Still tackling the list!

On September 1st I posted a quilty "to do" list, and I'm happy to say I ticked a few things off this month.

Star Fall, RSC Butterfly, Wandering Geese, Sparkling Trail, Samoyed Baby

1. Quilt Cyclone baby quilt
2. Quilt new Wandering Geese
3. Add final border to and quilt new Starlight Wishes
4. Quilt both mini Sparkling Trail quilts: 1930s version, black and red version
5. Make a new RSC butterfly or two
6. Finish hand stitching binding on Samoyed baby quilt
7. Start brand new Lemoyne Star quilt (or two - I have fabric options to work out!)
8. Start Anne of Green Gable quilts (two of them, one for me, one for daughter)
9. Start a snowflake quilt - I've been thinking of all 26, and maybe a few new ones, all together in a single quilt...

I'll have a picture or two of the new Wandering Geese soon.  We're taking it for a walk in the park for glamour shots (or my attempt at them) tomorrow.  I wrote posts about the butterfly, Sparkling Trail and Samoyed earlier this month.

I made good progress on Star Fall, a new design.

Star Fall in Tula Pink

It still need background strips on either side, then I need to decide:  border or no borders?  My original idea was to skip borders and just bind in scrappy print leftovers.  Now I'm not sure.  It will have to simmer a little bit.

In the meantime, I've been working on figuring out the details of making these Lemoyne Stars without the Rapid Fire Lemoyne Star ruler.  As much as I loved using Deb Tucker's ruler to make the stars and the triangles, I fear a pattern requiring two specialty rulers might be challenging to sell.  I plan to include instructions for using the rulers, but also instructions without.

Today I worked on trimming details.

Paper trial

I had previously printed out templates from EQ7 to measure the pieces.  I then worked out how to measure to rotary cut the pieces without the templates.  What I needed next was help aligning the pieces, so I cut out paper pieces, drew in 1/4" seam allowances all around, and put pins through the seam intersections, matching the intersections of two pieces the way they would be when sewn. With the pins holding those matched points together, I could mark where one piece extended past the other piece.  That's the trim line for that piece.

I trimmed the paper as marked, then pulled out my handy dandy Marti Michell corner trimmer to see if it would trim the same way. 

 Yes!  That made things so much easier when I switched to fabric!   Trimming the tips just so lets me line up the pieces with no guesswork and no marking of each individual fabric patch.

I got impatient to see if all my figuring worked and neglected to take progress pictures.  Here's the finished test star block though.

Blue Lemoyne Star Block

I'm going to try to remake the quilt in different fabrics using these measurements, without the specialty ruler.  If that works, I'll move on to writing up the pattern both ways.  Or maybe three ways.  Paper piecing would be easy and accurate, so I could make it that way too.  I do hear a lot of people say they won't touch paper piecing though and I don't want to limit the pattern's appeal....Clearly, I have a lot of thinking still to do!

While I think, I'll cut fabric for method two.  Here's what I spent a couple of hours choosing for it at the quilt shop a few weeks ago.

Hmm.  That's not a great picture.  There's a pop of yellow in the second fabric, and the last fabric, which will be background, is deeper and richer that it appears in the photo.  I guess I need to step away from the computer and go cut the fabric in all its glorious batik color so I can put it all in a top to show it off properly!

Fall again! - Blogger's Quilt Festival 2nd entry

Today was the first day of fall, even though you wouldn't have guessed it from the heat and humidity!  Still, the changing calendar made me think of pulling out my fall quilts.  I only have those out until early December, when Christmas quilts get their turn, so I need to pull them out now to enjoy them for a few months.

I thought I'd share one of those for my second Blogger's Quilt Festival entry.  Here is Autumn Moons, finished in August 2013 but still one of my favourites.

I was practicing curves and had to do something with those practice blocks!

Like many of my quilts, this one was quilted with a walking foot.  It involves lots of turning and smooshing of the quilt through the throat of my domestic sewing machine, but it gets the job done nicely! Marking curves and following along with the walking foot gives me a much smoother and precise arc than I am able to achieve with freemotion quilting.  I like tidy and neat :)

I hope you will pop over to the Blogger's Quilt Festival to be inspired by all the quilts.  It's quite a collection of all sizes, styles and colors!

Sparkling Thirties - Blogger's Quilt Festival 1st entry

Amy at Amy's Creative Side is hosting the Blogger's Quilt Festival again.  This year she has gone back to basics, with no categories and no voting, just a chance to be inspired by oodles of beautiful quilts of all sizes and styles.

I'm a little last minute with my contribution, as I couldn't decide what to share.  I've been working on quilting a new Wandering Geese all week, and I thought it might be fun to share the new version as the original was one of my early Blogger's Quilt Festival entries.  However, the quilting isn't finished so I chose my most recent finish instead.

Sparkling Thirties Quilt

Sparkling Trail in 1930's fabric had been sitting in a bin, unquilted, since February 2015. I really like how the top turned out, so why was it languishing in a bin? When I pulled it out this August to show different color options in my trunk show, I felt bad showing just a flimsy.  I didn't have time then to finish it properly but it moved up a few places on my priority list!

I think this sat unquilted for so long because I just couldn't quite decide how to quilt it. I have quilted every version of Sparkling Trails differently (you can see those here, here and here).   I thought I should do some free motion swirls or feathers on this one, but I just couldn't work up the enthusiasm to do that.  When I presented my trunk show this summer, I realized that most of my quits are quilted mostly with a walking foot (some have a few FMQ flourishes added in) and the audience really liked what I had done.  It reminded me that there's nothing wrong with straight line quilting. As long as it enhances the piecing, it doesn't matter if I used FMQ or a walking foot, especially it it gets me a finished quilt!

So, out came the flimsy, the walking foot and my hera marker to mark some straight lines.  I quilted in the ditch around all the triangles and borders, between the squares in the outer border, then added the diamond crosshatching.

This is a mini version of Sparkling Trail, just 30" x 36", but I didn't have appropriate yardage for even such a small back, so I used some scraps from the top to add some width. I think it turned out pretty cute.  I used scraps for the binding too.  I'm feeling very thrifty!

Pieced back of Sparkling Thirties

I have one more version of this quilt to quilt.  Maybe the black and red mini will get the swirls!  It is a little lower on my list though. I have Wandering Geese to finish, a reworking of Jelly Bean Stars clamoring for me to get started, two Lemoyne Star modern quilts in progress and some Anne of Green Gables fabric I'm itching to get to.  And some pattern writing to do in there somewhere.  I think the black and red one will be the 2018 Sparkling Trail finish!