Christmas runner

I have two healthy teens who take care of the shoveling, so I’d welcome a decent layer of white stuff outside for Christmas.  However, according to the current weather forecast these snowflakes are the only one we’ll have for Christmas this year.



We had a small party last night and I really wanted this on the table so I bound it by machine to get it done in time.  I sew the binding to the front, then fold it around to the back, pin it in place, and stitch in the ditch beside the binding on the front.  It looks very much like hand binding on the front.



I had planned for a while to share a tutorial on how to do this, but look at the link someone posted on a discussion on a Facebook quilting group: http://www.elsiesgirl.blogspot.com/2012/01/machine-binding-explained.html  This is pretty much how I do it (I don’t have a “quilt in the ditch” foot but it is now on my wish list!) so I’ll just link to it and go bake Christmas cookies instead of writing it all up myself!

A New Year’s Wish for Quilters

 

May your points always meet

May your thread never break

May your borders behave

And may inspiration never desert you

 

Thank you all for your friendship and encouragement!  I wish all of you joy and peace in 2012.

		2011 Finishes VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

		2011 Flimsies VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

(Borders still pending on two of these tops…)

All done!

Thank you for all your encouragement in the machine quilting department.  My Christmas quilt is all quilted and bound and I am very pleased with my first effort.
I decided not to push my luck and try feathers in the borders just yet.  I tried some on practice sandwiches but I haven’t quite figured them out yet.  (Any tips on those are welcome!) Instead I did a free form overlapping drops kind of thing in the inner border and decided the narrow pieced outer border didn’t need any quilting.

Looking at it in my living room, I it actually fits in quite nicely with the rest of the decor.  Maybe it won’t be limited to Christmas after all. 


Back in January I did get around to quilting the pinwheel table runner but somehow never posted a picture.  




I’m enjoying crossing projects off the UFO list.  It wasn’t very long by most standards but it was really bothering me.  Knowing I had projects sitting unfinished kept me from enjoying new ones.  That’s just a personality quirk, I guess.  Anyhow, here’s where the list stands now:

1. Leaf quilt – needs basting and hand quilting
2. Swap quilt – need basting and machine quilting (still pondering quilting patterns for this one)
3. Churn dash table runner – machine quilting in progress
4. Hawaiian quilt pillow – hand quilting in progress
5. Canadiana quilt – have fabrics, design is taking shape on paper
6. Whimsy – do I even want to finish this anymore?

Almost there! I think once I finish #3 and #4 and get #1 basted I’ll be happy to start something completely new again. Or perhaps I’ll be inspired to try to fix all the problems in #6 after all (and trust me, these aren’t subtle!) .  We’ll see…

Wrestling

I have now confirmed that no amount of practicing freemotion skills on a small practice sandwich can prepare me for quilting anything larger than a table runner.  I’ve started quilting my Christmas quilt and I am learning to wrestle the quilt into submission.

Surprisingly it was the straight line quilting with the walking foot, which I thought would give me an easy start, that gave me the most grief. Despite my best efforts at folding and rolling and supporting the bulk of the quilt it kept catching on the edge of my  extension table.  That resulted in tiny stitches when the feed dogs just couldn’t compete and the fabric didn’t advance much, or jogs and wiggles in my straight lines where I stopped to adjust the quilt.
At first I got discouraged and gritted my teeth and wondered why I was machine quilting in the first place when I could have so much more control hand quilting.  Then I remembered exactly how long it takes me to hand quilt a quilt.  I told myself it wouldn’t be perfect but at least it would be done.  I also reminded myself that I have to start somewhere!  It looks OK from a few steps away.  I’ll just practice not looking too closely :)
So, all the straight line quilting is done, and about one third of the freemotion motifs.  The stencil I have has options for much more detail.  I was getting pretty good at them on my practice sandwiches, but when I started wrestling with the whole quilt I opted to leave out the details.  I need more practice on large pieces before I can do a decent job with fiddly details.  It works out well though.  I think the size of the motif without the extra details gives me a pretty good match with the density of quilting on the rest of the quilt.
I’ll try to finish the centre of the quilt today.  The next question will be “What to do in the borders?”  I’m thinking about treating the inner border and the pieced outer border as a single border and doing a large feather all around.  That may be a little ambitious at this point.  We’ll see how I feel when I get to it!

Thinking ahead...

Time in my sewing room skipped right past Halloween to Christmas.  I have never pieced a quilt top this quickly before. On Friday morning I cut into my Northwoods Botanicals ayer cake.  By Saturday evening I had the center of my quilt all pieced.  Today I stitched up the pieced border and had to stop for lack of just the right fabric for an inner border.  Here's the quilt so far as it looks on the design wall.  I need a creamy/gold fabric for that inner border.  I had planned a red outer border after the pieced border but looking at it at this stage I think I'll leave well enough alone and stop at the pieced border.

It didn't come out quite as I had pictured in my mind, as the lights were just a bit darker and more varied than I thought once they were all cut up and jumbled together.  However, overnight Friday I threw out the mental picture and was more than happy to keep working on my Christmas quilt on and off between chores on Saturday.

I can't believe how quickly this came together, and I can't believe how little fussing I had to do to match up my seams.  Why is it that in some projects the seams just seem to line up all on their own, while in others, where in theory they should also line up beautifully, they just won't no matter how much pinning and seam ripping and starting over I do?  I'll just savour the victory in this case. :)

Looking at the picture I see places I wish I had oriented the four-patches differently to put less emphasis on the lights, but then I look at the actual quilt and I don't notice them.  Isn't it interesting how scale really makes a difference in what you see?

Speaking of scale,  Ann Hermes can rest assured that I won't be stealing customers for mini quilt items. I made these five little ornaments for myself and while I'm pleased with them I'm not in a rush to mass-produce any!  Talk about fiddly little pieces!  The two smaller ornaments are 2 1/4 inch square.  The larger ones are 3 inches square. 

Now that I've gotten these two Christmas projects taken care of, I guess I should backtrack to Halloween.  Sometime before trick-or-treat I need to make Pippi Longstocking's braids stick out straight...

I almost forgot - the quilt design is Scrappy Prairie Queen by Sandra L. Hatch.  I made the blocks smaller but the idea is hers.

Still slowly stitching...

When I talked to Mom on the phone this week she commented that she hadn't seen a new post on my blog so she assumed I'd been busy with other things.  That's partly true, but mostly I just haven't had much new to show.  I'm still stitching away on the hearts quilt. Did I mention I'm a slow quilter?  I've made progress though.  I now have 32 of the 48 blocks quilted.  That's two thirds.  Yay!

Because I was getting bored quilting the same thing over and over I went ahead and started working on the outer border adjacent to quilted blocks.  I leafed through a lot of books and thumbed through my idea files for inspiration then took out a compass and paper and came up with a template for this.

 When I took it out of my lap frame the first night I worked on it I had a few misgivings about my choice.  I thought it was perhaps a little too girly sweet for my daughter's taste.  All I could see were heart flowers with big tulip-like leaves, which hadn't jumped out at me when the design was just on paper.

Sure enough, the hearts in the border were just too much for her.  Not that she said so.  She just looked and looked, smiled a wobbly smile and disappeared.  I found her crying in her room.  She finally admitted that she thought it would "take a long time to get used to" but she hadn't wanted to hurt my feelings.

 We both still like the curves but I'll leave out the hearts.  I'll try some lines running behind the curves and see how that looks.  It will take a few more than what I have now to really see if it works.  If not I can always - sigh - stitch in the ditch along that inner border to make sure I don't have too big an unquilted space between the last quilting in the center and the dip between curves.  Have I mentioned I really don't enjoy hand quilting in the ditch?

Maybe by the time I finish quilting all the curves the hearts will have grown on my daughter and I can use the hearts to fill that gap after all.

After working on just this for the last few weeks, I'm feeling the need to piece something and use different colours, so I sat down with pencil and paper yesterday to figure out if I had enough of this

 to make a smaller version of this:

The fabric is a Northwoods Botanicals by Holly Taylor layer cake that I won in Thelma's giveway a while back.  The pattern is Scrappy Prairie Queen from "Creative Scraps: Quilting with Bits and Pieces" by House of White Birches.

Reworked to use 12 12-inch blocks instead of 20 15-inch ones it will be a throw size quilt mostly made with my layer cake.  I'll just need a little bit of light fabric for the inner border and something for an outer border.  This can be my Christmas quilt if I get it made in time.  I know I'll have it pieced but I'm not sure I'll have the quilting done.  Ah well, if not this Christmas, there's still the next one!