Paintbox Quilt-A-Long - Blocks finished!!

The real Paintbox Quilt-A-Long has us making 80 squares. But since I got behind and then ran out of different batik fabrics to use, I decided to stop where I was. That ended up being 64 squares.

In the original version, the blocks all are separated by sashing, but because of my catastrophic cutting error, some of the blocks have black borders on two sides. Some of the blocks don't. I was going to use black sashing, but that wouldn't work with black borders on some of the blocks. I tried it just above and below the blocks, separating each row, and really didn't like it. I liked what it looked like without sashing much better.

I have the blocks all sewn together in rows and my goal for tonight is to get this part of the top completed. Next, I decide whether I'm going to put a border (or two) on it, or leave it as is.

River quilting

I had this idea in my mind that I was going to quilt feathers all around the border of my River Quilt. I read about quilting them and practiced on some crappy scraps of fabric. Then I drew out a feather on one section of the border and quilted away!

The quilting isn't marvelous, but I was pretty darn pleased with the quality of it. Most of the lines went where I wanted them to and the stitches were somewhat even (trending towards too small because I was moving very slowly). It took me probably a good hour to do roughly a foot and a half of feather. Here's what it looked like:

Once it was done, I decided that I didn't really like it. It wasn't the quality of the quilting, it was just sort of distracting running through the pink border. It made the pink sort of muddier and I didn't like the way it looked. You can decide for yourself:

I spent the next couple of hours ripping out the stitching for the feather. I'm going with a simpler quilting design that doesn't go through the pink border.

Finish!

I finished hand-sewing the binding onto my blue quilt on Monday, but my laptop was out of commission so I couldn't post pictures about it until today.

Here's the entire quilt so that you can admire the wide variety of totally random fabrics that went into it.

And here's one including my helpful quilt holder.

I quilted it in little spirals, which I thought looked sort of like wind or water and were therefore appropriate for a blue quilt. It's the biggest quilt that I've quilted so far - roughly 60" x 80". It wasn't that bad to manipulate through my machine during free motion quilting, but it sure did use up a lot of thread! I had to go buy more half-way through quilting it because I ran out.

I waffled on the binding for quite a while. I considered about 8 different fabrics and finally narrowed it down to this one and a solid blue one. The solid blue one was just too boring. It's a pretty bold choice of binding for me and I'm not sure that I *love* it, but it was good to try a binding that stands out. I like how the red-and-blue brings out the bright colors in the other fabrics, but I don't have a very good picture that shows the binding in relation to the whole quilt.

Construction details:

Piecing thread: I was doing this as a leader / ender project, so it's pieced with whatever thread I was using for the "real" project I was working on.

Piecing needle: variable for the same reason.

Batting: warm&white cotton

Quilting needle: size 75 quilting needle

Quilting thread: blue variegated Signature size 40 cotton thread; same thread as for the river quilt. This is why I ran out half-way through.

Tension: increased to about 6.

Assembling a quilt sandwich

Every tutorial I've ever seen on assembling a quilt sandwich tells you to lay the backing out on a hard surface: your giant, attractively tiled kitchen floor; those several large folding tables that you keep stored in your ample basement; your living room's reclaimed oak or ecologically-responsible bamboo floor. For those of us who live in smallish apartments with crappy wall-to-wall carpet, this doesn't work well.

I've been assembling quilt sandwiches in my kitchen. At the widest point with available floor space (i.e. not under the table), it measures about 5' across. This works fine for putting together small or lap-size quilts. Larger quilts have to be assembled in the living room, where there is floor space, but where there is also carpet. The backs of quilts assembled in my living room have up-till-now contained puckers and wrinkles because I couldn't get them to stay flat.

I was thinking about putting together the quilt sandwich for my blue quilt and wondering where I could go to lay it out on a hard floor (my mother's house? school? the grocery store?) when it occurred to me that all I really needed was tent stakes. Well, not literally tent stakes, but that idea: something to hold the backing fabric stretched out on the living room floor.

I decided to try using my largest size of safety pins. I stabbed them through the backing fabric and into the woven part at the back of the carpet. It actually held quite well.

I didn't take a picture of just the backing fabric for the blue quilt because it's large enough that, in order to fit it all into the frame, you wouldn't be able to see the safety pins. Here's a smaller-size reproduction:

If you look carefully, you can see the pins at the top and sides of the fabric. I "staked" the backing down, then went back and repositioned the pins to pull any loose areas tighter.

After pinning, the back seemed to be quite flat. I'll post after I finish quilting with a pucker-and-wrinkle-report.

Blue Quilt

I decided to follow Bonnie Hunter's advice and always "find one more unit to leave under the presser foot as you chain piece." She recently published a book called "Leaders and Enders" which talks about how to sew the blocks for one quilt in between sewing other projects. At least, I'm assuming that's what the book says. I don't actually have the book... but I think she posted about it on her blog or it used to be somewhere on her website or something. I can't find it now, but I got the basic idea down: have a simple piecing project that can start or finish a chain piecing series.

I pulled blues out of my bin of 4.5"x4.5" blocks and started sewing them together into 9-patches. I started this project a number of months ago and it's been sort of plugging along while I've been working on other things. Finally, I finished sewing all my 9-patches, then I made them "disappear" in order to make things a little more interesting.

I carefully arranged them all (on a friend's living room floor) in a pleasing pattern and labeled each block (130 total) with a little piece of masking tape so I wouldn't screw up the order. I finished sewing them all together during Quilting and Eating Day with Ciara.

Here's the end result, after being pinned into a quilt sandwich in my living room.

It's very blue.

Paintbox Quilt-A-Long

I'm participating in Oh, Fransson's Paintbox Quilt-A-Long. I ordered Kona roll-ups (which look like these, but were different colors) in several different colors from Fabric Depot when they were on mega-sale, but by the time I placed my order, they were temporarily out of stock. Lucky for me, they came back into stock, but I started out a bit behind.

The paintbox quilt blocks are supposed to be monochromatic with a solid and a print fabric in each block. I don't have enough print fabrics in my stash to make this work, which is the second reason I was behind. I didn't want to go out and buy new fabrics for this quilt because TD already thinks I have a fabric addiction.

And then, in steps my fabulous quilting friend CJ! She had ordered a bunch of fat quarters of various batik fabrics for me for Christmas. Apparently they took a while to get here, then I didn't see her for a bit, but we finally got together for a happy hour recently. I decided that they would be perfect for the paintbox quilt.

Here's the fabrics I'm working with, matched with solids from my Kona roll.

It's an interesting selection of colors, really. I'm not 100% sure how I like all the pairings, but some of them make me very happy.

The paintbox quilt instructions call for 40 different prints and 40 different solids. I don't have 40 different batiks, so I decided to use each batik twice paired with two different solid colors. I tried to use as wide a variety of solid colors as possible to get the "paintbox" look, which is supposed to be fairly rainbow-y.

Here's what my completed blocks look like right now. The goal is to complete 8 blocks per week. The week prior to January 11 was week 1. That means that by February 1 (this coming Monday - 4 sewing days from now), I should have completed 32 blocks. Right now, I have 16 blocks, so I'm halfway there.

So why do some of the blocks have black in them?

Well, sadly, this is due to a quilt fail on my part. The instructions said to cut the solid fabrics into strips 1.25" wide. I read that as 1.75" wide. This isn't a problem until the very last set of strips. They're just not quite long enough, and I don't have enough of the solid colors left to cut new strips.

I do have extra batik fabric, which meant that those blocks turned out as planned. I just couldn't bring myself to recut all the strips I'd already cut, so I had to come up with a something else. I was planning on sashing the blocks with black anyhow (I love the way bright colors look with a black background), so I decided that I'd just replace the too-short solid strips with black and not do a sashing. Or maybe I'll just do a sashing across the quilt and turn all those blocks with black edges so that they're upright so it will look like a complete sashing. Regardless, it's going to be substantially different than everyone else's paintbox quilt. Well, I wouldn't want to be too ordinary.

Valentine's Pillow

I bought three quilting magazines recently. I read through them. Then I read through each of them again. Then I paged through and looked at the pretty pictures. I scrutinized the quilting. I perused the ads. I looked through them before bed. I've had each of them several weeks now and have probably gone through each of them 8 or 10 times. I feel that I've gotten my money's worth.

I decided that I wanted to make a Valentine's pillow for my Grandmother. She doesn't really need any pillows, but I just gave her a quilt for Christmas, so I needed another idea. A pillow seemed relatively easy - a small-scale project. I got a pillow form and decided to make a removable case so that I could make other cases for other holidays.

I had originally picked out a pieced and quilted design (it was a heart with flowers coming out the top), then I saw this quilt in one of my quilting magazines. It's

an applique design, which I haven't done much of. However, one of the blocks seemed like it would make an excellent Valentine's pillow, without being TOO heart-y or red-and-pink. I had ordered some Steam-A-Seam, which I had seen a lot of and tried out at a quilt expo that my quilting friend CJ and I went to. It's pretty easy to use. It's sticky on one side, so it doesn't move around when you're trying to cut out the fabric to be appliqued. After positioning it on the background fabric, it permanently irons on and doesn't need to be additionally sewn on around the edges. I was skeptical of this last bit and planned to sew around the edges anyhow. Turns out that I didn't need to. They're totally glued down. Turns out that's a good thing because most of the pieces are pretty small. If I'd had to zig-zag around the edges, I think I would have lost some of the definition of the shapes or the edges would have looked frayed.

The only problem was that the hearts in the pattern are larger than the sheets of fusible web. I had to do the hearts separately as two halves, then stick them together on the fabric. The stickiness of the fusible web helped immensely, but when I tried it the first time, I cut two of the same side of the heart. It's only sticky on one side, so that wasn't going to work. It was also slightly difficult to get both ends to line up because the web can distort slightly as you pull on it. That doesn't seem to have affected my finished product, though.

Here's my end result. I echo quilted around the heart (which took WAY longer than I thought it was going to. Who knew it was so time consuming to go around a heart over and over? I made tiny little loop-d-loops inside the heart around the strawberries. It sort of makes the strawberries, stems and leaves look puffed out, which I like. The stems are a very tiny little weird slanted zig-zag that my machine does. I didn't have any green embroidery floss and didn't want to buy a whole thing of it just for this project.

The ruffle was sort of a pain in the ass. I had originally envisioned it as being entirely red. However, I was using fabric I had purchased as remnants for the entire project and the red piece I had was too small. If I had made the ruffles narrow enough so that I could have made the correct length, they would have been much more narrow than I wanted them. I decided to use the rest of the blue remnant as well. I like the way it turned out color-wise. I also was reminded why I don't often sew ruffles on things - the gathering and the sewing and the pinning and the resewing... it's a bit irritating.

All-in-all a success.