One lump or two?

This quilt has been successfully gifted, so it's time for the reveal. Meet Never Run Out of Coffee, which was made for my cousin and her husband who own a sailboat. They lead very busy lives and don't live aboard full time like we do, so they are often away from their boat for weeks or months at a time.

One time, my cousin opined that there was no coffee aboard, and she needed her morning cuppa. I had some fun coffee themed fabric and thought I could provide her with quilty coffee, at least! So I started stitching up big hearts using Cluck Cluck Sew's fun free pattern.

The backing is made of two different fleeces, pieced into a big sixteen patch. The fleece will dry quickly in a damp marine environment, and is light and warm. This was the first time I did extensive FMQ on fleece, and there was definitely a learning curve. The needle made a lot of chunking sounds, which took some getting used to!

The argyle fleece pattern is actually a bit fuzzy in person; that's not an out of focus photo. This is the back of one of the hearts where I used a flame-shaped FMQ motif.

Each color heart got a different motif. They are easier to see on the back because I used bobbin thread that matched the top thread. The darker threads really show against the white fleece. At first, I didn't care for that look, but it has grown on me. It's the back, it can look a little off kilter and still be just fine!

This rusty red fabric has coffee words on it, like Kona and Espresso, and the dark heart is coffee beans on a black background. I quilted a spirally square motif in the cream background for lots of texture.

Strictly speaking, I think this fabric is supposed to be swirls of chocolate, but it certainly fits the theme. Who doesn't like chocolate and coffee together? Yum.

There is only one of these golden hearts, and I outlined the pretty flowers and leaves on it. Not really related to coffee, but it blends and has nice metallic accents.

How cute is this coffee cup border print?? The red and white polka dot cup is my favorite. I actually started with this fabric and designed the entire quilt around it. I didn't want any cups to be cut in half, so I used a LOT of quilt math (and possibly some cursing) to fill in extra cream background to make the body of the quilt fit just right. I stitched a heart in the red sashing above each cup's handle, too.

Here's the back of the coffee cups where you can see the little hearts better. After I pieced the fleece backing, the edges tended to curl and make a lump, so I finished the seams between the fleece pieces by sewing the flaps back before basting the quilt sandwich. I've forgotten what that seam finishing method is called. 

The corner stones are four different coffee pots, fussy cut from a panel. The wide outer border is roasted coffee beans, and a dark brown--excuse me, dark roast--binding tops it all off.

I actually finished this quilt quite a while ago and set it aside for some reason. I wasn't really ready to give it away, even though it had been made for specific recipients. Have you ever done that? Held a quilt before gifting it? I guess it needed to live on our boat for a while.

Quick receiving blanket

Last year I did some experimentation with using fleece as quilt backing. While I really like the soft fuzziness of fleece, it's kind of a pain to quilt. It's stretchy and drags against the sewing machine bed quite differently than quilting cotton. I didn't love sewing with it, so I stopped buying fleece.

I had one backing-sized piece of soft pink fleece left, and it kicked around my small sewing studio for many months. Because it was just the one piece, it didn't have a proper place to be put away and it's fairly bulky. Yesterday I'd had enough of moving it out of the way AGAIN and decided to just use it and get rid of it.

This sweet panel seemed like a good match for the pink, so I sewed them right sides together, pillow case style, then turned it right sides out and edge stitched it. I then did some minimal, free motion quilting around the flowered border and the outline of the tree. I also outlined each butterfly, so on the back you see a simple tree with butterflies in and around it. An easy, quick project to not stress my shoulder too much.

It ended up being very soft, and is a good size for a receiving blanket, about 36"x42". Project Linus distributes all sorts of blankets for children, not just quilts, so this will be useful to them. Win-win!

Do you ever sew something just to get rid of the fabric?

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.

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.