String Ring Dresden Quilt

I am so happy to reveal the finished String Ring Dresden quilt today!  I received the package in the mail on Thursday from Elizabeth, who had done the wonderful quilting, and on her domestic machine, no less.  The quilting really takes it to a whole 'nother level of awesome!

I spent last evening attaching the binding and label, excited to see it all done.

This is a rather large quilt, and the challenge was going to be how to capture it in photos...with a rather dark house...with small rooms...in the winter...in Wisconsin...by myself with no assistant quilt holder-uppers.  
Fortunately, the weather cooperated with a clear and bright, windless, not-so-cold day.

I thought I might get a better perspective by laying it on the snow outside and shooting it from a higher vantage point, i.e., the upstairs bathroom window.

Well, uh, fail.  Even with zoom, it didn't look right.  Pretty view of the back yard, though.

So I tromped back outside and did the best I could on the level.  Of course, every time I walked near the quilt, I was making eight or ten-inch craters in the snow with my boots.

As I was leaving the back yard, it struck me to toss it up over the deck railing.  Smaller quilts typically slide down on one side or the other, but with this big-un, it actually stayed put.

Elizabeth really knocked it out of the park on the quilting.  I can't thank her enough for everything she did to get the quilting just right.  You can read more about that experience in her blog post here.  Great photos there too.

The label she hand embroidered is so very special.  I think she could have a niche business just hand embroidering quilt labels.  How often do we skip that important step?  Guilty, here.

By the way, the backing fabric is Robert Kaufman, A Pirate's Life for Me Pirate Booty.  Who doesn't love a little pirate booty?  Just adds to the whimsy.

More about the back story of this quilt can be found in these previous posts:

* how the idea came about
* significance of the color scheme
* tutorial for a string table mat (how the string rings are made)
* design decisions
* finished quilt top

Thanks for stopping by, and a very Happy New Year to you!

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Scrappy Table Runner

It has been a good weekend to finish things up...Christmas shopping, of course, and this little table runner.  I just put the last stitches in the binding a little while ago, as the snow fell softly outside. 

We were due for several more inches of the white stuff today, but it seems to be dissipating now and the sun is peeking out.  Snow or no, it's a fine day to be in the sewing room and maybe catch a bit of the Packers game. 

A couple weeks ago, I was playing around with scraps from the drunkard's path pieces I'd cut for the Hemispheres quilt when an idea came together for this table runner.  I machine appliqued the leaf shapes onto a background and then bordered it with wedge-shaped pieces.

I feel like I'm slowly getting my quilting mojo back.  I used Aurifil here as the top thread and, for the first time, tried Superior Bottom Line in the bobbin, which seemed to work pretty well together.  Bottom Line is a very fine thread which almost disappears into the background while giving good thread definition.  If that makes any sense.

I had thought about making a table runner or wall hanging with a charm pack of Blitzen this season, but that probably won't happen now before Christmas.  Nevertheless, this one seems to go nicely with the Pyrex Snowflake Blue pattern.

As a final note, oh my gosh, you guys, I am SO excited about the quilting Elizabeth did on my String Ring Dresden quilt!  It's on its way back to me in the mail right now, but you can see photos of it over at her blog, Such a Sew and Sew.  She did an amazing job and deserves a huge Whoop-Whoop too!

Silver Lining

I finished a quilt that had been basted since September.  It sat around waiting for, I don't know, inspiration? the right mood? a not-sore shoulder?  When I awoke in the wee hours on Thursday morning and couldn't get back to sleep, it suddenly seemed as good a time as any to get started on it.  I conceded that it wasn't going to have the "right" thread or the "perfect" predetermined quilting pattern; nope, in that moment, what was needed was somewhere to focus my attention, and that trumped everything else.

Thus, the cloud of insomnia had a silver lining:  One UFO down.

I quilted vertical lines down the whole thing, trying to vary them somewhat so they weren't completely straight yet not totally curved.  Wonky took a little practice.

I like the back almost as much as the front.  Isn't that the way it goes sometimes?

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Today was caramel corn making day.  Every year I make a big batch for my coworkers at the clinic and bring it in the week of Christmas.  But they started asking about it last week already, so I figured I better bump up the delivery date.

You can find the recipe in my post from three years ago here.

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I discovered this gem on my hard drive recently.  It's me and my siblings circa 1968. 

Paulette, Nita, Darrell, Russ c. 1968

Dad especially liked to line us up for photos around the holidays.  I so appreciate that we have such great documentation of our growing up years on film, goofy as some of those pictures are.

I'm on the left in the red sweater.  I love my sister's shirt with the Nehru collar, the bark cloth curtains, our antique Knabe grand piano with a bazillion little fingerprints on it, and most of all, my brothers' sweet faces!  Almost as if they can't wait for Santa and are trying to convince him they've been very good!

Linking to A Stitch in Time 2013 Finishes and Can I Get a Whoop-Whoop!

Now with More Cowbell

Well, the strangest thing happened while the internet was out here for a day and a half this weekend.  I actually got stuff done!  Funny how that works.  As in, I got a quilt one hundred percent D-O-N-E, done.  Also knocked out a really good chunk of the Christmas shopping on Saturday, caught up on laundry, and made a big ole turkey dinner and trimmings yesterday, because apparently we must not have eaten enough turkey on Thanksgiving what with all the wild waterfowl.

If the internet had stayed down past noon yesterday, I may have even gotten up the Christmas tree and possibly channeled my inner Betty Crocker with some holiday baking.  Hopefully, that will happen in due course before the next outage.

So, quilt-wise, the baby boy quilt is now ready for gifting! 

I went with a solid green binding, a Quilter's Basics in Peridot from Connecting Threads.

The pieced backing did use up most of the Denyse Schmidt fabrics in the stash, except a few small scraps.  Sweet, soft blues and blue-greens.  I can almost smell the baby powder.

I am so happy to have a finish, at long last.  Linking to:

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The other day I was looking for something in a store while the most annoying Christmas song ever was playing.  I don't even remember what it was, but it was an over-amped nerve jangler that made me want to finish up and get out of Walgreens on the very next sleigh.

Which led me to muse:  Can there be too much of a good thing?  (Sure.)  Are we obliged to hear all the familiar tunes in their various renditions, everywhere we go for six weeks?  All that repetition; to me it kind of starts to feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, stuck in a loop and waking up to "I Got You Babe" every morning.

And yet there I was doing my shoulder exercises yesterday and instead of counting the seconds to hold the stretch, what am I doing?  Singing Jingle Bells.  Fifteen seconds, folks.  That's about how long it takes to get all the way up to "Dashing through the snow..."  I know, I'm a walking contradiction.

I like the Christmas season and all, but the older I get, the more my feelings about the music are mixed.  And as I followed that thought trail, I had an idea:  Why not mix up the sleigh bells and bell choirs and silver bells with...more cowbell?

And that, friends, is how my YouTube playlist, "The Twelve Days of Cowbell", was born.  Norm and I had fun coming up with two pages' worth of song titles throughout the day yesterday, and then whittled it down to an even dozen.  It is an eclectic mix.  I hope you enjoy!  (PS-The first one may be my favorite, drummer boys!)

Little Bitty Batty

This week's time in the sewing room started with a few hours of fabric pressing and folding.  A growing pile of prewashed stuff had teetered on the back of an office chair for a couple months, threatening to tumble onto the floor.  It was time to deal with it.

One good thing about the job was getting reacquainted with the stash.  I definitely have some whatever am I going to do with that? pieces.  I'm okay with it; in fact, I find it a fun challenge.  One item was a sort of creepy purple-gray, black, and white print I'd bought on vacation in July (found in the clearance bin, no big surprise).  Then there were the mottled burnt orange and poison green pieces.  Ah, yes, this could be the makings of something spooky and seasonal.

As it happened, I'd found a wicked cute bat applique PDF a few days ago (here).  Instead of putting it on a single fabric background, though, I thought I'd try a string or strip-pieced one.

So I made a strata of strips.  Then I cut four squares by turning my 6.5-inch square ruler so the middle strip would be along the diagonal, like so.

Here they are laid out on the cutting table prior to sewing.  I traced the bat onto freezer paper.

Then I layered four pieces of black print fabric, pressed the freezer paper bat onto the top layer, and carefully cut all four bats out at once, following the pattern.

In hindsight, since the bats were going to be fused onto the background, I should have ironed the fusible web onto the black fabric first.  But I didn't, so there was some more fussy cutting of bat shapes from fusible.

The bitty bats were then fused and machine appliqued around the edges.  Then it was sandwiched and quilted.  It's about 12 inches square, table mat size. 

I have, in the past, had a problem quilting through fusible (and I haven't tried another brand yet, which I intend to).  So the best course was to avoid quilting the bats and just concentrate on the center and outer portions of the mini.

I winged it on the center quilting, just following the lines where the four pieces joined and waving back and forth over the line, east to west, then in reverse to make oval shapes.  Then the same thing, north to south.  That didn't seem like enough quilting, so I did double-size waves east to west and north to south and back again, making double-size ovals.

I did concentric circles in the outside with a walking foot, since the bat wings created such a cool circular shape, and I was thinking of bat sonar too.

Isn't it interesting that the bats are sort of an illusion that you don't necessarily see immediately.  You might notice the center first, and then those curious things that look like green fangs around the outside.  And then...bats!

So that's my creepy-cool little bitty batty mini quilt!

Quilted and Donated

I quilted and finished the improv baby quilt on Saturday.

This morning, after a brief photo shoot, I dropped it off at Nancy's Notions as a donation for Project Linus.

This was an experiment in working with freehand cut curved strips, and I enjoyed it.  I got to use up some scraps and stash in the process for a unique, bright baby quilt, which ended up being 37 inches square.

I did ditch quilting around the curved elements and an elongated loop in the narrow border, then overall loopy quilting in the wide outer border.

I'm linking to 100 Quilts for Kids at Swim Bike Quilt.  Would you like to make a quilt or two for this drive?  You have until September 30, so there's still time.

Also linking to A Stitch in Time September 2013 Finishes at Such a Sew and Sew.

Black and White

Finally, a finish!  That is a good feeling indeed.  The black and white quilt that I pieced over two years ago has been quilted and bound.

And I lived.

Seriously, the actual quilting is not my favorite part of making quilts, but this was kind of fun once I got into it.  Once I gave up the idea of quilting a perfect spiral, that is.

Shay reminded me that imperfect, scribbly style quilting is called "organic."  To which I responded that this quilt may be so organic it attracts flies!

But the spirals got better each time.  No buzzing was noted in the vicinity.

Having practiced all those circular motions, I moved on to the narrow stop border and did more circles.  Organically, don't you know.

My outer border was a wee bit ripply, I noted as I was basting it.  I fought the urge to remove and resew it and instead hoped it would quilt out.  A little meandering in that area seemed to do the trick. 

Then I went back to the frame borders in the interior and did a back and forth stitch.  I really like how that turned out.  After quilting down one side, I was in the zone and went on to finish them all in one sitting.

Finally, the little red patch.  I changed thread to red and quilted a little daisy with some pebbling (very organic, ahem) around the outside.

It took longer yesterday to hand bind the thing than anything.  I intended to machine bind it, but hand binding is sometimes what happens when you take too generous a seam.

After binding, it was time right away for pictures, since it was the perfect kind of overcast (plenty of light but no glaring sun).  Then the quilt was nap tested.  It passed.

You can see the quilting better from the back.  I had in mind a zen garden kind of thing, thus the straight lines, spirals, pebbles, etc.

The original plan was to quilt it somewhat differently, but after getting reacquainted with the quilt as I was pin basting it, an alternate idea took shape.

I don't have a clever name for this quilt, but I thought of this song.  To call a song a rag is one thing, but a quilt, well, no.  Anyway, both the song and the quilt make me happy!



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