Q3 Finish-Along Goals

Yeah, yeah… I’m cutting and pasting from the last one. Whatever. I don’t need your judgment! HA!

Here are the quilts I hope to finish this quarter, in no particular order:

1. Southwest Merry Go Round. It’s partially quilted, and then we moved back home and I haven’t touched it in almost 2 years. It shouldn’t be too difficult to finish this one up.

Southwest Merry Go Round
Southwest Merry Go Round

 

2. Smoke Damage. This is ready for 3D embellishments, but it’s emotionally difficult to work on. Or maybe it isn’t but I just keep expecting it to be so I don’t work on it. I don’t know… But I need to spend some quality time with this piece.

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3. Five Pillow Covers. There are several of these (3 swoon blocks, plus a few other orphan blocks). I’ll just consider the 5 pillow covers one finish if I get them all done. They’re closer than they were last quarter — I got two more quilted and battings/backings matched with all of the rest of them. So this might even happen. CRAZY TALK.

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4. Figgy Pudding Scrappy Trip. This one needs a backing, and needs to be layered and quilted. Maybe I’ll get the backing done at retreat this weekend.

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5. Peacock Quilt: Layered and ready to quilt. And I moved all of the furniture out of one room of the house and basted this sucker at HOME. So proud of myself for that.

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6. His. Layered and ready to quilt.

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7. Hers. Needs more blocks. A friend sees a Picasso-style face in this arrangement, so I may try to stay with that. It’ll be interesting to see how this one develops.

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8. Glory. Ready to layer as soon as I have released enough safety pins from other quilts in the quilting queue.

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9. Mystery Maze. Guild mystery quilt from a few years ago. Ready to layer.

HQH Mystery 2011
HQH Mystery 2011

10. Under the Sea. My mom is going to draw an underwater scene on it for me (that my husband will help provide inspiration for from his diving photos) and then I can threadplay and quilt it.

Storm At Sea Experiment
Storm At Sea Experiment

 

11. Tessellation quilt. Needs backing/layering/quilting.

Tessellation quilt, unknown start date
Tessellation quilt, unknown start date

 

12. ZebraTown. It’s about half quilted. I haven’t touched it in 5 years. My skill level has improved so much that I think working on it again will be weird — there will be a definite shift in how the quilting looks, but whatever.

ZebraTown, 2008
ZebraTown, 2008

 

13. Star Puzzle. AMH fabrics and Grunge fabric in “Picnic” color. Trying to decide how big to go with this one… As it is, I think this would finish at 56″x70″ so I may do 8 more stars and *THEN* quit. It hasn’t told me what it wants yet, just that it wants to be bigger. Who am I to argue?

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14. Fibonacci Fractal in Grunge solids. I love it, but I have no idea how I should quilt this one.

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15. Not Quite White, which I’m making for a friend who has always wanted an all-white quilt. I can’t quite do THAT, but I can almost do it… This one is under the needle right now and will likely be the first finish off of this list.

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16. Scrappy Fibonacci Fractal — this one was my first attempt at my FibFrac pattern. It doesn’t really work in a scrappy application like this, which is why I made the Grunge one. It’s cute, but the mathematics is lost, which was the point of the whole concept in the first place.

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No way in the world I could possibly finish all 16 on this list, but this way I can pick and choose which one I want to work on next. 🙂

Linking up with Katy at The Littlest Thistle for FAL2014

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Thanks to Katie — Finished!

Finished my Economy Blockalong quilt last week also!

This one was made as part of the Instagram #economyblockalong project, and I had a lot of fun sizing it down to make a dent in my batik charms stash.

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I quilted it with orange Aurifil thread (color #2245) in a spiky swirl pattern. Extra blocks were inserted on the back to make the scrap of Ikea fabric large enough, and I love how that turned out.

We are giving it to a friend of ours as a thank you for all of the uniform hand-me-downs that she has passed to us since our girls have been at their school. I wanted to do something tangible to say thank you, so I sent Jerry with photos of quilts and Katie and her daughters picked their favorite. As soon as I get the label on this one, they can have it.

Zinnias — Finished!

Even though this is the third quilt I’ve finished this quarter, it’s only the first one that was on my original Q2 Finish-Along list

I made this background probably in 2007 because I wondered if the idea would work. It did, but it was a pain — the entire background is constructed with partial seams, which is tedious. And then the light green zigzag was so powerful that it was too strong to be used as a background.

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And then I decided to make some monster flowers and see how they’d do on the background.

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I made the flowers to see what would happen if I made a Dresden with too many wedges. Each of these flowers has around 32 wedges per layer, as opposed to the usual 20 wedges. So they are forced out of two dimensions, which is what I needed to do for the 2014 Heritage Quilters of Huntsville challenge.

Once I made all of the wedges, I had to figure out how to get the extra wedges to distribute evenly, and I called on an old skill to do it — SMOCKING!

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I used the standard scaffolding Stem Stitch to get the petals to fan evenly around the centers, and it worked beautifully!

Once they were on the background it looked even better than I had anticipated.

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I covered the centers of each double-layered flower with an upside-down yo-yo and appliqued those down. Each flower is attached to the background at every Dresden seam for the bottom layer, so usually around unique attachment points. I tied off each attachment point separately so that the flowers will be more secure. The top layer is attached at every other seam, so that they’d have a little more fluidity. Leaves are a little less secured but because they don’t have as many pieces and aren’t as heavy, I decided that was OK.

The leaves were painted with white Paintstiks so that they’d show up a bit more. If I had it to do over I’d probably do the leaves in citron or something that would show up better on the background, but I was also trying to make this entirely from fabrics already in my possession and I didn’t have anything that would work for that.

The challenge show was June 19, and my quilt ended up getting one of the top three prizes! I won “Best Use of 3D Elements” as voted by the viewers, which pleases me greatly!

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(thanks to Vickey H. for the above photo)

I’m pleased with how it turned out, and it has already sold to my friend Jill. It’s like I made it for her master bedroom. I’ll ship it to her this week and can’t wait to see pictures of it in place.

Memory Quilt for a New Baby

A friend contacted me during the spring to ask if I’d be willing to make a baby quilt. Because of my Lenten promise not to start new projects and because of the House Divided quilt I knew I’d have to make between April 20 and May 23, I wasn’t sure I had time. The friend said she wasn’t looking for complexity as much as she was looking for simple squares made out of meaningful fabrics, so I agreed to try.

The friend’s nephew and his wife were expecting a baby in June (the baby is here safely and everyone is doing well), and they wanted to have a baby quilt made with the fabric from a favorite shirt of the baby’s grandmother, who had passed away. The child is named for the grandmother, which makes it even more special. I was also asked to include silk from one of the bridesmaid dresses from the wedding (that my friend washed and dried to make sure it would stand up to such abuse before making the request), as well as fabric from a shawl that was carried in the wedding.

I used the arms of the shirt first, so that the grandmother’s arms would be wrapped around the baby. Then the fronts of the shirt, then the shoulders, and then the back. There’s about a 12″ square of fabric left of the shirt that can be used for a future quilt if they want another one. There are two dark squares in the quilt that were the fabric under the front pockets of the shirt. The patch that would have been over the grandmother’s heart is on the edge of the quilt, so that they could monogram the baby’s name into it if they wanted to.

I quilted flowers into it because of the grandmother’s love for gardening, since the denim shirt was her gardening shirt.

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Working with denim, silk, and satin damask proved to be an interesting challenge. The quilting cottons were a good stabilizer and helped keep the quilt square as I finished it.

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I was going to add brighter fabrics, but found that the competed with the shirt and the silks, so I chose instead to go a more subtle route. The final result was very good, I think.

My friend said that when she delivered the quilt to the new parents and shared the order in which I made it and that I made the quilt top on Mother’s Day, there was not a dry eye in the room.

I’m really glad I got to be part of this important project.