Things That Make Me Smile

Meet Kahlua, the latest of my cows for my aunt's quilt

Citron--avec un accent français, oui oui?!--"see-troh" à la stuffed up nose...notice the difference a little starch makes for pressing between these two...might've found a new love.

I'm shamefully far behind in the cow quilt.  Yellow was the March colour of the month at SoScrappy! Brown was the October colour.  You can see my first two cows here.  I also have a purple (April) one done. Although they are time-consuming, 2.5 hours at least per cow, I adore them.

Creamsicle Wheelchair Quilt #10 and The Stack!

I got this finished last night, but have only just now sat down to write the post, a couple hours after a lovely dinner with our next-door neighbours who are Florida bound in the morning.  I'm really happy with the way this quilt turned out.  It is also a goal on my Q4 FAL list at On the Windy Side.  The orange and pink on the white background kept me thinking of creamsicles from the popsicle man who used to pedal around the neighbourhood when I was a kid.  So I named this quilt Creamsicle. 

Stardust Wheelchair Quilt #9

I really really love this little quilt.  It is #9 of the wheelchair quilts I have done this year, 8 will be for the guild charity project and 2 were done on my own this past Spring.  It is also another goal on my Q4 FAL list at On the Windy Side.  Two down, six to go...

Wheelchair Quilts 7 & 8 Finished

These are such pretty fabrics that were languishing in the charity quilts fabric bin of the guild.  Lots of scraps from other people's projects in there... That green, which is a wide backing, is just the richest emerald!  This is one on the list of my Q4 FAL goals at On the Windy Side.  Feels good to scratch one off the list. I had the two together as they were really quite quick projects.

I basically doodled various curly designs across the quilt, using Christina Cameli's Fervent as well.  It was fun!

This quilt is another rendition of my Fairy Steps wheelchair quilt from Pam & Nicky Lintott's Two From One Jelly Roll Quilts.  That first soft pastels one I made is my favourite, but this is also so pretty.

The back against the backdrop of the neighbour's Burning Bush. This is a young one; the older ones around town are really "on fire" with their brilliant reds.

A closer look.  Do you see where I have to go back in and add another curlicue or two?

I used up every bit of the floral fabrics and even a couple pieces from cutting the half hexies for the other quilt, as well as trimmings from the front columns to make the back pocket

Quilt Stats:
Pattern: slightly modified Fairy Steps from Two From One Jelly Roll Quilts
Size:  29 X 35.25"
Fabric: guild charity (donated) fabric
Batting: Pellon Legacy 100% polyester (love this batting!)
Quilted: on my Avanté -- 48 009 stitches :-)
Threads: quilted with Floriani's Fufu's rayon thread in olive green

The second quilt in this post is the half hexie quilt, a tutorial on Cynthia's Quilting Is More Fun Than Housework blog.

I made the binding from the strips left after quilting and squaring the quilt; love the two fabrics! I also had totally run out of the emerald green, so it really was as quilters of old used to do: make do!

There are a few differences in fabric in this one: the addition of the very soft pink and the lemon yellow.  Hmm and I see I also had no white in this one, and only the one floral.  This is the second Half Hexie I made; the other is waiting to be quilted (it may first need a backing pieced from leftover flannels).  The quilting design is one of my all-time favourite designs to quilt.

The back:

Used up all of that purple floral too!  Smaller pocket because that's all I had of that floral.

 Quilt Stats:
Pattern: Half Hexie quilt from Quilting is More Fun Than Housework
Size:  30.75 X 36.5"
Fabric: guild charity (donated) fabric plus a piece from my own scraps
Batting: Pellon Legacy 100% polyester (love this batting!)
Quilted: on my Avanté -- 20 750 stitches (interesting! half the amount of Fairy Steps 2, but it is a much more open design with no echoed curlicues)
Threads: quilted with So Fine #403

None of the wheelchair quilts have been washed yet.  I might give the first seniors' residence where I sent my first two quilts a call to see what they prefer.  I have two more to finish, and then I'll show you the stack!  Now that makes me grin from ear to ear!

I'm linking up with Crazy Mom Quilts, Confessions of a Fabric Addict, TGIFF at A Quarter Inch From the Edge, A Quilting Reader's Garden, and on Sunday with Quilting is More Fun Than Housework.  Whoop! Whoop! indeed. :-) 

Stardust Flimsy and the Coolest HST Method

This is wheelchair quilt #10 (counting the first two I donated on my own).  At 36 3/4" square, it is the widest of the ten quilts, and I hope it will be okay as far as not getting caught in the wheels.  I love love love this quilt and plan to make one of my own to take as my 'sit-upon' quilt when I teach yoga.  It was definitely a little more finicky and involved (the small squares and star points finish at 2") than the previous quilts I've made.  Worth every stitch (okay, and a few reverse stitches ha).

This is outside on the front step in natural light.  Again, all five fabrics were in the guild's charity fabric stash.  The two blues are Moda, Brannock and Patek,  and of a superb quality. I loved working with them.  The red is Springs Industries by Ro Gregg, and of a similar quality.  The background is either a decent quality muslin or maybe just a solid, no selvages on it.  The medium blue also has no selvage on it.  Clearly these are older fabrics because of their deep colours, and no names of fabric line on the selvages.

This is a more masculine quilt, but could be for a woman quite easily (after all I could quite easily keep it!).

Here it is on the design wall before the final 2" finished border.

This shot shows the background more as it truly is, a linen colour, not the modern white as is popular now, but this colour just works beautifully with the tones of the other fabrics.

This quilt is called Stardust, and is another in Pam & Nicky Lintott's Two From One Jelly Roll Quilts, a terrific book, from our guild library.  I've made two versions of Fairy Steps for wheelchair quilts from this book; I might just have to get it for my own collection!  I already have two of their books, absolutely love their quilts.

The HSTs for the star points have the coolest technique!  I want to share it with you.  How can you get a 2 1/2" HST from a 2 1/2" strip?  Read on!

1.  Iron the two 2.5" strips of fabric together so they stick together.  Trim off one end to 45 degrees.

2.  Because I don't have the Omnigrid 96 ruler they use, I made my own template.  I first cut a triangle out of fabric that was 1/4" wider than the point of the diagonal which you see at the bottom of the blue triangle.  That would be the dog ear you trim when you cut your strips (squares) at 2 7/8" to yield two 2" finished HSTs.  I cut a pair using this template.  Then I made a paper template using one of the triangles.  I taped the paper to the underside of my ruler as you see below:

3.  In this second cut, I butted up the paper template to the blue triangle that is sitting on top of my strip set.  Cut carefully along the edge of the ruler.  You will notice there is a little gap where no ruler is! Egad.  Cut carefully.  I had no problem, but you might want to move the template up that 1/4".  You will get a diamond shape out of your strip set.

4.  I still haven't moved the dark blue triangle, as I gently lift my ruler and reposition it so that I can now cut the vertical line that separates the diamond into 2 triangles.

Voilà!  These chain piece through the machine so nicely now that the dog ear point is not even there.  You sew 1/4" from the bias edge and you only need to trim the lower dog ear.  Best of all, you get a 2 1/2" HST which will finish at 2"!  Love this.

Wheelchair Quilt #6

This one is ready to be donated.

I'm just so happy with how this mishmash of orphan blocks and additions from my own stash all came together in the end.  I absolutely love the quilting, feathers  in the chevron areas, and dot to dot in the diamonds.  On the sides I did a feather "flower" in each bottom corner and then arcs, using my trusty tool, a Bath & Bodyworks body butter container, to mark the arc.  Then I FMQ-ed the arc, echoed it, filled it in with back and forth lines, and did the feathers on the outside.  The dot to dot is ruler work and I only marked the inside point of one diamond, the turquoise one, on the first line.  Angela says just go for it, and so I decided to take that risk on this quilt, and I am really surprised and pleased with how evenly they all turned out. :-)  I had no problems with the tension with the Sulky rayon thread, but I did with the pale blue Fufus rayon, the same thread I used on wheelchair #5 quilt. I had few issues, if any on that one, so I am not sure what I am doing wrong, same bobbin thread.  I ended up changing my needle from a 20 to a 14, with a better result.

At first I worried that the back itself seemed to much of a mishmash, a dog's breakfast, but now that it is all quilted up and bound, I love it.  I machine bound this one again, as these quilts need to be durable for much wear and tear and washing.
Quilt Stats:
Pattern: original design
Size:  30X35.5"
Fabric: orphan blocks plus scraps from my stash
Batting: Pellon Legacy 100% polyester (love this batting!)
Quilted: on my Avanté -- 66 757 stitches :-)
Threads: Floriani's Fufu's rayon thread in pale blue and Sulky rayon in white

I also have my September and October steps sewn up for Cheryl's mystery quilt:

It's so intriguing to imagine and speculate what these will grow into!

Here is a tip that probably everyone knows for adding the HSTs onto the squares in the September step.

Sew with the square facing up so the bias edge is on the bottom. This will help to avoid stretching.

If you use the little triangle-like dog ears as a guide, you can get pretty good alignment.  I also finger-pressed the red square in half near the centre of the square so I could use that line as a reference for placement of the tip of the HST.

I hope it will end up okay, as I ran out of the taupe/ivory background, leftovers from my Indianapolis quilt (need to post on that one day, it's an older one), so I substituted the ivory cat fabric without knowing exactly where it would end up/how it will look.  So there is one rectangle in the courthouse steps blocks of the cat fabric.  It does jump a little, but it matches the cat fabric for the SiaS blocks, and I didn't think I should add in a third ivory-coloured fabric. Might have to ask Cheryl if she thinks this will be okay, or add in a third that is a bit closer to the taupe/ivory one.

These are humongous 19" squares! There are 9 fanned out here.

You can still get in on the mystery!  Head to Cheryl's blog, Meadow Mist Designs for the deets.

I'm linking this post up with Connie at Freemotion by the River.

Wheelchair Charity Quilts

I started to work on step 2 of Cheryl's Mystery Quilt, but then got sidetracked (we all know that that never happens to me) and spent all day until I had to drive in for yoga class working on more wheelchair quilts.  Lots of photos ahead.

All that this one needed was the binding, ties and pocket.  This one is my favourite wheelchair quilt finish to date.  It is #5!

Every piece of this fabric was in the charity fabric our guild has.  Even the batting was a donated roll of polyester, a first for me, as I'm a Warm 'n Natural gal.  OMG I love this stuff!  Must find out what brand.  (update: Legacy) This is not washed yet and look at that texture definition!  I just freehanded an easy open flowers, leaves and loops meander.  The pattern is from Pam and Nicky Lintott's Two From One Jelly Roll Quilts.  I did a different border and my rows are shorter.

Here is the back, a piece that fit just perfectly, both size-wise and character-wise, from in the guild stash.  I sewed a pocket out of the 3 columns trimmings.  I am getting better at machine sewing the binding down.  I prefer to sew it to the front of the quilt, and then machine sew it down with the right side up, stitching in the ditch.  I don't have to go back into too many spots now!  My preference is for hand-stitching it down though, just like that look better.

MacGyver planted his banana plants in the ground this year, as they'd outgrown their giant pots. One is 2 years old, the other 3, though they are now the same Jack and the Beanstalk height.  All the neighbours comment on them, as well as my impatiens which started out as those 1" little plugs in a 6-pack from the local greenhouse, and are now these globes of 18" high, two feet in diameter glory.  I'll have to go stand in amongst the banana plants and get a photo so you can appreciate their majesty.  I've convinced MacGyver to dig them up and try to save them over yet another winter.  They've survived thanks to a neighbour, the first year, and Dayna last year, coming in and watering them from time to time while we were in Florida.

Quilt Stats:
Pattern: from Pam and Nicky Lintott's Two From One Jelly Roll Quilts
Size:  30X34.5"
Fabric: charity fabric from my guild
Batting: a fairly flat polyester by Legacy
Quilted: on my Avanté
Threads: Floriani's Fufu's rayon thread in pale blue

Here is the other I was working on yesterday.  I had the flimsy done a couple of days ago.  These are the rest of the 23 giant HST flying geese orphan blocks I won at the August guild meeting. I had to add a purple, a red and a yellow half diamond to make full diamonds, and then two half diamonds, one pale green the other the floral, to fill in the design for this flimsy.

You might recall the first bunch of them I made into this wheelchair quilt:

All I added was one 5 1/2" square to make the flimsy

So I played around yesterday making a pieced backing for the second quilt.  All I do is pin the flimsy to the design wall, and then place fabric pieces over it, filling it in like a puzzle as I go.

Here is the final result, a little different from where I'd started, but I like it.

And here it is in progress on Avril.  I decided to do some more involved quilting as the zigzag low volume areas were begging for feathers. I've loaded it sideways since it is such a small quilt, and that way I can do the feathers in the zigzag areas without breaking thread.

Yes, for those of you more observant types, I'm floating the top.  I've done that on the past several quilts with no issues.  One less edge to pin, I like that!

And.  Sigh....Bella has a new obsession:

This is her latest favourite place to perch and help me sew... Uh Huh.  Try seeing where you're going, through that plume of a brown tail, never mind afraid I'm going to sew those strands of fur (which are rather plentiful) into the seam!  When I hold it aside and sew one-handed (listen to me!  I sound like a crazy cat lady) she will swish it quite strongly, trying to get it out of my hold.

Still sewing scraps for the scrap vortex in progress

I usually end up dumping her unceremoniously, okay, sometimes apologetically, on the floor beside me much to her exasperation.  I always feel bad, well, okay, often feel bad doing that, as this is a cat who is just SO into every step of the quilting process, from pulling fabrics to finished quilt.

Another wheelchair quilt in progress.  Aren't these the coolest blocks?!

These were in the guild's charity fabric, leftovers from the quilt show we think. I sewed the four of them together yesterday too.  I just need to figure out a funky border to frame these and I'll have another wheelchair quilt flimsy.  So they're simmering on the design wall at the moment.

Linking up with Freshly Pieced and Sew Fresh Quilts --OMG go there and hop around for Lorna's Dog Gone Cute blog hop.  Our dogs need new daybed covers and two of these puppies just might be a part of that project.

Musings on Guilds

I joined Erie Shores Quilters' Guild two years ago this month.  It has been a hard group to break into, but I don't think this guild is the anomaly.  Part of the reason, I believe, is that it is in a small town and rural area, where so many people are either related to each other, have gone to school together, grew up together, or have just known each other for a long long time.  Not only was I new to the guild, I was new to the area, and I am younger than the majority of the members.  Much like my beloved pittie puppy, who is 6 years old today, I was regarded, especially here in Ontario where there is a ban, with perhaps a little wariness.

Posing Tuesday night for the camera on my daughter, Dayna's, first quilt I made her, circa 1997

Making the two wheelchair quilts for seniors and donating them to a local residence caught the attention of a couple of members, and that has become our Christmas charity project for this year.  This past Tuesday, a small group of us got together at the Kiwanis Camp to sew for a day, using fabric from the guild's charity fabric stash.  It was fun!  Now I know a few more people by name and face as well as a little more about some of them!  One is a retired teacher, and is happy living alone, another is a longarmer, got her APQS machine in 2008, and quilted the fundraiser (gorgeous) quilt for the Christmas raffle (I think), another's husband has just been through some alarming times in hospital where he was sedated because he was on a ventilator (she is now going to be my helper with the guild library, yay), another is going through some fairly serious eye issues, another just won the Grand Champion in one of the quilting categories at the Harrow Fair, and another who has her own little fabric store, is going to bring to the next meeting (we hope) the rest of a gorgeous aqua fabric she used on the back of one of the wheelchair quilts so we can buy it!

Chinese Coins wheelchair quilt; I added 3 strips, the yellow, the taupe trees, and the taupe gypsy jewels

I quilted this up at home in no time on my Bernina (it was when Avril and I were on the outs over thread, and I was not going to unload Wings to do these two small quilts).  I did a wavy line with my walking foot in the columns of coins, and then FMQ-ed the square spiral, which I LOVED, and did not mark a thing for, so I was glad it ended up pretty evenly spaced!

This one is made with some of the orphan blocks I adopted at our August meeting

I used the pillowcase turn method on that flying geese one, so didn't even have to bind it!  Because the geese are so big (they finish at 5X10") I used my walking foot to do the dot to dot. I also quilted it on my Bernina, ditched and then did the loopy meander in the low volume areas.

The backs. The floral is from my stash, the horse one the guild's

Yes, you see ties on these quilts, ties to attach the quilt to the wheelchair arms to prevent it from sliding off a lap, or tangling in the wheels.  Each has a pocket on the back as well.  This makes 4 quilts for seniors in wheelchairs I have completed, one top waiting, another top I worked on that day (which is proving to be a "leedle" more involved than I'd anticipated, can you say 120 2" HSTs without a shiver), and almost enough orphan geese blocks for another.  That day I also cut fabric to make kits to have for take-home at the October meeting.

In musing over the past two days on the way I now feel about the guild, I think that I have some advice for both sides:
1.  For the new member:  get involved as soon as you can find a way.  I joined the executive in a fairly minor role as the new librarian.  In attending the executive meetings, I get to meet a group of about 10-12 great women, and means more people will know who I am.  Going to the sewing bee day meant I got to meet several more, and was able to get to know those I did already know by name on a more personal basis.  I was invited to a cottage group on my first meeting, but it isn't very close to my house...(our guild covers the entire Essex County, so a lot of area)

2.  For the guild:  1. Something I am going to put either to the new executive or in our new suggestion/tip box, is to have a person or persons in charge of meeting and greeting the new people and getting them involved right away in some small way.  This could be in a block exchange, or a mini-quilt activity, or a bring your favourite quilt book to the next meeting and the four, or however many new ones join at any given meeting, get together with the persons in charge either just before the meeting or during the break.  2. Make a bigger deal out of Show 'n Tell that is brought by new members.  That nearly made me not go back, I was so crushed over that first year.  Although I'm not looking to be revered, I sure would have liked a little more recognition for or interaction about the quilts I first brought to this group where I knew not a soul.  (btw, I'm hoping to change a bit the way we do Show 'n Tell, as in time and a space to get up close and all touchy-feely with the quilts!)  3. Somehow have a list of cottage groups available for all members to see, and where/when they meet and if they are open to someone new joining.

Back to Rocco, I cannot believe he is six years old today.  It's been a little while since he's been on the blog, so today he's a star:

Happy pittie...on a human bed with a pillow and a stuffie!

This morning after I'd given him his birthday biscuit, and sung Happy Birthday to him, and of course he'd joined in his best pitbull throaty singing voice!

Wheelchair Quilt Stats:
Pattern: Chinese coins and original design with flying geese
Size: approximately 28X36"
Fabric: guild charity quilt stash, and orphan blocks and my own stash
Batting: Warm 'n Natural
Quilted: on my Bernina, walking foot and FMQ
Threads:  Gütermann for piecing and for quilting

Linking up with Kelly at My Quilt Infatuation!