Sister Sneak Peak (8/18/2013)

I can't keep this in - I AM HAVING SO MUCH FUN!  

Michele over at Quilts From My Crayon is hosting a swap called "It's a Sister Thing Swap".  I am having so much fun!  Did I say that already?  

I can't resist posting a peak of what I am working on right now.  Enjoy!

I can't wait for the reveal day!  I can't wait!  I can't wait!  

Happy dance :o)

woof woof meow

Tina & Gabi's Day and Night (4/11/2013)

Hi hi!  This post is long overdue…Tina and Gabi got their quilts a while ago, I’ve just been slow getting the pictures in a post and up on the blog.

Backstory:  I worked with Tina and when she was sent off for her job, I wanted to make her and her daughter matching quilts so that they would have a little piece of each other while Tina was gone.  Yeah, that didn’t happen before she got home.  At first it sat cut in strips.  Then it sat sewed into strips and cut into pieces.  Then it sat sewn in half the blocks.  Then it sat in all the blocks.  Then, they both got put together, on the Gammill and off to them all in the space of a few weeks.  It did all the previous sitting over about 14 months!

Pictures, pictures, pictures.  This is a pretty picture heavy post from here on out.  And, of course if I took pictures of the fabrics, I can’t find them.  So, we’ll start out with pictures of the blocks instead.  I used Eleanor Burns’ “Day and Night” pattern for both quilts.

Gabi's quilt has two colors, light pink and black.  Tina's has three: light pink, dark pink and black.



Here are the two blocks together.





Gabi's top with Tina's block in it.

Tina's top with Gabi's block in it.

The backing.  A pink flannel that screamed girlie girl on it.  Not sure about the "owl" on it though.

Tina's quilt loaded on the Gammill.

The quilting detail on Tina's quilt: loopy hearts.

More quilting detail on Tina's quilt with both blocks.

Gabi's quilting detail: loopier hearts.

More quilting detail on Gabi's quilt with both blocks.

Gabi's quilt finished!

Tina's quilt finished!

Oakleigh trying to help with the binding:  "You finished yet?!?!"

Annie in front of Tina's finished quilt:  "You're finished now Mom!"

woof woof meow!

A finish - Baby Henry's Quilt (2/11/2013)

Yay - this was a fun project!  Josh's cousins had their second child - a boy - in October and when I heard they were expecting, off I went to find a quilt to make for them.  Then, Melissa Corry blogged about her Snuggly Squares II baby quilt.  I knew it was the pattern I wanted to try for this baby quilt.  I scrounged around on the web and found a (very hard to find) Lily & Will II layer cake at Christa Quilts!.  I ordered it and when it got here, I was soooo excited.  So excited, it sat. And sat.  And sat.

Then, when I got to it, the cutting and piecing went really fast.  Then, it sat again.  When it is nice outside, I usually stay at home, go hiking, take the dogs to the river, ride my motorcycle.  So, the quilt top sat on the bed in the guest bedroom for months.  Molly was nice enough to sneak into the room when I could catch her and hold down the quilt top for me.  Sweet child...

Before I finally got to Tigard to use the Gammill, I sketched out what I wanted to do - bunnies, flowers and vines, to mimic the fabric patterns.  I found a bunny outline at Pixabella and sketched them in the centers of the single-piece blocks. 

The flowers went into the pieced-center blocks.

The vines went around the outside of each block and around the border of the quilt.

It went on the machine really easily - normally my lines are crooked as sin!

If I didn't live alone I would think someone else sewed the top for me ;o)

After I took it home, bound it and washed it, I took it over to my MIL's and asked for her to take some photos for me.  The quilting shows up pretty well on the back, but it doesn't photograph very well in the sun.

The front turned out great and Liz's photography made it look even better!

I loved working on this quilt and working on my skills with it.  I hope Baby Henry loves it just as much!

woof woof meow

A First, a Finished Project and Fabric

A First:  I got to mow the sod for the first time!!!  It filled the mower bag to the top - but I got it all done without having to empty it mid-mow.  Now I know what my husband knows: what he got himself out of!  That backyard is twice as big as the front!!!

There are a few burn spots from the first few days, but other than that, it looks great!!!

A Finished Project: Ranger's Pride is pieced, quilted, bound, labeled and washed!  It looks fantastic and the quilt poofed-up in all the right spots.  Doesn't it look great outside?  I can't wait to give it to the baby!

Fabric: We picked up some fabric for a few projects at Jannilou's in Philomath on the way home.  Any guesses on what I might be doing with them?

And a photo of Molly talking with Rowdy, the neighbor cat.

Quilting Ranger's Pride (7/1/2012)

I got to Diane’s this morning and got to work as soon as I got there.  With about 45 minutes total breaks to eat and potty, I got the quilting done in 8 hours.  The machine said I had 4 active machine hours.  I look forward to cutting that extra 4 hours of messing around down as I get better at the designs on the machine.  In addition to the batiks I used for the top and backing, I used a single layer of Warm and Natural cotton batting, a navy blue Superior Threads and Superior Threads King Tut Line #927, De Nile (it is a variegated thread with all the blues to match the top).  The first step was done a couple of weeks ago: marking the quilt top.  I drew out the whole quilt (easy since it was a small baby quilt) in permanent marker on graph paper, then started to doodle in the empty spaces with a pencil and a lot of eraser.  This is what came out of the couple hours I spent on it. 

 

A close-up shows all the elements in a corner. 

Then I used a Clover Fine Tip White Marking Pen and started to mark the quilt with the designs I put on the sketch.  After one entire block of all the designs, I decided it would be best to just do the triangle swirls and do the flower free hand when I got on the machine. 

Next step was to pin the backing to the frame, then lay the batting and quilt top on top of that and square the top up.  I never really paid attention to this step much with my other quilts and I paid the price (luckily none of them were ever shown in any shows where they were judged), they came out wonky.  The long arm has horizontal and vertical stops so it makes it easy to line the edges up and make sure everything is square. 

Once that was done, the actual quilting begun!  I started with Stitching In The Ditch on all the seams that I drew out in permanent marker on my drawing paper.  These served to divide the quilt even more than the actual colors in the blocks did and also to really frustrate me.  Can’t seem to stitch a darn straight line with that! 

I used a tool called Linda Mae’s Ditch Stitcher and it worked great on the open areas when I stitched my diving lines in the borders. 

The borders I divided up into triangles that I put the triangle swirl in and flowers.  The triangle swirls were an iteration of the original triangle echoes that I drew on the sketch.  I learned in my practice quilting that the echoes were just not time effective since they weren’t continuous lines. 

 

 

I also jumped from each triangle to the next rather than clipping the thread and moving to each new spot. 

 

The triangle swirls were half the brown borders and in each brown pinwheel. 

I also did small and large flowers in the quilt.  The other half of the brown borders were in flowers.   

I used the jumping technique with the flowers too. 

The larger flowers I put in the half square triangles of the dark blue pinwheels.   

 All together the three look pretty nice, triangle swirls, small flowers and big flowers. 

For the filler in the light blue spaces of the blocks I originally had straight lines with hearts at the ends. 

 

I changed that up a little bit by adding squiggly lines to the straight ones and doubling the hearts. 

I hope it will puff up a little when I wash the quilt so you get some puffiness to the baby quilt to off-set the heavy quilting in the borders. 

The dark blue borders I just did straight lines.   

 

You can kind of see the variegation in the thread in the straight lines. 

In order to do the straight lines on the long sides of the quilt, we had to un-pin and turn the quilt 90 degrees and re-pin it to the frame.  Took a little bit of tweaking but we got it on right.  Everything looks pretty much like the original sketch, with the few tweaks I had to make. 

I was very happy to un-pin it and take it off the machine! 

Here is what I had looking over my shoulder the entire time – isn’t it cool?!?  Diane took a class where they enlarged a picture of something (in this case a dahlia), changed it to grey-scale, assigned each grey a real color, then translated it to raw-edge appliqué.  She FMQ it on her Juki and I think it looks great! 

 

This is the BOM for the Santiam Scrappers Quilt Guild for June – strawberry block. 

I just did mine as raw edge and whoever wins the block can quilt it as they like.  Needle turn is still wayyyyyyy beyond me.