Churn Dash

It's been a beautiful long weekend here. The weather has been perfect, not too hot, not too humid and lots of sunshine, and what did I do? I spent most of the weekend sewing.  You gotta do what you gotta do when your sewing mojo comes back. I did go out and enjoy the sunshine in between sewing stints.

I procrastinated for ages on what to do for the last border of the medallion quilt I have been working on since the beginning of the year. The orange peel blocks were finished and I don't think I showed a photo of them once they were added.

 My quilt holder upper isn't here so it's floor shots for now.

The original plan was for churn dash blocks. As usual, my unwillingness to commit kicked in and I spent ages trawling through books and the internet looking for alternate block ideas. I drove Shay insane, coming up with the perfect block then ditching the idea.  I even made a couple of churn dash blocks in the meantime to see whether they would work. Didn't think much of them at the time. Eventually it was just too hard, I needed to make 40 x 6inch blocks, and I already had 2 churn dash blocks, so I took the easy option and went with it.

40 blocks = 160 HST's that needed to be sewn, cut and trimmed. My Bloc Loc HST ruler came to the rescue, and if it wasn't for that ruler, I would have given up.

Twelve made, only 28 to go!

28 blocks finished.

I'm almost at the end now, I have 12 blocks left to sew.

These are the last 6, laid out on an old cutting board covered with batting,  I can take blocks to the sewing machine to sew, and not sew them in the wrong order. It's been very handy, my stuff up rate has been reduced considerably.

Meanwhile my trusty assistant found a nice place for a cat nap or two.

WIP Wednesday

Last week I totally amazed myself and quite a few other people too!  I made the jelly roll race quilt top as the backing for a quilt top that I had made almost two years ago.

I finished the quilt in a day.  Yay!  It had been bothering me that the quilt top had been sitting there for so long, so it was good to finally finish it.


and the back

I quilted through the middle of the chocolate squares on the front horizontally and vertically.
Front

Back - and sometimes the quilting crossed through the chocolate squares on the back!

Pure for the binding.

It's not very big but it's the perfect size as a small lap quilt while sitting in a chair or wheel chair. I have someone in mind for this quilt, but I'm going to wait and see how the next quilt pans out before I make a decision.

Part of the pile of squares from last week has been made into HST's and trimmed to size. It's time consuming trimming them down, but at least I know they are all perfect 3 inch squares now. I much prefer making them a little bit bigger, and knowing I can trim them down, rather than hoping that my piecing is perfect and then finding it isn't and I have to make more because I wasn't accurate enough.  This is coming from a LOT of experience in my not so accurate piecing. The  #@!* snowballs especially, come to mind.  I'm slowly piecing the rows but I'm not 100% sure how it's going to turn out, as I think I may have stuffed up the value. I wasn't looking at the colour value when I started, more concentrating on the use of colour.  I'm reserving my judgement until I have more of it sewn together. I'm hoping that the fabrics and colours will produce a subtle pattern on the quilt top which will be great for a masculine quilt. Rather than a dogs breakfast of random grey and aqua blocks with a few HST's thrown in for good measure. Fingers crossed. I'm using a wonderful pattern from a fabulous person but I'm not going to say who or what yet, as I don't want to give her "credit" for a really crappy quilt top that is all my fault. If, however it turns out as beautifully as the original by ________ I will be shouting about it from the rooftops.

I'm going to need another burst of colour in my sewing soon, all these neutrals are pretty but you can't beat lots and lots of vibrant colour.  That reminds me, most of my hand sewing and quilting projects have lots of colour,  and I forgot to show the finished circle from a couple of weeks ago. It's not as colourful as some of the other BOM blocks but I really really love this one. I swapped out a couple of the fabrics from Amitie and slipped in my own. I'm really starting to enjoy the process of making the templates and then hand sewing these blocks.

I also forgot to show the Grey Skies and Sunshine quilt in it's new home.

I was relieved to see, the greys, taupes and browns worked perfectly in T's new home. Look at the fabulous coloured glass on the kitchen wall in the background.

Finally, a tiny bit of hand quilting has started on this.



Worked On This Week
Pure Quilt
Modern Chevrons
Charm Pack Mini Quilt


Sitting On The Sidelines
Material Obsession BOM
Amitie BOM
Starflowers
Paper Piecing For The Terrified

Ignoring/Possibly Given Up
McFlurry
Mystery Quilt

Statistics
Finished - 1 and it wash't even a WIP it had been a UFO
Worked On - 2
Waiting Patiently For Me To Show Interest -  still 7
New - 1

Pop on over to Lee's blog, Freshly Pieced to see all the lovely talented people who are working on WIP's this week.

Festival of Half Square Triangles

I've decided to enter Urban Stars into the Festival of Half Square Triangles. Nothing like leaving something to the last minute.


I originally posted about finishing this quilt (here) in December 2011. I used my Baby Go Cutter for the very first time, to make the HST's for this quilt. They were a breeze to cut and sew. It's all HST's except for the sashing and has a few more HST's on the back.

Lots of Hometown by Sweetwater was included, plus various co-ordinating fabrics from my stash. I'm so very pleased with this quilt, and it's perfect in my living area.

Unfortunately it hasn't been used yet as the weather has been too hot and humid here to snuggle under quilts, but it's been a lovely piece of eye candy draped over my sofa. We are heading towards winter now so I'll be using it as much as possible during the cooler months.

The back very crinkly straight out of the tumble drier.

I also love the backing. I used some of the left over HST's to piece a couple of strips and then added Lecien Basics Dots. The binding is Hometown City Streets in Mist. The machine quilting is organic straight lines, and the finished quilt is 53" x 53".





I'm sorry but for some reason Blogger is not letting me link within the pretty Linky button so if you click on the link below

here it will take you to  Canoe Ridge Creations page where you can check out all the other fabulous HST designs that have been entered into the festival. Thank you so much Megan for hosting a great party!

Urban Stars

I started the HST quilt in August this year.
I wanted to try out my Baby Go cutter and decided to try cutting half square triangles for a quilt.

I change my cushions/pillows in my living area nearly as often as I change my hair colour. Maybe not quite that often but I think a change is as good as a holiday.  I like having a neutral living area so that I can change my cushions and the look for minimal cost and play out all my colour fantasies. I found some really nice cushions/pillows at a local store that went very nicely with some I already had.  I ordered a fat quarter bundle of Hometown, and then rummaged through my very significant (according to Shay) stash to find some co-ordinating fabrics.
After playing with Quilt Pro I finally fluked working out how to use it and came up with a repeating star using half square triangles. Something nice and easy that wouldn't tax my brain.


I'm over the moon with how this finished up. I love the colours and the subtle star pattern.

When I posted the photos on Flickr there were some great ideas suggested for a name, which I used to help me come up with Urban Star.  I love the urban edginess of the colour palette and the fabrics I've chosen. I especially love text fabric and there are quite a few used in this quilt. The overall look kind of reminds me of city buildings both modern glass and steel and old sandstone and marble.

As usual I had no idea how I was going to quilt it. I really do need to think more about the quilting in the initial design stages rather than leaving it to when it needs to be quilted.  I didn't want to quilt it by following the diagonal lines, I really wanted to do straight line vertical quilting but was very afraid to do it in case it looked crap. I spent hours looking at quilted quilts on flickr and on blogs, but could never find anything that looked like what I wanted to do. Eventually I just went for it and I'm very very glad I did as I really like the look of the "organic" vertical lines.  Most of the quilting lines are approximately an inch from the seam lines and there are areas where the quilting lines are further apart.


All crinkly after a spin in the machine and the tumble dryer. I threw in 4 colour catchers just in case. One came out a soft rusty brown colour, two a beige colour and one off white. Strange, but I'm pleased I used them.


The binding is Hometown City Streets in Mist, I love the soft colours in this one. I wanted the binding to be subtle and I think this fabric works really well, it's also a nice contrast to the backing fabric which is a Lecien Basics.

Pattern - my own using Sawtooth Star and sashing
Fabric - Hometown by Sweetwater plus various other fabrics from my stash. Not 100% sure what the off white was that I used as it was in my stash. I think it's a Kona solid.
Backing - Pieced using left over HST's from the front and Lecien Basics dots a Kona solid and Mist Textured Solid from Hometown.
Binding - Hometown City Streets in Mist, strips cut 2 inches wide for a narrow binding.
Machine quilted
Size - 53" x 53"



My 10th finish for the year!!!!!!!!

Friday Night Sew In

I'm linking up with FNSI which is hosted by Heidi from Handmade by Heidi and Bobbi.

I hope you haven't stopped by in the hope of seeing some absolutely stunning project that I whipped up last night, as you are going to be very very disappointed.

Friday night started with an attempt to quilt more Circles of Doom.  I'm not sure whether I jinxed myself calling them that or they really are circles of doom.

If the world ends tonight I'm going to blame them.

I originally quilted them a few weeks ago as they are in the above photo. It didn't work, in fact they looked crap, so I had to unpick them, that's when they were christened The Circles of Doom.

After hours of time spent getting to know my seam ripper, which by the way is a very nice seam ripper, I was finally able to start quilting them in a pebble pattern. It was ok but I wasn't really happy with my Pfaff foot that came with the machine as it was a closed toe foot and gave me a limited view. I ordered an open toe foot and waited for it to arrive. I started quilting with the new foot last night, at first all seemed fine, but the longer I used it the more problems I had. The tension  kept on changing, I broke three needles last night and it just wasn't looking great. After a couple of hours of frustration I gave up in disgust.

I then went on to finish the pinwheel blocks, yay.

All was well until I checked some of them. A few had come out too small and the ones that I had to unpick the other day had slightly stretched out of shape.  Enter an hour of rotary cutter fun (dripping with sarcasm here), cutting them down to size. I still have about half left to trim.

Spice Boxes quilt top

Final attempt at being creative was to start hand quilting the Spice Boxes quilt. I'm not even going to show photos of that disaster.  It's not quite bad enough to stab it repeatedly, set it on fire and then run over it with my car, twice, BUT....................

A summary of my evening: FNSI would stand for a whole lot of other not very nice words if I had my way. There were plenty of those words flying around here last night. 

I hope everyone else had a much "funner" night than me.

Assiduous

This is becoming difficult, it took me a little longer to find an interesting and appropriate adjective today.  The dictionary is my friend!

We have had very humid weather here, approx 90% humidity, temp. approx.  26 C (78F)  and I've been working slaving away on the wonky owl quilt, quilting in the ditch. About half way through I decided it would have been better to be a bit more daring. Rather than unpick it all, I finished quilting in the ditch on every block and I'm now trying to decide how I should be more daring.  

All the blocks are finished, and I spent the last two days arranging and re-arranging the 30 blocks.

The HST quilt is now quilted, bound, washed and dried. I am going to try very hard from now on to not make any more quilts using only the one line. I much prefer to use a whole range of fabrics, it feels much more exciting.

Lamb and Greek salad with marinated lamb, marinated feta, cucumber, capsicum, tomato, Cos lettuce,  (no olives as I didn't have any, much to my surprise), and tzatziki,  and yes that does look like the world's largest dollop of Tzatziki. It's an optical illusion, trust me!

I was hoping to go for a walk and take some photos to show you the views around here, but it has been so wet it will have to wait until the weather improves and the cloud lifts.

A couple of valuable lessons

Firstly, I learned last week I can't sew half square triangles using a 1/4 inch foot. Well, I can but they look like crap if I do.

I need to use the ordinary (is that the technical term?) foot. They aren't too bad in the above photo, but the "little miss perfect" side of me would have liked them to be more accurate than that.  However, the "I can't be bothered doing it again" side of me won out and this is how they're going to stay.

Do NOT click on the photo to enlarge, as you will probably find some more glaringly obvious spots where the seams didn't meet, but overall I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. The colour is a little too pastel/soft for me, but it was a good exercise to try half square triangles, and it will be a nice size baby quilt when it's all finished.
You did click on it, didn't you!

The second thing I learned last week is,  if you want to feed a kookaburra on the verandah don't leave the door open.

If you feed the kookaburra, and if you leave the sliding door open after you have gone inside, the kookaburra will follow you inside to see what else you have for it. This will cause the fur baby that is the most quiet easy going of all your fur babies, Karma (Mr Innocent), to turn into a crazed, I want to kill a Kookaburra maniac. He was worse than the cats.

Mr Innocent, he does look slightly possessed doesn't he, (or possibly spaced out).

Try wrangling two cats that are still finding it hard to believe that all their Christmases have come at once in the shape of a large feathered three course meal, a dog that has gone absolutely berserk, whilst running around the house opening as many doors as possible so that the kookaburra can find it's way out, hoping that you won't frighten it even more.

The good news, the kookaburra found it's way out of the house, intact and without leaving any deposits behind, phew, in fact double phew, as it flew over the dining table covered by all my fabric a number of times. It didn't seem to be too traumatised by the whole adventure, as it came back the next day for some more food.