Kaleidoscope Quilt Progress

It has been over a month since I posted an update on the status of my kaleidoscope quilt.  It is coming along in fits and starts, with steady quilting over several days followed by total neglect then back to steady progress again.  I have to concede that it will not be finished by Christmas as I had hoped but at least I am making progress, despite my fitful efforts.

In between my quilting sessions I have been pondering what I will quilt in the black border space.

It would be a good place to highlight feathers, but I suspect the feathers would not quite suit my teenage son, whose quilt this will be.  I think I have come up with something I like if I can figure out how to make the design turn the corners.  As you can see from my progress chart, I have quite a bit of quilting I can do before I start on the borders, so I have lots of time to sort things out.

I’m going to go get the fruitcake out of the oven and settle in with some slow stitching.  I hope to get a few more triangles colored in on my chart by the end of the evening.

Linking up with Slow Sunday Stitching at Kathy’s Quilts

Slow stitching progress

I haven’t spent as many evenings hand quilting as I had planned over the past several weeks.  Tonight I hope to sit and quilt for another hour or two.  I think it takes me about an hour to quilt everything in the frame so I might get two frames’ worth done if I walk away from the computer sooner than later!

Let’s see how the quilting has progressed since September 21.

Yes, slowly but surely I am making progress.  I’m walking away from the computer now!

Linking up with Slow Sunday Stitching at Kathy’s Quilts

Old habits…

In anticipation of cooler weather, when I would enjoy having a quilt in my lap as I quilted it, I made this lovely armchair sewing caddy (Sit & Stitch Pincushion, pattern by Cindy Taylor Oates, Taylor Made Designs).

It’s a great improvement over my previous setup, involving lining up my gear along the armrest, and knocking it off the armrest, and losing stuff.  That pincushion, however, is possibly defective. Well, it isn’t the designer’s fault.  I followed all her directions to get a well formed pincushion stuffed with crushed walnut shells.  You may, however, note that there are no quilting needles stuck in this lovely pincushion.

Old habits die hard.  My family is still hearing “Shoot, where did I set my needle?”

If we’re lucky, the quilt is doing double-duty as a pincushion.

I am making progress, slowly, on my as-yet-unnamed kaleidoscope quilt.  This week I printed out a line drawing of it to help me keep track of how much I have completed.

I didn’t touch this quilt all summer, so there hasn’t been much progress. My husband thought this looked discouraging, but I find it motivating.  I can’t easily spread the quilt out at the end of every little bit of snatched stitching time to survey what my progress looks like as a part of the whole, but it’s easy and satisfying to colour in those bits I just finished quilting and watch the coloured part of the page grow.

This evening I hope to sit and quietly hand quilt for a couple of hours, then break out the coloring pencils again.

Linking up with Slow Sunday Stitching over at Kathy’s Quilts.

It’s on the wall!

I just realized I never shared a picture of my completed Canada Quilt after I finished it in January.  I was waiting to get it hung on the wall.  My dad made a quilt hanger especially for it (thanks Dad!) and brought it on his recent visit.  Here it is, filling a space on the very plain wall at the top of the stairs.

It hangs straighter than I hoped for, which is nice.  I think when I get around to inserting a dowel into the little corner pockets on the back of the quilt that tiny ripple will be taken care of. 

I’m so happy to finally enjoy this one out on display!

Maybe not

I finally basted the kaleidoscope quilt, and settled down to start hand quilting it.  I have known what I wanted to quilt in it for a while so I dove right in last Thursday evening.  I went to bed quite pleased with my progress.  Friday morning I walked by the quilt before breakfast and then I wasn’t so pleased anymore.

I had thought the crisp lines in the black diamonds would make them fade into the background so the eye would focus on the way the colors make rings.  More stitching was planned for the colored parts.  Friday morning they just jumped out at me and reminded me of padding.  Then I stepped to the side and this happened:

One whole direction of quilting seemed to disappeared.  Since this is the direction we’d see and the way the light will be hitting from the window once the quilt is on the bed, it would look like there are columns of quilted diamonds and nothing in the rest.  So much for knowing how I was going to quilt it! This is not going to work for me!

Last night I tried something else that I like much better.

This quilting handles light and shadows better, staying visible at different angles. I hope once I have more of them quilted the lines in the colored triangles will draw the eye around the rings and not be overpowered by the quilting in the black.

I’m off to pick out the parallel lines from Thursday evening, then I’ll settled in to more hand quilting.

Linking up with Kathy’s Quilts’ Slow Sunday Stitching

Quilting complete!

I just put the last hand quilted stitch in my Canada Quilt!

The lighting at 10:30 pm is not doing the colours justice but it sure shows off the quilting texture. I’m very happy with how this turned out, despite wondering halfway through, and again at 3/4 of the way and again and again, why I chose to quilt it so densely.  In the end it was worth it. 

Tomorrow I will trim it and add the binding, which I uncharacteristically prepared before I started the quilting.  Then I will hold my breath and hope it doesn’t wave at me when it hangs on the wall!  It was flat before I started the quilting and I did aim for more or less even quilting density, so I am hopeful.  If it does wave, perhaps I can try blocking the quilt.  I’ve read online recently that that is very helpful to make hanging quilts hang properly.  Do any of you have any advice about this?

Slow Sunday Stitching

Today I am linking up with Slow Sunday Stitching over at Kathy’s Quilts.  There are lovely hand stitching projects there every week and it’s nice to know I have company in the slow stitching department.

I’m still plugging away at hand quilting my Canada quilt, picking up momentum as it gets closer to completion.  There’s nothing like seeing the end in sight to motivate me!  I think the quilting is about 3/4 done, and all the bits for which choosing a quilting motif was challenging are finished.

These are not the true colours.  They are really much brighter, but adding light or using the camera’s flash washes out the quilting.  It’s just not a good time of day to take pictures of quilting details!

Looking at this now, I wish I had left some unquilted space behind the letters. The letters seem to have lost definition.  I may go back and redo this, or I may not.  I have already rethought, unpicked and redone a few other parts of the quilt and I’m not sure I have enough enthusiasm left to do that again!  Perhaps once I’ve finished everything I can reconsider and decide if this little bit bothers me enough to redo.

Tonight I’m working on the last corner of the quilt center.  Next up will be the trees and the last 5 log cabins in the pieced border, and finally the plain outer border.

Hand quilting again

A couple of evenings ago I was moping around, feeling I would really like to have some handwork to do and wasn’t it too bad I actually had to make the binding for Clear Skies before I could sit quietly and hand stitch it to the quilt.  It took me a while to hear the Canada Quilt hollering at me from upstairs: “What am I, chopped liver?”  Nope!  It qualifies as handwork!

It has been sitting untouched in the work basket in the living room since May when the weather got too hot for me to want to sit with a quilt in my lap. However, evenings have turned unseasonably cool here this week.  I’m sure it won’t last, but as long as it does I’m happy to be able to sit and hand quilt in the evening without overheating.

Taking a break from the quilt turned out to be a good thing, despite delaying the finish. Back in May I was trying to catch up from the quilting time I missed due to tendonitis, and though I wasn’t 100% happy with some of my quilting designs I had “finish” on the brain and kept quilting even though I didn’t quite like how things were turning out.  When I spread the quilt out the other night to see what I still needed to do, those spots I hadn’t been sure about jumped out at me and I knew I wouldn’t be happy with them.  Don’t worry, it wasn’t a huge amount to unpick!  Just the bits I did in May.

Time away cleared the brain a little, and I came at the quilt with new ideas.  The straight lines behind the ship are a much better match to the rest of the quilting on the quilt than the swirly things I marked earlier.  Conversely the swirly bits I have now started quilting in the blue sky behind the lighthouse fit that space much better than the overpowering double diagonal lines I had started before. 

I’ll be making changes to what I had planned in the log cabin blocks too.  I had one block quilted with concentric circles and thought it was an original and interesting way to quilt a log cabin blocks.  Now that I’ve had a second look I don’t think it was such a great idea after all!  Just plain traditional outline quilting in the logs will work much better in this particular quilt.

At this point I think the quilt is a little less than half quilted but I have decided how to quilt most of the remaining parts. Those peaked column beside the lighthouse and ship are giving me trouble but I have finally decided to quilt everything else and see if inspiration eventually strikes.  On that note, I’m off to quilt!

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?