Tampa, FL

As a break from quilting Bright Bento, today I've been working on Charming Cupcakes. This little quilt for Project Linus is mostly scrappy, simple 5" patchwork squares. 

I recently purchased Angela Walter's book Shape by Shape. It's full of ideas for filling various geometric shapes: squares, rectangles, triangles and hexagons. I modified a couple of the designs to fill the heart shapes I was working on last week. I thought the charm squares would be a great way to try out a bunch more motifs, and decided to quilt each fabric a different way. There are about six to eight squares of each fabric.

This turquoise one has a "spiraling in" square pattern that I really like. I'll definitely do this one again. The only drawback is that it ends in the middle, so you have to break thread to move on to another area; there's no way to travel except back along the entire spiral.

This one has lines radiating out from one corner. It was easy and requires no marking. The pattern ends not in the original corner, but in the ditch in the middle of one of the opposite sides, so good for moving to the next square.

This one is hard to see because of the very low contrast between the dark blue block and the navy thread. That's a good thing, though, because it was a tricky shape for me. I had to mark some guidelines. It's basically a diamond shape inside the square, with loopy curves in each corner.  It starts and stops in the same place. While my loopies improved a little each time (especially after I started working counter clockwise around the diamond), they were never consistent within each block. Meh.

Here's that same motif from the back of the quilt. Yes, those are the backs of circus animals wearing jackets. I scored six yards of that fabric for about $15 on eBay! It makes great backing fabric for Project Linus quilts. The official name of the print is "Animal Tails," but Sean and I both call it "Guess What? Animal Butt!" and giggle because we are highly mature.

The last set of squares I worked on today are these busy turquoise medallion bursts. The quilt motif is super hard to see on this one, too.

A bit easier to make out on the back. The design divides the block into four equal squares and fills in two opposite ones with a tight back and forth wiggle. Because it was so hard to see on the front, at first I really hated this one. But after four or five repeats it started to grow on me and I got into a nice rhythm. I'm going to try it again on a plainer block, maybe a bright yellow one. With a little thinking ahead, it can be sewn to start and end pretty much anywhere in the block.

Unitarian fans tutorial

A reader requested that I show how I do the Unitarian fans free motion motif. I'm sure I didn't invent this variation of Baptist fans, but I've never seen it demonstrated in exactly this way so I figured I earned the right to rename it.

The big difference between this and other variations I've seen is that the arches don't overlap or touch the previous stitching. I'm bad at following a previous stitch line, also called "travel stitching." I also do my share of ripping out and having a continuous line of quilting is MUCH easier to rip.

This is an edge to edge, overall filler design. What I like about it is that it requires very little thinking or planning. It's impossible to get stuck in a corner because you weren't thinking far enough ahead. You just work your way across the quilt in rough rows, then start again back on the other side. The end of a row makes a good stopping point to take a break. And my brain likes regular, repeating shapes.

Start in the lower right hand corner of the quilt, about two inches up, and sew straight down to the corner. Turn left and sew about two inches across the bottom. Turn up at a right angle and make the first arc back up to the right hand edge.

At the right edge, sew straight up about 1/2" to 3/4", which will be the spacing of the rest of the arcs. I just eyeball this spacing relative to my presser foot. The "Unitarian" part of these fans implies that they are rather liberal and not too straight laced. Wobbly is OK, organic is OK. Arc back down to the bottom, then left that same 1/2" to 3/4" spacing.

Sew six lines back and forth in roughly parallel arcs, ending at the bottom edge of the quilt. I've tried four arcs and eight arcs, but six works best for me in that it keeps the whole fan contained in an area small enough that I don't need to keep moving my hands to control the quilt.

Start the next fan by stitching about 2" along the bottom to the left, then arcing up about 2" until close to, but not touching, the last fan. How close I get varies a bit, but usually is about 1/8" to 1/4" away. Stitch parallel to the last fan up 1/2" to 3/4", then arc back to the bottom. Note that the first fan edges were parallel to the edge of the quilt, but subsequent fan edges are parallel to the previous fan.

Sew the six arcs and end at the bottom of the quilt. 

Repeat across the bottom of the quilt to the left edge. In my drawing, you can see that my fans aren't all exactly the same size, and that's fine with me. It will all tend to mush together after multiple rows and give a nice overall texture.

Start the next row about 2" to 2 1/2" inches above the top of the first fan. Sew straight down to within 1/8" to 1/4" of the first fan but not touching, then turn left. This time, instead of sewing directly to the left (parallel to the bottom of the quilt), stitch roughly parallel the top of the first fan about 2", then turn up to form the first arc.

Repeat the six arcs, ending each one close to but not touching another fan. You can see that this fills in the space nicely with no obvious gap between the rows.

Repeat across the width of the quilt. Because my fans are not identical or premarked, they vary a bit in width and height. That means when I get to the far left edge, I might be in the middle of an arc. Just treat the edge of the quilt like another line to sew right up to, but not touch, and continue the six arcs. The final fan might be wide, or it might be squished, but as long as the arc spacing is roughly the same, you get a consistent texture.

The bottom row of fans all have that nice, straight edge, but all the rest of them have curvy edges dictated by preexisting fans. At first, that threw me off from making consistently curved arcs, until I focused on trying to make the first few stitches of each arc roughly perpendicular to the previous fan.

This design scales really nicely. The numbers I give here are what work for me, but you could make this design super tiny or big and widely spaced. On the Scrappy Chili Peppers quilt, my initial arcs were about 3" and the arc spacing closer to 1". This gave a softer, looser feel to the finished quilt and sewed up quite a bit faster. But I couldn't stitch an entire fan without stopping to move my hands. I found that quite annoying, since The Little Kenmore That Could doesn't have a needle down feature. So I changed to this tighter spacing for Bright Bento.

Sarasota, FL

I finished quilting the gift quilt yesterday. Here is the back, trimmed. I haven't decided what fabric to use for the binding. Several rather large batches of fabric are waiting for me at our mail receiving company in Green Cove Springs. We will have a good address for deliveries next week while in the Tampa/St Pete area, so all my goodies will arrive at once. It's always like Christmas when that happens!

As I said earlier, this quilt does not have any batting, just a cotton top and a fleece back. There are three reasons for that. One, this is a gift for fellow boaters, and we have found that our fleece blankets dry really quickly. Even when salty, they don't get that sticky, damp feeling as badly as cotton. So half cotton/half fleece seems like a good boat compromise. Two, while I've made two other fleece back quilts, I didn't do extensive FMQ (free motion quilting) on them and wanted to try that. Three, I was running low on batting anyway so this seemed like the right quilt to do my testing.

I'm pretty happy with the FMQ from the front. I had a nice selection of matching Aurifil 50 weight thread for each color cotton, so everything blends well. I tried a boxy spiral shape in the sashing that flowed well and gives good crinkly texture. 

I'm not as happy about the quilting on the back, though. In order to make sure the bobbin thread didn't show on the front, I matched it to the top thread in all instances. That worked well for the front, but makes each motif stand out quite starkly on the back, especially on the big cream rectangles.

It's not that the quilting is bad; in fact, the fleece does a fantastic job hiding some variations in stitch length. It's just that the shapes that make sense on the front look odd and out of context on the back. It looks...unfinished. I really wish I had started with enough of the red argyle for the entire back, because it did a much better job of blending into the quilting. 

The whole thing is very soft and cuddly, though, and I'm still stoked about the fabrics and the design. I just need to decide if my hesitations about the back are enough to knock it off the gift list. We'll see how I feel about it after binding and laundering. Once I make a final decision I'll be able to share the completed front with you.

One of the things that surprised me about using fleece on the back was how different it was to move the sandwich through the sewing machine. While sewing the pieces of fleece together to create the back, I kept thinking, "Wow, it's really easy to sew. Very forgiving." But I had read that it was hard on the needle and it did start to get what I call "thumpy." The machine sounded like it was working hard to punch through the cotton and then up to two layers of fleece at the seams. I kept checking to see if the needle felt dull, but it stabbed my finger just fine! I'll toss that needle out after binding, though, just in case.

The fleece was much harder to slide around on the machine bed during FMQ, even though it fed well when doing straight sewing with the feed dogs up. It's almost like the synthetic material got staticky rubbing against the plastic bed, although I never got "shocked." And of course, fleece is much stretchier than cotton so I had to be careful that I wasn't just pulling the backing around while the top stayed in one place. That happened several times, even with spray adhesive holding the layers together. The cream fleece was much stretchier than the argyle, so the whole sandwich moved and felt different as I moved from one section to another, with a really thick, "thumpy" transition across each fleece seam.

Lessons learned for using fleece backings: Look for less stretchy (thicker?) brands. Try to minimize seams in the fleece. Patterned fleece hides more quilting (that's true of cotton, too!) Try a different size or type of needle.

Today I started quilting this bright quilt top. What a difference and what a pleasure! The fabrics are mostly Kaffe Fassett/Rowan. They are very high quality, thin and smooth. Lovely to work with. These blocks were originally destined for our own bed quilt, but I didn't have enough of them for a queen size so I set them aside over a year ago. They are a sort of Bento Box design, so I'm calling this one Bright Bento.

The back is another quality brand, Studio E, and the line is an older one called "Tea Time," I think. It's a bit calico and traditional compared to the wild front, but that's okay. This quilt will most likely be a donation quilt for Hands2Help, so the recipient can flip it over as the mood strikes.

I'm quilting it with my "Unitarian Fans" motif that I first tried on Scrappy Chili Peppers. This time I'm making the fans tighter, almost half the spacing between the arcs, and I'm happier with it. It's taking twice as long, alas. It takes me about 20 minutes to quilt across one pass, about 55 inches wide by 8-10 inches tall. It's a meditative motion of gentle curves with almost no thinking or decisions to be made. 

I really wanted the quilting to blend in on this one, after my disappointment on the gift quilt. I also didn't want to keep changing thread colors and take a break from burying threads. The top thread is a bright aqua and the bobbin is a soft baby blue, close enough to each other that there's no obvious color show-through between top and bottom, but nicely blending on each side.

Whoop, whoop!

I was very excited to see a couple of my blocks today on Kat and Cat Quilts! Kat asked for adult-themed I-spy quilt blocks for the month of March, and I sent in several but forgot to take any pictures of them. 

That's my little plover in the navy blue square, and my artichoke surrounded by kitchen appliances. You should go look at the entire quilt at the link above; it turned out beautifully!

If you're unfamiliar with the term "I-spy" or "eye-spy," it comes from a children's game of the same name. One person says, "I spy, with my little eye, something that begins with the letter B." The other people playing the game looks around and tries to guess: Boat? Box? Oh, that bicycle! Whoever guesses correctly gets to spy the next object. I-spy quilts are very popular for children, and I made this one last year. 

When Kat asked for the blocks, she specified "novelty prints that would make adults smile." Hence the kitchen appliances, French horns, and Alexander Hamilton blocks. And speaking of adult fabrics, here's a bit more of the gift quilt I've been working on. Hmm, seems to be a definite theme here. 

I stitched red hearts all along the red border, and outlined each cup in dark brown. Once again, the blending threads hardly show on the front, but are quite visible on the back. The hearts look very heart-like on the back, but the cups are strange blobs! Today I'm doing a fill pattern on all the oval shapes...can you guess what they are supposed to be?

Linking up with Confessions of a Fabric Addict for the Friday "Can I Get a Whoop, Whoop!"

Cabbage Key, FL

Today I did a little free motion quilting (FMQ) on a gift quilt. The center of this quilt is large, pieced hearts in five different fabrics: a green, a gold, a dark brown, a medium brown, and a rusty red.

I wanted each fabric to have its own FMQ motif, so I sketched a number of ideas. Because the hearts are squared off, it was a real challenge for me to come up with five different designs. Ones that look good on my sketch paper didn't always work the way I wanted them to on the large heart. I use a piece of clear plastic and a dry-erase pen to test the designs.

The blue tape around the edge of the plastic keeps me from drawing right off the edge onto the fabric! I need to write something like "draw only on this side" on the tape, too. Even after wiping off the pen, there is still some that lingers so I try to draw on the same side of the plastic each time, keeping the pristine side down. The plastic is 8.5" x 11", so you can see how big these hearts are.

Ready to stitch the first red heart. I wear Wonder Grip gardening gloves to keep a good solid hold on the fabric as I guide it under the needle. There are specialty quilting gloves for this, but garden gloves work just as well and are cheap. I like this brand because they are nice and tight on my small hands.

The first time Sean saw the gloves, he read the brand as Wonder Girl and commented that it was a bit grandiose! Harrumph! I may not be very good at FMQ, but I'm getting better all the time.

By the way, for my non-quilting readers, the "free motion" part of this technique means that instead of letting the sewing machine pull the fabric through in a straight line, the feed mechanism is disengaged so the fabric can be pushed and pulled around in any direction. The direction and stitch length is completely controlled by various body parts, with stitch speed controlled by the foot pedal. At first, this feels a lot like patting your head while rubbing your stomach while writing cursive in a mirror.

Anyway, the FMQ design that I chose for the red hearts is a simple, angular set of triangles and diamonds that fill up most of the space. I used Angela Walter's "dot to dot" method, and finished quilting those today. That's the good news. The bad news is that because I used red thread, the motif is very difficult to photograph on the red fabric. But here it is on the back. If you look closely you can see the squared off heart outlined in cream thread.

 

The backing fabric for this quilt is fleece, and I used no batting. I had this great red, cream and tan argyle fleece, but it wasn't quite big enough to cover the entire back. So I pieced it with some cream fleece in a big checkerboard. Fleece is interesting to work with: it doesn't fray, but it also doesn't iron flat. So I finished the seams by sewing them down on the back (the inside of the quilt.) Fleece is also quite stretchy, which is a mixed blessing.

On the green hearts, I chose a FMQ motif that makes the heart look like a giant hosta leaf. It ended up right between two sections of fleece.

I'll share more bits and pieces of this quilt as I work on it, but the big final reveal won't happen until after the recipient has it safely on his/her lap.

Sanibel Island, FL

Time for another big quilt round-up post. One of the major reasons I wanted to spin off this new blog is that it's kind of a pain to write huge summaries like this one. I've been thinking it would be simpler if I wrote shorter posts more often so that blogging wasn't such a Major Event.

But what seems more interesting to me to write about each day is much more of the nitty gritty of the quilting process, and I know that our travel blog readers probably aren't the target audience for that. So if you're checking in from Our Odyssey, where you've come to love an obsessive level of detail about boat repair projects, this is your last quilt summary post. After today, it's going to be nonstop musings on fabric selection, block design, free motion quilting motifs, and stitching blooper reels.

Charity Quilts

First up is the most recent Project Linus quilt I've finished. It's called "Cat Family Portrait." 

Those cat faces are just so cute and friendly! I think they will charm any kid with their funny little whiskery smiles. The triangles were leftover from the Pinkly Purply Hearts quilt, cut off from the corners of the heart shapes. I went looking through my stash to find something else in those colors and found the cat faces. They were part of a larger panel that I will use in a different quilt. The faces were arranged randomly around the large panel, but I tried to cut them out as squarely as possible to match the size of the arrays of 3x3 triangle blocks.

The striped border is sewn with mitered corners, the first time I attempted that. Turns out that a wide, super busy stripe is kinda tricky, so the little scallops and doohickeys don't line up very well. However, the overall effect is nice, and I though it looked like a big, fancy picture frame. 

Here's the back, a couple of semi-matching flannel pieces for fuzzy softness. It's a small quilt so I figured it would end up with a small person. I did a combination of walking foot straight line quilting on the borders and free motion quilting in the main section. The triangles have back and forth squiggles, and the cats are simply outlined. You can also see the nice labels that Project Linus provides for us to attach. Very professional!

Next up is "Scrappy Chili Peppers," which I have made for the Hands2Help charity challenge. It was made with a variety of green fabrics from my stash, plus red, yellow, green and black scrap 2.5" strips. Many of them feature fun, bright chili peppers, which came with a large group of novelty fabric samples I bought on eBay. I'll write more about that purchase in another post.

I quilted this one in a free motion pattern based on the traditional Baptist Fan motif. I modified it so that there would be no travel stitching, but just one long, continuous line of stitching. I'm calling this more liberal version "Unitarian Fans" and will definitely be sewing it again. It was fast and easy.

I used a vareigated Aurifil thread in green, yellow and red. It seemed like a good choice with these fabrics. Vareigated threads are gorgeous on the spool, but I think they are tricky to implement well. You never know when you'll end up with a really high contrast area, but it's usually when I make a sewing wobble. Hey, the boat moved right then! That's my excuse.

The back of this quilt is one of my favorites. I had a large piece of this striped fabric that is just perfect. Gotta love that kind of serendipity. I don't plan my backings or bindings in advance; there's a whole lot of "winging it from the old stash-a-roonie" here on Vector.

This is a small, wheelchair sized quilt made in an attic windows type pattern. I'm not sure yet where I'll donate it, possibly to a charity that supports ALS patients. I just love this bird fabric and thought it looked nice in the "windows."

Here's a closer view of the birds before I did much quilting. Each little feathered friend is outlined and I loosely followed the swirling branches. I did a wood grain free motion motif in the dark blue, which was fun and new.

Selfish Sewing

That's the term in the quilting world for projects you sew for yourself.

This piece is made of silk dupioni. I bought a book of small, discontinued sample swatches from an upholstery or drapery company. Each 6"x9" piece was backed with paper and stapled into a cardboard book binding. The eBay seller reassured me that the paper backings would come off easily when heated with a medium-hot iron.

Wrong. The first sample I ironed scorched into a brown mess. The second piece melted the glue into a sticky morass that bonded permanently to the silk. After doing some internet research, I soaked the third piece in water, then soapy water, then rubbing alcohol, then acetone. Each bath softened another angstrom-thick layer of paper but none of the glue. Arghhh! 

Fortunately, the paper only covered half of each piece of fabric, so I sent photos of my science experiment failures to the seller, who graciously refunded half my money, and I set my sights on a smaller quilt. As you can see, it's an odd size: too big for the salon table, but definitely not big enough to be a lap quilt.

But it fits nicely over the master stateroom bed, even if the colors of the silk are a bit muted compared to the bed quilt. 

The silk was easy to sew. I think the dupioni samples were treated with something that made them a bit stiff. I cut most of the edges with pinking shears to keep them from fraying, and that worked well. The few unpinked edges did fray aggressively.

Why quilt with silk at all? Look at that sheen! This is gorgeous, gorgeous material. It catches the light beautifully, and rustles like a Southern belle's petticoats when you touch it. I chose a triangular quilting motif, using Angela Walter's "dot to dot" technique, which was fun and pretty straightforward. That being said, I won't be doing much else in silk. It's very expensive, which is why I started with the used drapery sample book. By the yard it can be four to five times more than cotton, and in order to get this much color variety I'd have to purchase a small fortune of fabric.

On the back I used a nice Asian vase patterned quilting cotton and tried a binding technique called "facing." The facing is wrapped completely on the back so that none shows on the front of the quilt. It is often used for quilts that are entered into shows, la di da! I didn't want a plain cotton binding to show against the fancy silk, so this worked well. It isn't harder or easier than regular binding; just different.

Gift Quilts

My final finished project to share today is "Brewskis."

I found out a couple weeks ago that my stepmom's nephew, Will, had been very, very badly injured in an explosion at his work. He faces multiple surgeries and many weeks of rehabilitation. It is a scary time for our extended family. 

I had only met Will once, many years ago, when he was a child. So I asked my stepmom Kay what he liked to do as an adult, and she told me he was a quintessential Western Guy: a fishing, hunting, outdoorsy fellow who appreciated a cold beer at the end of a long day. So I made him a beer quilt to brighten up his hospital stay, and this week I'll mail it off to him.

I had this fun beer themed panel that I cut up for the centers of the blocks. They have cheeky sayings on them: "I never met a beer I didn't like," and "A well balanced diet is a beer in each hand," and about seven or eight others.

These were part of the same set of novelty fabrics as the chili peppers. There are bottles of beer, and mugs of beer. And glasses of wine, because there's always someone who doesn't like beer but will drink the wine. And tortilla chips, because who doesn't like a few munchies to go with your brewskis?

I think the colors are rather manly, quite different from my usual rainbow hued kids quilts. This green leafy piece was left over from the Star Surround quilt I made for Kay and my Dad, for a bit of family connection.

All the remaining bits and scraps got integrated into the back, along with larger pieces in the same blue/brown/green/sand color scheme. I figured I probably wouldn't be able to use beer stein scraps in my Project Linus quilts. Scrappy backings can be fun to look at, too.

Brewskis is about 54" x 54": not huge, but also not overwhelming for a small hospital bed. As I made it, I concentrated on sewing loving, healing thoughts for Will into each stitch. I hope it provides a bit of cheer and amusement for him and helps to speed his recovery.

A blog of my own

Well, looky here! I've whipped up a brand new blog, just to talk about quilting. The online quilt world seems to be quite large and I'm getting more involved in it. There are block drives, bees, link up parties, contests and more, and having a dedicated blog makes participating in those a lot easier.

So welcome to my Quilt Odyssey, a journey (by boat, of course) from beginner to something slightly more than a beginner. I've moved all my previous quilt-related posts from our travel blog, Our Odyssey, over here to have them all in one place. If you've been following along over there, everything below this post is old material (Ha! Get it? Quilts, cotton, material!)

If you're a new reader, here's the story in a nutshell. I live full time aboard a boat named "Vector" with my husband, Sean, and our cat, Angel. We are currently traveling up the western coast of Florida. About two years ago, I got the quilting bug and started sewing in our second stateroom, now called The Quilt Room. It's a pretty big room for a boat, but a pretty small room for a sewing studio, so I am concentrating on smaller projects like lap- and child-sized quilts.

I have made one large quilt, though: a queen sized cover for our bed. It seems huge to me, and it certainly is difficult to take photos of something that size on a 52-foot long boat. You know how other bloggers spread their quilts on the lawn or drape them artfully from a tree in the backyard? Yeah, that's not happening for me. Since forgot to take a picture of the back of when I originally documented it, today Sean fixed that omission. The photo at the top of this post shows the back of Exuberant Color, and the front is on the far right in the blog header picture. We took a number of photos to get the blog header and it was nerve wracking to have all my hard work hanging precariously over the water from spring loaded clamps. The boat is salty and dirty, too, so I didn't want to drape anything freshly washed over the side. I won't be setting up many more "side of the boat" photo shoots.

In the meantime, watch this space for more frequent quilting updates, and thanks for following along. If you leave me a comment and aren't a "no-reply" blogger, I'll write back.