fun finish

I've got so much to post about but no time to post! The photos on my computer have been in disarray for months, and it's making it tough to blog. I'm trying to get them organized a little bit at a time.

In the meantime, here's a top I just finished. 

I don't think I ever even posted about it being in progress.

Yes, it's a Christmas quilt! This was a free pattern from Kate Spain called "In from the Cold." You can still find it. It immediately caught my eye because free patterns that show off fabric lines are usually pretty lame. But this one is so fun and unique!

The pattern sat around in my head until last summer when I found a Christmas fabric bundle on sale at my LQS.

I cut out the pieces and worked slowly, one mug at a time, whenever I was feeling overwhelmed by my other projects. I can't recommend enough this method of having a "fun" side project to default to when the others tire you out.

Here are some close-ups of some of the fanciers mugs:

Aaaaand that's all I've got today. I am in between large quilt projects and loving it. I am working on little odds and ends that I picked up in Paducah (a really cool tote bag, some wool easter eggs, wallhangings), and finishing off random UFOs (my bee block quilt, another tote, some wallhangings). It's fun to walk into my sewing room and say "what do I feel like working on today?" I hope you are enjoying whatever projects you are working on too!

More finishes!

Yes, I have been quilting during the past two (three? eek!) months. I'm just awful at photographing my progress!

So let's see, last we talked I was in the process of quilting Celtic Solstice. One of the stencils I had bought was not feeling quite right for the design.

So I went into illustrator, mocked up the block, and sketched up a new design of arcs, similar to the style I had quilted on the other blocks.

Here's the printout of the quilting design.

I'm sure the pounce pad people don't want you to know this, but you really don't need to buy stencils to go with your pounce pad. These printouts work great. I just stitched out the design with no thread and then used the pounce pad on it. Below is the backside so you can see my stencil holes.

 And here it is laid out for marking. I snipped out the triangles to help with alignment.

Miss Rosie provided quality control! She looks really annoyed in this picture, huh? ;)

During the quilting, I was shocked to find the following error. Can you see it?

It seems I used that green square as test fabric for my zigzag stitch at some point! And it ended up in the final quilt! Luckily it was easy to pick out.

The stitching was done on this quilt quite some time ago, but I only finished recently because I took so long to sew down the binding. I decided to order a pack of wonder clips from Massdrop. Have you used them? They have a quilting section and post one new quilting product per day. One big downside is that it takes forever to get your items. (Also the sales are not always that great, check around online before you buy!) Anyways, three weeks later when the clips finally showed up I was super happy and FINALLY got this quilt finished!

The wonder clips were great. I am a convert!

Here's the only shot of the finished quilt I have so far. I need to do some glamour shots soon. (And apparently I took this photo before the binding was sewn down)

It fits on our bed! This is a big accomplishment, we don't have any other bed-sized quilts yet. And yes, my room is a mess. But let's focus on the quilt! Ooh aah! (Psst - do you see Pepper waiting to jump on top? For some reason she LOVES this quilt! The entire time I was binding it she would burrow underneath and take naps!)

A note on the batting - this quilt was made with wool batting by Quilter's Dream. I really like their company and their battings. So far I have had no trouble quilting with it. I didn't experience any pilling problems although there are bits of batting all over it that I still need to go through and pick off - I think they came off from the bits hanging out the edges while I was quilting. It seems soft but lightweight. I will let you know more after I've used it longer.

Onto other projects...here is a fun side project that took up a week of my time:

 These are supposed to be campaign ribbons for a cat-themed trivia night. There was a table decoration contest. Our team name was "James Garfield Lasagna Party" and was supposed to be Garfield (the cat) running for president, so I made these Garfield kitty campaign ribbons for everyone to wear. I think the theme was a little too obscure/difficult to understand though so we didn't win the decoration contest.

The other big thing I my list was knocking out Grand Illusion once and for all! With Celtic Solstice I burned out before adding the final border, and I didn't want that to happen here. So I sat down and got those border pieces sewn!

Unfortunately, when I went to sew the border on, it was a full two inches too short. W.T.F.

I read and re-read the instructions. All I can think is a seam allowance issue that compounded. I definitely followed all of the instructions correctly. So this was really frustrating and after some distressed phone calls to my mom and paces around the house, I added filler fabric to each end of the border pieces.

So you can see in that photo, those extra lime strips aren't actually supposed to be there. But in the end I don't think they lock as awful as I feared they would.

Here's the finished top on my bed. It's even bigger than Celtic Solstice!

Now I attempted some glamour shots outside for this one, but a thunderstorm was rolling in at the time and it was really windy. Here's the best shot.

And some outtakes...

I think everyone agrees that it doesn't have quite the same pop as Celtic Solstice, but I do still really like the colors I chose for it. This one is getting folded up for a while, and will be quilted maybe in the fall. In the meantime I have started some fun, easy project, and have another quilt top nearly complete! I will share that in a future post.

To close, here's Pepper interrupting my photo shoot.

Skill Builder BOM Finished!

I am spending the first part of the year finishing up loose ends. It is so refreshing to finish off projects! It is also refreshing to walk into the sewing room and ask "what do I want to work on today?" instead of being in the middle of a huge project that I feel I have to complete.

So, one of the first loose ends was last year's Skill Builder BOM from Pile O' Fabric.

I have to say, I was dreading the final assembly, but it was super easy!

This was my first "quilt as you go" quilt. Each block is quilted individually, then joined together with batting and sashing.
It was a little
 nervewracking because everything needs to be stitched with the seam just so in order to fit together properly, but all went smoothly. And I must admit that the finished quilt has far more intricate quilting than it would have had if I had tried to quilt it after fully assembled - it's just too hard and tedious.

Here are some close ups of the blocks:

I probably won't be doing future skill builders...the teaching style and my learning style didn't match up. But I do like the finished quilt. However, I used 80/20 batting (Can't remember the brand at this point) that ended up being super thin. I don't think it would be a very snuggly quilt. My mom suggested hanging it on the wall of my sewing room, which would be perfect, but my sewing room has slanted walls and the quilt won't fit. So I'm sure what to do with it now. (Oh and then my boyfriend said, "why did you make it if you didn't have a plan for it?" Quilters must create, sir!)

Oh, in addition as you might have noticed the batting shrunk like nobody's business! It's really noticeable on the blocks where I left portions unquilted, like the iron and sewing machine. It's funny because I know some people like the shrinkage because it provides that "heirloom" sort of look, but am I the only one who would prefer my batting not to shrink at all? I guess that's the one advantage of the polyester batting, it doesn't shrink.

After this guy was finished, I did a few odd jobs on my list. I hemmed a pair of pants that have been waiting over a year for my attention, and whipped up these cute Yosemite pillow cases for our bed.

We both really love Yosemite and have been many times, and this flannel fabric is so nice and soft! I know they don't match and they aren't particularly attractive, but they're special to us. The top one features lots of Yosemite landmarks, and the bottom one just has so many fun camping items. Do you see the campfire popcorn? Or the ranger hat? Too cute! It's fun to have them.

The next big unfinished project to tackle is the 2013 Celtic Solstice Mystery quilt. This is a biiiig quilt and I am using wool batting, which I am pretty eager to test. Instead of trying to figure out a freehand design, I got some stencils and am using my pounce pad to transfer the designs to the quilt.

Here is the quilt with the stencil laid out:

All marked up: (Not perfect but close enough to follow)

Aaaand stitched!



In general the pounce pad has done a fine job marking up the quilt top. I like the stencils but I must admit, they are less forgiving than your typical free motion filler. With free motion if I make a mistake I can hide it or make it look like part of the flow. Here any wibble wobbles or inconsistencies are really obvious. The design I picked is also leading to little raised areas in the center of each block. I think if I pulled the fabric tighter it wouldn't do that as much. I'm also facing the usual tension issues when trying to quilt.

Now this quilt alternates two blocks to create an overall pattern. I have quilted all of the one type of block, but the stencil I bought for the other block doesn't look quite right:

I can see what I was going for but since the diamonds don't really follow any of the lines in the quilt, I think it's too incongruous. I am thinking of other design ideas and might just make up my own stencil, by printing something out and stitching through the lines with no thread in the needle. I've done this before and these work great with the pounce pad as well.

On a side note, at our guild meeting this month we had a tutorial for how to use instagram, so I finally signed up a quilting-specific account. You can find me @chibibenz. Instagram has a lot of appeal because it's so fast and easy. Writing blog posts usually takes me an hour and getting all of the photos added takes quite some time. With instagram you click one button and you are done! So I will probably start being more active on there than on here, just for time management purposes.

One last note! This month at our guild meeting we also did our pincushion swap. It was a huge hit! This was a relief because I am on the challenge and swap committee, and our last challenge was a flop.

Remember my pincushion? It was a teapot!

And I came home with this super cute "hot toddy" pincushion, which came with actual hot toddy recipes. I just love the detail with which she made the accessories of the lemon peel, cinnamon stick, and star anise. 

Okay that's it for this update! Back to stitching!

Progress

Progress has been slow but steady around here. Today I finally got the top all sewn together for my Grand Illusion mystery quilt. It still needs the borders added, I will work on those next.

The photo is awful because it is dark out and this quilt is really too big for one person to hold, but you get the idea.

I've been taking my time partially to see how everyone else is finishing their quilts. A lot of people (myself included) found the original design too busy and altered it. I've been looking for ideas and I think what I ended up with is pretty good considering I wasn't really willing to do any re-work. A lot of people ditched the checkerboards, but they took my FOREVER so I wasn't about to scrap them. This way I used all of the pieces I had already made and just altered their orientation.

Throughout the process I've been trying pretty hard to keep things nice and straight. I really wanted to push my perfect pieces. But once it came time to put these blocks together, all the perfection went out the window. There are a LOT of wonky seams. At some point you have to decide how much you care, and I decided this quilt wasn't going in any shows, and a lot of the imperfections are the kind of small things that only I would notice, so they stayed in.

Do you see how wonky that navy square is??

Can I just say though, I HATE these checkerboards? They were a total pain to make - this step took me a month alone - and they don't even fit with the quilt. The main block is a nine patch (in thirds) and these are an eight patch (in fourths) so the seams don't match up. That annoys me. And the color in them, purple, isn't in the main block, which means instead of tying the quilt together, they throw in a completely new element. And finally, they really show errors. They are supposed to be little squares and I think 80% of mine are rectangles. Even though I was trimming mine down at each step of the assembly, almost all of these were about a quarter inch to half inch too long. It was frustrating.

It's a rectangle.

In other news, I made this cute pincushion.

It was based off this tutorial. Somehow my lid ended up looking very much like a clown hat, but I still think the overall effect is pretty adorable. (And notice I tried very hard to ensure that all of my hearts were face up!) It is for my guild's pincushion swap. Hopefully nobody will mind that it isn't "modern."

And ALSO! I never shared my Christmas sewing. I made these wine totes from a tutorial here. They came together quickly and I think they look pretty good!

I also made a bee block - did I show this already? Can't remember.

It was supposed to be improv. We all discussed in our bee how much we appreciated it because it turns out we are all super uncomfortable with improv. It was a good learning experience, but I will have to do more with improv before I really feel comfortable with it.

I also wanted to share...last weekend I was in Chicago. We visited the Art Institute and the BEST PART was an exhibit of a bunch of miniature rooms. Here I am next to one for a sense of scale.

Almost of them had itty bitty needlepoint objects inside. I also do needlepoint, so I was pretty much blown away by these things.

Here is one in progress on a frame. And you can see the rug as well. Can you believe how real this room looks?!?!

And the needlepoint chairs! Look at that chair! It's probably 4 inches tall. Totally crazy.

Needless to say, my boyfriend had to drag me out of there I was so in love with all those miniature rooms :)

Grand Illusion Link Up 6

Well hello! I haven't linked up since week two because...well...I'm still stuck on clue 3. I don't know why, but it is going suuuuper slow for me. I've only gotten 90 of the 8 patch units finished.

But the advantage of falling behind is that I get to see whatever everyone else has done with their quilts before I decide what to do with mine! One of the most fun parts of these mysteries is to see how everyone makes the quilt their own.

I spent a loooong time last night arranging and rearranging my blocks in many formations to try to decide what my favorite layout was. I have narrowed it down to two options and would love your help choosing.

Option 1:

I really like how the pinwheels POP with the teal centers and navy edges. I think it makes a a bold, eye-catching statement. And since the pink and teal were my two favorite parts of this color scheme, I had to put the pinks in the cornerstones. But the big disadvantage of this design is that you lose the double diamond impact of Bonnie's original.

Option 2:

I think the pinwheels make less of a wham bang with the pink next to the teal centers instead of the navy, but this way you can see the secondary design of the diamonds formed by the navy lines. This is very similar to Bonnie's layout.

So, what's your vote? You have to squint and stand 20 feet from your computer before you decide! I might have to whip up some mock-ups in photoshop of how each design will look with the full number of repetitions.

And go check out all of the other quilts! There is so much inspiration as many tops are complete! As always, thanks to Bonnie for putting this wonderful design out there for free. I know it can be a big headache for her with SO MANY participants, but it sure is a blast for all of us!