Finishing Fall: Next Steps

In addition to finally finishing some tops that have been in the works for a very long time, I'm also using this time to work on acquainting myself with further finishing steps. That is: basting, quilting and binding. I'm working on teaching myself how these techniques work by hand, and also then deciding which steps might be better suited to machine work in the future.

For my test run, I decided to use a cheater print from Tasha Noel's Country Girls line. I got a 1-1/2-yard cut of that print, then cut off the selvages and edges and finished them with a light running stitch just inside the edge to minimize fraying. For the back, I got a 2-1/4-yard cut of one of my favorites from the new Kona colors added in 2014, Creamsicle. I cut off about 9 2-1/2-inch strips for binding - I realized once I started cutting that I could've gone for just 2 yards, but I've got enough different projects that the extra strips will get used somewhere or another. I kept those selvages on, and sewed the same running stitch down the sides. The batting is Quilter's Dream, Request Loft, 100% cotton, and it is one of the softest things I've ever felt. Seriously, you know that jingle in the commercials for cotton clothes? "The touch, the feel of cotton"? I've never once thought about that when I felt an article of cotton clothing, but I couldn't stop thinking about it feeling this batting.

I thread basted on the tile floor of my laundry room, and it took forever. Seriously, hours upon hours. I'm not sure how I'm going to change tactics for the next time, only that they must change. It might be in investing in some kneepads for volleyball players, because my whole body ached for days afterward. It might be in investing some time in getting trained to rent a longarm at a local fabric shop, because this was only a crib-sized quilt and life is too short for however much time it would take to do a twin- or queen-sized one. We'll see.

Anyway, I used 40-wt Aurifil in color #1135 - I use 50-wt for piecing and 28-wt for quilting, so it seemed reasonable to split the difference for the basting. I used yellow so it would show up, but not be too dominant. I sewed with a basting needle from Roxanne, whose sharps I use for my hand piecing, and used the herringbone stitch that's taught in this tutorial. You can see here how much of the spool I used for basting just this one project. If I keep basting with the 40-wt, I might need to invest in one of those giant cones Aurifil sells.

I will acknowledge that it was better than the one previous time I've tried basting a quilt, in my old apartment, where I 1) accidentally sewed much of the quilt to the carpet and had to use some judicious cutting to separate them without incurring security-deposit-depleting damage and 2) stepped on my pincushion barefoot and had to pull a needle out of my foot.

The quilting practice is going okay so far. I learned the technique using the Craftsy class from Andi Perejda (no ad here, just acknowledgement). The class has recommended designs for learning the method, but I like the straight-line grid that the cheater print provides. I'm using Roxanne size 10 betweens and Aurifil 28-wt in #2021. I'm still getting used to the quilting motion, the way you use a thimble in the stitch, and in wrangling the quilt in the hoop in my lap. I can't quite find the right motion - the stitches are small and look good on the back, but there's more space between them than I'd ideally like on the top. It's like the needle is getting a little lost in the batting on its way back up, and I'm still figuring out how to alter my motion to remedy that (as well as the slight right-to-left you can see in the stitches here on the left side of the red pinwheel.)

When this year started, I had lofty plans about how many tops and quilts I was going to have finished by the time December came around. Setting "Finishing Fall" for myself has helped me get at least partway to that goal. Now I think I've altered it - my new goal is to try to get all the tops I have and will have finished paired with backings and basted, in time to try to take advantage of the chilly weather that invites sitting around with a big pile of fabric and batting in your lap. It can be a slog sometimes, but I'm glad to be getting a better, more realistic sense of what each step requires of me. And I can see that sometime next year, I will have a finished product to share here!

Sunday Stash

I can't decide whether I want to join a link-up for this or not, but I do want to share some of what I'm gathering and hoarding. Thinking on projects like the Glitter quilt prompted me to pick up some scrap packs - one warm and one cool fat eighth pack each from Westwood Acres, and a "fresh" scrap pack from Hawthorne Threads. (I also picked up a quarter-yard of Liberty fabric in the Westwood Acres order. I think for machine practice I may try to sew my way through the Love at First Stitch book from Tilly Walnes, so the Liberty is for the book's first project, the Brigitte scarf.)

I got a good assortment - including lots of blenders, and lots of cuts of Cotton and Steel fabrics, which I often admire from afar without quite knowing what I would do with them if I got the full half-yard that most online shops require as a minimum purchase. For instance, these Melody Miller roses, which I'm intrigued by, but otherwise wouldn't have thought to get.

The biggest surprise from all of the scrap packs? These Lizzy House cats, which are knit rather than quilting cotton. I suppose it shouldn't be that surprising, coming from a shop that sells a range of substrates. It's a bit perplexing, though. What does a quilter do with an errant eight inches of knit fabric? I guess we'll see!

I also added some Aurifil to my collection in my Hawthorne Threads order. The aqua is #5006, which coordinates well with two different collections I've built - Bonnie and Camille, and Riley Blake basics. I got a small spool of 50-wt #5006 in one of the Fat Quarter Shop Aurifil Club packs this spring. Once I saw that it worked well with those existing collections, I decided to get a bigger spool of the 50-wt so I can use it to fill a bobbin for machine-piecing a backing that uses big cuts of a Riley Blake aqua basic. I got the 28-wt for an idea I have percolating for quilting some existing projects in different colors. The big 28-wt spool is #2021, their classic creamy white, which I'm using generally for quilting projects. I got the 40-wt in #1135 for thread basting (more about that on Thursday.)

Finishing Fall: Baby Swoon

This was probably the easiest of all the projects I decided to focus on this fall - the top has sat, mostly finished, for months. I only needed to add the last two borders - I calculated the overall square inches, and this top was 93% finished before this week. Sashing and borders might be the most tedious part of hand-piecing, though I finished these so quickly, relatively speaking, that I think maybe it's more looking at the long seam and anticipating it being tedious than the actual sewing.

The pattern is Camille Roskelley's famous Swoon, obtained via her Pre-cut Piecing Made Simple Craftsy class. The original pattern uses nine blocks; the four here make it throw-sized. The fabric is from the "girl" palette of the Celebration line from Bunny Hill Designs, with a couple of corresponding Bella solids, and the background is my go-to, Kona Snow. I started the quilt as a baby gift for a family friend, and now that the top's finished, I might actually have a completed quilt before the intended recipient turns three.

Not-So-Finishing Fall

So...as much as I try to be all "100% Focus! More Finishing Fall!" there are a few distractions that have crept in here and there. (Who, me? Add more to my WIP list? Never!)

A few weeks ago, I had an Amazon order with an "add-on" item that needed a partner to get over the shipping minimum, so I finally bought a quilting book I've had my eye on, Jen Kingwell's Quilt Lovely.

I love Kingwell's scrappy aesthetic, and several of her designs are on my quilting bucket list. I love them so much that I kind of couldn't stop myself from starting in on one from this book, the Glitter quilt.

I love the idea of a pattern with tall, skinny blocks instead of the standard squares. I also love the push to combine interesting colors and patterns, as I think I can be a bit formalist. (This should ostensibly drive one to endeavor to use up more fabrics from one's stash rather than indulge an impulse to purchase, but...we all know how that goes.) It's a pretty easy block to cut - the squares and the edge triangles are easily rotary cut, and while the other pieces are kind of wonky shapes, they're all quadrilaterals, so it's not too hard to cut them from rectangles. With a little finagling, they can all actually be cut from charm squares, which opens up stash-busting possibilities. The only pain is that you have to add the seam allowances to the templates included in the book - if you look at the picture above, the papers sticking out of the side of the book are the copies I made to trace the templates with their seam allowances onto the template plastic.

My other impulse purchase is also fueling a drive to embrace colors and patterns - the Tula Pink coloring book.

I've often admired Tula Pink fabrics from afar, without quite knowing how the dynamic prints and bright colors would fit in with the rest of my stash. Only recently, I've started to add some here and there . You can see one in the Glitter blocks - when Southern Fabric had their insane, site-crashing 30%-off sale a few weeks ago, I grabbed an Elizabeth scrap bag. (How could I not? We have the same name!) I love that the coloring book allows you to indulge in designs from some of Tula's older lines, without diving into the crazy, price-gouging black market of online Tula sales from any line Salt Water or earlier. My first choice of coloring project - dragonflies from Flutterby.

I love that fabric designers are getting into the coloring book game - it may be a fad, but it really is soothing, and gets my brain thinking in new color combinations.

Finishing Fall: Austen Family Album

Fall Finish No. 2 is more like half-finish, half-WIP - it's a big project, with multiple stages of "finishing." It comes from a block-of-the-week that started eighteen months ago, and finished ten months ago - Barbara Brackman's Austen Family Album. I love a sampler - I can spend hours poring over my favorite block book for inspiration, which also means that I love a sampler where someone else has hunkered down and already chosen the designs and laid out a cutting and piecing plan. I decided to use all fabrics from Bonnie and Camille's Moda lines, plus some corresponding Bella solids, for all of the blocks. These are the final two blocks I've finished out of the thirty-six in the BOW - not number thirty-five and thirty-six posted, just the last two that I stalled out on finishing.

So what took so long? As I said in my first post about the Nana McIntyre design, I went through a period of HST exhaustion, and just looking at the Lady of the Lake block was a major culprit. I also spent a disproportionate amount of time dithering over my fabric choices. Over the course of the project, I cut into a lot of fat quarters and half-yards from my Bonnie and Camille stash - now I have a basket full of strips and scraps ranging from 1-7/8" to 7-1/4", so in addition to the various other projects I have in the pipeline that use B & C fabrics (one more in Finishing Fall, four more on the broader WIP list), they'll be showing up in scrappy projects from here to eternity. (There are more blocks from this BOW on my Instagram.) Did I want to try to figure out what I wanted from the fabrics I'd already cut, or cut something new? In the end, I ended up with a combination of the two, including using a bit more Daysail than I originally thought I would (back when I thought I'd finish before it was widely available, ha!)

These last two finishes are the Ladies Wreath up top, and the Lady of the Lake here. I like the cool palette I ultimately chose for the Ladies Wreath - I think reds and pinks are such a distinctive theme in the Bonnie and Camille family of collections, so I liked trying to mix that up. I also like that it ended up with a lot of Happy-Go-Lucky, since that's the line that first dragged me down into designer obsession. And I think the Lady of the Lake will look striking on point (as it will be in the setting) - it drove me crazy, but I'd love to see someone else do a full quilt with that block.

I plan to use the Netherfield setting Brackman provided, which means whenever it's done, this quilt will be a monster. I have the navy and coral dots from Miss Kate ready to go.

I think the cutting will be the difficult part - really, I just need to set aside like, a day, set up a banquet table with a cutting mat at the end, and tackle all of my big cuts of fabric that need to be cut down for backgrounds, settings, and sashings. Most of the setting should be time consuming, if not too challenging. My only worry is that I've realized that once I get over about a 6"-finished HST, I have a tendency to let my seam sort of bow in around the center, leaving an undersized finished square. (The corner HSTs in this block finished at 8", and I had to re-sew all of them, one more than once.) I worried a bit about finding a good backing for something that would ultimately finish at 104", so I was gratified when Bonnie and Camille announced that their next line will include a 108" backing fabric. Maybe the binding will come from Vintage Picnic, too. (At this rate, it'll probably be whatever line comes after that.)

The next finish won't take so long!

Finishing Fall: Norwegian Star

I didn't intend for this lengthy hiatus from writing! Sometime last month, I looked around at all my errant stacks of different pieces and realized that I needed to at least temporarily focus my energies and try to actually finish some works in progress. It's not just that I've got a lengthy WIP list, but that I tend to grab on to new projects and ideas and leave others for months when they're actually closer to being finished than not. I eyeballed a few of my projects and thought, "If I just gave that two weeks of undivided attention, I bet I could finish that." I made a list of seven projects - five tops close to finishing, and two sets of sampler blocks that will still need settings. This particular project took a little more that two weeks, but today, this top is done!

 I don't remember when I realized that fair isle knitting patterns could double as designs for quilts - maybe I saw a pattern on a blog, maybe I was just flipping through one of my graph paper notebooks and noticed the similarities between the different sketches. I've been knitting much longer than I've been sewing - over ten years! In more recent years, I made an effort to add stranded color knitting to my skill set.

A Norwegian star design I knitted:

A holder I designed and knitted for my Kindle:

Both those projects, as well as the quilt top design, were accomplished by consulting with Alice Starmore's Book of Fair Isle Knitting, a classic resource. (If you're interested in a breakdown of what Fair Isle is and how to put a pattern together, it's a great book. It's from 1988, so the photos with the sweater patterns are definitely dated, but it's one of those old-school information goldmines.)

I based the quilt design on a Norwegian star pattern, as well as a separate color scheme included in the book. The original star is on a 25 x 25 grid, and I added a row around the outside so it would be a 27 x 27 grid and I could easily divide it into 3 x 3 grid blocks that would finish at six inches. The border is basically included in the blocks. The overall top is about throw-sized.

Here you can see the grid as I broke it down. The sections at the bottom with the hashmarks are where I recorded to make sure I'd cut enough of the pieces I needed of the background fabric. I chose Riley Blake basics for the main fabric - their small dots - and Kona Ash for the background.

I'm not sure when exactly I started this project, or when I abandoned it to focus on other things. My last Ash purchase was around two years ago, so it must have been around then. When I picked it back up in August, I had already finished all the navy, aqua and red blocks, and had cut all the fabric for everything else and divided each type of block (since the grid is symmetrical around the center) into a separate baggie. Finishing the blocks took longer than I expected - my original "two week" estimate - but once I got on a roll, it wasn't too hard to get it done.

Once more, just for effect!

I like the way this turned out, though I think that there's not quite enough value difference between the aqua dots and the Ash. I've got some ideas for quilting that might better mark the distinction between the background and the main fabric.

I could see revisiting this pattern in the future - if there's interest, I might try to pull together a tutorial, and there's all sorts of designers whose palettes include these same colors that could be used for a scrappy version. Other Riley Blake basics come in the same colors, and I'd be intrigued to see how they could offer a tweaked version of the same aesthetic. I'd love to try it with all solids, or Karen Lewis' upcoming Blueberry Park line for Robert Kaufman.

Finishing Fall marches on! One down, six to go!

A Favorite Tip

Someday, I will write my paean to Jinny Beyer's Quiltmaking by Hand, the book that taught me how to hand-piece and convinced me to dive in and not be afraid to just start sewing. For now, I'll share her excellent video on inset seams, since they show up so frequently in the Nana McIntyre top I'm working on.



Another blog goal I have is to refrain from attaching any epithets to the inset seam. No fomenting of anticipatory fear for any technique!

Almost Primary

I stated in my introduction that I'm daring myself to get involved in some link-ups, so here's one I've always wanted to do - one of the Stitched in Color mosaic contests.

This time, the mandate from Rachel was "Almost Primary" - just a bit "off" from the classic red, yellow, and blue you might find in those Crayola eight-packs everyone's picking up this time of year. I tried to go for a "dusty" palette: For reds, I chose two from Fig Tree, the queen of dusty reds, and a mid-volume blender from Bonnie and Camille's Miss Kate line. For yellows, I tried to find some with a mustard tone and picked one from Heather Bailey, one from Carolyn Friedlander, and one from Jeni Baker. For the blues, I thought a hint (or more than a hint, in the case of the Hadley print) of green would satisfy the "almost," and went for three vintage-inspired lines from American Jane, Denyse Schmidt, and Kim Kight. I like the way the grids in the Botanics and Lucky Strike prints balance with the more floral choices in some of the other fabrics. And I think the mix of different eras of inspiration for the different designers gives the bundle a funky, thrift-store feel.

Nana M in Progress

I'm about halfway through adding the next ring on my Nana McIntyre.

After I set in one of the bigger hexie "flowers" - the six-jewel "flower" with hexagons set in around the edges - I noticed I'd somehow placed it wrong. Stitched around sixteen different hexie edges without noticing until the whole thing was in. It's the one with the orange center at the bottom left. The pinks are supposed to alternate, mimicking the pattern in the original-original, as shared by Jodi.

I think I'm going to set in all twelve, then decide if I want to change it back to the way I originally wanted it or leave it in like one of the "humility blocks" of yore. I'm leaning toward the former, I think I like the flow better that way. And those pink Riley Blake dots right next to the Kona Valentine are playing a little too dominant to my eye. I don't want the pink to be overwhelming. Maybe once the ring is complete, I'll share a pic and take an informal poll before I pick the stitches out.

I think I've also figured out how and at what stage I want to finish this top, so I hope to post some about that, since it'll involve some jury-rigging of different shapes with the Jaybird rulers.

Taking on Nana M.

You know those times when you see a quilt somewhere that catches your eye, and despite all the totally rational reasons you know why you shouldn't take it on, you just can't resist? I had one of those moments when I saw the Nana McIntyre design shared by Jodi Godfrey on Tales of Cloth.

It sort of devolved into a devil-on-one-shoulder, angel-on-the-other situation. "It looks so fun!" "What about all your other unfinished tops?" "...really, what's one more?" Then suddenly, I found myself cutting up fat quarters and in came the rationalizations: It'll be a good stash buster! (It actually really is. I've pulled out so many fabrics I purchased ages ago that weren't the right palette for projects I was working on or that I bought just because they're pretty without any real plan for them.) Such good practice for inset seams! (Also true! I find the sense of accomplishment involved in finishing an inset seam kind of unbeatable.)

The center here is from Sunnyside by Kate Spain, and the diamonds are from Terrain, also a Kate Spain line. The petals of the central "flower" are Kona Torch, a sunny bright orange that I love. (I used to be very anti-orange, and I think quilting has really prompted me to embrace the color.) The rest includes prints from Heather Ross, Denyse Schmidt, Lizzy House, V &. Co, and Darlene Zimmerman, among others.

I didn't have any diamond or jewel papers handy, so while Jodi's project uses EPP, I got out my Jaybird Quilts Sidekick and Hex-N-More rulers to cut the pieces, using the 2 1/2" hexagon for the "flower" centers, 3 1/2" jewels, 2 1/2" diamonds, and the bigger hexagons are the 4 1/2" size. It's a bit bigger than the size of Jodi's EPP. For comparison, the pink hexie is 2"-edge EPP, and the aqua was cut with the 4 1/2" measure on the Hex-N-More.

As previously mentioned, this method uses a lot of inset seams. The more I work on it, the more I feel like that's part of what drew me to this design. The repeat of the sew-press-trim of blocks with lots of HSTs and flying geese was maybe getting to me a little, and I think my brain has really sparked to the jigsaw puzzle aspect of making all these pieces fit together.

There's so much potential in this design for interesting fabric choices. It could lend itself well to the kind of fabric selection and fussy cutting that's come to characterize the La Passacaglia, but without so many pieces. I think it would be interesting with designers who utilize a similar palette across multiple lines, like Fig Tree, or designers who take a lot of inspiration from 20th-century vintage prints, like Denyse Schmidt or American Jane. The initial prompt of Jodi's original in working with solids make me think it would work well incorporating some of Robert Kaufman's new 12-color Kona bundles in specific color families.

My plan is to build out to the next ring of "flowers" with surrounding hexagons, then assess based on size and see if I want to keep going, as well as whether I want to try to build it out to a rectangle or keep the shape hexagonal. I already know I want to make at least two more of these, so it may end up being a ubiquitous pattern here.

Hi

I keep waffling about actually taking the plunge and writing here, so I'm just making myself do it. July's not too late to follow through on a New Year's resolution, right?

My name is Liz. I'm 29 years old. Up until last year, I was a graduate student, and now I'm figuring out what comes next. Around February 2013, I started to dive deep into the online world of quilting. Before I knew it, I was amassing a fabric stash and starting to tackle a few patterns, largely through hand piecing. I may or may not elect to share my wonky early churn dash blocks in a post of their own. Right now, I've got an active list of about two dozen works in progress, in varying degrees of proximity to completion, plus countless other ideas germinating. I hope to use this space to talk through some of my ideas, and share what I'm working on as I'm working on it.

Some goals:

 - I want to write about hand piecing, even though it's relatively slow going. I can't quite seem to stop adding works in progress, and I've got lots of ideas, even if finishing comes less frequently than it might with machine work. However, I love the quiet, meditative practice of it. And I think it should be asserted, and repeated: You don't need a machine to start quilting.

 - I want to be a more active participant in the community of people who write about what they're doing creatively - sharing what I'm working on and commenting on what others share. I've dipped my toes in on Instagram - and maybe it's crazy to step it up to a more text-y medium when so many people seem to be going the other way and scaling down from blogging - and want to expand further. I'm daring myself to join link-ups and share my opinion, and hope to get some good feedback from the wide world of crafters in turn.

 - I'm going to reacquaint myself with the sewing machine. I first learned to use a machine back in middle school Home Ec - and sewed a pretty cute stuffed animal if I do say so myself - but now that's over fifteen years ago! While I enjoy the calm and quiet of working by hand, I also feel like I have too many ideas and not enough time to tackle them. I'd also love to make garment sewing part of what I do, and obviously that one requires the machine. My tentative goals for the rest of this calendar year are to a) attempt a garment and to b) install a zipper in something, maybe a bag. We'll see how that dovetails with my massive list of WIPs.

- Maybe figure out some more graphic design stuff? I have no idea whether this blog template will frame my images well or not, but hope to be able to tweak with some confidence if I decide it's not working.

- I want to submit a quilt to the Bloggers Quilt Festival. I can't say right now whether I'll have anything in decent enough shape for this fall, but I'm keeping that one as a soft deadline for some finished work.

So, here it goes.