Design Wall Full? Welcome to the Design Floor!

I finished assembling the three brown/burgundy quilt tops I was working on last week. Now I've got a different quilt on the design wall.

It's nice and cheery and I haven't been in too much of a hurry to take it down and assemble it.

The problem came in when I was just randomly assembling columns for another quilt, but I need to lay the columns out to try to prevent too many of the same fabrics being grouped together. Thus, the design floor.

I do have one spot where the same fabric touches diagonally (besides the navy background). I've decided it's just going to stay that way, because every time I tried rearranging the columns I ended up with something touching. This quilt looks pretty trippy, and I made it with a teen in mind. The pattern is called Cascade and the tutorial is here. My plan is to press the columns tonight, and then sew the last four seams tomorrow. Since I was using scraps and not jelly rolls, my quilt is not the same dimensions as the tutorial. I also decided against borders, and the pattern calls for borders. I think it's pretty funny, I have the binding tool you use to make this quilt in two sizes, but I've never used it for binding. There are several quilt patterns that use the binding tool as a template, and I wanted to make a couple of those, so that's why I bought them. I'd totally make this quilt again! It's fast and easy, and has a fun modern vibe. I think you could have a lot of fun doing a rainbow quilt with this pattern, and plan the cascade drops across the quilt. 

The bridal shower I went to on Saturday was lovely. The bride liked the quilt, and gave me a huge hug! The wedding is in about ten days, and I'm looking forward to it. Neither the shower nor the wedding are large affairs. 

This coming weekend I'm having DD#1's family over for Miss A's birthday. She's turning 7, and one of the things I'm giving her is a cross necklace I got when I was seven. I came across it when I was decluttering in June, and decided she's the granddaughter who should get that. It's a very nice quality necklace, which is the only reason I've kept a child's necklace all these years. I never even considered giving it to one of my three daughters, but giving it to Miss A seems right. Sometimes you just know it's time to pass something on when the right person comes along. 

Besides the Cascade Quilt, I sewed up the blocks for three other quilts this week. They were all scrap projects that were already started, I'm not starting any new projects until I clear up some of my current projects. I also finished the weighted blanket I really didn't want to make. I've been using nine patches as my leader/project for quite a while now, and I am really sick of nine patches! I've still got quite a few nine patches to go, so hopefully by the time I've got the latest batch of quilts assembled, I'll be finished with the nine patches. I have so many quilts ready to assemble it's crazy! Of course, once I get all those scrappy nine patches finished, that will be several more quilt tops, but I'll have to decided how to set them, and that may take a while. 

I finally started sewing the last of the 2021 wedding quilts. It's been cut for a while now, and it's finally made it to the front of the piecing queue! Well, I say front of the queue, but actually, I was using it as leaders/enders while I pieced the side borders for the bargello quilt. I'd like to get that bargello quilt top finished in the next week or so. 

DH has next week off work, so I don't know how much sewing time I'll have. There's actually a lot going on over the next month or so, so I'm going to have to be really flexible. DH has two different weeks off in the next month, not consecutively. I have a birthday party and a wedding happening, plus I will have two different pairs of grandkids spending multiple nights here at different times. Lots of interruptions, but good ones, so it's all fine. 

 My sewing goals for the next month are to assemble quilt tops as I have time, piece the wedding quilt and finish planning the baby and kid quilt that now have a before Christmas deadline. I hope to make steady progress doing my FMQ an hour per day, and for non-quilty stuff my focus will be cutting and sewing up scrub tops for DH. How much I'll get done it anyone's guess, but if I don't make a plan and have it prioritized, nothing will get done. I'd rather have a plan and not meet my goals because life got busy, than have the time and not get things done because I didn't know where to start. 

I'm sure some people are great at winging it, but I'm a "fail to plan is a plan to fail" kind of girl. I like lists, they keep me focused, even if that list has me working on several things at once. 

A Big Finish

 

The second of three wedding quilts for this year is finished! Just in the nick of time too, since the bridal shower is Saturday! I picked the fabrics for this quilt last year, but I didn't start cutting until this year, so it's a new start for the year. I'm perfectly OK with new starts, but finishing it the same year I started it is a big win. This quilt is a monster, 110" x 110".

I started quilting another quilt this morning, the advantage of basting several quilts at a time, I can easily do my hour of FMQ on the next quilt right after a finish. I'm using the same quilting design on this quilt as I did on that wedding quilt. 

I got half the weighted blanket filled. I had time to finish it, but I decided to spend the time folding as much fabric as I could onto my mini-bolt boards. I ran out of boards before I was done, but most of that big fabric purchase is on boards and put away. I cleared a shelf for the remaining fabric, so my cutting table is cleared off! As I empty mini-bolts, I'll get the remaining fabric onto boards and put it where it actually belongs, but for now this is workable.

I had a couple people ask me who was pregnant when I was making all the burp rags that got finished last week. At the time, I didn't know of anyone being pregnant. Well...that didn't last long. Come to find out, one of my nieces is pregnant and had been keeping it hush hush. I didn't find out until she announced it is a boy! I talked to her and she wants a Marvel themed quilt for the baby, which is easy, I should have everything to make that. She also wants me to make a quilt for her stepson, which I'm happy to do, but she wasn't sure what theme she wanted for his quilt. All that is great, then I found out she's due on Christmas Eve, which doesn't give me much time, when I still have a wedding quilt to finish this year too! I'm going to have to follow up pretty quickly on the stepson's quilt, because I need to get it planned out so it can get cut and put into the queue.

I'm still trying to clear the decks of quilts that need assembly too. These blocks were from busting my brown 2" strips, and I ended up with enough blocks to make two throw quilts like this, plus one baby quilt. I have one block leftover, and it can go into the orphan bin. I've got all three of these quilts sewn into rows, and hopefully all three will be assembled today. I'm not planning on borders for any of them, just a burgundy binding, so once the rows are sewn together, I can press the three quilt tops and hang them in the quilt closet. When quilts don't need borders, it's pretty easy to assemble them as leaders/enders. 

As I'm getting quilt tops together and hanging them in the quilt closet, my sewing room is feeling a bit lighter with every top done. Sometimes putting projects away is the answer, other times you just need to sew your way out of the mess. 

I debated on just concentrating on the deadline projects, but honestly, my attitude is better if I'm working on a project of my choice at the same time I'm working on deadline quilt. 

Now that my cutting table is cleared off, I can work on cutting out the scrub tops for DH. Those will get done a lot faster now that I have my no quilting weekends.

So many projects to work on, and I keep seeing things online about Christmas, and I just can't go there! The last couple years I've just had a really hard hard time getting into a Christmas-y mood, and making things for Christmas is becoming harder and harder. It's not that I don't like giving gifts, or even that I don't like making gifts, I like doing both of those. What I don't like is the pressure, the time restraints, the trying to top whatever I did last year, the sheer number of presents that need to be made if I make them. I told DH I feel like gift cards may be the way to go this year, if I can't get into it. With five kids and their spouses and a dozen grandkids plus other family members we buy for it's just overwhelming me. That's NOT what Christmas is about. 

I keep reading about supply chains being broken, and how things may be hard to find for the holidays, and that's easy to believe when there are things at the grocery store that are hard to get even now. I'm also well aware of how much stuff everyone already has. I really like giving activities for gifts, movie tickets, zoo passes, or restaurant gift cards, but with Covid numbers still going crazy I'm not sure I want to go that route either. Last year I finally came up with giving family gifts and going for a game night theme for at least the families with children old enough for that. Once I had decided on that, it was easier to get in the Christmas mood. I'm still waiting for inspiration to strike this year, and I'm sure hoping it does!

Vacuuming the Clothes Dryer

 My plan to work on non-quilting projects on the weekends is going pretty well. The stack of burp rag pieces that have been on my fabric counter for months, are now all sewn into burp rags, I clipped the edges, washed and dried them twice to get the edges to rag nicely, and now they are stacked up in the gift closet. 

I never counted how many pieces I had cut, I was just cutting up all the flannel I had that was too small to back a baby quilt. If it was too small to cut a burp rag, I cut 4.5" squares, and if it was too small for that, I tossed it guilt free! I ended up with 60 burp rags, which will be several baby gifts ready to go. The flannel made such a mess in the washer and dryer, I got out the vacuum and the crevice tool and vacuumed the washer and dryer after each load. With that much lint in the dryer I figured it could be a fire hazard, so I used the crevice tool to get down into the area below the lint filter. Now the only flannel in the house is either yardage large enough to back at least a baby quilt, or 4.5" squares. Everything between those two sizes is now burp rags. I found I liked using four layers of flannel best for the burp rags. If I only had one or two of a pattern I usually used it for the middle layers. 

I've been FMQ my hour per day, but I'm not finished the wedding quilt yet. I think I can get it done in two more hours of quilting. Even with a concentrated effort it takes a while to quilt a king sized quilt on a domestic machine. 

After my hour of FMQ on the weekdays, I've been all over the place on quilting projects. 

This is folded into fourths for the photo, but I've got the center of this quilt done. It's getting three borders, one of which is pieced, so still a ways to go on this.  

I made this quilt about three years ago, a wedding gift for one of my nieces. I had a full extra strip set left over, as well as part of another. It was too much to make something like a pillow, but not automatically enough to make a quilt. I stumbled upon a photo of a bargello quilt with black strips between the strip sets, and realized that could be the perfect project  for the leftover stripsets I had. 

All the black strips are the same width, though because the other strips aren't the same width, your eyes may trick you into thinking the black ones are different too. The second quilt is pretty tall and skinny at this point, but thankfully I had packed the stripsets away with any extra fabric I had. Since I bought the fabrics specifically for my nieces bargello quilt, I had very little leftover, except for the border fabric. I don't have a ton of the original border fabric left, but enough to have a plan on how to use it to make the quilt wider. I've got an idea to make a pieced border for just the sides, then I'll add a narrow black border all the way around. I think it will have much more balanced dimensions then. Sometimes a scrap quilt doesn't end up looking like one!

So it looks like I'll be working on borders, and my weekend project is to stuff the weighted blanket that's ready to fill. Hopefully I'll be binding that wedding quilt soon too! It's about 80% quilted now. DH has a four day weekend this weekend, so I'm not sure how much quilting time I'll actually have. I know he has some plans, so likely more time than I think. Once I get the current wedding quilt finished, I'll switch over to piecing the last wedding quilt for this year. It's not as large, nor as many pieces, so I don't think it will take a very long time to piece. 

FMQ Woes and a Win

Normally when I'm getting ready to start quilting a quilt, I get ready the day before, choosing thread and winding bobbins. Since I was working on burp rags all weekend (halfway done those) I didn't do that this time. Well, I thought I had a cone of medium grey thread in 40 wt cotton. Surprise, I didn't. I've had issues with polyester thread on my Janome, but I figured surely I could conquer them, so yesterday I dug out a cone of poly in medium grey, and wound the bobbins. 

I quilted out the first motif, front looked great, checked the back and it looked pretty good. I tightened the tension just a smidge, stitched out a couple more motifs, checked the back, looked good. I them quilted for about 30 minutes before checking the back again. Uh-oh, eyelashes everywhere! Now, some of that was probably because I was going too fast, I have a tendency to just want to go as fast as I can. But, some of that was likely due to the Janome not doing well with poly thread. I can quilt that fast with cotton and not have all those issues. I'd still like to figure out how to get poly to behave with the Janome, but maybe with a quilt that doesn't have such an imminent deadline. I think I'm going to try a different type of needle next. If I quilt on my Bernina I can use any thread, it just sews like a champ with anything. 

I broke thread, dragged the quilt and a seam ripper upstairs, and proceeded to spend most of the day ripping out what I had quilted. The parts with the eyelashes were easy to rip out, but the parts that were quilted well took sooooo long. All I can say is thank God for same day Amazon delivery, because I ordered cotton thread before I started ripping, and had it in hand by dinner time. 

This morning it was time to try again. I wound bobbins of my cotton thread, and got to quilting. You better believe I was checking the back a LOT. All went well, I quilted for my usual hour, and now I'm blogging on my break. 

So, if that was my FMQ woe, what was my win? Well, for years now I've tried to find a design I can consistently stitch out large scale. Sometimes I don't want dense quilting on a quilt, and I've struggled to find something that works for me large scale without any marking. Oftentimes I resort to crosshatching with a walking foot if I want less dense quilting, but I don't always want straight quilting. Some of the designs I can easily stitch in medium or small scales, I just can't consistently stitch large scale. For example, if I'm stitching spirals, I can make tiny ones, and my usual has about a half inch between lines, but if I try for an inch between I just can't do it. Microstippling came easily to me, and I can meander with that same half inch scale, but I haven't been able to do larger scale, I always resort to getting smaller. When I'm quilting a king sized quilt, I felt like a larger design would work better, so all day Monday I was searching my FMQ resources for something new to try. 

I was doodling away while trying to find something I thought I had a shot at stitching larger scale. I find different quilting teachers better at teaching different things, and I knew my Patsy Thompson videos had some large scale designs. Fast and Free Volume 3 was just what I was looking for. I have a pretty tight deadline to get this quilt quilted, so I wanted something easy-ish, and larger scale so the quilt wasn't stiff, with the bonus of having less to quilt. 

I watched the chapters on the rotating axis family, which I've stitched out before, but not for quite a while. I think I'm going to use one of those for my next quilt. For this quilt I decided on something from the circling the element family. 

I guess the good thing about yesterday's fiasco is I got some practice in on the design I chose. 

This design kind of reminds me of peacocks. The win is that I've been able to stitch it large scale consistently! I keep up a mantra of "Slow down, stitch slowly" to keep myself from going too fast. It's far from perfect, but I've been FMQ long enough that I know as long as the quilting is consistent, when you step back and look at the quilt as a whole, it ends up looking fine. It doesn't have to be perfect. 

I finally got to give Mr. Z his cloak, and in exchange DD#1 brought me some duck eggs. 

It came out pretty good for starting as table runners and curtains! Now his younger brother wants one, but he's going to have to wait a bit. I'm actually going to have to buy fabric for his.

Basting Some Big Ones!

I basted three quilts this week, and all three of them are king sized. I thought one was closer to a queen, but when I dug it out and measured it's more like a queen sized bedspread, so would definitely fit a king easily. DH took photos of two of the three after helping me lay them out on the basting tables. 

This is the wedding quilt for one of my nephews. I was so worried I'd have a block wrong way around and have to rip, and I almost did have one. I was sewing the first quarter together, but I had already put the second quarter on the design wall. I was comparing the two as I was sewing, and I realized I had made a mistake in the first quarter, but thankfully, I noticed before I sewed that block onto the row. 

DH didn't take a photo of the second quilt I basted, but this is the third one.

I just finished basting this one today. I still have pins left, but I'm going to take the basting tables down anyway. I still have quilt tops that need basting, but I have five quilts basted now, three of which are king sized, and that will keep me busy for a while! I'll have to get back into my FMQ an hour a day routine. 

When I'm basting monster sized quilts like these, which takes me quite a while, I try to be nice to myself and not make any other quilting goals besides basting one quilt per day. I did get some sewing done each of those three basting days, but I only worked on whatever I wanted to. 

I got the border fabric sewn onto the Cartoon dog fabric. I think the paw print fabric is pretty cute on there. This quilt top is now hanging in the quilt closet. 

I finished sewing a bunch of units for another quilt, and once I get those all pressed, I can sew the units into blocks. I also sewed some 6" blocks into four patches to make 12" blocks. My sewing room is still a disaster, but I'm not really wanting to put away any of the projects I have out until they are quilt tops. The cartoon dog quilt hanging in the closet gives me a little less mess in the sewing room. If I can get a few more quilt tops assembled, I'll sew my way out of the mess.

Oh, I did get all the bowl cozies I was making finished last weekend! I think this weekend I'm going to tackle the stack of burp rags that have been sitting cut for months. 

The big fabric purchase I made has arrived.

These are three 102 yard bundles. Marshall Dry Goods tends to make bundles of 17 different six yard cuts. I've bought a bundle of neutral tone on tones from them before, but I was pleasantly surprised that only one print of this batch is the same as the last one I bought. 

The bundle of solids I got went heavy on the browns and greens, which was great because I'm low on those. The blenders were quite heavy on the blues.

Of the 17 blenders I received, seven of them were shades of blue. Considering I don't like blue, you might think I was disappointed by this, but honestly, I'm not. That light sky blue? I was completely out of that color in stash, because I use quite a bit of it in pictoral quilts like the tree house baby quilt I made last year. I was out of turquoise because I used the last I had in the last wedding quilt. I needed more turquoise for another quilt I want to make, and now I've got it. Actually, I think I'll be using blues 2-4 in that quilt. 

Even when I get a color I don't like much, I am still really happy, because those are the colors that teach you a lot. I don't really understand the quilters that only work in a certain color palette. It's probably because I give most of my quilts away, and I know not everyone likes the same colors I do, so I try to make quilts that fit the recipients taste. I find the colors I don't like teach me a lot more about color theory and balance than colors that naturally attract me.

I've made so many blue quilts, I don't hate it as much as I used to. I still have no desire to keep a blue quilt, but I've made a few I can honestly say I think are pretty, even if I don't want them in my house. 

I try to expand my color ideas, but some popular combinations I still can't stand. I love red, but hate turquoise. I will pair turquoise with black or purple, but turquoise and red I've never liked and you won't be seeing any quilts in that combination coming from me. I know some people love it, and think it's cool and retro. To me it's just an eyesore, but that's OK, because I know some color combinations I love aren't loved by others. I love doing Google image searches of a quilt pattern I want to make. Seeing what other people decided to combine always interests me, whether or not it's to my personal taste. 

I'm trying to fold a fabric a day and get it onto a mini-bolt. It's a lot to do in one day, so I'm happy spreading out that job. These six yards lengths aren't even folded in half like they are on a bolt, they came off a roll, so I have to do all the folding. I've already been into the fabrics though, and some of them I'm already cutting for projects. I've had several quilt patterns I've been wanting to try, and if one of the fabrics I'm folding works for a background of that quilt, I may as well cut it while I'm handling it. I need sashing cut for several quilts too, so again, if the new fabric works I may as well cut it while it's out. 

Basically, I'm all over the place as usual. I see progress being made, so it's a win, no matter how disorganized I seem to some.