Off the fence about quilting On the Fence

It's a good thing I had quilting distractions the last few weeks.  Just as I was building up a head of steam to write a blog post then tackle less exciting business tasks, our internet connection cut out.  Literally. A cable bundle in our neighbourhood was accidentally cut. It took our provider more than 2 weeks to restore our phone and internet service.  

All those "exciting" business tasks needed internet so had to be put on hold. What's a girl to do?  Turn on the sewing machine, of course.  

The stack of tops waiting to be quilted is getting distressingly tall, but if I stop to think about it I get discouraged and none of the tops get quilted.  I plucked up my courage and plucked this one off the top of the pile.

The pattern has been waiting for its cover quilt.  The top has been ready for months but right about the time I was ready to quilt it, the pandemic turned things upside down.  My husband started working from home and we set up an office space for him in the other half of my space, where I usually baste larger quits.  This quilt isn't very large, but it is a little wider than my table.  I thought it would be easier to wait until the larger space was available again.  I think you can all guess how that turned out.  The university is encouraging people to work from home as much as possible, so the home office is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

I don't want to wait forever to release the pattern or to use the quilt, so it needed to be quilted. I only have so much budget for quilting-by-check, though that would be easier. Then again, maybe I have an idea of what I want and I couldn't afford the cost of custom quilting. But sending it to a longarmer would free up time for other things...  Let's just say that I spent a lot of time sitting on the fence about what I should do about quilting this quilt. 

I finally got off the fence and made a decision. I committed to quilting it myself and went ahead with basting in sections on my cutting table.  It wasn't as much of a pain as I anticipated.   I just had to make up my mind and do it.

I thought I would get this quilted quickly.  Surely, a day, two at most, should do.  I should know better!  Quilting always takes longer than anticipated. This time, it took closer to a week.  Some of that time was spent pondering what to do next, or whether what I was doing was really a good choice. (It turns out I didn't have as much of an idea of how to quilt it as I had thought!) A lot of time was spent wrestling the quilt sandwich through the throat of the machine. Finally, let's face it, I'm not a fast quilter!

First I stitched in the ditch in the lattice using my walking foot.  Stitching straight lines in a single direction at a time, I didn't have to turn the quilt much, so the using the walking foot was less time consuming and more convenient than using the ruler foot and straight ruler.  Next, I quilted a motif in the background areas of the lattice using the ruler foot and one of my Westalee templates.

That actually went very quickly and I patted myself on the back until I spread it out.  It was OK, but...I was not 100% satisfied. The flowers seemed a little lost somehow when I spread out the whole quilt.  What to do, what to do?  Sleep on it, of course.

The next day I drew out several options on paper, all based on what I quilted the day before because I was not prepared to pick out all the previous day's work!

Well, this filled the space a little better, and dressed it up a little.  It was more time consuming that the previous day's stitching as there were a lot of starts and stops, and switching rulers for the center circle. I was happier with the result, but then had to decide what to quilt in the lattice.  

My original plan was to not quilt anything in the lattice strips beyond the ditch stitching.  However, with the densely quilted white space, the unquilted lattice was puffy, in a messy sort of way, and looked unfinished.  After much deliberation, I agreed with my husband that things were busy enough without adding too much dense fancy quilting to the lattice.  Plain straight lines evened out the quiting density well enough.

Moving on to the edges, I was momentarily stumped figuring out how to transition from the open sides of the lattice to the surrounding background.  Echo quilting to the rescue!

With the center now defined by the echo quilting all around, the rest of the background became a sort of border area.  Again keeping in mind how busy the flower motif was, I decided to give the eye a quieter place to rest in the border with some plain piano key quilting.  I used the ruler foot and straight edge for these lines.

I had all sorts of grand plans for some sort of arc design in the dark blue border, but I decided the quilt was already busier than I had planned and I didn't want to add more "busy".  I thought of mirroring the straight line and peaks from the white edges, but that would have left the valleys between the peaks, right up by the edge of the quilt, less densely quilted.  I know from experience that less densely quilted borders end up being very friendly - they wave!

My husband had the answer.  He asked why I didn't just carry the straight lines over all the way to the edge.  Huh. I was so wrapped up in the idea of mirroring the other side of the border that the simpler design just never occurred to me.

It's simple but I think it works, and it doesn't distract from what I quilted in the center.  Plus my border doesn't wave.  That's a big plus!

I also chose to keep things simple in the focus star.  The straight lines tie in to the borders and the lattice.  Using the ruler foot and straight edge quilting ruler this was easy and quick to quilt, also a point in its favour.

Quilting in the ditch around the stars and a little extra something in the center to flatten out a little poofy bit finished off the quilting.

The quilt still needs a photo shoot for (hopefully) glamour shots.  Maybe I can conscript a family member to help with that this weekend!

That's half of what I've been up to recently while I was out of digital reach.  What has been under your needle?

Mood swing!

Thanks for all the kind encouragement about what I claimed was a lumpy, wrinkled, puffy mess in my last post.  I pushed through and finished the quilt, binding and all, then went through another mood swing:  I love this quilt!  You may hear my daughter say “I told you so”!

It took me about a year to decide how to quilt this quilt.  I came up with three or four sketches of elaborate and less elaborate custom quilting for the center and the borders.  This was going to be the quilt where I practiced FMQ.  With well defined small areas I figured I wouldn’t have to move too much quilt for each design and I might be able to pull it off.

When I finally pulled the flimsy out of its storage box, those plans went out the window.  The colours and the design jumped out at me and I fell in love with the combination all over again.  I love that the orange stars pop out but that if look again, I see stars in the blues and greens.  Look again and I see white stars.  Or a lattice.  I just love this about the design and I decided that’s what I want the focus to be.  Any of the custom quilting plans I came up with focused attention on a particular part and interfered with the eye finding a different way to see the quit.

In the end,  I quilted lines 1/4” way from every diagonal seam, on both sides of the seam.  I did the same on every vertical and horizontal seam that touches the points of the squares.  Every other vertical and horizontal seam was stitched in the ditch to flatten out the mountains I complained about in my last post. 

 

I wanted the colored part of the border to look like a framing mat set on top of the plain cream part, so I quilted parallel lines like a frame around the center, with one line running between but not over the points, as though it runs beneath the points.  It looks better in person than in the poorly lit photo below.  I quilted I the ditch in the zigzag border.

As you can see, it has been kid-tested.

It is now officially ready to curl up in next to the fireplace on cooler nights.

All it needs is a name.  I called it Seeing Stars for the last year, but after googling that name I discovered there are a lot of quilts, and a quilt-along, by that name.  I’ll have to dig a little deeper!  I do have a couple of thoughts.  I’ll let you know what I choose to rename it when I figure it out.

I love it when that happens!

I pondered quite a few different ideas for the quilting in the border of Baby Steps.  I had an idea to use a butterfly stencil, but the scale was off. I thought about straight lines of some sort but decided that curves were needed to adjust the balance of straight lines to swirls (all straight line quilting in the blocks and just a bit of swirl in the star).

When I finally settled on trying to create a pattern with circles I dug through my envelope of cutout circles to see if any of them fit or if I would have to draft a new one.  There it was: a corrugated cardboard circle I saved from the packaging my pots and pans came in.  Here’s the part I love about it.  Just as though I had planned it that way, the diameter was exactly right to run this border all around the quilt without stretching or squashing any of the circles to make the repeats fit. It just fit exactly as it was! I’m glad I settled on that 1/2” inner border instead of the 1” one I had considered!

The pattern even wrapped around the corners with no fudging at all.  Happy dance!

In other creative directions, there have been birthdays in this house in the last two weeks which of course required birthday cakes.

Every year I wonder when the kids will be old enough that I can get away with not decorating the cakes, but I’m coming around to the idea that that isn’t going to happen!  At least now they assist with decorating each other’s cakes.  While my daughter was away at a sleepover my son, husband and I had a fondant sculpting party to make those penguins as a surprise for her. The Craftsy fondant animals cake topper class we watched made it seem very simple.  We managed, but it took us way longer than it took the instructor!

The LEGO minifigs (from a Craftsy blog tutorial) were a bit more challenging.  That’s why there are fewer of them than there were penguins!  I also tried to make the ladder out of fondant, but in the end a surreptitious raid of my son’s LEGO bins was more effective.

Back to the quilting now.  Today I may cut out the setting pieces for the non-string remake of Sparkling Strings. We’ll see how the day goes.

Quilter’s Scrapbook!

It’s finished!  Now I am yet again pondering the question of how quilt magazines get all those lovely shots of quilts artfully draped on furniture.  It was a little mucky to go outside for pictures so I tried the artful drape approach.

 

I’m not quite managing that magazine look!  It looks very tidy on the sofa. No, I didn’t intentionally match the pillows. Those were already on the sofa, but they do complement the quilt nicely.

I quilted this with, of course, my walking foot. The borders and sashing are all quilted in the ditch.  The perimeter of the 100-patches are quilted in the ditch and again 1/4” outside the block. Here’s what I ended up with in the block, after playing with then taking a seam ripper to nesting squares on point and diagonals all in one direction:

I didn’t get a good picture of the quilting across the whole quilt.  If you could see the whole top you would see that tipping this quilting design on its side every other block added a bit of movement to the quit top, drawing the eye from one block to the next.

Despite grand thoughts of trying some quilting in the white parts of the sashing to make it look like the red and yellow strips were floating on top of the quilting, I decided that would make the quilting in these spaces much too dense compared to other parts of the quilt and I’d get a puckered, wavy quilt.  I didn’t want to quilt too densely in the 100-patches because I wanted the scraps to be the focus.

I have already posted a peek of the border quilting, but here it is again.

By the time I started quilting the last side of the border I had figured out how to quilt it most efficiently so that side was completed fairly quickly.  Those first three were not fun though!

I am writing a pattern for Quilter’s Scrapbook and am looking for a few kind souls who might like to test it in exchange for the pattern.  If you are interested please email me.  Now I am off to wrestle with block diagrams…

Walking foot quilting again

I am determined to whittle down the list of flimsies waiting to be quilted.  I know my pile isn’t as high as some others’, but I really start to spin my wheels and be very unproductive when I have too many unfinished projects in my sewing nook.  I just don’t know where to start and feel guilty working on new ideas.

So, in the last couple of weeks I pieced a quilt back and basted and started machine quilting last fall’s autumn themed quilt. (Last fall’s flimsy.  Do you see the inertia a project acquires once it becomes a complete but unquilted top?)

This one measures about 48” x 60”, not a bad size to manage on my machine.  These days I am drawn to the crispness of straight lines so Walking Foot and I are continuing to work on our partnership.  We’re stretching a bit to include arcs.  I know the accepted wisdom is to use free-motion quilting for curves, but I know my current free-motion limits!  I want crisp arcs in those circles, and my free motion skills won’t give me those so I’m turning the fabric under the walking foot.  I don’t know that I would do it if this was a larger quilt to wrestle with, but it’s working well enough for this one.

So far I have quilted all the straight lines in the background as well as quilted in the ditch around the maple leaves and circles.  It doesn’t show up well in this picture but each quarter of the circle has a different set of concentric curves quilted in it.  There are only 33 more quarter circles to go!  And the border… 

I am enjoying the luxury of leaving this project out and working on it a little bit at a time as I feel like it  With my new-to-me work table, I don’t feel the urgency to get it done quickly to unclutter the dining area upstairs like I did when I had to do the quilting on the kitchen table.  I wonder if feeling like I needed to clear a long uninterrupted stretch of days to get a quilt quilted in one big push contributed to  me dragging my feet about getting around to the actual quilting?