This Might Become a Thing

I made another ball this weekend.  

Pink, orange and yellow with a pop of green.  

It is nice to finish an English paper piecing project in a day or two instead of a year or two.

Scrap Hexies: Coming Along

 I have made some progress since January on my English paper pieced hexagons.  It is starting to look like something!  When I cut up all my small scraps for the hexagons I was worried about how they would play together, but so far, so good.

 Becca enjoys climbing all over it (when her horse isn't) and looking at the different fabrics.   She has assigned a flower to every family member.  Her's is the pink and gray one with the seahorses and I think my husband's is the orange/red one.  I forget mine.  I'm sure she will inform me again.  :)

Linking up with Scraptastic Tuesday.

Quick and Easy Charity Quilts - Applique

 When I first started quilting I never thought I would do applique.  Too hard.  Too fussy.  Not happening!  But it turns out it really isn't that bad and applique can add a great pop of color and interest to a simple piece of fabric.  Here are two examples of simple whole cloth quilts that have been dressed up with applique.

First up, this great Air Force print with an airplane made by my guild-mate Sherry.  It is backed with the fuzziest brown flannel.   Perfect for snuggling!

Sherry appliqued on two layers of fabric and satin stitched around them.  Beautiful work.

For this quilt top, I took three hexagon flowers I had made years ago and zigzagged them onto some pale yellow fabric.  Applique can be a great way to use up those orphan hexagons too.  ;)

If you want to make and applique your own hexagon flowers I wrote a tutorial as part of the Skill Builder Sampler.  Just change the size of hexagon you print out to 2 inches.

If you want to know more about how to applique by machine, Julie, The Crafty Quilter, has an amazing series on applique.  Seriously, the third post will teach you everything you need to know about using different machine stitches in applique.
Part 1:  Terminology
Part 2:  Machine Applique with fusibles 
Part 3:  Machine Applique Stitches

So, only a week and a half left in September!   Have you made any quilts for charity this month yet?  On October 1st I will have a link up and prize drawing for anyone who has made a quilt for charity in the month of September.

You could win a $20 dollar gift certificate from the Fat Quarter Shop and a set of Owl note cards from my wonderful friend Lisa Orgler.

Tomorrow we are having a sew-in as a guild and I can't wait to get sewing!  :)

This Week...

This week... I have worked on appliqueing the hexagons onto a linen background for my Pillow Talk Swap pillow.  Before appliqueing, I layered the linen, fusible fleece and backing and quilted them together in a grid pattern.  I added some hand stitching around a few of the hexagons last night in pink and yellow and plan on using one of the fabrics on the side as a backing.

This week... I learned that if your eight year old wakes you up in the middle of the night saying that she had a bloody nose you shouldn't blearily ask if it has stopped, (yes) and tell her to go back to bed, assuming that she only got blood on the worn old baby blanket she is holding.  Because the next day you will find yourself facing the prospect of scrubbing dried blood out of a new quilt and wondering how she only managed to bleed on the white fabric on the front of the quilt and miss all of the dark fabric on the back.  Thankfully it came out much better than I expected.

This week... I have realized how hard it is to get pictures of large quilts.  The sun, my husband-quilt-holder and non-bloodied quilts never seem to be in the same place at the same time!

This week... I learned that there is a Modern category in the Iowa State Fair!

183 Modern - a quilt using a new design or reinterpreted traditional design, including improvisational piecing, alternative block structures, or emphasis of negative space and asymmetry.

I worked with the Fabric and Threads superintendent this fall to get this category added.  If you live in Iowa and have made a Modern quilt would you please consider entering it?  Please?  I would hate to have asked for a new category and have no entries.

To enter a quilt in the Iowa State Fair:
Go to the Iowa State Fair 2013 Categories/Premium Books Page

1. Read the Fabric and Threads Booklet to see how many things you would like to enter.  Only one entry per category.
2. Fill out an online entry form.  You do not have to know for sure what you are going to enter at this time.  It will simply ask you how many entry tags you would like.  Each tag can be used for any of the Fabric and Threads categories. 
3. Drop off your item on July 27th.
4. Pick up your item on August 19th

I would love to see a bunch of modern styled quilts hanging at the fair!

Pillow Talk Swap 10

the fabric pull for my partner

For the last month things have felt a bit more calm around here.  Maybe because the baby is sleeping through the night now?   I started to feel kind of itchy and wanted to do some social sewing.  So I signed up for the Pillow Talk Swap.  This is my first time in the swap and man, is it fun!  We have all been assigned secret partners and people are posting pictures of fabric pulls and pattern ideas and asking for feed back.  There are so many great fabrics and ideas that I wish I was 10 peoples' partner!  ;)

My partner said she likes blues, greens and other pastel combos.  She also had some pictures of pillows with hexagons in her inspiration mosaic.  You know how I love English paper piecing!  So I ran with her hexagon inspiration photos.  So far I have appliqued 1 inch hexagons onto a variety of 1.5 inch hexagons.  The plan as of now is to space them about 1/2 inch apart and applique them onto a linen background.

I am loving how it looks and loving making it!

Flower Garden Finish

Last night I finished sewing on the last of the white spacers along the edge of my hexagon quilt!  I love it!  It was a long journey to get here and I am so proud that I really did manage to finish it.

I took a picture of the first five flowers I stitched together back in February 2010.  I was sooo  proud of them.  I felt like I had made so many!  How naive I was. There are 132 flower blocks in the finished quilt so I had a bit more to go.  :)

In the fall of 2010, I had finished about a quarter of the quilt.  That cute little girl started kindergarten this year!

I kept chugging along.  Sometimes months would go by without any work on it and sometimes I would make flowers obsessively.  My favorite time (only time, really) to do handwork is after the kids go to bed.  I love to just sit down and watch some Hulu or Netflix and do English paper piecing.  If I worked fast I could get one flower done an evening.  Let's not even start to think about how much TV watching this quilt represents, ok?  ;)

Early on I found an online offer for twenty-five 1930's reproduction fat quarters for $25!  Sweet!  In retrospect I should have gotten two packets - there is a lot of fabric in this quilt!  The spacers are Kona Unbleached PFD.  It is more cream than Kona white and more white than Kona Snow - the perfect white in my opinion.  The flower centers are Kona Corn and the hexagons are 1 inch a side.

I love the texture on the back!

I got the idea for using three white spacers between the blocks instead of surrounding the blocks in white from the Paper Pieces picture page.  I was afraid if I surrounded each flower in white that I would get bored and give up.  I like how the spacers still give the flowers breathing room, but how I didn't have to stitch as many white hexagons.  Plus it makes it a bit different from other Grandmother's Flower Garden quilts.

I give my husband a bad time about always having to build stuff so sturdily, but I am just as crazy about my sewing.  After making a couple flowers I had my own system for joining the hexagons together which included laying the tail of the thread under subsequent stitches to hold it in place, reinforcing the corners with extra stitches, averaging 18 whip stitches per inch and knotting off the thread at the end twice - once at the end of the stitching and then again back 1/4 inch.  That thread isn't going anywhere.  ;)

Now I just have to decide if I have the guts to hand quilt it.  The part that makes me the most nervous is the fact that where the fabric folds back on itself to make the hexagon shape, I could have 6 layers of fabric plus batting to stitch through. That does not sound easy or fun.  Any advice?  Will quilting this be horrible?  Should I just send it out to be quilted?  (I don't trust myself to machine quilt it after so many hours of work.)

I also have to decide whether or not to applique on a bit of a border or just trim the edges straight.  Binding around each pointy hexagon is not an option, in my opinion.

Hopefully it won't take another 2 1/2 years to finish quilting because I would love to see it on my bed much sooner than that!

I am linking up to the Festival of Hexagons (lots of fun hexie projects there!) and At the End of the Hallway.

If you want more info on how to English paper piece, you can check out this tutorial.

How Hard Can It Be?

Remember these lovelies?  Last time I checked in I was trying to decide what color of spacer hexagons to use between them.  I didn't think it would be so hard to decide, but I have been thinking about fabric choices for a good month.

I started my fabric journey by going to JoAnn's and picking out any fabric that I thought might look good.  These are the short listers.  My cart was Full!

I stacked all of the pattern books on one side of the pattern table and spread out.  Thankfully no one needed to find a pattern that evening.  :)  I took each fabric, unrolled it, laid the hexagons on top, stood back, took pictures, asked the opinions roving employees and still couldn't figure out which one was best.

There were some definite No Ways in the bunch.  Black and whites that made me loopy when I looked at them and solids that were just a bit too boring.  Here are some that made the very short list.

This was the best aqua in the bunch - it actually looks way better in the  picture than it did in the store.

Big black and white dot.  It made my eyes water a bit, but interesting.

A cross hatched print.  It looks ok in the picture, but I wasn't sold on the quality of the fabric or the print.  The hashes are kind of weird when you see them up close.

This black with mini white dots is what I ended up buying.  Then I got home and didn't like it.  Sigh.

More help was needed.  So I took the hexies to the Des Moines Modern Quilt Guild's July meeting which happened to be on color selection.  Perfect!  When Eva Marie asked if there was anyone who had a piece of fabric that they didn't know what color to use with, my hand shot up and we spent some time discussing fabric options.  One side of the room leaned more towards aquas and another towards blacks.

After another week of thinking about it, this is what I chose.  A black with an open circle in gray.  I still don't know if it was the perfect choice or not, but it was my husband's favorite fabric of the bunch, so when in doubt humor the husband.  :)

Here it is so far.  The black is a strong contrast, but I think some bright chunky quilting in perle cottons will soften the black areas.  Now I just need to make more star hexagons so I can make it twice as long and even out the sides.

More Star Flowers

This week I discovered that if I put my feet up and iced them regularly throughout the day they didn't get nearly as swollen as usual.  Oh, the joys of pregnancy!  On the bright side, this gave me a chance to make quite a few new Star Flowers - I think that is what I am going to call them (unless they have a real name?).

My spacer Flea Market Fancy fabric also came in the mail and I got to work joining them together.  I am not so sure about it.

Here are some more flower stars laid over the fabric.  It just looks like a mushy mess to me.  (And I have no idea why my camera refuses to take crisp pictures of these blocks!  Grrr.)  Or am I just not daring?  Both my husband and daughter suggested white fabric instead of the floral.

So here is a roughly edited picture with white spacer hexagons.

 Solid or dotted turquoise?

 

 Gray?

 Or black?  I think a black and white dot might be the best choice.   What do you think?

Thanks for all of your input on the star flowers and the fair block.  I really, really, really truly appreciate it even if I a total rubbish at responding to comments.  I decided to make the Belted Star block for the fair and it is perfect -- except for one fatal flaw.  I'll unpick it and tell you the whole story soon.  :)

Mimicking Mary

Gypsy Kisses by Mary, via Flickr

Have you ever fell in love with someone's style?  It was love at first sight when I saw Mary's quilt Gypsy Kisses.  I started following her blog, Molly Flanders, and have seriously loved everything I have seen.  I totally want to be more like Mary.  :)  I even tried out chunky quilting with perle cotton on a pillow recently - chunky/primitive quilting with various bright colors of perle cotton is Mary's signature quilting style.  Love it!

I wanted to start another English paper piecing project this summer that I could bring with me to the park and pool and decided that I wanted to recreate the look and feel of Gypsy Kisses.  Ironically, I have not been able to work on the project at the pool or the park - those crazy kids want me to play with them, not sit and stitch - who would have thought?  ;)  But I have been working on it every evening after the kids go to bed.  I love to put my swollen feet up and stitch while watching a show.

Anyway....This was my first block - a star in a hexagon.  Nice, but lacking.  Would Mary just use one color of gray for the star?  No way!

So I gave it another try.  Stars with two black/white/gray fabrics.  Perfect!

They look pretty good all together, but...

...I think I am going to spread them out and put some turquoise floral fabric in between the star hexagons.

I am planning on using Turquoise Bouquet from Flea Market Fancy.  It mimics the fabric in Gypsy Kisses and I love it as fabric, but I must admit that I am going out of my comfort zone here.  I tend to use smaller prints and don't usually do bright and scrappy.  What do you think?  Will it work?  Am I crazy?
  

I have made 14 star hexies in the last three weeks and have enjoyed every moment.  Only 30 or 40 to go!  :)