Winter 2016 quilt roundup

Happy First Day of Spring! Seems like a great time to play Show and Tell on the quilting and sewing front. 

First up are four blocks sewn for Covered in Love, a charity in Texas that gives quilts to families of patients who pass away in the hospital. The quilts warm up the room of the loved one in their final hours, and give grieving families something to focus on and take home. Covered in Love is coordinated by RN Kat Drinkwater, of Kat and Cat Quilts. Each month, Kat asks for specific blocks to be made in certain colors, then she sews them together into beautiful quilts. 

The December block request was for these spinning diamonds in peacock colors (gold, purple, green, and turquoise) surrounded by warm brown. 

I had never made this block before, but it was fun and easy with Kat's excellent tutorial. She received enough blocks of this design to make three (maybe four?) complete quilts. From Kat's blog, here is one of the finished quilts with a couple of my blocks in it: 

Isn't that pretty? I love how scrappy and warm these group effort quilts turn out, so I'm planning to contribute more blocks in the future. 

This quilt was made as a house-warming gift for Sean's cousins who recently moved from California to New Hampshire. I couldn't remember their color scheme, so I enlisted the help of Sean's aunt for some photos. She sent me the link to their California house's real estate listing and voila! Well lit, professional photos of their living room. I had the perfect fabric in my stash, these beautiful reds, pinks, creams and aquas from the Lario fabric line.

You know your quilt is a success when the teenage boy of the house immediately claims it as his own. 

On my side of the family, we welcomed a brand new cousin: baby Luke Tallis Wolcott. Of course, there needed to be a quilt to celebrate the new arrival. I found this darling panel by M'Liss, featuring a sunken ship surrounded by sea creatures and being explored by three cats and two dogs. Check out the dachshund in the scuba helmet!

Panels are a great canvas for free motion quilting, so I went to town. I outlined most of the critters and plants, and filled in the water with a swirly background that I learned from my friend Stephanie. 

The backing fabric is a pretty geometric with the same aquas, oranges and blues in it. It was big enough to wrap around to the front as the binding, my first time trying that technique. I was careful to fold it such that there were two layers of fabric on the edge of the quilt for strength and durability. Baby quilts get washed a lot!

And here's the handsome little squeaker on his very own "Scuba Dog" quilt. 

The very first quilt I made, "Dive Plan," was created for Luke's big sister Lyndy. I think they will be sharing a nursery for a while, so I tried to keep the same colors in their quilts. Here's a nostalgic flashback to Lyndy's quilt. I had no idea when I stitched it up how much I'd come to love this hobby! 

And speaking of quilts for little people, here are my latest Project Linus charity projects. This one was made using the heart block tutorial from Allison of Cluck Cluck Sew. I used a variety of purple and pink fabrics as part of the Purple Sewing Challenge on Instagram. The focus fabric is a gorgeous multi color butterfly print by Laurel Burch, and I love how the bits of orange and yellow in that one keep the whole thing from being too saccharine. The binding is a random stripe that I had in my stash.

The back uses a big scrap of another bright butterfly fabric, plus one of the purple paisleys from the front. The butterflies were printed on a slightly thicker cotton; I think it is supposed to be used to cut into pieces for applique. I learned that thicker is NOT better when it comes to quilt backings. This one fought me tooth and nail during the quilting process. I'm glad that a run through the hottest cycles of the washer and dryer added enough crinkliness to hide some quilting boo-boos! 

How about polar bears in brightly colored sweaters? Except the two that are, you know, naked. 

I outlined each bear to make him/her pop out from the white background a bit. In the large yellow squares, I tried a technique called "dot to dot" quilting. It's a way to stitch geometric shapes quickly and easily without marking any lines on the quilt top. You can see the diamond shapes stitched in this close up. You can also see why Sean named this quilt "Polar Bears with Old Man Hairs."

The back is a single piece of bright blue with little hot air balloons. Not really a polar bear theme, but the colors were right. I used the "wrap the backing around to the front for the binding" technique again. Fast and easy, but requires some planning ahead to make it work.

"Go, Dog, Go!" features bright arrows pointing this way and that on a scrappy cream/beige background.

The center stripes have these super cute dogs in cars. They have their heads hanging out the windows, of course. The fabric is from Makower UK, an out of print line called "Woof!" I have more of it, so you'll see these dogs again. I quilted it with an overall meander or stipple pattern. It basically looks like squiggles all over the quilt. 

This little doll quilt is only about 20" square, and it was made for a teddy bear! It uses the same heart block as the purple quilt, but the hearts are much smaller. I love these pure blues with bright white; so classic.

The back is a lovely fabric that looks like hand painted Mexican tiles. I didn't want to cut it up, so using it on the back is a good way to enjoy the design.

"St. Louis Sixteen Patch" is the name of this pattern, and it is sewn from long strips that are then arranged into the groups of 16. No one seems to know what the connection to St. Louis might be. The way the pieces are ironed makes the assembly go together very smoothly, and this is my favorite pattern yet. Something about the symmetry is just so appealing to me. I quilted it diagonally through each small square.

After making the quilt above (which will be a gift) with the gorgeous muted colors of the "Vienna Garden" fabric line, I was inspired to finally cover our own bed using a 16 patch design. I've been collecting fabrics in our colors for a while, but no pattern had called my name loud enough.

I named it "Exuberant Color" after one of my favorite quilting blogs. It features bright fabrics in cool blues, greens and purples. This is my biggest quilt to date, and I used a "quilt as you go" technique that allowed me to sew it in four manageable sections. The navy blue sashing is part of how the sections are held together: the dark color hides those beefier seams. It also gives a nice stained glass effect that I like.

This is a queen sized quilt, about 87" square. It is a 7x7 grid of blocks, so the four subsections were either 3x3, 3x4 or 4x4. (To compare: "Polar Bears with Old Man Hairs" is about the size of the 3x3 section.) Keeping track of which section attached where kept me hopping, but I'm happy with how it can lay on the bed in any orientation because it's square.

The back is a mix of more muted navy blue fabrics. I'll take a photo of that another time, when I'm willing to wrassle the whole thing back up to the fly bridge for pictures. The only place on the boat where there is enough room to hang this and then get far enough away to fit the whole thing in the camera viewfinder is hanging from the canvas bimini structure. Needless to say, I won't be making another queen sized quilt anytime soon.

And finally, a few non-quilting projects got checked off my to-do list this quarter. 

During TrawlerFest back in January, we had a family with five very young (ages 3 to 9) children aboard Vector for a tour. We had heard that several of the vendors at the show refused to let this young family board their display boats. I didn't want them to leave the show thinking all boaters were kid-phobic jerks, so we went out of our way to invite them over and show them around. I made these little velcro-closure pouches with ribbon handles for each child so they would have a fun souvenir from the show. 

The pattern is actually intended to be a business card case, so I slipped one of our boat cards in each one (and kept the sixth for myself.) I told the kids that living on a boat means you don't have as much room as in a house. They listened to my explanation that the pouches were for tiny treasures with wide eyes and each one said thank you in turn. They were very, very well behaved and delightful kids so I send a big fat raspberry to the vendors who turned them away!

A big part of quilting is ironing each seam before moving on to the next step. Many quilters set up their ironing boards right next to the sewing machine so they can pivot in their chairs to go back and forth between the two machines. That's not practical in my tiny space, but I don't mind the opportunity to get up and stretch regularly. However, my ironing board was UGLY! It's a little tabletop model that sits on the bed, and it came with the boat. (Seriously, John, that thing was uuuuuuuuuugly.) After living with it for three years, and ironing on it daily for almost two years, I finally realized I could recover it! With fabric! Pretty fabric that I own by the boatload!

So I did. I recovered my ironing board with this fabulous bird print and now I'm a happy camper, um, boater.

I also sewed up a simple canvas cover for the fly bridge Furuno radar display. I promised Sean I'd make this for him many, many months ago. I'm not usually a big procrastinator, but sewing canvas is not fun at all. It's thick and unwieldy, requires a special UV resistant thread that is very slippery, and needs a heavy duty needle to penetrate it. The Little Kenmore That Could struggles a bit to get through the thick layers. Before I started quilting, that didn't bother me. But now I worry that my one and only machine will go on the fritz over something as trivial and unimportant as protecting the boat's navigation instruments.

Fortunately, the cover went together without incident and I can relax. Back to quilting!

From guest stateroom to quilting studio

(This post was edited in September 2016 to link up with the Studio Hop over on Melva Loves Scraps: Hi, Studio Hoppers! I originally wrote this post to show some non-quilting friends how I convert our boat's second bedroom into my quilting studio. So there's lots of blah blah blah about that in the beginning. You can scroll down about halfway to start seeing fabric storage and more quilty goodies. Thanks for stopping by!)

Living in a small space poses some interesting logistical challenges. Like how to create room for my quilting hobby without making costly structural changes to the boat while maintaining all previous functionality. In other words, how can the quilt room be used to house guests comfortably? (Sean would argue that the question is really, "How can the guest stateroom be used to sew quilts," but let's keep our priorities straight here.)

Ben and Karen's recent visit gave me an opportunity to take some photos of the process of transforming the room, and a much needed incentive to clean up and organize my fabric. The results are two-fold: this blog post, and the rather embarrassing realization that in just 20 short months of sewing I have accumulated enough fabric to create scores, if not hundreds, of quilts. Ahem. 

Vector has two staterooms. The master stateroom is amidships, directly under the pilothouse and galley. This is the most stable place on the boat, low in the water and near the centerlines for both pitch and roll. It makes for a very comfortable place to sleep both at anchor and underway. The room is relatively cubic, with fairly vertical walls and a mostly flat floor. There is one small, approximately 2" high step between the floor around the bed and the area in front of our shoe cupboard. Moving around to make the bed, get dressed, or visit the head in the night runs a low risk of tripping or toe-stubbing.

The guest stateroom is jauntily nautical. Like the real estate term "quaint," this means it's small, oddly shaped and impractical.

Positioned under the foredeck, up in the pointy part of the boat, the walls slope noticeably away from vertical to follow the rake of the bow. There's no extra room for a closet, just a couple of cubby shelves up near the ceiling to hold necessities. The shower is en-suite and entered directly from this room, so there's a towel bar along the sloping wall and a few strategically placed hooks.

The keel also curves upwards rather aggressively, so the floor around each side of the bed consists of three carpeted steps. Here are the starboard side steps, looking aft at the shower entrance.

Here are the port side steps, looking aft into the other half of the head with potty and sink. And why yes, the steps do have big, non-symmetric, angled cut-outs to maximize midnight tripping on the way to visit that vital little room. The good news is that the space is so small that if you stumble, your head will hit a wall well before you can fall all the way to the floor.

In other words, it's an ADA nightmare. And before you even enter the room you've had to negotiate the steep, uneven, and curved stairway down from the pilothouse. It's a wonder I didn't sprain my ankle before last week, frankly.

But this odd little room offers a comfortable double bed for our guests, two opening windows for light and fresh air, and a private bath. And with just a little folding of the space-time continuum, I can quilt there.

First step: Flatten out the starboard steps to create a stable surface for a table and chair. 

A couple of pieces of 3/4" plywood supported by a sturdy folding step stool fills in the cut out first step. The plywood is stored in the engine room when not in use.

Then a small plastic folding table is placed on the next step up. Only one set of table legs are deployed; the other half of the table is supported by the mattress. This table is stored up on the flybridge when we have guests, and can be used as a dining table up there.

Also sitting on top of the mattress is a thinner piece of luan plywood and a self-healing cutting mat. Both of these thin items slide under the mattress for out of sight storage. In this photo you can see four large drawers at the foot of the bed. In theory, we keep two of them empty for guests to use. That just means that the stuff in the drawers can be easily stuffed elsewhere when needed. 

This adjustable height swiveling mechanic's stool allows me to shift myself as needed to sew comfortably. The control pedal for the sewing machine sits on the higher step with the table legs, which is weird, but being able to make minor height adjustments keeps it ergonomic enough for hobby sewing. It certainly isn't OSHA compliant.

Just aft of the stool, I have several totes that hang from hooks. They hold most of my quilting tools: rulers, cutters and scissors, thread, etc. All within easy reach. Those tote bags get crammed into the closets in the master bedroom when we have guests.

The sewing machine and cordless iron both fit nicely on the portable table. The mattress is firm enough that there is minimal wobbling while I sew. I'm a very slow sewist; this set up probably wouldn't work as well for someone who likes to run their machine a mile a minute. There's non-skid padding under the Little Kenmore That Could, too. It will stay put in mild to moderate sea conditions, but I set the machine on the floor when the going gets rough.

The clear plastic doo hickey surrounding the sewing machine is called an extension table. It makes a large surface flush with the throat plate so the quilts are more evenly supported. Usually I have more miscellaneous junk under the extension table...scissors, scraps of extra material, paperwork.

To iron, I move a small table-top ironing board onto the luan sheet. The surface of the bed is about counter top height from the floor here, so this is a great set up for both cutting and ironing fabric. The ironing board lives in the engine room, behind the washing machine, when we have guests. Getting a cordless iron was a huge improvement for this set up. You can see the charging base with its cord running off to the right. There are only two outlets in this room, both up near the head of the bed, so wrangling the iron cord at the foot of the bed got old, fast. I'm clumsy enough without tangling with a garrote attached to a red hot slug of metal.

The rest of the bed hosts a couple of storage boxes up near the pillows. These hold fabric for the current project, scraps to be sorted and filed, finished quilts to be shipped, and various messy bits of the creative process. (This photo was carefully staged to hide exactly how chaotic my process is.) The quilt on the wall is draped over a spring loaded curtain rod that stretches between two cabinets; this keeps larger in-progress pieces out of the way.

Those two cabinets on the port side wall, plus one other on the starboard side, hold most of my fabric. 

The fabric is folded into uniformly sized rectangles, sorted by either color or theme, and stored in clear, covered plastic bins. Since each cubby shelf is a different depth, width and height, there was a lot of trial and error to find boxes that efficiently fit those spaces. They are rather small in order to squeeze past the fiddles that keep them from falling out in heavy seas. 

I love color and variety, which is a good fit for creating children's quilts. It also works well in this small space, since I typically buy fairly small pieces of fabric. Most of my fabric is "fat quarters," which are about 18" x 22" each and fold up to around the size of a pack of playing cards. 

Larger pieces of fabric are useful for quilt backings, but more unwieldy to store. I keep them in one much larger plastic bin that sits on the floor on the port side of the bed. I find that bin frustrating since I can't seem to keep it neatly organized for very long. A better storage solution will manifest itself at some point.

A critical mass of quilts

Another few months have passed, so it's time for another quilt round up. Let's start with quilts that celebrate the season.



This pillow cover was finished a couple days ago. I just couldn't resist this fabric with a Christmas tree in a little red row boat. While there is quite a bit of nautical quilting fabric, and many metric tons of Christmas quilting fabric, the intersection of those two themes is vanishingly small. And what little exists showcases sailboats and lighthouses, so this is a rare find. Unfortunately, it's very low grade fabric, a bit stiff and nasty, but should be fine for a pillow used for a few weeks a year.

The pinwheels at the bottom are pieced out of scraps of other Christmas fabric, with snowflakes and festive swirls. Did you know pinwheel blocks can spin both clockwise and counter-clockwise, and you need to keep track of exactly how you're sewing them together? Me neither, so the backwards one ended on the back.



This lap quilt is pieced with hexagons and triangles, where the hexagons are "fussy cut." That means that the large flowers were (mostly) centered in the hexagon rather than just randomly placed. I guess if I was fussier, my fussy cuts would be perfectly centered. However, with the wild assortment of holiday fabrics in this quilt, a bit of fudging is hardly noticed. In fact, this quilt ended up being so lurid that we call it the Christmas Vomit quilt. It's okay, I'm keeping it for myself.



So all my Christmas themed items are what's fondly called "selfish sewing" in the quilt community: stuff you greedily keep for yourself.

But I'm not an ogre; I did make a few things to give away.



This little table topper was a gift for our friends Rod and Pauline. They really took us under their wings when we were brand new boaters and gave us tons of great advice. We've had some super fun evenings with them, drinking too much and telling tall tales, so I pieced this out of fabric with a wine theme: grapevines and corks and bottles.



I learned how to make this picture quilt in a class called "Accidental Landscapes."  It will be a gift for someone who doesn't read the blog (I think). I took the class at the Houston International Quilt Festival in October.



This lap quilt was made for a dear friend's mother. She has lost a lot of her mobility and spends quite a bit of time in a wheelchair now. My friend said her mom loved blues and deep burgundy. I had the perfect blue batiks in my stash.



While researching how big a wheelchair quilt should be, I learned that many people consider it quite helpful to be able to tie the blanket to the arms of the chair. This keeps it from slipping into the wheels or sliding off altogether. I used some pretty burgundy fabric to bind the quilt and make the removable ties. This type of quilt is similar in size to baby quilts and is a good fit for my small sewing space, so I may be making more of these in the future.

And speaking of babies and their quilts...



Amory Lloyd Gross, our first grand nephew, was born on December 13th. Baby Amory and his mother Charis (my niece) are healthy and happy and all the relatives are just tickled pink. As in pink elephants. Actually, grey and yellow elephants, to match the new nursery.

I made this fun, modern baby quilt using a free pattern from Sew Fresh Quilts and quilted it with wavy lines. Charis keeps a Pinterest board of nursery decorating ideas and when I saw this pattern I knew she would love it. All the baby elephants are following their mothers except the one in the middle who holds Mama's trunk with his own.



The back is a super soft, thick flannel that should withstand many, many years of being snuggled, dragged around, spit up upon, and washed.

Of course, this isn't the only baby quilt I've working on. No, this is only the most tasteful one.



Cartoon cats, surrounded by purple ladybug sashing, sitting on a sea of pink and purple flowers, with lime green binding? Yep.



These goofy cat faces just make me happy! More wavy line quilting on this one.



How about jungle animals in saturated colors, set in tilted blocks on a blue sky background? Every fabric needs to be different, of course. I designed my own free motion quilting pattern for this one in the shape of clouds.



Thank you, Rainbow Zebra, for your wise advice. Sean certainly dared to be different when I asked him to hold up the quilt for photos. "Now show me the back."



Smart alek.



This one is all dog and cat fabrics. They are supposed to be in the shape of big "plus" signs, but that gets a bit lost in the busyness. While I think I did a good job choosing a variety of colors, I should have chosen a wider variety of scales. All the motifs are about the same size, so your eye sees the spottiness of the fabrics even more than the color.

I still have so much to learn when it comes to design theory! Even though my style is happily lurid, there must be some method in the madness or it ends up being too chaotic. But I feel like I'm starting to hit my stride with the Project Linus quilts for kids. I firmly believe that the colors and fabrics that make me happy will be warmly received, but I want to keep getting better at my unique style.



This one is called a rag quilt. The seams are exposed and naturally fray as the blanket is washed and used. It is made of soft flannel pieces and was fun to do...once. All those exposed seams have to be carefully snipped with scissors every half inch. So. Much. Snipping. And the frayed bits filled our washer and dryer with fuzz that then ended up all over the boat. If I make another one, I'll go to the laundromat!



Look at these dog faces! I'm dying with the cuteness!



Here's the whole shebang. The dog fabric was oddly shaped scrap chunks that I trimmed down into squares, making sure each square had at least one face on it. I was left with quite a number of dog butts. Somewhere out there is a nine year old boy who would enjoy a quilt made of nothing except dog butts, but I'm not going there.



This is an I-Spy quilt. Each square of fabric is different: stars, bugs, shoes, tools, animals, vehicles, etc. It can be used to play the I-Spy game. "I Spy, with my little eye, something red that begins with the letter L." When you find the ladybug or the lips, you win that round! Lots of fun doo dads to look at on this one. I bought the variety squares already cut, but was a bit disappointed in the quality of the fabric, so now I'm accumulating my own I-Spy fabrics for the next one.

I buy the vast majority of my fabrics on eBay, so I do occasionally get some duds. It's hard to judge fabric quality from photos alone, but I'm getting better at it. I also try to visit local quilt shops (LQS) in the towns we can reach by boat. I appreciate being able to see and feel the fabric in person at the LQS, so I try to buy a little bit at each one.



I got a smokin' deal on this very nice alphabet fabric, perfect for quilt backs. The brand is Moda, one of the best manufacturers, and the theme is timeless unless kids stop needing to learn their ABCs. Who cares that it is from a line that came out in 2008?

After months of scouring eBay for heavily discounted fabric, I have enough now to be able to sew quite a few quilts without any further shopping. "Quite a few" being a very, very large number. Possibly Avogadro's Number. This condition is known as STABLE: STash Accumulation Beyond Life Expectancy. I'm going to try not to buy any more fabric in 2016. Ahem.

This last quilt is a special one. If I need to ask an eBay seller a question about their fabric, I usually mention that I will be using it for Project Linus. Some sellers have been quite generous, contributing to the charity by offering me extra fabric or discounted shipping. 

The lady who was selling this cute train fabric told me that her daughter had received a hand made blanket in the hospital years ago. She said, "I'm going to send this to you for free. All I ask is that you send me a photo of the finished quilt."

She also sent the coordinating fabric for the back, no charge.

When the fabric arrived, she had included a note. It said that her daughter Amy had died at age 23 and that this was a gift in her honor. I can only assume that whatever hospitalized her as a child eventually took her life. I simply cannot imagine the depths of pain this family must have gone through. I was so, so touched at her generosity, and I named this quilt "Amy's Trains." Thank you, Amy's Mom. I hope it gives comfort to another child and helps in some small way.