Weirdly Whimsical finished

We're currently underway from Charleston to Jacksonville, and that's the lovely, flat calm Atlantic Ocean you can see peeking through the window above. I put the final touches on this odd little quilt last week, called Weirdly Whimsical. It was a bit of purge sewing to clear the funky panels and green linen out of my stash and will be sent to my Project Linus chapter in California.

Since it's so small, I decided it was a good quilt to try a few new things on. First is the mix of fabrics: linen and cotton. Then I tried some donated fabric as the backing. This woven plaid was given to me by Sean's aunt. It's a little thicker than quilting cotton so I wanted to make sure it wouldn't fight me during FMQ before I used it on a larger piece.



I'm happy to report that it quilted up nicely. It's very high quality stuff and the gender neutral color and geometric design are super versatile. All very good news, because I have over 15 yards of this yellow and a similar green! The downside of using a plaid as the backing is any crookedness is obvious but hey, it's the back.



The next new-to-me technique I tried is the quilting design. I learned this from an Angela Walters video. She calls it "hook-swirl." It gives a nice texture while being easy to fit into corners and odd shapes. It took me a while to get the size and spacing consistent, but by the end of this piece it felt pretty natural. I'll definitely hook and swirl again.



And finally, this is the first time I've used a 40 weight Aurifil thread for quilting. The bright yellow, color 2135, coordinates well with front and back so I used it both the top and bobbin threads. My Juki seemed to like it, and I'm happy with the look of the thicker thread. I got a smoking deal on 12 spools of 40 weight ($4.25 each!) and I've since used several other colors. The only downside so far is that less of it fits on a bobbin.

We've had a really nice stay in Charleston, and enjoyed many nights with sunsets like this. But it's time to move on to warmer waters, so we're heading south. It's an overnight run to Jacksonville, so I've got a yummy stew in the crockpot making the whole boat smell delicious. Sean is napping to prepare for his late night watch, and I'll take the early early morning shift. We'll probably lose internet connectivity soon, but the sea is so calm that perhaps I'll get some sewing in on this trip.

Linking up with Celtic Thistle's New To Me, since I tried a bunch of new things on this little quilt.

Squirrel video and a small finish

I have a new favorite YouTube quilting video channel: Jordan Fabrics from Grants Pass, OR. Donna Jordan gives really clear instructions for some nice patterns, and doesn't do a hard sell of their products. The camera angles are good and I've been learning quite a bit by watching her techniques.

The video linked above, for the pattern "Teatime" gave me a total SQUIRREL! moment, though. She makes the green quilt using 40 green batik 2.5" strips and the technique is fast and fun. My brain said, "Hey! I could do that with scrappy 2.5" strips!" and I was off and running.

I had the equivalent of about 40 strips in my "rainbow bright" scrap box. These are fabrics that are too multi-color to fit into any single color category. Most of them are not full width of fabric, so I just sewed shorter pieces together until each strip was about 40-42" long. (You can see two of our boat radios in the background of this photo. I listen to marine radio traffic all day.)

Following the video (which you should watch for full details about how to finger press to make everything easier), I sewed together five strips. You can see my pieced strips here: stripes sewn end to end with cupcakes, several Kaffe fabrics in the bottom row, etc.

Then each set of five is sewn back together into a tube, so the middle strip is now folded along the bottom.

Press the tube carefully so that bottom fold doesn't get creased but the seams are flat.

Cut into triangles. Donna uses a special ruler for this, but I just marked a regular square with some tape for guidance.

Open up the triangles and admire straight, square, scrappy, strippy blocks made without foundations. Half the blocks have the carefully folded center strip in the middle (bottom row) and half have the last seam of the tube in the middle (top row.) The latter just needs to have that final seam pressed flat.

Because of the two different styles of blocks, if you lay the quilt out by alternating the blocks, there are ZERO strip seams to match. No foundations? No seam matching? This is a total winner of a block for this lazy quilter!

And speaking of lazy, this little finish required no seam matching, either. In fact, there isn't a single seam in the entire quilt except for the binding! The cute panel is wide enough that it makes a nice size baby quilt all on its own. It's about 36"x42" of bright, happy animals and the fabric is very soft and smooth.

My current set up with the sewing machine in the salon/living room doesn't have a nice supportive area to the left of the Juki, so I wanted something really small to maneuver in the space available. I kept the quilting super simple, just outlining the sweet animal shapes and the border.

The wind helpfully flipped the little quilt up so you can see the back in coordinating fabric. A nice stripey binding finished it off easily and now this fun baby quilt is ready for Project Linus.

Linking up with Musings of a Menopausal Melon's DrEAMi!

Winner, winner

The winner of last week's random drawing is lucky number 13, JanineMarie of Quilts From the Little House. Janine is finishing up her improv piece called Deconstructed Coins. I just love that quilt, and can't wait to see the final quilting and binding. Go check out her latest post, where you can peek at the finished flimsy and her improvised pieced backing. Congratulations, Janine! A little bit of purple fabric will be winging it's way to you soon!



I finished two little toddler quilts this week. This one uses a fish fabric for the focal blocks and simple four patches for the alternate blocks. Simple cross hatch quilting with my walking foot made for a speedy finish.



For the back, I used one of my new pieces of fabric from Lydia. It's nice how these little quilts can be backed with a single width of fabric and no piecing.



This one features all cat and mouse fabrics. The pattern is called County Lines, and it pieces up very easily. I quilted it with a relaxed meander in turquoise thread and finished with a stripey binding on both quilts. They will both be donated to my old Project Linus group in California.



We are settling in at our marina in Charleston. This gorgeous yacht is one of our closest neighbors. She's 120 feet long and recently sold for $13,000,000. The only people we've seen aboard her are crew members. There have often been dramatic thunderstorms in the afternoons, and I love the dark, brooding sky in this photo.

On the less glamorous side of things, this wad of icky, stinky marine....stuff...was clogging the intake to our air conditioners. When the bedroom a/c stopped, we scratched our heads. But when the quilt room a/c failed with a sigh, THAT really got my attention! Stop everything and fix it now!! Fortunately, Sean is an excellent Chief Engineer, and got the cool air flowing again in about an hour. Whew!

Three for Tuesday

We are in Lake Charles, LA and docked at the L'Auberge Casino's little marina. With unlimited power and water here, I decided to get some quilts finished so they could have their spa day in the washer and dryer.

I pieced all three of these baby/toddler quilts while we were living in the RV last month. Once we were back on the boat, I got them all basted. And in the last several days I quilted and bound them. I had high hopes for a higher class of glamour shots, but no sun today, alas. 

You'll have to settle for the classic "rolled up quilts with murky marina water in the background" shot.  All three of these quilts will be donated to Project Linus.

Left to right in the top photo: Pretty Pink Sixteen is made of most of my flannel stash. There is no batting in this one, just two layers of flannel. I did simple cross hatch quilting through the diagonals of all the squares. The binding is regular quilt cotton, sew onto the back. I then sewed it to the front by machine. In this photo you can see the front with edge stitching holding the binding on.

Here's the back, which is long strips of flannel. The line of stitching about 1/4" inside the binding is that top stitching from the front. It's fairly unobtrusive on the back. I really like this binding method and feel like I get pretty consistent results on both back and front.

The middle quilt is a cute soft book panel of bugs and frogs, alternating with lime green seersucker with tiny fruits. So cute! It's called Garden Friends, and I quilted it with turquoise thread in big loop-de-loops. The texture is great, but my loops are, um, lumpy. Stippling is much easier for me and my new rallying cry is, "Stick With The Stipple, Louise! Lumpy Loops Are Lousy!" The binding on this one is rainbow satin blanket binding, but applied like regular double fold quilt binding. 

Here's an overall shot of that quilt so you see how the rainbow pattern on the binding repeats around the edge. This quilt doesn't have great contrast between the blocks so it looks better up close when your eye is drawn to the cute critters. I doubt a toddler will be very critical, though.

I adore the fabric I used to back this little quilt. Check out all the fun animals in sherbet colors! I had one yard of this and used it all.

To fill out the rest of the backing, I used some more of the seersucker. There's a photo of the flimsy that shows the colors better in this post.

The final quilt, Little Boy Blue, was made from a panel plus 25 patch scrappy blocks. See this post for the flimsy pictures. I bound it in the same darker blue as the sashing. The backing is a single piece of fun animals driving cars, with stop signs and words like "Vroom!" That fabric was just a teeeeensy bit small, and one of the selvedges showed after I finished the quilting. On this one, I sewed the binding it to the front first so the slightly wider part of the binding would be on the back and cover the selvedge bits.

Here's a shot of the front binding. To attach the back, I stitched in the ditch right next to the binding on the front. It makes a very clean, nice front finish. Unfortunately, it means I was sewing blind to catch the binding in the back, and that ended up pretty wobbly and inconsistent. The crinkling from washing hides a lot of the wobble and again, the toddler won't care, but I need lots more practice in this method before I'm as happy with it as the reverse method!m

Linking up to Sew Some Love, a linky for charity projects on Kat and Cat Quilts.

Sweet Astrodelic

Sweet Astrodelic is finished. I'm happy to report that it had a successful run through the washer and dryer. It shrank up a bit to 41"x41", a good size for a baby quilt. I used leftovers from the fat quarter bundle to make a scrappy binding.

Here is the backing, a soft cream with yellow flowers and roosters. On quilts this small, it's so nice to use a single cut of fabric for the backing.

I tried to capture the relative "coarseness" of the fabric in this photo. The weave is more open than most quilting cottons, and I worried that I wouldn't quilt or wash well. However, it turned out fine. And it isn't rough to touch at all, just sort of visually more open. The roosters are about 3/4" tall, so you can see the scale of my stippling.

I will definitely donate this one to Project Linus, and here's their cute label. I machine stitched the binding to the back first, then did a machine edge stitch on the front of the binding. Not as graceful as the traditional method with hand sewing, but very fast and sturdy.

I admire those bloggers who take such nice "glamour" shots of their quilts. Mine are...adequate. Here's Sweet Astrodelic clipped to the back of our boat. 

And here it is, held up via the Handy Husband method. Love that post-dryer crinkle! The New Orleans Industrial Canal and a tourist river boat are in the distant background. The boat with the pointy bow sticking out just to the right of the quilt is rumored to have cost $20,000,000 new. That's a lot of fabric, my friends. 

The boatyard is still working on our (not $20M) boat. This afternoon I was amused to see a guy hanging over the edge. He's sitting on what looks like an orange Hippity-Hop (remember those?) but is actually an inflatable ball fender. It's used to keep the boat from banging against hard surfaces, but Khahn is riding it cowboy style instead. Most of the yard workers speak only Vietnamese, but they completely understood me when I said, "I gotta get a picture of this!" and everyone laughed.

Blog silence but the Juki is humming

We have moved back aboard the boat, hooray! It actually happened right after my last post. The boat was still out of the water, so getting aboard required climbing this loooong, wobbly ladder. All the stuff we had moved into the RV also traveled up a ladder to return to its boatly home, so it was a pretty tiring process.

All my fabric and the tops I stitched up in the RV ended up in a giant pile on the bed in my sewing studio (also known as the second stateroom.) I decided to finish adding borders and sew backs for all the tops, then baste them all in an exciting week of March Basting Madness.

I didn't take any photos during the basting, but you can read here about my on-the-bed technique.  Here's the stack of basted pieces, ready for quilting. I basted eight and I'm feeling quite industrious. I've decided which three will go to the three charities in the Hands2Help Challenge, plus one for Covered in Love. H2H has the earliest deadline, so I'll work on those as soon as possible.

Today I started quilting Sweet Astrodelic, even though it isn't for H2H. That's because I'm using a backing fabric that isn't standard quilting cotton. It's a very cute little yellow rooster print, but seems to be thicker and more loosely woven. I want to use the same fabric on the much larger Veggie Mountain, but only if it quilts and washes up well on this piece. 

Sweet Astrodelic is being quilted in a loose stipple, to keep it soft and get it finished quickly. If the backing passes muster, it will probably be a Project Linus donation. If it falls apart or shrinks strangely, I'll be sad but not devastated.

I've already learned something important on this quilt. My Juki does NOT like Connecting Threads brand thread! I broke three needles before I figured out it was the thread. That was three different brands of needles, too. Very strange! My theory is that the thinner Aurifil that I usually use glides through the eye of the needle more smoothly and is less likely to "catch" as I free motion quilt. In any case, after I switched back to a very similarly colored Aurifil 50 weight, I've had no problems and the thread change is undetectable on the quilt.

I sent Kat one of the extra spools of Connecting Threads that I had, along with this month's blocks. Kat, if it works in your machine, I'll send you two more spools. If not, toss it in the trash!

And speaking of spools, here is our 400' long anchor chain, all spooled out on the ground. We mark it every 50 feet with alternating red and yellow paint so it's easier to keep track of how much we have left. The length of chain used to anchor depends on the depth of the water, so it's important to keep track. Over time, the paint wears off and needs to be renewed. This time, we also had the entire chain re-galvanized, so it looks shiny and brand new! I'm rather unnaturally excited about this, so I'm sharing it with you, my quilty friends.

Little Boy Blue

This small quilt top, measuring 42" x 42", is called Little Boy Blue. The focal fabric is a small panel that I bought in a local quilt shop in...Maine? I think. There were only the four blocks on the panel, then the pattern repeated, so I fattened the quilt up with scrappy 25 patches in creams and pale blues. The sashing is a brighter blue. Another row of scrappy 2.5" squares around the perimeter used up most of those bits and pieces. I'll use the same sashing fabric for the binding, which should tie it all together nicely.

The adventurous boys in the panels are so sweet! I'll take more detailed photos after I quilt this one so you can see their happy little faces.

While sewing one of the longer seams, my bobbin ran out. I changed it quickly and continued to sew. My machine suddenly was much, much smoother and quieter! Hmm, I wonder why? No matter, it sounds great! I sewed another long seam, then moved over to the ironing board. Those two seams were long, curved bows and when I tugged on them gently, the thread snapped. Wha??! It turns out that I hadn't put the bobbin in quite right, so the tension was super high on the bobbin side. I have no idea why that made the machine quieter, but lesson learned. Even what seems like a sudden improvement in sewing should be viewed with suspicion. Rethreading (and two looooong seams to rip) solved the problem.

Linking up with Sew Some Love, since this is a charity quilt for Project Linus.

On a Roll

Yesterday I finished this little toddler quilt for Project Linus. It's made of bigger rectangles of transportation-themed fabrics with smaller orange bars in between. Most of the bus, truck, scooter, and car fabrics came from Sue and were from the same collection of fabrics. However, I guess the same blue, orange, brown and green palette was used over the years by several fabric companies, because I had quite a bit of stuff that matched in my stash. Serendipity!

I actually pieced this quilt back in the summer, and basted the quilt sandwich in the fall. It's been folded up on a shelf since then. In preparation for the inevitable layer of dust that will end up everywhere after the boat painting, I'm trying to get as many WIPs finished and mailed out before they get dirty. Anything I don't finish will end up in big plastic garbage bags for protection.

 

For the backing, I had a single piece of this fun print with bright numbers and letters on an orange background. 

I think Sue's fabrics must have been either an Australian or British line of fabric. This "classified ads" print uses some non-American terms like "tip truck" instead of "dump truck," and the place names are unfamiliar to me. Any guesses on the origin?

My absolute favorite fabric in the whole batch is this fleet of tiny, multi-colored dump trucks. Aren't they adorable!? I used them for the outer border. You can see the bright striped fabric I used for the binding in this photo, too.

For the quilting, I used a medium orange thread and did SITD around the bright blue inner border, straight lines in the outer border, and big stipple in the main section. My stipples/meanders tend to be quite small and time-consuming, so it was good practice to open up the design. It should also make the quilt more floppy and soft for a little one to cuddle. Big stipple actually goes fairly quickly, so I thought to myself, "Woo! I'm on a roll!" and then, "Hey, that's a good name for this quilt!" On a Roll is is, then.

It's a special part of the process to sew in one of the nice labels that Project Linus provides. On a Roll will be winging its way to my California chapter early next week.