(Sort of) finish it up Friday

Ok, so I have actually haven't finished this quilt but I've finished the blocks for this month - that counts right?!

Come to think of it, this week has all been about finishing up tasks for the month. Today is the turn of the Moda Building Blocks BOM project by Simply Solids.

This month we finished the last of the 12" blocks and also joined section B of the quilt together.

In all honesty we could have joined at least one of the other sections together too as we have finished all the blocks but no doubt this is a task for another month.

I loved the 12" blocks; they're so much easier to deal with than the behemoth 36" ones or the 28" ones. I'm not looking forward to those tiny 6" ones - those flying geese are going to be nightmarish!

Basting a large quilt

Whilst collecting quilts to take to the Auction of Promises, it occurred to me how many WIP I have. Many of the tops have been completed (or almost completed) and I have backs for but haven't basted. The reason? I hate basting. REALLY hate it.

I've watched numerous videos and read tons of articles where people show you how to baste but they always use little baby quilts or smaller. I don't make quilts that small - all of mine are lap size or bigger. The mechanics of moving that weight of quilt around tires me out just thinking about it. 

My technique is fairly straight forward but does include a bit of manual labour. I dare anyone to find a basting technique for larger quilts that doesn't.

1. Find a willing victim. My housemate is now very experienced (and bless him, willing!) in basting.

2. Clear out a large area with a hard surface. I use our tiled conservatory floor. Make sure it's as clean as you can get it.

3. Grab some pins or curved safety pins, some sticky tape (I find masking tape the best) and something to baste with (I use spray but pins and tags work well too).

4. Fold your backing material in half lengthwise and mark each edge of the fold with a pin or safety pin inserted exactly in the crease of the fold. This marks the centre of each short side. Unfold the back and refold it widthwise. Mark the centre of each long side with a pin or safety pin. Your back should now have a pin in the middle of each side.

5. Unfold the back and lay it out, as smoothly as you can, on your surface with the wrong side up. Smooth out as many wrinkles as you can and tape down the edges, about every 5-6". Don't over stretch the back - you want it smooth, not taut. 

6. Lay your batting on top of the back, ensuring that it's as evenly spread out as possible. Smooth out any big wrinkles but don't worry too much about small ones - they'll quilt out.

7. If you are using basting spray, fold your batting back away from half of your quilt and spray the exposed wrong side of the back lightly with basting spray. Relay the batting back on top and smooth out, repeat with the other half of the back and batting. You should be able to tell when you reach the mid point of the batting where you've already sprayed as it won't lift easily from the back anymore.

8. Repeat step 4 with your quilt top.

9. Lay your quilt top down on top of your batting, wrong side down ensuring that the pins marking the centre of the sides of the quilt top line up with the pins in the centre of the backing. They won't lay perfectly on top of each other because your top will be smaller than your backing but they should be in line.

10. Either pin all over with curved safety pins or repeat step 7 if you are using basting spray.

11. Carefully remove the masking tape from the backing and quilt your sandwich!

If this doesn't motivate me to do some basting, nothing will!

Orphan blocks

Whenever anyone mentions the word "orphan", I don't think of Dickens's Oliver or Orphan Annie. Instead I think of this little guy

I'm a classic Tom and Jerry fan (Fred Quimby all the way!). Did you know that the cartoon "The Little Orphan" won an Oscar?!

I always seem to end up with orphan blocks at the end of a project. I don't know whether I miscalculate how many blocks I need or always over-estimate but, in most projects, there are a few bits left over. Sometimes I put them into the backing fabric - handy if it's too narrow -  but often I'm left with them.

Here's a few from my latest projects.

Any suggestions? I hate to waste good fabric!

Auction of promises is here!

Right, todays the day for the auction of promises in support of Let's Talk About William.

I have packed up some quilts to go along to the auction. I'm going to take Towne Square as an example of a simple masculine design and palate.

And Leah Day's Building Blocks quiltalong as an example of a child's pattern and colour scheme.

I'm also borrowing a quilt back from someone as it's a good example of a traditional barn-raising curved log cabin. Sadly I don't have a picture but will try to get one. It sort of looks like this

I'll also be taking Mister DJ as an unfinished top but a good example of a modern pattern.

 

That should be enough for people to get a good idea and bid! Keep your fingers crossed that we raise lots on the night.

Windows and skulls - EQ7 the revenge

I've been playing with EQ7 off and on for a while (mainly "off" lets be honest) and I'm slowly getting to grips with all its tips and tricks.

I still need to work out a few things in order to be able to draw up some of the designs I want but, in the meantime, I've managed to figure out a few things.

Firstly, how to convert an image into a quilt. I wanted an image that would be fairly easy to translate into patchwork so started with a rather gothic "Day of the Dead" skull.

 

It needs a bit of tidying up and I might smooth out some of the smaller elements to make it cleaner. It's s start though.

 

Then I wanted to try and have a go at designing a block rather than just using the pre-set library ones. I am terrible at art so didn't try anything too challenging, just straight lines.

 

I ended up with something that, to me anyway, looks like a harlequins outfit.

 

As a side note, does anyone remember Harlequin chocolates?

Foundation paper stars with Carol Doak

What seems like an age ago I bought a Craftsy class with Carol Doak. Carol was lecturing on foundation piecing and the class project with a quilt of stars. Isn't it gorgeous?

I love the accuracy and simplicity of paper foundation piecing. Plus I love the organised feeling that the pattern of "sew-press-trim" gives you. In my case it's the illusion of being organised but still, I can pretend.

In the lull before my commission begins I thought this would be a great project to make a start on because it's easy to pick up, stop and restart at any point.

I've started pieced the first four twinkle stars together and will try to get them finished before the quilt  auction on Friday. I have half my part As done and have just started my part Bs.

Sew On and On and On

Back to the Fat Quarter Shop Snapshots block of the month with February's block - Sew On and On. It's an incredibly cute replica of a sewing machine, complete with thread and buttons.

Again it's a fairly simple block to piece apart from the sheer volume of pieces; over 30 for one 12.5" by 16.5" block!

I (along with many others it seems) am looking forward to the puppy and bicycle blocks but they're all adorable.

Unlike most block of the month projects, this one doesn't seem to be teaching me any new techniques but still wins hands down in the cuteness stakes! Bring on March.

Siblings Together blocks

A slight sojourn from the Fat Quarter Shop Snapshots block of the month today with some slashed nine patches for the Siblings Together project.

If you aren't already aware, this is an awesome project which gives quilts to siblings separated by the social care system. 

The blocks are pretty simple to make - just make a nine patch and then cut it twice in the diagonal.  Swap some sections between blocks and voila - slashed nine patches! 

Mary Emmens of Handmade by Mary Emmens has requested that fabrics suitable for a teenage boy are used so I dug through my stash and got rid of anything with pink, rainbows and/or ponies! 

Electrifying the quilting process

I've now spent a few hours playing around with EQ7 and, whilst I've still got a long way to go, I've at least managed to design a few blocks and quilts.

I've also discovered that I'm rubbish at naming quilts. I ended up calling this one "On Target" for lack of any other inspiration. Any suggestions from people more creative than me are definitively welcome!

I've wanted to do a monochrome quilt for a while and the combination of curves and straight line seemed to fit in with the modern quilt movement which I seem to be leaning towards these days.

The splash of pink is completely out of my usual comfort zone but seemed to finish off the design.

Meanwhile, back to the drawing board...

Let them eat cake and...cake!

The final part of my Fat Quarter Shop Snapshots kit came this week so, already two months behind, I thought I best crack on with things. I try to keep up with quiltalongs as the months pass or I find myself in September with nine blocks to do in one month (see Leah Day's building blocks from last year, oops!).

January's Snapshot block was "Let Them Eat Cake" - an iced layer cake block so pretty it's almost edible.

It's fairly basic to out together - all straight seams and a few snowballed corners. The only bit which requires some thought is marking the diagonal lines on the back of the squares with text print so that, when sewn and flipped over, the text is still readable. I confess to having to check every time that I had it the right way around.

Working on such a pretty cake inspired me to make some of my own.

These chocolate and raspberry butter-cream beauties are from Sally's Baking Addiction. I dare you to go on the site and not want to make at least one recipe!

I'm off to stuff myself with sugary goodness whilst cutting the pieces for my next block. I think rotary cutting whilst on a sugar high should be classified as a contact sport.

Double squee!

I had two definite "squee!" moments today.

The first was when I received my final part of the Fat Quarter Shop Snapshots quiltalong kit. If you're not already aware, Fat Quarter Shops quiltalong this year is to benefit St Jude's Children's Reasearch Hospital which is a specialist children's hospital in Texas.

The cake and sewing machine blocks are from January and  February respectively so I need to catch up this weekend

The second "squee!" moment came when by EQ7 package turned up. I've had a (very brief) play with it and it's clear that I need a lot longer to get to grips with it! Hopefully it'll save me some time and graph paper in the long run!

Back to basics

Today I finished off the Quilt As You Go sashing between the rows of the Leah Day Building Blocks quiltalong. All I need to do now is trim up the edges and bind it. It's so great to have to miss out the horrible basting bit!

The blocks in this quilt are a lot simpler than I normally tackle and I must confess that I didn't originally start this quilt because of the piecing. Instead I wanted to use it to practise my free motion quilting. And whilst I did get a lot of great quilting practise (my circles are now great so long as I can mark the quilt top!), the piecing was a good reminder about fundamental blocks and techniques. With huge four patches in high contrast fabrics, there's no room to hide if your points don't perfectly match up. It's a good reminder to me that, amidst all the fancy needle point applique and bias bars, it don't mean a thing if your 1/4" seam is off.

On a separate note, how cool is this back?! I need to add a monochrome quilt to my bucket list. You can't get more basic than b&w.

The impossibility of random

Most of today was spent joining the rows of Leah Day's Building Blocks Quiltalong. The project is a "quilt as you go" project so, having pieced and quilted 42 individual blocks I now had the task of joining the blocks together in rows and (tomorrow) the rows into a quilt.

Although Leah's pattern just called for two fabrics to be used for the whole quilt, I decided to use a variety of bright solids, one per style of block. Ironically Leah later produced a Spoonflower cheater cloth which was almost identical to my finished quilt - great minds think alike! 

Here's my quilt ready to be finished off with the sashing between the rows.

Despite changing my fabrics, I still closely followed Leah's pattern so, when it called for the blocks to be sewn together in a particular order, I still followed along. Because I had used different colours to Leah, that meant the some of the neighbouring blocks had high contrast, some low. 

I'm normally a very "matchy-matchy" quilter; my nightmare is a pattern that says "randomly sew one piece A to one piece B". But what if the fabrics match?! Or clash?! Or there isn't enough contrast?! I don't think I'm ever going to manage to sew a scrappy project because my quilts and fabrics have to be planned out to the n-th degree. This was a real problem in the Mister DJ quilt where I was meant to randomly sew strips together. I confess I didn't but it still came out great. 

Happily it's not just me that had a problem with choosing things at random. Apparently humans are pre-programmed to find patterns and create order and can't therefore make truly random choices. Even when we think we are making random choices, we're actually still broadly following a pattern.

The fact that Leah's quilt now has two neighbouring pink blocks and a few clashing colour combinations is actually great - for once I've actually been random! Although technically I suppose I'm still following Leah's pattern so I'm not really being random after all. Drat.

Moda Building Blocks pattern by Simply Solids

Along with lots of other quilters I'm currently piecing together the Moda Building Blocks pattern. One of my favourite shops, Simply Solids are running the pattern as a block of the month club using Kona by Robert Kaufman solids. They've cleverly matched all the tones and hues of the original pattern to produce an almost identical finished quilt.

So far we've pieced the HUGE 36" blocks, a 30", 24" and 18" blocks and we're now working our way through the 12" blocks. Still to come are some 6" blocks with tiny pieces. Yay!

Here's some pics of the larger blocks...

And some of the smaller ones...

Apart from one flying goose unit where I lost point and will probably redo, I'm fairly happy with them so far even though some of the techniques were not my usual style. For instance - I'm a "stitch and flip" flying goose girl. I know it wastes some fabric but I liked not having to sew those bias seams. Ditto for half square triangles where I like to create them two at a time by sewing down the middle of squares and then cutting them apart.

There's none of that in his pattern where all the triangles are cut on the bias and then carefully pieced together. I've talked before about why I love BOM projects and this is a good example of why. I would have stuck to my tried and tested methods if this project hadn't forced me to try something different. And now I have a new skill to show for all my hard (yeah right!) work.

Let's see whether I'm so sanguine after sewing those 3/4" seams in the 6" blocks!

Old blocks, new shoes

A couple of days ago I wrote about changing the pattern for the Craftsy 2014 block of the month. I had it all planned out and only had to sewing in some sashing to finish the new layout. I had it all planned out. It was going to look something like this...

But somewhere between starting the sashing and finishing sewing the final parts of the quilt together, I changed my mind again. I didn't feel that the quilt was balanced enough and would need a lot of border to bring it into balance. So at the last moment, I changed my mind again. Yes I know, that's at least the third time right?!

So, the final design looks like this. 

 Overall it feels more balanced and has the added bonus of no longer needed borders. Win-win!

The secret that quilters rarely speak of - easing

I was watching House (the tv show) recently and there was an episode where one of the doctors was planning to give a speech at a medical conference entitled "Euthanasia - we all do it. Now let's talk about it". It reminded me of the one technique that I (and I suspect many other quilters) use but which we never discuss. No, not killing people (if you do that you really shouldn't discuss it!) - easing.

When I first started quilting my pieces didn't always fit together perfectly. Maybe a piece had been miscut; maybe my 1/4" seam wasn't perfectly straight; or my fabric wasn't exactly lined up. More likely it was all three! Common sense said that I should just unpick and redo but when all my seams were only very slightly off, I couldn't bear the thought of having to start again from the beginning. In some cases I didn't have the fabric available to. So I learnt the age-old technique of "easing" the mismatched seams so that they fit. 

A word of warning for any beginners - easing is not a magic solution to fix everything. It has its own problems but occasionally these are less severe than having slightly mismatched seams. In that case, easing is your friend! So how do you ease two pieces together so that they fit? 

1. Do you have enough room? Easing only works if the seam that you are trying (and failing) to match up is long enough to ease in the amount of excess mismatched fabric. If your seams are only 1/16" or 1/8" off, you can usually ease that in over a fairly short seam. If they're 3/8" or more off and your seam is short, you need to redo the block. I have managed to ease in 1/2" over a 33" long seam before but the results weren't pretty. Here's a block I had recently where there was about 1/8" excess to ease I'm over a 6" seam. 

2. Match up your starting point. The one part of the seam that you aren't going to be able to ease is the start so ensure that you match up the starting points accurately.

3. Pin. Pin a lot. Each pin is going to give you an opportunity to spread out the excess fabric and avoid buckling and creasing so pin lots. When easing, I start with a pin at the beginning and end. I also cross pin the start and end, putting a pin in perpendicular to the seam I'm going to sew but below it to ensure that the edges which I'm not sewing don't get pulled out of alignment. It's easy to end up matching the first seam perfectly but pulling the pieces so far out of alignment that the rest of the block is skewed. These extra pins minimize the risk of that.

4. Pin more. Your two pieces aren't going to lay perfectly flat together because one has more fabric than the other. It will cause gapping to appear between the fabrics. In the picture below there is more white fabric than yellow, hence the white fabric bows away from the yellow. Hold the top corners of the two pieces of fabric and very gently pull the corners in opposite ditrections. This should stretch the fabrics along the grain line, bringing them closer together. Pin in the middle to make sure the fabrics stay together. Pin either side of this centre pin to ensure that the excess fabric is evening spread out along the seam.

5. Start sewing. Sewing slowly up to your second pin, pull gently down on the pin (whilst it's still in the fabric) to provide counter tension to the needle and foot. This will flatten out the fabric. Remove the second pin and the continue sewing up to the third pin, pulling gently down on this one too. Repeat until you reach the end of the seam.

6. Check the end. How much did you manage to ease in? Do you want to unpick and try again or do the edges now match? I managed to ease in about a 1/16" which I thought was acceptable. I could have pulled harder on the fabric and eased in more but such harsh easing brings problems...

7. Have you skewed the bias? I only ease on grain or cross grain seams, never on the bias. Bias is very stretchy but easing will completely distort a bias edge so that the fabric will not then fit with the rest of the block. You will effectively solve one problem but create three more.

8. Does the block lay flat? Easing causes waves or buckles in all seams but it's particularly noticeable in longer seams. Ever had wavy borders? That's unwanted easing caused by borders cut too short or too long to fit the quilt. One eased seam in a smallish block is unlikely to be noticeable but waves in longer or more prominent seams will show in your finished quilt. 

Sorry if I've upset any of the quilt police out there by mentioning the unmentionable; I can only promise it won't be the last time...

Hey Mister DJ quilt and thread choices

The Mister DJ quilt for my brother's birthday is pieced and ready to be basted (yuck), quilted (yay!) and bound (meh). The pattern is Melissa Corry's from www.happyquiltingmelissa.com so all kudos to her. The fabric is Sphere by Zen Chic for Moda with some Kona solid in grass.

I wasn't sure what thread to use to quilt with until I spotted this fab variegated Isacord thread at Barnyarns. I didn't even know Isacord did variegated thread until I spotted this little beauty!

 I admit to being bi-threadual when it comes to patchwork - I used Aurifil 50 weight for piecing and binding but Isacord for quilting. I've tried quilting with cotton but gave up after the 50th or so thread break. Plus, I'm a student of Leah Day and if Isacord is good enough for her...

Resetting the Craftsy BOM 2014

Last year I signed up for the Craftsy block of the month and even went so far as to buy the kit.

I slaved away (ok, happily sewed) for 10 months and was at the point of finishing off the quilt when I had a horrible moment of realization - I hated the quilt design. The individual blocks were fine, some were even pretty but together the overall design was too bright and busy for me.

I stuck the blocks in a drawer for a while and had a think about what to do. Luckily I had some left over Kona Charcoal from another project and set about redesigning the quilt to make it more ascethetically pleasing. 

It's sort of ended up as a stained glass window design which was unexpected. But I definitely prefer it to the madcap craziness of the intended design.

I've still got some sashing to do but it's almost ready to go up for sale. The backing kit will be too small now but luckily I've got some left over fence rail blocks to go into the center of the back to widen it out.

What do you think?

I've already started the Craftsy BoM for this year and must confess that I've already broken the rules. I tried hand sewing the first block but my 1/4" seam ended up being more like a 1/2"! So I unpicked it and have done the other blocks on the machine. I know my comfort zone!