Which?

I bought a kit from Connecting Threads because I fell in love with the colors.  I'm not even a "red" person but the combination of aqua and red with this gorgeous tropical print did me in.  I sketched the quilt in EQ and decided that I would increase the block size from 9" to 12" so the quilt, designed initially without borders, would be upsized from 54" square to 72".  This would be good for a couch quilt.  Here's a picture courtesy of Connecting Threads website:

Using EQ, I determined how much additional fabric I would need and ordered the yardage with the kit.  When I cut out the patches, however, I found that Connecting Threads was so generous in their kit that I almost didn't need what I bought extra (only a bit for the aqua large print).  So I have some fabric to play with and am thinking about borders.  Here are two options:

Aqua outer border and red inner border:

 Or, red outer border and aqua inner border:

Both would have a bias striped binding.

I can't decide which I like better.  No rush, of course, because I have only made 6 of the 36 required blocks.  But I like to think ahead.

So which do YOU like?

Cute and done

This is what I decided to to with the border.  Since the middle border is cut on the bias, I assembled the three into a single strip to stabilize it and sewed them on as one.  Then, of course, I had to miter the corners.  Oy vey, the trouble I cause myself.

Linky party - What's on Your Bed?

Bonnie Hunter had a linky going on Monday - What's on Your Bed?  Quite appropriate for a quilt goddess like herself.  So, without further ado, here's what's on my bed:

The pattern is "Sweet Escape" from Carrie Nelson's "A Touch of Rosie Quilts".  The fabrics are from Moda's Buttercup collection.  And I just love it.  The essence of spring.

Little sis

After I decided to give this quilt to my sister in law for her birthday:

I decided I liked it so much I would miss it and wanted to make something else in that pattern and fabric, but I didn't want to tackle another large quilt.  So I found a couple of charm packs of the "Etchings" fabric and made nine pinwheel blocks for this wall quilt, its' litter sister.  Here it is pinned together on my design board: 

I"ll assemble it after I complete the binding on the gift quilt in the next few days.  The large quilt is set on point but this small version was better in a straight set because it showed the pinwheel blocks better.  Side setting triangles in the gray fabric were too overpowering on the smaller blocks.

Sherry Meyer did a magnificent quilting job on the gift quilt as usual.  I'll post pictures of the pretty design as soon as it's bound.  By the way, Sherry's got my Orca Bay to quilt right now.  I can't wait to see how it looks.

Border decision

Not sewn on yet, but you get the idea.  It's kinda cute.  At the very least, it's a new cat bed quilt.  Navy binding, I think.

Oh, there's the NYE mystery quilt there on the floor, waiting to be finished......I need to put together the last 15 blocks after lunch.

Amusing myself with a couple of charm packs

Nothing special, just a table topper. I'll join the rows and add borders in the morning. If I had been thinking further ahead I would have saved all the red charm squares to make the flying geese.  I might do this one again in a slightly larger scale (these hourglass blocks are 3"; the inside of the quilt will be 36" square).  I would like to use all red for the flying geese and autumnal colors for the hourglass blocks.

OR....ooh, I just had a brain flash.  I bought a piece of this rose background paisley from Moda's "Luna Notte" recently.  I pulled out a stack of coordinating pieces from my stash, rose to maroon, tan, brown and blues but hadn't decided on a pattern.  How about rose/red for the flying geese, tan/brown/blue for the hourglass blocks,this print for the center squares in the intersections and the border?  Cool!.

Another wrinkly, thread-y finish

It was laid out considerably flatter and neater until the cat got to it.

This one will be a gift later this year.

What a relief to finish all these half-done projects.  What's left?  A quilt using the Brackman "Lately Arrived from London" collection I'm calling "When My Ship Comes In", an Orange Crush variation that needs borders, those New Year's Eve and New Year Day mysteries, and adding the final border to my Orca Bay mystery.  Of course I also have the Brackman Civil War Sampler blocks to set but I haven't decided what to do with them yet.  And, I cut out a Blue Ridge Beauty during the Quiltville mystery that's about 1/4 pieced.  And the Cheddar Challenge Bowtie blocks.  Whew!  Not as caught up as I thought.

And next.....

You can see the sample border section on the upper right.  This one is going to be a gift.

I spent the afternoon piecing together a backing for the other quilt from all my scraps.  It used every square inch I had left, even though I thought I had plenty of leftovers and had actually bought generously for this purpose.  Amazing how much goes into a backing.

Another one done

It's wrinkly, it's thread-y, but it's done.  Now to make the binding and decide on a backing.  Perhaps all the scraps from the fabrics when joined together will be large enough.  Hope so, because I wasn't bargaining on buying backing.  Alternately, I have a green batik that might work.

The Farmer's Wife Sampler Quilt

After several years owning "The Farmer's Wife Sampler Quilt" book but not making the blocks, I have been seduced into joining Izazette's group   by the thought of a lovely quilt made all of such small parts.  The EQ BOM this year was 6" blocks and showed me that I can sew accurately enough to do them.  I'll be starting the quilt in January.  In preparation I've been thumbing through the book looking at the blocks.  One, I have to admit, stopped me cold:

Look at it.  Heavens, just look at it!  Those pieced chevron bars, the triangles, the diagonal seams.  All in a 6", YES 6 INCH, block.  Yipes, there are 57 patches in that block.  This looks like a job for foundation paper piecing.

I have found several other instances that give me pause.  The author is fond of 5 x 5 blocks, which are difficult to parse out of a 6" square, and require cutting on 1/16" intervals that is often not very accurate.  And she really seems to love those bias diagonal seams.  This is going to be an accuracy workout.

No surprises here

An ironic side effect of using EQ to design your quilts:  Remember when you didn't have a way to visualize your designs other than perhaps graph paper sketches?  Remember when you started to join your blocks together and got your first glimpse of the completed quilt design, and what a kick it was, watching your quilt come to life.

Well, with EQ, it can be a case of "been there, done that".  Unfortunately.  Here's an example:

An EQ generated image of the quilt I made for a Christmas present:

An actual photo of the quilt: 

See what I mean?  Definitely no surprises there.  Of course, the possibility of making a complete dog of a quilt has been vastly diminished, but after you draw and visualize the quilt, actually making it may become anti-climactic.

In some ways, the thrill is gone.

This is a little sad.

New blocks using "Lately Arrived from London"

I can't remember if I've posted about these blocks before.  Several months ago I picked up some charm packs of Barbara Brackman's collection for Moda, "Lately Arrived from London" when I visited the rebuilt quilt shop in Georgia that had been destroyed by the spring tornadoes.  I wanted to be sure they had enough business to keep going.  Anyway, I loved the colors in the collection and designed a block I could make from those 5" squares. 

It's not my favorite kind of quilt sewing because, using the charm squares as a basis, you end up trimming every subunit to size so it's going slowly.  You've probably done blocks from charm squares before.  The small HSTs are made by drawing diagonal, horizontal and vertical lines on pairs of charm squares, sewing on either side of the diagonal lines, cutting them apart on all the lines  and trimming them to 2" square. You get eight HSTs from a pair of charm squares.  Then you make the hourglass blocks with two pairs of charm squares, 2 dark, 1 background and 1 light.  You make two sets of HSTs, pair them up, sew on either side of a diagonal line and cut them apart.  You get four hourglass blocks that can be trimmed to 3.5" square.

I have 24 blocks so far and need 41.  Anyway, here are some of  the blocks:

 and here is a EQ mock-up of the design.  I had to go back and buy some yardage for the background, border and star points after I decided on the design.  You wouldn't believe how many possible settings I came up with in EQ before deciding on this one! 

Playing on the name of the collection, I'm calling the quilt "When My Ship Comes In".  In construction, this was a Carrie Nelson type project.  Ms. Nelson has published many patterns that start with charm packs or layer cakes, and I've made quite a few of them, but usually employing yardage or fat quarters so I could cut the patches exactly to size and avoid all this trimming.  The trimming makes me crazy!

Clearing the decks for the Quiltville mystery

Friday is Q day - the day Quiltville's Bonnie Hunter launches her fall mystery quilt. In preparation I've been sewing like a demon, finishing sets of blocks that will be assembled later when their designs are finalized. There's the set of 25 pinwheel blocks:

and the 36 album blocks:

now all done and neatly boxed and labeled for completion after the mystery quilt is finished.  I've even straightened my sewing room and cleaned off my work table, and emptied storage boxes to hold pieces during the mystery quilt's progress.  I still have to load a stack of bobbins and fish my Easy Angle and Companion Angle rulers out of the storage cabinet.  Then, I'll be ready.

I'm thinking of not sewing any more until Friday to be able to start fresh.  Can I do that?  Doubt it!

My baby's back

Hooray!  My Juki TL98E is back from the repair shop!  It's humming along like nothing ever happened.  The timing had gotten out of adjustment, so it was an easy fix.  And it got a thorough cleaning and oiling, so it's good as new.  Not cheap - they're minimum charge for a fix is $98 - ouch - but great to have it home.  I used it this afternoon putting together the backing for my QCA mystery quilt, the large one.  And I mean LARGE.  100" x 100".  I tried to photograph it and had to push back the furniture in the living room and lay it out on the floor.  And then couldn't get a good picture.  Here is the best one:

And an enlargement showing a portion of the sashing and border. 

I'm very happy with it.

Pinwheels

Can't work on my Album blocks until my ordered background fabric arrives.  Don't want to work on my QCA mystery quilt  borders.  Don't have the patience to fiddle with the small blocks on my quilt using Moda's "Lately Arrived from London".  What to do?  Start something new, of course.  Don't know where I'm going with this, just making pinwheel blocks.  They come from a book that I looked at over at Chattanooga Quilts, the new local shop, and I can't remember the author.  Apologies to the creator of the pattern.  Love the blocks.

The bottom three blocks might be rejects because the contrast in the center pinwheel pieces is wonky.  The fabric is from a jelly roll of Moda "Etchings".  I tried to use it all regardless of how well I thought it would work, and some strips just didn't have enough color/contrast from the backgrounds.

Family resemblance

These blocks were in the planning stage when the QCA mystery started.  If you look at the blocks in the previous posts from those mystery quilts I think you'll see a family resemblance.  That's why I was able to guess the mystery quilt pattern just a couple of steps into the process.  The diagonal blocks were already imprinted in my brain.  I have 11 total made and 9 more to go before I start considering settings.  Sashing?  Borders?  I don't know yet.  I've been digging through the stash closet but haven't found anything I love yet.

I should have been finishing my other mystery quilt today.  I only have one long seam through the center to sew and the borders to attach, but simply didn't feel like dragging a huge quilt back and forth from the sewing table to the ironing board so I worked on blocks instead.  Tomorrow I must knuckle down and get it done.

Weeding

......No, not in the garden.  I'm talking about weeding out selections for a scrap quilt.

I found a pattern online that I liked and decided that a rust print in my stash would be perfect for the outer border, and as a jumping off point for selecting fabrics.  Of course, it would be scrappy - but the question is, how scrappy is too scrappy?

At first this was my selection.  The rust focus print is on the top left, and the rust and gold next to it will be used in the pieced sashing and borders.  I didn't photograph the mottled cream background fabric:

But then I got to thinking:  is it TOO MUCH?  I actually never thought I'd say that because scrappy is my "thing".  But the more I looked at the stack of fabric and studied the photograph it seemed that the whole was waaaaay more than the parts, so to speak.  It was screaming, not conversing with the viewer.

So I spread out the stack on the table and started thinning out to those fabrics which most seemed to relate to the outer border print.  And I got it down to this: 

A much more controlled selection which still picks up the rust/gold/olive/brown/tan palette of the print. It had more room to breathe.  It had tonal range and variety in the prints, but none of the prints fought with the focus fabric.  I was much happier with it. 

This is a real admission for a "more is more" kind of gal.

In or out?

I have something more to consider about my Quiltmaker's Newsletter mystery quilt assembly.  Since my colors differ from those chosen by the magazine, I have some leeway how I lay out the blocks in the outer border.  Initially, I thought I would do it like this, which is more like the magazine's choice: 

with the darker blue on the inside.  But I tried it the other way round:

and I like that too.  It separates the dark pink and the dark blue and points up the border somehow.  On the other hand, I like how the light blue relates to the blues in the outer border in the first example.  I'll have to assemble the top out to that border and then decide.  In the meantime I can join the strips for all the borders and finish the center medallion, which is growing on me, by the way.  If I had known that the dark blue would be the background for the blocks surrounding the compass medallion I would have chosen a different fabric, because I think it kind of sticks out.  But that's one of those "don't cry over spilt milk" situations because I don't have the inclination to remake those blocks. 

Diamond log cabin

As soon as I finished the last block I threw them down on the sewing room floor for a photo.  Man on man oh man this thing is WORK!  This probably isn't the final arrangement and there are borders to cut yet but this is pretty much how it will look.  It's cool, but mercy, I won't do another one.  Too much stretchy for one soul to take. 

You know how you can assembly line piece log cabin blocks, laying each new block on a long strip as you feed them through the machine?  Not with this one, at least if you expect them to come out the same size in the end.  I had to make wonky trapezoid paper patterns for each piece in the blocks, and even stranger shaped ones for the border half diamonds, and trace them onto strips as I made each block.  I had sort of planned to make the design edge to edge but when it got to 80" square, I said "I'm done!"

I have GOT to stop looking at quilt patterns online!

This is a Moda pattern for the Barbara Brackman group Morris & Company:

I love it.  Not in those colors, however.  I have a nice indigo print with reds and browns that will go well for the outer border, a dark blue for the rust bits, a darker gold for the inner pinwheels and a collection of blues, reds, browns, tans and golds from my stash for the stars and outer pinwheels that pick up the colors in the indigo print. 

If I've gone to the trouble of pulling the fabrics from the closet you know I'm going to make the quilt soon.  But how many projects in planning does that make?  6?  10? 

I've got to stop looking at patterns.

P.S.  I considered using my other Morris group (the blue/green/purple fat quarters) for this quilt, and they would work beautifully, but husband liked the other design for those fabrics.  So I'm making that one for him.