Update & Friday Block Party

I haven't done much quilting for the past 2 weeks. The previous week I was down to London Ont., to visit my mom and some of my friends so that weekend was shot in terms of sewing. This past Friday I had to go and get an injection for a trigger finger and I thought I would only be out of commission for 1 day like I was a couple of years ago. But the doctor gave me a different medication because the trigger finger returned and I'm out of commission for 1 week so not much sewing till the end of this week.

What I did do was start looking at all the Friday Block Party (FBP) blocks that I have and see what I could do with them. My 10" blocks (with the exception of one) are all done in a solid turquoise, a dark blue abstract peony flower pattern and a motley pink to turquoise batik. Below are 9 of the 10 blocks that I have in this combination of fabrics.

Donna who hosts the FBP has started to sew up some of her blocks and decided to make hers all a standard 14" by sewing sashing around each and then square them off. She is planning on then doing a quilt as you go quilt. I thought that this was a really good idea so I'm now looking to see what I have in sashing. I found a Kaufman Fusion fabric that I think will work for this set, but the picture below it came out a bit bright. Fergie was helping with the layout but I guess she had enough and decided it was time to wash her paws.

This is more the true colour of the fabric and it really sets off the blocks nicely. I tried lighter coloured fabrics and the blocks looked too washed out. I also tried a dark blue and it seemed too harsh. With these blocks I think I will take them to a 12" finished size.

I also have a bunch 12" blocks from the FBP but those are all various colours. I'm still looking at what would work for those. I tried some neutrals and they were OK. I might try a soft blue or soft aqua and see how that would look.

I also have some 8" and 9" blocks, but at this time those are going to remain my orphan blocks.

Christmas Quilts - Part 2

I've started work on the Christmas lap quilt that is a wedding present for a friend of mine who got married back in June. The wedding was announced quite quickly so there wasn't time to make a quilt then, so it became an IOU quilt and I let the bride and groom pick colour &/or theme and they decided on a Christmas quilt.

So yesterday I spent a good part of the day ironing fabric. I really wonder sometimes why I decided to take up quilting as a hobby when I really hate ironing as much as I do. I guess I'm a masochist of sorts.

Today I was cutting my fabric and I learned something new. The design of this quilt is on point which is fine when the design of the fabric is such that there is no specific direction to the prints as in the two blocks shown below.

But when you have directional prints as in the next two below, it becomes a whole other ball of wax when you go to cut the fabric, or you would end up with sideways trees and birds. I basically had to turn my fabrics on a 45 degree angle and cut the squares so that the trees and birds would be upright. So this will put a bias into the squares when I go to sew them. Fortunately all the fabric that I purchased was good quality quilting cotton and with all the weeks of practice on the Friday Block Party blocks I'm pretty confident that they will sew up without too much problem.

Cats and Dogs - Part 6

Well here is the menagerie of cats and dogs with the exception of one set. One of the gals who lives just down the street from me was also madly sewing this weekend and just didn't have enough time to finish all of hers and asked if it would be OK if she could drop mine of later on. I said there would be no problem since I actually wouldn't be starting putting together this project until January so in fact she has lots of time. We have to have our quilts ready for our March meeting so plenty of time to finish. Check out the blue cat and dog in the middle row right side, they even have cute button embellishments.

Cats and Dogs - Part 5

I got the last of the cats finished over the weekend and towards the end I was getting the hang of attaching their tails.

As I looked over all the cats and dogs I wasn't satisfied with a couple of them so I decided to make 2 more sets and then the gals can have some extra choice. If someone is picky in how a block is pieced then they won't have to settle for one that might be slightly off kilter because there are a couple extra. Here are the 2 extra sets.

It's going to be interesting to see what fabrics the other gals used for their cats and dogs.

Cats and Dogs - Part 4

I've got 4 of the paper pieced cats done as of this evening, which leaves 4 more to go. So I'm on track for Monday. The trick with the cats is getting the tails lined up with the bodies. I had to re-sew two of the tails because they were wonky.

Art and Cold Cash - Part 3

It has taken some time but the quilting and machine embellishment on the Art and Cold Cash quilt is now finished. I just finished up the couching of some embellishment yarns today. Now what remains is the beading, hand embroidery and then the quilting of the final images in parts of the border.

Echo quilting was done in the large open background spaces as well as in the small red space in the upper left hand side of the quilt.

There is a profile of a boy on the left hand side and the image was emphasized with a teal chenille yarn that was couched along the edges of the outline of the profile.

A thicker teal nubby yarn was couched around the fish bone to give it dimension and below you can see it's detail as well as some of the echo quilting.

All of the English hand writing and Inuktitut syllabics were outline quilted in a combination of teal and scarlet thread. Since teal and scarlet variegated thread is hard to come by what I did was use a double thread (one spool of teal and one of scarlet) in the top of the machine and teal in the bobbin. I used a top stitching needle since it has a larger eye than a quilting needle for the two threads to freely feed through and had no problems with tension or pull. It worked out to have a nice effect and I may use this in the future when I can't find a variegated thread in a colour combination that I want. Below if you click on the picture you should be able to see the detail of the two colours of thread used in the quilting.

The hand embroidery will be of the four o'clock flowers that are in areas of the quilt that aren't already quilted with words. The flower seeds will be beaded with seed beads. These will be the next steps.

Cats and Dogs - Part 3

I had some time last night to do a bit of quilting and I got the other 2 paper pieced dogs done so here is the picture of them with the 2 I got done on the weekend. So now I just have the 8 cats left to do.

Tonight I'm finally suppose to get together with my friend Anne for dinner and give her the dinosaur stacked coin quilt. We had to postpone from last week because her mom had taken ill. So hopefully she is doing better and I'll be seeing Anne tonight.