life+running » quilting

Ay Matees, I gots me some treasure.

chimes — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 15:00:00 +0000

I mentioned that my mom told me that she found a box full of of treasures the other day in one of Gram’s closets..

Boy, did she.

First, there was a little box full of embroidery thread and instructions for different stitches. I remember getting this out sometime when I was a kid, so I’m not sure if this is Gram’s or Granny’s, but it smells a little like Granny (she died of emphysema … figure that one out).

I already sorted and bagged the floss. I seriously JUST started to make a dent in the other bag that I’d already sorted from several years ago. Maybe I should make friendship bracelets. I could make one for everybody attending BLEND. That would be fun … a summer camp trinket! But that would be a long month of friendship bracelet making.

In case you didn’t see it in the picture above, this book cost TWENTY NINE CENTS. I wish I knew what year it was from, but judging from the photography on the inside, I’m guessing the early 60s.

I remember this book. It teaches embroidery, crochet, knitting and tatting. Tatting? What the hell is that? I took this book home the first time I wanted to learn how to crochet. And I brought it back after several failed attempts.

Along with the box of embroidery stuff, I got a MASSIVE box of vintage fabric scraps and unfinished hand-pieced quilt blocks.

These were most definitely Granny’s. Gram did not do patchwork. And I know some of the fabric in here was from clothes that Granny used to wear. Look at that cool olive green fabric with the Las Vegas-style stars! I would say there’s about a yard’s worth of scraps here.

But there is about a full or queen-sized bed’s worth of quilt blocks. Maybe more.

They’re all this 6-point star pattern. And I’m not sure what to do to finish them. I’m going to take them to the Des Moines Quilt Guild meeting in April and see if they can help me. I know I have to put fabric between the points, but I’m not sure how to go about doing that because it just doesn’t work like that (this won’t make sense to those of you that don’t sew, but trust me, you can’t just sew a triangle in that shape in that void). And then if I don’t make these puppies square, I’m going to have to figure out how to sew a bunch of six-sided polygons together.

This is going to be a task.

But, she spent all the time cutting these out and sewing them by hand, so I want to finish this the way that she intended it to be done.

Also, I kind of want to bitch at her for the seams after learning how to actually press seams. She’d probably just pinch me and go get a bowl of Trix (that woman LIVED on Trix. It wasn’t for kids. It’s for grannys is what she used to tell me).

Otherwise I’d just applique them onto the big bed sheet that I got with all this stuff (true story. my grandpa thought that I could use a bedsheet that had a tear in it — which I can, but I don’t need more thrifted / gifted supplies) and finish the quilt really fast. But I hate applique quilts with a passion. There’s no skill involved (okay, some skill but it’s not as badass as piecing) and I hate how the edges turn out … and they always look ultra-cheesy. Yuck.

But seriously.

GIANT BOX OF BLOCKS.

Thanks in advance to my friend Doris for most likely helping me trouble shoot this. She’s an awesome quilter. And she’s probably geeking out over this treasure find.

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Patchwork + Hot wings

chimes — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 15:00:00 +0000

The patchwork class I taught Saturday and Sunday was a success. I even learned something. Two of the ladies in the class were hardcore quilters, but needed help figuring out how to pick fabrics and wanted a fresh look at things, which is why they took my class. I kept getting guff for not pressing my seams correctly, so finally one of the ladies showed me how to press and set my seams. You press to the dark side. Tee. Hee.

We made a hugetastic mess.

I brought my improv piece to use as an example for class and ended up finishing it. WELL, not completely finishing it. I want to do some embroidery on it. Then it will be finished. Mini quilt? Pillow? Wall hanging? Who knows.

We had a giant table and an ironing board area set up and we needed every inch of that space. The Workspace had two huge tubs of fabric, and everybody brought some of their own. There were some really interesting finds in the bins. I picked out some spiffy 80sesque fabrics for my first project. And went a little crazy with the quilting.

Seriously? I’m pretty sure this was somebody’s screenprinting project. But I cut it up and used it for the back of my potholder.

On Saturday I taught everybody how to make a wonky log cabin block. I wasn’t sure how long it was going to take the class to complete a block and turn it into a potholder, but it ended up taking up about one 3-hour class period. So on Sunday I had everybody throw caution to the wind and make an improv block — no planning, just creativity flowing. I gave everybody a piece of my fabric that they had to use in their improv block — just to spice things up and make it harder for those who were already well out of their comfort zones.

Letitia, The Workspace coordinator, took my class. Which kind of made me nervous because this class could have gone horribly wrong if super-hardcore quilters showed up and weren’t wanting to learn new ways to do things or break the rules. But it didn’t go badly [ other than the crazy amount of people working in the woodshop behind us being really loud ], and she had a good time too. Here she is stitching away.

I was really proud of her improv block potholder. The fabrics she chose were really great. And just look at that stitching! She should probably get a long-arm sewing machine and have people pay her to quilt.

And thanks to my new knowledge I learned from a master quilter, my seams are so much better in my second block that I made in class [ on the left ] than in my first block [ which I turned into a potholder ]. I’m so glad somebody finally showed me that pressing my seams properly makes a difference. I pressed the seam together to set it, then pressed to the dark side [ to the darker fabric ] so the seam doesn’t show through. I didn’t press to the dark side on seams that had a bunch of different seams within them — got too bulky and the newest seam wouldn’t stay put. But seriously? This little tidbit of knowledge is going to make all my pieces so much nicer.

Look how straight the seams on the left block are. Then look at how crooked and frankensteiny the seams on the right one are. I’m somewhat amazed at the difference that a little extra ironing made. And it really didn’t take any extra time.

Beautiful.

Gross.

In addition, I learned little tidbits about canning, sewing circles, and how NOT to pack your carryon when traveling — and to always put the things you actually can’t live without in your carryon. There’s so much we can learn from our elders!

Here’s one of the blocks done by one of the other ladies in the class.

She initially had some traditional pink floral instead of my bright pink and another brown / khaki instead of the teal. I pulled out the bright pink and she loved it, so I gave it to her, and we decided to add the teal to complement the teal in the bright pink fabric. I think she learned a little bit more about pairing fabrics and picking colors.

On a different note, about 2 hours into class I got a text from Mark that said: “Just butchered about 10 hot wings. I’m awesome.”

Huh?

I leave him home alone and he makes incredible food from scratch — usually not using a recipe. Bread on Saturday. Hot wings Sunday. Once I left for 3 days to go to my cousin’s wedding in Fairfield, and he perfected Chicago-style pizza.

About an hour later I got this photo. He’s been wanting to try to make hot wings from scratch for a long time. Now he’s succeeded.

He didn’t make about half of the wings he bought so I could do a run-through with photos for the blog [ see, he's getting better! ]. I will have step by step instructions because these are multitudes better for you than the flash-fried version. If they weren’t so salty and if there wasn’t butter in them, I’d give them a green light. I might have to see what I can do to lighten them up after the first go-round.

This was a pretty eventful Sunday for me. I usually try to sit around and do as much nothing as possible on the weekends. What about you? Do you try to cram a bunch of fun stuff in on the weekend? Or do you sit at home and relax?

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Improv Block Progress + Patchwork Class

chimes — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:00:00 +0000

I’m teaching a modern patchwork class this weekend. I’ll be showing how to stash, scrap bust and make some pretty sweet improv blocks. There’s still time to sign up … you know.

Currently I’m working on this super girly improv piece. I thought I’d do something different and was inspired to use all my scraps from my Mendocino quilt for the strips between the pieces of fabric.

I’m liking where this is going. You?

I’m even using my last little bits of Wonderland.

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mendocino progress

chimes — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:00:00 +0000

~~Quite some time ago~~ — okay, a realllllly long time ago — I posted some quilt blocks I had put together. Yes. I realize there was a 2-year time lapse there …

This year I’m going through the giant pile of WIP quilt pieces and finishing them. I swear. For real.

I decided to use some pink around these blocks to give some relief to the eye between the busy blocks. Normally I’d use white, but I thought this dark pink was nice and went well with the blocks. I’m liking how they are turning out.

I’m also slightly obsessed with Barbara’s Puffins. Any flavor. They are gluten free! And delicious. Definitely not sugar free though.

I’m excited to make a design wall for the guest / craft room so I can put these together. Next month’s crafty endeavor!

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FO Friday: Stella Quilt

chimes — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 13:00:00 +0000

You may remember this quilt top from 2009 when I originally had it slated to become a finished quilt for my niece’s first birthday.

Well, as you may know I’m really bad about finishing quilts. Mostly because it isn’t cheap to get them quilted professionally and up until I got my new sewing machine recently it was a huge pain to quilt them myself.

So what I’m saying is that my niece didn’t get this for her birthday in 2009.

It ended up being a lovely baby shower gift for my friend Adria who is due in February. Adria made me a quilt a LONG time ago and is responsible for my slightly expensive fabric hoarding obsession.

Also, I posted the photos on my flickr last week and cutable.com picked one of my images and featured this quilt on their flickr Friday on December 1. I couldn’t share until after her baby shower for obvious reasons.

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FQS Giveaway!

chimes — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 16:00:00 +0000

I love giveways, especially ones that involve fabulous fabric.

Quokka Quilts is hosting a blogger’s choice giveaway for 12 print fat quarters and 3 solids (holy cow!) of your choice from Fat Quarter Shop.

Since I mostly make bags, I picked a bunch of patterns conducive to bag-making. I also mocked up a couple of bag patterns.

First, these are the fabrics I chose. I went through and picked my favorite fabrics without thinking about putting them together. I didn’t read the rules all the way through … they are PICKING the best ones. I doubt I will get picked, but putting random fabric patterns together and making them look pretty is kind of what I do, so …

And now? How about a couple of ideas for what I might do with them. Stack them (wonkily and not straight of course):

Wow that’s a lot of fabrics. Okay, now for the bags I could create using a bit of ALL of these fabrics.

Probably with an orange zipper on that one.

And a turquoise zipper on this one. Obviously the patterns would translate into bigger than what they’re shown here, but you get the picture.

Anyway, here is the part where I say … pick me! Please.

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Tu-tu-tu-Tuesday: Quilt as you go [and more!]

chimes — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 12:00:00 +0000

I went to my first Des Moines Modern Quilt Guild meeting last Thursday evening. My friend Doris has been bugging me to go since she is one of the co-founding members. I missed out on their Habitat challenge and their ugly fabric swap, but came last week. They have a guest speaker every meeting and a show and tell where members show things they’re working on (quilts or related sewing).

I introduced myself by showing all my embarrassing works in progress: My coin stack baby quilt, Hello Betty quilt and my Thea’s puzzle quilt — just to name a few (there are WAY more).

And member Eva Marie was kind enough to fill in for a speaker that was unable to attend. She taught us the quilt as you go method. Here are some great tutorials.

Whilst she was showing us the methods I shared above, my brain was spinning on all sorts of ideas. I’d seen this method before and thought it was a great way to make things on my machine because it doesn’t quilt large objects well. I could use this method to make blocks for a larger quilt, make larger bags, pillows, all sorts of things …

… But then I remembered that my machine doesn’t do well with quilt sandwiches — no matter what the size. It even has a hard time with stitch length equality with my little zippy pouches.

I love my sewing machine. It’s a fabulous hand-me-down from my great aunt Willi — so I knew it was a good machine. I got it and it was pretty much brand new, though it was at least 30 years old. It’s done me well and I’m keeping it for threadbanging crafty projects (like quilted greeting cards, mini portfolios, sketchbooks, etc). I got DC1050 from Amazon (because they are the Wal-Mart of the internet of course) — so it should be here in the next week. I cannot WAIT for: Start stop button instead of pressure foot, 50 awesome stitches (perfect for my wallets and bags), computerized (EVEN) stitching and a self-threading needle.

I’m beside myself with excitement! If you’ve followed my blog for a while, you know that I’ve never had a NICE new machine. I’ve had a new machine (from Wal-Mart) and I’ve had some nice machines (that are 30 or more years old), but not a nice and NEW one — with a 25-year warranty, might I add.

You will see an update sometime soon with a metric butt-ton of new wallet 2.0s, new and improved teeny tiny wallets and little zippy pouches.

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craftathon

chimes — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 15:00:00 +0000

We are moving again soon. And this weekend is the last weekend that I don’t have plans before the move, so I’m getting my last hurrah out of my system because all my crafty stuff has to go in storage as soon as possible.

I started going through my craft stuff and decided to finish off some UFOs this weekend.

I started with some bags …

(pink little zippy pouch)

(geometric little zippy pouch)

… and some more — 17 to be exact — quilted cards …

… but then I found a whole mess of white fabric, which I had no idea I had — my granny had left it in a bunch of unfinished projects she ultimately didn’t get to finish and her craft supplies were gifted to me. So, I decided it was time to finish my vintage scrap fabric (courtesy of Adria) strip quilt.

I’m still in progress today. I could have finished last night but I really don’t have room in our tiny apartment to lay out the quilt, and this is one that I have to lay out and think about. Here’s a photo of the progress. I’ll post a tutorial once it’s finished. It’s really quite easy, but takes a bit of thinking.

Here’s what I’ve done so far:

Decided I wanted to do a strip quilt that kind of zig zagged with the scrap fabric Adria gave me — this, but without the border and with more variation in width and length of fabric.
Cut all the fabric scraps to 2″, 1.5″ and 1″ wide pieces. One inch is probably too small, but to get the most out of this fabric, I had to go that small.
Sewed all of the 2″ wide scraps together to make a really long strip, and did the same with the 1.5″ and 1″ scraps. Did this last year and pulled out the finished rolls of strips yesterday to start putting this together.
Figured out that I wanted to make a 50″x50″ quilt. Originally I was going to go with twin size, but I realized I wasn’t going to have enough vintage fabric to do what I wanted to do.
Cut 50″ wide strips from the long strip of each width I’d sewn together.
Laid them on the floor to make 50″ wide — this required cutting the strips in halves and thirds. See above — the bottom piece is the full length that I want and is used for measuring.
Cut 2″, 1.5″ and 1″ strips out of white fabric and added them to the ends of the vintage strips to make up the width difference so they measure 50″ again.

Here’s what I’m doing today:

Deciding where I want the vintage strips to line up in the quilt, then cutting the end of the white off (where it goes past 50″) and adding it to the OTHER side of the strip (so there’s white on both sides).
Trimming everything to 48″ or so wide since inevitably there will probably be a math error on my end.
Pinning 3 strips at a time together and sewing them into a wider strip.
Repeating until the quilt top has been finished.

And that’s my day today! Patchworking and probably running 6-8 miles. If I finish the quilt top in just a few hours (hoping so — I got where I currently am now with this quilt top in 3 hours yesterday), I’ll work on some more bags. I found the motherload of scraps I was saving of Wonderland …

… so I’ll probably be making some more zippy pouches out of that. I’m loving the zippy pouches. I need to make some more wallets, but I like to make the zippy pouches so much more. I figure I’m doing this for fun and not for money, so if this stuff sells, great, if not, I’ve got Christmas presents taken care of. Or maybe I can keep something for myself for once.

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FO Friday: T-shirt Quilt for my Cousin

chimes — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 11:00:00 +0000

Um, I may have gotten the t-shirts for this in the spring of 2009. Like March 2009. Regardless, I finally finished it. It broke my sewing machine twice. Twice. Therefore, not making any more quilts (at least quilting them). So if you want a quilt, I’ll make the top, but you’re on your own for getting it quilted.

I also hate t-shirt quilts. I think they’re boring and stupid and I am not sure why people love them so much when there are so many beautiful quilting fabrics or vintage fabrics out there to make a quilt from instead. I’ve made 3 t-shirt quilts now — but the first 2 were really deconstructed. And the first 2 were because I wasn’t sure if I was going to like quilting, so I didn’t want to BUY fabric until I knew if I liked it or not.

Anywho — the twist on the regular t-shirt quilt here is adding the lyrics to Lateralus by Tool on the back of the quilt. I just quilted straight lines to make it easy. And I used scrap fabric that coordinated for the binding.

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Tut-tu-tu-Tuesday: Quilted Potholders

chimes — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 12:00:00 +0000

A long time ago I created a TON of blocks for what was going to become my ugly string quilt. I quickly realized that entirely too much work goes into making a quilt for me to purposely make an ugly one. And my blocks weren’t turning out as nice as I hoped (ie. nothing was lining up because I have no patience). So instead, I used the blocks I’d made to make potholders using this tutorial.

In case you’re extremely curious as to how to make string blocks, I used this tutorial to create these blocks.

EDIT (December 2011): If you’re going to make potholders that work, be sure to use Insulbrite instead of regular batting.

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