Quilt Finishes for Mike, Kim, Jane, and Carrie + Halo Progress

Happy Sunday and Happy Spring!  I have four clients' quilts to share with you today and then I'll wrap up with a couple photos of how my Jen Kingwell Halo Quilt is coming along.  Lots of ground to cover and I know you're all here for the eye candy anyway, so I'll try to keep my comments brief!

Mike's Thank-You Quilt: Cherrywood 9-Patch with Amoeba Quilting

Detail of Amoeba Quilting on Cherrywood 9-Patch Quilt

This first quilt I'm sharing began as a very traditional pieced top that was donated to our guild from the estate of a former guild member.  The quilt top and backing are all Cherrywood hand dyed fabrics, with a suede-like look and rich but muted colors (this post contains affiliate links).  The Cherrywood hand-dyed fabrics are fabulous; I've heard of this line but never worked with them before.  I love how understated they are, and the quilt top reminded me of Amish quilts.  I could have played that up by quilting a traditional feather design in an inconspicuous blending thread.

However...  I was asked to quilt this top so that it can be gifted to Mike, the young man who sets up the room for our monthly meetings at the Tyvola Senior Center and stays late on the first Wednesday each month for our meetings.  Mike doesn't give off an Amish vibe!  Given free reign, I choose Karlee Porter's Amoeba edge-to-edge quilting to inject some youthful, modern energy into this quilt.  I love it and I hope Mike will enjoy it, too!

60 x 60 Cherrywood Quilt for Mike

Not sure what batting is in this quilt as it was provided to me along with the quilt top.  I used King Tut 40 wt variegated cotton thread in Saint George for this quilt, with shades of caramel and rusty coral that were perfectly matched to the Cherrywood fabrics and the matte luster of cotton that I am loving lately.

Quilts Around the World: Anders' Charity Finish; Go Forth & Visit Wendy & Kerry!

Design Wall: Works In Progress

Ah, Monday morning, once again!  Are we tired of seeing my design wall yet?  I'm linking up with Design Wall Monday over at Patchwork Times and with Anything Goes Monday at Stitch By Stitch.  No progress on my bear paws and sawtooth stars, but I did finish another of my paper pieced pineapple log cabin blocks.  That makes 8 blocks complete, 28 more to go if I want the quilt to finish large enough for a California King.  I've also been working on some petals for more Frankenwhiggish Rose applique blocks, too, but I'm not going to show them to you because they look just like the finished block you already saw.  Boring, right? 

You know, this makes me wonder about how blogging might affect the creative process of quilting.  Do we feel pressure to come up with new content on a regular basis, and does that encourage shortcuts and simplifications just to get to that "finished" post?  Do we create more sampler and medallion quilts so that we can have a new block design to share each week or each month?  Do we opt for a straight line grid quilted with the walking foot because that's what we think is best for the quilt, or because it's a fast finish and we want to debut a new project on the blog?  Well, I'm nowhere near a quilt finish so if I run out of things to say about what I'm working on, this might morph into a Laundry Blog.  You have all been forewarned!
 

So, remember over the summer when I got this great idea that my son and I should go to one of our church's quilt guild meetings and help make quilts for Lutheran World Relief?  Anders worked hard to make his fabric "squares" meet up at the seams and he was disappointed that the donated fabrics he got to choose from were not very exciting, but he finally finished the quilt top just before school started and the ladies in the quilt guild layered it with batting, tied it and bound it to finish it off.  Yesterday we had the Blessing of the Quilts at church, and they were hanging on display all over the sanctuary so I was able to get a picture of Anders standing behind his quilt after the service.  I was zooming in from far away so the resolution is terrible, but here's Anders with the finished quilt:

Anders with his Charity Quilt for Lutheran World Relief

I wish I had known ahead of time that the quilts would be hanging up today -- I would have asked Bernie to bring his fancy schmancy camera and then we would have gotten a better picture!

 

But one thing I DO know ahead of time is that two of my favorite quilting bloggers, Wendy Sheppard of Ivory Springs and Kerry of Simple Bird Applique, will be blogging about their respective creative processes today because I tagged them for the Around the World Blog Tour.  I selected Wendy and Kerry because I've admired them both for their technical mastery and beautiful quilt desgns, but often wondered how they and other quilters who quilt for a living keep their creative juices flowing, deadline after deadline, always with fresh new ideas.  Wendy is a quilt designer whose work has been on the covers of so many magazines that she must have lost count by now, and Kerry designs and stitches the most beautifully intricate traditional applique patterns.  Both Kerry and Wendy teach quilting as well, and they each have fantastic blogs with excellent tutorials on applique and free-motion quilting with domestic sewing machines.  Please pop over to visit them when you have a moment, and tell them Rebecca sent you.  ;-)

Have a wonderful Monday, everyone!

August FMQ Challenge: Wendy Sheppard's Jester Hats

I was so excited when I found out that quilter Wendy Sheppard of Ivory Spring was giving the August Free-Motion Quilting Challenge tutorial at SewCalGal.  I have admired Wendy's work for a long time.  She's a tireless, prolific, and truly inspirational person who supports and encourages the work of others.  Her Thread Talk posts contain the best quilting tips and tutorials I've seen, and I refer to them often.  To view the original August Challenge tutorial, learn more about Wendy Sheppard, and see some examples of her breathtaking quilting, click here.  Come back when you're finished.

So, you're back?  Good.  Wipe the drool off your keyboard and let's get down to business!  Wendy's tutorial covered an allover motif she calls Jester Hats.  I spent at least an hour trying to doodle repeating jester hats on my iPad before I began quilting. 

My Jester Hat doodles, drawn in FREE Paper app for iPad in the waiting room at the pediatrician's office



More Jester doodles in Drawing Pad app for iPad

I am still having trouble with these allover designs in general -- anything where I have to concentrate on stitching a shape, while simultaneously thinking about how I'm going to travel with that motif to completely fill a space without getting stuck in a corner, leaving an unquilted "island" that I can't get back to, or crossing over a previous line of quilting.  I am not thrilled with my results for this exercise, but I think it's a fun motif with a lot of potential.  Like anything else, it will get better and better with repetition.

I used a pretty fat quarter of batik fabric with ugly Bob the Builder backing fabric and a scrap of Hobbs Heirloom Tuscany Silk batting, a 75 Schmetz Quilting needle, and 40 weight YLI variegated machine quilting thread for this sample.  You can see the jester hat pattern better from the back...  and it looks much better from a distance.  Trust me!

My Jester Hats, Backing Side Up

I had trouble visualizing the jester hats, so then I tried thinking about them as the number 3, or as chubby little baby tushies, or mushrooms that turn into the horns of a ram.  With the contrasting thread color against the backing fabric, every awkward "oops" jumps out at you.  But if I was stitching this in a thread color that blended into the background fabric, I think you'd just get the effect of the pretty texture without the mistakes being so glaringly obvious.  Here's what the sample piece looks like from the front:

My Jester Hat Sample, Right Side Up

Not as bad, right?  Or so I tell myself.  Here's one of the Up Close and Ugly shots:

The View from 6"

See those weird mushroom/chef's hat thingys?  Or are they Smurf feet?  How did that happen?  When Wendy quilts jester's hats, there are definitely no Smurf feet!  Also my stitch length was all over the place, mostly because I was experimenting with speed and never quite found the right rhythm that would keep the curves smooth without being so fast that I lost control.  Next time I attempt this design, I'm going to switch back to the finer thread weight that I'm more comfortable with and try making the motifs much smaller.  I just thought this particular motif would be fun to stitch big and bold with the variegated thread.  And I'm sure it would be, if it was done well!

Meanwhile, I'm about halway finished with the free-motion paisley fill on Lars's Drunken Dragons quilt.  I'm a little nervous about how densley quilted the circles are compared to the rest of the quilt, and I hope that the whole thing will get softer and snuggly again after I wash it for the first time.  I do like the way the paisleys look, though, and I never would have believed that I could quilt this design at all if you'd asked me a month ago.  If I can learn to quilt paislies, then surely I will learn to quilt jester hats with more practice!

FMQ Paislies on Lars's Drunken Dragons Quilt (In-Progress)

I'm using Mettler 60 weight 2-ply cotton embroidery thread for Lars's quilt, and I still feel like the dense fill pattern is making it stiff.  I wonder if the silk thread that Wendy Sheppard often uses would be softer?  I think she mostly quilts with Aurifil Mako cotton thread or with YLI silk thread, neither of which my local Bernina shop stocks.  I may have to order a couple of spools online just to play with.
Okay, enough blogging -- back to quilting!

Ice Berg, Dead Ahead! Approaching the Perils of the Quilting Phase, and the Band Plays On

The Titannic, image found here

Well, Lars's Drunken Dragons quilt top is nearly complete.  (If you missed the earlier posts about this project, click here to catch up).  I just have to assemble the last of the 15 rows of blocks, then attach that row to the others.  I decided to assemble the quilt top in thirds (five rows per section) to minimize fraying along the raw edges, so I'll have to join the three sections together, and then the piecing stage of the 70" x 105" twin bed quilt will be complete.  After that, I'll join my two widths of the backing fabric together and make and attach the quilt label to the backing so it will be quilted in securely. 


Scrabble fabric from Quilting Treasures, photo from Fabric.com

I am excited about the quilt label; I'm going to spell out "MOMMY LOVES LARS" in Scrabble fabric, cutting out each letter with a seam allowance so I can stitch them together like a Scrabble board. 

The scary part comes next. Depending on the quilting design, I may have to do some marking on the quilt top -- always a terrifying prospect, because what if the marks don't wash out afterwards like they're supposed to?  "They" tell you to test the washaway marking pen on every fabric in your quilt to be sure it will wash out afterwards, but I used so many fabrics...  Also, I would have needed to make up my little marking pen tests on fabric scraps a couple of weeks ago to do this, because it's going to take me at least that long to do the quilting.  Just because the ink comes out after it's been on the fabric for a day doesn't mean that it would come out after three weeks.  Anyway, I'm not marking anything until I know for sure how I want to do the quilting.

So far, this quilt has been pretty smooth sailing, like the Titannic, speeding across the Atlantic Ocean with its sparkling chandeliers and happy passengers, but we're about to enter dangerous waters...  Nothing like a positive attitude, don't you agree?  Here's what's going through my mind as I stare out into the frigid, frosty darkness of the quilting voyage that lies ahead:

Machine Trapunto by Anita Shakelford

My first thought is to stitch a grid of diagonal lines as background quilting everywhere except inside the circles.  The circles would have concentric, fairly wide spaced circle quilting for emphasis.  To make the circles stand out even more, I could add trapunto to the circles (an extra layer of batting just under the circles for added dimension) using the method that Diane Gaudynski describes in her books.  I'd use my walking foot for the background grid, but the circles?  Well...  I can't very well turn my quilt around 360 degrees under my sewing machine needle to quilt each circle with the walking foot, not on this oversized twin bed quilt.  The line of quilting that goes right in the circular seamline would be challenging to execute even with a walking foot -- do I really think I can do that accurately with the feed dogs down and the training wheels off?  Am I really going to be able to quilt perfect circles with FMQ?  I've jokingly dubbed this the Drunken Dragons quilt because the block pattern is called Drunkard's Path, but I don't want people to look at the finished quilt, covered with wobbly, crookedy lumpy-non-circular blobs and think I was drunk when I was quilting it!

I've been telling everyone how I'm going to do free-motion quilting (FMQ) on this project in hopes that I won't chicken out, but I feel a cold sweat coming on. For those who don't know, normally the feed dogs on the sewing machine pull your fabric through at a steady pace beneath the stationary needle going up and down to create stitches of exactly the same length.  When you do free-motion quilting, you disengage those feed dogs so you can control the fabric movement with your hands, enabling you to go back and forth, diagonally, sideways, all without turning your fabric.  It's like trying to draw a picture or sign your name by moving a piece of paper around underneath a stationary marker, except that you also have to be careful to move the quilt at a steady speed so you don't end up with a mess of some really long stitches, some really short stitches, and a bunch of knots.  With a lot of practice, people like Diane Gaudynski and Wendy Sheppard are able to quilt the most exquisite designs using this method, but my experience with FMQ so far looks like I tried to doodle with my left hand, blindfolded. 

Bernina Stitch Regulator, from Bernina USA

I have a gizmo for my fancy computerized sewing machine that is supposed to help -- the BSR function (Bernina Stitch Regulator) has a little Doctor Evil laser thingy that scans and counts threads next to the needle as I'm moving the fabric, speeding up or slowing down the needle movement as needed to keep stitches around the same length.  But BSR doesn't improve my ability to "draw" by moving fabric, it only helps to keep stitch length more or less consistent.  If I'm really going to drop those feed dogs and quilt without training wheels, then I'd better set the quilt top aside and do at least a week of practice quilting before I even mark the quilt top. I'd hate to mark an overly ambitious design on my quilt top and then realize I'm not skilled enough to execute it well. I'm looking at this quilt top, and not really coming up with a lot of FMQ ideas that would look good on this quilt and that I'm likely to be able to do well.  I mean honestly, circles?  I really WANT circles, though.  I may have to plan a smaller project, like a table runner, for FMQ practice.

Anders' Froggy Quilt of Many Colors, Decorative Quilting Motif Stitched with Embroidery Module, 2006

So there's this cunning little voice in the back of my head, and I can't tell for sure if she's an angel or the Devil. She says there's no shame in using all the high-tech gadgetry at my disposal in order to finish the quilt and get it on Lars's bed, looking the way I want it to look, and finished within this lifetime. I have several design collections of Keryn Emmerson's outline quilting designs that I could use with the embroidery module of my sewing machine to insure good looking results using fancier designs than I could manage free hand.  When I've used this method in the past, most notably for Anders' Froggy Quilt of Many Colors above (I know, I should have done more quilting on the Flying Geese patches and I still might add more later), I got annoying little thread knots on the back of the quilt (which, thanks to Diane's book, I now know could have been minimized by using a lighter weight quilting thread).  I just found a Bernina Through the Needle: Quilting in the Hoop article that suggests using these outline embroidery designs on just the quilt top and batting for the decorative stitching, then adding the backing fabric before doing the background quilting through all three layers, so that any tension snafus or knots gets hidden between the layers of the quilt.  I guess I'd need to use an adhesive basting spray to adhere the quilt top to the batting if I'm going to do some of the quilting before I layer and pin-baste all three layers together, though -- ugh, this is getting complicated again!  I wonder if this is like that moment when Captain Edward Smith ordered his crew to increase the Titanic's speed just as they were approaching the ice they'd been warned about?  I mean, is this going to make my project go more smoothly, or will this plan of action come back to haunt me in my dreams? 

Here are a couple of the quilting designs I'm considering for the circles on this quilt:

Keryn Emmerson's Continuous Quilting Designs collection for Bernina

 I like that Celtic knot circle design shown on the cover of the design collection packaging, but it's too small so I'd want to enlarge it and then add some additional wide-spaced circle outlines.  This particular collection is on one of those design cards that plugs directly into my sewing machine rather than on a CD, and although I can resize the design directly on my sewing machine, I'm pretty sure I need to use my PC software to add additional outline circles.  I may be able to do this if I open the design on my sewing machine, save it to the sewing machine's memory, and then copy it from there to a thumb drive that I take downstairs to my PC. 

Another Keryn Emmerson design from her Quilting Inspirations 788 Collection for OESD

The design shown above is another possibility, and even though it's also too small to fill the big circles on my quilt, perhaps I could stitch them out as-is and then add some FMQ echo quilting.  Since this design is so angular and irregular, the echo quilting wouldn't need to be perfect in order to look good.  But I really, really want circles...

I did some browsing over at Embroidery.com (even though I hate to buy more embroidery designs when I have SO MANY that I already own and have never used), and found another possibility:

Rangoli design from Embroidery.com, get it here

I like the circles in the Rangoli design at left from Embroidery.com, and even though at 3.5" it's again, a little on the small side, I could easily resize it larger to fit, and the stitching looks like it would be open enough to allow the quilt to puff up between the stitches.

Alternatively, I should also be able to digitize my original concentric circle idea myself fairly easily with my Bernina Embroidery Software, but I upgraded from Version 4 to Version 6 last year and have not been able to take classes from my dealer yet to learn how to use the new version.  It's completely different than the older version, because Version 6 has a baby version of CorelDRAW for digitizing from scratch and when I fooled around with it last night I wasn't able to figure out how to use the circle tool.  However, I was able to find the handouts for the Version 6 Software Mastery classes online, which I printed out, and I also managed to send the colossal on-screen software owner's manual PDF to my iPad so I can read it in my Kindle app -- but it doesn't navigate as easily as a Kindle book would, and I'm not able to use the hilighting or annotating functions.  This is so irritating -- I want a real, physical owner's manual that I can highlight, write notes in, and cover with Post-It flags to help me find the right information quickly when I need it again!  I know some users have paid to have a local printer print the whole thing out in multiple spiral bound volumes...  Ugh.  Bernina, are you listening?  I want an owner's manual next time!!!  So anyway, there is going to be a little software learning curve, and I have a few hundred pages of boring technical reading ahead of me, but it's doable -- and I need to learn how to use that software anyway or else it will be a huge waste of money.

Monofilament Nylon Thread from SewArt International

Finally, just when you thought I was finished with this smorgasbord of anxiety-inducing possibilities, we come to the question of thread.  I wasn't thrilled with the look of the heavier-weight "machine quilting thread" I used on Anders' quilt.  I've considered using the lighter-weight cotton or silk threads recommended by Wendy Sheppard and Diane Gaudynski.  But I'm leaning toward a .004 nylon monofilament quilting thread from Sew Art International for this project.  I have a lot of busy fabrics in this quilt, and I don't think I want the quilting thread to stand out and scream at anyone.  Plus, invisible nylon should hide my oopses and glitches better than any other thread, and it will enable me to quilt in that Scrabble label without scribbling all over it with the quilting thread. I have this thread in both clear and a smoke color, and I haven't decided which color to use yet.  I've never used the monofilament nylon thread before (it's a maiden voyage -- just like the Titanic!), and I'm nervous about the thread snarling, snapping, or otherwise misbehaving, but I'm going to do my research as far as tension settings and practice before I tackle the Real Deal.

Ready to Go: Final Blocks Awaiting Assembly

I can worry about all of this some more while I stitch those remaining blocks together today, since they aren't going to sew themselves.  After all, it's not a real quilt until somebody gets an ulcer.  Isn't that what they always say?  Well, that's what they should say.  Meanwhile, the band plays on...

Drunken Dragons Update: 100 Blocks Sewn, 50 to Go

7" Drunkard's Path Blocks, 10 in each pile

I've sewn 2/3 of Lars's Drunken Dragons quilt blocks!  If you've missed my earlier posts about this quilt, you can catch up here.  I've got them laid out randomly in piles of 10 to help me keep track of how many I've finished.  I'm starting to get an idea of what the finished quilt will look like, and I like it!

I'm pinning blocks downstairs while I watch television with Bernie at night, and then I shoot for sewing 10 blocks at a time during the day.  Some days I get in the sewing room for an hour or so, and other days I don't, depending on what else is going on that day.  In case you're wondering, the answer to "will this be done in time for Christmas" is a resounding NO!  Even if I finished all of the blocks this week, I still would have to figure out how I'm going to lay them out and then sew them all together.  Then I need backing and batting, which I haven't even thought about purchasing yet, and there's the not-so-small matter of quilting...

Wendy Sheppard's Free-Motion Feathers, photo from Ivory Spring

I wanted to do some free-motion machine quilting on this quilt, but I might chicken out.  Free-motion quilting means lowering the feed dogs on the sewing machine and moving the fabric around with your hands beneath the sewing machine needle to create the quilting designs.  This is a lot like trying to draw a picture by moving a piece of paper beneath a stationary marker, except that with quilting, the stitch length comes into play as well.  Without the feed dogs guiding the fabric steadily, it's up to the quilter to control the length of stitches by moving the fabric at an even speed.  If you speed up and slow down, you get ugly, sloppy looking stitches, some short, some long, some piled up on top of one another in a messy knot.  Quilting goddesses like Wendy Sheppard (check out her blog and fabulous Thread Talk tutorials over at Ivory Spring) make all of this look easy, but that's because she's amazingly talented and has spent hours and hours perfecting her craft on many, many quilt projects.  So when I look at Wendy's quilting and think, "I'd like to do that on my quilt," it's kind of like me watching Tiger Woods on television and thinking, "That looks easy; maybe I should try professional golf!"  Now that I've spent so much time carefully cutting and sewing these blocks together, I'm starting to get cold feet because I don't want to wreck all my hard work with lousy, crooked, uneven quilting.  We'll see.  There's more than one way to quilt a quilt, and this quilt may be a candidate for baby steps and compromises.

Meanwhile, tomorrow's ten quilt blocks are pinned together and lined up next to my sewbaby, all ready to go.  I'm really enjoying these fabrics.  I actually appreciate other people's quilts with more restricted fabric palettes, but for me, I need to mix up LOTS of different fabrics to fight the monotony of sewing so many blocks together and keep it fun. 

One thing I'm discovering is that it's easiest to sew two similar fabrics together on these curved seams.  For instance, the batik fabrics in particular tend to be stiffer and more tightly woven than some of the other fabrics.  The most challenging blocks have been the ones where I have a batik quarter circle on the bottom and I'm sewing a looser weave fabric on top.  So if you're thinking of starting a Drunkard's Path quilt of your own, you might want to keep that in mind when you're selecting your fabrics.

It's time to read to my kids!  Goodnight!

Check out Karen McTavish on Subversive Stitchers

Award-winning quilting diva, teacher, mother, and heavy metal musician, McTavish definitely gets an invite to my Imaginary Dinner Party for Interesting People. Take a look at McTavish's very funny guest blog post for Subversive Stitchers on how her passion for quilting keeps her sane.  It reminded me of how, when Lars was little, he'd notice when I was getting stressed out and frazzled and say, "Mommy, I think you need a Time Out in your sewing room."  If you're not a quilter, just substitute gardening/painting/golfing/baking, or whatever gets you recharged:

Subversive Stitchers: Women Armed with Needles: Extinguish burnout with quilting passion

Then, check out McTavish's drop-dead-gorgeous longarm quilting in her gallery at http://www.designerquilts.com/, where you will also see a better picture of the cool heirloom quilting feathers motif tattooed on her upper arm. There are two kinds of tattoos, after all: many people get "me-too" tattoos to fit into a group whose other members all have tattoos, but my favorite tattoos are those that make a personal statement and express the individuality of the person wearing them. I love how McTavish's tattoos as well as her quilting take a traditional art form and then give it a fresh, personal twist. I also love finding quilters who shatter the stereotype, because we're not all conservative old ladies with white buns on our heads.

Many thanks to another innovative and inspirational quilter, Wendy Sheppard, for turning me on to McTavish's work. Wendy's blog Ivory Spring has wonderful machine quilting tips and photography of her breathtaking quilts, and she's one of the nicest people I've never met! Pop over to see her at http://www.ivoryspring.wordpress.com/. Have a happy weekend!