It's a finish: Snafu

Welcome to the Quilt Odyssey episode of Quilting in Real Life, hosted by Bernie of Needle and Foot. Or as I like to call it, the Festival of Foul Ups! Bernie asked us to "share both the mistakes and the achievements, the blunders and the best of our work...to present a balanced picture" of our quilting. I usually share my best, so today I'll be presenting some blunders.

I happened to be in the middle of making a disappearing hourglass quilt, inspired by this post on Confessions of a Fabric Addict. Sarah's blocks looked great in solids, but I don't have many solids. However, I did have a nice batch of Blueberry Park that was given to me by Rose. The fabric line is unusual: the entire line is white designs printed on Kona(?) solids. There is SO much white ink on the front that I find the fabric feels kind of sticky when I iron it. Plus it's quite busy, which I thought wouldn't work as well with this pattern. So I flipped it over and used the plain backs instead. The printed patterns shadow very slightly to the back, which gives the solids a kind of interesting "grunge" look.

So far, so good. Fabric choice seemed to be on track, and all the blocks were pieced, so I decided I would document any errors that came up for the Festival. After all, I make a few small mistakes on every quilt. 

Never let a quilt know that you are "documenting its errors for blogging purposes." Quilts are known to be a source of comfort! They are helpful and generous! They will reach out to accommodate you in any way they can! And so this piece GENEROUSLY and HELPFULLY fouled itself up in every way.

First of all, piecing together the complex, bias cut blocks didn't go very smoothly. So many seams. So many directions. So many opportunities to have things NOT nest and NOT match. Ripping out wonky seams along bias edges led to too much distortion, so I mostly just left things alone. But I ended up with plenty of junctions that looked like this:

Ick. Nevertheless, I plunged into the quilting. I decided this one wouldn't be going to one of my overseas charities. That meant it was a good candidate for using a backing fabric that has some pigs (and other farm animals) on it. And it was exactly the right size to use up some polyester batting I had tucked into a bag. It was only halfway through the quilting that I realized that I had saved that batting SPECIFICALLY to use on a quilt for the charity that asks us not to use pig fabric. Oops. Guess I'll be buying more batting.

OK. I chose a free motion design that uses various loop de loops, but needs to be stabilized with a bit of stitch in the ditch first. I selected a pretty turquoise thread that blends pretty well with MOST of the fabrics. So let's get started! Stitch in those ditches! Except, I'm really not very good at that. So there's a bit (OK, a LOT) of stitching NEAR the ditch. In the NEIGHBORHOOD of the ditch. In the same AREA CODE? Oy.

Hooray, loop de loops! I'm pretty good at those. Lazy Louise Loves Loops. They look like letter Ls, which is part of my signature. But at least one whole line of them did not not resemble Ls. Not at all. I just lost my focus and the Ls became literally scribbles. My brain farted and I started laughing and I just finished a whole line of scribbles. I'm really sorry I didn't take a pic before I ripped those out, because they were spectacularly bad. 

What I didn't rip out, though, were the bad transitions between Ls and the leaf shape I chose for the corners of each block. 

Bad transitions, uneven stitch lengths, little tucks, poofy non-flat fabric...this quilt welcomed it all into its bosom. Such a helpful quilt, right? "Take a photo of THIS foul up, Louise! You're welcome!"

I grumbled. I ranted. I may have used a different F word when describing the Festival of Foul Ups to my husband. And I didn't rip any more out. At some point I just decided to soldier on and see what would happen. How would the final piece look with all the squirrelly, not centered, wonky quilted weirdness?

And to add insult to injury, I could feel that tell-tale tug during quilting that means the back is full of pleats like this one:

You can also see how the bobbling of stitching down the binding caught on the back incorrectly here. Sigh. 

But you know what? It was all okay in the end. Because it's a super complex design, full of movement to distract the eye from...everything. Look at all those colors and diagonal secondary designs! And after a wash and dry, everything is sooo soft and crinkly that any tucks, puckers, wrinkles and poofs are just part of the cuddliness, right? I think so:

And I know for certain that using the backs of the fabrics was the right choice. Here's a shot of the back of the flimsy before layering for quilting. Too busy, yikes! The grunge side definitely worked better.

All those tucks and pleats? They disappeared completely in the busy barnyard back:

Boaty glamour shots shows lots of nice, crinkly texture. If you can't quilt smoothly, distract with tug boats, that's my motto.

I named this quilt Snafu: Situation Normal, All Fouled Up. But don't get me wrong, I still like it! I'm really not a big believer in pointing out ALL the errors in our work, ALL the time. I'm not looking for anyone to reassure me that it's OK, because I already believe that. But every once in a while it's fun to get the full story to remind ourselves that social media like blogging is curated. Everyone carefully chooses what they want to show the world, good OR bad. Take it all with a grain of salt! If you want to read more stories of quilting woe, check out the comments section of Bernie's post.

It's normal for things to get fouled up, at least a little. And I've learned that it's always better to step back and get the long range picture on a comfort quilt like this one. It's not going to be judged on the neatness of my quilting, and the next one will (probably) be better. Unless it hears that I need help writing a blog post...

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.

Bricks and stones

I'm piece piece piecing away here. A couple days ago I finished this relatively fast flimsy. It's a free pattern from Timeless Treasures called "Marvelous Maze" by Osie Lebowitz and is part of their Broome Street Patterns collection.

There are lots of free patterns put out by the fabric manufacturers, which makes sense. It's in their best interests to make it look fun and easy to use their fabrics and nothing shows off a new line like seeing the designs working together in a quilt. At least that's the theory. Very few of the free patterns appeal to my eye, so when one does, I download it and save it for later. Since the patterns feature a particular fabric line, the older ones tend to disappear. If you can't find one that I've used, feel free to ask me for a PDF copy. Passing it along to another quilter for personal use doesn't violate the usage agreement on most of them.

Back to this one, which I've named Bricks and Stones. All the fabrics are prints of bricks and stones, except one that I think it supposed to be leather but looks quite a bit like stones to me. The blocks are really simple, just a square with the accent color sashed at a 45 degree angle across opposite corners. They can then be laid out in a wide variety of settings, including kind of randomly which then looks a bit like a maze. I kept thinking about wandering through Home Depot's outdoor paving section while I pieced this.

I did a quick layout on the design bed, mostly to get the lights and darks scattered nicely across the quilt. I then carefully stacked each row and column and carried them upstairs to sew. After stitching all the pairs and taking them to the ironing board, I discovered that my matching of all those sharply contrasting black accent angles was, um, really lousy. And then I discovered that these fabric, which were someone else's scraps bought on eBay, were really el cheapo low quality fabrics that stitched fine, but whined and complained when I ripped a bunch of seams out. Oh, wait, maybe that was me whining and complaining. And squinting since I used black thread on black fabric. Ugh.

Somewhere in all the ripping and whining, I lost track of my initial design layout since the rows weren't labeled. Eh, it was fairly random anyway, so I soldiered on. When I got the finished flimsy hanging up for a few photos, I realized that my lights were a bit clumped together, but decided I could live with that.

Then, I noticed that my random placement resulted in a giant swastika in the middle of the quilt. ARGH!! Once seen, it couldn't be unseen! No, I didn't take a photo. Fortunately, I realized that I only had to rotate a single block 90 degrees to fix that, although (of course) that single block was right in the middle. And that single block was (of course) the el cheapiest of el cheapo fabrics that practically shredded under the seam ripper. But I got that sucker ripped out and turned and all's well that ends well.

I certainly learned my lesson about keeping better track of my rows and columns! So the project I'm working on now, the strippy scrappy rainbow blocks, was handled differently. I put pins in the first block of each row: one pin for row one, two pins for row two, etc. I was so proud of myself until I sewed row two to row three...yes, that's one of row three's pin heads sewn right into the seam. The Juki punched through the plastic flower head pin like it was butter and didn't even hesitate. Oof.

Fortunately, the stitch length was short enough that it basically perforated the pin head so I was able to pull it out of the seam easily. Now I'm looking for other ideas for marking rows and columns. What method do you use?

Charleston County Lines

Today's little quilts are both made using the County Lines pattern. This is the second (and third) time I've used this pattern; it's fast and easy. Sewing both flimsies at the same time allowed for a lot of efficient chain piecing. 

This fall-themed quilt is called Anticipating Autumn. The fabrics feature leaves, pumpkins, apples, and gourds. The green fabric is a neat basketweave print from the lady who donated 15 pounds of fabric to me last month. I used a mottled cream sashing to keep it light.

The wind conveniently flipped a corner up to show the single piece backing. It's a tone on tone leaf motif in rusty orange. A brighter orange blender binding makes the little pumpkins pop. I think the colors look really nice with our boat's new paint color, "Moondust." Much more coordinating than that ratty blue line, which is worn out and ready for the trash. I have brand new navy blue lines that I'm rather overly excited about. The yellow thing is our power cord.

For the quilting, I did a variety of FMQ motifs in the squares and rectangles. With the busy fabrics, it was pretty much a waste of time! The quilting is almost complete invisible. So here's another photo of our neighbor's pretty little Down East boat. The teak brightwork (wood) on this boat is gorgeous, so I didn't use my clips to hold the quilt in place and almost lost it into the water. Yikes!

I did get in some good FMQ practice on Anticipating Autumn, so that's a fine thing. I also decided not to stitch in the ditch or quilt the sashing at all, just to see how that looks after washing. It was nice to let the harvest-y fabrics remind me that cooler weather is coming, since it's been so hot and humid here.

The second quilt is called Charleston Catch, and features fishing fabrics and mossy green sashing. There are fish, seagulls, fish, guys with fishing poles, more fish, and boats. 

Specifically, the fabric shows this type of center console fishing boat. These are very, very common in South Carolina, so I thought a local retired fisherman would get a kick out of using this on his or her lap. The binding fabric is a dark blue with little bubbles on it. Having learned my lesson on the last one about FMQ and busy fabrics, I just did a simple large stipple on this one.

Another one of our marina neighbors has a (very nice and expensive) center console, so I tossed the quilt over the gunwales for a photo. It's considered quite rude to climb aboard without permission, so this was as much as I wanted to touch their boat. Our boat is in the upper right corner of the pic, with four large, lurid orange ball fenders protecting it from bad drivers (we've been hit once already in this marina.)

Here's another shot on the center console, which is actually the tender (small, auxiliary boat) for "Tika Dika," the large sailboat behind it. 

If you'd like to purchase your own boat, here's the sales office. It's kind of a sales shed, but quite a nice shed. I used their advertising/sandwich board to display my quilt, and the southerly wind held it nicely in place. No flapping in the wind! I'll have to remember that for more photo shoots.

I have six little quilts in the washing machine right at this minute, and I'm eager to see how my various experiments in quilting and puckering have fared.

Two Peas In A Pod

Two fast and fun finishes: meet Pod One and Pod Two. Don't ask me which is which. These are both the 36"x48" small wheelchair size that I've been making lately. They go together so quickly at this size, especially when the blocks are already sewn.

Back in March, I pieced 32 of these leaf shapes out of a jelly roll of autumnal fabrics. I really like the colors and shape, but just couldn't make a layout that worked well. With big, 12" blocks, it didn't make sense to sew up a large flimsy that I didn't really care for, so I set the blocks aside.

However, when I limited myself to the much smaller three by four block layout, I was able to get the leafy shapes to play nicely across the quilt. Each row "leans" in the same direction and feels a bit more orderly.  The colors aren't true in these photos; the main fabrics are quite bright, and the background is a much warmer, nicer tan faux burlap design.

On the first one, I tried my hand at big, loose feathers in each block. Then I did a bit of echoing in the sashing. I guess this one must be Pod One. I tried several styles of feathers, some more successful than others. They were fun, but almost completely lost on the busy fabrics. I guess that's a good way to hide the wonky feathers while I practice. (Note that I think of these shapes as leaves, but DH Sean kept calling them pods, and the name stuck. Leaves don't have feathers, anyway, but feathery pods might?)

Rather than lose more quilting into the visual chaos, I chose to do simple curvy cross hatching on Pod Two. This was very fast and easy, taking less than two hours on my domestic machine using my new walking foot with the spacer bar. The spacing is 1.75".

Here are the two different bindings: a groovy, psychedelic 70s paisley in exactly the right colors, and a small, dark green diagonal stripe in more traditional fabric. The stripe is printed diagonally; that's not bias binding. I'm way too lazy for bias binding unless there are actual curves to bind around. 

Here are the backs. These fabrics are just about as dull as they appear in the oddly lit photo: a brownish grey cable print on the left, and dark green flowers on tan on the left. Certainly not what I would put on the back of a child's quilt, but perfectly serviceable for adult quilts. At least the fabrics have a nice, soft hand to offset their "meh" coloring.

The grey cable print does show the nice shape of the enclosed pod feathers. That sounds a bit like a mild curse, doesn't it? "Oh, pod feathers, madame!"

Here's a close up. One of those feather lobes is a bit mutant!

On the back of Pod Two...a very, very large pucker. Oh, no! Drat, darn, and pod feathers! I found the pucker after completely finishing the quilting, when the cross hatching was done from both directions. I considered ripping a bunch out, but then decided to try something different.

In this more distant shot, you can see that the backing fabric isn't particularly geometric. With the curved stitching moving your eye around, I think it is visually forgiving enough that I can just hand sew the pucker down into place, and it won't be very noticeable. So I put on the binding and will do the handwork in the next couple of days. Then we'll see how it fares after a trip through Mr. Whirlpool's Quilt Spa (AKA, my washer and dryer). If it looks bad, I can always rip it out later.

Linking up to Free Motion Mavericks.

Making hay while the sun shines

Well, taking photos while the sun shines, anyway. I have two finishes to share today. First one is called Partly Cloudy. I pieced this little sample of dark and light strings a couple of months ago. After gathering, sorting into light to dark shades, and stitching together lots of 1.5" scraps, I ran out of steam when the top was about 36"x44".



Since coming to Charleston, I've learned about a charity called Quilted Embrace, which provides small lap quilts to wheelchair-bound seniors. One of the local guilds is collecting quilts for them, and I'm hoping to jump on that bandwagon if the guild allows me. Quilted Embrace requests 36"x48" quilts, so it was a simple matter to add a few inches in length to this piece and quilt it up.



The fabrics are quite busy, so a simple loop-de-loop motif inside parallel lines was a fast and easy way to free motion Partly Cloudy. I used a lighter neutral beige thread in the light sections, and a darker grey in the dark diagonal. It didn't actually make much difference, but it was a useful experiment. Black binding frames the riot of color and pattern.



The backing is a single piece of this pretty Asian-inspired blue and pink floral. As you know, working on smaller quilts is the best fit for my tiny sewing space, and I'm excited to be sewing up some pieces for adults. I'm still having fun with kid-friendly themed quilts, but have decided to concentrate on Embrace quilts while in Charleston. So excited, in fact, that I've already pieced and basted at least six quilts! I'll be sharing those with you one by one as I get them quilted.



If you read my guest post over at Kat's last week, you know how happy I am to donate this super-scrappy piece full of visual interest to a charity.

This next quilt is called Fiesta De Los Gatos. The cats are cut from a fun Makower UK panel, and it finishes at 50"x50". Sorry for the rather crooked and blurry photo; the sun was so bright that I could hardly see my phone screen, and the wind kept flipping up the lower right corner. I'll take more pics after washing because it's raining again now.

Each panel is surrounded by red, green, or blue sparkling fabrics. Between the fact that each cat is smiling and the festive metallics, I couldn't help thinking that the cats were at a party and the Fiesta name stuck. The thin, cream and gold inner borders are actually part of the panel, so they were easy peasy. I quilted a different filler motif in the background fabrics, and outlined each kitty.

Here you can see a cat outline. Sean was particularly amused by this moggy's toes. The backing fabric I used is fairly thin, so there was a bit of bearding. That's the white fuzz you see in this picture, which will wash away.

Here's a shot that shows some of the fillers I used: back and forth diagonal lines, meander, ribbons, and pointy arcs. I used coordinating red, green or blue thread on top so it was a bit hard to see what I was doing. It was a relief to see that the beige bobbin thread looked pretty good on the back.

The fillers are quite a bit denser than the cat panels, which might be an issue after washing. If the panels pucker too much after Fiesta De Los Gatos has its spa day, I'll go back and add more quilting. I haven't completely decided who to give this quilt to, but it reminds me a lot of one of my cousins. Perhaps I'll surprise her with it.

Linking up with Pets on Quilts at Lily Pad Quilting in the "pet themed" category.

QAYG Sampler Finish

This week, I stitched up this little Quilt As You Go sampler piece. The blocks are 12" square so it finishes 36"x48". This size is requested by the group Quilted Embrace, which gives wheelchair quilts to folks in nursing homes, so that's probably where it will end up.

The strings were sewn one at a time directly onto both batting and a backing piece. I tried to include at least one fun novelty print in each color, so there are chickens, chiles, cupcakes, basketballs, dogs, trumpets, flames, fishbones, race cars, seahorses, snakes, horseshoes, asparagus, bicycles, butterflies and hot air balloons. I hope that will amuse the recipient.

I followed Fiona's tutorial to join the blocks together. Her method has no hand stitching, which is exactly what I wanted. She wisely used black sashing on her piece and it convinced me to stay with a dark, solid color instead of the black and white stripe that was in the back of my mind. This photo shows the machine stitching that attaches the sashing in the front. Navy blue thread on navy fabric disappears nicely into the background and hides the wibbles and wobbles.

For the backing pieces, I chose fat quarters in roughly the same color as the front so you can kinda sorta still see the rainbow effect.

The actual quilting stitches show on the back, and I used the same neutral beige thread on all the backs. The sashing looks almost the same as the front. Because I sewed the sashing down from the front, I missed the back pieces by a hair in a few places. I used navy top and bobbin thread for the sashing, so the near misses show a bit on the lighter fabrics like this grey and teal medallion print. However, since it is just a line of blue thread closely paralleling the blue sashing, I decided to leave it.

I also used the same navy blue for the binding, to make the whole piece look more like stained glass. My usual method of machine sewing the binding was fast, but in hindsight I should have switched back to the beige bobbin thread. The line of bobbin stitching always shows in this method and that doesn't bother me, but using the navy blue made it stand out more. Not too bad on the purple, but pretty obvious on the pink.

All in all, it was a fun, quick project. String blocks are so rewarding, and it was nice to have the quilting finished block by block. Attaching the sashing is fiddly and clearly I could use more practice to get it to line up more evenly. I don't know that I'll use this method very often, but it's nice to have it in my tool kit.