Tuesday Tangents: AQS QAL Complicated and Resized, Under the Stars Kit Augmented, and Block #5 Planned for Beware the Ishmaelites Sampler

Good morning, and Happy Tuesday, everyone!  I spent some time tidying up my studio yesterday, so I rewarded myself with a few design diversions this morning before getting back to work on my Spirit Song quilt.  

First Tangent: AQS Summer Star QAL

First I played in EQ8, redrafting the AQS Summer Star QAL project that caught my eye in their email newsletter.  Here's what I came up with:

The original design by Betsey Langford, shown below, finishes at 72" x 72", which is not a useful size for me right now.  I thought this would make a good baby quilt, so I resized Langford's design to finish at half size, 36" x 36", and then added 3" borders so my quilt would finish at 42" x 42."  I added some red and orange for some summer sizzle.

[In case anyone's interested in the technical details: I imported the image of the AQS quilt into my EQ8 software and used the Easy Draw Tracing Image tool.  So I told the software that the image was 36" x 36" and had a graph paper type grid overlaid on the image, allowing me to designate patches by "tracing" the design with intersecting straight lines wherever I wanted to put my seams).  

But the most important thing that I changed, that might not be immediately obvious, is that I UNsimplified and REcomplicated Langford's design.  If you look closely at her rendering, you can see very faint white lines between some of the fabric patches, indicating that her design is made completely from squares, HST units, and Flying Geese units.  That was probably done to make the project more approachable for beginners and more appealing to the many quilters who would rather jam a needle under a fingernail than sew a Y-seam.

My own personal preference is to have as few seams as possible in a block, even if that means the construction will be fiddlier.  It gives the finished quilt or block a cleaner look, in my opinion, to have fewer seams, and it definitely results in less bulk from unnecessary seam allowance, fewer bulky seam allowances to quilt over later, and perhaps most important of all, I know I can see where the piecing lines are when the quilt is finished and I really like the way that the diagonal seam lines radiate from the center of the star if I piece this with diamonds and Y-seams.  

And now, for the Million Dollar Question: Will Rebecca Actually MAKE This One???

Well, maybe.  The size is manageable and I have bolts of Kona Snow and a orangey-red solid fabric in my stash that would be perfect, so I'd only need to purchase the two blues, the yellow, and some kind of backing.  It would be fun to quilt, too, don't you think?  For now, I printed out the quilt design, yardage requirements, rotary cutting charts, and cardstock templates.  They are paperclipped together and set aside.

Second Tangent: Under the Stars Kit

I recently snapped up a quilt kit that caught my eye -- I have NEVER bought a quilt kit before!  Karen made me do it...  ;-). When I saw this Moda Good Times Under the Stars kit, it reminded me of so many gorgeous star quilts that I'd pinned to my Pinterest boards or admired in magazines over the years, and it was nearly half off in a clearance sale -- I couldn't resist.  

I love the design, but I am going to have to tweak it just a little bit to make it my own.  First of all, the quilt is designed to finish at 88" x 95", and I'm going to want mine a little bigger to more generously fit a Queen sized bed with a deep pillow top mattress.  I'm going to disregard (and REcomplicate!) the instructions for the smaller stars, which are designed as a single applique piece for each star (mine will be pieced from diamonds).  I'm going to add a wider border, or multiple borders of some kind, to get my quilt to the size I want it to be.  But I'm also going to mix in some other fabrics with the ones that came in the kit.

Two reasons for doing this: First of all, quilters who have more experience with kits than I do have warned me that sometimes a kit will be short fabric, or won't have enough extra fabric to save you if you make a cutting mistake.  I ALWAYS make cutting mistakes -- every single quilt.  I just factor in extra yardage now, automatically.  Instead of purchasing additional yardage or precuts from the Moda Good Times collection, exactly like what I got in my kit, I decided that my quilt would have even more vintage appeal -- and I would have even more options if I ran out of something -- if I mixed in some coordinating fabrics from my stash.  The fat quarters and half yards that you see laid out on the right side of the photo above are the stash fabrics that I'm thinking of mixing in with my kit fabrics.  But I'm not ready to start this project yet, so I just crammed those FQs into the box with the kit fabrics and pattern instructions and set it aside.

Third Tangent: Planning Block #5 for Beware the Ishmaelites Sampler

Does anyone remember the Moda Modern Building Blocks Sampler from a few years ago?  Typically for me, I redrafted and resized the whole thing in my EQ8 software, recoloring it in Kona Solids to coordinate with the graphic Italian wallpaper in my son' en suite bath, swapped out some of the blocks that I wasn't wild about, made everything weird sizes that are anything but ruler friendly so I'd have to foundation paper piece and template piece everything, and added striped borders to get the size I wanted for Son the Younger's Queen bed.  Here's my version, renamed Beware the Ishmaelites because it is much more colorful than his older brother's quilt, and it reminded me of Joseph's Coat of Many Colors in the Bible and how his jealous siblings faked his death and sold him to the Ishmaelites for revenge:

I bought all of the fabric and started in on the largest blocks in the quilt back in 2016.  I've finished exactly four of these blocks so far, so I should probably crank out another one, don't you think?!  The next block is thankfully a lot more straightforward than the last few.  It's even ruler-friendly, so I can just cut out the pieces and sew them together.  Imagine that!  Its the yellow and white block in the upper left corner of the quilt, second down from the top.

Since I redrafted the whole quilt in EQ8, I'm not using the Moda instructions at all for this quilt.  What you see in the photo above is the Rotary Cutting Chart that I'm able to print out for any block in EQ, whether it's a block that was preloaded into the Block Library or a block that I drafted from scratch.  What I did this morning is figure out how I want to piece the block and which way I'll press all of the seam allowances to get a flat block with seams that nest at intersections.  I'll be making four of the 5" corner units, four of the 5" yellow and white side units, joining these into three rows, and then sewing the rows together to complete the block.  I might even do this TODAY, if I manage to drag myself away from the computer...

The last time I pieced a block for this quilt was before I started piecing my Spirit Song quilt (on the left side of the design wall above), the one that's currently on my long arm frame and is about 75% quilted at this point.  I've still got the blocks for Ishmaelites on the right side of my design wall because "out of sight, out of mind," and this quilt is one of my top piecing priorities, alongside the baby quilt for the baby who's almost two now...  

That's enough dilly-dallying for today, don't you think?  I'm linking up today's post with some of my favorite linky parties:

TUESDAY

·       Colour and Inspiration Tuesday at Clever Chameleon

·       To-Do Tuesday at Home Sewn By Us

WEDNESDAY

·       Midweek Makers at Quilt Fabrication

·       Wednesday Wait Loss at The Inquiring Quilter

THURSDAY

·       Needle and Thread Thursday at My Quilt Infatuation  

Last Day to Enter the Electric Quilt Design Challenge + Andover Fabrics Giveaway!

Good morning, my lovelies, and Happy Tuesday!

Today's post is just a quickie -- I stumbled across an Electric Quilt software design contest sponsored by Andover Fabrics to promote their new Century Solids line of solids.  The winner gets a free collection of beautiful muted, historically inspired solid fabrics to add to their stash, and you still have time to enter -- but today is the deadline.  

Here's my entry:

These are 20" star blocks that could be made from either a jelly roll or a honey bun (although you'd need to go skimpy on your seam allowances if you were using the 1.5" honey bun strips).  Even if you don't feel like entering the design contest, EQ users will want to take advantage of the free fabric download of the Andover Century Solids collection that you can find on the EQ web site here.  While you can certainly design a quilt with solid fabrics using the paint color palette in EQ, using actual swatches of solid fabrics ensures that your finished quilt will come out looking identical to what you created on your computer screen.  As of right now, there are only 50 designs that have been entered in the contest, and they are still accepting entries through 11:59 PM EST tonight.  If you decide to enter, then good luck to you -- and if not, then all the good luck should be wished directly to ME!  :-)

You might be wondering why I am promoting this contest today, since I have no affiliate relationship with either Electric Quilt software or with Andover Fabrics.  Telling other people about the contest only reduces my own odds of winning!  But I like my strippy star design so much that, if I DO win the contest and they send me this pack of solids, there is no way I'd have the discipline to put that fabric away in my stash and responsibly continue working on my many projects already in progress.  I would have to immediately cut into it and start turning my star design into an actual quilt top.  You guys can't let that happen to me, not so soon after I just caved in and bought the Moda American Jane Good Times Under the Stars quilt kit that I have no time to start making any time soon.  SAVE ME, by submitting an awesome design of your own before midnight!  :-)

Who am I kidding?  You guys know me by now.  You know I'm going to start making my Amish Baby strippy star quilt whether I win the fabric collection or not.  I'm liable to get impatient and go out and buy the fabric TODAY, before they even announce the contest winner!  Whether I ever FINISH this quilt, or whether I ever finish any of the projects I've already started, is another question entirely!  

Because what I'm most intently focused on right now is custom quilting my Spirit Song quilt on my APQS long arm machine.  Meanwhile, my husband is intermittently nagging me about why I haven't made any more blocks for the Beware of the Ishmaelites sampler quilt I started making for my younger son's bedroom a couple years ago, and I should also start thinking about that same son's high school graduation quilt that I'll want to have finished by June 2021...  My Tuesday To Do this week is to finish quilting the borders and the blue HSTs on my Spirit Song quilt (using blue thread) so I can start the last stage of quilting, which will be all of the fill quilting in off white thread in the neutral patches of this quilt!

What you see above is a gray scale photo of my actual quilt top, oriented sideways like how I have it mounted on my quilting frame, and I've sketched in my border designs on my iPad.  I printed that out and have it near my quilting machine to help me remember which way the half inch spaced lines should be going in the different triangle sections as I'm quilting.  It would be a HUGE bummer to get to the bottom long border, quilt my way across, and realize that my design didn't match up at the bottom right corner!  In the full color photo below, you can see the already quilted lines across the top border, and the lines I've drawn in on my iPad in blue to show me which directions the lines should go as I move into the side border:

Feedback Requested; Please Vote in This Quick Poll -- Just One Question, Just One Click!

Hey, if you haven't already done so, I'd really appreciate it if you'd take a second to vote in my poll (below) to let me know there's enough interest out there for me to start hosting a new Long Arm Learning themed linky party here at Cheeky Cognoscenti.  You can also share feedback about that in the comments, such as if there's a particular day of the week that you'd prefer for the weekly link up, or anything I should do to make it easier for you to remember to participate.  For the record, I'm all about casting as wide a net as possible, because the more people who are involved, the greater my opportunity to learn from all of you.  So any and all longarm quilters are invited to participate, regardless of whether you have a frame mounted long arm, a sit down table mounted long arm like the HQ Sweet 16 or the Bernina Q20, any brand machine...  Even machine quilters who are using domestic sewing machines.  I think I can structure the link up so that you can either participate by linking up a blog post, OR by linking an Instagram post or photo.  For those of you who are professional long arm quilters running a business or for those who have have quilting businesses where you teach, coach, write quilting books or sell quilting related products, know that I would NOT restrict anyone from linking a post that promotes their quilting business.  I am all about supporting small businesses, and since my whole objective in doing this is so that I can find out about new techniques, classes, books, rulers, etc., participation from professional quilters is a huge value add.  I would also be open to hosting or promoting a giveaway, quilt-along, or a blog hop as long as it directly relates to some aspect of machine quilting that can be done on a long arm quilting machine.

I'm linking today's post up with:

·       Colour and Inspiration Tuesday at Clever Chameleon

·       To-Do Tuesday at Home Sewn By Us

Should I Jump Into BERNINA's Summer Sparkle QAL?

Oh my gosh, you guys -- I'm so smitten with a new quilt idea that I'm tempted to mask up and head to my not-quite-local quilt shop right NOW to buy fabric.  Never mind that I'm still slogging away at the long arm machine on my Spirit Song quilt, or that my son's Beware the Ishmaelites sampler is still languishing, untouched and barely begun, and my Modern Baby Clam Shells quilt has been cut out and waiting for me to start piecing it for an entire year...  I have eight works in progress at the moment, and I really have no business starting something new.

None of that stops me from wanting to start making THIS quilt:

44 x 44 Baby Version of BERNINA's Summer Sparkle Quilt-Along

Bernina has been hosting a quilt-along on their We All Sew blog featuring a pattern called "Summer Sparkle," designed by Faith Jones of Fresh Lemons Quilts.  I love Faith's aesthetic and have admired her work for years.  The pattern for this quilt is available on the We All Sew site for FREE here.

50 x 60 Summer Sparkle, Designed by Faith Jones for BERNINA

What do I love about Summer Sparkle?  First of all, I'm a huge sucker for star quilts.  I LOVE stars.  Second, I love how Faith has taken the simple, traditional sawtooth star block and given it a fresh, contemporary feel with her use of a gradient color scheme and her asymmetrical alternate block based on a 5-patch grid.  Plus, these 10" blocks should go together fairly quickly and the assembly of the top won't be a hassle, either, since there are no seams needing to be matched.

No Points to Match at Block Intersections Means Speedier Assembly of Quilt Top

So I love the quilt pattern and think I might want to make it, but of course I had to tweak it first in my EQ8 quilt design software.  I stuck with the 10" block size to keep things ruler-friendly for rotary cutting, but I reduced the number of blocks from 30 to 16.  This will significantly reduce the required investments of time (and fabric) for making my version of Faith's quilt.  

Recoloring in EQ8, Using Pinterest Images for Color Inspiration

I also wanted to change up the colorway in my version.  Faith's version in pinks and blues is lovely, but I'd rather not spend time making a quilt that looks exactly like everyone else's.  I have a Pinterest board called Favorite Color Combinations that I refer to sometimes for palette inspiration, which is what I was doing in the screen shot above.  I could do the same thing "in real life" at the quilt shop, by choosing a beautiful large scale, multicolor print bolt of fabric and then matching solid bolts of fabric to the colors in the print.

To bring my quilt up to a 44" x 44" size that would make a good baby gift, I added asymmetrical 2" borders with corner stones on just two diagonal corners.  These borders have the added benefit of moving all of my star points away from the quilt binding, so I don't have to worry about cutting off star points when I bind the finished quilt.  Win-Win!

The Colors I Ended Up With

I saved my design and printed out my yardage and rotary cutting instructions, but I'm loathe to go buy more fabric for another project that I might not actually get started on, ever.  I might just hang onto this one and pull it out the next time I have need of a baby quilt.

Is anyone else participating in Bernina's Summer Sparkle QAL?  Maybe I just need to see some other versions to make up my mind.  For now, I'm headed back to my long arm to continue quilting Spirit Song.

Stay safe and happy stitching, everyone!

I'm linking up today's post with:

MONDAY

·       Design Wall Monday at Small Quilts and Doll Quilts  

·       Monday Making at Love Laugh Quilt

·       BOMs Away Katie Mae Quilts  

TUESDAY

·       Colour and Inspiration Tuesday at Clever Chameleon

Drumroll, Please: MORE New Projects! Feathered Star Baby Quilt Variations Designed in EQ8

Oh, SHHH!!!  I hear you all, clucking your tongues at me in disapproval!  Designing new projects in EQ8 is GOOD for me, and this little detour from my immediate projects only took me about 20 minutes, I swear.

44" x 44" Feathered Star Baby Quilt, Designed in EQ8

Okay, so designing the "bones" of this baby quilt only took 15-20 minutes.  Click, click, click, done!  Then I spent another 45 minutes playing with different color schemes and fabric possibilities.

Same Quilt, This Time With Novelty Prints

And This One in Kaffe Fassett Collective Prints

How fun is that, to see right on my computer screen what a quilt would look like made up in different fabrics?  Isn't it cool to see how the same exact quilt can look so very different depending on the fabrics you choose?  Plus and besides, I just "made" three quilts for free, without even buying ANY fabric...  

I was inspired to go wandering off on this tangent by my friend Julie's gorgeous Feathered Star baby quilt in progress over at Pink Doxies.  Julie designed her quilt in EQ7 and is struggling with the feathered triangle points, and when I suggested paper piecing them she said something like she'd "rather give birth to a rhinoceros without an epidural than paper piece," so I was curious about how EQ software would divide a quilt block like this for paper piecing, and whether or not paper piecing it really WOULD be worse than childbirth.

The borders I put on my feathered star quilt are easy to paper piece in one section, and since the software calculates the sizes there's zero chance that I would mess them up and have to redo anything.  So I'm selecting the center of the quilt, the feathered star block, and asking EQ8 to generate foundation paper piecing patterns for me to print.

EQ8 Has Divided My Block Into Foundation Piecing Sections

As you can see, paper piecing offers no advantage for the inset LeMoyne Star portion of this block.  I would most likely just cut those pieces with my rotary cutter and use traditional piecing for that bit.  Each blue line you see above represents a line between separate foundation paper piecing patterns that need to be sewn to one another the regular way after you've finished paper piecing.  But paper piecing is going to get all of my feathered star points to finish exactly the right size on the first try, with no risk of chopped off points, swearing, or seam ripping.  That's worth the extra bother of printing the foundation paper patterns, don't you think?

Fitting Foundation Pattern Sections to my Printer Pages

So the next step is to arrange those foundation pattern sections on the print layout so that each of the pieces I'm planning to use for paper piecing fit entirely within single pages.  Otherwise, I'd need to align and tape together, and not only is that extra work, but it also introduces an opportunity for slight inaccuracy of alignment.  EQ8 lets me rotate each pattern section individually and drag it to the page where I want it to print (which I started to do in the screen shot shown above, but didn't finish since I'm not actually making this quilt right now).  One innovation that I really appreciate with the newest version 8 is that I can print out my foundation papers in color, which is a big help in ensuring that I sew the correct fabrics down to cover each patch.

My friend Julie's quilt design doesn't have a LeMoyne Star in the center of the feathered star, though.  Hers is more similar to this design:

Yet Another Feathered Star Baby Quilt Variation

So, how does a feathered star block like this one work for paper piecing?

EQ8 Has Divided My Block Into Paper Piecing Sections

As you can see, this type of feathered star block is even more conducive to paper piecing.  After I cover those foundation paper piecing patterns, I trim them down to size with my ruler exactly 1/4" from the seam lines, so I know they will fit together much easier than if I tried to piece all of this the traditional way.  Accurate piecing with foundation paper patterns is so easy, I swear it feels like cheating!

EQ8 Automatic Print Layout

As you can see in the screen shot above, EQ software separates the block between the individual foundation sections and then just plops them onto sheets of paper.  Some of the pieces for this block, like the large white corner squares and the four white QSTs (quarter square triangles) I am going to rotary cut, so I just deleted those from my print layout and rearranged the others so as to conserve paper while having each foundation section fit completely onto a page so I don't have to tape anything together.  This is an easier task with smaller blocks, by the way -- since the center block of this quilt finishes at 36" square, I have selected a 13" x 19" paper size this time that I would print at a copy shop.

My Revised Print Layout, No Taping Necessary

Now that I've scrambled up all the pieces, can you see why it's helpful to have everything numbered and labeled and colored in while I'm piecing the block?

So now I'm curious.  How many of you out there have PaperPiecingPhobia?  Would anyone like me to actually MAKE this quilt and show you here on my blog how easy it is?  If so, let me know in the comments!  (We all know I'm just looking for someone to give me an excuse to chase another squirrel, right?)  Although this would be yet another new project, I did finish something last week...  And this would be a manageable, 44" square baby quilt that would be pieced and moved onto my longarm frame relatively quickly...  

Ta Da! Paper-Pieced Star for my Advent Table Runner

I finished my 12" paper-pieced star block for my Advent table runner!  Isn't it pretty?  I doubt I'll have any more time to work on this between now and Christmas, but at least it's started.  I played around with fabric choices for a LONG time before I started this block, and I think I achieved exactly the effect I was hoping for.  Hooray!

And now I'm off to bed.  At 1:45 AM, on a SCHOOL DAY.  Morning will be painful, but that is why God in His infinite wisdom has blessed me with espresso beverages, n'est-ce pas? 

Sneaky-Peeky: A Paper-Pieced Star for My Nativity Table Runner

First Quadrant of my First Ever Paper-Pieced Block!

I have to leave for church in 10 minutes, but I'm so excited about the project I started last night that I had to post a quick preview.  I have a narrow console table behind the sofa in my kitchen/family room area where I display my nativity figures, and I'm currently using a store-bought quilted runner beneath them in reds and greens, but that table runner doesn't do anything for the muted colors of my nativity figurines.

Auditioning Fabrics with my Nativity Figures

I got an idea that I should make another runner in deep blue for Advent, with a gold star right in the center where the baby Jesus in the manger goes.  I've had Carol Doak's book 40 Bright and Bold Paper-Pieced Blocks (available from Amazon here) for several years, but had never gotten around to attempting paper piecing until now.  I spent several days reading and re-reading Carol's instructions, trying out different fabric combinations with my nativity figurines, and going back and forth between the different star blocks in the book before I finally settled on "Chris's Block."

I made four copies of the 1/4 unit that makes up the block, using special paper for foundation piecing (also already in my stash) that is supposed to be thin, strong, and resist transferring printer ink onto my ironing board.  I planned out my fabric placement with my sons' colored pencils, selecting colors as close as possible to my fabrics to get an accurate sense of how the finished block would turn out.  I wrote the color names of each fabric on the corresponding section of the paper foundations, lined up my pre-cut rectangles in numerical order, and sat down at my machine for some very weird upside-down sewing with my fabrics completely hidden by a piece of PAPER that I was sewing through.  This gave me ANXIETY, and I probably held my breath while I was sewing each seam.  However, I followed the instructions, kept the faith, and when I was finished I ended up with what appears to be a correctly sewn quarter of my star block.  (Note: my camera was crooked; the block is actually perfectly square).  Yippee!

I've got some gifts to wrap up for shipping and homework to supervise this afternoon, and my boys are singing in our church's Christmas concert this evening -- Lars even has a solo -- so I'm not sure whether I'll have a chance to work on the remaining three quadrants of my star today.  I only have a vague idea of what the rest of the table runner will look like, but at least I've made a start.

Happy Second Sunday of Advent to all of my Christian friends and family, and Happy Hanukkah to my Jewish friends!

By the way, I'm linking up to SewCalGal's Quilter's Christmas Party today.  If you have a moment, please pop over to join the fun, see what holiday projects other quilters have been working on, and learn how you can help make a difference by supporting Operation Homefront.