Posts Tagged ‘Quilting’

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30.6 SQ Ep Post March A Long 2013 and Foundation Paper Piecing general tips

May 4, 2013

podcast feed

It’s finally out, the post March A long Report, plus some discussion of my projects, a tiny bit of paper piecing advice in addition to the project.

*quick warning, I play with the mic stand in this episode – not terribly loud, but occasionally distracting. whoops. not taking this out of the audio.*

During the month of March, we try to quilt for 15 minutes, building our ‘quilting muscles’.

If you listen to the podcast, the first 20 minutes or so I recap some of the achievements we accomplished in the month of March. Here are the links to the past March A Long posts where people reported their progress.

You did it!  So did I! Congrats to everyone who worked toward this wonderful hobby.

AJ Dub of Harriet Homemaker Strikes Again wins the giveaway for the March A Long as decided by random.org

I am currently listening to the Ender’s Series on Audible by Orson Scott Card through audible. There are many books to listen to, the story is science fiction, also somewhat political (one story arc), some are older books, some are newer -  great audio drama due to multiple people reading the story!

I am working on my Quilters Healthy Choices #QHC by doing more exercise in the last 5 months than the previous number of years combined.

I recently went to a local arboretum. Beauty for ‘early spring’.

arboretum april 2013

Then I discuss about how I work on paper piecing. I really mean foundation piecing. Some tips below:

  • I glue the first piece down.
  • I cut my strips into sizes that I may try to use later, such as 5″ by width of fabric, 3.5″ inch strips by width of fabric. Especially when I am deciding the size needed for the rest of the pattern.
  • I don’t trim off the quarter inch or eighth of an inch in between seams. Unless there is a seam ending in the middle somewhere. Or unless you plan ultra bulky amount of quilting on the piece.
  • I prefold my paper before sewing. And I prefold all the way down the length of the paper.
  • After I fold the pattern, the piece that I am going to fill up next has to match up with the fabric behind or it won’t fit very well. This eliminates the need to have an “extra large” piece of fabric that all gets cut off and discarded. (see picture below)
  • Make decisions that make sense for you to help you stay organized. Do things that may help you out in the long run. Always put the dark fabric in a specific place if it doesn’t matter to the design.
  • Make one copy of one block before moving on to chain piecing or cutting all of them, you may save on fabric if you try out something first.
  • I pin down the other side of longer seams to help it stay in place, but I don’t pin the whole seam unless I fear it shifting around too much.
  • Carol Doak’s paper piecing is wonderful, use it for times when you have either intricate or small patterns when pulling out paper will be a pain in the bu*t later.  Regular paper also works okay.

how to measure for paper piecing

pin one long seam

Incompotec.com graph paper of all kinds, shapes, & sizes. You print off what you need in handy 8.5 X 11 pieces, downloads to PDF files.

Craftsy paper piece design for Hexadaisy.

The love it / hate it / love it / hate it block for the hexadaisy with stripes.

outer rings purple

I bugged about everyone I knew online to see what they liked better, but shows my decision in making the design. I picked the 5th option not shown below – combines the left half with the right half of the mosaic below – which was always intended (some people didn’t know that).

hexadaisy choice mosaic

I ultimately decided (finally) to use grey swirls instead. I love the stripes and striped pattern will work on it’s own in a different quilt. But NOW the stripes are gone for this project as they were TOO DEMANDING of my attention.

swirly grey centers

The version is going to the quilt guild auction in July. When it’s quilted.

small hexadaisy top for auction

A completely random couple of notes tacked on.

Be careful at a quilt show in case of emergency. See if your quilt guild has insurance in case expensive sewing machines become damaged.  A guild close to mine had a problem at a local show recently.

Also don’t forget to finish making blocks for other quilters if you signed up to do them.

Posted in 15 minute challenge, March-A-Long, Podcast Episode, Quilting Design, Quilting Tools | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

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29.6 Retreat Progress

February 23, 2013

It’s been an interesting month. I didn’t realize it would be an entire month before posting, but here it is.

Anyway. Starting from NOW.

It’s also been an interesting week. What with going to my guild’s annual retreat and all.

And then the bereavement day. And the snow day. And now the days picking up the rest of the work resulting from snow delays, and in the future (monday), possibly more snow.

It seems things just have to be interesting right now.

Any case.

I should show you what I worked on Thursday as a compliment to what I have started with at the retreat.

weave updated smaller borders

I have reworked the corners of this quilt, removed the bright yellow inner border.

During retreat I created a total of 16 blocks of each direction of the weave border before I ran out of red fabric. I needed to have 19 blocks of each direction to complete the pattern all around plus the fabric for the corners.

I think this looks atheistically pleasing, and repeats the same numbers of blocks on each leg of the border as in the center of the quilt.

The design you see above requires 14 blocks of each direction and so I’ll be unpicking two of my completed blocks and reworking them to make the corners. If it’s possible to do, I kept similar dimensions and requirements of red for the corners compared to the original blocks.

32 of 38 weave block centers done

I currently have not designed the ends for the borders. I was trying to make the design wrap around itself, but EQ crashed for the 3rd time, so I didn’t bother retrying right now. Instead, I chose other computer time.

At least I have a direction. And I have removed the papers from about 20 of these blocks too.

Oh yeah, I need to start working on the tutorial for these blocks. Pictures have been done for a few weeks.  Getting there.

Okay, well after spending 2+ days on 9 blocks, I got out some projects that just needed borders.

So you remember the samurai Sudoku quilt I made, now it’s got its borders on, and just wowed the people at the retreat how well the borders work and are also very contrasty.

samurai sudoku quilt with borders

So now it floats in the middle of all the borders. I normally don’t like a lot of big borders, but this quilt it seemed to work quite nicely.

And the last quilt I also was working on borders for. The mystery quilt I did with my guild called Gemini Sky.

gemini sky borders started

Obviously, this picture was taken at a time when the lighting was way different. The whole picture/quilt is too pink compared with real life. I didn’t get the borders sewn on after the bright pink border, but I did add the ‘filmstrip’ quality to the already fabulous and sewn strip border.

I designed a few cornerstone blocks for the corners, but this quilt we were really rushing to work on as it was on the last day and I wanted as much sewing time as possible, also knowing I had to pack up & leave soon, so no pictures beyond this point.

Gemini Sky looks way different than I expected, but I really like it.

And if I may share one other situation from the retreat that I was a ‘small’ part of….

There was a lady who was working on a double bargello rainbow quilt twist pattern.

DSC02677

Not my quilt, but hey she is a math teacher, and what can I say, I really liked this quilt idea.   Great minds think alike. I would venture if I saw this pattern, I would try it out.

And so over the course of the few days, she worked on it and worked on it. The quilt requires you to sew strips and then cut the strips with a specific wedge template, sew them together in circles, and then cut portions of both of the circles, and then sew it together.

DSC02756

And just as what happened to me with my dancing ribbons, things weren’t lining up all that well in the wedge shape.  So we talked about it what to do to fix it, she asked another math person, and they said to tighten up all the seams coming in and out of the circle. I agreed that would help, emphasizing the amount of sewing in the center of the circles to help tighten the thing up.

And so the lady did just that, and then had both circles laid out, and things still weren’t matching up, and she wants to get this quilt finished before April (for her other guild’s quilt show), and what she was doing to fix it wasn’t helping enough to work without some MAJOR reconstructive surgery.

So on the very last day, I saw the two circles together, thought of dresden plates or drunken path blocks, and came up with a solution that I think she liked.  Just one of those things, “well what if you placed this piece here” type of things.

To save a quilt from “certain destruction”, here’s the resulting pattern which will be appliqued onto something. (or could stand alone I guess).

DSC02795

I am amazed that the rainbow pattern works too with this quilt. I am glad she didn’t have to trash the quilt that she had already put so much work into, and as I said, I think she likes this design too.

Best part is that with this design, you just have to be “close” to a quarter circle, so all that extra tightening, not quite necessary. no further seams to match up. Wheew!

Sew happy to have been able to help! Sew glad to have been able to see the possibilities with the design!

Alright until we meet again. It’s almost March-A-Long time.

I need to start working on that after work again, march starts the end of this coming week!!! AACK! Expect another post pronto.

Posted in 15 minute challenge, Home Sewing Front, Quilting Community | Tagged , , | 5 Comments »

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28.0 SQ Ep 048 – TaDa – Mystery Revealed

October 21, 2012

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Ya know how hard it is keeping a secret from yourself?  Sometimes it’s relatively easy. You do things and you don’t always know why.

Sometimes its a tiny bit hard. Once you see something, you can’t unsee it.

Well as I mentioned in my previous episode, I went to a mystery quilt workshop during the weekend.

I broke into my thoughts about halfway through the quilt top center to share with you some of the things I was thinking about when making this quilt.

For some reason, I am not wanting to write about this as much as I want to just talk about it.

So we started here with all the precutting & presewing.

And then at the workshop had several steps to do (pics 1 after another after another)

1. gemini sky step 4, 2. gemini sky step 5, 3. gemini sky step 6, 4. gemini sky step 7

For a while I was fooling myself into thinking that I really didn’t “know” the pattern.

I saw step 8. Then I had to make a decision about the coloring based on my light fabrics being different.

Once I settled on the grouping, I had things spread out everywhere in this tiny room!


But I pinned part of the ‘color choice’ design to my design wall.

So here’s the center (taken inside).

But as you can see a galloping horse in the middle of the lighted forest would see this way.

Which I admit, is pretty nice.

Then the way I have the ta-da triangles to make the first blocks, you can see one section of it here.

Pin it down to sew.

Some of my “fat quarters” of fabrics sewn on the ta-da triangles.

Hopes this helps explain a little better. Watch the finished size, does not mean finished size of unfinished HST! Who knew?!!

What do you think about doing mystery quilts??

Posted in Home Sewing Front, Podcast Episode, Quilting, Quilting Design | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments »

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27.8 Little Fibonacci Quilt – Minimalist Style

October 15, 2012

So the 2nd quilt of my three mini quilts that I’ve been working on this past week is one quilt in a set of 2.
I took a motif that I loved in a fabric that I really didn’t own a ton of.  I cut up the large portion of the motif and made a mini quilt out of it.

Then I framed the quilt.  I used little borders of coordinating fabrics that I thought I would like in a polka-dot apron.  You can tell these fabrics are part of a set.

I quilted this minimally.

Currently you can see the fold line on the quilt, there is so little quilting on the quilt.

Hopefully for this quilt, the minimal style quilting will win out in the end. The next one, quite similar, is much more heavily quilted.

Here’s a close up of the curve.

This is obviously a quilt where the design influenced the quilting style.  I could make one more spiral a little ways out from the fibonacci curve, but I want this to be simple, simple.

So I decided to do one quick little decorative stitch, all while I had my quilting foot on the machine.  Key is to go steady and you’ll be fine.

This quilt taught me to “hold back” and “go steady.  And that you can still quilt decorative stitches with the darning foot. And it’s simple and I just like it.

Which is all a quilt ever really needs to be. Something somebody liked at one time!

Currently the fabric you see on the back, an olive green with the same dot family, is on tap to be the binding on this quilt. I am joining the binding straight edge, so I’ll see what that process is like since I’m really not all “that experienced” on binding.

And I am considering doing a blog post and/or podcast on TaDa Triangles and kicker bindings since people have been curious about both of those items based off my last podcast.

But before that, the more heavily quilted partner to this quilt, the Feather Fibonacci (to be shown at a later date).

Posted in Home Sewing Front, Mathematics, Quilting | Tagged , , | 7 Comments »

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27.7 Little Star Quilt

October 13, 2012

Wednesday I worked on 3 little quilts. I did a little more yesterday afternoon (before everyone else started #gdas) and finished up the last one. Well, maybe finished.

These are little quilts that I already had backing for, I had to match my batting scraps, Frankenstein one batting together (just a tad too short), and stitch them down to sew.

Today I have time to share with you the first little quilt I worked on quilting.  As you may be able to see (over the next several posts), these quilts are even smaller than my “don’t panic” quilt.

The first little quilt I had purchased the block from Fabric Recycles earlier this year, and I had bordered it a while ago.

Now I decided to take my recent ventures into FMQ and go to town on this quilt.

This probably has a little “too much FMQ” all in the same area.  As you can see, I have circles around the circles, and lines of quilting on the X’s (I may just applique a star in the middle of the quilt, don’t like the circle I ended up making).

Here are some better pictures of this little quilt.

Hmm. I can see this better when I zoom out, but I have rows of pearls quilted along the X, but in the middle of the rows I have some “l’s and upsidedown v’s”.  Its the same pattern I have in the borders.

Which is a cute pattern I drew in my notebook a while ago when I wasn’t stitching anything.

Starting to think in FMQ now. :)

Good sign.

Here’s a final picture of the little star quilt showing the whole thing.

One of my favorite Craftsy tips on FMQ is from the beyond basics Free Motion quilting class is to give yourself a little area just off the side of the quilt to correct tension issues on the quilt before starting.

This is the little green patch of fabric to the left of my previous picture.  This allowed me to play a lot with my tension before committing the stitches to the quilt.

Like how this turned out. Except the center circle, but again, a yellow/gold applique star will just do the trick there!

Posted in Home Sewing Front | Tagged , , | 3 Comments »

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25.6 SQ Episode 043 – Meetup at MQS

May 20, 2012

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In this show I talk about my experiences of going to our international/national/semilocal/local show “Machine Quilters Showcase” which I helped out on two different occasions, and discuss some things that go on in quilt shows that you may or may not know.  Some of the behind the scenes stuff for the show in the tasks that I was able to do.

First I talk about my experience receiving quilts, and what that involves, and next about working on putting ribbons on the quilts, and some of the “last minute details” getting cleaned up before the show.

This is the stack of boxes just before getting the quilts out ready to sort and analyze them.

This is a small stack of quilts after sorting and folding some (maybe a 10th of the total were done by this time?) This is still when we’re unboxing things.

Here is the “ribbon committee” who were helping with sorting and organizing ribbons for placement on the quilts.

And here are the pretty ribbons we placed on the quilts.

And a particularly sparkly quilt that we loved the way it looked with the low light. This is the back (YES YOU HEARD ME) the back of the quilt.

Then I discuss meeting Jackie and Robin and a little bit about our day. If you can stick with the podcast until near the end you get to hear the small amount of audio that we recorded (just a hi and goodbye mainly in addition to many many giggles).

And here is Robin, me, and Jackie. I wore that shirt because I thought it’d be easy to spot me. :) Had a couple of guys from up north tell me that the shirt was nice later in the day due to the logo.

And here is the BEST OF SHOW quilt that I was able to help move the plastic underneath the quilt prior to showing. And I pinned the ribbon on it (with white gloves).

Um…. I didn’t get the picture of the full quilt like I had thought. Too much to do/see I guess.  So you’ll have to just take my word on it.

I didn’t get the pictures all uploaded or analyzed yet. But if you like these, there are more to come later!  Enjoy!

Posted in Podcast Episode, Quilting Community | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments »

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25.5 Bloggers Quilt Festival Spring 2012

May 18, 2012

I’ve never done this before, but it can’t be too hard, right?

In the midst of looking at fantastically done quilts, mainly done on longarms at the Machine Quilter’s Showcase, I am going to show you here something that I have A) finished, B) hangs on my wall C) truely love and D) has walking foot quilting.

Sunflower Patio Dreams

This picture is probably my best full on picture which was taken while at the show we did back in July of last year. Which is why the paper is pinned on the left of it.

I took a simple pattern about Daisies and duplicated, rotated, enlarged and changed some of the flowers and leafs. I designed my own flower pots.

The birds I copied applique patterns from Award Winning Applique Birds. I decided they lived in the patio too.

The quilting is cross hatch along the blue background, as my original idea was looking through a window at the birds on a hypothetical back porch.

For the longest time I was confused weather these were daisies or sunflowers, but in the end they looked like sunflowers more.  I found out there are lots of centers of sizes of sunflowers  out there in the world, and these were closer to some type rather than others.

I offer up my simple quilt in the festival as my first ever entry to the 2012 Spring Quilt Festival. I am a little disappointed that there is realistically no reason for me to be at quilt market as it’s happening in my own backyard (theoretically).

But my day at Machine Quilter’s Showcase yesterday was fantastic and I’ll share more about all of it really really soon. At least that’s my hope!

If you happen to want to attend a quilt show with fantastic quilting and you’re still in Kansas City, pop down to Overland Park tomorrow 9-3 and I’m sure you’ll have a good time!

Posted in Quilting, Quilting Community | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments »

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23.7 SQ Episode 037 – March A Long Report March 11

March 11, 2012

Podcast Feed

Can you sew for 15 minutes a day during the month of March?

Did you know March is National Quilting Month?

And that March 17 is National Quilting Day?

And that Seamed UP is having a twitter sew in on that day? (#NQDSI)

And that Seamed UP is having a month long promotion / contest for using their site?

And that you can report your sewing to me on the blog, email or twitter (#MAL15)

See the past posts about the March A Long

Starting Here, going Here, and Here, and here before today.

And one more picture of my Necchi in action.

Start thinking about MQS if you’re in the middle of the country as I am.

MQS is Machine Quilters Showcase in the middle of May, a quilt show for machine quilted quilts. I will be there (somewhere sometime).

I hear a rumor that the SeamedUP girls (girl?) are going to try to attend Spring Quilt Market, which is held in Kansas City during the same time frame.

Imagine that.

Meetup possibilities abound. I have already heard that Robin and Jackie are going to try to make it to MQS. I want to spend at least one day there volunteering, and I have to figure out when /where to take days off to be available to help out and / or meet up with people.

One more reminder:

This is also a big finish for Rhonda’s Finish A Long for 1st quarter. Deadline for 1st quarter Finish-A-Long is March 31, then she will run a week of tutorials so I think the linky party of the second quarter goes live April 1st or 8th not sure. Probably the 1st. This is what I got from Rhonda.

Posted in 15 minute challenge, Podcast Episode | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment »

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23.6 Report for 1st week of March!

March 10, 2012

Report soldiers!
How have you been doing this first week (full week) of March? I’ve gotten a couple of reports already, but there could be more for the podcast tomorrow.

Me and my Necchi have started to bond. She’s fiesty alright, and I have to triple check to make sure that I am hitting all the little hooks for the tension.

I also bought her some bobbins, but they happen to be plastic and do not have a section to pull up the loose thread in. I wonder how I am supposed to start the new bobbins, because this was tricky. Any tricks?

Trouble may be with this heavy of a machine, I may not be able to use my current FMQ set up. This girl really moves the whole laptop stand when I get to sewing fast! Seeing as I currently use a wimpy TV tray, uh… I’m going to have to rethink that too.

But she sounds really nice, and fabric seems smooth with the machine, so I’m willing to do the little quirks that you have to do when you get new things, like a new/old car.

Also today I had to clean up my sewing room.

In my cleanup, I found a block that I bought at Fabric Recycles and I framed it for quilting.

So this was a full Bonus little thing!

I coulda done something more with the borders, but my star fabric didn’t exactly match colorwise. And now the border is on, so I am not going to unsew and change it. I dont think.

Well the corners just scream to have something going on with it, maybe some applique??

 

And in my cleaning, I found some partial blocks that I can set with black to make the black backing for my exothermic quilt. Productive day. At least 15 minutes.

And I started making pieces for a Guild BOM two sets of blocks to see if I could make a cute scrap quilt block directions and have an example for my guild members to see.

How was your week? You motivated to sew? At least a little, or motivated to get ready to sew later??

Report! Thanks!

Posted in 15 minute challenge, Home Sewing Front | Tagged , , | 5 Comments »

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21.2 Practicing quilting with paper

December 4, 2011

Sometimes you just have to make your own mistakes and make your own experiments before you believe a result that someone else has already warned you about.

I have been neglecting the FMQ on my giveaway quilt, probably since I haven’t FMQ’d since June. (That’s Free Motion Quilting, for the uninformed)

That and I really just want to piece my (other) quilts in my own room, around my own things, which leads me to procrastinate on this current project.

This quilt was supposed to be a quick quilt to get me to practice the FMQ, and that is starting to serve it’s purpose this early morning.

My experiment & hypothesis: I can FMQ through a freezer paper quilting template and still like the quilting results on the quilt when the freezer paper is removed.

First I took a paper copy of my design (Just ran the freezer paper copy through my printer) and pinned it down to the top of a practice quilt sandwich.

I quilted through that.  First, I locked up & realized how much lint is gathering under my metal plate, so spent a half hour ‘delinting’ my machine.

After all is lint free, I try again with the regular paper. I suppose this was my ‘control’ of my experiment.  To see if freezer paper would be easier than the regular paper.

Regular paper quilts through mostly fine, although at this point, I haven’t removed the regular paper yet, so this data is only halfway done.

Then decided I needed more time getting the rhythm for the design down, so I cut a smaller sandwich for the middle design & quilted it down.

So I took freezer paper and put it on my practice quilt sandwich and FMQ’d away.

I have only removed the paper from one of the flowers and leaves at this point, and although this technique I think would work, I am having reservations at how much this is pulling up the stitches.

One solution: faster foot pedal, slower hands.

This produces smaller stitches that would make it easier to tear away the paper and would prevent large loops coming undone

Another solution: tighten the tension on the top (?)

I am not sure but maybe a tighter tension would produce tighter stitches on the top.

Another solution: get the freezer paper wet with water to help remove the paper.

enough said.

Another solution: get a light weight quilting paper specially designed to dissolve away.

This would help with keeping the stitches close to the actual fabric underneath, perhaps also providing more tension all on it’s own. I don’t own any of this.

Another solution: trace the design from paper to the fabric using dressmaker’s carbon.

This way I don’t have to deal with the paper itself. Of course I don’t OWN any dressmaker’s carbon.

Another solution: trace the design onto tissue paper.

Same as the carbon, and I may actually have some. somewhere. Somewhere.Tissue paper’s thin.  May come with its own set of problems too though.

Another option: leave it – it’s working out ok enough.

I think this may work overall, if I decided to leave the freezer paper & tear it out by hand, I think this could be “good enough” and know that over time, I’ll get better. And hopefully the recipient would understand.

I realized that I never have come to this place before in my stages of quilting.

Which solution / option do you usually chose?  Reasons why?

Posted in Data, Experiment, Home Sewing Front, Hypothesis | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments »

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