Florence, AL

We have docked at a marina here along the Tennessee river, which means unlimited air conditioning. And that means I can sew anytime the mood strikes, hurrah! I immediately launched into making this month's blocks for Covered in Love. Kat asked for any type of star block in any combination of red, white, and blue.

Since I have never made a quarter square triangle before, I decided to try a couple of old fashioned star blocks that use the shape. The one on the left is an Ohio Star, and the two others are Spinning Stars. The patterns have been around for such a long time that they are probably known by other names, too.

The dark blue fabric in the corners of the middle star is really gorgeous in person. Unfortunately, I only had a small scrap and wish there had been enough to use where the small white triangles are so the star would be completely surrounded by the blue. It will be fine in a big quilt filled with many different scrappy stars, though.

I've also been plugging away at the Pretzel Twist pattern, which I'm going to call Twist N Scrap. I've known a lot of pretzels, and this, sir, is no pretzel. So far, so good on the polyester blend background fabric.

This quilt is a bit tricky without a design wall. Ideally, I'd sew all the little subsections of each block that contain a single color piece and the background pieces. Then they would be placed on a design wall and arranged to make the interlocking squares, being careful to not end up with the wrong colors in the corners where the squares "run off" the edges of the quilt. However, there is no place in the boat where I can lay out everything and work on it over the course of many days. I use the bed as a design wall and that only works until bedtime! I can roll up the tablecloth I use to stick the blocks to, and put that back in the quilt room for the night, but that's a marginal solution with larger blocks and won't work well at all for lots of really little pieces. They'd just be a jumble when I unroll it.

So I'm sewing the size blocks you see in the photo: one full color square with four interlinked corner squares. Just have to take it slow and think about where each next color is going and whether it will eventually be a full square or a "run off" partial square.

I'll probably set the whole thing aside in the next few days and try to finish one of my Project Linus WIPs. My PL chapter is in Alameda County, California and I usually ship them. We'll be flying to the West Coast to visit family and friends and I'm bringing two PL quilts with me. Maybe I can make that three, or even four. Ambitious, but all things are possible with sufficient air conditioning!

Bay Springs Lake, MS

I started piecing the Pretzel Twist top. First I cut all the scrappy strips and neatly piled them up. Then I pulled out the tiny heart background fabric yardage and cut off a chunk so I could iron it easily.

Instead of gliding easily over the fabric like it should on 100% cotton, the iron had that slight "stickiness" and distinctive smell of a polyester blend.

Oops. That's not what I wanted. I try to only buy 100% cotton.

Since I buy most of my fabrics used, I do occasionally end up with some odd pieces that weren't properly identified. I've mostly learned to pass on anything listed as a cotton blend, or at least to ask the seller if they know for sure that the fabric is all cotton. This one slipped through the system, darn it!

The general consensus in the quilting world is that "good" quilts "should" be 100% cotton, so in the past I've gotten rid of anything containing any polyester. But I really had my heart set on using this heart print. What to do, what to do? I hit Google and started researching online.

The main reasons to avoid polyester blends seem to be:

1. It doesn't breathe as well as cotton so the quilt will be "hot."

2. It doesn't shrink so the quilt won't crinkle up properly.

3. It doesn't hold a crease like cotton, so it will harder to press quilt blocks properly.

4. It doesn't stretch along the grain as much as cotton, so there isn't as much leeway in piecing blocks.

5. It's significantly stronger than cotton so it will tear the cotton seams apart somehow.

Hmm, interesting. In my limited experience:

1. There are lots of polyester blend battings on the market, offered by all the reputable batting companies. Surely the batting has a much more dramatic affect on how warm a quilt is?

2. I have mixed pre-washed, pre-shrunk cottons with unwashed, unshrunk cottons in the same quilt with absolutely no mis-matched crinkling, so I suspect a poly blend would also work fine. Crinkliness seems to be much more affected by the density of the quilting design. I've also used poly batting, which doesn't shrink much, with no crinkle issues.

3. Poly does iron differently (see stickiness and smell above), so block pressing is something I'd have to try for myself.

4. Accurate piecing should mitigate most issues with lack of stretch.

5. The relative strengths of the two materials seems to be a complete nonissue to me. If you're yanking on your quilt so much that the seams split or the cotton tears, blaming the polyester content is disingenuous. That kind of force will part the weakest link, so don't abuse your quilts.

What I also found online that is the sites that clearly stated that polyester blends should not be used were usually sites that were selling cotton fabrics. On forums where quilters actually asked each other about different fabrics, many people said they had successfully used polyester blends in their quilts for years. In fact, they said those quilts wore better and washed up brighter, without fading over time.

So clearly, the answer is that I need to try it for myself. And as you can see from the top photo, I cut up some tiny heart background pieces and started sewing. This is a scrap quilt, so if it really turns out badly I won't have sacrificed much.

Isn't it a sweet little print? The fabric is actually quite thin and smooth, like fine shirting material. It's almost impossible to tell which is the right side. When I work with batiks, I also have trouble telling right from wrong side, so I just don't sweat it, and that's what I'm doing here.

So far, the piecing is going just fine. Each unit being sewn together has at least once chunk of 100% cotton, so there's a little give and stretch. It is definitely true that the poly blend isn't holding a crease as well, but this block only has a few seams that need to match, so we'll see how that plays out when joining blocks later. For now, I'm just concentrating on how I need to press the ones that allow any block to join to any other block properly.

 

In other news, we passed through the 4th tallest lock in the United States, the Jamie Whitten. It was kind of eerie to be at the bottom of this dark canyon before being lifted over 80 feet back into the sunlight!

Near the Buttahatchee River

I just realized that I never shared the nice prize I won by participating in the Hands2Help charity quilt event. Aren't these pretty autumnal leaf fabrics? Five fat quarters. No information printed on the selvedge, but the colors are very crisp and they have a nice hand.

I generally sort my fabrics by color, but have a separate bin just for fall color/themed pieces. The muted oranges, browns, and golds don't tend to play nicely with my brighter kid-friendly fabrics. These leafy prints kind of cross that line, though, don't they? The purple is especially vibrant and I love it!

The final numbers for Hands2Help were very impressive: 198 quilts sewn and donated by 106 volunteers! Sarah managed to find enough sponsors so that everyone received a nice prize, too. I was certainly tickled to get my leafy goodies.

Covered in Love, one of the H2H beneficiaries and where I donated my two quilts, also passed a major milestone recently. Kat says she has been able to provide over 100 quilts to families who have lost loved ones in the hospital, and the H2H quilts pushed her over that mark. That's pretty darned tootin' great, especially considering it's really just Kat doing the lion's share of the work. Atta girl, Kat!!

In other donation news, I filled out an application to be a quilt top piecer for Heart Builders, and was accepted this week. This is the charity arm of Stash Builder Box, and they work with various groups that support children in need. They provide the fabric and the sewists can create any pattern we want. The pieced top is then shipped back and another volunteer quilts it. They require a 4-6 week turn-around, but I can request fabric on my schedule so I'll know when it's coming. I need to be ready with a good receiving address for that. I'm looking forward to seeing what fabric they send! We can also to add to it from our stash, and I suspect I will do that.

Between sewing Kat's monthly blocks for Covered in Love, piecing tops only for Heart Builders, and creating finished quilts for Project Linus, I'll have a nice variety of things I can be working on at any given moment. Life is good.

And yes, there really is a Buttahatchee River. I could have picked any number of watery landmarks (watermarks?) for today's post title, but my inner 12 year old just had to go with that one!

Columbus, MS

Let's Go To The Races quilt top is finished. True to its name, this was a speedy project! Now it will go into my pile to be quilted after we're at a dock for a while. It will probably get an all-over type quilting design; maybe I can figure out a flame motif.

While we were cruising slowly upriver yesterday, I brought my bin of 2.5" strip scraps up to the pilothouse and sorted them by color. Then I pulled out ones that were at least 36" long.

Ever since I saw this photo of Fons and Porter's Pretzel Twist, I've wanted to make it. The bright pile of scrap strips should work well. I have the perfect background: cream with tiny pink hearts. It's actually a pretty simple design, and I was able to easily figure it out just from the photos. (But you can follow the link above if you want to purchase it; I just happen to really enjoy reverse engineering!)  The challenge will be in laying it out so that there's plenty of contrast at each point where the squares interlock. Should be fun!

Tombigbee River

I am slowly piecing another Project Linus quilt while my WIPs whimper quietly in the corner. It's just too darned hot to even think about cutting batting, basting and handling an entire quilt sandwich. I'll stick with small pieces of fabric for a while.

About six months ago, I bought a group of novelty fabric samples on eBay. The focal fabrics for Charming Cupcakes came from that batch, as did many of the fabrics in Scrappy Chili Peppers. There were also quite a number of racing themed fabrics, and that's what I'm using for this latest quilt, called Let's Go To The Races!

Some of the race cars are sort of cartoon-like, and others are fairly realistic. There are checkered flags, flames, and monster trucks. While I don't usually purchase anything with a black background for kids' quilts, the bright primary colors of the cars and trucks look great against the black.

The fabrics were part of a traveling quilt shop salesperson's samples, and so were cut 13" wide, with lengths varying from about 6" to about 20". They were stapled together so that the shortest pieces were on top and the longer ones peeked out below. I wanted to use as much of each fabric as possible and settled on cutting 5"x12" rectangles. Almost all the prints are directional, and this wide format block captures a sense of the cars moving sideways, I think.

The pattern is a version of Shadow Boxes, or Missouri Star's Illusions. Offset strips of gray make it look like the block is "floating" above the yellow background. Here I've laid out my first two test blocks to show how that will look. The illusion works best when there are more blocks. It will have 24 blocks, three across and eight down. That should make a nice size quilt for a young race fan.

This is a really simple pattern: nothing but long strips and straight sewing. All the sashing and shadows are the same, so there's nothing to keep track of. I can sew one piece or 20 without losing track of where I am. A good fit for highlighting the fun racing fabrics while keeping my time in the sewing room short and sweet.

Mobile, AL

Oof, it's hot here. I haven't been getting a lot of sewing done because we've been at a dock with no power outlets. That means we have to run the generator for air conditioning, and we try not to do that 24/7. The generator is great for charging the batteries, which only takes about 2 hours per day to do. Any additional time running just to make cool air means a hot, noisy engine room and shorter intervals between oil changes and other maintenance. So if it's breezy and comfortable out on deck, that's where we hang out, not in the stuffy below-decks quilt room.

It's taking me a while to get used to this new schedule. I'm used to wandering downstairs when the muse strikes, and sewing for a few minutes or a few hours. Now I need to sew when the a/c is on, and it isn't always when I'm in the mood! But I did manage to get all my scraps sorted and put away, so the whole room is feeling more streamlined and clutter-free.

While we were in Pensacola and had a good delivery address at the marina, I ordered some marine fabric from Sailrite.com. Half of the pillow covers up on the flybridge are getting faded, so I ordered more of the higher quality Sunbrella upholstery fabric to re-do those. In addition, I got three yards of black Phifertex to make exterior window covers.

Phifertex and Textilene are two brands of similar materials. They are vinyl-coated polyester and are commonly used in the mesh seating on "sling" style patio furniture. Think strong, thick, durable, and plasticky. The weave is fine enough to provide good shade while being open enough to see through in bright light. Our boat came with a set of covers custom made to fit most, but not all, of the windows and that snap into place.

If you look at the boat photo at the top of the blog, you'll see the front three windows have covers. You'll also see that there are three windows in the back under a fairly deep overhang. The sun only hits those in the early morning and late afternoon and we have good interior blinds to cover them. But now that we're in such hot weather we decided we really needed exterior covers for them. 

These back windows are identical on both side of the boat, so I figured I could make a single cover that could be moved from one side to the other as needed. When we're at anchor, the direction of the wind and the current determines which way the boat faces, so on any given day the morning sun could come in any window.  

Even though the outer two panes are trapezoidal, I didn't try to match those angles and sewed up a large rectangle to completely cover all three panes. Once the cover is in place, you can't see the panes anyway. And there's no way to see both sides of the boat at once to compare window shapes. 

Here is the finished cover, snapped in place on the port side. The other window that needed a cover is the one on the left side of the photo, which is above the galley sink. With no shading overhang, that one really takes the full brunt of the sun so I wonder why it never had a cover to begin with.

The big cover is made from a single piece of Phifertex, 108" long by 40" tall, with 1.25" hems on all four edges. That's a really, really, really big piece of really, really unwieldy fabric. I cut it to size in the quilt room by unrolling a bit, then cutting, then rolling the cut piece, then unrolling some more to cut. The stuff doesn't fold well, doesn't take a crease, and is impossible to mark with pen or pencil. I started wrestling with it while the a/c was off, but that lasted about 5 minutes before I cried uncle. Once the room cooled down, the material got even stiffer and harder to work with, but my attitude improved. Getting all that stiff, recalcitrant fabric through the sewing machine was not for the faint of heart, either. Fortunately, it sews pretty easily with a heavy duty needle and UV resistant thread. The Little Kenmore That Could just chug-chug-chugged through all the seams, even up to six thicknesses at once. The biggest issue during the sewing, besides just wrangling the giant piece into position, was that the very thick UV thread tended to jam to bobbin. 

The material comes 54" wide off the bolt, so I cut up the remaining skinny strip and pieced the galley window cover.

This photo shows the lapped seams I used to join the pieces. Phifertex doesn't ravel, so this was really just to get the sections to lie flat. There's no way to iron this stuff so I'm glad these were fairly short (34") chunks. I had a spool of white, UV resistant polyester thread. I like the contrast with the black covers.

Here's a corner that shows the nice stainless steel snaps we used. I had to buy a snap installation tool from Sailrite since stainless snaps are really tough and need a special hardened tool. Sean installed the snaps, punching holes through the corners of the covers for the female part, and drilling holes into the boat to screw in the male part. I assisted by holding the vacuum cleaner under the drill to catch metal shavings, and handing him tools as he balanced precariously on the boat railing to drill the upper holes. I swear that man has prehensile toes, the way he gripped that railing. Fear of falling in the Mobile River will motivate a man's toes, it seems.

Here's the galley cover snapped in place. The camera flash reveals the curved shape of the window frame underneath. Without the flash, the covers look opaque and provide a lot of privacy during the day. At night, the lights inside the boat are easy to see, so we use our interior blinds for privacy.

All in all, this was a satisfying project. This afternoon we moved to an anchorage, and the covers really helped keep the boat cooler. These two covers would have cost at least $300 to have made. I paid about $60 in materials plus the $30 tool and they looks just like the professionally sewn ones that came with the boat. But I'm glad to have marine sewing behind me for a while. To celebrate, I cut up some quilting cotton for the next Project Linus quilt (spoiler alert: race car theme!) and it felt like gossamer butterfly wings and unicorn farts compared to the Phifertex.

Pensacola, FL

I am merrily sewing away while Sean is in Virginia again dealing with the bus for sale. For more about that subject, you can read his post on the travel blog. Since he flew this time, we needed a place with an airport to leave me, the cat, and the boat. Pensacola had decent flights, so here I am.

I made some decisions about the Dragonfly quilt, but left it set aside in my growing pile of WIPs (Works in Progess.) They hang on a spring loaded curtain rod placed between two of the cabinets in my studio. Can this actually be called a pile if its hanging? Maybe it's a drape of WIPs? In any case, that's three quilt tops and two quilt backings there, ready to be sandwiched, basted, then quilted.

But I'm in a piecing mood, not a quilting mood, so I started yet another quilt top. It actually sort of makes sense to do this now while the boat is in a marina with constant power and constant air conditioning. Piecing requires a lot of back and forth between sewing, ironing, and the "design wall." Which in my case is the "design bed," since there isn't a single wall on the boat big enough to use for that purpose!

This is another gift quilt. The focal fabrics are all from a Makower UK line of Asian-inspired designs, called "Kimono." I thought they'd play nicely together in a pattern called Natural Beauty designed by Lori Mason and available free from American Patchwork and Quilting. Here's the cover photo from the pattern:

The pattern is written to use certain fabrics in a precise order so that the thin lines (purple and orange in the pattern photo) line up in a certain way. But since I'm sewing from my stash, I didn't have an exact one-to-one correspondence for the pattern fabrics and would need to use smaller amounts of more fabrics. I'd also need to cut up enough pieces to start laying it all out on the bed to see what worked. 

I wanted to use black as the background, rather than the cream in the pattern. Actually, I really like the cream, but all I have is a fairly pure white that didn't work at all with the Asian fabrics. My perfect cream fabric happens to have distinctive silhouettes of dogs on it; not a good thematic match.

Ew, that didn't work well at all. Hmm. How about this rusty orangey fabric as the background?

Better, but that color is kind of an acquired taste and I'm not sure the recipient will like it. (By the way, the lighting is TERRIBLE in the master stateroom and my cell phone photos just make it worse. You'll have to trust me that this color actually did work, because it looks like dog barf in the photo.) 

Next I tried a brighter red, with some of the border fabric alongside to hide the underlying bed quilt.

Wrong bright red for these fabrics, and too Christmassy anyway. Even though the focal fabrics have red and green in them, they don't scream Christmas until big chunks of red and green sit side by side. Aha! That's the problem: the green fabric.

Mo' better. Replacing the green with a neutral makes the black background work much better. There was too little contrast between the black and the green. Back into the stash to find another gold/beige/tan/cream neutral. I have a tub full of neutrals but alas, nothing that was right. Drat! I could have sworn I had a nice sort of wood-grained looking gold-y-ish fabric.

Oh, there it is, peeking out of the scrap pile from Hades. This is a shot of the bathroom counter in the quilt studio, where I've been tossing scraps and recent purchases that need to be folded and put away. Guess it's been awhile since the "put away" part of the process has happened. 

Now I could start sewing in earnest. Lots of squares and rectangles in this quilt that meet at their corners. In order for it to look crisp and nice, all the seams needed to be carefully nested. I had an Aha! moment on seam nesting today. Usually, I just press and nest the seam right along the stitch line with one finger, like this:

But today I started nesting the seam with more fingers, along three or four inches, like this:

Actually, I use a couple fingers of my right hand, too, but they were taking the photo. Lining up more of the seam made everything feed better through the machine and less likely to slip on the corners. So that worked much better. Probably most quilters already know that trick, but I had never heard of it before.

And here's the (probably) finished quilt top:

It may get a thin outer border of the same black background. The size is good as-is, though. I had to stand out on the port side deck and take the photo through an open window to get far enough away to fit the whole thing in the frame using my cell phone camera.

The actual sewing went pretty quickly on this one. Probably more time was spent pondering patterns, layouts, and the sorry state of the "to be put away" pile. I guess that's my next task!