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!

Ronan the baby dragon at Hershey's Chocolate World

I started this blog with the intention of its being a chronicle of, and a motivation for, finishing my UFOs. True, my life over the last 21 months has been rife with more changes than I could ever have anticipated: getting pregnant, losing a job, traveling the country, finding a job, having a baby, learning to balance the whole job/baby situation. Thus, I really shouldn’t be particularly hard on myself over the fact that this is only the second true, preexisting UFO I have finished since starting this project. But all recriminations aside, the fact remains:

I FINISHED MY HALLOWEEN BUZZ SAW QUILT!

Halloween Buzz Saw, 68" x 85"

I’ve referenced this quilt here before due to the minor fabric miracle I experienced, but I hadn’t told its full story. It’s possible that this quilt was my oldest UFO, as I believe it may have been only the third quilt I started when I got back into quilting roughly ten years ago. To begin at the beginning, I love Halloween and always have. Considering I love theater, sewing, and candy, it’s pretty much a natural. My sisters and I always had homemade costumes thanks to our loving, creative, Bernina-having mom, and as soon as I was able to contribute in any way to the construction of my own costumes, I jumped right in. I was a wizard, a werewolf, the Grim Reaper, a pumpkin-headed Headless Horseman, a witch doctor, and a basket of dirty laundry at various points in my costumed career. At one point, I made an octopus costume for my sister Cassandra. So I’ve been collecting Halloween fabrics since before I was quilting; in fact, some of the fabrics in this quilt were purchased while shopping with my best friend from college, Nichole, who died in August 2000. At the time, I didn’t know what I would do with those fabrics, but I knew I had to have them.

I believe it was probably fall of 2002 when we went to visit Kathy and Doug in Haddonfield, NJ and I saw a shop model quilt I absolutely loved at The Little Shop. They had used multiple dark Halloween prints, and then one light fabric as the background. I bought the book and decided that this would be a great showcase for my collection.

From "Leisure Arts Presents Quick Cozy Flannel Quilts"

Here is where my woeful lack of experience came into play. My previous quilting endeavors had primarily revolved around solids, so I didn’t have much real-world knowledge of how value worked with prints. I laid out my fabrics on the dining room table and realized that I had two distinct piles:  prints with a purple or black background, and prints with a cream or orange background. In large pieces, these two groups definitely read as “dark” and “light,” so I thought that rather than mimicking the book or the shop model in having just one light print, I would get to use more fabrics by making both value families scrappy.

You see where this is going. What I failed to recognize in my naiveté was that when you cut a medium to large print into 2 1/2″ strips, you inevitably cut through some of the motifs. And on a light-background print, those motifs are dark, and vice-versa. So when I sewed my strips together, the competing prints just bled into one another and completely lost the sense of the larger design. Again, my inexperience meant that rather than evaluating the situation as I sewed, I just blithely pieced along until I had the whole thing done. I held it up to behold my triumph and saw– a mess.

Detail, Halloween Buzz Saw

I sought out the advice of Diane and Rhonda, who agreed that the wild mishmash of prints caused the intended swirling pattern to be lost. We all agreed that the eye needed somewhere to rest, so I took the twelve blocks apart and sashed them with an undeniably light fabric, an orange ditzy print on a cream background, with lime green cornerstones. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough of the sashing fabric to go around the outside edge. My plan was to use plain muslin, possibly with an orange stripe pieced into it, as a replacement, but I wasn’t entirely satisfied with this idea, so the top was put aside as a UFO.

This actually wound up working in my favor, as I subsequently found the sashing print on the bolt at Quilt Quarters. But by the time I came triumphantly home with my fabric, I was wrapped up in other projects. Every year since, as Halloween has approached, I’ve thought about trying to get this quilt done in time for the holiday. Unfortunately, October is also the month that guild challenges are due, and I’m usually working down to the wire on those. But this year, the planets all aligned:  I had chosen not to make a challenge quilt, as I didn’t want to start another project when I had so many unfinished; I wanted to get some tops ready to quilt in preparation for quilting higher-stakes projects like Ruby Wedding; and it was, after all, nearly Halloween.

The outer sashing and border went together nicely, despite the fact that my piecing from lo these many years ago was woefully uneven. The blocks finished at an average of 14 1/4″ (?!?) and they varied a good bit block to block. But this was never a quilt for show; this was a salvaging of a fun collection of fabrics as well as a bit of an object lesson. I had to piece my border fabric, especially as I wanted the bats to be right side up the whole way around the quilt, but it made me feel thrifty and virtuous.

I used the bamboo blend batting from Pellon Legacy, and this is the first of their battings I’ve been disappointed in. I’ll have to see how it behaves with wear and repeated washing, but while I was quilting it and the excess was exposed around the edges, it shed like mad. I had little fuzz balls all over the quilt top. It’s definitely softer and better draping than Warm & Natural, but overall I wasn’t impressed. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by all this wool.

I wound up taking a relatively short-notice trip to Pottsville, PA for a military dental event the third weekend in October, and since it’s nearly two hours from my house, I had a hotel room for Friday and Saturday nights. Pottsville isn’t exactly a vacation destination, so Dan and Ronan stayed home. To my mind, the only way to find a silver lining in being away from my family for a weekend was to turn my hotel room into a travel quilting studio! Housekeeping must have gotten a kick out of this:

Machine? Check. Sew Ezi table? Check. Law & Order? Check!

My hotel stay gave me a solid start on the quilting, and momentum carried me through so that the last stitch went into the binding with five full days to go before Halloween! I quilted the whole thing using the Superior Threads Rainbows in Piñata that I had bought at Quilting with Machines, and the only marking I did was to divide the sashing into quarters for the freehand pumpkin seed design (I love using that on Halloween quilts.) I used Sue Patten‘s “Questionable Question Mark” with flames along the spine in the buzz saw centers, and placed strings of pearls and some weird little flaming heart things I invented in the orange corners of the blocks. The lime green cornerstones got spirals, and the outer border was done in piano keys using my Accents in Design ruler. I loved doing the quilting; I had no thread problems whatsoever! I can only hope my luck holds.

Quilting detail, Halloween Buzz Saw

The backing is one of my favorite fabric buys ever, Skull-finity by Alexander Henry. I had bought 6 or 7 yards of it at JoAnn Fabrics (of all places) a few years back, and I used the last of it on this quilt. I put a piece of the selvedge on the label so I can’t forget that name.

Back and label, Halloween Buzz Saw

The binding was scrappy, since I didn’t have enough of the lime green bat fabric from the cornerstones, but I had plenty of similar hue and value scraps from my Tucson Saguaro guild challenge quilt from 2007.

This quilt was a terrific confidence builder in many ways:  1) I really can finish my UFOs, even if it takes nearly a decade. 2) The piecing doesn’t have to be perfect. 3) The quilting doesn’t have to be perfect. 4) My machine and I seem to have reached detente.

I think this quilt deserves a slightly different type of happy dance:

Some final cleanup! (This was a broken shredder, imprudently left in the hall prior to disposal)

I was very well-behaved at the vendor mall for QwM:  I did not buy a single piece of fabric! Not one!

(And no, I wasn’t sick.)

Part of it was the realization that I am so over full-priced fabric. First of all, I don’t need anything. I could quilt for literal years without needing to buy any fabric. I can possibly justify buying some larger pieces for borders and backs as needed, but over all, a fabric has to be pretty darn special for me to feel comfortable paying full price for it– especially now that full price is $10.85 or more per yard! The cotton price increase I had posted about last year has definitely arrived, giving a whole lot of quilters a pretty significant case of sticker shock not only at recent shows, but also at the local quilt shop. And since it’s usually the shiny new full-price fabrics that vendors bring along to the shows, not their discount rack, I only had to use a small amount of willpower to keep my wallet in my purse. If I’m going to buy any full-price fabrics, I’d rather give the business to the quilt shops near me who have given me so much in return over the years by way of service, support, advice, and the fostering of a greater quilt community.

Besides, this was Quilting with Machines! There were so many other fun things to buy that I definitely can’t find at my local quilt shops. MeadowLyon Designs was indeed there again this year, and as I posted when I had finished Ronan’s Minkee Dragons quilt, I had planned to buy at least one or two more of her “pictogram” designs. Well, she made the proverbial Offer I Couldn’t Refuse (although no horses were harmed in the making of this purchase.) The pictogram patterns are normally $18-20 each, depending on size, and Judy was running a show special of five patterns for $60! At that rate, it seemed like leaving money on the table to only buy two. So needless to say, I am now the proud owner of five more of her patterns.

In comparison, I was relatively restrained at the Superior Threads booth, considering I’ve already bought the thread for my upcoming big quilting projects, and I’m no longer using their titanium needles for machine quilting. I was considering buying some more NiteLite glow-in-the-dark thread to quilt my Halloween Buzz Saw quilt, but it doesn’t come in orange the way I thought it did, and I couldn’t settle on an alternate color that would look good. Instead, I bought two cones of Rainbows, their 40-weight variegated trilobal polyester, in Piñata for Halloween Buzz Saw and Neons just for fun. In fact, I used that Neons thread for all my class samples and really had a great time with it. I think that’s a thread I’ll be able to use for some Patsy Thompson-style hyperquilted feathers, as well as for anything I want to show up on a print. I also bought an entire 3,000 yard cone of Bottom Line in Tangerine, since in my studio, orange is a neutral.

At the Friday night banquet, which I attended for the third year, there are always door prizes donated by various sponsors and vendors, some of which are worth close to $100. For the first time, this year I won one! The good news was, I was the lucky winner of a Westalee adjustable strip cutting ruler from Quilter’s Rule. The bad news was, I already had it– along with their half-square and quarter-square triangle cutting rulers. I dearly love that ruler; someday I’ll have to do another Favorite Things post about the quilting gadgets and gizmos that make my quilting life more enjoyable, and that ruler would definitely make the list. But I didn’t need a second one. Fortunately, the very nice people at the Quilter’s Rule booth were willing to let me exchange it towards getting some design templates:

These are 1/8″ acrylic, in contrast to the 1/4″ acrylic used for longarm quilting templates, and therefore are at least half as expensive, but can be used for tracing directly onto fabric or onto Golden Threads paper for quilting designs. Sue Patten used shapes like these as the basis for the Zen-Sue-dle designs in the class I took. I’m excited to play around with them and see what I can come up with. The circles will be useful as different-sized arcs as I make my Spirograph-type designs with Renae Hadaddin’s circle and ray tool on Taupe Winding Ways (someday…)

But definitely the best thing I bought at Quilting with Machines this year was my Fine Line Quilter’s Ruler from Accents in Design. I didn’t actually buy it in the vendor mall, but instead from Beth Schillig during her feathers class.

That’s the sort of thing that frequently happens to me when I take classes:  the most valuable thing I learn in any given class is often something only tangentially (if at all) related to the stated focus of the class! Beth was showing us a quilt in progress to display the feathers on it, but we students immediately zeroed in on the beautiful textured border quilted in close parallel lines like beadboard. She demonstrated how she accomplished it with no marking, which is a phrase that’s always music to my ears! I had accepted up to this point that acrylic templates for quilting were a longarm-only option, since you need to guide the machine head along them. However, Accents in Design has developed rulers with handles on the top and gripper strips on the bottom, like super-strength Velcro, so that the template can be used to move the quilt along the foot on a domestic machine. In addition, it has etched lines on the underside so that you can space multiple quilted lines evenly. Beth had brought along extras to sell, and I’ve been greatly enjoying it. In fact:

That’s a preview of my next “Finished!” post, which I could not have accomplished so quickly or sanely without this little gadget. More to come on that soon!

The Best of Show winner was Fire and Ice by Claudia Pfeil, which is gorgeous and fabulous and has got to have won its weight in ribbons by now. I’ve seen it at several other shows, so I didn’t take a new picture; there are nice ones of it and all the other winners at QwM’s show page here. Most of the pictures I did take were of the kind of quilting I think I can reasonably aspire to; there were lots of great ideas. Recently, as I attend shows I’ve been focusing more on trying to get pictures to serve as examples of how other quilters have solved the kind of design decision problems I’m always wrestling with:  the kind that Debby Brown addressed in her class. I tried to get some good detail shots of the quilting, as well as the overall beauty of the quilts.

So bear with me as I try out the slideshow function of WordPress for the first time, and allow me to be your virtual White Glove Angel as you enjoy the pretty!

"That's a great lake, all right!"

Continuing my story…

Friday afternoon and Saturday morning were devoted to my two hands-on domestic sewing machine quilting classes. I feel almost honor-bound to take as many of these as the powers that be at QwM will offer, as I want to do my part to make sure they keep offering them. It also gives me the opportunity to meet, and therefore evangelize to, my fellow DSM quilters who may not know that any of the design-type classes are equally applicable to them as to the more numerous longarm quilters in attendance. We may have to sit through some minor references to canvas leaders and advancing the machine and so forth, but I use that time to meditate about how I can quilt in any direction I choose, for as long a distance as my quilt requires, and how my dining room still has a table in it. Kidding, of course, but Leah Day had an excellent post recently on Seven Reasons Why I Don’t Want or Need a Longarm, which was exactly what I needed to galvanize me pre-QwM against feelings of machine inadequacy. She reinforced the fact that quality machine quilting is possible on a DSM even if you’re not Ricky Tims/ Diane Gaudynski/ Lee Cleland/ Patsy Thompson/ Barbara Shapel/ Karen Kay Buckley/ Caryl Bryer Fallert/ Hollis Chatelain. Don’t get me wrong; if I walked downstairs tomorrow morning to discover that my house had magically grown an extra room with a longarm quilting machine in it, I wouldn’t turn up my nose. But in the real, non-magical world, that’s a huge investment for a huge machine that I’d only use for my own quilts, and buying one wouldn’t automatically turn me into a better quilter, just one with no dining room and a big payment to make every month. The learning curve is still paramount, and the big machine isn’t a shortcut around practicing.

OK, off the soapbox and on to what I did in class. The first was “Freehand Feathers” with Beth Schillig, who has had quilts at Houston and Paducah and used to be a Bernina dealer near Columbus. She was a kind, patient, generous teacher who showed us several feather styles I hadn’t tried before, and I was very happy to have produced these doodle cloths in a four-hour class:

(Click on the pictures to zoom in if you need to, photographing wholecloths is hard.)

The next morning I had “Becoming a Domestic Diva Part 2″ with Penny Roberts, who is primarily a longarm quilter and inventor of longarm gadgets, but keeps her hand in with DSM quilting and was an excellent teacher with a well-thought-out lesson plan. She provided us with a pre-”stitched in the ditch” sample so we could concentrate on the free-motion fun stuff. When she started with continuous curve, I was concerned I had taken too beginner-y a class, but I quickly came to realize that my current lifestyle doesn’t really allow me much time to just play and experiment with my quilting; I always feel like I have to make every minute count so I have to accomplish! Taking these classes was like the “spontaneous activity in a prepared environment” concept from Montessori school:  it gave me permission to just goof off with my machine, and I definitely feel the value of the experience. As you see:

Not to mention, through all that in-class quilting, I did not have a single problem with my machine! Not one! I certainly hope this augurs well for the future.

Saturday afternoon, feeling more than a little fried, I finished up with “But How Should I Quilt This?” with Debby Brown. While the class was excellent, the most valuable thing I took from it was finding Debby! She was not someone whose reputation I knew before taking her class, and I’ve greatly enjoyed perusing her blog and checking out her free online videos and tutorials. She was an entertaining lecturer, and really synthesized a great deal of disparate information into a fairly coherent system for helping the quilter focus on a few complementary designs to successfully quilt each top.

This spoke very centrally to my recurrent problem of Analysis Paralysis when it comes to quilting my own quilts:  I fall for the fallacy that there is only one way to “correctly” quilt the quilt, and if I don’t find it, the quilt will be a failure. Debby rationally and rightly pointed out that the first step to quilting a top is to simply make a decision. Her next words stopped me in my mental tracks and made me write them down:  ”Sometimes it’ll be just good enough, but sometimes it’ll be perfect.” I think the reason I found that simple statement to be so profound (aside from sheer mental and physical exhaustion) is what she didn’t say, but I’ve apparently believed to be true, that there is no acceptable alternative to perfection. And the secret, of course, is that there is. There’s good enough. There’s quite nice. There’s really special. What there is not, is COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE OH MY GOSH YOU RUINED YOUR QUILT. Because even crappy quilting results in…A QUILT! Not a top sitting in a box, waiting to be sold in (hopefully) many decades in my estate sale, but a quilt, that gets used and loved. That keeps the baby warm. That gives the cat a place to sleep. That lets me see that fabric I absolutely had to have. That goes to show and tell and hangs in the guild show and maybe gets given as a gift to wrap the people I love in the longest-lasting hug I know how to give. A top can’t do any of that, and it’s not a quilt until it’s quilted.

So I’m going to go quilt those tops. I’ll keep perfection on the horizon, but I’ll try to keep perfectionism at bay. Let’s go make some good enough quilts.

"I'm on vacation!"

Dan and Ronan came to Ohio with me, and at first that seemed like a mistake. We left Wednesday evening after I got home from work, planning to spend the night in a motel in Hermitage, PA, which would get us most of the way to the resort and leave us just two hours yet to drive in the morning to get me to my 11:00 am Thursday class. Easy, right? As you faithful readers know, I tend not to do so well with the whole “best laid plans” concept, and adding a 10-month-old baby into the mix doesn’t exactly improve my batting average. We left a little later than we’d planned, but still thought we were doing OK until Ronan decided he wasn’t going to sleep. Ever. I got about 3 hours of very intermittent sleep, with Dan doing a little better (he was driving in the morning) but we managed to get me to class with 20 minutes to spare.

Fortunately, it was Sue Patten’s class, and anyone who could sleep through one of her classes probably needs to have a physical. The class was “Zen-Sue-dled in Fabric and Thread,” Sue’s version of the ZenTangles idea. I’ve been a fan of her Three Textures concept for quilting ever since I first heard it in one of her classes two years ago, namely that every quilt needs to contain Puffy, Medium, and Stipple-ish textures of quilting the same way the quilt top needs to contain light, medium, and dark values in order to have depth. In this class, she extends the concept to an idea for designing a wholecloth quilt in a very randomized, artistic, no-rules manner to create a framework for creative play. “Put your favorite part of quilting into this,” is what she told us.

A Zen-Sue-dle wholecloth in progress

I think I could use a piece like this as an opportunity to try some threads, filler patterns, and techniques without the stress that comes from worrying about “ruining” a pieced top, while still finishing something I could call a quilt rather than just creating yet another doodle cloth. Plus, it’s always worth the price of admission to watch her quilt, and she always makes me laugh. After all, this is the banner she had up in her booth:

Next up was Dawn Cavanaugh’s “Quilting Feathers When You’re a Chicken.” Dawn writes the machine quilting column for Fons & Porter’s Love of Quilting magazine, and I had taken her continuous curve class at last year’s QwM. I unfortunately missed the first half-hour of class because my poor sleepless brain somehow thought there was an hour between my 11-1 class and my 1-5 class! Hopefully I didn’t miss anything life-altering, but Dawn graciously welcomed my apologetic breathless disoriented self into class, and I spent the next 3 1/2 hours happily drawing feathers on a whiteboard as she talked us through different feather styles and techniques. I definitely understand Kim Brunner’s “Twirly Whirly Feathers” better now, and I think I know how I’m going to quilt the setting triangles on my Shop Hop sampler quilt.

My favorite of my whiteboard designs

Thank heaven (and more locally, Dan,) Ronan took a good afternoon nap and then slept well Thursday night, so Friday morning I felt like a human being again and was prepared for class. My morning class was initially a letdown through no one’s fault but my own:  I had accidentally registered for the exact same Pam Clarke class, “Fabulous Block to Block Custom Quilting,” that I had taken from her 2 years ago! My heart sank when I flipped through the all-too-familiar handout. But not only was this a great topic for review, but Pam emphasized slightly different aspects of the material, especially as she responded to class questions. Also, since Matt and Alyssa’s wedding quilt and the double pinwheel table runner, two of the only projects I’ve finished in the last year, relied almost exclusively on her concepts and designs, it would have seemed wrong not to take a class from her when attending a seminar where she was teaching, even if it was review.

I had a three-hour break until my next class, and while I did go see the quilt show (future post) and shop at the vendors (future post), my top priority was to go swimming with my family. So I did, and it was great! The Sawmill Creek Resort has this crazy pool:

Yes, Dan is holding Ronan up, but he didn't want to be in the picture so is underwater.

We had a lovely time swimming before my next class, which loosened up my back and neck before sitting at my machine all afternoon, and completely justified the decision to make this a family vacation. At only ten months since Ronan’s birth, I would not have been ready to go away for four days, nearly 400 miles away,  for “just” a hobby trip. I’m already feeling some pangs over my desire to attend the guild retreat in December. But thanks to Dan’s generosity of spirit, we managed to make it work together. He may not be a quilter, but he totally gets it.

And this post got really long, so the second half of classes will be in Part II!

Another new project I’ve been dabbling with is entirely Bonnie Hunter’s fault! (Didn’t I start following her to help me finish my UFOs?) She’s been posting on her blog about her English paper pieced hexagon project that she works on for handwork during all her travels. As I’ve been feeling a little uninspired by hand applique lately, and my counted cross-stitch projects are in a woeful state of disorganization at the moment, I’ve been in a bit of an uncharacteristic handwork drought myself. So when I saw a lovely display of English paper piecing projects and die cut papers for sale at Back Door Quilts outside Indianapolis in August, I thought I’d give it a try. If I didn’t like it much, I’d only be out $3.75 for the bag of 250 3/4” hexagons and a little stack of scraps.

I’ve never been much one for traditional hand piecing a la Jinny Beyer, so I never really contemplated making a hexagon quilt. I think they’re lovely, but the necessary step of basting in the papers seemed like it would be tedious. So far, I’m enjoying it far more than I’d ever imagined I would. (I am thinking I need a thimble for my thumb when I baste, but I haven’t seen Roxanne thimbles at a show lately, and I’d want to be fitted in person.) I learned a quick method of chain basting hexagons from a YouTube video by Jackie Willis, so the preparation stage doesn’t take quite so long. And it’s remarkably satisfying to take the papers out once each hexagon becomes completely surrounded, kind of like a quilting version of playing Minesweeper.

I’m using scraps left over from cutting out Taupe Winding Ways (you know, the same scraps I used for Ronan’s quilt? and for my circle applique block? and there are still more of them?) The whipstitches used to put the hexagons together are so far much less susceptible to my perfectionism than my applique stitches usually are. Rather than making typical Grandmother’s Flower Garden shapes, I’m piecing elongated diamonds like in the Martha Washington’s Flower Garden quilt:

"Martha Washington's Flower Garden," by Hannah Wallis, 1800-1849

The beauty of this project is that it’s self-limiting: I’m planning to make diamonds until I get sick of them, and then I’ll join them into whatever size they make. It could be a bed quilt, a hot pad, or anything in between. I’ve been pleasantly surprised so far at the speed at which they’ve been going together when I really have a chance to focus, though; I finished an already-started diamond and basted a respectable baggie-full of hexagons while sitting at my most recent quilt guild meeting. And I’m certainly honing my reflexes for hiding the scissors every time Ronan pulls himself up to my table while I’m working on them!

I’ve certainly seen many hexagon quilts over the years, especially examples from the 1930s at Documentation Day, but I had never really studied just how many possibilities a hexagonal grid leads to. The English tradition means that they show up all the time in Australian Patchwork and Quilting, and the handwork aspect means they’ve become popular among Japanese quilters as well, so I’ve been looking through some of my old magazines with new eyes. My starting this project seems to represent such a perfect example of the odd juxtapositions inherent in being a quilter in 2011:  I was inspired to start doing a style of hand piecing that’s been around for nearly 300 years, by a blogger, and I learned how by watching a video on the internet. Oh, Miss Bennet!

"Mommy, how about you stop quilting and read me a story?"

I wish I could tell you about the single wonderful product that changed all this, or the secret button I found on my machine that cured everything, but instead, as with so many of life’s problems, it took several small incremental areas of change rather than one big revelatory one. The closest things I can identify to magic buttons were threefold: receiving Barbara Shapel’s “Art of Machine Quilting” DVD for my birthday, reading the entire Education section of the Superior Threads website, and absorbing every scrap of information I could from Leah Day’s website.

I had never heard of Barbara Shapel before I put her DVD on my Amazon wishlist, but the reviews were positive and it was the only quilting DVD listed on Amazon that I was interested in (and didn’t already own.) Since watching the excellent DVD and seeing her beautiful quilts I’ve started learning more about her; her blog only just went live, but I look forward to future posts. She makes art quilts, many of them double sided, and frequently incorporates painted fabric and heavy threadwork, so her quilting style is very different from my own. However, she quilts in a very organic style with little to no marking, and as she is self-taught, she brings a different perspective to several aspects of free-motion machine quilting. I haven’t adopted all her techniques, of course, but on her recommendation I have switched to a Schmetz Jeans/Denim needle for machine quilting, and have raised my feed dogs and set my stitch length to zero.

When Diane and I attended the Ricky Tims Super Seminar in Richmond, I enjoyed the privilege of getting to hear Bob Purcell from Superior Threads give his Threadology lecture. He did a very entertaining, audience-participation demonstration of how sewing machine tension works. He also stated what I’ve heard many quilting educators reiterate, that sewing machines simply aren’t designed for what we’re doing with them when we free-motion quilt. Even longarm quilting machines are based on the original technology for sewing two pieces of fabric together in a straight line with a dual-duty type thread. So we have to deviate pretty significantly from “factory settings” to accommodate this utterly different method of sewing. However, recently just playing with the tension (top and bobbin!) hasn’t been enough. I was really getting to my wits’ end.  I studied everything I could on the Superior Threads website and gained further insight into the problems I was having, such as paying attention to whether the knots of thread on the underside of the quilt were top thread or bobbin thread. I also realized that I was using the HandyNets Thread Socks incorrectly: I was using them for storage, but taking them off when sewing. By leaving them on, I eliminated the occasional problems I was having with thread getting snagged on the base of the cone.

But it still wasn’t enough! Thank goodness, enter Leah Day. I found her website last spring when I did a Google search for “skipped stitches quilting Janome.” As it happens, one of her machines is the same as mine, a Janome Memory Craft 6500, so her advice was particularly applicable to my situation, although it is general enough to suit any domestic machine quilter.  From there, I discovered her amazing Free Motion Quilting Project, in which she posted 365 free online videos of filler patterns, an absolute inspiration to anyone who’s struggled to find alternatives to just stippling. In July I was thrilled to see her listed among the winners at the AQS show in Knoxville. Based on her advice, I am using the Supreme Slider on my machine bed, a Little Genie Magic Bobbin Washer in my bobbin case, and have changed how my free motion foot sits on the quilt surface.

With all these individual “tweaks” to my quilting setup, things were improving dramatically. The cherry on top was my realization that my stitches were too short for the thread I was using, so I decreased the speed on my machine so that “flooring it” with my foot pedal resulted in better control. With almost no skipped stitches or thread snarls, I was able to finish this:

Minkee Dragons, 37" x 45": I promise it looks better in closeup

See? Detail, Minkee Dragons

I had started a version of this project last fall before Ronan was born, shortly after blogging about it here, but the mottled dye pattern on the Gelato Minkee was too distracting. I bought the solid Minkee in early spring, but the “quick project” I was expecting turned into anything but, when my thread kept snarling. I’d had this project set aside in a big guilt pile in the corner of the studio ever since. It was supposed to be my warmup for quilting Ronan’s quilt, and instead just set me despairing of ever doing quality free-motion machine quilting again. But now the cloud has lifted! I was able to quilt the remaining 7/8 of the pattern in about the same amount of time as it took to quilt the first 1/8 with all the tension problems. Quilting on the Golden Threads paper for this project was rather delightful. I found I didn’t need to use my Machingers because my bare fingers were quite grippy on the paper. The lines were extremely easy to follow, since they were Sharpie lines. Once the quilting was complete, removing the Golden Threads paper was nowhere NEAR as arduous a task as I was expecting it to be. So in short, I would absolutely do this again. If Meadowlyon Designs is a vendor at Quilting with Machines again this year, I look forward to buying at least one more of these “pictogram” designs, if not more.

My first attempt at Minkee Dragons: poor contrast and big thread knots

This was a fairly short-term UFO, but it is nevertheless finished and out of my physical and psychological space. As such, it deserves a happy dance. We’ve been watching a great deal of Star Trek: The Next Generation on Netflix streaming lately, so this clip immediately sprang to mind. It’s not from an episode (too silly!), but was filmed as a birthday surprise for Gene Roddenberry. Thanks to YouTube, we all get to enjoy it: