Wish I could see this…

Carrie just wrote a post about the American Folk Art Museum’s exhibit “Infinite Variety:Three Centuries of Red and White Quilts”.  She has various links to articles and pictures about the exhibit but you have to go see the slide show in this link.

Seeing 650 red and white quilts in one place is stunning enough, but the way they have displayed them is really cool.  I suppose nobody will get a really close up look, but it’s still a beautiful way to display these quilts.

Whittling down the UFO list

My Hawaiian quilt pillow is finished!  It only took me 15 years and a couple of months :) 
It came as a kit, with the applique piece already cut out.  I wasn’t very familiar with sewing at the time so it was slow going when I first attempted it.  Knowing what I know now I realize that the poor quality fabric and the very poor instructions that came with the kit probably didn’t help my progress.  I don’t know that I could have gotten the hand quilting done following those directions if I had gotten to that step 15 years ago, so I’m glad I set it aside till more recently.
Here’s how the UFO list stands now:
1.  Leaf quilt – needs basting and hand quilting
2. Swap quilt – needs basting and machine quilting (currently stumped on what I want to quilt on it)
3. Whimsy pinwheel/windmills – needs borders, basting, quilting (hand or machine?)
4. Designing a Canadiana quilt (maybe this doesn’t count as a UFO since there’s no fabric actually cut yet?)
It feels great to have the list whittled down like this.  It’s about as long as I like it. It gives me one of every activity I like to have available: piecing (Whimsy’s pieced border), machine quilting and hand quilting.  I think  the swap quilt will be my next big focus.  Any thoughts about what to quilt on it?  There is an extra 3 inch border and prairie points all around (all in the same fabric as the setting triangles) since this picture was taken.

Tackling UFO#6

On Monday evening I decided to take another look at UFO#6, the one I wasn’t sure I even wanted to finish anymore. Here’s where I left it last May, the last time I pulled it out.

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I started this at least two years ago, possibly three, with fabric I received for my birthday.  It wasn’t fabric I would have chosen myself, but I stretched a little and decided to make a smaller version of “Whimsy” by Darlene Zimmerman from her book “Granny Quilts”.  Hers was made with scrappy 1930s reproductions.
My first pinwheel came out perfectly so I was encouraged to go ahead and cut up the rest of the fabric.  Since the first one came out so well I figured I had the hang of it and merrily chain piecing units for the remaining 11 and for the sashing units as well.  When I got tired of that I took the units that were finished and started putting them together and discovered that my seam allowances were not as consistent as I had thought.  With this pattern it mattered.  Pinwheel blocks were a smidge too small to fit with the sashing, or points got cut off or wouldn’t meet neatly where they should.  I bundled everything into a box and left it.
Last May, with my new sewing machine and a lovely 1/4 seam guide I took it out again.  I was able to fix some problems but thought I would have to rip a lot of seams to fix the rest.  A lot of those seams were on the bias and I feared I would distort the edges while I ripped,so I decided against it and just bundled the whole thing up again.
When I pulled it out again this past Monday I decided the flaws weren’t as bad as I had thought after all.  I must have been in a very grumpy, critical mood last May! 

By the time I quit for the night on Monday I had pieced all the cornerstone pinwheels and sewn all the green triangle units for the sashing.




Tuesday afternoon I matched points and pinned and pinned and pinned some more to sew pairs of triangle units together point-to-point.  Those points were a thing of beauty!


After the kids went to bed Tuesday evening I sewed units into rows.  So far so  good, all points behaving.  When I sewed the rows together those earlier not-quite-right seam allowances made themselves known again.  I had to do some tugging in places and easing in others, and fudge seam allowances in the new seams to get all the sashing units to line up properly with the big pinwheels.  Sigh.  In some places I can’t quite see why things weren’t fitting. 
There are rippling seams in places where two units were just not quite the same size and more rippling where I had tension issues with my old sewing machine.  There are points that don’t quite meet where they should or aren’t pointy.  No amount of fiddling would make the points in this picture behave without making the quilt crooked in other more obvious ways.
However, the center of the quilt is finished. It isn’t going to a quilt show, so who is going to be looking for the faults besides me? I’ve decided to relax a bit and just enjoy the whole without focusing on the little things (That said it isn’t going to be gifted where I had thought to give it!)
Standing back from it, I think it looks really cool.  It still needs borders, but here it is so far.