Postcards From Ikea finish

Ta da! Here is my finished quilt from Sandra's Quilt Along. I feel that I can post it guilt-free now that the QAL is ending. The truth is that I hung it on our bedroom wall on February 22nd. What can I say? I was really motivated to fill that dark wood wall with something bright and cheery.



I'm calling my version of the Postcards from Sweden pattern Postcards From Ikea: enough like Sweden for the average American. The original pattern uses Kona solid fabrics, but I chose similar colors from my stash. Most of them are blenders, so the look is a bit different. I also reduced the size of the blocks so the final quilt would fit the wall space.



The backing is this super fun, big dinosaur print. It was part of a very large and generous batch of fabrics given to me by DH's aunt. It's a bit thicker and stiffer than quilting cotton, so it works well for a wall hanging like this.

PFI is quilted in straight lines using my walking foot. I chose several places to start quilting a small square, then echoed out with a spacing of roughly an inch. When the echoes encountered each other, I veered out toward the edge. The result is nicely geometric, but not terribly rigid. Because the quilting lines cross all those 45 degree triangles, the lack of consistent spacing is lost in all the angles and colors. That's how I like my quilting: lookin' good without workin' hard.



Occasionally, a patch of sun comes in our small portlights and moves across the quilt. The texture is really yummy, even though the piece has not been washed and dried.



The binding is one of the darker colors from the piecing, a deep burgundy that I used as the pattern's color #23, Cerise. Did anyone get to the point where you just knew the colors based on their numbers? "Oh, another #10, my cross hatched peach. 31 is the pink with big polka dots..."



I like this outtake photo that shows our ensign blowing straight out in the wind. You can see why I use the strong clip on the left to hold the quilt onto the chair. Sean just took our long handled net back to the restaurant where we ate last night, to recover his sunglasses that blew off the table into the water. I really don't want to do that with a quilt! The water might be a gorgeous color, but it isn't very clean in the marina.

I really enjoyed making this quilt and love seeing it every day. A big thank you to Sandra for hosting the quilt along! She has forgiven me for turning it into a Quilt Ahead At Breakneck Speed, and I truly appreciate that. I've already started on her next one!

Postcards are from Sweden, chickens are from Key West

This week is the Step 3 check in on MMM Quilts for the Postcards from Sweden Quilt Along. We should have our triangles all sewn together and started piecing them into the top. Check and check. There is a possibility that more progress has happened, but that's neither here nor there. Although if a body just HAPPENED to be further along, a body need not feel guilty about that. As my friend Rose says, "Guilt and Quilt may rhyme but they don't go together!"

Oo, look! A stained glass shot! I like seeing how all the seams are pressed in opposite direction in this photo. Because I can't see the inside of the seams anymore, possibly because of further progress on this quilt that shall remain unmentioned.

Now here's a completely finished quilt that I don't feel guilty about at all. I pieced the top for this back in June of last year, so it was officially a UFO for quite a long time. When our visit to Key West was extended another few days, I figured I could quilt up one last top and ship it off the boat. I asked my husband which UFO I should work on, and he said, "The chicken one, of course!"

What makes a chicken quilt the obvious choice in Key West? Why, the Key West Chickens, of course! Feral fowl are everywhere in this town, and we heard roosters crowing every day. One saucy rooster tag teamed with a sparrow to steal food right out of my hand, too. That one thought he was some kind of feathered star, or something.

We both decided that getting photos with the quilt and the chickens would be fun, but the chickens weren't very cooperative. We couldn't find any until we were literally walking up to the post office front door to mail the quilt to Happy Chemo, a Hands2Help charity.

Feral chickens aren't afraid of much, but a big piece of cloth flapping in the wind, held by a man with suspicious intentions, is one of those things. Sean would sidle up to a few chickens and slowly unfurl the quilt, then they'd scatter. This group cackled and scolded and ran away into the shadows, leaving us with just a few bad photos. But the other tourists were amused, at least.

Key West Chickens was quilted with free motion orange peels in the focal blocks, and a four lobed design in the hour glass blocks. The yellow part of the hour glass is baby chicks, and the red is fried drumsticks. The full life cycle of a chicken. 

I used a 40 weight yellow thread which gave me fits by shredding and breaking. I changed everything: new needle, different tension, new bobbin, but no avail. After two rows, I gave up and tossed the spool in the trash and switched to a slightly different shade of yellow, which quilted the rest of the piece with zero trouble. Have you had that happen, where a particular color just won't work in your machine? It's happened to me three times. I'm wondering if the different dyes affect thread strength.

One of the "bad" colors in my thread stash is my only spool of black. I wanted to use black in the border of this piece, so I gritted my teeth and tried it again, hoping it would cooperate this time. Nope. Shred, shred, break, break. What to do?? The next closest color was navy blue, so I decided to try that. And you know what? It looks fine. If you reeeeeeealllllly look closely, you can see that it's blue, not black. But mostly it's just completely invisible. For the record, I did wishbones in the border (ha! like on a roast chicken!) and you can only see them here on the back. You can also see the binding, which is fried eggs on red. It's a very silly themed quilt, and I hope it will make someone smile.

Here's a parting shot of Key West Chickens with a bit of boaty flavor. We've left Key West now and will be crossing the Straights of Florida to the Bahamas tomorrow, hooray! Next time I post will be from the Islands.

Swedish Postcards

I am participating in the Postcards From Sweden Quilt Along. In my mind, I call it the "Swedalong," although folks less weird than me are using "PFS QAL." It's not too late to join in with Sandra and the gang if you want to make this fun, bright quilt. My fabrics were all selected from stash, and are mostly prints and blenders with a handful of solids.

The pattern calls for 36 different Kona solids (for my non-quilting readers, Kona is a fabric brand) with names like "Capri" and "Cypress." I had to go through each color name and compare it to the color photos in the pattern to decipher some of them. Both of the above named colors are pale aquas. Who knew? I made a list of all the colors used in the pattern with their translations:

Kona color          Rough translation

1 Lipstick             Red
2 Flame                Red-orange
3 Bright Pink       Red-pink
4 Pomegranate  Red
5 Blue grass        Aqua
6 Fern                   Green
7 Sprout               Yellow-green
8 Citrus                Yellow
9 Lemon              Yellow
10 Peach              Pale orange
11 Mango            Pale orange
12 Kumquat        Dark orange
13 Chartreuse     Yellow-green
14 Leprechaun   Green-yellow
15 Cypress           Pale aqua
16 Lake                Light blue
17 Delft                Dark blue gray
18 Breakers         Blue-aqua
19 Oasis               Dark aqua
20 Royal              Royal blue
21 Capri               Pale aqua
22 Thistle             Pale pink
23 Cerise             Dark red-purple
24 Purple             Dark purple
25 Mulberry        Medium purple
26 Crocus            Medium purple
27 Poppy             Dark red-orange
28 Violet              Medium purple
29 Azalea             Pink
30 Carnation       Pale pink
31 Bubble gum   Pink
32 Candy Pink     Pink
33 Water             Medium blue
34 Carrot             Orange
35 School bus     Orange
36 Pear                Pale green

I found roughly equivalent fabrics and put them in rainbow order. I do love a good rainbow! However, the pattern refers to each color by number, and the numbers are not necessarily in color order. The dark reddish purple at the end in the photo is number 23 "Cerise," but that became completely irrelevant as the pattern progressed. I made little numbered tags that I attached to each color with Clover clips.

After selecting fabrics, the next step was to cut a certain number of squares from each color. The number of squares ranged from 1 or 2 up to 9. Each square was then cut in half into triangles. I then sorted my triangles in numerical order onto paper plates, being careful to always keep them clipped to their number.

Good thing, too, since I'm kinda clumsy. Oops! Fortunately, my clipped numbers system survived this fall intact and no fabric was harmed nor tempers lost.

Choosing fabrics and cutting the triangles are as far along as the QAL has gone this month, but I was having so much fun that I kept going. I'm really not a quilt along-er so much as a quilt all at once-r. But don't feel bad if you're just cutting your triangles, because that makes you someone who follows directions better than I do.

The pattern next calls for pairs of triangles to be sewn back into squares. I've heard it said that quilting is just cutting up perfectly good fabric so you can sew it right back together again. So true. The pattern lays out the blocks in 15 rows of 12 squares. I chose to sew only one row at a time, and marked each block with numbers 1-12 using blue painters tape. I was able to reuse the tape all the way to row "O" although the tape stickum was pretty wimpy by about row "L."

I can't tell you how many times I almost sewed block 4 to block 7 instead of block 5, or turned a block 90 degrees, so the blue tape kept me on the straight and narrow. After the row was sewn together, I only needed the correct letter, A-O, on the far left block, plus an arrow to show which way I pressed the blocks.

If you're getting ready to sew your PFS QAL blocks, I highly recommend using some sort of consistent numbering or lettering system. And keep in mind that each triangle rotates a quarter turn from all the ones around it. In other words, a block with the diagonal seam going from upper right to lower left ALWAYS joins a block that has the seam going from upper left to lower right. I also noticed that the two-triangle blocks were usually colors fairly close together on the color wheel. If you find yourself sewing together a blue and an orange, double check your numbers! 

I managed to finish piecing all the way to row "N" before I realized I was short a #23 Cerise triangle because it got sewn into the wrong spot earlier. Spoiler alert: I chose to go the Amish route (you know, the myth that the Amish always put a mistake in their quilts because no human is perfect) and left the mistake in as a mark of humility. Or laziness. Or OMG THERE ARE SO MANY TRIANGLES NO ONE WILL NOTICE ONE MISTAKE!!