So Many Projects

 I've been in a flurry of getting things prepped and ready for 'the next phase' this past couple weeks. With the holidays right around the corner, I know the quilting side of things will slow down and then, if I'm not careful, all the momentum could be long gone.

All the prep work for another
Autumnal Tulips quilt

Right in the middle of all this busyness, there was an email asking me to consider doing a commission quilt. It was a very sweet request which made it hard to say no. After some serious deliberation and a little back and forth with the customer, we settled on a plan of attack. The timing isn't the greatest with everything else going on in our lives, but it's a good challenge! Thankfully I will only be doing the quilt top, so that feels helpful in limiting the overall amount of time involved in reaching a satisfactory conclusion.

Auditioning fabrics

One of the projects that has been nagging at me for a very long time, is the Improv. Hourglass Abstract quilt. I'm one of those people who have a LIST {or two} of open ended projects, which makes it extremely difficult to sincerely 'forget' about any one quilt. It's hard to believe this top has been ready for applique since April and I've just been steadfastly ignoring it.*wince

Auditioning color and shape

I finally got the mojo to dig it out of the project totes and start figuring out the details for the larger applique motifs it always seemed to desire. I knew if it could just get to the point of being ready for hand stitching, then most of my agonizing would be gone. The problem was, this was a large applique endeavor, taking over most of the top of a quilt. It's a time thing really. Did I actually have hours and hours to dedicate to figuring out this one quilt? And eventually, yes. Yes I did. Because I wanted it to happen too badly to let it fade away at the back of a shelf forever.

In transferring ideas from the original drawing into templates, some of the units were large enough that I really struggled with wanting to unnecessarily 'waste' too much freezer paper. It was kind of funny when I happened upon an old roll of Christmas paper and the light bulb went off in my brain! Oh yes! Much better than using smudgy old newspaper sheets!

Christmas paper works too

And it's always kind of interesting cutting out the individual pieces of fabric and laying them onto the quilt. Placement here? Or there? Will this work better? Definitely not that fabric... etc., etc. The process is a little uncomfortable at times, requiring decision after decision after decision. 

Figuring out the details

It can be the silliest of things that take oodles of time. In this case, it was the slivers of narrow fabric over the top of the sun. I'm just not sure if they will look right if they match up too exactly with the lower sun rays. Hmmm...

A very small change

But then I sort of love the way it pulls the eye right into examining the sun so much more closely! It gives a better energy in some ways. Ah..., those dreadful decisions. Love them and hate them. It feels marvelously good to have all the prep work done on the largest sun here, and the vine plus lower leaf units. I won't actually be doing any handwork here until the commission quilt is done and mailed off but this feels like a weight off. I'm so relieved that my procrastination didn't end up making the whole effort feel flat and uninspired. You know how some ideas have an expiration date and you don't even realize it until you're knee deep in trying to successfully implement it? I've learned the hard way that some quilts won't wait forever.

Applique prep ready to go!

In case you're interested, here are the two doodle drawings that ended up competing for design details. As you can see, I chose this first pic.

Inspiration doodles

The second one was very tempting, but I so wanted to have more options for using up the yellow fabrics especially. Also, this sun applique will nicely dovetail with this 2022 AHIQ Prompt. I am very, very behind on completing that particular challenge because there was way too many ideas floating around in my head. Many of us are too aware of how often that can make a sort of paralysis happen in the decision making department. I've been contemplating the merits of both of these designs for literally months now!

Inspiration doodles

Another quick applique project that needed attention was this 'worthy' block. It will probably be the only applique in a entire quilt made up of improv. piecing, but this time I wanted to start here, not with the piecing. This pineapple motif was lifted from a previous quilt made in 2021. That quilt was gifted to one of my DIL's so I get to see it often when visiting. Lets hope the rest of this quilt will be half as interesting as the first one!

Worthy quilt

Also happening in the quilt room was this 'Good Vibes' quilt top coming together. I have wanted to make another awkward tulip quilt for years and years after completing this Spring Forward quilt. There's just something so quirky and endearing about the clumsy lines in an out-of-proportion-tulip-look. 

Good Vibes quilt

Now that I'm looking at this picture though, I am deeply regretting not putting the purple and coral center piecing directly inside of the tulip petals. Wouldn't that have looked sweet poking out of the middle of the flower? Oh well. Not fixing it now! Next up will probably be some sort of outside border because of course I can't resist that particular challenge.

Close up of the large tulips

Something completely unrelated to recent work, but just too cute too pass up.... I happened across this picture of an older quilt of mine with some little hooligans wrestling around on it. This quilt was gifted to a close friend of ours years and years ago. After she passed away, earlier this year, it found its way to one of her sons family home and that's how I stumbled across it on Instagram! 

Monkey Wrench quilt

I love that her family wanted to hang on to the quilt as so many times, the younger generation doesn't have the same attachment as the original recipient. Once, years ago, one of my gifted quilts ended up in a dumpster! Ugghh... Why not give it to a second hand store? And yes, I got permission to post the picture if I made sure not to add names and physical address etc. 

BBI centerpiece

BRAMBLE BLOOM QAL: All of the stitching is now done on my centerpiece which helps me progress on details for the next prompt. I've been working on it, but unfortunately, most of that will have to wait until after the Thanksgiving holiday and all of our out-of-town guests leave to go home. As before, I'm not quite sure how much information to try and provide without dulling things down to the point of exhaustion for the more experienced improv. quilters. It might be best to break it up into two different posts? We'll see.

Anyone who has posted a comment requesting to join the BBI participants list and NOT received a reply back from me via email needs to privately send me an email or drop your email address into a comment here on the blog. Anonymous commenters are a real thing here at Blogger. Please check too as your name might be at the top of the comment, but the email link will have been disabled due to your privacy settings I believe. Which only you can change! Very frustrating for all of us. 

Sorry for the confusion, but the participants list is only for those quilters who choose to publicly share their progress so as to give other participants the chance to go take a look and perhaps receive encouragement /and/or get inspiration for their own work. There are many other quilters who have notified me that they too are silently working on this QAL, but choose not to have social media for whatever reason. I do not and will not ever have a master list of every single quilter who chooses to take part in this--though of course it would be very interesting!

In other news, my husband has been sick for the past week. Naturally, this is absolutely wrecking my schedule, both in preparing the QAL posts and also, getting ready for our holiday company. Boohoo.  So, so thankful that our daughter gets to come home for Thanksgiving and we finally get precious grandbaby hugging time! In fact, all of our kids will be home this year. Love it! I've been trying to pre-bake the rolls and get them all in the freezer this week. So ambitious of me. Using a recipe where you only partially bake them and then cook them more fully the day of? It has to be better than the absolute chaos we usually endure trying to prepare a holiday dinner with only one oven! 

Pics of my Vintage Reproduction in the Local Quilt Show (and a few others)

Today was the 15th annual quilt show in our little town. It's held in a small church and the quilts are quite crowded together with very little room to step back and take a good picture.

Vintage Reproduction

I'm not actually part of the local quilting guild, but they are very generous to open up the quilt show to other local quilters--an open invite actually. I used to be extremely nervous about entering my quilts into the show because my style is so extremely different than theirs, but I loosened up a couple years ago when I realized that at least a few of the guild members seem to enjoy my quilts. There are a million times I've wished I could be a fly on the wall when they hang my quilts. What do they honestly think? hehe Better not to know sometimes! My mom has encouraged me the most, saying, it's always good to have something different to look at, compare with and maybe even shake things up a bit. lol

Vintage Reproduction

The previous picture is actually taken at home--I wanted to show one pic with a closer view of the quilting. I'm really, really happy with the way this quilt turned out. The quilting on the last border about gave me a panic attack after I had gotten it washed and dried. But long story short? I went back and added in a couple hours extra quilting. Now I'm happy. That thing about quilting evenly throughout the entire quilt? It does matter.

Vintage Reproduction

I usually try to enter three or four quilts if I've managed to finish that many in the last year.  My Monkey Wrench is very dark quilt, but I thought is looked very nice regardless. Funny how much lighter it looks without the borders pictured!

Monkey Wrench

I also entered my Antique Medallion quilt which looks happy and bright.....

Antique Medallion

and then of course there is Sew Charming! I definitely wanted to put this fun little scrappy finish in the quilt show too! Had to borrow it back for a few days in order to do that of course!

Sew Charming

Just a few other quilts caught my attention today.  This one was very interesting to me. Love the ladies!

This  30's reproduction quilt looked so sweet and wonderful, especially with the light streaming through the window behind it.

I thought whoever made the star quilt below has an excellent eye for combining complimentary colors.  It really had a lovely zing to it!

Then there was this hexie quilt that I just wanted to bundle up and take home.  I had a horrible time getting a decent picture of it because it kept looking so washed out, but finally I got one close up that shows a little of the quilty goodness that I so admired...

I meant to take a picture of the explanation pinned to this scrappy 'historical' quilt below, but like always, I forgot.  Taking pictures is definitely secondary to checking out the quilts, at least in my book! The story behind this quilt was something about a specific challenge to the quilters involved (possibly the first quilt guild in the town?). I think they got a dollar for every piece of fabric in their block and then the person who had the most pieces in 'her block', got to keep the quilt as well! Talk about incentive!

The block with the least pieces of fabric had 15 pieces I believe (it's the block in the far left corner of the prev. pic). Not too shabby, right?

Well, then you got to looking (they embroidered the number below their blocks) and wow! These ladies got very creative with such a little space!

I adored these blocks with the pieced baskets! They were absolutely fabulous! And the fan below was very sweet too in a blendy, blendy way.

But this lady below? Wowsers, she ended up with 300 pieces of fabric in her block! It was so fun to check this quilt out and see how inventive they all were.  If you look closely, this block below has fans carefully pieced into the corners.  Overall, This quilt was my absolute fave in the whole entire show! So much fun!

So yeah, very enjoyable day! My oldest daughter got first place in the 5k and almost all my kids played on one of the 3on3 teams of basketball. Crazy, busy hot Summer day.  Right now everyone's trying to recover from the 100 degree heat and rest up for the fireworks later on....

The Last Finish of the Year

The Monkey Wrench quilt is officially a 2012 finish!  My house is ready for a complete and thorough clean up after this weekend, but (late) last night after all the company had left, I only focused on binding work.  Blinders on to the disaster of a house!  There is something so incredibly rewarding about putting in the last little bit of work on a quilt!  I am always so baffled to why I ever put it off in the first place.*wink 

It's finished!

Today I washed and dried the quilt to get all that wonderful crinkly goodness to show and look?  It simply won't cooperate and show to it's best advantage at all.  You'll have to take my word for it that after all the love/hate, push and pull of getting this quilt to a proper finish, I am amazed and proud.

Wish I could capture all the goodness of this quilt in a photo!

I wish I had time to do a 2012 re-cap of all of my quilt finishes, but that's not for today.  Till next time, happy quilting and the best of the New Year to all of my readers!

Binding on the Monkey Wrench Quilt (Finally)

I have a house full of company all weekend, but I thought I would try squeezing in a bit of binding here and there.  You never know what can be accomplished in tiny bites of time until you actually try it.  It would be so nice to have one more finish by years end!

Binding on the Monkey Wrench quilt

I have some new binding clips that I'm trying out and already I think they are amazing.  Love them!  The whole family will appreciate not having to search for the lost pins that I always manage to lose during the binding process too.  lol

Getting Close to Another Finished Quilt!

The hand quilting is all finished up now on my Monkey Wrench quilt!  Hard to see the details because of the dark thread I used, but trust me, it's all there.  The binding color was a no-brainer for me this time around.  Plain old black seemed to be the only color that made sense, so why bother fighting it?

Monkey Wrench all ready to start binding.

I'm still not sure why I put the red sashing squares on the outside sashing strips like I did.  Probably because I still hadn't made any decisions about the borders at that point?  Someday I'm sure I'll get a better handle on my decision making skills.*wink

And now there are three!

Here are two more Big Stars that I have made (I previously posted a pic of the top left one).  This is a pattern out of 'Simple Pleasures' by Jan Patek, Alma Allen and Sue Spargo.  Karen over at Log Cabin Quilter recently made another sweet quilt out of this same book that I have considered making for myself.  After looking at the finished product up on my design wall, I'm thinking that I may need to sew a bit slower.  You know, for the smoother curved seam look.  Ahem.  Or maybe give it up completely?  hehe  Now if I can just dig up the courage to sew on the outside curved pieces for these big monsters.....

Making My Own Quilting Template

I finally got the entire center of my Monkey Wrench quilted.  Then.., no compass, no motivation and a queasy feeling about drawing my own cable pattern pretty much stalled me out for longer than I'd care to admit to.  After nagging my husband about finding his compass, begging my kids to borrow one from school (yeah right, mom) and then combing Walmart and coming up zero, I almost gave up entirely on quilting a cable pattern for the borders of this quilt.

The left border is completely quilted.

Hey, I'm a just quitter at heart.*wink  Anyway, something I said one night apparently challenged my husband to look through Walmart for a compass on the way home from work.  He was gloating when he walked through the door with two of them.  I hate gloaters.  And why do men always think that if we need something, two will be better? (Ahem, it's always okay to buy two if it's chocolate or Pepsi.  Just saying.)

So, because I was really, REALLY busy, I put it off for another day and a half before I grudgingly pulled out my Gwen Marston & Joe Cunningham book. This is so not my forte.*whine....  I carefully followed directions and came up with one or two really small football cable things.  Great.  But how to make them big enough for the border?  And that's where I simply couldn't do the follow through.  Math was a grind for me at school.  A's and B's 'cuz I did all my homework, but no real spark of genius or intelligent life here.

The incredible homemade quilting aids.

I was so NOT asking the husband for help at this point. lol  I started folding paper and cutting out freestyle footballs (using up way too much freezer paper) until I had something that looked about right.  With a few little tweaks and measurement checks, I was able to finally come up with a tolerable template.  I used a file folder for the cardboard and my exacto knife to cut the slits.  (Nobody needs to know that the first two slits were terribly difficult because I was using my exacto knife upside down against the blade. hehe)

I decided to make myself a detailed visual aid so that when I was stitching I could have a clear reference point in the event I became confused.  Who, me?  This also seemed like the perfect time to try out my new 'Miracle Marker' my mother bought for me last year.  This quilt is fairly dark and so I need a light colored marker.  Yes--I did test it out previous to marking the entire border and it irons out in literally seconds! Thank goodness for that as I had already marked into my third cable before I realized that the footballs were not supposed to be joined at the ends, but linked together....  Duh!  Very prescient of me to make that visual aid, don't you think?:)

Trying out 'Miracle Marker'.

So, now I have one entire border stitched and I've started on a second one.  Things are moving along very well and I haven't had to remove very many stitches so far.  Apparently the template is a success!  Would I recommend this method to other quilters?  hahahahahahaha  Not if you're anything like me.  On the flip side though, I feel very accomplished and smart now.*wink

(I think) It's a completed quilt top!

On a different note, I added one more border to this particular quilt and now it's being crossed off of the list. I'm totally ready to call it a completed quilt top and stick it away in the drawer.  For now.  I may decide to add another border one day in the future.  Or not.

A New Basket Project

I have two basket blocks sewn together and a very rough cut basket handle I'm still in the process of evaluating. I'm not sure this quilt is going to have picture perfect seams, grain-lines etc. so this decision will be key to emphasizing the 'not perfect' thing going on.  I may even make each basket handle different.

Blocks for the Vertical Basket Quilt

I've had the base blocks cut out for over a month, but didn't want to start in on the sewing until I cleared away a couple other UFQ's.  My applique projects are stacking up so high, I just couldn't resist some sewing machine time.  Vroom, vroom.*wink

Trying to get the pieces organized...

This Monkey Wrench quilt is really, really getting to me.  I have enjoyed the time I spend on it tremendously and I'm not quite sure why.  No pressures?  No expectations?  Great fall colors?  Probably just the timing of starting in on it.  Sometimes a quilt top perfectly fits the current mood.  In fact, my husband teases me about how dark some of the last quilts I've worked on are.  Are they representative of my mood?  Hmmm.....  Life is definitely full of lots of changes and challenges lately.

Monkey Wrench in progress

I dug out my go-to hand quilting book 'Quilting With Style:  Principles For Great Pattern Design' by Gwen Marston and Joe Cunningham.  They make this border cable idea sound so well, 'do-able' that I'm almost embarrassed at how nervy I am to try drawing my own.  The point is, what am I going to lose?  If I get it right and figure it all out on my own, I'll feel very accomplished and resourceful.  If not, I can always order a stencil and then (carefully and discretely) bemoan my lack of smarts and intellect to those who would care....

Really?  It's that easy?

Loving the Hand Quilting

Oh!  I meant to link this post up to Kathy's Slow Stitching Sundays!  Can't believe I forgot!

After last weeks frustrations, it feels really, unbelievably good to get in some hand quilting.  I love this hoop.  Perfect placement means I can quilt two sides of the border and one entire block before moving my hoop.  Yay!

Getting in some good therapy....

The plan is still to do very simple quilting on the block--mostly just defining the Monkey Wrench piecing and then leave it be.  Lately I seem to want to do more quilting than that, but it's not completely necessary and I would like this quilt to be a little less stiff (and maybe drape better).  I'm seeing it as more of a snuggle quilt actually.  Lori over at Humble Quilts recently finished a quilt with a triple border similar to mine on this quilt.  Her cable quilting worked beautifully on the border and I'm contemplating trying that with this quilt.  We shall see.  I am still mulling around the possibilities!

A Finish and a New Hand Quilting Effort

I finally completed my little Bow-ties table runner!  Just sat down with my daughter one evening and hand stitched the binding on while we visited.  She was stitching a heart shaped crazy patch on one of her sweatshirts, but had lots to talk about (start of a new school year and all).  Before I knew it, my little quilt was finished and I was looking at it like, what? where?  Too funny.

Little Bow-ties

So...., no more delays.  It's time to get serious and put a real quilt back in the hoop again.  This Monkey Wrench quilt top was completed at least three years ago and it is absolutely the next in line to be quilted.  I was extremely happy with how it turned out at the time, but you know how new projects can begin to overshadow the old ones?  Uh huh.

Monkey Wrench

My intentions are to keep the hand quilting very simple, but I am at a complete loss at what to do with the border.  Hopefully my subconscious will be busy figuring that out while I'm working on the rest of it.*wink