A quilt for G

I was "forced" to take a break from working on my challenge quilt for the upcoming Harvest Quilters' Guild show at the end of March and make a "Big girl" quilt for my eldest granddaughter. She'll be 5 on Friday. We went fabric shopping yesterday and she picked out all the bright colored prints. She was very disappointied that  I couldn't get the quilt finished in 3 hours (I barely got the fabric washed and ironed in 3 hours!), but I will have it ready for her by Friday. I just got the top (and matching pillowcase) done a few minutes ago.

The thing I learned doing an attic windows quilt for my daughter when she was around the same age is that it works better when you use very dark and very light colors for the window frame. I was happy to find a wide scrap of Dora the Explorer and Disney Princess fabrics in my stash (thank you eQuilter "scraps by the pound"!) and was able to use some characters in the windows as a surprise for her.

I also made my first proper pillowcase, using that "roll up and sew n a tube" method. It turned out really well.

What I'm working on now

I just pledged the 2012 Free-Motion Quilting Challenge (the badge for the challenge is further down the page in the blogroll). We'll see how that goes.

In the meantime, I'm working on the Harvest Quilters' guild challenge quilt for the March show. The challenge is to make a bi-color quilt, with white and another fabric that "reads" as a solid color. I'm using a white-on-white print and a black hand-dye that has just a bit of texture in it. I'm not going to spoil the surprise but I will post a bit of a teaser:

Something Useful

It wasn't terribly easy to part with my mug rug at the swap last Monday, but I was consoled by the fact that I had to cut through a stack of 5 squares of fabric to make the one block. This meant that I had enough fabric to make 4 additional blocks that are nearly identical (but with the fabrics swapped in each piece).

I also needed something to carry my Wacom Intuous 4 drawing tablet back and forth to the office, so I decided to design and make a carry bag for it.  I used some of the Pellon fusible fleece that I see used for a lot of purse projects (that I procured at the last quilt show I attended). It's a whole lot floppier than the ultra stiff heavy duty Pellon that I've been using for various things, but it seems to make a nice bag.

The bag is still missing some Velcro closures,  because the Velcro is hiding in my sewing room, somewhere.
The "front," sporting 2 of the leftover blocks from the mug rug.

The back, with accordion pocket for  tablet accessories: USB cable, pen, pen stand.

 Pocket, opened.

The bag, open, so you can see the great batik lining fabric, and a the tablet peeking out.

Well I went and did it

I sent in my information to be considered as a contestant on the Ultimate Craft Throwdown.  Having watched Cupcake Wars and Halloween Wars more than a few times, I sort of know what to expect if I get picked to be on the show. I am sort of hoping they do pick me. Then I'd have to think about who to take as my assistant...

Mug Rug Swap

Tomorrow is the Mug Rug Swap at Garden State Quilters' Guild. So I did some curved piecing and spme spiral quilting.

The fabric is from Connecting Threads; a "layer cake" pack. I stacked 5 fabrics on top of each other and went to town with my rotary cutter. So I actually have enough cut out for 5 different "blocks" in the same design (but the fabrics will alternate in the patches). I'm not sure what to do with the other 4 yet, aside from piecing them.

I also used another piece from the layer cake for the backing.

Happy 2012!

I haven't posted here since the last workshop... Because of personal stuff, I haven't really been in the sewing room too much since October. That will change with the new year. There are a lot of projects on the back burner that need to get done and I'll be posting about it here.

Workshopping

Last Tuesday, the Garden State Quilters' Guild, to which I belong, sponsored a workshop with RaNae Merril on her Spiral Mandala quilts. These intricate and beautiful quilts are foundation-pieced, and based on twisted log cabin blocks. So, conceptually, they aren't terribly difficult for my engineer's brain to latch onto very quickly. The complexity arises in how you choose to color the patches in each block, and reverse (mirror) symmetry.

We spent the first half of the workshop choosing some basic blocks that RaNae had designed and then coming up with our own color schemes for our "pizza slice" - the workshop mandalas are built from 7 wedges: 4 and their mirror images.

The second half of the workshop was spent assembling the first block of one wedge, following her paper=piecing technique. Prior to this, I had seen some demonstrations of paper-piecing, and watched come video and read some tutorials, but there's really nothing like actually sitting down and doing it with a teacher, especially a teacher who's spent some time and thought on making the process more streamlined.

For example, none of the prior demos I have witnessed showed how to use the "add a quarter" ruler for trimming seam allowances, and I had never seen anyone use a wallpaper roller to "finger press" a seam before. 


Paper piecing is certainly a time-consuming process, and it does seem to have more "waste" than regular piecing, but it would be next to impossible for me to use such tiny wedges of fabric in a design any other way.  Ms Merrill also had us work with that EQ foundation-piecing product that is basically tear-away interfacing that you can run through your printer. One of my guild=mates mentioned to me before the workshop that once I tried it, I would never go back to regular paper for paper piecing again, and she was right. It's more expensive than using regular paper, but it's really forgiving, you can leave it in if you want, and it's translucent so you can see what you're doing on either side of the pattern.

RaNae is a great teacher, and I recommend both the book and her live class.

I've been working diligently on this quilt all week. I've finished 24 blocks out of 40. Here is the center block, arranged on my design wall:

I have 2 smaller blocks completed, and one of them is now sewn onto the center block. The other small block gets attached to a block that's not started yet. I have 2 more blocks to do, but they are, I think, the most complex of all the blocks in this quilt. So far, I have used 25 different fabrics and pieced 384 individual pieces.