It's a Quilt Top, Panel Style

Quilt panels, do you love them or hate them? Perhaps it's a bit of both. If a panel is off grain, it can be really tricky to work with. I think it's kind of funny when I see beginning quilters encouraged to use panels. In a perfect world, where everything is on grain and naturally square maybe a panel would be perfect for a beginner. Well, maybe some panels would be perfect for a beginner. When you have to trim a huge panel, I do not consider that a beginner skill. I know I find using panels easier now, than the first couple I used 20 years ago, and it's not because the panels changed, it's because I am more skilled.

There are a lot more ideas out there for using panels now, which I think is great! If you need to make a themed quilt for someone, and you don't have a lot of money to spend on fabric, you can buy a panel, and then just use scraps in coordinating colors to make the rest of the quilt. 

I have a family of six all wanting new quilts, and panels are going to help me out. I get to make quilts in their interests, without buying six quilts worth of fabric. I wrote a post about my grandsons quilt a while back, and I finally got that quilt off the design wall and sewn up. I was designing it on the fly, and I had to figure out how to make the center the size I needed. It was one of the few quilts I've designed from the outside in. 

There are parts of three different panels in his quilt. I LOVE how it came out, and I think he's going to love it too! 

Notice I said there were PARTS of three panels in this quilt. I didn't use all of any of them. You know what that means? More quilts will be made with this fantasy theme! One of the panels I had three of, and I only used a bit of one of those in this quilt. Does that worry me? Not at all. 

I really liked the blocks I made for the border, in fact, I liked them so much, I made enough for another quilt. I had to change the corner fabric because I didn't have enough of what I used in my grandson's quilt.

Each of the Wizards and Warriors panels has 30 different pictures on it. I only used 12 in the first quilt, but this second quilt used all 30. I really like the secondary design that came out when sewing the blocks together. It remind me of a mosaic or fancy tile floor. I still had another full panel, plus a partial panel. I didn't have enough of these fabrics to make another full quilt, but I did have the stone fabric in another colorway, so I started another quilt. 

I think the gray colorway works nicely too. I did realize I could use these same units for different blocks.

I could make a folded star type of pattern.

Something Shoofly-ish?

I decided to stick with my original idea, and I just finished the blocks in the gray colorway a few minutes ago. Tomorrow I'll start assembling that quilt. 

I never mind having extra quilts that are more masculine. I'm not saying a girl wouldn't like these quilts, I just mean a boy wouldn't think it's too girlish. And quilts that a TEEN boy would enjoy??? That's a serious win!

Now that I've got two quilt tops done from these panels and another quilt top ready to assemble, I can start thinking about what I'm going to do with the remaining panel pieces. I've got two more castles, two more of the 12" blocks I used as cornerstones on my grandson's quilt, plus 18 more of smaller Wizards and Warriors pics. Will I try to make one quilt with all of those, or spread them into several quilts. I haven't decided, but I have a bunch of dragon panels that would work with any of these too...

 

Finish #20

 So far this year, all of my finishes have been UFO's, and this one is no different. It's another quilt I pieced in a hotel. 

It's nothing fancy, but I did bust a lot of squares with white, black, or gray backgrounds. I used a black/white stripe on the binding, which I think was pretty fun. 

I stuck to the black/white/gray theme for the backing. That animal print is such a huge scale, that I was stuck on how to use it on a quilt. I have the same print in sepia, and just like this one, it's likely to be used on the back of a quilt. I don't remember buying such large scale prints, so possibly someone gave them to me. I could have picked them up a thrift store, I'm less picky about what I buy if I pick it up secondhand. I'm virtually positive I did not buy it new, I just don't think I'd have paid full price for something on that scale. The center fabric was just what I had on hand to make the backing the width I needed. 

I'm really glad I took the time to pull fabrics off the shelves that I wanted out of stash. That animal fabric was unlikely to be used when mixed with my stash for quilt tops, but busting it as a backing? That works! 

National Sew A Jelly Roll Day....Weekend?

 I've got a lot going on these days, I haven't done a mystery quilt in a couple years, haven't finished the last one I started, and even though I sew as much as I can, I still feel out of the loop. I haven't even been keeping up with the online quilt groups I am in. 

That's why it was so important to me that I get to participate in Sew a Jelly Roll Day. I didn't choose a one day pattern, so I knew I couldn't finish the top in a day, and I was using other projects as leader/enders while working on my jelly roll top, but I did indeed sew on it on September 19th. 

This was my starting place, the jelly roll Paisley Place by Wilmington Fabrics, some background strips I cut from a piece in my stash, and a pattern from Scrap Basket Strips and Squares by Kim Brackett. If you have never seen a Kim Brackett book, you are missing out, her patterns are fantastic! 

I chose the pattern Off Course, which I've made before, and I will make again. It's a fun, easy pattern to make. 

To make the pattern as shown, you only need 30 strips, and I had 40 in my jelly roll. I had four peach strips and I pulled out all of those, since the contrast with my background wasn't great, and I pulled out some black and white prints that I found to be a bit boring in comparison with the other fabrics. The good thing about pulling out the more boring prints? They will be easily used in another project, no crazy prints to try to fit in with different lines of fabrics. 

Step one was to sew a background strip to each jelly roll strip. 

By the time those were sewn and pressed, I ran out of sewing time for that day. The next morning I subcut the stripsets per pattern instructions, and soon I was making blocks.

My jelly roll strips were longer than the pattern assumed, so I cut some extra units. I have an extra block, and some extra parts, but not enough variety to make more blocks. I do have some extra background strips, so I'm thinking I may go ahead, pull some strips from my scrap user system and make another quilt. I could use the strips I didn't use in this one, but now that I'm thinking another quilt, I am still likely to exclude the boring ones unless I can find some really stunning ones in my scrap stash and need some boring ones to calm things down. 

This is how my jelly roll quilt top came out, and I'm quite happy with it. It looks better in person than in photos, which is often how things go. Did you sew a jelly roll up for National Sew a Jelly Roll day? I really want to do this pattern in one color of scraps, probably blue since I usually have the most blue scraps, and a white background. I think the design might show up better with less variety in the fabrics. The upside of the large value variety in this quilt is that it creates a lot of movement, your eyes are moving around trying to get the big picture. 

Trying to Stay Ahead While I Fall Further Behind

 I've been trying to schedule a few blog posts ahead, because life is just insane right now. We had only been home for five weeks after that two month trip, when we had to make an emergency trip to New England again. We had a bunch of legal things to attend to, as well as some medical issues to sort for my parents. We didn't know how long things would take to straighten out, so we opted to drive again. We drove there in four LONG days, spent three days running around getting stuff done, then took six days to come home. Thirteen days gone, ten of which were travel days, 5,500 miles on the van, and loads of stress! 

I'm still sorting things out from here, but all is as well as can be for my parents right now, and for that I am truly thankful. More trips out there are inevitable, and we will go as needed. My sister and I have tried to talk them into moving here for years now, but they don't want to move, which I totally understand. I also know, that if all my kids move away, we WILL move near one of them. Trying to do elder care from across the country is not easy, and much more complicated than if we only had to cross town to deal with something. My MIL is here in Southern AZ, and we are closest in distance to her, so we are torn between our aging parents. When we are the ones who need help, I'd like it to be as easy on our kids are possible. 

I do realize that we are blessed to have three of our parents still alive in their late 80's. It's amazing really. We also want to be there and be helpful for all of them. My MIL lives about 8 miles from us, my parents live about 2,600 miles away. My MIL was hospitalized days before my parents had a crisis. What do you do when they are all having a crisis? Thankfully my SIL stepped in and took care of things here, while we went across the country. 

Right now everyone is stable and cared for. That's the goal, right? I'll enjoy the lull while it lasts, knowing another crisis is just around the corner. My parents celebrated their 68th wedding anniversary on September 13th. How cool is that? So much to be thankful for, but that doesn't eliminate the stress. 

DH is hosting a scooter rally in October. I'm rapidly running out of time to get things done for that. No matter what is going on with our parents, we still have other obligations to meet. I've put other things aside for the last couple days, and I got the rally bags made.

Now I've got to to get them filled. I have some smaller zipper bags I was going to sew some trim onto, that we'll be filling with emergency type stuff, like zip ties and duct tape. I told DH rather than sewing the trim on, I'm going to take a scooter stencil we already have, and the screen print ink we already have, and decorate the plain zipper bags with that. I can likely get them done in an hour or so, where sewing the trim on the store bought bags would be fiddly and take much longer. Sometimes taking the easy way out makes a lot more sense. I already have a lot of the things that are going in the bags, just a couple more things to buy. Stuffing them won't take long at all, it's not as big a rally as we sometimes do, and I've pretty much got stuffing rally bags down to a science. 

That's all the sewing I've gotten done since we got home, but I am already prepping for National Sew a Jelly Roll Day on September 19th. I chose a jelly roll I wanted to use, and cut the background fabric I'll need for the pattern I want to use. I'll have to sew up some strip sets before I cut anymore, but I need a play day. The jelly roll and background fabric were all in stash, so it's not even an expensive play day! Is anyone else ready to play on Sew a Jelly Roll Day?

Finishes #18 and 19

 Having a stack of basted quilts sure does make it easier to get quilts finished! My stack is going down quickly, so I'm going to have to find some time to baste a few more. I know I won't run out of quilt tops anytime soon, the quilt closet is full of them!

I wanted to try out the walking foot with my new Bernina, so I opted for straight line quilting on this one. For FMQ the 735 does better with poly thread, but I have a lot of cotton thread too, so I used cotton thread for this and it did just fine. I was sure it would do OK when I was using the walking foot. 

One thing I did not like was because I was turning the quilt frequently, I hit the screen several times and changed the setting accidentally. I think next time I use the walking foot on that machine, I'll tape a piece of template plastic over the screen, so if I do hit the screen with the quilt, no settings will change. It's always interesting adjusting to a new sewing machine. 

My stash does not have much in the way of teal or aqua, so I've found this dark teal works well as background for my scrap quilts. Since few of my scraps are this color, it doesn't blend in with most of my scraps. I think the teal makes for a more modern looking scrap quilt too. This quilt just used my 2" cut squares for the four patches, and teal 3.5" cut squares to alternate with them. If you want to make a very scrappy quilt with decent contrast, try a color you don't use much for the background, it might be just the thing. 

This quilt is from a pattern in American Patchwork and Quilting August 2024. It was a flying geese challenge and this was Emily's quilt. I started with a pastel batik jelly roll, and opted for a navy background so the pastels would pop. I liked this pattern so much I cut a second one out at the same time, but that one has a white background, with darker colors for the flying geese. I made the Flying Geese for the second quilt, but it got stalled out there. It's in a project box waiting it's turn. 

You can see I used a really pale backing for this quilt, which made choosing a thread color for quilting a little challenging. I decided to use a variegated thread on top (Fantastico Birthday Cake by Superior Threads in case you were curious) Between the blues and pinks in the thread, the quilting shows but isn't shocking anywhere. In the bobbin I actually used a very light colored thread, not pink but more a pinkish-lavender. I auditioned a light pink first, but the pinkish lavender actually blended in better with the back, and worked with the top thread as well. I thought white would be too stark of a difference in the bobbin, and if I had any tension issues at all would really be shocking on the top with that navy background. I was really happy at how little the bobbin thread shows on the back. It can be hard to choose threads when the top and backing of a quilt are drastically different colors. 

My goal for the year was to finish 24 quilts, only five more to go!