Shifting Crystals

 I'm excited to share Shifting Crystals with you! 

Shifting Crystals by Canuck Quilter Designs
Made with fabric from the Fossil Finesse collection from Island Batik, a division of Lumin Fabrics

It needs another photo shoot.  My supportive husband trekked out with me on a very cold January day so we could take pretty pictures before I shipped the quilt to Island Batik for their April catalog.  By the time we photographed this quilt my fingers were freezing.  I landed flat on my back when I slipped on the ice.  I was ready to be done and rushed through. I think I might manage better pictures now that the quilt is back home and the weather has warmed up.  

The chevrons in this design are strip-pieced, so they are quick and easy to make.  If you've made Leading Edge or Echo Point you know how these work.  The key to making these is the diamond-shaped segments cut from the strip sets.  The pattern illustrates and explains how to measure the diamond segments, but you might also find this tutorial helpful.  Just remember you should NOT be measuring along the top edge of the strip.  Trust me.  Just check out the tutorial and the instructions and email me if you still need help!

What about the stars?  These all all made with stitch-and-flip tecniques, without cutting and sewing individual triangles.  If you find it challenging to trim QST so the seams stay on the diagonal to get the crisp star points in these stars, scroll down to the last part of my QST tutorial to see how I do it. 

I spent some time mulling over pressing directions for these stars.  Press to one side?  Press open? There are some intersections with the potential for a lot of bulk.  In the end, I figured out it was possible to plan the pressing to spin the seams allowances in all those potentially bulky spots, including in the blocks and between blocks.  The pattern walks you through all of it, showing what direction to press and spin so that everything flows together, rather like the seams in the 9-patch in this tutorial.

What colours would you choose to make this quilt?  I'm considering rusts and earth tones for a version with extra columns to fit a queen sized bed.  The pattern is single size, but it would be easy to expand by adding columns and making the top and bottom colour blocks taller.  So many possibilities...

Happy quilting,

Joanne

Extending the life of a favourite quilt

After almost 6 years of daily use,  my daughter's bed quilt came back home with me for some TLC last August.  When I visited my daughter last summer, she showed me several places where the hand quilting was coming out.  

Broken hand quilted stitching

I thought there were only a few spots and expected to make a some quick repairs while I was visiting, but when we went over the blocks indivudually, there were many, many spots with broken stitching.

More broken hand quilted stitching

It looks like the thread just broke in multiple places.  In hindsight, I realize the thread I used to quilt was rather old, and probably not very strong anymore.  Cue daughter's sad face.  For life reasons, this quilt means a lot, so the quilt came home with me so I could ponder the best way to extend its life.

I thought I could pull out stitches on either side of each break so I could knot and bury the thread to secure the stitching, then stitch new stitches in the gaps.  After mulling this over for a while, it occurred to me that if the thread of the original stitches had broken in so many places, more breaks would inevitably pop up after I repaired the current breaks.

Re-quilting the whole quilt by hand wasn't an option.  It took me a year and a half to quilt it the first time, and that was before I started getting tingling in my fingers after less than a half hour of stitching.

Machine quilting was one option, but daughter and I both wanted to preserve the look of the hand stitching.  In the end, I came up with a compromise.

Walking foot quilting in the ditch

I'm going to stitch in the ditch along all the curves.  I had hand quilted in the ditch originally, so those stitches are being covered up by the machine quilting, but it's hidden in the ditch so it won't change the look of things much.

All the visible hand stitching will stay as is.  Some will inevitably disappear where the thread has broken or will break, but some will survive and hopefully maintain the original character of the quilt.  The machine quilting in the ditch is dense enough to keep the layers together no matter what happens to the hand stitching.

It's a bit of a chore to turn the quilt, especially when lots of it need to go through the machine's throat space.

Lots of bunching to get through the throat

A little easier when there's less quilt on the right and more on the left...

I think it looks OK on the back too. If you look carefully you can make out the machine stitching over old hand quilting, the hand quilting I'm leaving as is, and a break in the original stitching.

I think it's going to work out.  I just need to keep plugging away a little each day so I finish the quilting in time to take it back to British Columbia next month when we attend her graduation from UBC.

Just keep stitching, just keep stitching...

Joanne

Pattern was Chic Country by Sew Kind of Wonderful. 
I added borders and tweaked the colours in the edge blocks to blend into the border.

PS:  If you would like to see the evolution of this quilt, I blogged about it in progress many times

• March 2016 - First peek at the fabric pull
• November 2016 - Starting to cut fabric
• January 2017 - Starting to piece and failing random colour placement
•  February 2017 - Redesiging the border and finishing the top
• January 2018 - hand quilting progress
• August 2018 - progress update
• January 2019 - finshed quilt on the blog (finished in late December)

Spinning multiple intersections

When we speak of spinning seam allowances when pressing, it's often in reference to one seam intersection in one block, such as at the center of a four-patch block. What happens when there are more than one intersection along a long seam?

Let's take a look at a nine-patch.

First, if you need to know what I mean by spinning seams or need a refresher about how it's done, go read this post.  Make sure to read all the way to the end for the spinning part. Go ahead.  I'll wait.

OK, back to the nine-patch: 3 rows of 3 squares. Here's the start of one, with squares sewn into rows.  The white arrows show the directions in which I pressed seams in each row.  By pressing the seams in the middle row in opposite directions to the seams in the other rows, I'll be able to nest and spin the seams.

Here's what that looks like on the back after I sew the top and middle row together.  The new seam is the horizontal one in the photo, not yet pressed.

Let's take care of the seam intersection on the left first.

You see that the center portion of the horizontal seam will end up pressed towards the top row.  That works out just right, as this direction is also the direction it needs to be to spin the seams at the second seam intersection as well, as you see below.

Adding the next row of squares, nesting seams, looks like this:

Spining one intersection sets the stage for spinning the other as well.

You can see how all the seam intersections are nice and flat.  

Note that I could have reversed all the pressing directions in the very first picture.   As long as they allowed seams to nest in the next step, I still would have been able to spin the seams at the intersections.  They simply would have spun in opposite directions to what is pictured here.

This example used a plain nine-patch, but it would also work where some or all parts of the nine-patch are pieced units.  You just need to plan pressing directions at each step to nest all seams when joining rows.  The following block is a fine example.

The white arrows show the pressing directions to press seams between units so that you can nest seams when joining rows. 

Spinning seams at one intersection will flow into the seams being oriented properly to spin seams at the next intersection, and so on.

This may seem a little daunting at first, but it will really make sense when you start pressing.  Just remember to always start with pressing to nest seams, and the rest will flow from there.

Of course, there will be occasions where you will end up with an intersection that can't be spun,  but I find it's always worth spinning wherever I can to minimize bulky seam intersections.

Have you tried spinning seams?  Do you have any tips to share?  Let me know in the comments.

Happy quilting,

Joanne