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.

Scrapception and purge sewing

Yesterday's scrappy strippy triangle quilt top generated quite a number of subscraps. You know, those even scrappier scraps leftover from when you cut bits off your scrappy project? Well, I was determined not to keep the subscraps. Scraps get only get once chance here! So I pieced all the little bits into slabs and combined them with the cut off ends of the triangles.

Then I cut the chunks into random rectangles, bordered them with bright red, and set them in a yard of gray linen. It ended up being about 42"x42", a good baby quilt size. Kind of odd colors for a baby, but it has a very modern vibe and some young mom might like that.

The photo above has the flimsy hanging in front of a translucent blind, so I tossed it over our little round outdoor table to get a better photo of the true colors. Boy, that linen really attracts the lint! I'm not cleaning that up until I go to quilt it, someday. Since this top was made from scraps of scraps, I'm calling it Scrapception.

I cropped this out of the first photo, but realized that this scrappy quilt just happens to be the same colors as our trio of boat paintings. 

The purge quilting part of this blog post was getting rid of that gray linen. I've experimented with several types of fabric besides quilting cotton: silk, flannel, linen, corduroy and seersucker. Each one is interesting, but I don't particularly want to mix and match them in my quilts. And I simply don't have the room to store stashes of different types, so I'm purging the odd stuff.

This little quilt is also purely for purging purposes. All the green fabrics are more linen and I just wanted them gone gone gone. The greens matched this weird whimsical panel that I also wanted out of my life, so I took that as a sign to put them together. I like each block, but I can't wrap my head around why the panel included spaceships, mermaids and random animals. Somebody's own made up creation story? I don't know and I don't like it. I want my whimsy to have a consistent story line, apparently.

Here it is in the natural sunlight. The colors are very vibrant. The size is just under 36"x42" so it will only need a single yard for backing, and I have one yard of hot pink linen. Soon to be gone! I'll use a black and white stripe for the binding to pick up the inner printed borders on the panel.

The center stripe on Weirdly Whimsical (I guess that's what I'll call it) quilt, was a single strip scrap that came with this long quarter bundle of pretty homespun stripes and plaids. The pieces were clearly washed and are quite frayed, which must have frustrated the eBay seller, because I paid less than $1/yard for this. Sweet! No purging of this batch; I'm looking for a nice pattern to do it justice.

Testing the space limits

I am still sewing away in our little borrowed RV, but boy am I ready to move back onto the boat. This week I had to stop several projects due to space limitations--I just couldn't wrap my head around how to proceed.

First semi-finish is this hexagon quilt. I started it in the fall of 2015 in a class that I took at the big Houston quilt show. For reasons I won't go into here, I didn't enjoy the class and the mostly cut out pieces of this quilt have been languishing in a plastic ziplock baggie. In a fit of purge quilting (sewing just to get the fabric out of one's stash and one's life), I finished piecing the center, happily using the blue polka dots to fill in the edges. After all, those hexies and triangles have to stop somewhere. 

The dots were a great match with the wild, mostly Kaffe fabrics, so I was excited to stitch up a nice border with it, too. First problem: I don't have any surfaces long enough to accurately cut pieces that long. My cutting mat/ironing pad here on the RV is only 12"x18" and you can see in this photo that it only fits on top of the stove. Oh well, I muddled through the first two sides. Second problem: I miscalculated the size of the dang borders anyway, and ran out of polka dots! ARGH!!

Fortunately, the boatyard's ladies' room is a pleasant two-minute walk from the RV, and a stroll through the crisp evening air was enough to clear my head and provide a solution. I decided to cut some more triangles and have them poke up into the polka dots, leaving just barely enough to finish the top and bottom. It's a little odd to have the triangles cut off flat on the left and right, and fully pointed on the top and bottom, but we'll call it a Deliberate Design Decision! Much better than Completely Clueless Cutting! Now it needs another border, but that will have to wait until I'm back at my big 24"x36" cutting mat in the boat. No name for this quilt yet.

Speaking of the boat, the yard has finished most of the painting and moved her out of the painting shed and out into the open. In this photo, she is hanging from the mobile blue frame, called a travel lift. She's also swaying gently two feet above the hard ground, always a bit alarming. Still lots of work to be done, but we're hoping to move back aboard this week.

Which is good, because we're both sick of this view. This is taken from the back bedroom, looking forward. My Juki is on the dining table, and all my bins of fabric fill the bunk bed space above the driving compartment. Poor Sean has been relegated to the loveseat. Even his "coffee table" is one of my fabric bins! He's been a pretty good sport, and we're so grateful to our friend who loaned us the RV, but it's time to move on...

Back to quilting subjects, ahem. My next project was inspired by my stash of vegetable fat quarters. Along with the corn, cabbage, asparagus and zucchinis above, I also have Brussels sprouts, peppers, basil, and carrots.

I looked at several white and off white fabrics to use as a background. But then this bright yellow-green fabric with water drops/bubbles leapt out of my stash. I think it looks like the veggies are being rinsed before chopping. Perfect! So perfect that I had exactly 2.5" of it left over.

Even the fabric trimmings look like julienned vegetables!

Here's the top. The pattern is Majestic Mountains, also called Scrappy Mountain Majesties. This one will also get a couple more borders to bring it up to twin sized, and it will be my donation to the International Institute of St. Louis for the Hands2Help challenge. I think I'll do a thin orange inner border and a dark green outer border. This quilt is named Veggie Mountain.

After wrangling Veggie Mountain through the Juki for the last couple of days, I wanted to take a break and sew up something small. Time to work on the March/April block drive for Covered in Love. This block is called "Grandad's Shirts," and it required me to learn two brand-new techniques. 

The first technique is pleats in the center square of each block. This photo shows all four of the blocks I made, and you can see the pleats in the lighter blue squares. You can also see the vintage-themed fabrics I used, with old fashioned telephones, trains and VW buses. There are also some dictionary pages, with some appropriate words like "memory" and "forgive." The second technique is partial seams, which aren't very hard but I just had never done them before. I'm happy to have new tools in my kit! Thanks for the inspiration, Kat.

Linking up with Sew Some Love.

First Four RV projects

We've moved off the boat and into the RV; let the sewing begin! I've stitched up four small quilt tops, and even finished the smallest one. To be fair, they are all quite simple, but I'm feeling really productive here.

I'll warn you up front that the lighting is TERRIBLE in here, so the colors in my photos are really off. I'll try to take more pictures outside in the future.

First up is this pink flannel 16 patch. After dabbling briefly with flannels, I decided that I don't have the space to store a decent stash of this bulkier material. So one of my RV goals was to use up the rest of my flannels. All these pinks came from someone else's scraps that I bought on eBay. The individual squares on this are 3" finished, so the entire piece is about 36" x 48", a good baby quilt size.

The backing is several of the wider scrap strips. The true colors of both the front and the back are mostly soft baby pinks with a few hot pink accents.

With the handful of leftover 3" squares, I pieced this doll quilt. Isn't it cute? I have no idea who to give this to, since I don't really know any kids who are at the baby doll loving stage. But it's small enough to tuck away until the right home comes along. This one is finished, pillowcase/envelope style with no batting inside.

Next, I cut up the four panels from the "Good Seasons" line by Andover fabrics. Each panel depicts one season of the year, with a large central square and four smaller squares. This one is Summer, and has a beach/lake theme. I set aside the small squares for another project.

Each panel had a different background color, so I trimmed them down so that wouldn't show. Then I added a thin black border to three of them. Autumn already had a black background, but had been cut from the bolt poorly so I had to add more black to one edge.

Then I auditioned several fabrics for the sashing, including a very safe and dull beige. This black and white pattern almost made the grade, but I decided it was just a bit too busy.

I ended up with this yellow and cream leaf pattern as sashing, since yellow and black were the only two colors that could be found in each of the four panels. The black edging really pops off that yellow! I wish the two blue panels could have ended up diagonally across from each other for balance, but there was no way to do that and have the seasons in order. 

Right now the top is about 48" square, which is a little on the large size for a wheelchair quilt, but a good size for a kid's quilt. With another border or two, it could be a good couch quilt. I think this fabric works well for both kids and adults, so I'll set it aside as is until I know where it's going. I'll choose a backing later, too.

Today I whipped up quilt top number four, a little toddler quilt from a soft book panel. This photo shows the panel before cutting. You can see there are directions for sewing it into a book, but kids grow out of fabric books much sooner than blankets, so it will have a longer life as a quilt.

The book "pages" were already outlined in a little block pattern plus the light blue, so I just added alternating blocks of a lime green seersucker fruit print. I thought that went nicely with the panel's theme, "Garden Friends." The fruit fabric is really quite bright and my camera couldn't capture it's limey goodness at all. A fairly plain purple border wraps it all up neatly, and I'll probably use one of my larger pieces of flannel for the backing.

I found the panel on line, and could see that it was a fun, cute print. Smiling bugs, frogs and flowers! Unfortunately, it was printed on really thin cotton, so I'll need to quilt it fairly heavily to shore it up a bit. Unless I'm very familiar with the designer and manufacturer of a particular fabric, it's a bit of a crap shoot to buy online. I've gotten pieces that were printed poorly on gorgeous, high quality cotton and ones like this where everything was great except the underlying material.

And finally, there is a fifth project but alas, no photos. One of our regular blog readers, Tom, came by to meet us a couple days ago. Tom and his partner work at See's Candies and brought us two boxes! It was such a sweet thing for him to do, that I decided to make them two mug rugs using some fun chocolate themed fabric I have. I used the heart block pattern from Cluck Cluck Sew and they turned out super cute, if I do say so myself. I was a bit rushed to get them finished before Tom came for a second visit, so I forgot to take photos.

No photos of the See's box of Nuts and Chews, either, since that was eaten so fast it would make your head spin...