NICU easy street block #1

This was the first quilt I quilted yesterday.  I am still in the practice mode for my freehand quilting skills.  I never imagined there would be such a large learning curve, to go from quilting on a domestic machine to a longarm.  I've quilted on a domestic machine for 15 years.

It would have been easier and of better quality of quilting, if I did it on my domestic machine, however that would not have gotten me my practice in.  The only way to increase my skills on the longarm is by practicing.  I just wish it wasn't sooooooo long a period of time.  But I WILL get there!  Everyone says, practice, practice, practice and practice some more.

I know the general motions, now I have to translate that to my arms moving the machine around, instead of me moving the quilt around.  

This is your basic four petal flowers that I did in all the green blocks.

In the first border I did the basic curl curving up and alternating down.  Still needing quite a bit of practice to get those curls more round, once I master the curves, I can work on the consistency of the spacing.  In the purple border I just did the cursive "l" and "e".  Same thing here.  I need to work on the smoothness of the curves, and the consistency of the size.

By the time I got to the last border, I was easing up a bit, but with the last border, I kept worrying that I was not going to stop in time before going off the edge of the quilt.  I am sure after more practice this will go away too.

Practice, practice and practice.  Maybe after the longarm bootcamp I will have more confidence....... can't wait.  I am really looking forward to it.

Barn block workshop

Yesterday, the Halton Hills Quilter's Guild had our barn block workshop.  There were eight of us, plus the instructor Marion.  They turned out great!  We all had a good time learning the whole process and the comradery.  We started at 10:00 am and got all the way to the first colour completed.  We took a break for lunch, and went right to taping off the sections for the second colour.  By 2:00 pm we were all mostly done and the few that were not, finished them while we started to clean up our area.

If the picture above says anything, I'd say that it speaks of everyone having a great time!  Thank you again Marion, for taking the time out of your busy day to teach us the process and being our cheerleader.

This was my barn block.  It's an Ohio star block.  It is pretty and wasn't complicated to execute. My mom and her block, are on the far left hand side, in the front row of the picture above.

After the workshop that was held in Halton Hills, I decided to head over to my mom's place for a visit.  I stayed for several hours and had dinner there.  While we were sitting and chatting, waiting for dinner to cook, I assembled one of my diamond shaped blocks of the hexagon quilt.  I had the patties done from the night before and just needed to attach them together.  We were chatting so much, it took me over 2 1/2 hours to make the diamond....lol.  At that rate, it will take me forever to get this quilt done, but I am not worried, I am taking my time on this one and enjoying the process.

Hope everyone had a great day.  As for me, I managed to get four NICU quilts quilted.  That will be for another post.

What's up today?

Yesterday was a mad dash, trying to get some things done, to end the first month of this year right.

Accomplishments: 1/ I did get the label done for an older quilt I made.  It's all stitched up, trimmed down and sewn to the quilt.  2/ I cleaned up my quilting room, giving me space to start February's UFO quilt.  3/ Got everything coordinated for the workshop this weekend.  4/ Put away some of the scraps on my cutting table.  I am feeling good.

Another thing I did, was I started the webbing of the NICU wild & goosey quilt.  It's all webbed together and the first four rows are sewn across.  That would be the blue, green and yellow top you see on my sewing table.  And yes, I still haven't put the borders on the modern version of my 3-way BOM quilt that is also sitting there on my sewing table.......soon.

American, Patchwork & Quilting magazine UFO challenge Facebook group called the number for February early.  I ignored it until now, the first day of February.  This month the number is 6.  For me, number six is my hexagon quilt.  My tin is ready to go, as it always is.  I enjoy working with these little pieces of fabric.

Many of the fabrics, or at least half of them, come from my cousin and her husband.  Her mother, his mother and his grandmother were quilters, or more so they were piecers.  They came to me with six quilt tops or pieces, asking me to see about finishing them.  There is nothing I like more than helping a fellow quilter complete the destiny of his/her quilts.  I made two quilts from the pieces (a pleated log cabin quilt and a Dresden plate quilt), and I quilted two hexagon quilts.  The last two hexagon quilts were not complete and were not worth the time to complete.  One of them I suggested would need to be taken apart and started from scratch and the other had some inferior piecing and pieces, so my cousins told me to just do what I wish with the remaining pieces.   I decided to keep the second one for the pieces, should we need to repair any of the other hexagon quilts and the last one I did take apart.

I started this quilt back in December/2014.  Taking it apart, washing the fabrics (to make sure they are durable enough to be used), resizing them and now putting them back together.  The half top that I took apart had some pieces that were too thin to be used again and some were not colour fast, but many of the others are good.  I cut out many pieces from my own stash of dated fabrics to match the time period of the ones from my cousin's pieces, plus some reproduction fabrics too.

I decided that I was going to make a combination of the two quilts I quilted for my cousin.  One of her hexagon quilts was florets and the second one was diamonds.  Hence the florets around the perimeter and the diamond forming a grid in the centre.  I have a lot of this quilt started, including the final border.  The picture above only shows a portion of what is done.  The border at the top and the one at the bottom are started too.

I know I will not get this quilt done in the month of February, however I am not worried.  I still want to take my time with this quilt and enjoy the process.  It's all hand work, so that in itself is time consuming.  You may get bored of seeing pieces that look similar to each other, but I am sure I will not be able to resist working on other things as well.........that is my nature....lol

Small finished top

I am still in the cleaning and clearing out mode.  Trying to keep my quilting room in order.  Though at times it gets to be a disaster while I am working on something or many things at once.  Yesterday was no different.  

I have one quilt block on the design wall, the wild and goosey block, and all of a sudden inspiration hits me.  I've been stalled on these 3" finished blocks, because they were just not doing it for me.  So, out came a mess of fabric to construct this churn dash block. I've decided to add in an alternate block, with bigger pieces, to tone down the business.  

I think it will work.  Though by doing this I have in fact just created a different quilt that uses up less wild & goosey blocks, leaving me with extra, to make another NICU quilt.  So, instead of decreasing the number of quilts to make, I have yet again increased them...lol.  I seem to be going the wrong way.

Anyways, so this leaves the extra pieces on the cutting board already laid out ready to be assembled with some sashings and cornerstones.  I still have my modern version of the 3-way BOM on my sewing table waiting for the last border and my six point stars sitting on the ledge behind me vying for my attention too.  

If that was not enough, out of the corner of my eye, I catch sight of this next NICU quilt number 5 of 20, or should I now say 5 of 21, with that resent addition...lol. The centre four log cabin blocks were donated to me, to do as I wish.  I decided to use them as they were and just attach them to each other on the dark side to create the centre plus sign.  

As this was an easy finish, it overruled everything else.  I needed to clear something out of here.  The blocks were together from another sewing session.  All that was left was to put the three borders on, to bring this NICU quilt to 24" square.  All done.
  

January is coming to a close at the end of the day today.  Yikes!  I have only one row left, plus a word to complete my label for this month.  I am in the process of going back to all the quilts I've made, that I still own or still have not distributed, to make a label for them.  Last year I did many.  Many are still here and others have been donated or given away as gifts.  At this point I now have 11 more labels left to make.  So, the way I figured it, if I get one label a month, plus keep up with the labels for the current finishes, I will be done and up to date with all my labels, by year end.

I know it is a stretch with everything else I plan, but if I don't set the goals they definitely will not get done. This way, there is a chance of getting it done.  At the beginning of the month I only had the first two rows done, so I have completed a fair amount already.  The thing is, that each row takes at least an hour to complete.  The stitches are so tiny, in order to get the curves and all, that I have to make a conscious effort to sit and sew them.  It helps if I play reruns on Netflix while doing it.  Guess what I will be doing this evening!

Enjoy the last cold day of January!

Camping quilt

I have this friend at the longarm guild group that I go to, that had a couple of panels.  She was wanting to make a special quilt for her son.  Her son is really into camping and the two panels she had were smaller pictures of camping scenes and the second one was of hunting.

This friend had finally found a pattern that she wanted to use these pictures in, however the finished blocks of the pattern were, I believe, 16" finished, which would have been way too big for her pictures.  There were two sizes of pictures and the small one was only 5" square.  It would have been lost in the background.

So I suggested she resize her blocks, to a better size, to suit the pictures.  That is when she looked at me with her eyes practically crossed...lol.  I realized that she did not have the "mad drafting skill", as they put it, for those that can just look at a design and rework it.  She was surprised that it could even be done.  So, I offered to do it for her.  The designing part is one of my favourite parts of quilting.

She did a great job assembling her quilt and the colours look great.  When she went shopping for her fabrics, she came across this brown, which is a wood grain motif.  It works very well with the overall nature scene going on in the pictures.

Here is a closeup.  Looks great!  It's all quilted and ready to be gifted some time in May.  I am sure her son will love it!

Buckhorn area Quilting at the Lake quilt show (QW)

I went to the Buckhorn quilt show back on September 9th, last year.  I took a bunch of pictures of various things.  There were some really pretty quilts.  The four that I am going to post here today are just for my record, so I don't lose the pictures in the vast folder of pictures.  Here I can word search it to find them.  They are in no particular order, only how I found the pictures in my folder.  

This first one is an old pattern.  You don't see this one around much.  It's a good pattern for using up colourful scraps.  This block is made up of a Baptist fan on the one half, with the half moon handle a solid colour and a different solid colour to fill in the corner on the opposite side.  As you twist and turn the blocks the solid colours make the candy part of the candy wrapper and the colourful Baptist fan does the edges of the wrapper.  This would make a pretty baby girl quilt.

This next one I fell in love with.  I love the colour and the intricate pattern.  Can you see those flying geese in a half circle formation.  Wow!  Everything about this quilt hit me.  There isn't a single thing I would want to change on it.  Kudos to the person who made it.  Unfortunately, I lost my page with the information about this quilt.  If anyone knows the name of the pattern, I would appreciate knowing it.

This one I took many different versions of.  I posted this picture because it was the one that you could see more of what was going on in the quilt.  Some of the other versions were softer on colour or more floral and I think one of them was only blues.  The Buckhorn guild members had a sub group, that got together and many of them worked on their own quilts together.  I wouldn't mind finding out the name of this pattern too.  The hand stitched blocks were cute.  You could make the different blocks and rearrange them to suit your own style.

This last picture I kept for the quilting aspect, though the hand stitched design of the quilt was gorgeous, I was wanting to remember this form of quilted feathers.  They were unique as they were made with a hook to form the first part of the feather, but instead of backtracking to move on to the next feather the maker did two humps that make it look more like a heart, before coming back down to finish the one feather leaf.  I thought it was very interesting and it adds more of a feminine feel to the feathers.

Even though this post is really only for my own record, hope you still enjoyed it.  At a later date, maybe I will go back and chose some other pictures from the show to share with you.

Enjoy you day.  Stay in and stay warm.

Layout and quilting ideas for the 6-point star quilt

We're fast approaching the end of the month.  ALREADY!!  I seem to be repeating myself, but where has the time gone!  Just a blink of an eye and January is over.

This is my progress so far on my January's challenge quilt of the month, as part of the AP&Q UFO challenge.  I am happy I got many quilt blocks done.  The more I do the brighter it gets.  There are eighteen full blocks completed and four half blocks.  The brightness is growing on me.

This is the layout for the blocks.  It's pretty simple.  I made the diagram more so to calculate the final size of the quilt.  When the rows stager, it's easy to miscalculate the size or how many blocks you need, especially horizontal with those points.

One morning a while back, I sat having my tea, enjoying some quiet time.  During these times, I often doodle.  I had enlarged a section of the quilt, in EQ.  I wanted a diagram of the outline of the block pieces.  The thoughts were in my head to design a quilt pattern for each block, as though they were individual stars.  Each one different than the other, but all linked together by a running chain of arches.

You can see the chain of arches better on the picture, at the bottom lefthand corner.  If you enlarge the picture, you can see all the different star designs.  Just like they say for snowflakes, "no two are alike", up until this point anyways.

Well......by the time I managed to fill this section, it was getting harder and harder to come up with more different ideas, that didn't look like one I've already done.  Can you imaging trying to do that for the whole quilt, with many more blocks than what you see here. Yikes!  I will have to give it some more thought and some time to brew.  I am sure the options are endless, but at that moment, that was all I was able to come up with.

So........this month's quilt may need to be put away for a while and sit uncomplete for a while longer, but I am still so happy for the progress that I did do.  The task doesn't seem so daunting anymore.

Until next time, have a great day!