A Busy Fun January

I’ve just been doing a variety of fun projects this month. Finishing some very old projects and playing with some new ones. This is a quilt top I finished a LONG time ago. Its so pretty, and I finally made a sandwich and got it quilted and bound. I don’t think you can see, but the squares are put on there raw edge, so there is a bit of raggedness to it, which I think adds to the charm. I know I did this from a pattern, so that’s how I know it was a long time ago.

You all know about my box of 2″ squares, right? Well one day in church I doodled this. It seemed like it might be a fun way to use up some of those squares. But then I realized it might be a bit harder to piece than I imagined. One night I dreamed about it all night (that’s what it seemed like) but by the morning I knew how it needed to be made. So I tried it out. This is about a 16 inch block. I’m thinking about making either 5 or 9 of them to make a big 9 patch throw.

Then I had made all these “sparkly” blocks a long time ago with a lot of hand dyed fabrics and some other commercial fabrics. I had them all put away neatly in a project box. But the thrill was gone. I didn’t really want to make a lot more of these blocks. So I came up with the idea of setting them into a blackish background. Luckily for me, Joann’s had just the right black sparkly fabric.

Its always a bit of a puzzle to piece these things together. It took a couple of days, but finally it was done. I had enough of the sparkly fabrics left in the project box to piece a background together.

My friend who has been working on this home for women recovering from drug addiction (remember I donated a couple of quilts for this) had an open house Saturday. It was fun to see my quilts in the setting.

I finally got out my owl rug hooking and started working on that this week, just to make sure I still knew how to hook loops. I do.

Another Finish

This is just another quilt in my big box of unfinished quilt tops. This one took quite a while to get quilted. Not only did I do a lot of quilting on it, but I put it aside while I worked on “My Flower Garden.”

I put a lot of thought into how I would quilt this. I did a camellia-type flower in the center of each block, and then surrounded that with some straight line quilting.

I did this pattern of swirls and hearts over all the rest of the center of the quilt.

And finally finished the border with feathers. I LOVE the fabric in this border.

I used muslin for the back. You can see the quilting pattern a lot better on it.

But the thing I learned (again) is that when a quilt top is so full of busy prints, it doesn’t really matter how you quilt it–it just looks like generalized quilting after you wash it! (all these pictures were taken pre-washing.)

My Flower Garden

Remember this quilt? That’s the one I made in class with Katie Pasquini Masopust. I pre-cut a few too many strips for that quilt.

So I used the leftovers to make this simple quilt. I didn’t really enjoy making this quilt. But it will be a nice baby quilt for someone.

I thought I had used up all the leftover strips with that quilt. One day I went out to clean up the studio a bit and opened a plastic bin. What??? More leftover strips? Well, I finally remembered that they were the smaller  strips (1 1/4 inch) and I had planned to put them in a ziplock bag to give to whomever wanted them.

I looked at them for a few minutes and thought–why not play around with them and see what I come up with.

This is a quilt I made a long time ago, and I really like it. It was the inspiration for how I decided to use these small strips, and how to construct the top.

As I went along, I decided it would be like my own flower garden, that was constructed a bit at a time, fitting things together as we went along.

I didn’t add any more strips to what I already had. I chose a few flower and leaf prints to add to the “garden.”

When I quilted it, I used straight lines and pebbles for the “paths” in my garden. I just outlined the flower and leaf prints.

This is my favorite of all three quilts that I made from those strips.

 

 

Scrappity Scrap

I like scrap quilts. For one thing, you feel like you are using up valuable leftover fabric. For another thing–ALL THE COLORS! Bits and pieces of favorite fabrics go through your hands as you piece them together.

Remember this? I had this top leftover from my first attempt at a kantha blanket. A friend is working hard at opening a home for recovering drug addicts. She asked if I would provide a couple of quilts. I thought this would be perfect, bright and cheery.

As I quilted, I realized I could include some encouraging verses in the lighter squares.

So I made another one.

Quilted a little differently, but including a few verses in it as well.

And then… I definitely over-estimated the number of strips I would need for my Katie PM class.  If I didn’t sew all those 1 1/4″ and 1 1/2″ strips together right away, I knew they would become very shreddy and would be headed for the dustbin. So I sewed them all together and decided a rail fence pattern would be just right.

 

Remember all these cross-cut blocks? I really like making them. I used quite a few of them for small quilts at my Christmas boutique sale. But there were more left than I had remembered. You can see that I added a few other orphan blocks into it. You know, I love piecing blocks without measuring. But eventually they have to all fit together into a quilt. And that can be quite a chore. Its like doing a jigsaw puzzle with some of the pieces missing. Anyway, I did like this quilt when it was done, and wondered if it would be a good one for another kantha blanket.

When I put the sandwich together, I used muslin for the backing and Hobbs 80/20 for the batting. (I normally use Quilter’s Dream cotton for my batting. I bought a big roll of the Hobbs with a Joann’s coupon for all the unquilted tops that I am working on finishing.)

I wrote a few posts ago about a new thread I found. Its DMC coton floche thread. Its supposed to be the same thickness as two strands of DMC embroidery thread. Anyway, I liked it very much. It has more of a mat finish than perle cotton, and is a bit thinner than a number 8. I thought it might be very nice for doing a kantha blanket. And then I found this on Etsy. This woman is very cleverly dividing the large hanks that the coton floche thread comes in, and selling them in multi-color packets. I ordered one in mostly soft neutral colors to do this quilt. Here’s the first square. I worried about there being a lot of seam lines to stitch through. But the Hobbs batting and the muslin, combined with this finer thread are making it a dream to stitch through.

Here’s the first block. I thought I might do this one block by block instead of straight line over the whole quilt.

 

And that’s what’s going on in between the other projects I’ve written about!

Obsession

I don’t know where it came from, this obsession to make a “kantha blanket.” I have a little niggling thought that it might be because of answering the question so many times “what is kantha stitching?” and always being careful to explain that my stitching is “kantha inspired.”If I did a blanket, I would have something more “authentic” to show people.

So after my failure at the last scrappy quilt top, I set about making a more organized, partially planned, scrap quilt for the kantha blanket. Like I do for most projects, I chose a large variety of fabrics that I like, and then narrowed them down to fabrics that might work together. And set a few parameters for the piecing–Longish rectangles, 4 inches wide by about 7 or 10 inches long. I would insert a few squares with my “crosses” and my circles. And I went to town working on this quilt top.

In just a few days I finished it, and with the finish came a deep sense of despair. This “planned scrappy” quilt top was not much better than my really really scrappy top. What is wrong with me? I can’t even plan a simple scrappy quilt. Which then devolved into Nothing I’ve ever done is really any good at all. Oh, it was bad.

Fortunately for her, my best friend was not available for conversation that day. By the next day I had decided to follow my own advice, and “continue on.” She concurred. I’m not sure if covering this entire piece with stitching lines 1/4 inch apart will help. But it will be in the spirit of kantha–using what I have and making something useful of it.

In the meantime, I mentioned to my mom what I was doing, and she started asking a ton of questions about kantha. So I got out my big book of Kantha, and what do you know–what I am doing now is still not very kantha-like in the traditional sense. We’ll just call it a modern take on kantha 🙂

The sandwich is made, and I am happily stitching away on my kantha blanket.

I decided to not show you the entire piece. Any hint of sympathy or disapproval might send me into a downward spiral from which I might never recover 🙂