bloggers’ quilt festival II: ocean waves quilt

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blogger's quilt festival, ocean waves quilt

The irony of entering a quilt into the Quilt Photographers category of the Blogger’s Quilt Festival does not at all escape me.

When I switch my camera to Manual, I don’t get pictures. The end. Just this summer I started taking photos using Aperture Priority mode (and these past two weeks something is going wrong and I don’t know how to fix it aaaaack)

But this year I’ve made real progress in photographing my finished quilts. I’m getting better at staging them (these photos were taken at Crane Beach in Ipswich MA; *sniff sniff* our “local” beach) (please don’t hate me)

and I’m just getting better at them in general. I’m now consistently able to take photographs of a finished quilt that I can be proud of.

I’ve also learned the valuable lesson that a quilt isn’t finished until you’ve photographed it. The dryer moment is nice, sure. But what’s nicer? The first kind person who “favorites” your photo on Flickr. Quilting is, in the end, about sharing. If you quilt and don’t photograph your work to share on the internet (Flickr, Instagram, a blog)

PLEASE reconsider. I promise your quilts are beautiful, and you should be sharing them with all of us, so that we can tell you how gorgeous they are.

This Ocean Waves quilt was made using the pattern from Denyse Schmidt’s book Modern Quilts Traditional Inspiration but with modifications to block size and number of blocks. I used leftover HSTs from my X-plus quilt to make the blocks, orange scraps from my stash to make the back, scraps from my first Washi Dress to make the binding, and even batting scraps for the batting. A 100% satisfying 100% scrap quilt.

Head over to the Quilt Photographers category and check out the other great quilts (and great quilt photos)!

bloggers’ quilt festival: roy g. zig quilt

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blogger's quilt festival, roy g. zig

When I read on Facebook that Peg at Sew Fresh Fabrics is sponsoring the prize for the Favorite ROYGBIV Quilt category of Blogger’s Quilt Festival at Amy’s Creative Side, I knew it was time to submit my very first entry.

I made this quilt using Rachel at Stitched in Color’s Ziggy Strings tutorial, which she wrote for this past spring’s Scrap Attack Festival of Strings event. I sorted my mountain of string scraps into color order and sketched this quilt out.

Most of you already know this quilt won the big prize at the Festival of Strings: a roll of Warm and Natural batting. (Quilts for a year, ya’ll.)

But what I don’t talk about so much is that I started this quilt the morning after the Boston Marathon bombing in April.

Lost for a way to react to the scary things going on in my city, I turned to quilting.

and making something beautiful did make me feel a whole lot better. The rainbow is appropriate for Boston, too; Massachusetts was the first state to allow any of its residents to marry, regardless of sexual orientation, and I *did* finish the quilt during Pride Week. (Also a little-known fact: my husband and I chose to be legally married at Boston City Hall before our TN wedding so that we could have an MA marriage certificate.)

This quilt is my proudest and my best quilt of 2013 (heh so far!) and I’m so glad for the Blogger’s Quilt Festival and the chance it provides for us to look back over our year of work and think about which are our “best” quilts. Hop on over to the ROYGBIV category and check out all the fabulous quilts shown there!

november grace circle block: stitching and bacon’s stars align

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do good stitches, grace circle, november block, stars align

November is my first month as Quilter in the Grace circle of do.Good stitches!

I joined the Grace circle at the end of July. I did July’s blocks a bit late, but have been on track and sewing with the group since August. I’m thrilled and honored to be sewing with the Grace ladies. They do some seriously amazing work.

I’ve got some high standards to live up to, so I’m turning to an expert: the smart and talented Sarah of Stitching and Bacon. Sarah is a dear blog friend and I pretty much love every quilt she makes, in a “you’d better lock your doors because I WILL steal that” kind of way.

I felt very much like I wanted to steal her Stars Align quilt this past winter. I can’t get her quilt out of my head! I love the limited color palette she used, and all of the secondary between-block designs created by the skinny-skinny sashing used within the block.

So, Grace girls, we’ll be using Sarah’s Stars Align tutorial to make our November blocks.

Inspired by Sarah’s quilt, I’ve chosen a limited palette for our blocks. Think winter, think frost, think ice. (I’ll be assembling this quilt in late December or January; definitely an icy time of year in Massachusetts!)

For the “background” of the blocks, please use a black, blue, or aqua-on-white, “low-volume” print (stack left, in the photo above) (A white solid is also ok if that’s what you’ve got in your stash.)

For colors A and B of the blocks, please use medium grey and mid-true blue and aqua to light blue and aqua.

For the lattice lines of the blocks (where Sarah has used white), please use dark charcoal to black fabrics (I think dark navy would also work).

I’m a prints girl, so I cut all prints. I know we have some solids folks in our circle, so feel free to use solids for 1 or 2 areas of each block, but I’d rather not have all-solids blocks for this one.

Here’s my pile of cut fabrics for each block. One tip as you’re cutting: go ahead and cut two 1.5” x WOF strips for the lattice lines. Just do it. You need 60” of that sashing, and you’ll get grouchy if you re-file your fabrics and then have to dig them back out (ask me how I know. I am officially a math genius for figuring that 28” + 14” + 15” somehow = 40”). (No I know now that I’m wrong.)

 

And my two finished blocks, which I whipped up in an afternoon. The blocks finish at 13.5” square, and we’ll have a 4 x 5 layout for a 52”x65” quilt. Not bad at all!

Let me know if you have questions. Can’t wait to see these start popping up in our Flickr group!

improv chevron blocks

Tags

improv chevron block how-to

Here, as promised, is your non-tutorial on how I did the center blocks in my Phoenix Twin quilt (there is a photo at the end of this post).

I’m fairly sure I’ve seen these blocks around the internet so I don’t think I’m doing anything particularly original here. But I don’t know exactly where to send you to show you how to do them, so find out here!

(Sidenote: RESPECT to you guys who write tutorials all the time. Just the photos and then the subsequent light photo editing about did me in.)

OK. Here’s the block you’re aiming at:

Take a minute and look. It’s got a little “center” bit on the right hand side; then there are wonky chevrons growing up, and then just wonky strips at the top. You can do this!

Step 1: cut your paper to size. I made my blocks 8.5” x 13.5” unfinished (they finish to 8” x 13”) so I trimmed down legal size paper (8.5” x 14”). You can make these blocks whatever size you want! I’ve made these three blocks the same way, and they are all different sizes. Just remember to add .5” to your desired finished block size, and trim away. (A note: I happen to think these are cooler as elongated rectangles. But they’re also pretty cool as squares.)

(I used a dull rotary cutter blade to cut off my .5” strip! Awesome!)

Step 2: Draw chevrons. With a ruler and a pencil, draw chevrons rising from one corner of your paper. Remember that your “corner” is going to end up on the opposite side of your drawing; so, if you’re drawing a corner on the right-hand side of your paper, the corner will be in the left-hand side of your block. Because you piece on the other side of the paper.

Steps 3 and 4: Extend the “top” horizontal-ish lines on the left to touch the vertical lines (see photo below). Number your pieces for paper-piecing. After you do one of these blocks you won’t need to number anymore. I remind myself that short goes first. (So that you can extend the seam line when you sew on the left, long piece and anchor the top of your short piece to the paper.)

Step 5: Cut your fabric. Remember to oversize the fabric you think you need by at least .75” – 1”. I drew my chevron strips to be about 1.5”-2.75” wide. So I cut strips of fabric that were 2.5”-3.5” wide. (Most, I found, I cut 2.75” wide.) For this block don’t bother trying to cut length. Just cut a strip from your FQ or half-yard or whatever. You can trim off the excess strip length after you’ve pieced on your strip and then use it to piece the second half of the chevron.

I found that my little “center” bits often needed to be 3.5” wide. The little centers are also great for using up little scrap ends!

Step 6: Paper-piece. Go! I’m no paper-piecing expert. My tips begin and end at: use a tiny dab of glue stick to hold down your #1 piece aaaand that’s pretty much it. If you don’t “do” paper-piecing yet, check out Faith at Fresh Lemons’s post about the method (this is the post I learned from, ya’ll). Recently, Michelle wrote up a great handful of tips about the things she’s learned while paper-piecing, and it’s worth a look as well!

For this particular block, the trick is to make sure that the top of the fabric you’re sewing on extends above the point of the chevron segment by at least 1/4”. See above? My Duet Dot strip is lined up so that it will flip over to cover the top point of the #2 segment by about 1/4”.

(The beauty of the improv method is that if you screw this up and your fabric is short in any way, look what you can do:

you can redraw your paper-piecing lines to fit your fabric. Yay for less seam-ripping.)

Step 7: Trim. Flip your paper back from your seam and trim off excess fabric (use your ruler to create a 1/4” seam allowance), then press the new seam with a dry iron and use the paper as a guide to trim off the excess fabric outside the rectangle.

Step 8: Repeat as needed until your chevrons are all pieced.

and voila

block.

Basically, if you’ve paper-pieced before, all you need to know is that you can draw the lines with a ruler and a pencil. (I have to thank Charlotte at Displacement Activity for showing us all we can do this; I have probably also seen other people mark paper-pieced patterns with pencil.) With really careful color planning, you can do really fabulous things with layout.

Let me know if you try it! And let me know if I can help or clarify anything.

what’s happening

Tags

lowbrow hat, phoenix twins, super tote

Oh, hello, two weeks that went by without a blog post. I’ve been ever so busy, in the best possible way!

I realized Christmas is coming. And so soon! So I went bats for hats.

I knit two gorgeous hats:

These are the Lowbrow Hat pattern. The lace pattern might look special, but is ever-so-easy to knit. I felt like a genius when I quickly memorized the lace pattern and didn’t mess it up at all. The blue hat is Plucky Primo Aran in Outta My Hair; the green is Tosh Chunky in Thoreau. (I think this is the IDEAL pattern for a lonely skein of Tosh Chunky, if one happens to have one languishing.)

I also knit a hat dud.

Purl Soho’s Chunky Cabled Hat, knit up in some heathen stash acrylic yarn. This might have turned out better had I ponied up the bucks for the gorgeous-looking Super Soft Merino, which undoubtedly has better drape. As it is I looked like Marge Simpson. I’m considering: trying to shrink the hat in the washing machine, adding a pompom (go bit or go home amirite), or giving it to one of my more-stylish younger sisters who seem to wear everything fabulously. I will not be frogging back or futzing with it in any way that requires real effort.

I made a Super Tote, too! I don’t have much to say about this pattern that others haven’t already said; that Noodlehead knows how to write a pattern. I will say that if you choose Essex Linen for your exterior gusset, DO choose to interface it. I did not, and the gusset is a little floppy for my taste.

I went to a Victoria Findlay Wolfe lecture hosted by my guild last Friday. (I wrote a little writeup of the lecture over at my guild’s blog.) You guys? I think Victoria Findlay Wolfe is a genius. Her lecture was luminous and inspiring; her quilts even more so. I’m still working out what to think about what she had to say (there’s always more fabric! cut it up and use it; never make the same quilt twice, try something new every time; make the quilt you said you would never make; if it’s not working cut it up; challenge yourself by using the fabric you think you hate) but I know that 100% of what she said is true.

I also worked hard at soaking up every last bit of fall sunshine before we fall into the cycle of 6 hours of grey daylight every day all five months of winter.

Oh, and I finished a little quilt top. No big deal.

Yes, this is the first of the two twin quilts I’m making for my friends living in Phoenix (so I’m calling them the Phoenix Twins). I started the second one today and I can tell it’s going to go very quickly. I’ve worked all the drama out of my system on the first one. I’m quite pleased with how this top turned out.

I’ve had a couple of questions about how I made the center blocks for this quilt. I took a few process photos today and will post a little behind-the-scenes tomorrow. You don’t need a tutorial, for goodness’ sake. They are just improv-pieced on a paper foundation (and I owe a lot to Rachel’s Ziggy Strings tutorial for helping me get here). Check back to see how it’s done!

insta-Sunday

Tags

iphone snaps, plum and june quilt photography workshop

(You guys are all the best. Thank you to everyone who commented and emailed with encouraging words after my last post. I am looking forward to thanking each of you individually over the next day or so!)

This post is supposed to be wordless, but this English major just can’t shut up. Beth’s Quilt Photography Workshop for the month of October asks us to communicate carefully using photographs instead of words. I’ve dragged my heels (“this is so much thinking” “this is so haaaaaaard” “I have to really WORK on this”) and gotten out my camera several times to take some really unsatisfying flops of photos (geez maybe somebody ought to comb my kid’s hair once in awhile), only to realize that

EVERY TIME we take a cell phone snap or Instagram something, we’re doing exactly what Beth is asking us to do. We’re using a photo to speak better than words could. So now I’ll shut up and share some of my most favorite iPhone/Instagram photos that I think work to SAY something about my sewing or my life.

Frustration!

Relaxing

My Style

Color Palette Inspiration

Favorites (yes, Plucky) (“sorry for the chat”)

Inspiration

My Sewing Process

Future and/or Goals

A Typical Day

Things That Make Me Smile

If this is cheating please feel free to throw rotten fruit boo hiss etc. But I really just have to point out that even if you think you’re not speaking with your photographs, probably you are, every day (or at least every time you Instagram). I encourage you to flip through your cell phone/Instagram takes and think about what you’re trying to say with each photo! Many of us are photographers many times a day; while I agree that we should strive towards increased DSLR use, sometimes…we gotta work with what we got.

Linking up, of course, with The Plum and June Quilt Photography Workshop

it’s okay to be little

Tags

being little, blogging

I’ve had this post a-brewing for a long time. It’s not so much about quilting, so feel free to click “mark as read” and move on. It’s okay.

When I started this blog in May 2012, I was a stay-at-home mom with a 1-year-old, and I was lonely and bored. We moved to our town in Massachusetts about five weeks before Lucy was due to be born, and, in full survival mode, dug into what we needed to do to survive late pregnancy and newbornhood. I didn’t do a good job putting down roots; I didn’t do a good job reaching out to make friends. I felt crippled by my tiny 10th percentile bottle-refusing baby who needed to nurse every 45 minutes.

By the time Lucy was 14 months old, I turned to my husband and said, “I feel like I’ve recovered from a long, terrible illness, and I’m finally well again.” I had picked quilting back up after nearly abandoning it during Lucy’s babyhood. I was sleeping again. Lucy was weaned. And I had this little blog and OBVIOUSLY I was going to be immediately and hugely famous.

HA. It took a year before anyone even started seeing my work. But this past summer, when I joined Beth’s Let’s Get Acquainted New Blogger Blog Hop, I was so overwhelmed by how friendly and wonderful all of my fellow bloggers are! I’m so glad to be having the kinds of conversations I always wanted to have about quilts and fabric hoarding and sewing and kids and being a stay-at-home-mom who tries to sew. Exchanging comments and emails with you-all has been a lifeline.

I’d be lying, however, if I didn’t admit that the same blog hop that brought me so many close and vibrant online friendships didn’t also bring some negative feelings. Feelings like stress and pressure. Feelings like jealousy, which is always really rooted in selfish feelings of inadequacy. “She has so many more followers than me, surely she doesn’t want to talk to little ol’ me.” “He’s so sparkly, he doesn’t have time to yak about which Art Gallery fabrics to buy.” “She’s already designing her own patterns! I’ll never be able to do that.” “How is she managing four or five posts a week? I still don’t know where my camera is from two weeks ago.”

Of course, all that negative stuff is in my own head. In my heart of hearts, I believe that any person possessed by the urge to cut fabric into tiny pieces and put it back together into a thing of warmth, beauty, and love, has a golden soul and is a truly kindred spirit. And it’s turned out to be so true! Every sewing blogger I’ve exchanged words with, big or small, is a lovely, warm person.

In the past two months, my feelings of jealousy and inadequacy have resolved into something more satisfied and peaceful. I used to think I wanted to be a capital B Blogger (like I used to think I wanted to be capital P Professor or a capital E Editor. Or a capital W Writer.) But I’ve learned (through experience) that something essential changes the moment that you do something for any reason other than love. The first novel you read to cite in a paper you’re trying to write so that you can be a fierce competitor on a brutal job market changes you as a reader. The first quilt you make to sell isn’t the same as the quilt you made for love. I’ve not done it, but I imagine the first blog post you write that isn’t for the love of your own little blog isn’t a bad thing–it’s just a different thing.

It’s not like potential sponsors are knocking down my door. It’s not like I get a lot of pageviews. It’s not like I’m getting emails from sewing websites begging me to submit tutorials. But truly? I don’t think I want them to. I need this–blogging and quilting–to be the thing I do out of love. I don’t personally feel the need to spend time growing my readership or trying to get pageviews or plotting a string of tutorials.

(Sidenote: some of the quilters I most admire–some of the PEOPLE I most admire–do tutorials and sell quilts and patterns and blog for reasons other than hippy dippy “love”. I’ll fiercely defend anything a person can do from their own home to support their hobby or allow them to spend less time in an office and more time with those they love. Fiercely. In saying this is not for me, I’m not passing any value judgment.)

So, materially, what this might mean is that I might be here a little less often. That’s OK. Some weeks I might have a ton to say. Some months, nothing. It’s all cool. This is a hobby, right, for love? So if I’m not loving it, I don’t have to do it. It’s also going to mean that I’m going to put even less pressure on myself to link-up-socialize-spend-three-hours-every-Friday-night-commenting-on-as-many-posts-as-possible.

I’m hoping these realizations help me reach a more genuine place as a blogger and as a quilter. It’s okay to be little! And it’s even more okay to figure out that little is always what you wanted to be in the first place.

bits, pieces, and stuff you should know about

 

(I can only LUCK into good photos of this kid lately. Here she is amusing herself while I worked on Scrappy Spiderwebs photos.)

1) Victoria Findlay Wolfe (she is who I think of as “THE WINNER OF QUILTCON”) is coming to lecture at an event co-hosted by the Boston MQG and the Seacoast MQG! She’ll be at the West Newbury Town Hall Annex in West Newbury MA on October 18, 7-9pm. Members of either BMQG or SMQG pay $5 at the door; all guests are welcome and can purchase a $10 ticket at the door. See the SMQG blog for details.

2) Lizzy House is coming to another lecture co-hosted by the SMQG and BMQG! She’ll be visiting us on November 23 from 10 am to noon, also at the West Newbury Town Hall Annex in West Newbury MA. This event is free to all members of the SMQG and BMQG; again, all guests are welcome and can purchase a $10 ticket at the door. SMQG blog has Lizzy House details, too!

3) Denyse Schmidt is coming to the New England Quilt Museum in Lowell MA in November. Her workshop has been booked up for months, but she will be giving a lecture on November 15 at 7pm. I won’t be able to make this one myself but check out the details if you think you can!

4) By Hand London just released a free PDF pattern, the Polly Top, and it looks FABULOUS. Fabulous, as in, why am I not already sewing this?! Head over here, enter your email address, and they’ll send you a download link. I’ve had a look and the pattern looks quite appropriate for a beginner sewist. (This is absolutely not a sponsored post, but seriously, you should know about the Polly Top.)

/and now back to your regular programming

finished: scrappy spiderwebs quilt

Tags

finished quilts, scrappy spiderwebs quilt

Remember when I won the spiderweb lottery blocks at my guild meeting in June? I felt like the luckiest gal alive.

I knew I needed to make a few more spiderweb blocks, sure. And I had a funky buttload of string scraps to use (even after Roy G. Zig). I felt sure that my beloved and much-coveted spiderweb quilt was close at hand. A quick finish!

Say it with me, in a Borat voice: NOT.

My first problem with this quilt I knew before I even left my guild meeting. This is a block that requires very consistent measuring and piecing to make all the star points meet correctly. If any one of my guild members had made 30 spiderweb blocks, all 30 of theirs would have made a perfect quilt. As it was, I had 16 blocks made by different hands, and the star points were just not going to all meet. This is the blessing and curse of bee quilts. I’m SO bowled over by the blessing of owning a quilt made by some of the most talented quilters in my geographic region, don’t get me wrong. But our points don’t match.

I know, call the quilt police.

My second issue with this quilt was that given my current quilting commitments (Penny Sampler, Phoenix Twins, two bees, some guild stuff, and holiday sewing looming ominously) I just knew I couldn’t scrape together many more spiderweb blocks. OK, I couldn’t do ANY more spiderweb blocks.

But then you brilliant people out there on the quilternet saved the day! Kelie of Craft Nurse Quilt posted this amazing finish on Flickr. I was struck by the fact that I didn’t HAVE to make 14 more spiderweb blocks! I could make more blocks, sure, but I could do them however the heck-o I wanted!

Then enter Kelly’s fabulous Serendipity scrap quilt, and the rainbow blocks Mary’s churning out. Why not some easy-peasy improv log cabiny blocks? Paintbox style? Around the edges? Quick, scrap-hoovering, perfect.

This plan looked fabulous and was so fun. Enter problem #3: then when I attached my sashing and improv blocks, the top wouldn’t lay flat. No amount of steam could flatten the sucker into submission.

So I thought, fine, okay, I’ll just stipple this bad boy and call it a day. HA. Problem #4. My backing wrinkled up twice and my front wrinkled up once before I had even an eighth of the quilt stippled. Then I spent a whole naptime watching a trashy movie and spitefully seam-ripping.

I finally gave in and straight line quilted it

and called it a day.

(I’m ignoring problem #5 I ran short of backing on one corner, problem #6 it’s not at all square, and problem #7 the first time I went to take photos of this they all turned out blue wth?)

You guys?

I love this hot mess of a quilt.

Thanks to the SMQG who made the blocks, and all of you who inspired me along the way! This is going to be my happy-times snow-days cuddle quilt this winter, I know it.