Second Thoughts on Scrappy Celebrations, Emma Louise Muslin Background for Stonefields + New Specs for Rebecca

Good morning, Quilty Peeps!  How is it Wednesday already?!  And how is it nearly the end of May when it was just February the other day?!!  Time doesn't just march on at a steady pace.  Time is picking up speed, taking shortcuts, and leaving me in the lurch.  All of which warrants a new practice for me: Reevaluating whether or not to keep working on a project all the way to the bloody end, just because I started it!

Here's your last glimpse of my inspired-by-Scrappy-Celebrations project on the design wall before I take it down and put it into a crypt prison project box from which it may or may not ever emerge:

I Celebrate Abandoning This Project Today!

This project has been tried and found guilty of Failing to Sufficiently Challenge and Engage My Brain, Wasting My Time, and Wasting My Tilda Precuts!  That last charge was the most serious, and I'm afraid I was an accomplice in this crime against my creative energy.  

Two things initially appealed to me about the Scrappy Celebrations quilt when I first saw it: The quilt "breaks the rules" about combining 4-patch and 9-patch blocks in the same quilt, but it works because only squares and rectangles are used in all the blocks.  I still find that interesting, but as I've been making the blocks I've been thinking ahead and dreading what a pain in the tush it will be to sew them together with all these seam allowances going different directions.  So I had already been toying with the idea of adding scrappy sashing strips between my blocks, but sashing increases the size of a quilt so I'd have fewer blocks (and less variety in my quilt) if I did that:

54 x 64.5 Tilda Celebration With Scrappy Sashing

In the EQ8 rendering above, I've arranged the 21 9" blocks that I've already sewn along with 9 more block mockups and "painted" my sashing randomly with prints from the Tilda Sunday Brunch collection to get an idea of what that would look like.  Meh.  I don't hate it, but I wish I hadn't made so many blocks using the same fabrics!  

When You Cut Your Fabric Twice, But It's Still Too Small + Stonefields NEW BEGINNING!

 Ugh — I spent so much time selecting the fabric combination for this 4-Patch Plus block for my Tilda Scrappy Celebration quilt.  Then I spent some more time ironing the annoying heavy creases out of my Tilda precuts (definitely a downside of buying Fat Eighth packs vs yardage), and then I spent even more rotary cutting the squares and rectangles for this block, exactly in accordance with my planning notes that I jotted down about a year ago.  Do you see anything wrong with this picture?

Original Fabric Pull: Hmmm, What's Wrong With This Picture???

Well, I didn’t see anything wrong with it until I’d spent about an hour carefully stitching those vertically striped 1 1/2” squares (stash fabric) to solid blue and green 2 1/2” squares.  Then I started adding the other striped fabric square to each of those units and noticed that my 3-square units, once sewn together with seam allowances, were an awful lot shorter than the solid blue and green rectangles that needed to be sewn to them next...  And then I remembered that the cut-out patches for a pieced unit that is supposed to finish 3 1/2" square should take up more space on the table than the 3 1/2" print square next to it because of seam allowances!   Aaargh!  I should have double-checked my cutting notes before I started cutting, or at least sewn a single test block before cutting up all that fabric.  I didn’t have enough of the blue or green fabric to recut my plus pieces to the correct size (another downside to working with small "fat eighth" precut packs of fabric, no extra to make up for miscuts), and I didn’t have enough of that striped stash fabric to recut 48 larger squares, either.  

So I decided to set the red print fabric aside to use in another 4-patch block, recut 3 1/2” squares of the same print with a blue background, and made my plus units work for a 9-patch block instead.  I was able to make three of these from what I’d cut out, and I think they turned out pretty cute.

Save!  4 Patch Block Becomes a 9 Patch Block

Cleopatra's Fan Test Block Completed: Construction + Pressing Plan

Remember this blog post from mid-March, when I was contemplating whether or not to make a Cleopatra's Fan quilt?  You can catch up here if you missed that one.  I decided to make a test block with my AccuQuilt GO! 12" Cleopatra's Fan BOB (Block On Board) die cutter (this post contains affiliate links) and, although this was fiddly and slow-going to piece, I like how it turned out.  I was unsure about the large 12" block scale initially, but I really like it paired with large scale print fabrics like this scrap of older OOP (out of print) Kaffe Fassett floral.  Isn't this fun?

12 inch Cleopatra's Fan Test Block Completed

First, my thoughts on cutting the fabric patches out with the AccuQuilt die, because as I explained in my earlier post, there are multiple different options for cutting out this block.  Due to the orientation of the fabric shapes on the BOB die, I needed strips of each fabric cut PARALLEL to my selvages, which caused me to mess up and miscut the violet fabric I originally planned to use in place of the green solid.  I was on autopilot, selvages together, then selvages to the fold and cut off a slice, but that would have resulted in feeding the slightly stretchy crosswise grain through the die cutter, and my patches from that color would likely have stretched during cutting and come out slightly too small in one direction.  Following AccuQuilt's directions about fabric grain really does make a difference, I've found.  The other thing I knew I would need to do was to heavily starch that flimsy, filmy Kaffe Fassett print fabric before feeding it through the cutting machine.  Even with the grain oriented correctly, that fabric still was unlikely to behave without being starched with old school Niagara Spray Starch Plus.  These days I'm more likely to be using   for pressing seams as they're sewn and for pressing finished blocks, but nothing beats the real starch like Grandma used when it comes to a slippery fabric that doesn't cooperate.

Rear View: The Pressing Plan

The PDF instructions for assembling the Cleopatra's Fan block don't say anything about how the seams should be pressed.  I did my online research and found a few different tutorials, but in addition to reading them I scrutinized the accompanying photos.  Lots of people are saying to just press ALL the seams open with this block -- and lots of those tutorials show photos of finished blocks with misaligned seam intersections and wavy stretched fabric edges.  

Tilda Scrappy Celebration, New Sewing Chair + Pretty Things Blooming in Florida

Good morning and Happy Friday!  I finally got around to piecing my backing for the Deco quilt a few days ago, packed it up on a hanger with the quilt top, and put it in the Quilt Purgatory Closet to marinate (and atone for its sins) while it awaits its turn on the long arm for quilting.  Finishing the Deco backing means that I can turn my attention to other projects at LONG last, and I decided that piecing six more blocks for my Tilda Scrappy Celebration quilt would be a nice palette cleanser.  

Three Blocks with Solid Aqua

Three Blocks with Stash Substitution Fabric

I had one fat eighth of aqua Tilda Solid fabric, and that was only enough for three of the six blocks I wanted to make, so I dug around in my stash and found a scrap of a print fabric that looks just as nice.  To my eye, this kind of "make do" substitution adds interest to the finished quilt, so each block that goes into the quilt will feature six identical, or nearly identical blocks depending on how much I have of each fabric I want to use.  It always feels good to pull something out of the Deep Stash and put it into a quilt!

Ready to Piece Some Y-Seam Blocks!

Scrappy Celebration was a 2023 QAL (Quilt-Along) designed by Lissa Alexander and published in American Patchwork & Quilting magazine.  The pattern is available for sale here on the APQ Shop web site, but I don't have the pattern -- I just went off the photos I saw online and did my own thing in EQ8 software as usual, and for this particular block I decided I preferred to piece the block with two chisel shapes and a Y-seam in the aqua fabric instead of with a rectangle and a square.  I printed a template onto green card stock paper from EQ8 and that's what I used to cut my aqua patches.  So there are my blocks (above photo), ready to be sewn!  

Cutting Out Chisel Patches with my Karen Kay Buckley Perfect Scissors

Three Quilts for Carrie: Roam, Stars Hollow + I Spy Shadow Boxes

Today for Finished On Friday I'm sharing three beautiful quilts that I long arm quilted for my client Carrie.  First up is Roam, a BOM (Block of the Month) medallion quilt kit designed by Tara Faughnan.  I wasn't able to locate any Roam kits that I could link to, but you can still purchase the Roam pattern (with or without the accompanying video tutorials) on the designer's web site here.  The back page of the pattern lists all the fabrics used in the BOM kit for this quilt in case you wanted to make one just like it, but I think this quilt would look wonderful in any number of different fabric combinations.  In print fabrics, it would look like a completely different quilt.

Carrie's 82 x 82 Roam Quilt with Diagonal Plaid Bias Cut E2E

I quilted Carrie's Roam with Diagonal Plaid Bias Cut E2E, a simple geometric pattern that emphasizes the strong diagonal elements in the patchwork.  I used King Tut 40 wt cotton thread in Lapis Lazuli and Hobbs 80/20 Cotton/Poly Black batting (this post contains affiliate links).

Detail of Diagonal Plaid Bias E2E in King Tut Lapis Lazuli Variegated Thread

Why the black batting?  Long arm machines use larger needles than domestic sewing machines, and with the thicker 40 wt thread I was using here I needed a size 110/18 needle to get that gorgeous stitch quality in all stitching directions.  Bigger needles leave bigger holes, and with a dark thread and predominantly dark fabrics in the quilt top, those needle holes are less conspicuous when the batting isn't peeking out bright white around every stitch.  Of course needle holes close up when the quilt is washed, but not every quilt does get washed, at least not right away.

Second reason for black batting in a quilt like this is that it prevents dark stray threads from showing through the lighter fabrics in the quilt top.  The Windham Artisan Cottons fabrics in the Roam quilt are gorgeous but they are also prone to fraying.  As neat as Carrie was with her quilt top, there were still stray threads all over the place no matter how many I tried to neaten away.  In that photo above, if I'd used a regular white or off white batting, we would be seeing some stray navy threads showing through the Orchid and Yellow/Copper fabrics.  Navy thread against black batting disappears, but navy thread against white batting will show through a light colored quilt top fabric.