Turning a pile of pants into a Friday finish

There were  too many jeans at my house with irreparable rips.

I will patch knees, but can't see my way around fabric rips

near the back butt seam.

So I decided to make a car blanket for my son's birthday,

and he provided the raw materials

I cut the legs into rectangles in three widths,

and sewed them together in long colums

and backed it with a 108 inch wide Henry Glass print.

Here you can see that I quilted the layers together 

(no batting, just top and bottom)

with red 28 wt. thread to match the backing

and I free motioned his name and address onto one of the patches.

You can see the imprint of his wallet on that dark blue pocket.

I also spent four days earlier this month free motion quilting a quilt for my mom.

She made if for my niece's high school graduation  (last June)

but for many reasons, it only got done now.

My mom made similar quilts for my other niece and my son for their grads,

and I also quilted those for her.

We took the opportunity last weekend to get a shot of all three of them with their quilts.

You can see the colour variation in them.

And here's the proud grad with her grandma.

I'm linking up with other Friday finishers:

Confessions of a Fabric Addict 

Crazy Mom Quilts

TGIFF

Still learning how to quilt

I'm going to be brave and show you a close-up of this quilt,

because I learned something.

Bias is tricky.

I made these blocks to get better at mitered corners.

I framed black and white squares with a striped fabric

and I had fun seeing all the variety involved.

Even though I thought I was being careful,

I still made some mistakes in sewing and pressing the bias.

Most of the blocks bow out, and they're wider in the middle

than at the corners.

That made them hard to square up

and resulted in a wonky quilt.

 So I embraced the wonkiness and quilted in wiggly lines

and used a busy print for the border.

This photo shows the variety of stripes in the fabric.

 I cut the strips on the straight of grain.

Sometimes, despite dumbhead moves,

the quilting gods smile on you.

I had just enough fabric to cut four strips for binding.

Thanks to Val for rescuing me with the 10 inches she had left 

when I ran out.

Here's another learning curve quilt.

I'm putting in organic straight lines with a walking foot

on this log cabin quilt my mother made.

Now she's a very experienced quilter and these blocks are perfectly made

and the quilt is very square.

Yet she made a mistake too.  

She didn't put in enough pins when she basted it

and so the quilt had room to bubble between pins during the quilting.

(I make her a deal: I will quilt for her if she bastes the quilts)

By the time I was half done the quilting,

one corner was noticeably off-square.

So instead of finishing the quilting this weekend,

I ripped out about a quarter of the quilting

and now I will thoroughly baste the quilt

to get it square again.

Another learning curve moment:

Be careful with the seam ripper.

I may or my not have put a small gash or two in the fabric.

Oops.

What are you learning from your quilting these days?

I'm linking up with Beth today.

Not-quite-finished Friday

There's lots of interesting stuff underway here 

but nothing finished, so I'm posting pix of works in process instead.

First up is this log cabin quilt pieced by my mother 

from Moda Grunge fabrics.

The quilt was sold as an idea at a charity auction

and the winner picked the colours and pattern.

It's now in a frame at  the Winnipeg offices of Mennonite Central Committee 

being handquilted by some of the experienced stitchers there.

This Elna Supermatic is also a work in progress.

I saved it from the scrap pile from a local thrift store.

It doesn't have any accessories other than the one foot

and it was obviously made for a cabinet.

I'm going to clean and oil it 

and look for accessories

and pass it on to to the next new sewer who needs it.

I've started hand quilting my diagonal blade quilt.

I'm using a combination of quilting thread and 28 wt Aurifil

and little stitches and big stitches.

I love posting Friday finishes and linking up with others,

but these projects are what happens on the way to finishes.

Big and small finishes

I've got two Friday finishes to celebrate this week.

This colour-blocked one was pieced by my mother

based on the Turning Twenty pattern by Tricia Cribbs.

I added various free motion designs

in coordinating colours in each of the blocks.

My goal was to add lots of texture and interest to this quilt

and I'm happy with how it turned out.

My mom put it in her local show last week

and she reports lots of good comments.

Turns out she made two 60 by 80 inch tops

with hand dyed fabrics and batiks

and I quilted both of them.

I'm just binding the other one

and I'm putting it in a local show at the end of the month.

This 42 inch square baby quilt has been on the finishing pile for months.

I pieced it from the leftover parts of this Grecian Cross quilt

made for my niece last year.

Since I cut up scraps for this one,

I had HSTs and strips left

so I put them together in this heart quilt.

Unlike the bigger quilt, this one has lots of fmq.

I put in feathers and fleur-de-lis in the borders and background

and pumpkin seed quilting in the heart.

I used up all of this Kaffe floating flower print

with an insert of purple Kona to get it big enough.

I'm linking up with other Friday finishers at

Crazy Mom Quilts

Confessions of a Fabric Addict

TGIFF

Wednesday quilting in progress

Instead of a WIP,

I have a QUIP.

Quilting in Progress.

I'm machine quilting a quilt top my mother pieced from

hand dyes and batiks.

I'm using a rainbow of Aurifil 28 wt threads

and a sampling of quilt designs from various sources.

The quilt is in two parts so I can handle it easier on my machine.

Here's the back,

showcasing a variety of fabrics my mom pieced together.

She's in a use-it-up stage in her quilting life.

I'm linking up with Lee at Freshly Pieced.

Making another scene on the design wall

Over the weekend I finished hand stitching down the shapes on this wool scene.

My mother took a workshop many years ago--maybe even decades--

and cut out and pinned this scene to a base fabric.

 

I took ownership of it over the holidays

and tweaked it a bit,

removing a building in one corner

and adding a few more hills.

I'd like to make it significantly bigger by adding borders of wool suiting.

And then I will extend the lines of the hills into the background

with hand and machine stitches.

 

I haven't ruled out cutting up the scene and sewing it back together.

So far, I'm just thinking about it.

 

I'm linking up to Judy at Patchwork Times.

A two-way Friday finish

This is a finish long in process.

Last summer, I machine quilted this throw-sized quilt

for my mother.

She had made the top several years back,

and I convinced her I could finish it.

And now, after all these months and years,

the binding is on and it's done.

We chose a gold thread and a gold binding

and I think this quilt has some great sparkle.

In this photo you can see the seam lines of the blocks.

The quilt is not sewn on point, but instead each of the coloured fabrics

is set on point with black triangles left over from other projects.

It's a version of the Economy Block I've seen lately.

 

And yes, we have snow in the Great White Frozen North!

 

I'm linking up with Sarah and Amanda and TGIFF.



Quilter is Citizen of the Year!

We all think our mothers are rock stars

but I have proof that mine really is.

The woman who taught me to sew on her Elna

who gave me her Featherweight

who made my sister's wedding dress

(I wore my mother's 1958 dress for my wedding in 1991)

who values her family

(here she is with her sisters, daughters, and daughter-in-law)

and who taught me how to quilt,

and made this quilt with me in 2010

is Citizen of the Year in Winkler, Manitoba, Canada,

for her volunteer work and her quiltmaking activities.

Congratulations!

vroom vroom vroom quilting

Sometimes when people hear we are quilters, a commission results

it may be slightly out of our comfort level....or interest

but there's an owner for every quilt.....even a HOG quilt.

This is the two-sided Harley-Davidson motorcycle t-shirt quilt my mother just finished, using the fronts of 40 Harley t-shirts, interfaced, and sashed in a quilt-as-you-go method.

.....and before you ask.....

She's not taking any more t-shirt quilt commissions...

(she even passed on that orange solid to me....so that's it for her HOG quilting days.)

Bonnie's scrap user fungly four patch

I tested Bonnie's scrap user system recently with a bag of 3.5 inch squares leftover from the fungly quilts and a box of strips. Many of these were fabrics from mom's stash purchased in the 1980s -- lots of little busy calicos, cottons of dubious quality, and even more of that Hoffman Painted Desert stuff. I sewed dark to light as best as I could, pieced some crumbs leftover from cutting the 3.5 inch blocks, and even threw in a leftover 16 patch from my 2 inch square quilt and came up with a 48" square. I needed this to be 60 by 80 for a donation quilt to Mennonite Central Committee, so I started sewing strips together from the strip bin to make it rectangular. Many of the strips are from my mother's days of log cabin quilting, so they match the busy calicos as well. The only yardage used was the grey dot, another inheritance from dear mom, and it was a narrow piece 100 inches long so I didn't have to piece the borders. This came together really quickly, since I spent little time cutting but could engage in some mindless sewing, which soothes the soul at times. Thanks Bonnie, for a great system. This quilt proved it was worth the effort to organize my scraps, and now they're ready to use whenever I need to make another quick quilt. Now this top moves back to my mother, who will take it to the local MCC depot for completion, since they've got a good supply of batting and backing. And everyone is happy -- I've used up lots of uglies and oldies, and they have another quilt for relief.

Hand quilting woes

This is most of my T-square quilt, a work in progress for the last three years. It was my first real venture into serious quiltmaking, and I had fun choosing the colours (from Mom's stash! Thanks again) and figuring out how to move the colours from one corner to another. I definitely did not have fun piecing all those half square triangels, but its not too bad, considering. I'm hand quilting a wind pattern through the whole thing (it should be visible if you click on the photo) and was planning to meander or stipple on all the light Ts. I picked this up last week after a year away, and was bored with the stipple, so I tried some other patterns for variety -- and now I don't like any of it. I thought I would post it for some other ideas before I pick out the hand quilting. The thought of taking out all the stitches puts me in a bad mood, but if I start over, maybe I can choose a less dense and labour intensive pattern. I was going to go with freehand fans and forget the wind pattern, but friends who saw it convinced me to continue.

and yes, this is a long, skinny quilt, meant for the tall wall on the top of my staircase landing. There's several rows more than pictured.

One more thing: Now that I've looked at the picture more closely, I'm definitely going to take out the fans in the light Ts. They're not doing anything for me. I'm still waffling about picking out the dense stipple in the top rows, and replacing them with a meandering outline inside the T. And for the record, I like handquilting, even over the seam allowances. But I really want to be done with this project, and it's so close.

Fun, and ugly!

Turns out I have more uglies than I might care to admit, most courtesy of Mom's stash. So I decided to join Tonya and Bonnie's Fungly Challenge after all. But I don't really like sewing half square triangles, so I went for something easy and really fun, using 3 1/2 inch strips and squares. What's fun about this is how quickly they sew up, especially since I've spent most of the winter sewing together those two inch squares, or 3/4 inch strips to make letters.
Fungly enough for you? I'm realizing I need some more busy little prints to contrast with all the big ones. But a good way to use up the paper doll fabric and the robots and the farm/garden print and yes, the lipsticks. Some of these I used for making pillowcases for Christmas, othese were inherited.
And to prove that chaos reigns in my sewing area, I'm showing you a fairly tightly cropped picture of my sewing area. I can't quite bring myself to show you the whole area, but I do clean up occasionally, between projects.
I sew on a 40-year-old Elna SP, similar to my mother's Supermatic, which she bought new in 1968 and the machine I learned to sew on. This one is heavy -- 25 lbs. and will sew through almost anything. But I can't drop the feed dogs, so I haven't mastered free motion quilting yet.

Sewing a machine

I've been thinking about Tonya and Bonnie's fungy challenge for this summer, but I couldn't quite make myself spend hours with uglies, so I tried something else instead.

I saw a paper-pieced sewing machine in a book Joyce posted about. I'm not good at paper-piecing (sewing on lines from the wrong side just seems --well wrong to me) so I decided to free piece one instead. Instead of a plain background, I pieced together some of those leftover two inch squares from Mom's stash, and had a little fun. Unfortunately, no one at my house could recognize this as a sewing machine without a little prompting. Maybe they haven't ever seen those old black Singers. And the spool of thread is hard to see.


So I cut into a yellow fat quarter I got for my birthday and this one looks like a sewing machine. I make it much the same size as the other one, so they could go together if I choose. Somehow, it's just too tame -- almost as symetrical and precise as (gasp!) paper piecing. I like the patchwork quilt though, and I made it a bit wider than the one above.

These blocks finish at 10 inches. I've put a border on the first one. I think I'll keep the chaotic one to represent my sewing room, and finish the yellow one as a gift for someone else's, with some words around as borders.

Summer strings

Last summer I began to search the web for string piecing ideas, and came across the Heartstrings website, Bonnie's patterns, and of course, Gwen Marston's Liberated String Quilts. With that huge amount of inspiration, I began my own attempt, piecing blue and green strings on 6.5 inch widths of freezer paper, and using neutrals for the sashing and border.

I deliberately went wonky with this, curving them on the slight bias one way and then another. It was addicting. I had planned for this to be a donation quilt, a "something from nothing" quilt, since it was made from strings from my Mom's stash and my own, but I fell in love with it and couldn't give it away. Besides, I should have pieced it on a foundation, since there's lots of seams in this one, and a donation quilt should be sturdy. So I'm keeping it to machine quilt someday, and send off to college with one son or another.

Then I got out my bag of silk scraps and made this one, which I've shown before. It was inspired by all the doll quilts bloggers were making last summer in Chinese coins/string versions. And I couldn't stop there, so my quilt guild, The Strip Piecers, made our first joint project, the Lobster quilt.

I've had a busy week away from the sewing machine, but I'm hoping to piece some more string quilts soon.