Quilting Again

In early June I was focused on the garden so I didn’t quilt or blog much.  Hurting my back while focusing on the garden stole the last couple of weeks of the month.  This weekend I finally felt like my usual self again but steered clear of gardening and visited the sewing machine instead.
Since Canada Day was on Sunday it seemed appropriate to work on my “Canada Quilt”.  I hope I’ll find a better name for it eventually but in the meantime I finally gave it borders.

Most of the fabric is “Greetings from Canada” by Thimbleberries.  The log cabin block centers were fussy cut from a print of postcards from various landmarks, one for each province.  The lighthouse and sailing ship represent Canada’s coasts, there are a delectable mountains block for the Rockies, wheat blocks for the Prairies, pine trees for the forests, and I’m saying the flying geese borders are Canada geese.  Of course I needed maple leaf blocks in there as well!
The strip to the right of the quilt top will go on the back. I don’t have quite enough of the backing fabric I bought last summer.  It is just long enough, but not wide enough, so I will cut it lengthwise and insert this pieced strip to make the backing wide enough.

This is the backing fabric.  The flowers are the provincial flowers of Canada’s 10 provinces and 3 territories.
Now I need to take a deep breath and try to make a straight 68 inch long cut!  I’m procrastinating, even making my binding first.I usually never get around to making the binding until I’m ready to put it on.
Once I do that, this quilt will go back into its bin to wait its turn for hand quilting.  Whimsy is only about one third quilted, and it is just too hot here these days to want to sit under a mass of quilt to move it along.  I’m guessing that I’ll start quilting the Canada Quilt next winter sometime.

Taking shape

I was back in the garden again today but got a bit of sewing done late last week.  The pattern is Kyoto Garden by Judy Martin. I’ve sewn enough of each unit in the quilt to start getting an idea of how it will look.  The picture in the book is lovely but my random blues are a very different colorway and much less planned so I was impatient to see units come together. The plan for now is to make the quilt 3x4 stars, and perhaps use a plainer pieced border than the intricate one in the original pattern.

Back in high school I went to yearbook photography camp.  The first thing we were asked to do was shoot a whole roll of film in 30 minutes.  Being used to snapping the shutter very selectively because every snap cost film and developing, this was quite a challenge but it taught me to just jump in and take pictures willy-nilly.  I think I need the equivalent class for scrap quilting.  Even just using all blues, I’m taking much too long sorting my fabrics and trying to place them just so, with not too much light  together, or too similar, or too clashing… I suspect I’m even going to lay out all the units on the wall and move several around before I start sewing them all together.  Isn’t scrappy supposed to be random?  Perhaps this is the quilt that will help me let go a little, like that photography class.

Trimming points and switching blades

After much deliberation, I pulled out the box with all the pieces for my blue Kyoto Gardens quilt. Getting reacquainted with them I acknowledged that they would continue to sit, unsewn, unless I just gritted my teeth and trimmed all the points that needed trimming on all those pieces.  I had thought I would trim as I went, but I kept not sewing because I never felt like trimming. See that white triangle?  It needed 4 swipes of the rotary cutter to trim the points just so.  The blue pieces they will be sewn to have only 2 trimming cuts, thank goodness!

After trimming the first half dozen I gave in and changed the blade on my rotary cutter.  Magic!  I don’t know why I always wait too long to change my blade.  Perhaps it’s partly due to resenting how much the blades cost and how short a time they stay sharp, but mostly I don’t realize how dull it has gotten until I put on the new sharp one and feel it slicing through fabric so effortlessly.  With a new blade and a fair amount of determination, all the trimming was done in a few hours.

Here is an illustration of why the trimming is worth it for this quilt.

Trimming the points not only eliminates a lot of bulk where 8 points meet it also helps me line these odd shapes up just right.  It was monotonous to do, but will be worth it now that I can sit and chain sew pieces together.  I’ll have enough units put together soon to show you what the quilt will look like.