Now Showing: "Heart Mania"

Since I'm hopelessly unoriginal at naming quilts I'm warming to the idea of having the recipient name their quilt.  It worked for my husband's quilt.  My daughter came up with "Heart Mania" for her quilt.  Here it is, finally!

 The 6" heart blocks are the "Heartfelt" paper piecing pattern by Cindi Edgerton. The setting, with 3" borders on two sides of each block, is mine. The cable quilting motif in the middle part of the quilt is "Avalon" from Quiltmaker's "Quilting Motifs Volume 1". The motif on the outside border is mine.

I finished sewing the binding to the back around 1 am on Tuesday.  I should have stopped earlier and finished on Wednesday, but I was so close to being done it was hard to quit.   It was even harder to get up on time and get the kids' lunches packed and everyone off to school on time in the morning!   However I got an "extra squeezy" hug from my daughter after she woke up and found herself tucked under her new quilt, so it was worth it.

On Monday night as I was attaching the binding I was pondering how astounding it was that a 26" square of fabric produced enough bias binding to go around the whole quilt.  I use the bias tube method to make binding.  I have a lovely laminated "cheat sheet" (Quilter's Strip Ticket from Lamb Art Press) with instructions and diagrams on one side and charts listing what size square of fabric I need start with to make various lengths of various widths.  I love that cheat sheet and was rather dismayed when it failed me this time!  Three quarters of the way around the quilt I realized the binding strip would be about 20 inches too short.

It turns out that the chart only works when you put in the right numbers at the beginning...go figure!   I got exactly as many inches of binding out of my 26" square as the chart said I would.  My quilt is 308" around, not the 288" that I looked up in the chart.  Luckily I had enough scrap left over to piece together an extra 20".

Now I'm off to ponder what I will make next.  I can play with other projects guilt-free now that "Heart Mania" is done and delivered.  I'm thinking about a Christmas zigzag table runner for my coffee table...

Almost made my deadline

I almost made my self-imposed deadline for finishing my daughter's quilt.  Of course, the deadline kept shifting, from the end of September, to the end of October, to the end of November.  I'm going to claim qualified success with that last one.  I finished quilting the last little bit of border this afternoon around 4:30 pm and today is the last day of November. :)

The quilt still has to be bound but I'm pressing the binding strip now and will have it sewn to the front by the time I head to bed.  I won't obsess and stay up till the wee hours to hand stitch it to the back, though it is tempting!  If all goes well I'll be able to spread it on her bed while she sleeps tomorrow night so she sees it the next morning.  December 1st is not too far of the mark!

Sorry, no pictures today.  I've got to run back to the ironing board!

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!

Hearts quilt quilting

I'm much less grumpy today, I promise.  I went in to the shop about my machine, and their machine guru will sit down with me next week to see just what the problem is that is causing skipped stitches and broken thread or poor tension when I freemotion.  They kept it for service when I brought it in in August and gave it back having found no issues, so now we'll have to see if it misbehaves when the techs are watching...  If it's something I am doing wrong, that's fine too, as long as someone can tell me so so I can start doing it right!

In the meantime I'm concentrating on my daughter's quilt.  She has been very patient waiting for it while I got sidetracked with various other projects, so I have promised myself not to start anything new until hers is finished.

The top photo shows the colours better, but the rest show the quilting better.  I guess I need to get up earlier to catch that early morning light before the morning running around starts,  getting breakfasts and lunches ready and getting everyone out the door on time!  Hmm.  I think for now I'll just settle for late night poor lighting.  Sorry!

I've quilted in the ditch around the heart shape and around the polka dot background.  I really tried not to stitch in the ditch, because it is my least favourite thing to quilt. I really have trouble getting into a rythm and keeping my stitches even when I'm in the ditch.  Maybe it's because the extra layers on one side of the ditch make the fabric stiffer there.  At any rate, I tried outline quilting 1/4 inch from the seams instead, but it just didn't look quite right, so after about 6 blocks I unpicked all the outline quilting, gave in to the ditch and am much happier with the result. 

By the way, can anyone tell me how quilters count hand quilting stitches?  Do you count just the stitches on top, or do the stitches on the bottom count as separate as well? I read a blog recently where the blogger was told by "experienced" hand quilters that "good" quilting has at least 9 stitches to the inch. I think even stitches are more important than tiny and your batting and fabric will affect the size of your stitches anyway so one size does not fit all.  I seriously doubt that any family or friends I quilt for are going to whip out a ruler and check my stitch size, but I'm curious anyway.  How do you count?

Getting the grumpies out

I just spent a frustrating afternoon and evening almost swearing at my sewing machine.  If the kids hadn't been right there I might not have been able to say "almost".  As it is both of them gave me a wide berth and headed for bedtime routines without being asked...  So, I'm going to post about things happy and completely different to get myself back into a better mood.  Maybe if that works I can ask you all for advice without launching into a long rant!

First Happy Thought:  thank you to Thelma at Cupcakes'n Daisies.  I won this lovely layer cake and honeybun in one of her blog anniversary giveaways.  The layer cake is Northwood Botanicals by Holly Taylor and the honeybun is Crazy 8 by Sandy Gervais.  I usually don't buy a lot of fabrics in any one collection, so making something up with these will be a fun change of pace.  I'm not sure what, though I'm thinking "Christmas".

Second Happy Thought:  thanks to Ann at A Good Yarn for a win on her blog earlier this year. I'm sorry I not only neglected to blog about them, I also neglected to take a picture before undoing the lovely packaging around this fabric, and before consuming all the lovely chocolate, and before my son absconded with the pincushion (he's quite handy with a needle).  Those blues are the start of rebuilding my blue stash.  The others will find a good home too when the time and inspiration is right.

Third Happy Thought:  Mom sent me some lovely goodies as a thank you for looking after her sweet pooch last winter.  She really didn't need to do that.  Apart from the fish food incident he was really great to have around.  That said, I'm not turning up my nose at these half-yard cuts.  They're all from the "Greetings from Canada" Thimbleberries collection. The fabric on the right is all postcards of famous Canadian landmarks.  Ideas for a quilt are simmering.  So far I'm thinking of pine trees, maple leaves, flying geese, delectable mountains...I can add a few more fabrics to work in lighthouses and beavers.  Does anyone know of a good beaver block?

Happy Thought Four:  21 of the 48 blocks on my daughter's quilt are quilted. That's almost half, and I'm holding on to that encouraging thought! My goal is to have it done by the end of October.  Of course that goal requires spending an hour or two hand quilting every evening instead of sitting at the computer...maybe I can learn to squeeze both in :)

I'll post more pictures of the quilting next time.  It's about the only thing quilt related I've accomplished in the last several weeks - except for the little project that had me so frustrated earlier.  Now that I'm all calmed down and getting drowsy I'll just forget about it for tonight.  I'll be picking your brains another time though!

Tiny bit of handquilting

I've gotten a start on handquilting the two quilts that came home basted last week. The first is my daughter's heart quilt. We still haven't settled on a name for it. Christine, any flashes of inspiration? :)


The chain pattern in the purple border is "Avalon" from Quiltmaker magazine's "Quilting Motifs, Volume I" book. Making a template from this was a real treat for me. For the first time ever I didn't have to resize anything to make it fit where I wanted. I also don't have to stretch or contract the motif at any point to make the pattern repeats fit. This one fit perfectly straight out of the book! I must say it made it easier to choose the motif, because the other two I also liked needed fussing with. (Disregard the large grid. That's just the machine basting.)

I've quilted 2 more hearts and the adjoining border areas since I took this picture. That's a total of 3 out of the 48 blocks in the quilt, so I still have a way to go.

There has been more progress on the astro quilt quilting, as it is quilted much farther apart in a much less detailed design. It is difficult to see the quilting in the picture, due to a combination of poor lighting and black thread on black background. I didn't want contrasting thread to add to the busy look of the background. You can see it a bit better on the back in the picture below if you click on it to enlarge it. The poor lighting really washed out the green in the picture though. Again, disregard the basted grid.




My daughter said it would be OK to work on this instead of hers since she already had a quilt and dad didn't. Frankly, I think she took pity on me because I kept having to re-mark quilting lines that were fading before they disappeared altogether. I marked this one all over before basting so I could see the whole effect, and make sure I balanced the number and size of the circles and where they overlapped. With my daughter's "permission" I am now trying to get all these quilted before I have to squint and mark a third time. I can go back and quilt the stars later.

I bought "White and Natural" batting for the astro quilt because the label on the batting claimed it could be quilted as far apart as 10 inches. I'm a little closer than that, but too far apart for the Hobbs 20/80 batting I've been using in most quilts. The White and Natural is thin and lets me make smaller more even stitches, something I hadn't considered in batting before. I wish I'd put it in my daughter's quilt as well, because with its flannel backing it has extra thickness and I'm getting larger less consistent stitches. What batting do you prefer and why?

Superbowl Quilting

Here's what I was working on last night while the rest of the family watched the Superbowl. I finished the last of the blocks for my daughter's new quilt. I now have to join all the blocks, but seeing them all up on the design wall is inspiring me to keep going.


The hearts are paper pieced using Cindi Edgerton's Heartfelt tissue paper foundations. The setting is mine, thanks to graph paper, coloured pencils (gotta love colouring!) and playing around on the design wall to fine tune colour placements.

I asked my daughter's opinion about fabrics for borders. She had a definite preference for "the light blue". That was actually the light aqua colour with the swirls. I decided the quilt needed a slightly darker border than that to frame it, but I kept the light blue theme. I came home from the local quilt shop on Friday with the blue on the far left in the photo below. I was also looking for more of the polka dot fabric I used in the heart blocks (far right), but had to settle for the smaller, denser polka dot (second from left). Happily, once I got it home with all the finished blocks I realized the denser polka dot will work better as a thin inner border than my original choice. It all looks like I planned it all out ahead of time :).


I'll post a picture of the finished top when it gets done, but it will be a while before you see the finished quilt. My daughter has a very realistic view of my quilting speed. She told me she was excited to see her new quilt come together, but she didn't expect it to actually be on her bed until next year since it will need to be quilted. I offered to send it out to be machine quilted to speed things up, but she declined. She explained that it would be cozier if I did all the work on it. Here I was, finally ready to part with some cash to get a quilt done sooner, and she sweet-talked me into taking the slow route. Ah well, since she cares, I'll be happy enough to hand quilt it :) I'm thinking heart chains or cables, and somewhere in there I have to quilt her name.

Now I'm off to do more quilting on "Kicking and Screaming". Thanks for all your encouraging words about that quilt. They gave me a nudge to keep at it, and I think it may finally be tamed. Perhaps I'll be sewing on binding by next week.