Twist N Scrap

Whoop, whoop! Twist N Scrap is a finish. I started piecing this quilt back in July, so it is almost a year in the making. For me, that's a looooong time.

I was discouraged with this piece because the background fabric turned out to have quite a bit of polyester in it. I didn't know how it would quilt up, or how it would shrink in the wash. So it ended up being tucked away, out of sight, out of mind.

When I was straightening up some drawers last week, I came across the finished flimsy again and decided to use it for some FMQ practice. I figured I would know pretty fast if the quilting was an issue. I chose a sort of Maltese cross motif for the background and got to work. The poly blend fabric has a tighter weave than quilting cottons, so the needle made more popping, punching sounds in areas like the very center of the crosses where lots of seams come together. Other than that, though, things went pretty smoothly.

In each of the square interlocking "pretzels," I tried various other fillers. I think the hearts in this red fabric turned out pretty well. I was inspired by Fiona's heart quilting over on Bubz Rugs. Most of the other fills are simpler than the hearts: easy back and forth, loop-de-loops, and stippling. 

I think the Maltese cross looks cool in the corners, where only a quarter of the shape shows. Since the whole piece is super scrappy, I used more scraps for the binding. This black, gold and royal blue bit is my favorite.

The backing is all flannel, so it's very soft and snuggly. That turquoise blue has a butterfly motif.

It's our last day in the boatyard in New Orleans. They are finishing up the last little bits of paint touch up, so there are spots of wet paint everywhere. It made it tricky to find place to take photos without making a mess of both quilt and boat! Several worrisome weather systems are spinning up, so it's high time for us to skedaddle out of the hurricane zone. 

Linking up with Can I Get a Whoop, Whoop? and Free Motion Mavericks.

Edited to add a post-washer and dryer wrinkly crinkly shot. I'm doing a little happy dance with how all the different fabrics played together! Flannel, quilting cotton and poly-cotton blend all shrink differently, but displayed excellent teamwork in this little quilt.

Holiday decor

I finished this funky table runner last week and finally got it washed now that we're in a marina with plenty of water for the washing machine. It needed to shrink just a smidge to fit fully within the fiddles (edges) of our dining table. 

Here's the back, a fun ornament fabric fattened up with a bright tonal green poinsettia blender. I actually pieced this runner two years ago and used it to test an alternative batting idea. I used a piece of white fleece in the sandwich and then did quite a bit of FMQ before I discovered that the back had shifted significantly. It was a Festive Holiday Medley of Giant Puckers on the back, and I had a Festive Holiday Medley of Cursing when I realized how much ripping I'd need to do. Lesson learned: fleece is waaaaaay too slippery to use as batting. I chucked the whole thing in a corner until I rediscovered this summer. At that point, I was more in a rippy mood (do you ever get that way? when stitch ripping actually is kinda fun?) I ripped and ironed and re-basted and tucked away again until I was ready for some walking foot quilting and here we are today. It's not my best work, but it's great as a table runner/cloth because it hides a multitude of dinner splotches and spills.

A few more photos of our holiday boat decor:

Aft port corner of the saloon with "Trim the Tall Tree" paper pieced wall hanging made by me in 2014, and ceramic tree made by Sean's grandmother many many years ago. The breakable tree can only be out if we're in a marina where the boat doesn't move much.

Pillow cover made with this perfectly nautical little panel of a Christmas tree in a red row boat. Stitched up last year.

Artificial garland with multi color lights, hanging from the ceiling hand rail that runs down the middle of the saloon. It's well secured and out of the way, so it stays up in all sorts of sea conditions. It is amazingly lifelike, right down to shedding needles every time you look at it cross-eyed.

The garland is decorated with unbreakable small shiny balls and birds, like this green sequinned hummingbird. I like how they seem to flutter through the branches above my head.

 

This peacock is made with real feathers, and peers down from his garlandy perch. See his tail?

This is my last post before Christmas (and it was actually written last week.) We have guests aboard all this week and I've had to dismantle my quilting studio in order to turn it back into the guest stateroom. This sad photo is my Juki, all bundled up and ready to head off to the spa for routine maintenance. That way it will be out from underfoot and then clean and shiny for sewing in the new year.

Immediately after our guests leave, we will be driving to my brother's house in Houston where my entire family is gathering this year. It's the first, and possibly only, time we'll all be together, so it's worth the long drive with the cat in a rental car. The big family party will include my Mom, Dad, Stepmom, brother, sister in law, all of my adult neices, nephews, their partners and my one and only grand nephew. He just celebrated his first birthday and we'll be meeting him for the very first time.

Whatever holiday you celebrate in the coming weeks--Christmas, Hanukkah, Winter Solstice, or just a few days off work--may quilts, peace and laughter find you here in the shortest days of the year. Thank you for joining me on my quilting odyssey; your presence and kind comments make me happy!

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!