Finish #6

 I may not be racking up a lot of finishes this year, but at least this one will never make my UFO list! I cut this baby quilt out early this year, just in case I needed a baby boy quilt for someone who ended up having a girl. I do actually need a baby boy quilt, but this one is not right for the family having a boy. I do know someone who is who hoping for more kids and this one would be great for them so I'm putting it aside instead of donating it.

This is the same type of quilt as my last scooter quilt finish, but I really like putting hexies and triangles together. The hexies on this are from a Grand Canyon National Park panel. The panel had four smaller pictures. I cut hexies out of my favorite pictures, and cut up the fourth picture into triangles. I made a very similar baby quilt last year in the same colors, but I used a different panel in that one. 

It's kind of funny, but when I started quilting I didn't like using panels. I think in my head I was thinking they had to be used as intended, which killed my creativity. Now that I've used panels in multiple ways, including sometimes as intended 😉 I find I enjoy using them more and more. There are some great panels out there, and now I find myself looking for them instead of shying away from them. They are especially useful if I need a themed quilt, but don't want to spend much money on fabric. One panel packs a lot of punch, so one panel mixed with stash and voila, themed quilt on a budget!

Just as I'm really enjoying using panels, Fabric Cafe just came out with a book to use panels. Panel Perfect 3 yard quilts would be a great introduction to using panels if you have shied away from them too. Panels really are fun to use once you jump in and start using them. 

More Quilt Tops!

 

I finished both the quilt tops from my last post! This quilt was so much fun to make, and I'm already thinking about making more. I think it would be a fantastic two color quilt done in scraps. For this quilt, I was using a partial jelly roll that was given to me, along with some of my own scrap strips. Choosing the background/border color was fun, and I just went with what matched the most strips without matching too closely for contrast. I used all WOF strips, but I think this quilt would work well with short strips. The pattern is called Off Course and it's in this quilt book.

If you've never looked through a Kim Brackett scrap book, you are missing out! She has so many great designs, and if you are like me and cut your scraps to size, there are a lot of great options in her books for you to bust those scraps. 

I also assembled the big quilt that was on the design wall. I wanted a border to add to the size, and I just happened to pick up a purple remnant of 108" wide fabric the other day. I rarely pass up a 108" wide remnant. Sure you aren't going to back a quilt with a remnant, but it's quick borders, or easily enough fabric for backgrounds of smaller quilts. Widebacks don't need to be relegated to the back, it's just fabric, and even a remnant of 108" wide fabric goes a long way. Without the border, this quilt was 90" square, with the border it's 100" square.100" is my minimum for a queen sized quilts, so that remnant was just what I needed, and I even have a little bit left since it was a 25" long remnant. The little bit left goes in scrap user system.

I haven't minded assembling the throw sized quilts, but this big one was pretty hot to assemble and iron during summer. I think I'd like to wait until it cools off a bit before assembling any more big quilts. I do have several big quilts that need assembling though, so I don't want to wait too long. I have a good opportunity coming up to take over the living room with basting tables and baste the big ones. Anything twin sized or smaller I just baste on my cutting table. If it's bigger than that, I prefer setting up my two 8 ft long folding tables. I have to move furniture to do it and it completely takes over the living room, but It makes basting the big ones easier. I try to wait until I have at least three big ones ready to baste, and then I'll baste until I run out of pins. Good thing I have lots of pins! I've got three quilts basted right now, so If I can get those quilted before I have the big quilt tops assembled, I can baste more big quilts with the reclaimed pins. Having a big pile of basted quilts to quilt over the winter will be a great start to hopefully cooler weather!

Why So Many Design Walls?

 I have a giant design wall in my sewing room. It's seven feet high and eight feet wide. I have an extra piece to it where I can make it ten feet wide. The insulation boards I used to make it were originally 8 feet tall, but I can't reach anywhere near that high so I had DH cut them down to seven feet.

You'd think with that size design wall, it would be enough. For some people I'm sure it would be enough. For me, I like having more options than that. I have quilt block design boards that I made using this tutorial. Blocks that are easy to get confused on, like ones with lots of HSTs are really great to lay out on these boards.

I also have a couple medium sized design boards on the wall next to my sewing stations. Why so many? Because I am always using one project as a leader/ender project for another, and sometimes the block boards are just what I need, sometimes the giant design wall is what I need, and other times I need something in between.

Right now there is (most) of a queen sized quilt on my giant design wall. The blocks are very large, and the bottom row doesn't fit on the design wall, but the rest of it is there. 

When I start assembling this quilt, with the blocks being so large, I don't have space to put a block design board anywhere on my sewing table. If I were starting a project that needed a bunch of HST's or something, that would be a good leader/ender for assembling the big blocks into rows, but I'm not working on anything like that now. I am, however, assembling some smaller blocks (made from other people's scraps) Block boards would be in my way, so my way around that is to use the medium sized design walls next to my sewing station. 

These design walls are flannel over foam board, and there are two pieces of foam board here. For these blocks I need to make sure no fabric is repeated in the same block, so being able to lay out a few at a time is very helpful. I can reach this board while I'm sitting at the sewing machine, so in between adding blocks to a row of the big quilt, I can assemble the small blocks for a different quilt. I don't need to worry about messing up the blocks, or knocking a bunch of pieces to the ground, because they are on the wall and not in my way. 

My big design wall is not mounted in any way, the big pieces of insulation board (covered with Warm and Natural batting) are just leaning against the wall. My block design boards are just upright on a shelf like a collection of books. The foam board design walls I have stuck up with Velcro Command Strips. If I want to move them, I can simply pull the foam boards off the wall, then the strips will pull off the wall leaving no damage. I'm sure about the no damage part, because I've moved them several times already. At one point I even had these mounted on the doors to a big wardrobe. 

We own our house, but any of my design wall options would work just as well in a rental. There's no big mounting ordeal, no damage to any walls, and easily moved to a different house. Originally I didn't think I had space for a big design wall, until I started facing the sewing furniture towards the center of the room instead of against the walls. Once I made myself a sewing "island" in the room, that freed up the wall space I needed. 

If you've been wanting a design wall, but thought you couldn't have one, maybe you can. You may just need to look at it with new eyes. If my house had a long hallway, I'd have put a design wall there. Once I rearranged my sewing room, a design wall fit in there just fine. There are a lot of options for design walls, my first was flannel glued to a bamboo shade so I could roll it up when not in use, since it blocked the closet. I really love having a design wall, or in my case design walls. Sure you can buy them ready made, but DIY ones like mine work just fine, and they are game changers. I used to lay out quilts on my bed, but this is easier, and better, so I highly recommend it. If you really can't have a design wall, a bed or the floor will work though. Where there's a will to quilt, there's a way! 

Playing with Other People's Scraps

 What's more fun than playing with your scraps? That's easy- playing with other people's scraps!

All of us have our own quilting journey. I have always loved quilts, especially scrappy ones. As a child when visiting relatives who had quilts, my favorite game to play was finding the fabric I thought was ugliest. I always thought the quilts were beautiful, but not all of the fabrics were. I always thought including ugly fabrics in a quilt made it better. 

My mother was mainly a garment sewer. She is incredibly talented, much better at garment sewing than I'll ever be. She used to let me play in her scraps to "make" clothes for my dolls. Of course, I couldn't sew and had no interest in learning, so my dolls mainly wore ponchos with a string tied around the waist.

I didn't start sewing until I was pregnant with DS the Elder. I sewed my maternity clothes, I sewed clothes for my kids, and I started my own scrap collection. I longed to make quilts, but the babies kept coming, and having five kids age 6 and younger does not allow for much hobby time. If I wanted to sew, I kept it practical and made their clothes or curtains, or whatever we needed at the time. 

The children grew as children do, and eventually they didn't need to watched every second. I bought a quilting book and read it several times through. The book was Quilting for People Who Don't Have Time to Quilt by Marti Michell. I still didn't really have time to quilt, I was homeschooling and involved in church, but I kept dreaming about quilting. Eventually, I did start quilting, a wallhanging here, quilts for the kids beds, because we didn't have enough blankets. 

I have never taken a quilt class. I started quilting by using what I had, however I could make it work. I followed no quilt police rules, because I didn't know the rules. I've learned that not knowing the rules is a very freeing thing. 

I LOVE reading quilting blogs, watching other people's quilting journeys. I LOVE watching quilters on YouTube for the same reason. I've seen quilters who are so paralyzed by the color theory class they took, they don't trust themselves to choose fabrics, and I've seen quilters who took a similar class and then created award winning quilts. The same class that can inspire one person, can discourage another. I'm glad I didn't know color theory when I started, and I'm also glad I've taken the time to learn about it now. 

I've noticed some quilters only feel comfortable playing with certain colors or color families. No matter which line of fabric Lori Holt or Sugaridoo has out, they all match their other lines. Karen Brown from Just Get It Done Quilts likes to stick with the same colors, even though she doesn't design fabric, she likes using a narrow selection of colors. In some ways, I envy them. If you stick to a color palette, all your scraps will play nicely together, every single time. I've run over it in my mind, could I stick to one aesthetic? No, I couldn't. I want to play with all of it! I want the brights and the neutrals, the modern fabrics and the reproduction fabrics, give me solids, tonals, and prints. Novelty fabrics I use a lot. 

My preference to use a bit of everything is why I LOVE playing with other people's scraps. I've used fabrics I would never, ever have purchased, and it was so much fun! If I don't like a fabric, I only look at it as a color, and ignore any print it may have. If I find a scrap I love, but I don't have much of it, I'll pull the colors from it to make a project, kind of give a quilt the feel of the fabric I liked. 

I'm still assembling quilts, largely from other people's scraps.

One woman gave me a bunch of plaids. I love plaids! She makes a lot of western style shirts, and a lot of the plaids leaned into feminine colors. I use men's shirts a lot in quilting, but feminine plaids? This was new. Another woman gave me a bunch of solids. A lot of the solids were colors that would work with the plaids. The solids were odd shapes and sizes from garment sewing. I decided to cut all the plaids into 5" squares, then cut the solids into 1" strips. I ended up needing more plaids, so I dug through my men's shirt stash and found some plaids that would work with the scraps I had, to make the quilt a bit larger. This quilt top is now assembled, and I'm really happy with how it turned out. I find the solid diamonds a fun modern twist on what overall has an old fashioned feel. 

I was given quite a bit of the stripe in this quilt. It again, was leftover from garment making, so the scraps were weird sizes and shapes. I chose strips from my Scrap User System that matched the striped fabric and made blocks. I originally planned to use sashing and cornerstones, and put on a border. I had even chosen the fabrics to do that, and they were piled up with the blocks. I had chosen a green for the sashing, but when I went to cut it to make the sashing, I decided I didn't like it. I tried several blues, no. Pink? Nope. White? It just washed everything out. I started playing with the scrappy blocks on the design wall, realized I could do the blocks by color in diagonal lines, and decided I'd go with that. I was still thinking of a border, until I got it together, and decided a border would be too much. I used all the striped fabric in the blocks, so that wasn't an option. The quilt doesn't look how I intended it to, but I'm OK with that. 

I'm currently working on blocks from jelly roll strips I was given. Most of the jelly roll strips are partial jelly rolls, some strips were used for a project, and I have what wasn't used. I'm picking through my Scrap User System to round out the number of strips I need for the projects I've decided to make. I'm trying several new to me patterns. The things about scraps is they aren't precious, you can relax and play a bit. Try something new, mix colors you normally wouldn't. Try a color scheme you saw somewhere, but didn't dare by fabrics for, not wanting to invest that kind of money in something you weren't sure about. Using scraps is a great way to get outside your comfort zone in a low risk way. What's the worst that can happen? You'll learn that you don't like something, which is useful information. You can always use the blocks you don't like as part of the backing on another quilt. Quilting with scraps is my playtime, the most fun I have quilting. Maybe you'd enjoy playing with scraps too!

Finish #5

I'm definitely not setting any personal records this year, but with how busy I am, I will celebrate every single finish I get! 

I finished another scooter quilt. This was was originally going to be raffled off in Chicago later this year, but that rally already has three separate raffles going on. We may hang it on our vendor booth as an attention getter, but it won't be getting raffled off there. At this point the fate of this quilt is yet to be determined. That's OK, at least it's finished. This quilt uses more different scooter fabrics than any other quilt I've made. It's got scooter fabrics from Italy, Great Britain, and Japan. It's got scooter fabrics I bought from Spoonflower at a premium $$$. I probably google scooter fabric once a week. For a very short period of time, they were easy to find. Right now, I don't know of any current fabric lines that have scooters. Spoonflower is about the only way I've been able to add to my scooter fabric stash lately. International sellers on ebay and Etsy are also an option. 

DH decided to host a rally this year as well, though it will be a road rally and not a big local affair. I don't have to make rally bags and such for it, and I won't be cooking for it either. In fact, I won't even be attending! When he started talking about it, I told him I'd rather stay home and sew, since he won't really need me to be there. His rally will be late October, so maybe I can get some of the king sized quilts assembled by then if it cools off, then I could set up the big basting tables in the living room and have a basting spree while he's gone. That would be a fantastic use of a few days alone!