A Baby Quilt

 I've been quilting for the past few days on a baby quilt for my guild.  We need to "fill our merchandise" to sell at the next Art in the Redwoods, and then Winter Wonderland.  These are the two main fundraisers for our guild (and for other organizations as well as the parent organization, Gualala Arts Center).  I had some fabric in my stash that had multi-colored squares printed on it, and I bought it with the idea of making it into a baby quilt.  So I pulled it out, got it sandwiched with a cute "kiddy print" on the back, and am now doing the quilting.

I don't pretend to be a very good free motion quilter, but I think that the more I practice, the better I should become, right?

This first design is simple leaves, all over and all different directions.  It was fun!

I believe this was a design that I found in a Leah Day free motion quilting book.  I drew one line wavy from corner to corner, then drew a straight line between the other corners.  Then simply followed the line, and echoed it.  I like this design a lot.

This kind of looks like a star to me, or a flower.

And some plain old stippling, which I really like, now that I've finally learned how to do it!

Several years ago, in my free motion quilting attempts, I could do "pebbles" quite well.  Now, however, something has changed, and I find myself pebble-challenged.  But I thought I'd try pebbles again.  The bigger pebbles are definitely easier for me than the small pebbles.

Below you see a square with a very simple wavy line going across it.  Also, you can see that these squares are about 5" square.

I still have several squares to quilt.  I'm quilting every other square, leaving the alternating squares blank.  I thought the quilt might get too stiff if it was quilted in every single square.

Recent Work

I'm afraid I've neglected my blog recently, but it's mainly because I've been so busy sewing!  So this blog post will be "short and sweet" so I can get back to my sewing.  #notaddictedtoquilting

Here are a few of the things I've been working on.

While watching Giants games in the living room with MisterStitches I've been cutting out aprons for TwoFish Baking Company.  Here Cassie is inspecting them.

On Saturday I started a new quilting project, one involving the "fabric confetti" method.  The whole quilt won't be confetti; I'll be adding some appliquéd shapes too.

Finished up this cute little Christmas tree ornament for my quilt guild's fundraiser sale on Thanksgiving weekend.  Isn't it cute!!??!

Added some appliqué flowers to my green denim jacket.  I guess I should do a whole blog post about that jacket, to show you all the treasures it holds.  

Here is a closer photo of the embroidered flowers.  I found a new way to embroider a flower on Pinterest:  the two red flowers.  I think they look a little like roses.

 I finished quilting a spiral on this quilt for our quilt guild's challenge show in October.  I found a great entry on Pinterest that gave very detailed instructions on quilting a spiral, and it was very, very  helpful.

And I finished crocheting another baby afghan.

Red Square Challenge

The theme for my quilt guild's challenge show this fall is "One Red Square."  The quilt can be anything, but it has to include one red square.  It cannot contain two or more red squares.  My little brain has been flooded with ideas for ways to use One Red Square in a quilt.  Here is one idea I had.  A red square in  the center, then another shifting square around it, then another shifting square around that, etc, etc.  I drew it out and used crayons to experiment with color possibilities. 

I used graph paper to make the squares, and cut them out to place them one on top of each other.  When I had it like I wanted, I took it to a copy shop and had it enlarged so that it's 30 inches square.

The large copy was perfect for tracing pattern pieces onto freezer paper.  I was then able to iron the pattern piece to the fabric, and measure and cut 1/4" around all four sides.  I found some really vibrant batik fabrics to use for the surrounding squares.

This is what it looked like (from the back side) when it was almost all sewn together.

 Now I'm wondering what kind of border to put on it.  Black?  Matching pink?  Another color?  No border?

And also, what to do for quilting?  I'm thinking maybe one big spiral starting in the center.

The Final Journey--A Quilt

The theme for our guild's challenge this year was "Journey."  My immediate thought was "the final journey," or death.  (I'm not always so macabre, I promise!!)  And what better way to show that, I thought, than "the light at the end of the tunnel."  So I googled that phrase and found these two representations, which I thought were perfect.

And I knew just what method I wanted to use to show my idea.  I learned this method back in 2015 in an Empty Spools class at Asilomar.  And I blogged about the quilt I made back then here.

 So I started cutting fabric confetti.  This is a very simple process.  Simply lay a piece of fabric down on the cutting mat, then cut random up and down strokes with the rotary cutter.  After that, cut random horizontal strokes.  You end up with confetti!

Maybe it wasn't a wise choice to cut the black fabric on a white cutting mat.  Uh-oh!

The plastic bags are kind of shiny and distorting, 

 but this shows some of the different colors of fabric that I cut into confetti.  I must add that with a lot of these, I had to get out more fabric and cut more confetti, as I ran out when I was building the design.

Finally I'm starting on the design!  Using the photo as a suggestion, I started laying down different colors of confetti fabric.  I started with the lightest colors and worked my way out to the edge.  (I have my backing fabric taped to the table, wrong side up, and then that is just batting laid over it.)  The confetti pieces stick pretty well to the batting.  Although I would not do this in front of an open window on a windy day!

You can see that m&ms are sometimes required when doing this!

Here is a close-up of some of the lighter pieces.

And this is what your floor looks like--even on a good day!!

Here I've made quite a bit of progress.  I just kept adding more fabric bits in a circular design.

You can see how the color gradation is changing as I get to the darker colors.  I wanted the light center to be off-centered on my quilt.

I pretty much have the whole piece filled with fabric bits in this photo.  Now comes the fun part!

A piece of black tulle gets laid--Very Carefully--on top of the whole thing.  Pretty sure MisterStitches helped me with this part.  Because once you lay the tulle down, you really don't want to re-position it.

And then came the fun part of safety pinning the living daylights out of it!  The pins have to be placed very close together so that the fabric pieces don't shift.  And yet, you can see that the fabric has shifted some; the white batting is showing through.  That will get taken care of with the quilting.

I know I used every safety pin in my house, and then borrowed some from a friend for this!

This photo shows the quilting.  While I'm quilting, I need to stop every so often and use a long pin to reposition some of the fabric pieces that have migrated.  This is the part where it gets quilted oh-so-heavily, to hold down all the little pieces.

When the quilting was all done, I hung it back up on the wall.  Wow, it really looks different from this angle!  Instead of laying on a table top!  

But now you can see a problem I had.  That white batting really looks awful.  At this point, I thought that maybe I should have used black batting, but that would have shown through the lighter fabrics, probably.  Not sure.  Maybe I should have used white batting for the inside circle and then black batting to fill in the outside edges.  That might have worked.  

What I did here was to take a sharpie and color in all the side parts of the batting.  

This. Was. Not. A. Fun. Job.

Another part of this challenge was that we had to use at least a five-inch square of a particular blue fabric.  I pondered how I was going to achieve this!  But then I simply cut the five-inch square into confetti.  I spread the little pieces around in the outer black part of the quilt.  And it worked!  In fact, I really like the effect. 

Here is a close-up of the little blue specks.

The final product.  About 36" by about 36".

I should maybe add a p.s. here at the end.  In May of 2017 I fell and broke my left arm.  That really hampers sewing and quilting!  I already knew this because I had broken my left arm in 2007 also!  But this type of "quilting" was very easy to do with just one (dominant) hand.  All the cutting of the confetti used just my right hand.  I started placing the confetti on the batting with just one hand.  Then I needed two hands for basting and quilting, and my arm had healed by then!

Christmas Ornaments, Already!?!

Yes, I'm making Christmas ornaments.  I'm working on some embroidered ones (like I've made in previous years, like these), and also made a couple little spool ornaments.  

I love wooden spools!

For these ornaments, I simply used a blue sparkly fabric to cover the spools.  (No real explanation or how-to needed for this, I think.  Simply turned under edges and glued to the spool.)

Then I looked at the ends, and they looked rather ugly.  There were no labels, but unattractive glue residue.  I didn't really want to bother with painting, but I wanted those ends covered.  So I grabbed a silver sharpie and that did the trick in no time.  

Then I glued plastic snowflakes (bought for use in making cards, which I've done) on the ends, before finally adding some silver ribbon for a hanger.

As you can see, I made one in the horizontal direction, and one vertical.  I'm pretty sure I'll be making some more, in other Christmas-y colors.

Way last February, at our annual PPQG retreat, all of the participants made disappearing four-patch blocks in reds, whites, and blues.

I have to say that I am truly amazed at how beautiful and scrappy it all looks.  Some people used colors other than the traditional red, white, and blue.  We have some light blue, some off white, and somehow it all blends beautifully.

Since then, I've been playing with different arrangements on my design wall.  

This is one of those projects that (sadly) I kept putting off.  It seemed like a huge mountain to me.

First, all of the blocks needed to be squared up to a consistent size.  Fortunately, my friend and fellow quilter Deb squared them up for me.  

Still, huge mountain!

But I finally got to it this week.  I finalized my arrangement, then got busy sewing all the squares together.  

Many years ago Libby Lehman taught a class at my guild and she showed us a method of sewing lots of squares into a quilt.    In the photo below you can just barely see gaps between the horizontal quilt rows.  That is because I sewed all the lengthwise seams first, but didn't cut the threads between the squares.  So at this point all I needed to do was to sew the crosswise seams together, and they are all held in just the right position.  This way nothing gets lost, and my quilt comes out the way I had planned it on the design wall.

Now all the horizontal rows need to be sewn together and again back up on my design wall.  I think I'll see if I can get some help adding a border and doing the basting and quilting.

Sunbonnet Sue In Gualala

My guild's 2016 challenge theme was about taking something from the past and bringing it into the present or the future.  And since this is our 20th year as a guild, there had to be 20 of something in each quilt.

My Tuesday quilting group decided to use Sunbonnet Sue to start with, as she is a rather old-fashioned quilt pattern.  Then we added certain touches to modernize Sue.  We brought her to our town of Gualala, California!

This shows the section of the challenge show where our group of quilts was hung.

 I saw this pattern in a SBS (Sunbonnet Sue) book, and just knew that I had to make it!  Isn't she funny!  And also brave, as the water is very, very cold here.  There are 20 small real shells sewn onto the beach fabric.

Another one of mine, Sue standing on the bluff top.  It can be very, very windy here at the edge of the ocean.  Hard to see, but there are 20 little tufts of grass embroidered onto the green bluff.

This is Sunbonnet Sue watching migrating whales.  Look at the cute ruffle on her dress.

Sunbonnet Sue at the Yoga Studio.  Twenty different poses of Sunbonnet Sue doing yoga!  I wonder how she keeps her hat on in some of those poses!

Sunbonnet Sue is neighborly.

Sunbonnet Sue watches the sunset.

Sunbonnet Sue goes shopping.  Pay N Take is a local once-a-month charity re-sale market.  Everyone in the whole community goes there to shop and socialize!  It's really quite fun.  And Sue is, of course, carrying her reusable fabric shopping bag.

Sunbonnet Sue walking her dog.

And another one of mine, Sunbonnet Sue Makes a Quilt.  There are 20 squares in Sue's quilt.  The quilt and the curtains are 3-D.

It was so much fun making these little quilts.  It's nice to be a part of a group making an entry into the  challenge show.