All the 2021 Finish-It-Up Details and Looking Ahead At What's Next

It was a strange, bewildering year. A lot of us yo-yoed between depression and keeping our head down, just trying to get through. Why even bother with anger when the energy could be much better spent stitching our way to some sort of tranquility? Once again, I have been ever so grateful for this colorful, fascinating, soul-soothing hobby of mine. Though I often felt like the days were aimlessly drifting by, the 2021 finished quilts tell the real story. These hands of mine were busy, busy, busy....

I've been feeling a wee bit guilty about one particular quilt that never made it out of the quilting queue, but hey! What about that HST Medallion quilt? Huh? It finished at 102" square and the whole thing is hand quilted. Woohoo! And then I made up for all that effort by continually choosing out quilt tops that seemed easy as pie to hand stitch. Hmm... 

The baby quilts kinda took precedence this year as one of my nieces, my sister-in-law and also our daughter-in-law all had new additions to their families. The other baby quilt finished this year was the boy quilt. Of course, everyone decided to have girls this one teensy moment when I was actually on the ball and thinking ahead.

Another quilt that somehow insinuated itself into the line-up was Rhi's quilt. It was the lap quilt my oldest daughter asked me to make, starting from a cut up sundress she wore in her middle school years. It's one of the few quilts I've made with a large-ish amount of green included. One that actually turned out to be relatively successful. Yay me! Given another half dozen or so of 'green quilt attempts' and the dial might eventually be turned up to 'amazing looking'. lol  Working with green can be hard!

Okay, Details please!:

If you're wondering, the past year saw me bring a grand total of 16 quilts, plus a slew of doll quilts to fruition. Slightly less than in years past, but not too shabby considering that our family hosted a wedding and also had a new grandchild! I hoped to bring down the number of quilt tops languishing in the quilting queue, but alas, that number stayed fairly stable at 23. Apparently I reliably alternate the act of finishing up, with all kinds of excuses to start anew. See my worried face? Yeah. Neither do I.

Here's the 'finished' quilt statistics that I'm always looking for at this time of year:

• 11 Doll quilts 
• 4 Baby quilts
• 5 Lap-sized quilts
• 7 Bed-sized quilts
• 13 of the quilts were hand quilted
• 2 of the quilts were mixed hand and machine quilted
• Only 1 quilt was totally machine quilted {plus all the doll quilts}

Another number I generally keep track of is how many quilts are given away. This year saw me gifting 12 quilts, either gently used or new. As usual, there were/are mixed emotions in giving away so many of the quilts that I've poured myself into, and no doubt, spent countless hours working on. Some people are easier to gift quilts to than others and I'd never suggest it's a mandatory thing. I'll just link to an article written in 2013 by Mary Fons where she makes the point that 'Quilts are love, manifested.' When we find the perfect person {or reason} for one of our quilts, it's truly a beautiful thing.

As for what's on board for the new year? 

• More from-the-stash quilting for sure. I'm sincerely hooked--line and sinker. It's beginning to get more and more challenging as certain colors and tones are starting to be depleted. Still, I rather enjoy the adventure of make-do-till-you-can-make-it-work. 
• Absolutely more focus on specific colors where the stash tote lids don't close as well as they should. Gonna have to bite the bullet and attack browns and tans at the minimum. {Whether I want to or not.} Grr.. How oh how to make that seem fun?
• There is still an ever-growing list of applique projects that I'm yearning to dive into. Most are very simplistic with lots of repeats. Yawn.... I don't know why this is so appealing to me, but who cares? If it drives me forward, then I say it's probably worth the effort and needs to happen.
• I don't think there was a single project started from the scrap bin last year. That needs to change. Scrap bin quilts are just too interesting to write off completely. The main thing holding me back is the sheer amount of work involved in the doing.
• The Adhoc. Improv. Quilting party is still ongoing, and in fact, there is a brand new challenge issued for the new year. Definitely one that I intend to dive into, especially as this one pertains to playing with color. Should probably {deliberately} choose a color palette that includes brown...
• As usual around here, squirrel projects tend to beget other squirrels. 2021 will undoubtedly see me continuing on in some form of series work, whether it be playing with the cut-outs from behind my circle quilts or adding appliqued tulips in a slightly different style and shape than used before. Probably gonna see another basket quilt or two, and maybe even another log cabin quilt. The world can always use yet another log cabin quilt, right?
• More hand quilting with perle cotton thread is a given, at least until the outside world settles down into something more 'normal' and truck-loads less stressful. Oh, who's kidding who? I'm gonna hand quilt until my hands give out or I get too old too see. The thing is, I'm not going to worry about trying to push myself into more and more finishes with that faster method of machine quilting. Especially during this particular season of my life. The only time I don't crave snacky things is when my hands are busy with a quilt in the hoop. Can you imagine how large a person I'd be but for this craft? Uh huh. Bet you thought we all got the extra padding from the extra quilting time....

On a different note, after deliberately shedding a few minor responsibilities this past year, I have now allowed myself to be talked into doing a short series of quilt meetings with our church group. We will be making a simple, scrappy, improv. sort of baby {or sm. lap sized} quilt from start to finish, with yours truly as the teacher. Ahhhh... What a muddle that will be. Part of me doesn't want to do this at all. Period. End of story. But the other part of me thinks that it's important for women to have connections. Interactions. Community. Doing that while creating can be enormously nourishing to the body and soul, which obviously, might be a boon after the past two years?

I thought we'd have three or four women at most who were interested, but as of yesterday, we're up to ten.*sigh  All ages and states in life and involving all levels of quilting and/or sewing experience. The only stipulation I made is that everyone need know how to competently sew a straight stitch and be able take care of their own sewing machine issues. Yikes! So far out of my comfort zone with this. Though I'm not 100 percent an introvert, I'm way more of an introvert than an extrovert which makes this feel a little painful. And I personally hate to be told what to do in quilting. How can I 'teach' a method without doing that? So many questions. Am currently trying to walk through the entire quilt project and make notes; emphasis on the basics and trying to leave room for flexibility wherever possible. Wish me luck!

About Ready To Turn the Page To the New Year!

Got the Christmas Stars quilt into the hoop. Finally! I've been running so far behind on where the quilt line-up 'should be' this year that I just wanna shake my head. Not making a lot of progress on plowing through the completed quilt tops 'cuz I'm too busy making new.

Christmas Stars next up in the hoop

No matter. Christmas Day might be behind us, but I'm still very much in the mood to work on a quilt that looks like this. I made a total of four Christmas-look quilt tops within the last year and a half. Just to hand quilt during the holidays! This was one of the first two attempted and probably the most obviously holiday looking.

Almost ready to pin...

Very poor planning for fitting the individual blocks inside the quilting hoop though.*wink  How inefficient is this? Mostly I just get a larger background square into the hoop and then pull off the side clamps whenever they get in the way of stitching on the stars. So annoying to move the hoop every half an hour or so.

Keeping the stitching simple on this one!

And it always feels wonderful to have a true blue, absolutely finished quilt to finish out the year. This one has such a cozy vibe, it could have happily been laying across my lap for another week or two and I wouldn't even have cared. Love all the scrappy feels.

Strippy Triangles is a finish!

It was tricky to get try and get a good pic of the full quilt, so this will have to do. I'm sure it would be soo much better if I managed to get the quilt properly arranged during that 20 minutes of perfect lighting we seem to have this time of year!

Lots and lots of triangles

It took me almost three evenings to finally figure out exactly how those long skinny gray strips were going to have to be hand quilted. I tried vines with leaves, vines with berries, straight lines, and then finally ended up with a double stitched wavy vine without any extras at all. Still wasn't 100% sure until there was several stitched frames to look at. Okay. That should do it!

Hand quilting for the win!

All along I thought the binding would have to be black, but then.... Nope! The quilt wanted red for some reason. Good thing there was enough of the right colors hanging around in the stash totes or this would have had to be delayed for quite awhile. Fabric shopping is not exactly on the priority list right after the holidays, though of course I wish it was. No gift cards for Christmas this year, but I really can't complain. My youngest daughter gifted me with a box of Valdani perle cotton thread.*sigh  I'm so in love.... Would it be silly to design an entire quilt around a variegated thread color?

All ready for cuddling

Also included in this end-of-the-year post is the very last completed quilt top, Crossroads. Once I got the applique out of the way, then it was only a matter of cutting out the sashing strips and finding time to sew the rows.

Just a little underwhelming

As you can see, I was trying to stick fairly close to the antique quilt inspiration this time. Not ever exactly, but hopefully my interpretation rings true for the overall spirit of the quilt! How boring if it was a spitting image! This quilt has been in a couple different books I believe, but where I found it is: 'Quilts. An American Heritage' by Terri Zegart, a book published in 1994. I literally paid a dollar for at a quilt show guild booth a couple years ago. 

Taking another look at the original Inspiration

At first, I was just a little disappointed with the wispy, fade-away look it had {see first picture}. If you remember, I had a little play at this very same inspiration with this previous quilt, and somewhere along the way, the vibe of that particular quilt had went sideways on me too. In that case, I just shrugged and went with it. Basically, I was thinking 'Wow, here we go again! Just cannot seem to get this quilt figured out!'

Playing with border ideas

Since border additions are like my secret little addiction, I almost instantly talked myself into adding a blue/peachy pink triangle border. I mean really, before I even gave it any other serious thought, there I was doing the math and auditioning for the most likely scenario. Then I sorta stepped back from it all and thought, 'What am I doing?' A pieced border was going to blow this whole quilt vibe into a million pieces!

So much better with the subtle-y scrappy but plain border

So I folded the quilt top up and purposefully left it on a slow simmer for awhile. Sometime just before I fell asleep that night {the subconscious can work so fast!}, it occurred to me that maybe, maybe? the quilt might welcome a slightly larger, but definitely darker surround of fabric. Hmmm... And something like that probably wouldn't ruin the lovely feeling the original maker had so successfully ended up with. Of course I wanted to immediately run upstairs and check the idea out, but decided that was a very poor idea. Would probably freak everybody in the house out if mama got busy in the quilt room at 1:30 in the morning...

Ahh.. Surely you can see that this make-do, pieced but plain, border looks so much better already. You'll never believe how ugly the darker, almost dingy peachy pinks {mauve?} looked all by their lonesome! It was almost scary to even properly audition them. But attached to the quilt? They are Beea-utiful! Such a wonderful, lovely complement to the rest of the quilt. So very glad that I hit pause and took a few extra minutes to think it all through.

Still trying to learn what the secret really is!

It's always so exciting when the perfect solution makes itself known and all the cranky quilt problems can just drift away. I totally have a soft spot for these antique quilt interpretations that I've been dabbling with now for several years. I always think that if I can just successfully interpret a few of these fabulously unpretentious quilts {unpack their secrets}, then in some mysterious way, the look/feel/spirit of these quilts will somehow rub off onto mine. I'm earnestly trying because these are the best of best quilts to me. 

Now I'm dreaming up ideas for the cream fabric cut-outs from behind these gold circles. Which absolutely needs to be a series, right? Because there's definitely gonna be a quilt from those cut-out circles next. I mean, why not? Happy Happy New Year to All! We'll probably be having a quiet evening at home this year by ourselves, just me and the husband. Sounds good to me!

Still in the Applique Groove

The Crossroads blocks sort of jumped to the head of the line. They just weren't happy hanging out in the handwork bag any longer. I'm having so much fun stitching these down though! Love the fact that the circles are not meant to be perfect, never will be, don't wanna be, the end.

Crossroads blocks on the wall

When I was sewing the background of the blocks together, the scrappy piecing didn't seem especially impressive. I definitely second guessed myself more than once! Now that the applique is coming along, I remember why the mixed fabric backgrounds appeal to me so much. It's the make-do vibe that makes so much of the warm and fuzzy vibes happen around here. And the blocks were too big to do all one piece fabric anyway, seeing as how I tend toward fat quarter cuts....

An Amish look for the applique

The cut-out circles from behind the crossroads applique are entirely too sweet to throw away. Because of the piecing, I have to go back and reinforce all the seams where it's newly cut. That's not slowing me down at all! I've already been playing with several ideas for a brand new project using these cut-outs. It's just soooo irresistible! The motif in the picture below is probably the winner. Love the spunkiness of that particular flower, whatever it is. Tulip? Lily?

Or something with more attitude...

All the applique is finished up on the pear blocks now. The light gray background fabrics was possibly a huge mistake, but I'm gonna do my best to make things work out regardless. It just changes up where I thought the challenges were focused at in the quilt!

A stack of pear blocks

And though it was a busy, whirlwind sort of Thanksgiving weekend, I did manage to squeeze in just enough hand quilting to move this quilt out of the hoop earlier this week. After all the initial angst about how best to do the stitching, it simply soaked up tons of texture from the hand quilting! Yay! Binding is already sewn on by machine and hopefully there will be a window for hand stitching on this later this month.

Bullseye Medallion ready for binding work

The next quilt in the hoop should be a Christmas-look quilt, but the heart wanted this one. The soft vibe of this scrappy quilt was calling out very loudly and so really, what else is there to do but get it in the hoop? I've fussed with the initial stitching on this one for three nights now and am getting close to being satisfied. It's terribly hard sometimes to 'see' in that first stitching, but some colors of thread just look so very wrong. 

Strippy Triangles

I know that once I figure out that first hoop, the rest should be smooth sailing. Crossing my fingers this quilt will be super relaxing to turn to in the cold December evenings! If you're interested in making a similar looking quilt, I posted some rough directions here. It's a very fast and easy quilt to put together if you don't overthink things. Which I NEVER do! hehe

Loving the old fashioned look to this one

So that's that. I'm thinking about doing a Christmas applique giveaway again this year {am I crazy?} and can't decide between two Love Apple designs. What do you think, the older one, or the newer one? 

Making It Up As I Go Along

The hardest part of blogging lately is actually making the effort to write the post. I usually don't wanna these days! Then, deciding what to touch on, what to highlight and even more importantly, what to leave alone. Ughh. Does anyone even care about quilting these days? Such crazy, crazy days indeed. Oh well. Quilting is what makes me happy, so here goes!

Strippy Triangles

This is the quilt that was started impulsively back at the first of May. Mostly I just wanted to chain piece and not think about design. It's now a completed quilt top, so yeah. Really fast finish for me! I've had the fabric stacked up together and simmering though, for well over a year. That was during a time when I purposefully dove very deep into the red stash tote in response to the Red is a Neutral AHIQ challenge. The first two fabric pulls of red didn't end up quite making the grade {here's the challenge quilt with the fabrics that won out} but I couldn't just dump these straight back in. Oh no. There was just something about them that pulled on my heartstrings.

A completed quilt top!

Maybe it was because there was a small piece of a leftover plaid from my youngest sons baby years {do you know how little fabric is in a long sleeved toddler shirt?}. Regardless, it was the 'go-to' fabric stack when I recently wanted something simple and low-key to immerse myself in.

Loving the soft, mellow look to this one

I am so very satisfied how successfully the lighter areas of the quilt turned out! I consider this quilt a victory because... one of my worst default decisions is usually to pick a whole stack of fabric in a similar color with very little variation in tone or pattern. Something I'm working on changing, little by little! This time, I deliberately stretched and made sure to have better range of colors, albeit in the light to very light spectrum. There are creams, lighter pinks, light grays and in addition, very light blues. If you look closely, you will also see that on the rare occasion, medium-dark pink fabrics from the darker areas were purposefully used in place of a light triangle. But overall? The lighter area definitely reads 'light' {without being choppy}, even though up close there's more going on than perhaps is normal with my efforts.

Definitely got an old fashioned look and vibe!

I kind of love the energy and depth it adds to this sweet looking quilt! Those unexpectedly placed pink triangles really aren't dark enough to fully stop the eye from perusing the quilt. None of that, 'Hey! Those are in the wrong spot!' moments, it just adds an amusing utilitarian touch. I like to think of it as whimsical, unstudied, and kind of old fashioned looking! Basically, I just divvied the cut triangles up into 18 stacks of half light and half dark and started sewing, one light triangle to one dark triangle, one after another. And then once in a great while, threw a darker pink over into the 'light' pile just for the fun of it!

Don't what I'd do without the railing to hang my rows on
and keep them sorted! 

After I got the initial pairs sewn up and ironed, then I started joining those pairs together. Then four with four, until a whole row was able to be sewn together. The most important thing being that there was no repeat of fabric sewn closely together. Otherwise I just grabbed and sewed. Once I got larger sets together then I quickly laid them out of the floor to see if the row looked okay, then sewed it up and moved on to the next row!

The page you see pictured below has been in one of my inspiration binders for close to a decade. Though I didn't closely follow the pattern directions  {my triangles are larger for one}, it's from the 2009 July/Aug. issue of  'Fons and Porter' Love of Quilting magazine. For a rough idea of how to make a similar quilt to mine, cut out approx. 100-5" squares of dark fabrics and 100-5" squares of lighter fabrics. {I think I had to go back and cut just out just a few more when I decided to add extra rows!}. Cut them on the diagonal and then cut on the diagonal again. Sew light triangles to dark triangles in sets {iron with a light touch!}, until you have 16 rows measuring 85" plus. Sew 2 rows measuring approx. 65" for the top and bottom of quilt.

Cut 15 strips @ 2 1/2" x 82" in whatever alternate strip fabric/color you like. The fabric that worked best for me was a woven so I intentionally cut my strips on the lengthwise grain for better stability. Since I had slightly less than 2 1/4" yards available, this meant that I had to cut an extra strip and sew length to length, then later measuring and cutting each strip at the desired 82".

Lay out all the pieced rows in the configuration shown below {light triangles to the outside} or perhaps like I did, {dark triangles to the outside}. Though the quilt is very scrappy, I did try my best not to have identical fabrics lined up in rows exactly side by side. This meant of course, that I had to change out pieced rows here and there until the color flow to the quilt worked the best.

Seeds of inspiration

As most of you know, my piecing isn't ever strictly precise, and so I took the {deliberately} extra long pieced rows and fiddled with them a bit at this placement stage. Moved them a little up or down so as to further distract from the fact that they were never going to match up in straight lines at the point of the triangles all across the width of the quilt. That meant that I cut a little off the top of some and a little off the bottom of others, whatever it took to make them all 82", but still have a good 'mismatched' flow overall. The one thing that I did NOT want to see happen was for them all to start out with an intact triangle at the top of the row, and then end up cut off willy-nilly across the bottom of the quilt! Then it would be altogether too obvious that I was a failure!

The top and bottom pieced rows ended up being cut at 62 1/4", but really, it's best if you measure the width of your quilt in three places, and then take the average before cutting. One thing that you might like to know too, is that I did not trim all the pieced rows to an exact width of 2 1/2". What I did do is take a ruler and trim a straight edge alongside both sides, just eyeballing things as I went. After all, it is a utilitarian look quilt, so who really cares? The original quilt in the picture dates back to the late 1800's. What do you want to bet that it isn't perfectly square either!

Cutting up shirts from the closet

On a different note, the new AHIQ challenge has been issued! For the first time in a long time I haven't even finished up the last challenge, but that won't stop me from thinking about the new one. This one is called 'Positive Thinking' and one of the ideas is raiding our closets for the start of a new quilt. Making do is something I love so of course I promptly went looking to see which shirts of mine and my husbands could be spared. Shh... hopefully he won't notice the empty spot in his side of the closet...

Positive Thinking in the works

Then I looked sown at my choices and had to smile. Me thinks this latest quilt top has greatly influenced these particular choices! {Not that I had very much to choose from as we do need to have things to wear} Whatever, I went ahead and ditched the darkest fabric {for now} thinking to uplift the color mood {positive thinking?}, and went looking in the stash totes for another spark. I guess that's going to be orange. Instead of putting the cream stripe {used in the Strippy Triangles quilt} back into the totes, I added it into the stack too. Grabbed a white/clue/orange/pink vintage fabric that never seems to find a good home and just kept flitting around in the stash totes till I felt that little hum of satisfaction. Okay. That's a good start. Will leave it there to marinate until some more definite ideas for a design gels! Will probably end up calling this quilt 'My Happy Place', but only time will tell how it turns out....

Gonna Take Another Brand New Project Just To Get Through...

Some days I can focus and some days it is pretty much impossible. Definitely dealing with some depression over all this, though I know you don't want to hear that. I am not a happy person all of the time, not do I suspect, are you. It appears that we are on the slow-boat to open-up plan here in Washington State. Had to laugh at something Lori posted today about her state. Oh my. Sounds too familiar! On impulse the other day I started a new project. Yep. This could get dangerous as a feel-good activity....

Strippy Triangles , the new project

Just cut a whole bunch of 5" squares in a 'light' grouping of fabrics and also a 'dark' grouping of fabrics. It's got interesting vibe going on that I hope bodes well for the entire look of the quilt. Strippy Triangles is what I'm calling it and the plan is to mix these long triangle rows up between long strips of sashing fabric. Very scrappy antique. So far I have 8 out of 14 sets of the strippy triangles pieced together into stacks of 4-triangle units. Once the longest measurement of the quilt is determined, then I will go ahead and sew those units into long rows. It might all depend on the length of whatever suitable fabric that I find for the alternate sashing strips!

Starting to sew the lengths together

Then I saw a post over on Clare's Instagram. She's doing a QAL for her lovely 'Big Kiss' quilt starting this week. Most QAL's haven't tempted me in the least lately, but this one grabbed my attention.

Big Kiss quilt fabric contemplation

I pulled some likely fabrics from two different, simmering stacks of fabric {made a lovely mess}, and am seriously contemplating making an attempt. The problem is, most of my fabrics are not nearly long enough {she indicated 38" long for the longer pieces} and that might make me change my mind. Maybe. This is a very sweet quilt and one that I have long admired! Just noticed that she has the tutorial posted on her blog now. Hmm... This could be my happy place for this coming weekend. And don't worry. There is a top limit for open-ended projects around here....

I Am a Maker in the hoop...

And, as usual, I am still hand quilting late in the evenings. Not been picking it up quite as early as usual and some nights I am only managing a good solid hour with the hoop. Love how much it is picking up the stitching texture though and am so, so glad that I chose this one for this particular 'time out'.

One of the things that is driving me insane is that we have so very little time to ourselves these days. Love my kids and all, but wowsers. Sure miss those days when we had the occasional evening alone, just me and my better half! Cannot even imagine if we all didn't get along as well as we did! After dinner my husband disappears out to the garage {it's so tidy now!} and the rest of us head to the corners of our home or in the case of one of my kids, out to the garden. Oh well. We definitely can't complain about being lonely, which is apparently something many other people are having to contend with. But no matter which way any one of us are experiencing this, nearly everyone seems to be on the same page with the difficulty of having our existence suddenly narrowed down and tightly controlled. I'll admit, there is starting to be some rebellion, visiting extended family members and running to the store just for ice cream...