Baby Cardi Nearly Complete

It was a challenge to pick up 134 stitches along the edge, mostly because I'd never done it before, but four rows of garter stitch and it'll be finished.

We'll be seeing the family in about a month, so I can give it to them then. I hope they like it!

Show n Tell

Some have called Show n Tell, "Bring and Brag". Well at guild I think that's okay. Other quilters KNOW what it takes to get to a finish sometimes.

Borders ripped and replaced, intersections resewn... and I still love it. It's a good thing, 'cause it'll probably take me three months to machine quilt it! DH and I were going to tack it to the side of the house for a photo, but the weather is wet and windy. Today I'm resting in the recliner with knitting. It feels good. :)

Friday Nonsense in the Office

It's being called Pink Friday, the day pink slips go out to teachers and management; it doesn't help that it's also Friday the Thirteenth. I work at the County Office of Education, you can imagine what the atmosphere is like.

So I had to laugh when a co-worker sent me one of those e-mail games. Copy the e-mail, fill in the blanks with words that start with the first letter of your last name, use real words and names, not made up and then forward to ten people. :)

1. Your last name: Roberts
2. A four letter word: Rate
3. A Boys Name: Randy
4. A Girls name: Rachel
5. An Occupation: Receptionist
6. A Color: Rose
7. Something you wear: Ruffles
8. A Beverage : Raspberry smoothie
9. A Food: Radishes
10. Something found in the bathroom: Rouge
11. A place: Rockport
12. A Reason for being late: Rabid animal
13. Something you shout: Reach for the sky!


You can play if you want. You can't use the same boy or girl's name if your last name starts with the same letter. Try it! And Happy Pink Friday!

A Quilter's Blessing

Kind words from a fellow quilter:

"May your seam ripper be sharp, your stitches loose and your fabric firm."

If you have to rip, at least it's good to know there are others out there experiencing similar struggles. Thanks Quilt Pixie - See February 16, 2009.

Return and repeat

I don't think I post too many of my struggles while quilting, and lest my gentle readers think it's 'all good, all the time', I thought I'd share the latest when I tried to attach the final borders to the Dbl Four.

The squares in the pieced border alternate red-brown-red around the quilt. When I decided to sew pieced units into the corners, I made sure the color of those squares continued the pattern, red-brown-red. I sewed the solid red to the pieced border, then laid that next to the quilt.

What the?? Red-brown-brown!!

So I turned it around and laid it against the other side of the quilt. ARGH!! Brown-red-red. How did this happen?? Well without thinking, I sewed the solid red to the pieced borders on the wrong side. Hmmm... what's the *fastest* way to rip 105" x 2?

This is my ripper, which sometimes doubles as a rotary cutter. :) I put a light tension on the seam with my non-dominant hand, tick the blade against the exposed stitch and rip! It goes so fast you wouldn't believe it. In the past I used to pick the seam clean afterward, but now...

I use my sticky lint roller to pick the loose threads for me.
Oh-kay, back to sewing the right side to the correct border, I'm back in business... Only maybe not quite yet.

I've ripped and re-sewn this seam twice.

And I've ripped and re-sewn this seam twice. This was not fun. This was so much like *work* I had to push back and take a deep breath. This is where I left it at bedtime last night. I still have the other border to reconstruct and attach.

And I do this to relax??

Continuous Strip Quilt

All that red and brown must've gotten to me, I took a sharp turn last weekend and pulled fabric from the two and a half inch strip bin; blue, green, purple, jade, teal, etc. It was great! I wanted to make Finn's Continuous Strip quilt (no link) and I wanted fast, no-thinkum sewing.

The bin before

The bin after

The color palette

The pile of strips was actually three times that size because I wanted my quilt to be 45" x 66", so I pieced 42 yards.

This is how I sewed the strips together, quick, on the diagonal. Lay them RST forming a reversed 'L'.

Bring the right hand corner down until it touches the opposite edge, crease with your thumbnail.

Open it up and use the crease as your stitching guide. Continue pulling strips from your pile and sewing them to the continuous strip. I found I preferred to work with strips that were 22" or shorter, I figure the more variety the better! I didn't measure as I went along, but stopped and measured about every half hour, so that I was getting up to move around too. I found I pieced on average 10 yards every thirty minutes, cool!

Trim all.

And I actually threw these away. It was so freeing, I can't tell you. :) I rationalized, if I stitched them again, they wouldn't make good HST's because the contrast would be too low.

Press open.

Next fold the strip in half RST and sew along one long side. Cut the bottom apart and press open, fold in half again and sew along the long side, and do this again and again. It's sooo fun! Everytime I opened it to press, I was delighted by the color play.

Here it is at 16 strips - or 32". Lila came to inspect my work.

On the next row, it turned the vertical into the horizontal. I love it! I didn't know it was going to do that, but I really like it. I was ready to do another one with a different set of strips to see what it would look like!

Close-up

Machine quilted

This took me a Sat/Sun to sew and 2-3 hours to machine quilt on my Janome. REALLY fast for me. I was so psyched!

Border Options

I've been 'staying on task' with the Double Four Patch Strippy quilt. I love the red and browns, the last time I spread it out on the floor - it's grown to 89" x 106" - I was so excited by the *red*.

This is the corner treatment I'd planned when I drafted it in EQ. But when I laid it out, it looked like there was a hole in each corner, what was I thinking?

So back to the piecing stage, rummage around for a few more pieces of that background fabric, which I was running out of, didn't want to add a new fabric in the final stage.

But after all the back tracking and effort, I like the new corners much better.

When a quilt top gets this large, I don't want to sew each border on one at a time, it takes so much effort to muscle all that fabric around and under the needle. So I sewed the pieced border to the final border and added them as one; the blue line drawn indicates where there's another seam. It's not the conventional way of attaching borders, but it goes a whole lot faster!

February Sew Day

Finally called a Sew Day during the President's Day weekend. It seems if I don't have a sew day with friends at least once a month I feel out of touch with my quilty circle. Well as it fell out, I called ten people, the usual attendees and one after another said they couldn't make it; illness, family visiting from out of town, schedule conflicts... Life just has a way of getting in the way!

Chari and Fran came and we had a good time anyway. I made cinnamon french toast strata for morning snack and tuna salad served on greens for lunch. Nobody complained. :)

Fran's working on her maple leaf wall hanging.

And Chari was proud to complete her Broken Dishes mini. She asked me if I remembered giving her the HST's a while ago at another sew day. I'm pretty much the only one in the group willing to work with these cut-a-ways, but that day she agreed to use what normally gets thrown out with the thread bits.

So over a year later...
She said I'd inspired her to try. How nice, I'm a mini grandma!

I continue to work on my leader-ender Ocean Wave quilt. Sometimes I just sit and make HST's, they're very restive.

I have this great bend wood Shaker box that sits on my sewing table.

It holds the sewn HST's until I feel like pressing.

Once in awhile I sew a five and a half inch block or two and add 'em to the stack. Seven down, ninety to go. :)

Victorian Scissor Caddie Necklace

I love it, but I never use it. Can be seen on eBay here.

Not Your Typical Brown Bag

I take my lunch to work and I've been using a double sided fabric lunch bag for almost 15 years. They're easy to make and last about three years with daily use.

I use coordinating cotton fabric, from the stash of course, and heavy Heat n Bond. This is one time the heavy Heat n Bond is really the one to use. It adds body to the lunch bag and makes it somewhat leak resistant.

Cut outside and lining fabrics 12" x 22" Cut the Heat n bond 11" x 21". Following the fusing instructions on the package, iron the shiny side to the wrong side of the lining, leaving a half inch margin of fabric all the way around the piece. Peel the paper backing from the Heat n Bond, place on wrong side of main fabric and fuse.

Stitch a 1" hem on the 22" end. Fold in half with right sides together and sew the bottom and side seam to make the bag.

Open up bag and 'box' the bottom as shown, the side seam will now be down the back. Using a ruler with a 45 degree line on it, measure in 2.5" from the corners. Click the image to zoom in, I've drawn a red rectangle around the corner measurement to help explain this step. Draw a stitching line.

Then stitch the corners as shown.

Turn the bag right side out and press the boxed corners. You could add a velcro strip to close it, but I always just grab and go!

Sunday in the Sun

It's been in the low 70's mid-afternoons lately. Wow! We drove to the coast and I couldn't believe how clear it was, no fog in sight.

The northern California coast is mostly bluffs, signs say "Coastal Access", not "Beach Path."

But we found a beach... and we had it to ourselves for hours. Man I couldn't believe how beautiful it was, smell that!! How long has it been since we came out here last? Too long...

The sound is just so soothing. How can something so big and so constant calm rather than annoy? Always a wonder to me.

Went home tired, but happy.

Ninepatches for Bumblebean

Blogland is an interesting place. Quilters write about what they're working on, swap with friends they've never met and put out requests for fabric or blocks, which are readily answered.

I read Christine's blog, which asked for blocks for Bumblebean and so many quilters responded that she closed the request within two days! I'm sending mine anyway. I'm sure they'll find their way into a charity quilt somewhere along the line.

I made scrappy

and planned. Which kind do you like to make?