OMG, It's February! Tabby Mountains is My One Monthly Goal

I have resisted joining this One Monthly Goal (OMG) thing for a LONG time, but I'm gonna give it a go this month.  OMG is a monthly linky party hosted by Patty over at Elm Street Quilts.  The idea is to set one REASONABLE goal that you share at the beginning of the month and then do a follow up post at the end of the month.  It's about Motivation and Accountability and Blah Blah Whatever.  There are even sponsors and prizes, if you're into that kind of thing.  Intrigued?  You can see others' goals for February and find out about this month's prizes over at Elm Street Quilts here.  

Anyway, I generally have multiple lists of goals and priorities for each project, each list having so many sublists, subgoals, footnotes and side trips that I can barely keep track of the lists, let alone accomplish any of the things ON the lists.  And that's just for my sewing and quilting projects -- there are other lists and sublists for my interior design business, for all of the music I'm responsible for learning for various choirs, for household tasks and for all of the responsibilities that come with being the administrative assistant mom of two teenage boys...  It can take me an hour and a half just to go through all of my lists and decide what to tackle first!  So for February, just for a lark, I'm going to try this OMG thing and see whether picking just ONE sewing goal for the month helps me to spend more of my sewing time SEWING instead of planning what to sew next.

I was musing aloud about this One Monthly Goal thing yesterday, wondering what my goal should be for February, and my darling husband piped up with a suggestion.  He thinks my goal should be "that your husband doesn't catch you buying more fabric."  Notice he didn't say my goal should be NOT BUYING fabric; just that he shouldn't "CATCH" me buying fabric.  Isn't that cute?  He wants to play that game where I buy fabric and smuggle it into the house at the bottom of grocery bags and carry it upstairs, buried within stacks of laundry...  Okay, Sweetie.  Game on!  But that's not a quilting goal, that's one falls under Things We Do To Keep Our Marriage Exciting.

And so: ONE goal for February, challenging enough to feel good about attaining, yet reasonable enough that I'm not setting myself up for defeat as soon as Life happens (as Life has a habit of doing).  I want my OMG to support my overall goal for the year of becoming proficient with my longarm quilting machine.  My One Monthly Goal for February has got to be piecing AND longarm quilting my Tabby Mountain quilt.  

My February OMG: Piece AND Quilt Tabby Mountain

The triangles are all cut out and laid out on the design wall, and I actually started piecing the first couple of rows over the weekend.  As anticipated, since these are NOT equilateral triangles, the piecing did not go smoothly.  The seam ripper was called into play repeatedly.

Sew, Rip, Sew, Rip; Repeat ad infinitum

This Is the WRONG Way to Line Up the Triangles!!

Look at the above photo, where I've drawn the seam line on the pink triangle 1/4" in from the raw edge.  That was my first idea about how to sew these triangles together, and that idea was WRONG!  In order to line these up correctly, the beginning of the chalk line at the bottom of the pink triangle needs to be touching the raw edge of the Cat Treats triangle beneath it.  When these two triangles are properly matched up for sewing, the lower right corner of that pink triangle will be sticking past the raw edge of the Cat Treats triangle.

I probably sewed, ripped, and resewed that one seam three or four times and it still wasn't right.  At this point, after so much handling, my raw edges were beginning to fray and the bias edges of my triangles were showing signs of distortion.  Clearly this idea of "jogging the edges slightly" as recommended by my pattern instructions wasn't going to cut it!  So I thought about traditional hand piecing, where you actually mark and align stitching lines on each piece, or at least mark dots at the beginning and end of each seam intersection.  So, using gridded template plastic and an X-Acto cutter along with the 30 degree triangle ruler I used to cut my fabric, I cut out a template the same size as my triangle units, including the seam allowances.  Then, laying my see-through template on top of my triangle ruler, I marked a small dot with an extra-fine point Sharpie marker where the quarter inch seam lines should intersect at each corner.  I punched a tiny hole exactly through each black dot with a 1/16" hole puncher, and now I can use this template to mark those crucial intersections with a Sewline mechanical chalk pencil on each triangle as I line them up for piecing. If I poke a pin straight through the dot on one triangle and straight through the dot on the other triangle, that should guarantee that my alignment is correct the FIRST time I sew that seam, right?

Marking Seam Intersections With My Piecing Template

Miraculously, even before I had the idea of making a template, some of my seams DID come out okay.  If they're not perfect, then at least they're close enough for me to fudge when I join the rows together.  I'm done ripping because my goal is to get this project QUILTED this month -- eye on the prize, right?

The Ones I Can Live With

I am disregarding the pattern instructions to press seams open because I tried doing that on the first couple of seams and nearly melted my fingerprints off with my iron.  So now I'm pressing the seams to the sides, alternating from left to right with each row.  Much easier to get a nice, crisply pressed open seam that way, at least in my experience.

Tentative Quilting Plan for Tabby Mountain

Meanwhile, I was well enough to sing at two church services on Sunday morning, and I came up with this preliminary quilting plan on my iPad during the sermons.  I'm fidgety, so I find that I actually pay better attention to what the pastor is saying when I'm doodling, so don't judge me...  It's not just the four year olds who benefit from coloring pages during worship!  So.  The above plan includes some ruler work and little circles on the solid colored diamonds (two adjacent rows of solid triangles) and some easy free motion fills on the print fabrics.  At least, these were free motion fills that I was able to execute fairly well on my practice pieces, so I'm looking forward to trying them out on a real quilt next.

And now that my "Math Is Beautiful" quilt is finished and delivered and I'm not as intimidated by my longarm machine, the thought of QUILTING this Tabby Mountain quilt is my motivation to persist through the piecing.  Yay!  

As I mentioned initially, I'm linking up with One Monthly Goal at Elm Street Quilts today, as well as:

·       Let’s Bee Social at www.sewfreshquilts.blogspot.ca/

·       Midweek Makers at www.quiltfabrication.com/

·       WOW WIP on Wednesday at www.estheraliu.blogspot.com

·       WIPs With Friends at www.mamaspark.blogspot.com 

·       Needle and Thread Thursday at http://www.myquiltinfatuation.blogspot.com/  

·       Whoop Whoop Fridays at www.confessionsofafabricaddict.blogspot.com

·       Finished Or Not Friday at http://busyhandsquilts.blogspot.com/

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...