Design Wall Monday October 28, 2013

I am hoping that this is the last week for having great Granny up on the wall.

All of the border units are pieced together and ready to be sewn to the main body of the quilt. There will be another plain charcoal border on the outside, and then I can declare this one done. Maybe this next week will see this one done, and I can cross off another UFO finished of the list of UFO's, except that I don't have a list of my UFO's. I'm afraid to go looking and actually count them. I don't really know how many of them there are, and I'm not sure I want to know. I'm just going to keep on working at them one at a time, while I resist the temptation to start something new.
After this, I have to choose, do I work on the Thanksgiving leaves quilt, or on the Lazy Sunday Mystery. I think I have 6 or 7 of these leaves blocks finished now. I need 16 for the large quilt, or 12 for the smaller.
                                                                                     

        Lazy Sunday still needs all its borders assembled. The individual pieces are all done and ready to be assembled into the borders. I have until Wednesday, when I'm going over to Gail's to sew for the evening to decide. Any opinions on which I should choose?
I'm linking up to Judy's Design Wall Monday. Lots of lovely stuff to look at today.                                                                           

                                                                                      

Sneak Peak

I've loaded one of Charlene's quilts today    Its a really fun, very scrappy version of a Rail Fence. I'm using a simple diagonal quilting design to complement the horizontal and vertical lines of the piecing. And one of the best things about quilting for others is seeing all the different fun fabrics. Look at that spider web fabric down at the centre bottom of the picture. It's just so much fun. 

Bloggers' Quilt Festival... Scrappy Dresden Plate/

A couple of years ago, Bunny Hill Designs sponsored a Scrappy Dresden plate quilt along. I have always loved Dresden Plate quilts. It was actually the first quilt pattern I ever made, over 25 years ago, and I have made several more since. So when I saw this quilt along, I gladly joined in. As usual, it took me several years before I got it completely put together, quilted and bound. It was finally finished this year, in August, and I am thrilled with the way it turned out, and I'd like to share it with the blogging community.

 I love doing scrappy quilts. Sometimes I like them all helter skelter and anything goes, as long as no two like fabrics are touching. Sometimes, as in this quilt, I like the scrappy to be controlled with a constant background and some unifying elements. With this one, the plates went on a white background, and the aqua cornerstones and the pink border provided the unifying elements. I further unified the Dresden Plates by giving each horizontal row the same colour center, but continued with the scrappy with each row's colour being different.

 I quilted it, on my long arm machine, with an all over feather design in the white background areas. Inside each Dresden Plate, I quilted a modified continuous curve in the petals and a five petaled flower star shape into each center.

The border has feathered vines that flow continuously around the entire quilt. It is bound with a diagonally printed stripe, with a narrow faux piping fabric in the same aqua as the cornerstones.

Here's a view of the backing, which shows a more detailed view of the quilting in the plates and the borders. I hope you have enjoyed looking at this quilt as much as I enjoyed making and sharing it. I'm linking up to Amy's Creative Side: Scrappy Quilts.

Stash report, Week 43, 2013

I remember saying a while back that I kinda hoped that my balance numbers for this year would get below 50 yards added. Well, this week I hit that goal. Doing up backings and bindings sure puts a dent into those numbers. So, now I will wonder if I can get below 25 yards added before the end of the year. I'm not sure if I will hit that, though. I'm still trying to concentrate on getting some UFOs finished, and a lot of the fabrics in them have already been counted. Getting to zero is in no way even remotely realistic, I don't think. Especially since someone a couple of years ago came up with the wonderful idea of having vendors at our monthly guild meetings. No, seriously, it's a wonderful idea. However, the temptations are sometimes just too strong to resist.

Used this week:                             7.5 yards
Used this year:                            118.85 yards
Added this week:                               0 yards
Added this year:                          165.55 yards
Balance:                                         46.7 more yards in than out.

Today, I'm going to continue working on Great Granny. And I also want to see if I can get some photos done of the quilt I want to enter into the Bloggers Quilt Festival. I'm linking up to Judy's Stash Report.

Saturday ramblings.

Our guild, the London Friendship Quilters' Guild, does place mats for Meals on Wheels every year at Christmas. Usually, the individual members make whatever pattern and colours they want, and bring them to the December meeting for labeling and delivery to Meals on Wheels. This year the program committee, on which I am serving this year, has issued a challenge to make the place mats a bit more interesting and fun to make. We purchased some cards from J. Lee Cards and Photograph, (unfortunately, she doesn't have a website), and then had the guild members who wished to participate draw a card from the bag, and then challenged them to make their place mats from the colours found in their cards. This picture to the right here is the card that I drew from the bag.

 And these are the fabrics that I have pulled that I think cover pretty much all the colours in the card. I have my design for the place mat all figured out. All I need to do is start cutting for it.
All of us participating will bring our cards and finished place mats to the December meeting and display them together to have the fun of seeing how everyone interpreted the colours in their cards.

 And then the other day, Thursday I think, I got a text message from Gail asking if I had seen the block of the month being sponsored by Mad About Patchwork pictured here on the blog for the Mad About Patchwork store. I hadn't seen it, so I went to look at it. Big mistake, since I have now decided that I have to do it. And Gail wants to do it, so we'll work on it together. I loved it so much that I had to play with pulling some fabrics. This one to the right here is the starting point.

And these are all the fabrics that I found that might work with it. It will be fined tuned some more before the final choices are made. And there are a couple more projects that have to be finished before I start anything new. Definitely the Great Granny Square quilt is going to be finished before starting this. The place mat has to be finished before starting this, and maybe the Thanksgiving Leaves will get finished as well. And, in order to stay with the intent to continue with finishing things before starting anything new, I'm now going to go sew some more on Great Granny. All of her border blocks are now finished, so I can get to work on putting her all together.

On the needles, Oct. 25, 2013

Well, I just finished my second cup of coffee, and am now into my third, which means my brain is at least partially functioning. I thought I'd write this now, while I'm thinking about it, rather than leaving it until later, since I have a bad habit of leaving things until later, and then they never get done. I'm trying to correct that habit.
Much as I want to continue knitting on my sweater for myself, it's that time of year to start knitting for others. I have all kinds of stuff I want to do, so I thought I'd better get started.

So, this is the back of the sweater. It doesn't look too interesting, so far. I have 2 of these big balls of this green, and 2 more of them in red. I must have been thinking of Christmas knitting at the time, in the rather distant past, that I bought them. But they are good for kids sweaters that will get lots of wear and lots of washing. This has knitted up in the past 2 evenings while watching TV, so it shouldn't take too long to do. I'm doing the back first, and then the sleeves, before doing the front. Oh right, I forgot to say that this is the Truck Sweater that I found on Ravelry, which I'm doing for Avery. I might need to purchase some smaller balls of yarn for the graphic on the front of the sweater, but at least I can get the rest of it done ahead of those purchases. I have some scraps of other worsted weight yarns here, though, that might work. And thinking about it now, his Daddy has a white pick up truck, so maybe I can change the graphic to look like that. Hmmmm...... have to think about that. I'm linking up to Judy's On the Needles. And then I really need to get this day started. I'm going to do some more quilting on the Road to Brenham quilt, and I really hope that all the thread shredding issues I had yesterday, that I talked about here, don't continue today. I ended up having to switch cones of thread. After that, I got 1 1/2 passes done with no problems.

Customer quilts

These quilts have been back with their owners for a couple of weeks now, but I'm just getting around to writing about them.
This first quilt belongs to Amalia. She is a huge fan of batiks. I'm not sure I've ever done a quilt of hers that wasn't made of fun, bright colours. This is one of Bonnie Hunter's free patterns, Scrappy Trips Around the World.

 I used the Fossil Pantograph, by Lorien Quilting, and a very bright variegated thread.

 This next quilt belongs to Maureen. I used the Trellis Vine Pantograph by Threadsongs for this quilt. Maureen used a lovely collection of fabrics in this quilt. I don't know the name of it, but it had fun strawberries and strawberry vines and flowers on some of the fabrics. The leaves in the quilting design were quite similar in shape to the leaves in some of the fabrics.

Here's a closer view of the top that shows the fabrics and the quilting a bit better.

And a picture of the back. For some reason, I don't always take pictures of the backs of the quilts I do. I'll have to remember to do it more consistently. There is lots of lovely texture showing here on the back from the quilting.