Finish #23

 I'm sure you are sick of seeing double four patches by now, but I made a lot of them while trying to bust a ridiculous number of 2" cut scrap squares. By using leftover wideback strips for the alternating squares, it's a really easy way to bust a lot of scraps at once. 

This one busted a bunch of patriotic scraps. I had just enough length of the red and blue for the backing, but it wasn't wide enough, so again, I just looked through my under 1 yard pieces and made something work. It's finish #23 for the year, all of which were UFO's. 

This was the last quilt I had basted. Since I lost my chance at a big basting spree in the living room, I'm having to baste on my cutting table. My cutting table is pretty big, and it's a great height for basting. The reason I wanted to keep my cutting table open was so that I could use it to cut the pieces for backings and also the other quilts for DD#1's family. Two of the quilt tops I had made for DD#1's family were done, and I was just backing with minky that didn't need to be pieced, so I got those basted. I also pieced a backing for another quilt top, and got that one basted. I won't get the basting spree done as quickly this way, because I keep needing the cutting table, but I've got a pile of three basted quilts now, and eventually that pile will grow. I decided I'm going to finish up the table runners I had basted before starting to quilt a new quilt. I think I have six table runners basted? Well, I finished quilting two of those this week, so technically four now. I need to sew the binding on those two before I go to another one. I could use the same thread on both, so I just quilted those two up, and now I'll bind both before moving on to one that requires a different color of thread. 

Speaking of thread, One of the things that was bugging me about the Bernina 735, was the fact  had to use a freestanding thread stand to use cones. I have no problems using a thread stand when I'm piecing, because nothing really ever goes to the right hand of my machine when piecing, but when I am quilting a quilt of any size, the quilt often hits the thread stand and screws up the way the thread feeds. Since my Janome M7 had a built in cone holder I never had to worry about it. I looked to see if Bernina had an attachment that would work, and they have a multi spool holder you can attach, but it's much larger than I need, and almost $200! It's mostly for people who embroider with their machines, and it would be worth it for that, but I have no interest in embroidering on a machine.

I went to etsy and found this. I bought it and I am so glad I did!

Here it is on the back of my machine, and you can see that there is plenty of room for the quilt to go under the spool holder, and the spool holder can hold big cones. I think the white cone has 6,000 yards of thread on it, and it fits just fine. You can also see which table runners I was working on! There is a video on his etsy listing on how it goes on, and it screws on very easily into screw holes already on the machine. Solving something that was bugging me on this machine is a win! I really wish we could custom order a machine that had all the things we want on it, at this point in my sewing journey, I have some specific preferences, but I've never found one machine with everything I want, at any price. 

Photo Bombs Plus Finishes 21&22

 I recently had grandkids 10 days in a row. We had a great time doing crafts, trying out the viral apple marshmallow recipe, baking cookies, watching movies and such. I didn't get much in the way of sewing done over those ten days, but I did start on a project that's been on my mind for a few years now, not quilting related.

I keep reading all these articles about kids not wanting your stuff. My parents are both still alive, and although they live in the same house I grew up in, it holds a fraction of what was in it then. They have been "downsizing" ever since they retired, even though they've never moved. Every time I go visit there is less than stuff than the time before. The basement is mostly empty, attic is completely empty, second floor is mostly empty.  They've gotten rid of so much stuff, they are practically minimalists at this point. 

My MIL is exactly the opposite. Every item has sentimental value to her, and she doesn't want to let go of much, if anything. 

We're all different in those respects, and I'm trying to figure out where I want to fall on the scale of minimalist to maximalist. I'm not at a point where I want to be a minimalist, but I am resisting buying new things, unless it's to replace something that's worn out. I'm really trying to get off the consumerism train, but that doesn't mean I want to get rid of everything, it means I'm being quite picky about bringing new things into my house, while simultaneously trying to declutter. 

Photos! Please tell me I am not the only one with copious amounts of photos. I used to think I'd like scrapbooking, I don't. I also don't like taking photos, I usually only take photos for my blog. DH is the photographer in this house. When my kids were little, I did take photos. DH took lots of photos. 

If you add up all the photos in this house, It started out as two medium totes full of photo albums and larger photos, plus six photo boxes full of regular photos. My goal is to get down to one tote of photos for now. 

While I had the grandkids, I decided to tackle the photo boxes. I had six, I wanted to get them down to two. Do you realize how many photos fit in six photo boxes? Thousands! It brought a whole new meaning to photo bomb! There were photos everywhere. I made myself some criteria. 

1) Any photos I kept had to have people in them my kids should know. If DH and I can't name who's in the photo, we don't need to keep them. If we know them but it will mean nothing to our kids, they should go. (we made a couple of exceptions) 

2) People are what's important to me, so photos of people are what I want I want to keep. Sure, we may have taken 40 photos of animals at the zoo, but if our kids aren't in them, out they go.

3) I want to see faces! The numbers of photos we had where no one is looking at the camera are ridiculous. Whale watching trip where you can only see people backs? Yeah, no. Whale photos? Ok, so you can see a fin. I can go online and see way better photos of whales, I'm not keeping them. Christmas photos where you are looking at a pile of mess and the tops of people's heads. Nope, they can go.

4) Blurry pics are out. Dark photos are out. Photos that show faces but that make the people look awful, like it would embarrass them kind of awful, no thank you. 

5) Duplicates are out. In today's day and age, if more than one of my kids wants a photo, they can just take a photo of it with their phone and have a digital picture. 

I tackled those six photo boxes, and got them down to two. One of them still has room in it. I got to show the grandkids all kinds of photos of their parents, and that was fun too. Showing them photos of us when we were young was fun too. 

I need a break from photo sorting before I tackle the photo albums. We had a puppy chew up the photo albums years ago, so I need to decide if I want to get new albums (not really) or just salvage the best photos, and sort those by kid. (likely) For now I'm keeping the empty photo boxes, in case I just go with emptying the albums into those. As long as I can fit whatever I keep into one tote at the end, I'll call it a win. 

I thought about digitizing the photos, but I decided against it. We have photo cds, but I think we only have one computer in the house that has a player that MIGHT be able to view them. Technology changes too quickly. Sure, I can load a thumb drive with photos, but ten years from now, will anything be able to read the thumb drive? Google photos is great, but with hacking, viruses, and even something like a big solar flare, you could lose it all. I'll keep some photos, but hopefully get it down to reasonable amount. I figure if I get the photos down to one smaller tote now, I can go through them again in a few years, and whittle them down some more. Sometimes decluttering has to be done in layers, but you have to start somewhere. I've even considered eventually trying to curate each kids best 100 photos. Maybe if there aren't so many, they'd look at them?

For my quilty bit, I finished two similar double four patches. These are finishes 21 and 22 for the year. All my finishes have been UFO's. My goal of 24 UFO finishes is doable! 

The alternate squares on the fronts are leftover widebacks. You can get a lot of squares from even a pretty narrow bit of 108" fabric. The amount of wideback scraps I have determines the size of the quilt. I'm continuing to piece quilt backs starting with the novelty fabrics I want out of stash. Scrap quilts are a good place to throw random novelty fabrics on the back. I do try to somewhat match the colors on the front. The center bits to make the backs wider are from my 1 yard and under drawers. I bust so much fabric on backings! 

Coping Columns

 If you've been quilting any time at all, I bet you know all about coping strips. If you don't know, coping strips are often used when you need to add a pieced section to something that's a different size. For example, if you pieced a border, but it came out larger than your quilt center, whether through a math error or piecing error, you'd have to add coping strips to make it fit correctly. To a non-quilter, coping strips just look like an inner border or accent piece. You need not correct their assumption 😉

A couple posts ago, I showed this center I was playing around with, trying to use up leftover Celtic knot pieces.

My top and bottom sections are wider than my center panel. I need to add something to make them the same width. I also need to add something to the width of the whole thing, because right now it's setting up to be too narrow for the height and it looks wrong. Borders won't work, because then it will retain the same tall, skinny profile, but it would be even taller. I need to add something to the sides before borders. 

I decided to add columns on both sides of the center. I did the math to figure out how tall my columns would be, then I could figure out the coping strips to surround that center panel. I needed 2.5" cut strips on the sides to make the center panel as wide as the top and bottom sections, but I needed 3.5" cut strips above and below the center panel so the whole center section would be the same height as my columns.

You can tell if you are looking for it, that the top and bottom border on the center panel are wider than the sides, but it's not glaringly obvious. I think the side columns bring the quilt to much better proportions, and the outer border brings it all together and makes the whole thing look purposeful. Now it doesn't look like I was just trying to use up leftover bits from other quilts, even though that was exactly what I was doing. 

I was having the same proportion issue on one of my panel quilts. This one is for one my granddaughters, I used one large wolf panel from one line of fabric, and another panel of smaller wolf pictures from a different line of fabrics. The smaller panels had a lot more colors than the center panel, so I not only needed to add width, I needed to add more colors so the panels coordinated better. 

I decided I wanted blocks in my columns that were reminiscent of flowers since I was adding colors from the small panels, but wanting it to coordinate with the center panel which had a lot of flowers. 

I think my multi-colored columns definitely help bring cohesion to the quilt, and aside from the background fabric, the columns are all scraps. Again, I managed to sneak scraps into what is not really a scrap quilt. I made the top and bottom periwinkle borders a bit wider than the sides, because the quilt was exactly the width I wanted, but I wanted it two inches taller. 

Would you ever just add columns to the sides of a quilt center, or add rows just to the top and bottom, or even just to one side if it got the top to the correct dimensions? If these look unbalanced to you, what would you have done instead?

Another Tiled Fabric + Scraps

I've had this knight fabric in stash for years. Fussy cutting is not my favorite thing to do, and with tiled fabrics that's pretty much what is required. The knight fabric had larger spaces between the blocks than the Celtic knot fabric from my previous post, so it was much easier to deal with. Even though I had yardage of the knight fabric, I had drastically different numbers of each knight. 

When I tried putting them up on the design wall in a random pattern, the fact that I had many more of certain knights was very obvious. I decided to try diagonal lines instead, using the knights I had more of in the longer diagonals. It almost works. I had two lines I couldn't make work exactly, so I stuck them in the bottom left corner. That's my tip for today, if something isn't working quite right, put it in the bottom left corner. Since we (as Americans as least) read top to bottom, left to right, I find most people start looking at a quilt in the top left corner, then scan across and down towards the bottom right hand corner. The bottom left hand corner is almost skipped. So if you've got a wonky block or two, try hiding it in the bottom left. 😉

I needed an alternate block to use between the knights. I needed the block to finish at 5", I didn't really feel like digging into yardage, but how would I make a 5" finished block with scraps? I mostly have 2" and 2.5" strips and squares. This will be a donation quilt. That doesn't mean at all that I don't want to make a nice quilt, but I am learning that they don't all have to be complicated. I realized if I surrounded a 2.5" square with 2" strips, I would indeed get a block that finished at 5". I have a box of 2.5" squares, and I dug out enough in appropriate colors to make the alternate blocks, then I went to my 2" strip stash and did the same. I only needed 16" of a 2" strip to surround a square. I needed two pieces at 2" x 2.5" and two pieces at 2" x 5.5" That means even strips I had cut from fat quarters were going to work! 

When DH came into the sewing room to ask me something, he saw this quilt on the design wall and really liked it. I asked him if it looked like a scrap quilt. He said, "No, it's a knight quilt, why would you ask if it was a scrap quilt?" I told him it was 50% scraps, and that a lot of scrap quilt patterns only use 50% scraps. That surprised him, and he said it looked purposeful to him.

That comment made me really happy. I really like scrap quilts, but not everyone does. If I can "hide" scraps in a quilt that doesn't look like a scrap quilt, it's a win. I've assembled this quilt top now, and hopefully it will be basted soon. I love donating boys quilts especially. Not that I don't make plenty of girls quilts, I just especially like making quilts for boys and men. 

I had planned a big basting spree, but that got hijacked by other commitments. Now I'll just have to try to get some quilts basted a couple at a time. I'm almost finished quilting the last basted quilt, but I still have several table runners basted that need quilting, so I'm not quite out yet, but basting needs to move up on the priority list. 

 

Tiled Fabrics - Are They Panels?

 Since I'm knee deep in panels right now, and having great fun working with them, I've been digging out some fabrics I've found hard to use, but thinking of them as panels has given me ideas. 

Years ago I saw some fabric online that I loved so much, I ordered it from the UK. The line was Celtic Illuminations, and at the time, I couldn't find it from a US supplier. I didn't buy a lot of it, a pillow panel, a couple yards (meters) of the tiles fabric, and maybe one yard of another in the line. I didn't take a photo of the tiled fabric before I cut it up, but I found a photo online of it in a different colorway, evidently, Fabric Paradise still has some of that colorway in stock.

If you like this colorway, you can get it from fabricparadise.com, and if you send me a message, I have two squares of the larger version in this colorway I'd be happy to send you. I happened across the two large squares at a thrift store, but haven't used them. 

If you pay attention to the measuring tapes, you'll see each square is about 3.5" It's not exact. The strips between the squares are almost 1/2". I didn't like the idea of cutting off all the seam allowances and having only 3.5" squares, but I found it difficult to cut the squares apart at 4", because those skinny strips between the knots are not always 1/2", and I kept getting further and further off. I tried cutting them when I got the fabric, made a few blocks, but overall found it really frustrating and put everything aside. I had made some units with the other fabrics, found a blue I liked to go with my fabrics, so I stuck it all aside, but at least it was together. 

When I was working on my grandson's fantasy quilt, I thought about those fabrics, and decided some Celtic knots would go nicely with the fantasy theme so I dug out the fabrics. I also had some more of the tiled fabric on my fabric shelves. 

When I dug everything out, I had the one pillow panel, with the fabric I cut to put it on point. I had a stack of nine patches I had made, and a pile of HST's. Back when I had worked on this, I was not good about writing myself notes on what I planned to do with things, and there was no pattern or anything with the fabrics. It's been at least 15 years since I worked on this, and I have no idea what I was planning. These days I am good about writing notes to myself, so it I put a project aside, I can get back into it easily enough. 

I had no more of the background fabric I used for the nine patches and HST's, so as far as that went, I had to use what I had. 

I had enough HST's to make pinwheel blocks, and I used the blue to frame them so they'd be the same size as the nine patches. I used most of the HST's, and all but two of the nine patch blocks. I used a fabric from stash to bring out the rusts and browns in the Celtic knots. I would have made the border a bit wider, but this was every bit of the fabric I had.

Now to deal with the other tiled fabric. I felt like the Celtic knots in the nine patches looked crowded cut at 3.5". I really wanted to cut them at 4", the thing is, I could really only get every other tile at 4", and the others needed to be cut at 3.5". Could I figure out how to use them together in one quilt?

The answer to that was yes. I put the 4" cut Celtic knots on point, and framed out the 3.5" ones. Each block finished at 5". I used all of the one cut at 3.5" for this quilt, and have only a few left of the ones on point. 

Now I've got two quilt tops done, and I've busted most of that fabric line. Can I bust the rest?

I still have that pillow panel I put on point. I added some of the leftover HST's to make the two remaining nine patch blocks larger. I didn't have any matching background fabric, but I found some similar enough. I made some of the extra 4" cut Celtic knots and put them on point using the extra few triangles from my grandson's fantasy quilt. I still need to frame out the on point pillow panel, then I need to make the whole thing wider. I'm thinking interlocking rings going up each side of this center. I have to do the math to make sure it's all going to fit together. Would I have planned to make these quilts this way, probably not. Will busting this fabric get it out of my stash and result in three usable quilts, yes it will. 

I will have a couple units leftover, even after this third quilt, but I am perfectly OK tossing the extras into the orphan bin for now, or possibly trying to make a table runner. Just because I loved the fabric, did not mean I found it easy to use. Since I felt up to the challenge, it was time to get it out of the house. 

It also inspired me to use another tiled fabric I had in stash, but that's for next time.