Farmer's Wife Quilts Almost Done!!

This is th e quilt from the Farmer's Wife 30s book.I felt like I have been machine quilting forever but it appears to be done with both quilts!  If I had the patience, I would have done some quilting in all those white spaces but didn't!  I like the colors in this one better than the purple one even though I don't usually enjoy working on my blue quilts even though it is one of my favorite colors!

I only have to put borders and binding on the purple one and  binding on this one as I am not doing borders.  This one has 90 blocks and is smaller than the other one so I could actually get a halfway decent picture of it on my design walls.  It is about 80 x 72.  

I have updated this piost to incude the almost finished purple quilt which now has borders on it.  I have the binding (just a darker shade of purple) ready to attach and then I  will handsew down!
 

-Farmer's Wife 20's Quilt Almost Done

If you read my blog, you remember me doing these blocks around this time last year.  Well, I finally managed to get them put together this summer and have been working the last two weeks on getting the three sections machine quilted which I finally got done this week.  The quilt is currently about 110 x 90 in so pretty good sized.  After putting the three sections together, I will add a small border of purple and then call it quits!  This picture does not include all the blocks as I can't get far away from my too small design wall to get a complete shot!

This is a rather poor picture that shows it altogether but still doesn't show the whole quilt.  I am in the process now of sewing the seams in the back down where the sections go together.  This is so simple fete as this quilt is large and very heavy as I used cotton instead of my usual wool.  The sad part is that I think this quilt is too big for out quilt club show or even to bring in for 
"show and tell" down here!  It will be about the right size for one of the three king sized beds that I have between here and Rochester!

Next to work on the 1930's Farmer's Wife quilt which has fewer blocks and only two sections but is still pretty good sized as there are 90 blocks in it!
 

Farmer's Wife 20s Blocks and Some Fun

Because I had more blocks for this quilt than the 30s blocks, I decided to go with a 11 x 9 orientation which with the sashing will yield a top that is 80 x 100 inches approximately.  I decided to add sashing as I felt the eye needed some place to rest and some dark to counteract all the light.  I haven't quite decided to do about borders yet but they won't be wide!  I actually used every square inch of the purple fabric that I had in the sashing.  I was two 9 in strips shy so found another piece that was close.  I had roughly calculated before I started using the fabric.  This is the first far left section.

This is the middle section.  Those outside strips are not attached but will be added when I do the "quilt as you go" combining the sections.

This is the third and last section.

In RAFA (Rochester Area Fiber Artists) group yesterday, Joyce showed us something called momigami (hope that's spelled right) which is the crumpling of paper over and over to give you a fabric-like look.  We took small pieces of brown paper bags and crumpled and re-crumpled and even added a little oil to our hands.  I took it one step further and took a photo of the result which is to the left.  I then played around just using Picasa  (not Photoshop which would yield even more interesting results).  I printed this on an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper (thus enlarging it by about four).  I am thinking I will print it on some cloth as well as it looks like rocks to me and could be used in an art quilt.  Some of the fiddling around with Picasa is below!

 

Back to Farmer's Wife Blocks!

It's been a while since I published a blog on the progress of the Farmer's Wife blocks that I completed back in January!  I found some significant yardage back here in New York so I managed to finish bordering them all last week!  I am going to make the king sized quilt in two pieces each 5 blocks wide by 9 blocks long.  These are the 30's FW blocks that I did.  For some reason, I missed quite a few in the book but have now given away the book.  I had one block left over which is one I wasn't all that crazy about anyway.  This is the second half.  The blocks finish at 8 1/2 inches square.  The strips around the regular blocks were cut 1 3/4 in wide and the half square triangles were cut from a 5 1/2 in square.  It used a lot of fabric but I must have had a full bolt of this off white fabric.

This was the first half of the quilt.  I am very pleased with it.  I found some leftover striped blue fabric that I am going to cut up and use as an outside border.  First will be a border of the off white and then a narrow border of green.

After I finished all the blocks from the 30's book, I decided I might as well do the 20's blocks, of which I have about 10 more so this quilt will be 9 x 11 blocks I think.  The blocks are very bright and I had a really difficult time deciding on how I would border them and how i would set them.  You can see this set is columns of straight set and then on point set and then straight set.

I thought I would like the green for setting the blocks as the yellow is so bright but didn't like it at all.  The background green is a better match than it looks in this picture however.

I found some significant yardage of a very pale yellow and decided that I would try that.  It is not perfect but is okay.  There is so much bright yellow in the blocks in this bunch of blocks.

This was my first day's work and you can clearly see the yellow background.  In some ways, it almost mutes the brighter yellow.  So I forged ahead!

And here is what is done after two days.  I actually found one of those slotted rulers that had 1/4 markings which made the cutting of the strips much more accurate.  These blocks also finish at 8 1/2 inches.  I am going to use purple and dark green in the borders to try to tone it down a bit.  I won't be doing any of the machine quilting until I get back to NC where my faithful Juki is as well as my pool noodles which make basting much easier!  I don't put on borders anymore until I finish machine quilting the whole quilt and get the two sections sewn together.  They lay so much flatter that way and i never have to measure the outside!

Charity Quilt

I decided to interrupt my Farmer's Wife progress with working on a charity quilt using up some of the red strips that I know I won't use for anything else.  One of the other groups I sew for doesn't like red in anything because of the potential of colors running.  We we supposed to bring about 20 colored strips and one solid to the group.  It turns out we were on our own to figure out what to do with them so I decided to go with traditional rail fence.  I made an absolute ton of squares in an hour and a half on my little Featherweight.  Putting them all the design wall like this, I had enough for a single bed quilt. 

However, I just didn't like it.  It felt much too busy to me so then I twisted and turned trying to find something that was more aethetically pleasing to me.  I tried using some black strips and then lining them up in horrizontal rows.

 

I finally came up with this arrangement which I do like!!  All I did was add white strips between each pair.  It kind of looks like a "modern" quilt!  This has inspired me to try mixing and matching some strips in the future.  It  sure doesn't look like rail fence anymore!

I do continue to do the Farmer's Wife 30's blocks and only have a few left to do before I reach my magic number of 90.  There were several in the book I chose not to do and a couple that I couldn't seem to draft at all even though they didn't look at complex.  

This block uses the most different fabrics I have used in any block -- eight!  

This doesn't look that complicated but it was a bear to put together and make sure everything was lined up the way it was supposed to be.

A little tricky!

 

Making Progress!

Progress is being made on the Farmer's Wife 30s quilt but it is far more complex than the 20's one!  I want to make 90 blocks and the book has 99.  I have found, however, for some reason, I don't have patterns drafted for a bunch and I am guessing is that they were too complex for me to do it easily in EQ8 where I drafted all the blocks.  I have had to redo several of the ones I did in EQ as the blocks were too complex as drawn.  This has resulted in duplicate blocks in the file.  As I am using such different colorations from the book, it is difficult to even guess which ones I haven't done anymore.  For some reason, EQ8 did not put them in the order in which I entered them.  If I don't get 90 blocks, I will just add a few I have seen online to make up the difference to 90.  I have 71 done now and a few more I have drafted so am getting down to the wire!

 

These are a couple of my favorites from the last batch.  This one took forever as I kept finding mistakes.  Good thing old age has given me more patience than I had in my youth!

Happy New Year!

Besides doing the binding on a bunch more charity quilts, I have been plugging away on the Farmer's Wife 30's quilts.  I did 14 of these last 8 days which is pretty impressive considering quite a few required templates, wonky angles and odd shapes.  Some I liked better than others.

This required templates and some fancy cutting and sewing to get those points to be points!  It is one of my favorites however.

This was actually one of the easier ones except I had to rip out seams three times on one side as I sewed it on backwards twice and then discovered after taking the picture (and this shows the mistake), I had to reverse two corners.

This one just has lots of pieces but I think it came out okay.  I have been combining as many as five or six different fabrics in each piece.

Another fairly easy one where I changed the color placement even from my created pattern!!

This one was very difficult and still a little wonky.  I also took this one apart after it was finished to change the corner pieces -- even though they were from the same fabric.  It looked unbalanced before.

This one I really like and it was only a little tricky but did require templates as many of the above ones did as well.  The darker pieces are from a scrap of fabric I marbled using black fabric as the base.  The medium blues with the points are literally scraps leftover from binding one of the charity quilts!

This is truly a scrap quilt as I keep a pile of scraps from cutting other pieces next to me and use them whenever I can.  I have also used several of the 10 inch squares I cut from patterned fabric in the summer.  You might recognize some Kaffe Fassett fabric as well as I finally brought it all south.  I do love the colors and boldness of the fabric and I have a lot of it!

 

Farmer's Wife 30s Blocks Continued!

I have continued to work on the Farmer's Wife 1930s blocks but they are much, much harder than the ones in the 1920s book.  I have decided not to do a few as they were just to hard to make a pattern or they were boring.  I will probably have 90 of the 100 blocks done by the time I have finished.  Here are a couple of my recent favorites.  I have a lot more variety of fabrics in my blocks than there is in the books and sometimes this makes for trouble for me as I only have a black and white printer so can only use value as a guide when selecting fabrics,

 

Here is an up to date look at the blocks I have done so far.  Some I like better than others!

This is the setting I will be using as well.  So many of the blocks in the 30s book look better on point than in a straight set.

I have been busy putting binding on charity quilts for a friend who is leaving the area and trying to get the machine quliting done on a large assortment of quilts.  I have gotten really good at machine binding quilts!  

Passacaglia Quilt Finished and a New Beginning for 1930's Farmer's Wife Blocks

Well, I finally finished the Passacaglia quilt!  I did some things differently from the original.  I didn't cut off parts of the quilt just to square it up like the book had you do.  Why do all that piecing just to discard it?  I appliqued it down to a background and did cut off the point of the stars as there was just no way to easily applique those tiny ends down so I just tucked them under.  I then cut away all the background behind the main part of the quilt.  This background was had dyed just for this.  At first I was going to do yellow but didn't care for how it looked so overdyed the yellow with blue to get this very dark green/blue which kind of goes into the background!  It measures 60 across by 65 down.  

The machine quilting was all freehand.  I chose to go with the machine quilting using matching thread for the most part as I didn't want the quilting to detract.  It is mostly in the "ditch".  It is not a quilt you should look at from a foot away but 3 feet away it isn't bad!  The pieces were so tiny, I have no idea how anyone could contemplate hand quilting it but I know a lot have!  Most of the centers of the circles were "fussy-cut" for my usual kaleidoscopic effect.  My daughter indicated she wanted to hang it on her high wall but don't know whether she realizes the size.  I won't be insulted if she changes her mind!

As we had an "Open Sew" day at Guild, I decided to work on the blocks from the 1930's Farmer's Wife book.  These blocks are a LOT harder than the ones in the 1920's book, many of which had over 50 pieces each!!  Some of these blocks are on an 8 x 8 grid which means the individual pieces in the block finish to 3/4 inch sometimes!!  I was literally stumped on how to piece one today but have edited the pattern and think now I can do it -- it is on an 8 x 8 guild and involves partial seams!

You can see I have chosen a different palette for this one.  I am going with old faithful blues, greens and beige/whites with a touch of purple thrown in and maybe a little pale yellow at some point.

 

The End of the 1920s Farmer's Wife Blocks-

I have finished 100 of the blocks in this first book.  There were 111 in the book.  Some I didn't want to do because they were just plain boring or symbolic of things I don't like but I think there were a couple I just plain missed!  This is the first 66 which I posted before.

This is the remaining 34 that I finished today.  My thought is to border each block with either a dark or light fabric and then sash them which will make a pretty good sized quilt which I will quilt in 4 sections and then sew together.  That will have to wait a bit though.  I may start on the 30's one but not with the same determination I have had with this one.

This and the next two are closeups of some of the blocks I liked best.

 

Farmer's Wife Blocks, Some Charity stuff and Blocks for Our Guild Raffle Quilt!

I should have added some hand dyeing to the iist of things done the last couple of weeks!  This was the most successful of my last dyeing adventure.  The picture doesn't adequately show what a nice purple gradation it is made with Jacquard Deep Purple.  I also did some ice dyeing with random fabric which turned out very pale and uninteresting so may  just throw it into a dye pot and overdye.  My one experiment was quite successful though.  It was copying something I saw on the Ice Dyers list on Facebook.  Many of the dyers just put down dry fabric, then sprinkle soda ash and dyes on top and then put ice over everything..  I was sure I would get spots of concentrated dyes doing this but didn't.  I used a lilttle Intense Blue and Basic Blue from ProChem as the dyes and got some nice mottling which will be great for skies.

This is just a small sample of the 2 1/2 in blue strips I have filling 4  two and one half gallon plastic bags.  They will be used in making background squares for the Guild's newest raffle quilt. 

I made seven blocks so far and ran out of the fabric I was given to include in each block.

This was extra challenging.  I was given a panel with 8 scenes on it and needed to make a 50 x 60 in quilt or close to it.  I was also given a small amount of the gold and reddish fabric and the black.  I ran out of the gold so went into my stash when I got home and added the greens.  I also ran out of the black but knew it was the same block of which I had a bolt.  I also had to come up with a center block.  Of course the panel squares were not square so had to take that into consideration when figuring out the center block.

Our Guild had an open sew day at a local facility and I took several of the Farmer's Wife blocks to construct there.  This is the result of that day.  I had one other block but I had the measurements wrong so had to bring it back home.  Even home, I messed it up twice before coming up with a ho-hum block!

I did these three blocks yesterday.  The first one I did using the fast "Flying Geese" method rather than making half square triangles so it was super fast!  As you make four at a time with this method, I had 2 left over which I used today in a block!!

This is one of the two blocks I did today.  These were a little trickier than some and took a little more time.    This is the one that used the left over flying geese from the first of the three blocks above so you can see the truer color there!

This was the second block done today and definitely more challenging.  I had to use templates for all the pieces.