Hands 2 Help update

Just a quick update today. I've been plugging along on the Unitarian fans quilting for Bright Bento, my second quilt for the Hands2Help charity challenge.

It's slow going, because I keep getting distracted by other things in my studio. However, the delay allowed the perfect material for the binding to appear in my life.

This solid lavender fabric was part of the extra freebies in my last fabric delivery, and I think it blends beautifully with all the Kaffe Fassett designs in this quilt. I may combine it with another solid for a flanged binding.

Hands2Help is approaching the final deadline of May 22, 2016 to get our quilts completed. I'm hoping to get this one done this week. If I finish the quilting and sew the binding on by hand, I can do that handwork in the rental car when we drive to Virginia in the next ten days or so.

St Pete, FL

Here are the last four FMQ motifs I used on Charming Cupcakes.

In this pink that reads as fairly solid, I used a fan shape that radiates out from one corner. Three lobes plus two half lobes along the adjacent sides. As I was stitching these, I felt like the lobes were really uneven. Where they all come together or cross near the corner seemed especially variable. But when the block was finished, that all kind of disappeared in the overall shape. So this one is a keeper. It was fast and forgiving. Starts in one corner, ends in an adjacent corner, no travel stitching.

After having quilted the turquoise and orange versions of this busy medallion fabric, I knew it would almost completely hide whatever motif I chose.  And sure enough, here is a photo that shows almost nothing of the FMQ! You're welcome. 

The pattern was actually concentric squares radiating out from one corner. Because the lines are supposed to be parallel to the sides, it isn't very forgiving. It worked fine with the busy fabric, but wasn't terribly interesting, in my opinion. This surprised me, because I'm usually drawn to geometric shapes.

On this darker green batik, I used a motif from the diamond shapes part of the book. Squares are, after all, just diamonds with all 90 degree corners. I like these fluid curves; they are fast and simple and don't need to be completely symmetric to still look okay. Starts in one corner, travels half way along one edge and ends in the middle of that same edge.

And finally, the green zig zags. I knew this fabric would be a challenge to quilt. There's so much movement in the design that no matter what quilting motif I chose, there would be a certain amount of conflict. So I chose a pattern that I have used before: a diamond with a curved iris shape inside it, then an inner fill of loops. Since I had several other designs that were open in the center and more densely quilted around the edges, I wanted this one to be the opposite of that.

All the remaining blocks on this quilt are the cupcake fabrics. I decided to leave those completely unquilted to make them stand out from the others. We'll see how it all plays out after it is washed and dried.

Now that I've tried a dozen or so motifs from Shape by Shape, I feel like I've made some progress in my FMQ journey. 

Lessons learned:

1. The fabric really makes or breaks the quilting. Busy fabrics and matching thread almost completely hide the stitching. While that's good for practicing, it's kind of a waste of time to put a lot of effort into fancy quilting there. Solids or near solids usually show the quilting more, but not always. The navy blue blender in this quilt looks completely unquilted. Maybe that's because it is dark?

2. Sometimes a motif is much easier for me if I stitch it in a different direction. Clockwise vs. counterclockwise; up and down vs. left and right; outside in vs. inside out. Try all the variations before giving up.

3. How the block is oriented can also make a difference. Turning the quilt so the block is square vs. on its point makes some motifs easier to visualize and stitch.

4. I don't like travel stitching, so I'd rather avoid motifs that require more than an inch or two of it. I do like patterns that let me move efficiently from block to block without traveling.

5. I don't like marking, but sometimes a single line or a few dots of marking can make a huge difference. I'm certainly not going to pre-draw an entire motif, though.

6. Simple motifs with only 4 to 12 lines of stitching per block can be just as pretty as fancy, dense quilting. On this size block (charm squares finishing 4.5") I like the more open quilting anyway. 

7. Most importantly, I really can't tell in advance how I feel about a motif. Some of these I picked out of the book because I thought they were really attractive, but my hand-eye-brain combo butchered them. Others looked "meh" in the book, but I really enjoyed stitching them and felt pleased with the finished block. 

Next time you see Charming Cupcakes, the binding will be on and it will be finished!

Fabric delivery

Living on a boat makes it tricky to acquire fabric. I try to visit local quilt shops (LQS) when I can, but that doesn't happen very often. It turns out that most quilt shops are not located within easy walking distance of navigable waters. I guess they figure their typical customer probably lives in a land-based home and owns a car. Who knew those people quilted?

We do own two small motor scooters, and we launch them any time we stay at a dock for more than a day or two. However, we really prefer to anchor the big boat and use the smaller dinghy to get ashore. The scooters don't fit in the dinghy, but we have folding bicycles which do fit. So my LQS world is mostly limited to shops within walking, bicycling or public transit distance of a dock where we can tie up the dinghy. The intersection of that Venn diagram has resulted in maybe a dozen different LQS visits in three years. One of my goals on this blog is to start documenting those visits.

But today's post is about my latest stash acquisition from my primary source of fabric: delivery from online sources. About 90% of my fabric is ordered online and delivered to our mail forwarding service in Green Cove Springs, FL. The service holds all our mail until we have a good local address. They will box everything up and ship it to a marina, a friend's house, General Delivery at a local post office, or a UPS Customer Care Center. This happens every 1 to 3 months, and I've usually forgotten by then what I ordered.

While we are in the Tampa area, we are very lucky to be close to our friends Ben and Karen, who have graciously allowed us to ship all kinds of JCS (junk, crap and stuff) to their house. We had dinner with them last night, and they brought along our mail. Oh, happy day! Beer, laughter, and chow with good friends, followed by the Unboxing of the Fabric!

I actually buy very little brand new fabric from online retailers. I much prefer to scour eBay for folks who are selling their own fabric stash ("destashing") or reselling items they found at estate sales ("dead people's fabric.") This type of fabric is considered "used" because it was cut from the bolt at the fabric shop, then stored in someone's home for months, years, decades. However, it hasn't been sewn into a project so as long as the storage was smoke-free, it's pretty much like new. My goal is to give this fabric life in a quilt, and to do it at 75% or more off retail prices.

I have found a number of super nice eBay sellers who know that I sew for Project Linus and will offer me great bargains on kid-friendly fabrics. Some lower their shipping fees, others throw in extra fabric for no charge. I try to send them photos of my finished quilts, because I know they often are emotionally attached to the fabric and enjoy seeing it used.

I bought this batch from one of my favorite sellers. It is a Robert Kaufman fat quarter bundle from the Imperial Collection and a Makower UK Advent panel in fun, modern colors. The shipment also included three yards of the basketball fabric shown at the top of the post. I'll use the basketballs on the back of a boy's quilt for Project Linus, so that was the main purchase. The others will marinate for a while in my stash before becoming gift quilts, but there was no additional shipping for them.

So that's what I was expecting in the medium sized flat rate USPS box. Imagine my delight when I opened the box and found at least four more yards of fabric! Woo hoo!

Only two are specifically kid fabrics: sweet elephants and fun kangaroos. But I will definitely find a way to work the others into Linus quilts.

Turquoise and purple are both great gender neutral colors, so these are quite versatile. And I love using geometrics like this one; the crisp lines make a nice foil for the florals that are so common.

These three fabrics aren't from the same line, but they play really nicely together in black, white and green. Another gender neutral combo! The mottled green is from a really high end line called Fairy Frost. It has a metallic shimmer that is so neat.

I have another shipment (or two) coming when we are in Palmetto next week to have some work done on the boat. I'm not completely sure what's in that batch and I'm deliberately not looking back through my records to refresh my memory. I like being surprised. Tune in next week and you can be surprised, too!

More FMQ in Tampa

Today I worked on the yellow and orange blocks of Charming Cupcakes, and tried six more FMQ motifs from Angela Walter's Shape by Shape book. In no particular order:

This four lobed shape is a definite keeper. It was super easy for me, which is surprising because it is so similar to the loop-de-loops in the navy blue block that I just hated. I think it's because on this one, the diagonal stitching is done first and that makes clear lines to guide the rest of the shape. It reminds me of leaves, and since leaves are an organic shape, I don't mind if the lobes aren't completely symmetric. It starts in one corner and ends at either adjacent corner, good for moving between blocks.

How about a little onion? Or is it garlic? A flame? Either way, this one was also really fun and easy. I chose it for the yellow striped blocks to try mixing the curvy shape and geometric fabric. The stripes made it really simple to line up the pointy tops of each, uh, thing. It starts and stops in the same place along the middle of one side. It looks odd in this photo because this is a corner block and I left a quarter inch allowance along the sides for the quilt binding. The rest of them sit right along the block edge.

OK, this is a terrible photo. But it doesn't matter, because I won't be doing this motif again and I'm glad it completely disappears in this tonal orange block. If you squint and have an active imagination, you can see that there are three (!) diagonal lines bisecting the block, with tight parallel lines filling one half and a curvy stipple filling the other. Fiddly, busy and time consuming. I think this one started in one corner and ended in the opposite, but I'm already blotting it out of my memory, la la la...

In this orange block, the motif is gentle arcs between each corner, then the outside edged filled in with ribbon candy. I like it OK and might use it again, maybe with a different filler than ribbons. (My ribbon candy looks like it might be an unappetizing flavor. Durian fruit, perhaps.) Even though I did six of these blocks, I never got them to look symmetric. My gentle curves really vary depending on whether I'm going left, right, up or down in the block. But I do like the contrast between the poofy open center of the block and the more densely quilted edges. Same point start and stop.

This one is very similar to a shape I learned in Angela's Dot-to-Dot quilting class and used in Polar Bears With Old Man Hairs. The idea is that very little marking is needed to create the shapes. After a few really blobby ones, I started putting in crease marks from corner to corner and that helped. This is one of the better ones I stitched, and it's still pretty wonky. Wonkiness in a straight line geometric shape like this is more obvious than in the curvy organic ones. However, the whole quilt is busy enough that I'm happy with it. Same point start and stop.

And finally, another block that was hard to photograph. This shape is curly brackets from corner to corner. It's a bit easier to see on the back.

See the shape on the giraffe butt? This one was very, very fast: just four lines. The curves make a bit of organic asymmetry fade away, and it was a good choice on a super busy fabric. The pointy part of the bracket shape extends well into the block, so it fills the space nicely. My only complaint is that I had to wrap my brain around making brackets going up and down, after so many years of drawing them left and right. Practice, practice, practice. Same point start and stop.

Three definite keepers in this batch, two maybes and one never again. I'm learning a lot about what works for me. After the final batch of blocks, I'll try to summarize.

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.