The Learning Curve

The hand quilting is all complete on the Antique Medallion!  I got this quilt sandwiched and ready to go on November 12, 2012 so I consider this very good work on my part.  I wish they all went this smoothly!  After my last stitch, I had to lay the quilt out on the floor and admire it--for a really long time!  In fact, I wanted to call all of the family in and do jumping jacks or something I was so excited!

Centerpiece of Antique Medallion quilt

I remember when I first started the center part of this quilt back in about 2009.  The pattern came out in the American Patchwork and Quilting magazine in April of 2001--one I immediately tore out and stuck in my inspiration book.  I always wanted to make the pineapple/pomegranite part of the pattern, but was so very intimidated.  Scared spit less of it actually because of all the precise-ness of it.  What a perfect way to showcase my mistake making skills!

Sponging out the quilt markings

Years and years later, I finally got up the courage to get started on it and I AM SO GLAD!  This project taught me an invaluable lesson.  Face your fears head on and plow right on through them!  It seems incredible now how frightened of this kind of applique I was!  There are definitely mistakes if you look close enough, but this quilt will always have special meaning to me for what it's done for my confidence ever since.

Ready for binding!

For now it's hanging on the railing in my quilting room to pet as I walk past. I confess that I have started a new project that is all about conquering my fears as well.  Those nasty drunkards path blocks.  Uggghhh....  I am not quite ready to say that I've mastered curved piecing, so I guess I'm gonna drown in it for awhile.  May the prep work take months.*wink

A new learning curve....

Learning About Creativity

I used to have this love/hate relationship with quilting blogs.  I browsed until my eyeballs felt singed and then I ran away and hid for weeks.  There's this worry some of us more ordinary folks get that too much exposure to brilliance will quite possibly suck all the creativity right out of our brain matter and we'll become sheeples, clones to the industry.  We don't have enough confidence in our own creativity to waste a single drop of it you know.  One amazingly important thing about creativity though:  it doesn't produce so well in a vacuum.  Yay!  Bring on the quilt blogs!

Quilt top sewn together

I can't seem to get a good picture, blah, blah, blah...  You've heard it all before.  I do feel good about this quilt top regardless of the lousy pictures.  When I first gathered the fabric together, I had some misgivings because it's really not my normal color palette.  I'm trying to stretch myself though--even though it's hard and frustrating and yes, even nerve-wracking at times.  And although there are hundreds of beautiful quilt patterns I want to make some day, I just couldn't fit this fabric into any specific pattern I saw.  Maybe because I dug deep into my fabric totes and ignored how ugly the fabric was and tried to focus more on what the color said to me.  Yes, some of the fabrics were rejects from other quilters.  Shhhh...  Don't hurt their feelings.  They feel loved and appreciated now.*wink  You have no idea how much I had to seriously fight off the desire to rush to the quilt store and buy enough fabric from the Sweetwater line for all of my applique backgrounds though.  That just seemed soooo easy.

I couldn't resist this background fabric....

I only had one fat quarter of that particular fabric and let me tell you, I used every bit of it except for one tiny little square!!  Which meant I had to spend an entire afternoon just in the piecing together of seven applique backgrounds so that every single background had a little scrap of that fat quarter in it...  Personally, I think it gave the quilt more character and depth in the end result.  Bingo!  Another lesson learned:  Easy isn't necessarily a building block for growth in creativity.  Huh....

I added the year onto a block that was out of proportion and bugged me.

There is so much I don't understand about creativity.  It doesn't come naturally to me at all.  The thing is, I want to embrace it in my quilting and learn how to put 'my stamp' on what I produce.  How do some people make it look so incredibly simple?

A Few More Flowers

Here we go.  Block #3 finished up and looking really sweet.  I'm very happy with the green and blue polka dot fabric on the flower, though I wasn't real sure at first.  Does it take away from the old fashioned look?  Yes, No, Maybe so.  It makes me think that I need to get bolder about my fabric selections.*wink (ya think?)

Applique block #3

I do tend to get stuck in a rut and rely on the blendy, blendy thing which looks great in a background, but not so much elsewhere.  That's been the one good thing about our latest Pieceable Souls challenge.  It has definitely encouraged us to think outside the box when it comes to choosing fabric, something I still struggle with. Quilting--always something to learn....

Someday It Will Be a Beautiful Quilt, I'm Sure Of It

This Pieceable Souls mystery project has been mostly relegated to the back burner of late.  The half square triangles were easy peasy of course, although directions have been quite rough at times as only one person set up our mystery project this time around.  Next time we'll definitely be making sure they have help.  Mystery projects are entirely too complicated to be the sole responsibility of only one person!

Getting started with my pinwheels

While trying to figure out the perfect layout for the first few pinwheel blocks, I discovered something very provoking to me.  The half square triangles needed to be trimmed by about 1/2 an inch.  You know how it is when you're in the mood to tackle something head on and then oops!  You have to take a step back to do something you neglected to do?  grumble, grumble....

This is only about a 1/4 of what I trimmed off....

I diligently trimmed over 150 half square triangles thinking the whole time that I was wasting what was obviously (to me) oodles of precious fabric.  Then, because I was still somewhat miffed, I completely forgot about the importance of trimming my half square triangles so that the diagonal sewing line would be exactly squared up.*groan....  It frustrated me so much that I decided not to trim my triple rail fence blocks immediately.  Thank goodness!  For some reason I had the wrong cutting directions for those and would have lost a ton of work plus all that fabric!!!--basically making this entire project a total bust.  Okay.  Now things are getting completely out of hand.  In self defense, I decided to give myself a much needed time-out.  From half square triangles and triple rail fence blocks.  Can I possibly sink any lower?

Self Preservation

I really thought that my kids Christmas break would be a slowed down version of the weekend, only maybe a little more festive. Wowsers!  The slowed down part is so not happening yet.  And why didn't anyone ever tell me that the teenager stage of parenting can suck all of the daylight out of a day?  It's a good thing I'm hopelessly crazy about my kids and know how to put my little quilting obsessions into perspective.*wink  I've been pulling out my hand quilting and trying to get a frame or two done every couple evenings just for self preservation.  (Unlike kids, hand quilting doesn't demand very much out of you.)  My goal dream is to finish the quilting part of this quilt before the new year.  It's good for a girl to have a dream.:)

A Challenging (for me) Pieceable Souls Project

Okay, I'll admit that I've been working on this little Pieceable Souls project a very, tiny little bit here and there.  Not much, because for some reason, I've been dragging my heels about it.  The plan is to meet back in January with everything cut out and lots of chain piecing done.  And so far all I've managed to do is find out that I don't follow directions very well and thus, I have ran out of my background fabric before my strips are all cut out.  Gah!!  It's because of the white fabric, I know it.  I don't do well with white.  Never have.  It's so uninspiring and it just stares at me like a dead fish while I'm cutting on it.  My husband and I got to spend a couple days in Spokane last week and on the way home we stopped in at the Buggy Barn quilt store outside of Reardan.  Now there's a quilt store that has lovely, gorgeous fabrics.  It's chalk full of Kansas Troubles type palettes and wonderfully muted and subdued fabrics that are obviously grayed and browned down versions of what I'm having to work on for this project.  Okay, okay, obviously the colors above are part of the challenge for ME, which will no doubt be extremely rewarding in the end....

I'm a Wizard at Math

Let's just say that there is a very good reason I haven't attempted mitered corners since the year 2007.  

I had BARELY enough of the red to cut my original strips.

Except that hmmm, I seem to have made a mistake....

This is the UNnecessary part of the strips I had to cut off.

Which would make the Pepsi in the background less of a prop.

Proof that I was determined to get something right before the day was done.

Although I kept referring to my book, I spaced off an important step.  Natch!  If ever I'm going to have issues, it'll be with something that in the finished product would make it look like I actually know what I'm doing.:)  (This is not Harriet Hargrave and Sharyn Craigs fault!)  Still, being the determined quilty person I love to be, I persevered, and after a quick break to guzzle the Pepsi my lovely husband brought me, I made it through to the part where I can finally sew those rotten strips together.  *Tip--if you cut your original strips correctly, you won't have those mile long edges to deal with! I carefully folded the extra strips up and put them into a ziplock bag to keep for a future project.  Trust me, those will show up in another quilt some day just because.:)

A Year of Quilty Blogging

I have had my quilt blog for just over a year now. Does that mean I can finally quit with the hand written journals already? I love, love, love the fact that, if I remember, I now have pictures that visually record the various stages of my quilting journey. Also, in a happy coincidence, instead of writing about each quilt at the point of completion only, many of my ideas, inspirations, motivations, learning curves (and false starts too) are recorded throughout the life of each quilt, which sometimes take me a year or two (or three!) from start to finish. There are things I'd like to do better with (get rid of the run on sentences maybe? ), pictures I wish I'd have taken (more please), and the unbidden Blogger guilt to deal with. I hereby, solemnly profess to take up the 'Blogging Without Obligation' motto because I don't want to feel any pressure whatsoever with my on-line quilty journal. Trying too hard has almost made me quit more than once in previous months. That and the occasional comment. I'll just say it straight out. I love and adore comments, but they seriously freak me out. My blog is public because I am an unashamed quilt blog lurker and I want to extend the same courtesy to my fellow 'everyday' quilters; however, when I have proof positive that somebody has checked MY blog out? I freak, plain and simple. It's completely unnerving to lay out my good and (sometimes exuberantly) bad quilty process/product out in front of everyone in Bloggee land to judge! Okay, I know, I KNOW most people aren't really judging. They, like me, are mostly cruising around to find someone that 'speaks' the same language, makes the same sort of quilting decisions, and has some form of the same quilty compulsive, obsessive disorder that seems to affect me--validation that WE are the normal ones and the ones supremely uninterested in quilty stuff are the weirdos. Do not scoff at this comfort!*wink So I will continue to open up my blog to the strangers, the lurkers, to the learner bees, the perfectionists, the wonkiness quilters, the quilt-by-the-rules traditionalists, and all the other myriads of everyday quilters that put themselves out there all year long to provide inspiration to the masses and expect nothing in return. Bring on the next year of blogging! And please! Don't be afraid to comment. I will overcome.:)

Not Enough Room on the Wall

It's Spring break around here--lots of sleeping in and weird hours. I took a huge leap (for me)and started cutting into my solid fabrics without a pattern. This is not my favorite way to make a quilt, but for some reason baby quilts occasionally develop that way for me. Obviously I don't have enough room on the wall for my idea, but it's giving me room to get started. I think the left and right sides of my brain constantly struggle for supremacy in the quilting room because I am NOT naturally creative. Oh well, I'm gonna keep after it until one or the other side admits defeat.:)

Little Miss Plain Jane

This is the red/cream & blue quilt with sugar bowl blocks I was working on last summer and fall. I had big plans to put a deep wide border on it with one of those wonderfully beautiful swags on it. I've always wanted a quilt with one of those things, just because.:) Anyway, I've pulled this top out a dozen times and laid fabric down beside it, draping it here and there in an imaginary swag and it just never fit. The quilt seems too busy, scrappy and maybe too simple too. Too ordinary? I don't know, but I refuse to put that much labor into a quilt top that simply will not appreciate the effort. So, yesterday I rummaged around and found a stack of dark blue fabrics to piece together and add as a plain 6" border. AND? I love it. It works perfectly for me somehow and just pulls it all together. Little miss Plain Jane I guess.*smirk I really admire a quilt that stands up for itself......

Medallion Quilt Frustration

I am making progress on my medallion repro quilt--Finally! This last border has been very frustrating. I had to put it up for awhile and just let it simmer. You know when something looks flat or uninspiring? Well, this top was starting to lose it's spark and I hate it when I can't figure out why. I was starting to wonder if the quilt top was DONE, move on woman and get over it. lol! Then, I pulled it out a couple days ago and starting playing around with the fabrics, re-introducing the unfinished border segments I already gave the old heave ho to, and trying to find my missing link. I ended up flipping the red and black triangles so that the red touched up against the purple, pulling a strong dynamic turquoise (which I was determined not to use in this quilt) into the very center of the quilt--see the little circle dead center?, and getting rid of my salmony pink I was getting ready to use on the next border. Ughhh, what was I thinking? Anyway, the turquoisey blue gives the quilt a punchy, much needed, 'Zing' and makes my black triangles look more 'black' and less watered down like they were looking before. If I can transition into my next border like I intend to, this quilt will be better than I even hoped. My mistake was in thinking that I could replicate a picture of an old quilt instead of simply using it for inspiration.:)

Too Cheap

It seems like such a long time ago, but starting out I was very resistant to buying fabric in quilting stores. The fabric was so incredibly expensive compared to Walmart and JoAnne Fabrics! I was convinced that I would NEVER be seduced into buying fabric that was eight and nine dollars a yard. lol! So naive and simple minded. Now I am a fabriholic every chance I get and I rarely, rarely buy fabric at JoAnne Fabrics--too cheap.:)

Just One More Quilt

I think during my first several years of quilting I was Very easily influenced. If I read a book that heavily discouraged using sashing, I suddenly developed an aversion to sashing. If I read a book that pushed pieced borders as the only civilized way to quilt, I decided borders were necessary for each and every quilt I finished. Now that I've settled into my adult years of quilting (lol!) I am trying to figure out my own personal style and what it is that interests Me. (Peer pressure gets me every time.*wink) Hmmmm, you know I think it varies depending on what reason I'm making the quilt, the fabrics chosen, who I'm making it for and all sorts of other reasons---and that's okay. Really, really, seriously OKAY. Why should someone else be allowed to dictate what is appropriate and acceptable for me and my quilts anyway? I am slowly trying to debunk all these RULES that are lurking around in my head. It's such a trial too. I have to keep proving my theories by making just one more quilt. And then maybe just one more after that....

Putting Things In Perspective

In order to recognize what I've accomplished and where I've come from, I am posting a picture of what I consider my first quilt. I sewed a couple very, very simple baby quilts prior to this quilt, but this was my very first full size, pieced block quilt EVER!! I finished this in November of 1995. Previous to making this quilt, I was an avid cross stitcher and I had been making a few of my clothes for probably 10 or 12 years. I had found some quilt books at the library that I found myself checking out over and over again. They were published by a local quilter named "Marsha McCloskey"! You have to understand that I was only a few years married with a young toddler and quite, quite limited funds. Quilting classes were completely out of the realm of possibility and besides, I'd been sewing my own clothes for years, so I wasn't totally unprepared for the task. hehe I bought my five pieces of fabric at JoAnne Fabrics and came home and cut this quilt out with my scissors and traced paper templates. Understanding the quilt directions was bad enough, but buying the fabric alone was a nightmare! I was used to matching colors in that decorating/80's way and I just about threw up my hands and gave up several times before I even left the store with my purchase. Considering that I had a very active toddler at this point, I must have been very determined.:) However, I persevered and managed to get to the point where I had all my rail fence blocks cut out and pieced together, then sewn together into a quilt top. Then I was stuck. No money for batting. I was absolutely terrified to scrape together the money to buy some and THEN POSSIBLY RUIN IT!! I ended up laying my quilt top over the front of a comforter I had with a tear in the top fabric and pinning it with my large diaper pins--maybe a dozen of them? (I did all this while my husband was away from home working somewhere--I didn't want any input whatsoever from anyone, anywhere.*wink Miss Independence ya think?) I had a vague idea from years and years ago of watching someone tie a quilt with yarn, so I decided to go for it. That turned out well, so I determined that I'd take my excess quilt top fabric and pull it over to the back, turn it once and stitch it on the machine. I was exhilarated and sweaty and also extremely aware of how much I really needed to learn.sigh! Who knew I could be so resourceful? Certainly not me. I am always, always a chicken heart when I have to throw off my security blanket and step out into the great UNKNOWN.:)

What Is Folk Art?

I remember when I first realized that there was a 'folky' style of quilting. I was in a quilting book club and somehow I ended up with a book by 'Country Threads' one month. It was full of applique, country charm and this folky touch that I absolutely drooled over. Not even knowing how to do the simplest applique, it was painful to look through this book and feel so extremely intimidated and inexperienced. I started searching for more of that style of quilting in books, magazines and patterns, but it was hard to come by or had a fake quality that turned me off. What exactly is folk art anyway? And then to bring that question to quilting? It's definitely not all about the weird shaped animals and crude patterns. I know it when I see it and anymore, I just try to give my quilts PERSONALITY, if you know what I mean.:) Mostly I've figured out that the 'folk' seems to be in the details and variation from the normal is good....

Scary Solid Fabrics

I haven't posted in forever--too much stuff going on and no time to blog. I have finally been working on my antique medallion quilt again, the picture I have posted at the side of my posts. I'm adding black half circles to the edges of my inner border, kind of a scallop look. It's amazing how modern this quilt looks when it's really just a close replication of a hundred year old quilt. It'll be interesting to see how modern it looks as I continue adding all the borders. I picked up some very nice (read flat out fabulous!) solid fabrics to add in because they were the exact colors I've been looking for. Hmmm, solid fabrics are so scary to me.:) Hopefully it'll all work out as beautifully as the inner section has. This has been such an interesting way for me to create a quilt--no pattern, just a picture. I've only done this one other time and now I'm wondering why I don't do it more often....

My Traveling Quilt

This is my traveling quilt. I made it from a American Patchwork and Quilting Magazine pattern. It is a really lovely quilt, although not quite as color balanced as I'd like. I hand quilted it in a fan design--the first time I ever attempted that particular pattern and I'm hooked! I love it. Very easy and so nice looking. But!!! Big BUT--on two of the star blocks, my 'air erasable' marking pen did not disappear like it should have. I have done everything I know to do and it is unfortunately a permanent part of my quilt. So, I've been trying to find a different brand of air erasable quilt and in the mean-time I'm using a white pencil from the art store. The permanent marks are why this quilt has become my traveling quilt. No big trauma if it gets something spilled on it!! I have to have a traveling quilt because I freeze with air conditioning and my husband and I are polar opposites when it comes to compromising on a comfortable temperature.:)

So Needy

I didn't enter any quilts in the fair this year, although normally I do. I have been so disappointed the last couple years by the judging. It seem so arbitrary and inconsistent. It feels like the group of women who do the judging lay the quilts out and say yes! We love this quilt! It needs to be our grand champion/reserve quilt this year and then, they maybe, maybe look at the technical details. Maybe. And I'm NOT a perfect quilter. But I do have thread on my floor and that proves that I AM a quilter!! I just decided this year that I don't NEED ribbons and such things--that's so materialistic and needy.*wink I just need find more time to quilt.:)