WiP!

I spent a lot of time quilting this past week-end and really made some headway on The List. There's just something I love about crossing an item off... it makes me keep stitching well past when my back and shoulders say I should! And since Himself is away, the cat will play!

Child's Play - DONE! I'm thinking of selling this one... Himself thinks it's a great plan! Once it stops raining here on the beautiful East Coast, there will be pics!

Jewel Squares - fully quilted and ready to bind! Though it's hard to see in this pic, I quilted it  in an asymmetrical pattern of radiating circles.

Mr & Mrs Cousin's wedding quilt - DONE! I really hope they like it. When I make a project that's a little outside of my comfort zone, I worry the recipient won't be gaga over it. This fabric is amazing... not what I'd usually choose, but I'm lovin' it now. I've got more pics, but think I'll wait until it's safely delivered to show them off!

The troublesome fabric...

Mme S-S's retirement quilt - main print arrived, but now I'm stumped. A visit to my local fabric shop produced absolutely nothing in the way of co-ordinating fabric. I`m feeling like I need to go back to the drawing board, but time is of the essence on this one!

K's Dare - no progress
Transformer - no progress
Ocean Strata - no progress 
2012 M1 quilt - top almost complete
2013 M1 quilt  - blocks complete

A few new items made it onto the list this week! Normally, I only revise the list in January, but I'm getting to close to finishing off everything. Besides, if I don't add to it, what on earth would I have to write about each Wednesday?


My school's Ovarian Cancer Canada Walk of Hope team is planning a Mother-Daughter Tea for the beginning of May. They're looking for silent auction items, so I whipped up a set of placemats to donate.

I've made these before. They're really good for fat quarters. If you cut carefully, you get enough fabric to do the patchwork along the sides and then use the remaining fabric for the back of the mats.

I've had these fat quarters hanging around for ages. It was an 8 print collection and it gave me enough for the patchwork sides, backs, and binding.

I wanted these to feel spring-like, so I picked up the yellow in the prints for the middle sections. That's Kona Sunflower!

I did some more of random straight line quilting. I'm really looking forward to doing this on something larger than placemats or a baby quilt.








Let's keep our fingers crossed for some more sunshine soon... though grey and foggy suits just as well for quilting anyhow!

J

A day with the Squares and Sewin`Sunday!

Seems like I`ve been managing to pack a lot into my week-ends lately. By a lot, I mean a lot of sewing. May`s looking like a busy month, so I`m going to keep sewing up a storm in April.

Saturday meant another quilt therapy session with the Squares. It was a bit of an odd session project-wise. Q-A opted to work on a vest/shawl. Making clothes is not usually her forté, but with Q-B in the house, there was lots of support. She finished it up by day's end... I think there's a new outfit for work this week!





 


Q-B was also working away on clothing - her MotB dress for Miss S's wedding just 8 weeks away. There were a few setbacks, but she left at suppertime with more done than when she arrived!




 
Only Q-D and I were working on quilt projects. But shockingly, Q-D didn't even take her machine out of the car!
 

She was hand-stitching away on the binding of a sweet girl-y baby quilt. It's based on a pic from this website found on Pinterest. Here she is trying out my fancy new binding clips... part of a bunch of goodies sent to me by Adrienne over at Chezzetcook Modern Quilts as part of her Crafty Pay it Forward.

I'm very lucky to have gotten such a treat in the mail. I've decided to revive my attempt at Crafty Pay it Forward. So far I`ve got two takers. There are still three slots left, so if you`d like to be the recipient of some crafty kindness, leave me a comment. But you`ve gotta pay it forward!

I was in dire need of consults on Mr & Mrs Cousin's wedding quilt and on Child's Play. At the risk of being predictable, I went with diagonal quilting. It just felt right.

And today, I finished quilting both! I just couldn't stop... I've even got the binding done for the wedding quilt.

I love the binding... if this quilt were for me, it would be the backing too!

Here's me working away on Child's Play... this one's been hanging around forever! The blue print with multi-coloured stars is the same one I used for Miss K's baby quilt... I`m now working on a quilt for her 13th birthday. (It was so long ago that I don't even have a digital pic of it to share!)

I think one of the main reasons I didn't go forward with this quilt is that it had some construction issues. They reared their ugly heads when I was quilting it today, but I decided to just roll with it. An imperfect finished quilt is better than any unfinished top, right?

The construction issues really show in these little stars in the sashing. My piecing just wasn't precise enough back in the day. But now, with the popularity of wonky stars, I think I'll just say they were meant to be unique! I even like 'em so much I'm going to bind the quilt in teal to highlight them. Who knew what started out as a flaw could be the thing I like the most?

Thanks for reading! Have a great week!

J

WiP! And on a Wednesday too!

It's starting to feel a little more like springtime here on the East Coast. Today, I escaped the classroom and took a little road trip (still work related) to the Annapolis Valley. It was sunshine and blue skies all the way there and back!

My latest quilt finish went with me...

We had a little photo shoot. It was windy and I kept worrying that she'd blow away! I could just imagine myself chasing her all the way to the four lane highway that you can't see in this pic. That's beautiful Blomidon in the distance.

I wanted to play in the studio a little last week-end and my current projects weren't calling me. So I started digging in my 2 1/2 inch square collection and sewing little sections of colour together. As it grew, I laid it out on the floor (I know, I know, I need a design wall) and made transition sections to go from colour to colour.  Et voilà! I'm really pleased with the quilting... totally different than what I would normally do, but that was kind of the point. Reminds me of ripples in a pond...

Also on the spring theme, here are the placemats I whipped up for the 'Rents for Easter. I couldn't resist staging them a little for pics. No, I didn't eat off them before wrapping them up.

 

 
Not quite as spring-y... but it makes me think of summer and boogie boarding.... I finished up my flip and sew project from the Elaine Quehl workshop. I blogged about it already here.

Pretty happy with the quilting again... used variegated thread. I'm not usually brave enough to use it, but I had enough different colours in my collection to do three of four sections!

Now, on to the List!

Child's Play - no progress. Just not sure how to quilt it. Need a Q-Square consult.
Jewel Squares -  backing and batting purchased today!

Mr & Mrs Cousin's wedding quilt - backing pieced, waiting to be layered and pinned. Check out my pattern matching... never done that before!
Mme S-S's retirement quilt - STILL waiting for main fabric to arrive
K's Dare - no progress
Transformer - no progress






Hope you had a wonderful Wednesday! With a Q-Squared quilt therapy session booked for Saturday, I see more quilting in my immediate future!


J

WiP!

Damn. I so meant to post this last night! Let's call it Work In Progress Thursday. I know at least one reader is out there waiting with bated breath for this week's update. So here we go!

On the Gotta Do department:

Jewel Squares!

Child's Play - layered and pinned, ready to quilt
Jewel Squares - top completed
Mr & Mrs Cousin's wedding quilt - backing arrived today, already washed!
Mme S-S's retirement quilt - waiting for main fabric to arrive
K's Dare - blocks complete (though I do need to check if she's got a double or queen bed these days!)

More Jewel Squares!

And after five hours of picking and tearing, the foundation paper is officially gone! Thanks to my Do-Bee pals for the assistance!

K's Dare thus far!

I also whipped up some placemats over the Easter week-end as a little Easter gift-y for the 'Rents. These were probably is more of a Mom gift than a Dad gift, but at least he might get to eat off them. I purposely made only two so that they would be used for every day and not saved for guests! Sadly, no pics today.... perhaps nect time!

Now, stop reading this and get sewing. You know there's something you're excited to work on sitting there waiting for you!

J

 

Sew-y Sunday!

Another wonderful sewing-filled week-end! Today I headed off to a workshop with Elaine Quehl, an amazing quilter and fabric dye-r from Ontario, organized by my guild, Mariner`s Quilt Guild. (On a side note, the current blog post is about my recent presentation on modern quilting - shameless pluggery!)

Our morning`s class was all about free form curves. Scary, right? But Elaine's technique is amazing. After her initial explanations, the class of 18 was off to the races, rotary cutting without patterns and sewing them together without too much trouble at all.

 Look, Q-D! No pins!

You just keep cutting and sewing more curves. The technique works best with gentle curves, so some of mine puckered a little. Nothing a wallop of steam and a load of machine quilting won't take care of!

You're unlikely to be shocked by this, but I opted to work with Konas for this project. The materials list called for fat quarters... I don't have a lot of FQs in my stash, other than my monthly dose of Kona.

These colours are (from darkest to lightest, with repetition): teal blue, turquoise, peacock, robin egg, and baby blue









Behold our creations! So amazing to see the variety created from one technique! I'm thinking of adding a bit of aquatic foliage in a lime green and a few orange fishies... I might even hand appliqué them!

I even have some ideas for the quilting... see what a workshop does to you? So energized!

The afternoon saw us working on small flip and sew projects. These were pieced on muslin backing with a technique reminiscent of paper piecing (Try not to cringe too hard, Q-A!) We worked from one of two patterns on offer - Femme Fatale or Ocean Waves. I chose Ocean Waves. Here's Elaine's piece... her goal was moonlight shining on the waves.

 You start out by tracing the pattern onto muslin, and then (horror of horrors!) cutting it apart. You then flip and sew your scrappy bits in place.





I went for more of a daytime feel with mine. I was thinking of afternoon breezes on the beach while staring out at the Caribean. The idea I had didn't line up with the fabric I brought, so a little more sewing time will be needed at home to finish this one off. Section 4 will have lighter turquoises and whites to represent the breaking surf and section 5 will have sandy tones.

This workshop was well worth the time and cost and has solidified my decision to take more workshops. I never would have thought of curved piecing as being something I could improvise with, but clearly, it is possible. Even if a class isn't exactly your "thing", you can always glean a new tip or technique just from being in a room with all that quilt talk. I only wish I had another day of week-end so I could play some more!

Here's hoping you had a quilt-y week-end too! Thanks for reading!

J

Baby time!

No, this isn't an announcement, readers! Just the theme of some sewing I've been doing lately!

One of the Squares, Q-B, recently became a grandmother (woo hoo!) and that much loved little one will need some baby swag! Off I went to Pinterest to select some goodies!

 

First up, the tag-y blanket from a tutorial  at Made by Me, Shared with you. I even had some minkee fabric for the back. I followed the directions pretty closely... only I was lazy and didn't baste the ribbon tags in place first. Speedy sewist that I am, I just can't get into basting! I didn't need quite as many ribbon tags as directed either. My cousin's little one has a tag-y like this and he loves it! Given that it's only 13 inches square, it's more of a snuggly toy than an actual blanket.

 I also made a diaper and wipes case from a tutorial over at  Feed the dogs. It's meant to hold a couple of diapers and a mini case of wipes for those times you don't want to carry the whole diaper bag.

I also made a couple burp cloths from Made by Rae. I love that one side is quilting cotton and that the other side is a recycled t-shirt. I can totally see me saving t-shirts for these. Only I think I'd make them larger next time!








And now for the star of the show - the door shhh-er! It's a little pad that attaches to the doorknobs on both sides and covers the locking mechanism on the door. No annoying click when the little person has just drifted off to sleep. I'm plotting my own tutorial for this one! Coming soon to a blog near you!


Add in one custom screen-printed onesie and the swag bag is complete. Sewing for babies is a lot of fun. They love everything and, given the amount of spitting up , it's okay if they have more than one!

Thanks for reading!

J