had the power to be a deal breaker because it depicts the art from Ronan’s favorite pages in the book, the ones in which the holes in the foods are actually punched out of the book’s pages so that little fingers can follow the path of the caterpillar. I had only bought 3/4 yard of the stripe last fall, as I had no idea what (if anything) I was going to make out of these fabrics and I didn’t want to go overboard. However, it’s also not the sort of design that could be pieced without looking extremely strange. Therefore, once I finished the center of the quilt and all the four-patches, I got on the Ladyfingers website to order two more yards. They were sold out. Trying not to panic, I began searching elsewhere online. I did find a few sites that had it in stock, but they were either a) in England, or b) offering it for the low low price of FIFTEEN DOLLARS A YARD. So Ronan and I made a Saturday morning trip to Zook’s at Kitchen Kettle Village in Intercourse. They had the majority of the line, but not the large food stripe. (I consoled myself by buying a few other fabrics at their fabulous prices.) However, across the street at The Old Country Store, they had it!

Success!

I promptly brought it home, washed it, and cut it the wrong size. The less said about that day, the better.

But I made it work. I had initially planned to have those borders run the entire width of the quilt without being surrounded by four-patches on all sides, so I wouldn’t be limited to multiples of 2″ for the height of the border and could just follow the design. So although having to cut it 12″ finished height meant that there are some little stems and leaves and details peeking up from the seam line, I think ultimately the four-patches gave it a more finished and cohesive appearance. I can’t say I’m glad that the price of gas is tiptoeing towards $4/gallon, but that certainly helped me make the decision to work with what I had rather than jumping back in the car, and I think the final result is the better for it.

In my continuing struggle to select appropriate quilting designs and appropriate threads to quilt them in, I think this project was a solid success. I wanted this quilt to be softer and more pliable than Ronan’s fancy blue and taupe quilt, so thus much less heavily quilted. The batting is Quilter’s Dream Orient, a blend of bamboo, silk, Tencel, and cotton; I thought it would be funny for the caterpillar quilt to have batting made by actual caterpillars. A practical advantage of this batting is that it can be quilted up to 8″ apart, granting me significant latitude in designing the quilting.

I never want to mark or measure more than necessary, so I used the four-patches as landmarks for gridding the unpieced panel areas. I used a simple on-point square grid for the central panels, and a hanging-diamond variation for the horizontal borders. I think grids come the closest to disappearing over heavily graphic areas so as not to distract from the artwork. This also allowed me to use the walking foot for all straight line quilting. I then switched to my free-motion setup, which continues to perform extremely well, with no skipped stitches or shredded thread. Again drawing inspiration from the subject matter, I quilted echoed leaves in all the four-patches. I used a yellow Isacord #40 polyester thread for all quilting. While it did play peekaboo to some extent, I’m happy with the result.

This process was a good reminder that simple quilts can be a satisfying and rewarding experience, that every quilt teaches me something. And Ronan loves it and knows that it’s his, which is reward enough.

I made the label from the only four leftover four-patches.

For a happy dance for a quilt based on the story of a caterpillar’s life cycle from egg to butterfly, what could be more appropriate than “The Circle of Life”? Dan and I were fortunate to see “The Lion King” on Broadway about 10 years ago, and this number left me speechless:

"Sometimes Mommy quilts till the cows come home!"

I haven’t been blogging lately, but I have been quilting! I have two quilts that are within heartbeats of being finished, and I’ll discuss the first one here. It’s a return to my original purpose for this blog, to motivate me to finish my unfinished projects and to document the process.

This is a weird UFO because to many eyes, it’s a finished top that just needs to be quilted.  In fact, that’s exactly what it is; I’m just being difficult.

In the nine years I worked at my former practice, we had three employees retire, and I made a quilt for each of them.  The most recent retiree, in April 2007, was a woman who decorates in a refined country style and loves pink, so I thought pinks and browns, heavy on the Civil War reproductions would suit her well.

Our guild had hosted a workshop on the Square in a Square ruler technique.  I had been unable to attend the workshop (stupid full-time job!) but had seen the great quilts that emanated from it, so I bought the ruler and a book and chose a nice Churn Dash variation block.  I’d been collecting pink and brown fabrics for a while (remember how you couldn’t avoid them a few years ago?) and paired them with shirting fabrics.  I made thirty blocks, making two each of fifteen fabric combinations, so that I could have a quilt to keep as well as one to give away.

I wound up loving the blocks but was less than impressed with the Square in a Square technique.  Sure, it’s accurate, but it does weird things with grain lines, leaving biases in places I don’t want them and creating some wacky effects with directional prints (look at the top block in the rightmost column to see a particularly egregious example).  Plus, I found it to be very wasteful of fabric; I brought my scrap bag to retreat after making this quilt, and one of my friends managed to make an entire pieced tablecloth just out of the offcuts. So I donated the Square in a Square ruler and books to the Guild Boutique. I may not be Sally Collins, but I am a decently precise piecer, so I don’t think I need this technique to be happy with both the process and the results of my piecing.

My thought for finishing this quilt was to make it both larger than it was and to make it just a little bit different than the first one. I have yet to make any completely identical quilts, and I’m in no hurry to start. With the large vertical strippy borders, I didn’t want to simply add solid circumferential borders, so I decided on pieced borders. And since I absolutely love pinwheel blocks, which would echo the half-square triangles in the corners of the central blocks, I settled on a plan. And then… stopped. For five years.

Continuing my snowball method of trying to pick out the UFOs with the least amount of necessary finishing work, and being in more of a piecing mood than a quilting mood at the moment, I pulled this top out of its box after finishing my retreat tote. Putting it back up on the design wall, I realized that it definitely needed a solid spacer border both to give the eye a place to rest and to make the math work for the pinwheel blocks. But what to use? A bold print would get lost, and using either pink or brown would mean that half of the pinwheel blocks would blend into it. I briefly considered using a neutral, but finally decided there was no way I could go but green.

The Judie Rothermel print I had used for the inner two vertical strip borders had touches of green, as did the stems and leaves of the floral in the outer two, but it was kind of an odd green that I was sure I’d have to shop for. Surprise, I had yards of an otherwise unremarkable tone-on-tone in exactly the right green. I must have bought it at an extreme discount, because it’s rather boring and I can’t imagine why I would otherwise have been inspired to buy so much of a fabric I didn’t love. But it was perfect for this project, so serendipity works!

To cut the pinwheels, I used the Easy Angle Ruler. Bonnie Hunter references this ruler all the time, so I had bought one (JoAnn’s coupon!) ages ago but hadn’t tried it. Basically, it allows you to make half-square triangle squares without the +7/8″ that leads to cutting weird-sized strips. I was making 3″ squares for a 6″ finished size pinwheel block, so by using the ruler I could cut my pieces from 3 1/2″ strips. I was very happy with this technique, as it gave me good precision, eliminated one set of dogears from the finished square, and left more usable scrap sizes than the traditional technique. I completely understand why Bonnie has embraced it, as it allows far more efficient usage of common strip sizes from her Scrap User’s System; it would also be great for jelly rolls or Bali Pops.

I had the typical fun laying out the border blocks:  for a quilt containing so many fabrics, it seemed way too easy to duplicate fabrics in close proximity to one another. But I finally came up with a layout that satisfied me, and sewed everything together.

This was the moment that for me, put the final nail in the Square in a Square technique. That was the weirdest, wonkiest quilt top I have EVER produced. Biases were fighting each other everywhere! I guess I hadn’t noticed it as much when I made my coworker’s quilt because I didn’t try to put a border on it; I was also at an earlier point in my machine quilting learning curve, when I wasn’t as cognizant of trying to keep straight lines straight, or quilts square and flat. It is very possible that that earlier quilt is actually trapezoidal or rhomboid and I just didn’t notice. (I hope my coworker didn’t, either!)

I’m hoping that it will all quilt out; I was able to get things more or less stabilized when I spray basted, so hopefully the finished product will be a square, flat quilt with occasionally straight lines. But even if it’s not, I’ll be able to say two good things about it: that it’s DONE, and that the back is fabulous:

Now that’s a fabric that I know the reason I bought four yards of it.

Talking about that top reminded me of The Singing Quilter, Cathy Miller, and her song, “You Can Quilt That Out.” I was happy to find this video for the song, made by professional longarm quilter Mavis Rosbach of Quiltbird Studio:

Christmas is exhausting!

Here we are in 2012 already! How did that happen? Christmas was a delightful whirlwind:  we did a lot of shopping, baking, driving, and visiting. I got some quilting books as gifts, and have plans to spend some gift cards and money on some other quilting gadgetry, but otherwise I hadn’t really been engaged in any quilting pursuits since finishing Ronan’s quilt a few weeks ago. The lack of pressure to finish quilted gifts was nice (I didn’t make any!) but I found myself at a bit of a loss when I actually had some time in the studio on New Year’s Day. I didn’t want to pull out the gigantic Shop Hop Sampler quilt that I started quilting at the guild retreat, as I didn’t know how much time I’d have to devote to it; I knew I couldn’t let myself start anything new; but what small UFO did I have? Fortunately, I remembered my Retreat Tote.

Quilting Retreat Tote, 27" x 19"

During our annual GenCon trip in 2008, I had spotted a shop model at Back Door Quilts in Greenwood, IN for an attractive, functional, large tote designed for lugging rotary cutting mats and rulers to classes and retreats. And (as is so often the case) thank goodness for the shop model, because I never would have given the pattern a second glance. The pattern, “Rotary Cut Border Bag Quilter’s Tote” by The Kentucky Quilt Company, was published in 2003 and the cover shot depicts a bag made to very self-consciously mimic the French Provinicial and paisley Vera Bradley bags that were extremely popular at that time.

Once I actually opened the pattern, though, I saw that the designers had done the work for me on a bag that I’d been designing in my own head for quite a while. One of my favorite things to do at a quilting retreat is to accomplish all the cutting for a project:  having a large, cat- and baby-free space makes the task far easier and far less fraught with worry, and having friends nearby to chat with makes a tedious job fly by. However, rotary cutting mats and large rulers are notoriously difficult to transport. I had thought about how best to make a custom tote to accommodate them, and had looked at (and rejected) a number of other designs, but this one seemed perfect. Inside, one side has a velcro pocket to hold a 17″ x 23″ rotary mat and/or a portable pressing surface:

Mat pocket, Retreat Tote

while the other has zippered pockets to hold rotary cutter, pens, templates, and other smaller items as well as larger pockets for books, patterns, and fabrics.

Accessories pockets, Retreat Tote

On the outside is a long pocket with a velcro flap closure to hold a 6″ x 24″ rotary cutting ruler.

Front ruler pocket, Retreat Tote

Of course, being me, I couldn’t leave well enough alone. The original design calls for a velcro flap closure at the top edge between the handles, and then long pieces of velcro inside to hold the sides closed. I decided I didn’t like the long pieces of velcro and wanted to use a zipper instead. I recognized that this would increase the difficulty of the overall project, but I underestimated by just how much… more on that later.

I started the tote at Kathy’s house the following spring, using fabric I’d bought at Seminole Sampler from Jason Yenter‘s Floragrafix I line. I used to do a lot of rubber stamping, and I loved how these fabrics reminded me of the edgier collage-style stamp art I’d seen. Plus, a color scheme of gray, aqua, red, black, and melon? Sign me up! As the pattern called for prequilted fabric yardage, I had to make my own prequilted fabric before cutting the pieces. I used Sandy Terry’s Hooked on Feathers design, as I had just used that to great effect when making a ridiculous number of Christmas table runners a few months before.

This was where I ran into trouble. I somehow managed to forget that quilting shrinks the fabric. Rather than making my quilt sandwich, quilting it, and then cutting out the pieces, I cut everything to size first and then quilted it, thinking I was using my fabric more efficiently. This resulted in my quilted pieces being slightly smaller than the pattern called for. That this was a problem was not immediately apparent:  I followed the construction steps carefully, and was pleased with the professional-looking, tailored appearance of the various flaps and pockets as I made them. The inside zipper pockets use an interesting technique of joining two 14″ zippers head to head to produce a 28″ zipper with two pulls drawing from the center to open and close all the pockets along the entire width of the bag. All this went very well, except for the fact that my bag was supposed to be 28 1/2″ wide and was now only 28″… which meant there was no seam allowance next to the ends of the zippers. I had chosen nice heavy “sport” zippers for durability, so their end stops were big chunky pieces of plastic. This left me with a beautifully constructed unfinished bag, with no way to attach binding or zippers to the sides. I pushed it into the bottom of the closet.

I definitely suffered quilt guilt over this one, because not only was I upset about my error and about not having finished yet another project, but I actually wanted to use the bag! But the only way I could see to correct the problem was to rip out that 28″ zipper and replace it, which I did not want to do. Fortunately, what this project needed was to be left in the closet for roughly three years to marinate. When I pulled it out and assessed it on New Year’s Day, I realized that the zipper problem was really only a problem for that 1/2″ on either side of the bag. I could attach binding to the rest of the perimeter, just skipping over the zipper stops, then go back and tack those spots down by hand. Once that was done, I reassessed the closing zipper idea. I still didn’t like the designer’s plan to use those long velcro pieces, and besides, the ship had sailed on placing a closing flap on the top. But I couldn’t use a single zipper to close the whole bag without running into those zipper stops for the inside pockets. Instead, my brainstorm was to use three separate zippers:  one separating zipper across the top edge, and one along either side, stopping just before the inside pocket zipper.

Corner zipper detail, Retreat Tote

It’s not perfect; it’s certainly not elegant. But you know what it is? Functional and FINISHED! And once again, most definitely a learning experience.

For a happy dance, I will stay within the accessories category with the brilliant Liam Kyle Sullivan and his hilarious character Kelly in the original “Shoes” (NSFW language.)

Getting ready for Christmas!

Way back in March, I had posted a picture of the quilt I was making for Ronan. I had finished Arianna’s quilt to give to her on the day both babies were baptized, and I really did believe that I’d finish Ronan’s quilt shortly thereafter. So here we are, more than nine months later, and hey, it’s done! Obviously, it’s not that I’ve been working on it all this time, just that the small amount of studio time I get these days hasn’t been devoted to this project. I put the borders on over the summer, pieced the back, made the binding, spray basted the quilt, and… stopped. It was mostly fear of ruining this quilt top after all the thread problems I’d had, especially considering how many seam intersections there are in all those hourglass blocks. However, Halloween Buzz Saw was a great confidence builder, so I was willing to venture a try. My guild retreat the first weekend in December was a great opportunity to get a large portion of the quilting done.

Ronan's Quilt, 52" x 52"

I started by stitching in the ditch with the walking foot to stabilize the whole quilt top, which allowed me to start the free motion quilting wherever I wanted to. In this case, I wanted to start with the feathered border. I’d been excited about this border ever since Quilting with Machines, since it was really the only place on the quilt where elaborate quilting would show. I used Robison-Anton #40 polyester thread in a light blue to quilt a Patsy Thompson-style free-motion feather after marking the spine and  a 1″ margin inside the borders, then echo quilted on either side of it using Isacord polyester thread in a light tan. Although I’m happy with the overall effect, I had expected the light blue to contrast with the taupe border fabric enough to stand out slightly, and I expected the light tan to blend in more closely and nearly disappear. Instead, the opposite happened: I think the tan has better contrast with the border fabric than the blue. I can’t call it a failure, not by a long shot, but it’s a learning experience, and hopefully not a mistake I’m going to repeat.

Border quilting detail, Ronan's Quilt

The next section to be quilted was the hourglass blocks. I did have some difficulty getting my free motion quilting foot set properly to deal with the bumps where the seams meet, but I found that switching to the closed circular foot attachment rather than the open-toed one I’d been using solved the problem. It’s a little harder to see around, and it requires an extra step when starting to get the thread ends out, but it glides over lumpy block centers rather than getting hooked on any imperfectly pressed flanges of fabric. There must be a good reason why this is the style of all the longarm feet I’ve ever seen! I think I’ll be using this one from now on unless I’m working on a wholecloth, which isn’t particularly likely.

Since I knew the heavy piecing and busy prints in this section weren’t going to allow anything fancy to show, I kept it very simple:  just some continuous-curve-variation loops. It looks prettier on the back than on the front, and I’ll have to remember it as a filler pattern for the future. However, once again I learned something about thread choice, in that I wish I had made a different one. I used the same fine tan thread that I’d used in the border, which means it vanishes in the light and medium triangles but contrasts highly in the dark ones. In retrospect, I don’t know if the better choice would have been to use a variegated thread, which would have played peek-a-boo throughout all the patches, or to use something that would have contrasted with all the fabrics, like a fine orange thread. I just know I should have used something other than what I did. It’s not terrible, just not right.

Applique quilting detail, Ronan's Quilt

I’m happier with the results in the applique blocks. I used the fine blue thread from the border and quilted more heavily over the applique than I ever have before, because I didn’t want to take any chances with a little boy peeling off the pieces. The monogram block got an allover freehand mini Baptist fan, which only shows up on the dark letters but looks good that way, and the hearts block has echo quilting inside the appliques and a loop-de-loop filler in the background.

Handprints quilting detail, Ronan's Quilt

The large blocks featuring the owl print were left for last, in part because I kept equivocating as to what I was going to do with them. This print has so many large solid open areas that I didn’t want to just do a stipple-equivalent filler pattern, but it has enough busy areas that I didn’t want to get too elaborate, either. I also want to introduce meaning through the choice of quilting design whenever possible. So I traced Dan’s, Ronan’s, and my hands and used our handprints as the primary design, stitching them in orange So Fine #50 by Superior Threads. As this wasn’t enough quilting for these large patches, I then went back in and stitched the loop-de-loop filler in the light blue thread, as well as a heart inside each handprint. I am entirely happy with how these sections turned out. I love the idea that in years to come, Ronan will be able to place his hand over his tiny handprint and see how much he’s grown.

The binding is scrappy, using the longest dark taupe scraps I could find among the leftovers from Taupe Winding Ways. I made the binding over the summer when I finished the top and pieced the back, and I made more than twice what I needed for this quilt:  I have no memory of whether that was a conscious decision or just bad math! Oh well, I know this isn’t the last project I’ll have a use for taupe binding on, so it’s not going to waste.

What’s a Ronan-appropriate happy dance? This was my best guess:

"Fabric stores are fun!"

Ronan, my mom, and I did the Eastern Pennsylvania Quilt Shop Hop during the first half of November. I had skipped last year due to being hugely pregnant; although I worked right up till my due date, the OB didn’t want me to be more than an hour’s drive from the hospital during those last four weeks, and while it would have been very appropriate for my child to be born in a quilt shop, I don’t imagine anyone else would have been too happy about it. There were twelve participating shops again this year, a number which has held fairly steady over the last several years, although there have been some changes and substitutions as shops have opened and closed. The absolute peak was 2007, when there were 18 shops, a number I’ve been very familiar with as I have finally finished the top from that year’s sampler blocks. However, that’s news for another post.

This year’s shops, and the order in which we visited them, were:

Saturday, November 5:

Endless Mountains Quiltworks, Tunkhannock

118 Fabrics and More, Sweet Valley

J&B Fabrics, Nescopeck

Sunday, November 6:

The Country Quilterie, Effort

Pocono Sew & Vac, East Stroudsburg

American Ribbon Outlet, East Stroudsburg

The Quilted Crow, Lehighton

Thursday, November 10:

At Piece Quiltery, Easton

Allentown Sew & Vac, Allentown

Happy Sewing Room, Hamburg

Ladyfingers Sewing Studio, Oley

Saturday, November 12:

Wooden Bridge Drygoods, Kutztown

Considering he spent so much time in the car, Ronan did really well. Quilt shops are pretty much his natural habitat: brightly colored fabrics, smiling ladies to meet, and (frequently, during the shop hop) cookies to eat! Spending lots of time with Grandma was an added bonus. If we do it again next year, I think I’m having shop hop team t-shirts made for us.

I feel pretty good about my spending and acquisition habits for this shop hop. Although I certainly did buy fabric, I didn’t buy a single piece at full-price, and not for lack of desire. There are too many gorgeous fabrics out there that seem designed just to catch my eye and get my imagination working overtime. But with little time to quilt and many many projects either unfinished or in the queue, I was able to stifle those expensive flights of fancy and repeat my Bonnie K. Hunter-inspired mantra: “I trust that when and if I need it, there will be an equally gorgeous fabric available. The fabric can live at the store until then.”

I bought several printed panels, again all at a discount. Not only do these form a nice foundation for quick and easy gifts, as well as excellent practice pieces for machine quilting, but I’m also considering working up instructions for my lattice window process that I came up with for Window on Whimsy as either a class or a magazine article (you know, in all my free time) and I would need some additional samples for that. I will NOT be piecing lattice strips on the bias into the animal map panel at the bottom of the photo, as that one is flannel. It is a testament to how much I liked that design (and how deeply discounted it was) that I bought it, despite its being flannel. I absolutely despise piecing with flannel. I love how it looks, love how it feels, HATE working with it for anything that requires precision. So I just don’t.

My favorite purchase of the shop hop has to be my ConeFlower thread holder, pictured above to the left of the fabric. I’ve had the standard functional one from Superior Threads for a few years now, and definitely appreciate how its use allows me to not only buy my thread in bulk cones, but also to tame some otherwise difficult threads. I had seen the ConeFlower in a magazine some time ago, then saw it in person at the Happy Sewing Room’s booth at Quilt Odyssey. I told myself then, that if they still had them at the shop hop, and if I’d been keeping my spending in check, that I would give myself permission to buy one. Not only was I staying within my budget, but I was able to buy the last one they had in stock. I’ve been using it ever since and have been very happy with it. Pretty, functional, and made in the U.S.A.:  how could I go wrong? I’ve long been inspired by William Morris’ statement, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” Ideally, I’ve been seeking out objects and furnishings that unify both, and the ConeFlower certainly fits the bill. It makes me happy whenever my eyes rest on it, and in an ideal world I would react that way to every functional object in my home. Someday, perhaps.

I did also buy the kits for this year’s sampler blocks. I struggled with the decision, as I still have unmade block kits from 2008 and 2009, but 1) they used Quilts of Valor fabrics this year, which are gorgeous, forward a great cause, and address an underrepresented area of my stash; and 2) buying the block kits means that I don’t feel pressured to buy something I don’t want or need at any given shop. Certainly there is no minimum purchase to participate in the shop hop, but I would feel awkward getting my passport stamped without buying anything, and even making the drive to a shop causes me to feel I should have something to show for my efforts. I had given myself a mental budget of $15 per shop, subject to review in the face of unprecedented bargains and/or fabulosity, and a few $4.95 block-kit-only purchases helped offset the bigger-ticket stops.

I don’t know when I might assemble the blocks, or how I might set them when I do, but I certainly got some great ideas on setting sampler blocks from viewing the shop hop quilts on display at each shop. In fact, seeing a different quilt made from the same blocks at each shop is one of the annual high points of the shop hop for me; even if I don’t follow any given pattern for my own eventual quilt, the photos end up being a textbook of setting ideas for any collection of blocks. Click any image to enlarge. Enjoy!