Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Summer is here! It came! It came!

What came?

My Missouri Star BLOCK magazine!  Summer fun can begin although I probably won't be doing that much quilting.  We have travel plans coming quickly, my husband starts a new job, and then school starts too soon in August. :P  BUT this mag actually helped me put on the fun attitude so I don't get bogged down in details.




Making it even better, it has directions for some of the quilts I've wanted to make like Stacks and floating hexagon quilts.  They also included a patriotic remake of the Friendship Star Sashing that got me excited to try.

I really like how the magazine suggests different fabrics and combinations so I can start visualizing the quilt patterns from Jenny Doan's YouTube tutorials in different colors.

Along with quilt patterns, Jenny tells stories to get me thinking of my life in terms of the high points instead of the shoulda, coulda, woulda slant.  I need that!!!

Some of the patterns include the Dresden Botanica, a quilt I never would have even watched a tutorial for but am intrigued at trying now.  Okay, so it's not going to happen first, but that's because I already have one in progress and more waiting on my shelves!

A new I Spy quilt follows with a delightful family stories that, again, got me fired up to try.  Summer in the Park reminds quilters that quilts are meant to be used and loved and looks easy.  In fact, the themes of summer and dirt and FUN resound throughout this issue!

Rhombus Cube reminds me to keep it simple, the Jelly Basket just looks like fun and seems to encourage it, Dandy Stars reminds me of the joys of children and the walks we used to take to the library, grocery store, and around the neighborhood.  Jenny didn't ignore the fact that it was often hair raising but always an adventure!

Wallflower goes into the power of remembrances and duplicating those to pass onto further generations.  I have a starburst quilt from my grandmother that I think I'll duplicate for my kids in the coming years.

Floating hexagons came with a delightful story.  This is one I already bought fabric and the template to make so I'm happy to have the written pattern.  I learned my lesson with the Hunter's Star quilt!

The magazine includes a heartwarming story about a quilty proposal that is fun to read.  And of course they end the whole issue with a continuation of the mystery story.  Cheesy but so lighthearted!

It's well worth $5.99 and my summer looks brighter with new ideas and attitudes!  Thanks MSQC!

Friday, June 24, 2016

Disaster strikes my sewing room

Oh dear.  It has been over a month since I've blogged!  I'm so sorry!  We've gone on vacation, I've finished the Hunter's Star quilt top, I've done some cross stitching, but I've blogged about none of it!

One of the major things that has happened is this:

It's not what is outside although the weed jungle is growing like mad with all the rain we have had.  My husband is taming it now that he has more time for yardwork.  He was laid off--did I mention that?  The picture also doesn't just show that my sewing machine table is a mess, but that's a major clue.

I finished the Hunter's Star and programmed my machine to write a label for it, and then forgot to change the presser foot.  The needle came down, broke in the machine, seriously messed up the timing, and the machine began shredding thread.

Even though I took my machine to the dealer's the next day (two weeks ago), the repairman attended training for at least a week so I still don't have it back.  I even tried sewing more blocks on my old Viking that is now my daughter's.  Getting the 1/4" seam right on a different machine is hard though.  Hopefully I really will get my machine back in a week because I have to sew the binding on the Hunter's Star quilt when it comes back from the quilter.  All before leaving for vacation the following week.

I have done these blocks so far on my husband's Minecraft quilt.


Notice the white chicken on the bottom row.  It was one of Kelli's bonus blocks that my husband preferred.  Since I've already purchased the sashing fabric and back, we picked and chose the blocks my husband wanted most and I'm putting all these blocks on the front.  Kelli recently posted a pattern for the pickaxe that I'm going to make for one of the blank spots although I'm changing it a tiny bit.  I spent last night graphing out a diamond sword for the other blank spot and figuring out how to make it without making it look appreciably different than the others, i.e., more pixelated.  I'll be publishing instructions for it soon--as soon as I write them up.  Making it into a 12" block was much more easily said than done.  I have no idea what software Kelli uses so I used graph paper and pencil.  I'll probably post pictures of that.  Very high tech--not!

Kelli has also created a large dragon for the back of the quilt that I'm duplicating too.  Here's the link to the tail section, mid section, and head.  Of course that means I bought far too much backing fabric.  Oh well. It will look cool when it's done after I get my sewing machine home.

Sunday, May 22, 2016

What does DONE look like?

Does anyone else struggle with prioritizing your own projects?

I'm really good at prioritizing other people's time but not so good at my own.  I wonder if that's why so many women go outside of the home to work, even when they don't have to do it for financial reasons.

Not only is it a struggle for me to prioritize my projects, it's really easy for me to feel overwhelmed with ALL the things I want to complete.  Shall I list all the quilts I've already put fabrics together to make?  How about the foreign language I want to learn?  And don't forget sewing for my own wardrobe or re-learning how to play the piano.  See what I mean?

One of the things I've struggled with is whether to do my own quilting, and I have decided not to do it myself right now.  There are several nearby women who charge really reasonable rates so I'll hire one to quilt my Hunter's Star quilt.  I need to get it completed by mid-July.  Totally done.  I hate the fact that I'm so far behind on my husband's Minecraft quilt so that might allow me the luxury of catching up on those blocks.  I really need some clothes too.  All of mine are too big.  Hooray!!!

My husband has been teaching me to apply AGILE project management techniques to everything I do, starting with the idea of knowing when I am done.  We just painted our main living area that houses the kitchen/dining/family rooms.  My husband painted the ceiling and I painted the walls with some help from my daughter.  I'm super happy with the result!



The room used to be a slate grey and is now a sand dollar color.  I need to buy about a quart of paint more to finish the kitchen.  Then it will be DONE!  I love the room so much more now.  Slate grey is not a color that encourages a family to gather around.  It's just a more warm, inviting place to be now.  For the first time since we have moved into the house, I go into the family room to sit and read or visit.  I think we bought 7 different colors to try on the walls before we found the one we liked best.

My Hunter's Star quilt tormented me all the while though.  It's fully pieced together, but the borders haven't been cut out or added.  Like I said, so had the Minecraft quilt so Saturday I talked it out with my husband and dropped some projects and prioritized some.  Most of the quilts will wait until next fall and winter so I have time to spend with my husband and daughter! I also decided to let someone else have the fun/headache of quilting the Hunter's Star.  Done for the Hunter's Star means to complete the quilt top in time to give it to my selected recipients (a secret.)  It does NOT have to be quilted by me.  I have gone through a Craftsy class to learn to quilt with a walking foot, and I've figured out how I could quilt that blanket, but I have a super short time frame to learn to do it well enough and then have to do it on such a large piece.  I've done just enough to begin to believe that I really enjoy the design and piecing part but not the quilting so much.

Today, though, I'm taking a break from all of that to do the Zombie Pigman.  We're heading out on vacation as soon as my daughter finishes her last final so this may be my only chance to do anything creative.  I have doctor appointments tomorrow and Tuesday and then I'm checking my daughter out of school early on her last week so she doesn't have to sit in the hall while her English class watches an R-rated show that I don't think appropriate.  (She agreed with that assessment and doubly so when she found out I was fine with getting her out of school a couple of hours early.  Bonus!)  Next week will be soon enough to add the borders onto my Hunter's Star quilt.


My colors are selected for the Zombie Pigman and I will be beginning as soon as I sign off here!

The lesson for the day is a simple reminder to allow yourself to take time for creativity, don't burden yourself with too many projects, and define what DONE looks like.

Sunday, May 15, 2016

Major milestone celebration!

April 18 saw my first Instagram picture of my Hunter's Star quilt so I guess that was close to when I began it.  I cut the layer cake into 4 squares as of that date.

Now I have the pieced part DONE!


And um, it feels like I've been working on this forever.  Can I hear Celebrate! now?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GwjfUFyY6M

The back isn't pretty, the 1/4" seams are far from perfect, the seams aren't always pressed to one side, and the seams didn't always nestle together because they had to go the same direction, but it's DONE and it actually looks pretty.

Miracles happen.  Every day.


Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Hunter's Star (long)

Oh my!  I thought I had posted more about my Hunter's Star Quilt that I am making.  The last post addressed that quilt, but that is the only post about it that I could find.  So sorry about that!  Here's a picture of the quilt on my design wall (from Fons and Porter--a little bit short but it will do better than the floor!)



Several months ago, I watched Jenny Doan's quilt tutorial about how to make the Hunter's Star quilt.  I fell in love with that quilt and bought the exact fabrics that she used.  What I didn't realize was that the Hunter's Star was a more advanced quilt block, even using her simplified instructions.   There are a few things I wish I had noted earlier:

1)  I needed one more charm pack of the print fabric in order to follow the same schematics as the tutorial.  There are far fewer purplish prints in either the charm pack or layer cake than any other color.  I actually raided my stash from the floating square quilt for one additional square because I ran short after buying the extra charm pack.

2)  The hunter's star is broken into four quadrants on her quilt, hence the need for more charms and unpicking.

3)  I wish I had ordered the Block magazine's Holiday 2015 issue because that's where the written directions are contained (I think.)

4)  I would highly recommend using only two colors for a first quilt, such as blue and white, red and white, batik and solid, a single print and solid, and so forth rather than a mixed print.  It wouldn't be so hard to coordinate.



4)  On another tangent, the Block magazine is fabulous reading!  I just received and devoured the spring 2016 issue.  Get the paper mag!!!  I know it's just another thing to store, but I'm finding I'm printing out a lot of pictures from the tutorials and Google searches.  The magazine is cheaper, I think.  Here's another quilt I want to make.  I love this green shade because it makes me think of my mother.  She loves this shade of green.  I may or may not have ordered the fabrics. :-) The 4-patch and strips quilt also drew my eye but I'm more inclined to pick my own fabrics for that so there's no rush.


Back to the Hunter's Star

The steps to creating the Hunter's Star quilt:

Make the half-square triangles for the 28 star blocks.  Hopefully your math will be better than mine!  Then you trim each of those down to 2 3/4 inch squares and trim off the tag ends.

Some of these are trimmed while others are waiting to be cut down.

All trimmed!

Next, lay them up into the star blocks.  The second time around, I put the colors in quadrants.  After unpicking seven whole scrappy-style stars.  


I HIGHLY recommend laying out each set of stars before sewing them together so you can be sure the prints play well together.  Then I found that the backs were easier to work with (and will probably be simpler to quilt) if I sewed each row together before attaching one row to another.  In the tutorial, Jenny sewed each quadrant together, but the bulky seams are atrocious doing it that way.  (Another unpicking session resulted for me when I realized that.)  I don't have pictures--I'm sorry!


For memories' sake: (I got lots of practice unpicking stitches!)


Note that there are two kinds of stars.  One moves to the right and the other to the left (12 and 16 of the respective blocks) so pay attention to the pattern: (Here's the sketches I mocked up.)


After that, piecing together 28 of the 4-patch blocks will seem easy peasy!  Take the white and print charms and sew them together--again according to the instructions.  You will rotate these on the quilt so the prints have to be in the top right and bottom left corners when you piece the blocks together.


And finally, we get to the final lay up on the design wall.
Seven blocks across and eight down.  The first row begins and end with star blocks from the stack of 16.  Orient the blocks according to the tutorial.  The second row uses the star blocks from the stack of 12 with the 4-patch blocks going the opposite direction from the ones in the first row.  I'm pretty sure I got that right.  Jenny kept talking about the orientation of the print, but I got lost there.  I'm a visual learner so pictures did the trick for me.

Last step is to sew all the blocks together before dealing with the borders and binding.  I'm toying with using the remaining charm squares by piecing them into a binding strip.





Friday, April 29, 2016

Quilting and repentance

My husband sat down with me several days ago to help me figure out how many more half-square triangles I would need.  So far, none of my calculations have worked out correctly!  In the process, he helped me identify the color pattern on the quilt on Missouri Star Quilt Company's tutorial that made the star and secondary arrow pop into view.  

When I began this quilt, I understood that it was to have a scrappy look and didn't see that the display quilt coordinated the colors in a set pattern.  They separated each star into 4 quadrants with blues in one corner, green in another, coral in another, and purple in the last.  If you follow that pattern, their material listing works perfectly and the quilt will have a cohesive quality.  If you use two main colors, one for the stars and one for the background, it also works, but if you randomly place the colored pieces that coordinate but do not match, the effect will be more confusing and lack continuity.  The stars will not pop out and neither will the arrows.

I had already completed 6 blocks of the Hunter's Star, 3 of the stars facing one direction and 3 facing the other.  I changed how I was placing my pieces and made the next 13 blocks in the 2nd block.  As I completed those, I realized I was down to a very limited number of prints and colors so I could either 1) buy another charm pack to make up the difference or 2) unpick those 6 blocks I had initially completed.  If I chose option 1, I would need to purchase more background fabric as well.  

I began unpicking.


That little white doo-dad has been called a sewist's best friend and her worst enemy.  Friend, because you can fix all wrongs.  Enemy, because there are mistakes that need correction.

I suppose I could have also tried to tuck the confusing blocks in between the cohesive ones and hoped that they would blend into the whole.  After all, I'm giving it away and may never see it again.  On the other hand, I've invested a lot of time and money into this quilt and I'm not happy about not receiving the pleasure of seeing it looking good.

Make no mistake about my quest for perfectionism.  I have plenty of imperfect 1/4" seams and other mistakes, but those do not affect the overall look or functionality of the quilt.  The seams will hold.  It might be slightly more difficult to quilt, but I'll be machine quilting it anyway instead of hand sewing.  Those are not critical errors.  

Mostly though, I want this quilt to represent my love for those whom I am giving the quilt.  They have helped piece my life into a beautiful pattern, through my scrapes and not-as-good decisions.  They helped me continue through hard times like my imperfect seams, and they never stopped loving me.  Sometimes I had to completely change course and do things again--the right way.  For that reason, I'm unpicking these seams so I can have a more beautiful result just as I want to have a more beautiful result to present to my Heavenly Father someday.



Likewise, that's the whole reason for repentance.  We make mistakes, sometimes grievous sins, and we need to take sometimes whole sections of our lives apart and begin again.  In ourselves, we don't have the ability, but with love and support from our families and our Savior, Jesus Christ, we can do it.  We can make a better life.  A happier life.

Amazingly, unlike these quilt pieces that still show tiny holes and pressing marks, our lives can be whole without little holes around the edges.  We are changed, just as my quilt will be changed, but our lives can be made new as if we had not made those errors or committed those sins.  

The answer lies in continuing to reach out to our Lord, Jesus Christ.  There is no other answer and there is nowhere any peace like the one that comes as we reach out to Him.  But as the song, When Someone Cares tells, 

And with God nothing is impossible,
 but you must reach and take his hand.
 With him nothing is impossible.
Those who have ears to hear will understand.
The blind could see, 
The lame man could walk away,
And lives still change from night to day when they know that someone cares
They know that someone cares,  when they know that someone cares.

And so I am continuing to unpick what took a very short time to make in the first place in my incomplete understanding of what I was doing.  

Just like life.  There is always hope, and it is never too late.  However, if I had persisted in continuing with my scrap happy method even after I understood the better way, I would have far more than 6 blocks to unpick and would have spent far more time with my little seam ripper than I ever wish to spend!  Again, so is life.  If we procrastinate changing, the changes become far more painful and difficult to complete.  

It is never too late, but it is also none too soon to begin even if you have to unpick many times over before you learn enough.  But it is in the trying and trying again where we learn and become strong.  Trust God and trust Him again.  He will never leave us even though we often falter in our imperfection.  He knows that and loves us anyway.  As the song teaches though, WE must reach out and take HIS hand.  His hand is already stretched out.

Saturday, April 16, 2016

Just dreaming

Today I'm starching fabric that I prewashed for my Christmas quilt back.  According to Leah Day, it's a good idea to prewash fabrics that might bleed.  I'm using two fabrics (haven't decided which of the off-white prints to use--opinions anyone?) for the back, chiefly because I don't have enough of one fabric to do the entire back.  I don't prewash my precuts though.  I was concerned about the blue so I washed the off-white so they wouldn't pull at each other.

I love my puppy dog (who isn't so young anymore; note the white muzzle) and thought he looked very gentle tucked in between the fabrics!  (He's a very large Lab, actually classed as a giant by weight, but he looks small here. While he is packing about 15 pounds too much, the vet thinks he is close to what he should weigh so there has to be some mixed breeding in him somewhere.)



Wish List 


I MUST stop looking at more and more quilt designs.  Here's are additions to my list of my new faves that are unfortunately going to have to wait.  I need to finish some quilts that are already on my shelves!

Here's my wish list:

Surprise Pinwheels by Missouri Star Quilt Company.  



Heck, MSQC is my real downfall because they send their daily newsletters with luscious fabric deals every single morning, often with links to beautiful quilt tutorials.  I really need to unsubscribe but totally don't want to.  I'm champing at the bit to receive my April issue of their Block magazine.  I remember my Grandma Jones saying that she loved to read cookbooks and thinking, "How weird is that?"  Umm, yeah.  I get it, Grandma!

Disclaimer:  By the way, except for being on their frequent buyer list, MSQC doesn't know I'm alive.  I am not paid for sending traffic their way or anyone else's way for that matter.  I WISH they would send me free fabric though. :-) If they want to send me the fabric for this quilt, I will toss everything else aside to get it done!

Hope Takes Flight by Robert Kaufman (I've considered doing this as a back so it forms a 2-sided quilt.  Not sure how I'd fashion the quilting though--maybe just an all-over pattern?) 




Speaking of which, the Robert Kaufman site has tons of printable, free patterns.  From what I can see, it also lists stores where you can buy the fabric along with the stock numbers.

P.S.  You can Google the quilt names and find them almost instantly!