Finished the fourth binding, and musing on the material requirements of quilting

I just finished putting in the final stitches on the label of the fourth quilt.  It boggles the mind how much sewing goes into a large bed quilt.  On binding alone, in the four I finished there was just shy of 1600 inches of blind hemming!  Astounding. 

And the fabric!  There is about 7 1/2 yard on each backing of these big quilts including margins, and anywhere upwards from 9 yards in a quilt top.  The seams eat up a huge amount, as I discovered when I totaled what went into one of them.  For example, the 100 inch square log cabin quilt I just finished had 64 10" square blocks, and two borders, the first 2" and the second 8".  Each 10" block is 100 square inches but requires 162.5 square inches of fabric.  That's 10,400 square inches for the blocks, 825 square inches for the first border and 3,400 square inches for the outer  border, for a total of 14,625 square inches of fabric.  Using an average usable width of 42" for a bolt of quilting cotton, that's over 9 1/2 yards of fabric and these were simple blocks without a lot of seams.

No wonder quilting is getting so expensive!

Oh NOOOOOOOOO. . .

I pulled out one of my project-in-waiting this afternoon to fill the time until the next installment of the Quiltville mystery and started sorting out the cut pieces. It was then that I realized that the first thing I needed to do was to make 225 red and cream 2" HSTs.

Sound familiar?

Even though I didn't think I could face another little red and white square of fabric I decided it was good for my character to persevere.

Indecision

All forty-two blocks for my batik version of Schnibbles' "Little Red" pattern are complete, and I have made 168 half square triangles from the cut off corners. These will be assembled into 42 pinwheel blocks to go in the border somehow. I've played on EQ for a while but can't decide.

There aren't enough pinwheels to complete the entire inner border so I thought of combining them with the blue batik of the outer border. I'm leaning toward this arrangement: But I am always so symmetrical in my thinking I even bore myself, so I tried this uneven arrangement. Then my old ways reasserted themselves and I tried this also: I just can't decide! What do you think?

Have I got a deal for you...

ADDENDUM: Thanks folks. I've had a great response to the fabric giveaway and now I have to close enrollment. The boxes will be going out in a few days.

I was cleaning out and organizing my sewing closet today and I'm red-faced with embarrassment about how much fabric I own. When did it get so out of control? Part of the problem is that the storage is limited, and with all fabric, especially longer cuts, stored in plastic boxes, it isn't apparent without some serious digging exactly what I have. I bet that I have bought stuff because I couldn't find an acceptable substitution in the stash closet.

My fabric collection consists of everything from yardage to small scraps left over from cutting out past projects. The leftovers can be anything from a scrap the size of my hand to almost a yard. I'm not really eager to use a lot of them in new designs because I'm tired of them. I thinned the ranks three summers ago and donated bags of fabric to a senior center quilting group, but it appears that just like rabbits, fabric reproduces rapidly!

Every few years I get the urge to clean out closets and reduce the piles of stuff that seem to accumulate, including my sewing supplies. This is looking like one of those years! I have already taken a huge load of clothes to the women's shelter, and have more to go. Some of these were smaller sizes from over 10 years ago that I hung in the guest room closet for "someday". Well, "someday" came with the weight loss but the clothes look ten years old in style and now I don't want some of them! (Boy, how fickle we can be!) So they're going, with some housewares and other stuff. The hardest thing to find a use for is fabric that I don't want anymore.

I'm sure everyone has fabric like that - you've used it one too many times, your tastes have changed, or you simply look at it and wonder "When I bought this, was I on drugs?" Since I can get a charge out of cleaning closets that would rival the best pharmaceuticals (I'm my mother's daughter, all right), I want to dispose of some of my stash.

So, I have a proposal to make that will especially appeal to scrap quilters. If you are willing to take a chance on what you receive and pay postage, I will fill a flat rate box with selections from the stash closet and send it to you. There are several choices of flat rate box sizes. The smallest are 8 5/8" x 5 3/8" x 1 5/8" that ships for $4.95, or 11" x 8 1/2" x 5 1/2" for $10.70. I could get a nice amount of fabric into either one.

I couldn't guarantee what sizes of scraps or what colors, unfortunately, but if you gave me a color preference I would try to meet it.


I also found a quilt kit I bought five or six years ago that I don't want anymore and doubt that I will make. It's "Pansy Park" by Thimbleberries. The kit contains all fabric for the top and all the instructions. I'll sell it for $50 plus postage.

ADDENDUM: The quilt kit has been sold.
This is what it looks like. The border fabric is printed with stripes of small trees. It's a big quilt, too, large queen size. It's pretty but I'm just not up for really large projects right now. One online store is selling the kit for $245, which I certainly didn't pay for it, but I guess scarcity drives the price up. Except here. So do I have a taker?

Contents: one quilt. Just add...

...time, thread, patience, pressing, inspiration, batting, worry, aggravation, sewing, bobbin-threading, concentration...and fun!

Quilt kit ready to sew, with all cutting and marking for HSTs complete. This one, I got smart and put a photo of the completed pattern in the package. I hate to admit that I've pulled out one of my home-made quilt kits before that had been in storage for a time and didn't have this critical piece, and couldn't remember how the blocks went together. Just another senior moment.

What price quilting?

I don't follow the "personalities" in the quilt world. I daresay I wouldn't recognize the names of most of them. So, when an interview with a fabric/pattern designer in my latest quilting magazine mentioned the popularity of one of her applique patterns, I had to go look it up.

Well.

They're really nice patterns, sort of traditional with a twist, for an appliqued nine inch block. And the patterns are for sale. For five bucks a block.

You read right. I thought at first it was the cost of a kit. But no. It's just the pattern. For one nine inch applique block. Five dollars each. Let's see - there's 25 blocks in the quilt. That's $125. For the pattern.

She's started to believe her own publicity. At least, that's the only thing I can come up with.

Tell Santa to bring me a design wall for Christmas

I've been using the horizontal design board, aka the guest room bed, to lay out this little beauty. My lower back is screaming; I'm too old for this. I really need a design wall but I have nowhere to put it. Even a piece of 4' x 4' foam core covered with fleece would do. I could store it under the bed, which is far better use for it than as a design wall. That needs to be my next project.

Excuse me, I need to go lie down. Ouch!

What's your favorite quilting magazine?

Without a doubt, mine is Fons and Porter's Love of Quilting. Every issue I find a quilt that I want to make. In the most recent issue, I found three! (Oak Leaf and Rose, Pinwheel Play and Christmas Sparkle - I'm definitely making the first one after the first of the year, and the others are going in my holding pile. I even know what fabric from my stash I'll use.).

McCall's Quilting, American Patchwork and Quilting, and Quiltmaker all have appealing patterns at times, and I often clip photos and designs for my inspiration notebooks. I read Quilter's Home for the articles, but Mark Lipinski's design aesthetic does not jibe with mine at all and I'm letting the subscription expire. None of them appeal to me like Fons and Porter. It's the only magazine than I devour when it arrives, muttering "Oh, that's great!" under my breath and dog-earing page corners.

Their designs are what I call "updated traditional". Their patterns are firmly rooted in traditional designs, with just enough modern use of color and layout to make them fresh and new. They seem to appreciate the history of the craft. I have nothing against abstract quilts, pictoral quilts, and all the other design innovations in the art, but they're not me.

Keep 'em coming, Fons and Porter. I'm waiting.

I never worry about anyone else causing me trouble, because I do such a good job of it myself

I finished piecing the allover design using the Benartex fabrics that I posted about yesterday. This evening after supper I started poking around in my stash closet to find another UFO to complete.

I pulled out a half-completed strip set Ohio Star using a lovely autumn leaf fabric for the setting triangles. As I unpacked the patches and completed blocks from the bag, I tried to remember exactly how this one went together. I was drawing a blank about the border; there were a bunch of triangles but no clue how they were supposed to be assembled.

I remembered that the pattern was taken from a book I had, and that the book showed the quilt with a navy and tan floral as the setting triangles. So I pulled up a chair and started thumbing through books.

After I had gone through five or six I started to get worried. What if I had sold the book last spring? Or donated it to the library? I knew I didn't have any more of the fabric, so if I couldn't find the pattern, how was I to put the border together?

At last, I opened a Marsha McCloskey book and there it was. Whew! That was close! I never thought about the UFO's in my closet when I thinned out the bookshelf.

What you find in the bottom of the closet

Ever since we installed the lovely cherry shelf and quilt hanger in the hallway I have been struggling to find the perfect quilt to display. Finally I decided what I needed was not one perfect quilt, but an array of small quilts to change by the season, the occasion, the whim. It could be my rotating art exhibit. And, since it was in the hall near my bedroom door, guests wouldn't necessarily see it, so I could go wild with color.

I started with my Delectable Mountains Whirligig quilt. It's back from the longarmer and waiting to be bound. I then found a wild teal and orange and yellow basket pattern and pieced a darling, VERY bright small quilt. Then the red/white/blue star that I showed a few days ago. While I was sewing on that quilt I remembered some Thimbleberries projects that I had begun but not completed several years ago. So, I went closet diving.

WELL! What you find in the bottom of the closet! There they were, four seasonal wall quilts (one pieced, the others cut out), my blue "big mistake" quilt (see previous post), a rose applique with yellow floral border and a small pine tree Christmas table topper (half quilted!). If I was looking for wall quilts, I had hit the motherlode.

The Thimbleberries quilts were from, gulp, spring of 2002. The date is right there on the web page I printed with the photos. They were the Thimbleberries Club projects for 2002. I, being cheap, decided that I could draft the pattern and use my Thimbleberries fabric to get the same look as the kits for sale. I had a lot of Thimbleberries leftovers back then. So, I dived into my stash, figured out the patterns, and constructed my own kits. The Club patterns were 60" square; I wanted wall quilts so I shrank them to 42". (It's so handy to be able to draft patterns.) I completed the Christmas quilt but stopped there.

Why, I wondered. There were a lot of reasons. My father-in-law's kidney cancer recurred in his lungs. That spring, my mother-in-law became ill and her brain tumor was diagnosed. My husband was out of town a lot seeing about them. I started working much more overtime at the power plant, and the utility started having more and longer outages as we did some major equipment replacement. My mother-in-law and father-in-law passed away. My mom had health issues. My husband and I did too. I continued to sew, at times only a little, through all of this, but these projects were stored and forgotten.

Now, they look fresh and new to me. I couldn't be more pleased with them if I had happened upon them at the quilt shop yesterday. And best thing of all - no money spent! I know that I have other home-made kits packaged and stored in the bottom of that closet. Enough to keep me busy for quite a while. If only I could quit reading the quilting magazines and getting new ideas!

Did I really do that?

Soon after we renovated our kitchen, I set out to find a pattern for a small blue quilt to hang in the back entry hall. Keepsake Quilting had a small sampler quilt with the right blues, using Civil War repro fabrics which seemed just right. Happily I pieced the small sampler, thinking "This will be perfect in the kitchen, and I'll even hand quilt it."

So I pieced it, basted it and started quilting. As I neared completion of the first row, something caught my eye.

Here's a view of the whole quilt:

And here's a close-up: (do you see it?)

Yep, I goofed up the Clay's Choice block! Now, how did I piece it, press it, baste it, and start quilting before I saw that mistake!

At that point, I folded it up in disgust and put it in the closet. This morning I was pulling out UFO's and found it, three years later. I need to finish it, and the only thing I can do is pick loose that one patch and hand sew it back in using an applique stitch. Sometimes you find a screw-up like this and wonder where your brain was at the time!

OK, I've had some of my fabric stash for a long time...

...but this is ridiculous. This fabric is old enough to drink!

How time flies!

Was my last post really August 14th? Wow, the last nine days just flew by! A lot of stuff going on here, not much of it sewing until yesterday, unfortunately. The cat went through another bout of stomach problems, like she has twice before. A vet visit ($264.00!!!!) and ten days of medication later, she's like new, but mercy, she's well on her way to becoming the six million dollar kitty! We, including the vet, don't know what brings this on, but it's like little kitty gastritis, and if you catch it early enough while she's in the merely thowing up stage (you can imagine what comes after that but you really don't want a description, trust me on that) and dose her with steriods and ten days of Flagyl, she straightens up and doesn't get dehydrated. If it goes too long, there sub-cutaneous rehydration and anti-nausea medication and lots and lots of misery for everyone.

She has had the sub-q hydration twice before, in which they inject saline beneath the skin where it's absorbed into her system, in lieu of putting in an IV. Much easier on the kitty, but she looks like a fur-covered hot water bottle. I'm sure it's not painful or perhaps even uncomfortable, but she acts so put-upon that I can't tell how bad it really is. Luckily we caught her condition before she got to that point.

I saw a couple more houses, and the short answer is - no, nothing will work for us. One broke my heart: it was advertised as 2138 sq. ft., so we drove by to take a look; it had only one short step at the entrance, a beautifully landscaped yard, and it was gorgeous. So far, so good. I called my realtor on the quick and set up a showing. Unfortunately, the listing agent not only fibbed about how big the house was, her listing information gave me the ability to look up the house plan on the Frank Betz design firm website and find out that it's only 1750 sq. ft. Hey, what's almost 400 sq. ft. between friends???!!!!!!! Makes me so mad I could spit.

This was a killer because in all other aspects it was perfect, a beautiful house, and if it were just a little larger, I would have made an offer. The finishes were top drawer, the layout was good, it was just wonderful. Thanks to the Frank Betz website, I copied the floor plan into a drawing program and arranged and rearranged scale models of our furniture, but it wouldn't work. What with his home theater (as my mother once commented, "Why is your living room all about the electronics?") and his computer room and my home office (which I am not willing to part with!), and all the furniture his father built that we don't want to get rid of, there simply wasn't enough house.

We saw another house under construction in a small town about 15 miles away that was still small but closer to the right size; however, we didn't want to move that far out of the city and give up the conveniences to which we have grown accustomed. I may have some problems about where our house is located, but you can't beat it for proximity to everything you need.

And, the builder who wanted so much for his house (the barrier-free design that fit us to a tee....except for outrageous price) keeps calling and calling, even after we told him it was just too expensive and we couldn't go that high. I don't know exactly what's going on with that, but I have an idea.

His houses were fairly unique in the area, on flat lots and without steps, and because barrier-free design is so rare here he was able to charge a premium and get it. Then the housing market slowed down, and his new subdivision isn't taking off the way he expected. He doesn't build on speculation; most of the houses are contracted before they're started. Without a ready market of people lining up to pay oodles and oodles of money, the subdivision is languishing, and that doesn't look good. He may not be hurting for money yet. But he wants the front of that development filled up and successful looking to lure more buyers. He has figured out we are a prime candidate for his houses and keeps pursuing us.

Of course, if he were to lower the price to a reasonable cost per square foot comparable to the rest of the builders, he might well make a sale - and to us, too. As it is, he continues to try to charge the premium amount in a slow market, and it's not working. It seems like he's willing to do anything except bring his price more in line with the local market. Oh, well.

I also saw a terrible townhouse which was in such bad shape it immediately sent a prospective buyer scurrying right back out the door. It had a pot-sized burned spot on the laminate kitchen countertop that the seller hadn't even had bothered to fix. When I say burned spot, I mean a 10 inch circle of laminate melted all the way through to the particle board! Combined with the scratches and dings on the cabinets, the state of the walls, the cheap carpet, the laminate flooring where there should be hardwood at that price, it was a horror.

So.......we have pretty much suspended the house search. It ain't gonna happen. At least not this year. Rats.

One the quilty front, I completed a little more of the dragonfly applique. One body and one wing done and part of the second wing in process. It's slow, but nice to be back on track.

And I bought a quilt kit. Now, that is so NOT ME. But I saw this design in the July Fons and Porter magazine and had to have it.

O frabjous day! Calloo! Callay! (and one little boo-hoo)

I have finished my brother-in-law's quilt! It took most of the day to sew on the binding; I finally completed it while listening to an absolutely dreadful movie on TV with the cat plunked down in the middle and protesting every time I had to move the quilt. I have already posted a picture of the top, so here's one of the completed quilt showing the backing.

Two things I'm happy about and one, not so. I love the way the longarm quilter kept the striped backing so straight; it was a design choice that made me very nervous but she handled it well. I also like that the back is ornate; you could turn it over and use it like a wholecloth quilt or bedspread. That stripe may not be everybody's cup of tea but it makes me happy. Long ago I quit using solid colors or tame tone-on-tone prints on the backings. I wanted the backing to make a big statement but not have to be pieced. Large prints and stripes like this are a wonderful jolt. Just hope that the recipient doesn't think it gaudy!

The only thing I am not so happy about is the tension in the longarm quilting at part of one edge. It's something that only a quilter would notice or be upset about, but while binding I realize that the stitches there are little tight. This is a peril of hiring your quilting. I use the same service but depending who's at the machine you can be surprised, sometimes badly. One quilt got overstretched so much I haven't finished the binding yet after several years, it just makes me upset every time I pick it up. I had to do some surreptitious trimming to make the edge straight. The border still looks wavy. It broke my heart because I loved the colors and pattern. I didn't take any work back to them for years until the business sold and the new owners hired better quilters.

This overstretching seems more prevalent when I use poly batting. Cotton lies flatter and is less prone to distortion. I only use poly batting on gift quilts where the propensity of cotton batting to shrink a bit when washed would only freak them out (not quilt-o-philes). I like the heft and low-loft surface of cotton batting and the little shrinkage makes those puffs between the quilting lines that seem to suit my scrappy designs. Looks old-fashioned.

Well, before I get too cocky, there's still one more to go!

My latest completion

This is my latest small quilt for Project Linus. The pattern is Dutchman's Puzzle and it's 36" x 42". It may be one of the cutest baby quilts I have ever made. I love the baby block fabric in the border and backing. It is from Avlyn's Bedtime Bunny collection and came from thousandsofbolts.com, which has a wonderful selection of fabric. I wish you could search their site by something other than color, but that's my only gripe. At least they have a category for juvenile fabrics, which is what I am buying recently. I wanted to use my stash exclusively, but I don't have bright kid-friendly fabrics.

New year, new quilt

I wasn't thinking about buying fabric, I had just found the new quilt store near the Goodwill donation drop. It looked interesting - well stocked, well organized, the clerks cheerful and helpful. So I thought I'd take a look around.

And then I saw the red fabric. Now, you have to understand that I almost never use red anywhere. Don't wear it, don't decorate with it (unless it's Christmas!) and seldom put it in quilts. But this was subtle red, with a William Morris influence to the flower print, and I realized that I really liked it and should buy some for my stash.

Let's talk about that stash. There is a five foot wide closet in the third bedroom / computer room / general-messy- projects room and it's FULL. The top two shelves in the closet are filled with completed quilts and the rest contains sorted boxes of fabric, quilt kits, tools, patterns, sewing machines, batting. Let's just say that if I never bought another scrap my hobby would be well supplied for the rest of my days.

After I decided to buy some of the red fabric, the floodgates opened. It was a large-ish print so would be better used in borders and center squares of blocks. Since I like to cut borders on the straight grain without seams if possible, and since I almost always do bed-size quilts instead of wall or lap quilts, that meant at least three yards of red print fabric. I got four yards to be safe.

But would the red have companions to mesh well together? Maybe the color scheme was so different from my usual choices that my stash didn't have coordinating fabrics. I decided that I would pick up a bunch of fat quarters that pulled out the colors in the main print.

You notice that I haven't talked about pattern yet. I didn't know. That would come later. This happens often. A fabric catches my eye and I know I will do something with it, so I get it, and sure enough a project comes to mind. I don't buy many kits and almost never copy a quilt from a magazine. My taste runs to traditional patterns and color combinations. I'm not a fabric artist. It would be wonderful to be that creative, but it's just not in me. I make bed quilts, cheery and comfortable.

So, when I return home I have the quilt-in-the-making all bagged up. I should stash it in the closet and work on another project that's already started, right? Nope. In the car on the way home I had decided to make an Ohio star with sashing built into the block (see picture). So, as soon as I got home I just HAD to cut it out. Then, I just HAD to make the first row. It's an addiction, I tell you.

But after that, our horrible summer started and we were consumed with doctor visits and outpatient procedures. It didn't really stop until after Halloween, and then there were the holidays. So, the quilt had to wait until today.

And now I have a reason to complete it. My brother-in-law is moving back east from Seattle after retirement. He might also remarry - that's not set yet. But wouldn't this make a great wedding present? Wedding or housewarming gift, it's going to his new home.

The only problem is, last month I went back to the quilt shop after delivering some toys to the Toys For Tots barrel at the shopping center. There was this beautiful burnt orange print, you see, and my brother just loves orange............