To see or not to see...

Quilting is progressing better now that I can actually SEE again.  I've really had trouble lately seeing what I was hand quilting on my music quilt.  I blamed it on bad lighting, etc., but finally had the 'duh!" moment...I needed new glasses!  My bifocals were failing me, and my non-bifocal hard contacts were TOTALLY failing me.  I just bought my first pair of $9.95 drugstore reading glasses, and I feel like a new person!  I wear them with my contacts and I can see to read and hand sew again.  This will work until I can get to the eye doctor.  Yahoo!

Between sessions of hand quilting, I have been doing some mindless scrappy piecing.  My bulging scrap bins needed some reducing, and I have a couple of baby and graduation quilts to make.

I've been playing around with the blues strings and the bright chunks...very cheerful!  While working on "Baltimore Rhapsody," my poor sewing machine has just been collecting dust.

I filled a dozen bobbins, and off I went.  It's good to give the fingertips a little break from the constant pricking of the hand quilting.

The choice of color by my niece for her graduation quilt was blue/maroon, so I'm trying to decide between two scrappy projects, one using these paper pieced diamonds, the other based on one of Bonnie Hunter's fabulous scrappy designs from Quiltville.com.

Also, every now and then I get out my collection of Wonky Stars and make a few more.  They are so much fun to make, and I am using very happy, chunky scraps to make them.  Directions for making Wonky Stars is also on Quiltville.com.

I'm not sure exactly how they will end up being used, but as the number grows I think of possible arrangements in my head as I dreamily chain piece the star points on the 2.5 inch scrappy neutral squares.

I love the mindlessness of this ongoing project.  My sewing machine is 6 feet from the washer/dryer, so it is a good project to leave out so that I can sit down for just a few minutes and get something accomplished without much thought.

I don't think too much about what colorful scrap goes where, and since the "background" is scrappy, I don't have to think about that either.  This is another good, mindless project to balance the hand quilting of the music quilt (where I DO have to think...).

And until I got the reading glasses, accuracy was not an issue with this chunky, imprecise project.  Ahh...  I should care that I ended up with two checked white neutral pieces right beside each other...but I don't care enough to fix it, LOL!

I am alternating between the border and outline quilting of blocks on the music quilt.  What was I thinking when I drafted this border?  It's taking more time that I thought it would, but it is worth the effort.

It's still fun to make all the fruits and flowers come to life with a little quilting attention.

My almost-16-year-old daughter is keeping us plenty busy with end-of-the-year outings.  Final band concert, being inducted into the National Honor Society, a dance, International Dinner, Korean Dinner, meetings about planning for college and looking for scholarships, field trips that need parental chaperoning...wow!  And she was in the school play with a big part playing a nutty mother, Penny Sycamore ("You Can't Take It With You") - she was awesomely crazy.  I hope she wasn't modeling her OWN mom...

So, I will keep on hand quilting this monster...hopefully I am getting close to done.  I forgot how cumbersome hand quilting a 95" x 95" quilt can be with a hoop.  

In the meantime, me and two quilts are off to the Shipshewana Quilt Show in June (Indiana)..."All Around the Town" and "Life of Riley - Mom's Civil War Bride Journey" were accepted into the juried show.  That should be a lot of fun!

I am hoping to post more often and catch up on reading all of YOUR blogs, in addition to answering emails and comments.

In stitches,
Teresa  :o)

Design Wall schizophrenia...

Procrastination is a killer.  This scrappy Positive-Negative Chains quilt (ala Bonnie Hunter) has been snoozing on my design wall for months awaiting two borders.  I didn't want to unpin it and take it down until I was actually sewing borders on, then walking out the door with it, taking it to be machine-quilted.  It was such a bear to get pressed nicely with all those little scrappy pieces...

I finally prepared borders and off the wall it came; first a brick red stop border, followed by a dark blue outer border cut from a length of Moda "Renewal" that I had been saving for years.  Does anyone else out there "save" things?  Afraid to actually use fabric because then it will be used up?  Those fabric manufacturers have us right where they want us...LOL.

See all my careful pressing?!?  It is worth the time and effort to press carefully and thoughtfully as I go, trying to "nest" seams when I can so they will lie flat.  That is critical for either hand- or machine-quilting.

I'm glad I pushed myself to use the outer border fabric...it is just what this scrappy, busy quilt needed.  I really like the result.  The quilt has a nice border set AND it is off the design wall.    Why is it so hard to use our stashes sometimes??  We cannot possibly take it with us when we go...what am I saving stuff for?   I should have named this post "stash constipation" instead, huh.

I had gotten "stuck" with many OTHER projects just because I could not use my design wall to study the situations.  I am a visual person, and even though I can imagine things in my head, I still need to stand back and take the whole thing in at various points in the design process...especially when I am making it all up to begin with.  Cluttered head, cluttered design wall...what's a quilt cave troll to do?

I've been wanting to lay out these blocks for a few weeks now.  I just trimmed them down to 8.5 inches this week, and I am considering setting the blocks 8 blocks x 8 rows.  With borders, the quilt would end up about 76-80 inches square.  I made this block up a few weeks ago.  It is a great way to use up scraps and I do it WITHOUT PAPER FOUNDATIONS (because I hate removing those papers).  I think I will call it "X Marks the Block" because the black scraps form very obvious "X" figures (when I lay the blocks out right!).  How did I make the blocks?  Go here to see.

I will take these down, in order, so that I can start sewing them together.

Here are some of my Wonky Stars...it is fun to put them on the design wall to see how they twinkle!  I need to put some of the scrappy pieces for these in my leader/ender basket by my sewing machine.  It's amazing how fast these stars appear when randomly making units while piecing other things.

These pictures seem so dark for some reason.  The fabrics in the stars are very vibrant while the neutrals stay in the background.

I forgot all about this U.F.O.!!  This is my "Poultry in Motion" project...crazy-pieced blocks using chicken fabrics.  I only have 3 more blocks to finish and it will become a flimsy.  I already have the chicken fabric strips cut and in a box labeled "chicken strips" - that box always makes me hungry when my eyes pass over the label...yummmmmm...chicken strips...

Down come the chickens and up go some of my Blackbird baskets from that ongoing project.  I'm getting a little dizzy from my revolving door quilt design wall...it's fun to see how far I've come with these projects.  I still have more red, blue, pink,green, black and purple repro fabrics to make baskets from.  I think I need about 300 in total.

But this is the main reason I wanted to clear the design wall.  It was time to put all the Lori Smith "Folk Art Applique" blocks together to see how they look now that all the hand applique is finished.  Me likey!!  I need to audition some of the swags I've drawn to see which one I end up using for the border.  I am really happy with how these turned out, and I am looking forward to finishing the top so that I can start hand-quilting.

Putting things on the design wall for a while has helped to build a little fire under me to want to work on these projects.  These U.F.O.'s need oxygen and daylight every now and then to continue the creative process.

In stitches,
Teresa  :o)

Scrapbusting...ch-ch-changes...

A while back, I set out to organize my overflowing scrap piles and fill some scrappy project bins with properly pruned little bits that are just waiting to "be someone."

Pruning scraps is very gratifying...especially if you have a good DVD or book-on-CD to listen to.   :o)

Well, now some of my scrappy project bins are overflowing!  Time to do some SERIOUS chain-piecing and get some units and blocks stitched up!

One thing that has stopped me from doing all this is my sewing machine.  Honestly, my sewing machine is a piece of crap.  I used to think that a sewing machine was a sewing machine...since I pretty much just use it to sew straight, why spend a lot of money on one?!? 

Ten or so years ago when my childhood Singer started wearing out (a 1970 "Genie" model...back when Singer was REALLY Singer...), I blindly (and stupidly) bought another Singer.  It was one of the "Quantum" models and it turned out to be a truly horrible machine (Singer is no longer Singer...).  I paid about $500 for it, which seemed like a lot of money to me at the time...my daughter was a toddler and I no longer worked full time.  It had some bells and whistles, and I blamed my immediate disappointment with the machine on the fact that it was new and fancy and I just wasn't comfortable with it yet.

Ten years later, experience has not made up for the fact that the machine is poorly lit, the throat plate "eats" the corners and edges of piecing units and "leaders," it doesn't feed well or evenly, winding the bobbin is awkward, it is clunky and noisy to use, it "walks" across the table when I am using it, there is limited room to manipulate what I am sewing, the buttonhole stitch is horrible, the foot pedal has a "delay," the tension is never correct, and the walking foot is huge and sounds like I am killing the machine when I try to use it.

And that describes its BETTER qualities!

And don't get me started on my attempts at free motion machine quilting...

Anyway, I have been paying attention to what other people sew on and I've been listening to them complain and praise various machines.  I just purchased a Janome Memorycraft 6600.  I am in love...

My friends describe this machine as dependable and a work horse...sounds like me.  I'm still learning how to use it, but decided that throwing together some wonky stars (a la Bonnie Hunter) would be a good introductory project for the new machine.  These blocks are liberated and don't require the accuracy that other piecing demands.  I can work on establishing that perfect 1/4 inch seam tomorrow...

Here are some that are finished...I make them, then trim them down a little crooked so that they look even wonkier.

Here are the last ones I made, before the crooked trimming job.  I almost got through all the neutral squares and little triangular scraps that I have been collecting.

I also managed to prep 20 more applique basket blocks...all green ones.  I have a few meetings coming up, and I always take some small handwork to do.  I listen better when my hands aren't idle...

Tomorrow I will solidify that elusive 1/4 inch seam on my new machine and catch up with some blocks for my Bee Balm group.

In stitches,
Teresa   :o)

It's politically-CORRECT to get all "Mavericky"

Well friends, I have really enjoyed playing around on Bonnie Hunter's site, http://www.quiltville.com/.

I love her instructions for making Maverick Stars. It's like Gwen Marston's liberated stars (so I've heard), and requires no templates and absolutely no worrying about star points! I challenge all of you to go to her site, find the directions to "Maverick Stars" on the right-hand menu of free patterns, and start playing!

Bonnie's directions have you starting with 2 1/2 inch squares, then sewing on chucks of colorful scraps in a flip and sew sort of fashion. I'm itching to try both larger and smaller 'jumping off' squares to make both larger and smaller stars.

Since I have a disease of not being able to throw away ANY LITTLE CRUMB OF FABRIC SCRAP, I am always looking for new ways to give life to these little cast-offs. It's very satisfying to use them up, and the variety of fabrics makes a scrappy project never dull. Sometimes I am afraid to allow myself to try really original and crazy stuff while sewing because I'm afraid of failing and 'wasting' good fabric. Heck, the scraps are already "waste," so I'm trying to let go of the needless worry.

In stitches,
Teresa  :o)