Working Through the Steps

It was great to see Antique Crows finally come together for a true blue finish! The hand quilting wasn't always the most fun as I was stitching on the inside of each of the 'points'. That's what I wanted for the look and texture though, so just kept slogging along regardless of extra layers of fabric. 

Antique Crows for the finish!

The backing is a bought-on-clearance, Kaffe, woven, stripe fabric. Makes for a great drape and feel and especially wonderful for summer! I'm already using this on our bed although it's a bit girly compared to the colors I usually prefer in our bedroom. Just. Could. Not. Resist.

Full view

This was a quilt where I really pushed myself to use busier prints than normal. It's a little frustrating to see fabrics stacking up in the totes and never quite feel comfortable enough to use them. I'd been wanting to make a New York Beauty quilt for years and that has always been just a little beyond my comfort zone as well. 

Love the mismatched circles....

Finally, in the year 2017, I admitted to myself that the New York Beauty was probably never gonna happen and instead decided to draft this more simplistic, chunkier-look block. Hey, why not? I started with cream quarter circle cut-outs from behind some other {previous} quilt and that was it, I was charmed into following my curiosity. This particular stack of fabric caught my eye and I was off and running. Catch me if you can!

Such a happy, fun look!

Like most everything else, it was a lot harder in my imagination than it was in reality. I'm so very glad that I made up my own block and ended up with this folksy, happy looking quilt! The colors may be a tad modern looking, but overall the vibe seems fairly cozy which of course is always my end goal. The added whimsy of the blocks coming together into a mismatched circle totally makes me smile. How could it get any better?

Spring Flowers

Lots of jumping around from project to project this past week. There are other things that I should be working on, but these flowers went ahead and pulled me in instead. At this point, I have all the stems and flowers stitched down and now just need to attack the leaves.

Seedpod Flower quilt

Uh huh. That seemed rather boring and so I changed directions altogether. This is an oldish project that I last worked on around this time last year. Well, that's not entirely true because I'm pretty sure that I cut some of the blocks out in December. It just never gained any real traction because of that border around the Seedpod flower. It has always been just a little bit wrong and thus, made the whole project rather confusing.

Starting to put the parts together

So I totally ignored this project in the hopes that it would somehow fix itself. But it didn't. Of course not! Why do some quilts always have to be so unreasonable? Having a rare, relatively empty house over the weekend tipped me over into the red zone as far as guilt goes, though. The centerpiece is just too good to abandon forever. Best get crack-a-lackin' and figure something out! 

The little blocks were oh-so-tedious to sew together. I think there's over 150 of them? I knew they needed to be available for auditioning purposes before making any serious decisions about moving forward. And I was right about needing to have the border attached, whether it was exactly how/what I envisioned or not. That's the point where I had stopped last August. More like froze in total indecision! The way this scrappy block {look} goes together, it seemed critical to have the width measurement for those little blocks in order to feel perfectly okay about moving forward. I do so hate to have an excess of wasted parts and too, I only have a finite amount of appropriate colored fabric to use in this quilt. What's a girl to do?

Why couldn't I just wing it like I do with everything else you ask? I don't know! Everything within resisted so strongly, there seemed to be no other option. If there's one thing I've learned through the years, it's to trust the quilt. Just had to keep tamping down the panic trying to rise up and take it one step at a time. By the time the quilt was at the stage you can see in the last picture, ideas were finally, finally starting to well up in my brain. There's something very palpable about the energy that builds when chain piecing and 'thinking' without really 'thinking' about a specific problem in a quilt. Then, when trying to lay different colored blocks out and balance appropriately with the various fabric strips? It all just sort of gelled. Thank goodness! What about this? How about that? Until all the working parts started making sense as a unit.

So that's where my time and attention has been for several days. I've finally got everything sewed up into rows and a serious applique plan for dealing with the blue border. It isn't very complicated after all, just fussy cutting from a rather small hunk of what used to be a fat quarter. And the width of the border remains exactly the same. No lost time and effort there after all!*sigh  Don't you love it when a difficult quilt starts cooperating?

A Lengthy Post About Summer Finishes and Other Stuff

Okay, wow! This is exhausting trying to learn a new photo editing program. I'm not very good with new techy stuff at all. Or change. In fact, I think this is probably going to be a new chapter in my life all the way around. The new normal is well, just a bit different. My family keeps urging me to continue on with my quilty blogging in spite of the fact that I feel it can't possibly be done 'right' these days.

Some new finishes..

So I'm going to try and lower my expectations, just blog when I can. Not worry about how consistent I am or who might be disappointed. If I disappear for two {or three} weeks then that's just my present life--c'est la vie! Maybe there'll be times I can surprise us all and get in a couple posts a week too. 

Low Volume Scrappiness

Or maybe I'll combine several posts into one, like today. Three finishes this summer! Wowsers. And I thought there was little to no quilting going on. But here they are. The scrappy 'make-piece' quilt was a fast one. Relatively. The quilt top was finished a couple years ago, but the sandwiching and machine quilting only took a couple days. The blocks were all  made strictly out of my scrap bin in a low volume experiment. Then I was scratching my head trying to figure out what to do with them. Aha! Put more color with them obviously! And I adore the country, happy look to my quilt. The organic straight line quilting looked better towards the end of the quilting than the beginning. For the first little while I was gritting my teeth and feeling positive I had made a huge mistake. Thankfully it worked to the good and I'm happy as can be about the end result.

Very snuggable, huggable and lovable....

And I'm just thrilled to have my own bow-tie quilt finally all completed and being put to use. You remember all that was left to finishing this one was the binding? This Bow-ties quilt is all hand pieced quilt block and then machine sewn into rows. Sacrilege to the earnest hand piecers but it's what made sense to me at the time and I don't regret it. Here's my original inspiration for those who have chided me lately about not giving credit where credit is due. As if any quilters anywhere {no matter how famous or art school learned they are} ever truly come up with brand new ideas without years of quilty influence. Seriously folks, we don't have to defend their precious creativity. It really should be able to speak for itself if it's truly original! And most of us homegrown quilters do link back quite a lot actually....

The Bow-Tie quilt is done!!!

I did see some bad hand piecing areas when I was doing the hand quilting tho. At first I thought to fix them as I went and then decided, no. Not necessary. This is the first hand pieced quilt I've ever made. and I'm gonna love it, mistakes and all. Besides, working on this quilt helped give me the confidence to make....

Hand quilting texture is the best....

This quilt--my Cactus Basket quilt. I would never have had the courage to sew so many of those diamond shape pieces before the bow-tie quilt. Once I figured out how much simpler some piecing is with hand piecing, well, I was raring to play with a long loved block.

The Cactus Basket Quilt

Learning, growing and trusting in our desire to create takes us many places in quilting. I was able to finish this one quickly even with the chaos in my life because, drumroll.... I first machine quilted in the ditch to stabilize it! Yep, I'm learning to ask first if it's even possible. Honestly I'm not terribly thrilled about the details of where the 'in-the-ditch' stitching meandered out of the ditch, but it's just what it is. This folksy quilt feels so very 'me' regardless. Sometimes I get away from those quilty elements that speak the loudest to {and of} me in my pursuit of something I can't even properly name. Taking this blogging {and piecing} break has given me a much needed new perspective once again.

Loving the lollipop flowers so much.....

It's actually quite refreshing to come back and look through the different quilty projects in all their odd stages. What was I doing here or there? Do I still like it? Does it feel important. Worthy? Will I love it even after it's finished? Am I excited by it or possibly challenged? That can be enough sometimes.

Finally believing --If I can see it, it can be made.....

This break has been good for me in a lot of ways. I'm sure things will be different from here on out, but hopefully not in a negative way. No quilt shows this summer, not a one. I'm still a process quilter at heart and I want to focus more on the in's and out's of  how it all comes together--sometimes magically and sometimes not so much. Working with color and fabric really makes my world a happier place. How about you?