Moving Things Along

Directions From a Local is a true blue finish! The hand quilting went very quickly and then it was just a matter of getting the binding properly attached. A quick look through the stash totes, and no worries, plenty of fabric to choose from for binding possibilities. 

Directions From a Local is finished!

Not surprisingly, I ended up sewing scrappy pieces of odd blue fabric together for the binding as that color seemed to have the very best effect. Some of the fabrics had been in the totes for a very long time and I had begun to question why they were ever acquired. But that's exactly why we buy the odd/interesting/unusual fabrics as our instincts nudge us to. So they are there waiting for us when the perfect opportunity crops up!

Love the feel of this quilt

Most of the fabrics used in this quilt are not solids, but a very subtle print or tone on tone. One fabric in particular, the brown and white gingham, is not 100% cotton and seemed to want to warple and wave at the slightest provocation. Still, I absolutely love the vintage look of it mixed in with the quilt.

So happy with the fix-it corners in the middle...

The choppy, cut up corners of the log cabin are a result of sewing the first part of the quilt together without ever measuring strip lengths. Just sewing them on and cutting the excess off at the corners. Eventually there came a time when the quilt began to misbehave entirely too much and it just had to be addressed. I am so in love with how that turned out, there is absolutely nothing to regret!

Hard to see, but some of these fabrics are very sweet...

This quilt was started as an attempt to recreate or rather, interepret, one of the lovely quilts in 'Unconventional and Unexpected' by Roderick Kiracofe. You are probably so very tired of hearing me talk about this book, but it is one of the best buys that I have ever made, quilting-wise. Still finding lots and lots of inspiration within the covers of this book, sometimes just enough to pull me out of a slight mojo slump.

Probably could have added more stitching, but I wanted
to keep it loose and drapey....

I am still kind of in awe that these colors came out of my quilting room, much less, that they all came together in such a successful manner. Playing with color is one of my very favorite things about quilting. Building a different 'to us' color palette often feels easier when trying to base it off an already finished quilt and using it as the ultimate guide.

Whimsical touch to add the 'white line' piecing

Creating a 'mood' in quilting just feels ridiculously fun too. 'Cuz of course, that's exactly what we're doing. Oh sure, it can be a bit anxiety inducing during the attempt {so many decisions}, but after? If it turns out well? High fives all around!

So happy with the Turn Right arrow effect

The next quilt in the hoop will be Vintage Coxcombs. It's been a finished quilt top for a couple years now and one that lately I've been itching to get into the hoop.

Vintage Coxcombs getting sandwiched and pinned

I actually took the time to pin it between all the rows for machine, stitch-in-the-ditch sewing. Ughh! Takes so very long and it was while I was feeling pretty rotten too. Totally underestimated how much energy I had and how much time it always takes. My general optimism about how easy it would be to get it all ready was probably rooted in the idea that it is completely unacceptable to have an empty hoop. My goodness, however would I survive without a hand quilting project warmed up and ready to go?

Still happy with the pieced backgrounds

The unfortunate saga continues as I discovered when eventually getting back into the sewing room to actually sew. Somehow I totally forgot to engage the dual feed with my special Stitch-in-the-Ditch foot, which basically eliminated the entire walking foot effect as hello? There was no 'walking foot' apparatus engaged. Oh yes. You guessed it. I ended up having to rip out some of my machine stitching and start over. Fun stuff.

Going to keep the hand quilting very simple on this one...

Thankfully I didn't have to rip everything out. Apparently the benefit to quilting with low ebb energy is that I was moving the quilt slower through the machine than normal. Wonder of wonders, that helped everything behave better than it should have/could have. While the stitching didn't end up looking fabulous by any means, the quilt is in the hoop now and there's no looking back. I refuse to be a slave to perfection and choose instead to just pick my battles. Stitching lines meandering a bit over the top of seams? Fine and Dandy. Wavy outside sashing? Time to pull out the seam ripper!

My husband and I are both feeling loads better these days and even got to see our grandkids over the weekend. He will be taking a bit longer to recover to absolute full health, but if spending time with the granddaughters doesn't help accelerate the feel-good endorphins, I don't know what could! Still working on some hand applique when time allows and feeling very optimistic that this is the week we mostly return to a 'normal' routine....

Love Seeing the Abandoned Bits Come Together

So the Scrapbin Improv. {Wing and a Prayer} quilt top is completed. It ended up being 51" x 57" after I decided to throw on the black print border.

Scrapbin Improv. quilt top is finished

That's barely up to a size that seems properly useful, but I had started running out of anything except itty bitty pieces. Ughh.. Not in the mood to work with those right now at all!

Just trying to see what can be done with the scrappy bits...

The black border is the remains of leftover strips cut off from a backing on some other quilt. Love that it carried on the use-it-up mentality of this particular effort! I'm thinking these were good colors/fabric to use for my first time attempting this style of freewheeling scrapbin sort of quilt. All the bright, happy colors just seemed more than ready to match up to each other with little to no fuss. Eventually I hope to try something similar in a much more subtle or muted colorway. This may be the start of another series, we shall see...

Love all the different pieces that ended up being included

On another note, the last three weeks have been brutal. When I posted last, I was just finishing up with a nasty flu and then promptly relapsed. Probably because I've been having to take care of my husband who had the flu, recovered, worked one day and then started having other health problems. He isn't always a particularly healthy person and has some ongoing issues which this flu has seemed to exacerbate. February has been going by in a blur of coughing, hacking, tending, and oh yes, little pockets of hand work. Not getting a lot accomplished in the quilting room, but it sure feels good to have a needle in my hand elsewhere. So very grateful for a well stocked hand work bag! We are definitely on the mend finally, but I just cannot find time to connect better. Will return when things settle down...

Getting Caught Up On the Big Basket Series

Gather Ye Roses is the first finish of the year! Yay! This quilt is the first in my big basket series, but somehow the last to be a true blue finish. For some reason, I was intimidated at the thought of quilting all that 'blank' cream space around the basket. After stitching on the other two though, then it all felt so much easier. Amazingly enough, procrastination does occasionally pay off...

These quilting lines are 'eyeballed', not carefully
measured out for accuracy and precision....

And though I liked this quilt, it had become the least favorite of the three. Why in the world? It looks ever so better with the hand quilting than it did as a quilt top! Not sure why that continues to be a problem for me after so many years, under-appreciating the effect that quilting texture can just generally bring to the table. A quilt top can look so well..., lifeless before the quilting. There's just no comparison and really, no possible way to imagine the entirety of the final results.

Gather Ye Rosebuds the first finish of 2020!
Big Basket #1

The whiter areas of the basket handle continue to amuse me. Should there have been an extra stitch or two down the middle of the basket handle in order to dull all that brighter area? I decided not to, time and again. Second guessing just gets tiresome. I decided that it makes for an extra interesting element, having the basket handle fade in and out of the background. In years to come, it will no doubt become another one of those 'what-was-the-quilter-thinking?' questions we all love to ponder.

Gather Ye Roses. Or whatever else flower you might love...

I quickly figured out that making large baskets for a centerpiece would create all sorts of problems in the border areas. Proportion, proportion, proportion! I emphatically did not want these quilts to all be king sized! In the first quilt, I kept to a simple, much smaller basket block repeat on two sides. The purposeful asymmetrical look resulted from adding 1. a different color border on two sides, 2. a larger border width on those two sides, 3. a distinctively different design application in the break from blocks to applique vines. Easy peasy, but yes, involving a lot of different design decisions.  Should do this more often. Love, love a good asymmetrical border application....

A few little flowers in the baskets...

Working with an asymmetrical design idea also totally ended the dilemma of what to do about a long gawky basket surrounded by too-narrow borders. Which just made the basket look even more awkward and weird. So what to do? More borders? One fabric add ons? Ugghh.. I just wanted it to look interesting and somehow maximize the effect of the super large basket. Seriously though, all along I was hinging the entire success of the quilt on the hope that the final quilting stitching would create important depth and texture there in the centerpiece. So, so happy when that came to fruition....

It's hard to tell from the pictures, but all the brown in the applique area is made up of several different brown fabrics. Very subtle difference, but something that I find much more compelling than using all the same fabric. From a distance, the change from medium to darker brown creates depth and movement in the quilt, and close up, it just gives it that utility 'make-do look'. In my opinion, that adds to the sneaky charm of this quilt, the overall coziness, not having everything come off as matchy-matchy.

Possible rosebuds on the vine?

Of course, the fact that I didn't actually have enough brown fabric in any one piece of yardage helped make those decisions come about more easily. However, if it was a truly awful idea {after carefully auditioning whatever there was available from the stash}, I do know where the fabric store is. Rare though it may be, I have taken that option once or twice before in my life! How much more rewarding {for me, can't speak for you!} to find a good use for fabrics languishing away in the stash totes. 

Mixing several different blendy-type, printed fabrics that have a similar color feel to them is a puzzle, but being able to totally use them up and maybe even have to search out more feels great. I love it! I mean, it's not like you'd actually consciously build a quilt around these fabrics, right? Ahem, yeah. Quick disclaimer, I might actually starting to do this very thing, just for fun? lol  For example though,  the brown fabric with the tiny white flower on the corner of the quilt was a 90's look print that I had been trying to use up for years. Why toss the idea of finally getting to use it, when it's an absolutely perfect match for this particular quilt? Oh, there's obviously not enough, bummer. Guess we'll give that idea up. No! Find some fabrics that play reasonably well with that one wonderful print  and make it work. 

Nothing helps out a red, white a blue quilt better
than the perfect amount of brown...

The sweetest thing about this quilt might be the words with the red flowers nearby. Not all the flowers are rosebuds of course, but the sentiment still makes me happy. Words to live by! The binding is several random lengths from the leftovers binding tote and a couple other scrappy pieces of red fabric that blended well. So easy to go scrappy on a quilt like this. Although it never really, truly reduces the sheer amount of leftover binding lengths does it?  Not in the long run. No matter how much I kid myself, there always seems to be just a little bit leftover to dump straight back into the tote.*sigh  Maybe it's like sourdough starter....

That soft, striped homespun was a bear to work with
but looks so good in the background position!

So there you go. That's the sum total of the Big Basket Series {thus far}. Gather Ye Rosebuds was the first Big Basket in the series to be a completed quilt top, but the last one totally finished up. Improv. Woven Basket, below, was the second quilt top and the first one totally finished up.

Improv. Woven Basket, Big Basket #2

Big Tipsy Basket was the third in the series and the second one to be completely quilted. It's interesting to see the overall comparison at a quick glance. The first quilt was started in 2016 on an impulse {really had no idea that I even wanted to make big baskets}, and that quickly led to the idea of series work. Kind of impossible to stop at one! There was supposed to be a fourth quilt, but somehow that particular idea never got off the ground floor. 

Big Tipsy Basket, Big Basket #3

Never say never! When Jolene shared her beautiful Tribute To Gwen Marston basket quilt earlier this year, it definitely got me thinking again. Hmm... Maybe. Maybe? I might just one more big basket quilt in me. Or two. The series is only over when I say it is.....