skip to main |
skip to sidebar
This is the Mystery Quilt which I finally completed after ripping out more stitches than I sewed the last couple of days. This is a classic example of "haste makes waste". Normally, when I get this frustrated, I just give up and wait for another day.
I went over to my friend Marcia's house and worked on this quilt. We did so much talking, however, that I had to finish it at home. I will not add another border but will bind with a nice dark blue, green or purple. It measures about 40 x 50 (10 inch blocks).
This is Millie. She is a feral momma cat that lived in Marcia's barn for years and years. She finally let Marcia pet her and a couple of years ago actually came into the house. She liked it so well, she never left!! She now even tolerates visitors and came to visit a couple of times while we were working!
This is Casper who was a kitty that someone dumped. He is super friendly and a lovely kitty. He is deaf though but has blossomed from a scrawny kitty to a big white puffball whose weight we shall not mention!!
This is the beginning of another house quilt. I made four strips of greens and used 45 degree and 60 degree rulers to cut out the shapes. If I make 2 more 60 degree triangles, I will have enough for two more house quilts. I have enough "kits" of houses to put together to make at least two quilts as well. It is a great use of shorter 2 inch strips. So now to just add the tree trunks!!
I liked the set so well for the mystery quilt, I created an EQ8 quilt with it as I think it would be an ideal set for some of my mandalas so I just played with some blocks that looked like the mandalas just to get an ideal. I think it will really work!
I have been going through all my fabrics and found a shelf full that I hadn't seen in awhile (blocked behind a plastic box!). I had forgotten that I had bought a bunch of these beautiful Sherrill Kahn fabrics she did for Robert Kaufman. They are so pretty, I will probably use large chunks in whatever I decide to do. I have a couple of her books which are about painting on fabrics.
Also my friend Julia is selling some of my mandalas on ETSY. Here is a link to one of the recent additions- One of my mandalas. If you click on her store, you will see more. The ones currently shone are all about 21 inches square and we will be adding the 11 inch squares next week. We shall see how it goes!!
Each year, the guild I belong to down in North Carolina has a mystery quilt where we get clues once a month for several months and then have a "reveal" in December. I have enjoyed doing these. For those not familiar with the concept, you are given a menu of what value fabric you are to get as well as how much you will need. Then you get cutting instructions and then each month, you get some piecing instructions but you never know until the last month how this will all go together. This year's called for so many different fabrics, I was very hesitant to go my usual scrappy way but did as much as I could.
These are the first two blocks I finished along with the secondary blocks (the x's) that we did a couple o months ago. You can see there is very little difference between the two blocks and they should look quite a bit different. The last step was adding those middle squares, all of the same fabric. I ended up taking the one on the right apart and changing the middle fabric to a green so that they would be a little more different. Don't know whether I did something wrong as I was going along or not They should have looked quite a bit different from a value standpoint.
Here you can see those center 4 blocks and the darker one on the far right on the outside. This will be the layout of the quilt. I used nothing but fabrics from my stash including some scraps I had from backing a quilt as well as a bit of my hand dyes.
At this point, I decided to see how the borders would look and put one set up on the design wall. Well, the two borders go well together but don't look at all good with the rest of the quilt. The focus fabric is more a blue-purple whereas the other purples are more of a red-purple and the green in the border fabric is a blue-green while in the quilt, the green definitely tends more to yellow. Ugh, so now to find a fabric that works and undo the whole set of borders. I saw no point in making a ugly quilt just to follow the directions!!
Well, after much searching, I did find a fabric that I liked better and luckily had enough of to work with. Here you can see that I have decided to replace the inner border fabric as well. This was the second set of strips I had cut up and it still didn't work for me!
I finally went back to the fabrics I had picked out for the quilt and found some leftovers from the secondary blocks and like the three bears, this one seemed just right! It was a scrap from a backing fabric, so it had the added benefit of being extra long so I didn't have to piece the border. I think overall the biggest problem I had with the borders was that I very very rarely would include a fabric in the border that didn't occur somewhere else in the quilt.
Well, off to sew this altogether and decide if I want to add another deep purple border to the outside. I will definitely be doing some quilting with dark purple thread in those white squares on the outside -- probably some kind of flower. Stay tuned!!
Our guest speaker for this month was our own Becky Bucci who talked about her evolution as an artist. In the background is this incredible hexagon quilt -- all hand done and hand quilted as well. I figured it had close to 10,000 pieces in it!!
Besides a really inspiring talk, Becky brought many examples of her art work in a variety of mediums. She discussed how she evolved through embroidery, needlepoint, and knitting before arriving at quilting.
Many of us have experienced the same journey. I have sewn since I was about 8, knitted soon thereafter and picked up embroidery and needlepoint later on. I always knew I would quilt though from about the 1960s on although I didn't take my first class until 1976.
Here is a bit closer view of the hexie quilt.
I was shocked by the number of people that participated in our Mystery Quilt Challenge. I am sure I didn't get pictures of all the quilts and mine basically didn't show at all as there was just no room!
I got pictures of as many as I could as they were a moving target and there were a lot of them -- I think close to 25 which I think is a really good showing!! (I think some of our missing members also made one as well.) I wish I could have gotten everyone to pose with their individual quilts at the end of the meeting! It was very cool!
This last one is mine. I do think that I was the only one that did a scrap quilt version of the mystery quilt. Below is a closeup of my quilting. It turned into a pretty big quilt!!
I decided there were so many pictures that I would have to do 2 blog posts this month so neonatal quilts and show and tell will come out tomorrow!!
All 90 blocks are finally finished and all sewn together!! Someone on Scrap Enthusiasts (a FB group) said it looked like blue doughnuts but I decided it was more like a blueberry bagel.
The weather was so warm the other day that I could take my 3 30 inch by 72 inch tables outside and spray baste this quilt and the mystery quilt. These are both really good sized quilts but the tables made it easy. I used clamps to hold down the quilts in halves as I did the spraying. It was still pretty back breaking but it was gorgeous outside and it's done.
We are having the unveiling of our mystery quilts in our January QBTS meeting so onward to doing the machine quilting. I don't have my nice table down here but took two of the above mentioned tables and made an "L" with one in front of the machine and one next to my left side. Has made life much easier!!
If you look closely, you can see the stitching. I stitched in the ditch around all these giant blocks to stabilize the whole thing. I then stitched in the ditch around all the green and added a row of stitching between the two outlines of green. Then I outline stitched the remaining sides of the yellow and did the machine equivalent of 1/4 inch of hand quilting. I did a double row of this around all the yellow pieces. I haven't finished all the yellows yet and then onward to the purple. I am doing something simple here as well and just doing a double row of stitches outlining the star. I am keeping the quilting fairly simple here. This way I won't have to do any more quilting in the light background.'
I will still have to do some quilting in the outer border though but will probably be one of my old standbys as it won't show anyway!!
I already know just how I am going to quilt the bagel quilt which will have more quilting.
I bought some new rulers for cutting down blocks and was very impressed with the brand which I hadn't seen before -- Arteza. They were fairly inexpensive and came with sticky dots so they wouldn't slip. After using a gigundo ruler to cut down all those kaleidoscope blocks, I decided I needed some smaller square rulers which I got on Amazon.
My blog got left by the wayside for awhile as my old whiplash injury was bothering my neck and then I managed to complicate that with an annoying case of vertigo. I have suffered with this twice before -- once it was like this one and another time it was very transient. It is scary and I always check things to make sure it is not a stroke!
I am on the mend and catching up with chores and quilts. I finished binding 29 stack and whack quilts a couple of weeks ago. I am keeping five temporarily as I have a guild program back in Rochester in the spring about stack and whack quilts. 20 are being donated to the Sweet Charity group and 4 are being donated to the neo-natal group.
The above quilt top was a mystery quilt with the clues being given each month since May and finishing a few days ago. I really had no idea what the final product would look like. I had originally planned to include orange in this quilt but thought that orange would too quickly overwhelm everything if there was too much of it. I am very glad I made that decision now and am a little concerned about the amount of yellow as it takes a lot of purple to balance this much yellow. I will probably do purple quilting in the yellow blocks. Each of these blocks finishes to 24 inches so the top is currently 72 x 72. I will be adding borders to hopefully make it about 82 x 82. It is a little overpowering right now because of these large blocks!! I am very glad I went the scrappy route though. I will be doing lots of scrappy quilts this winter!!
I now have to get several of the larger stack and whacks basted and quilted -- I have all the parts, just need to get the together!
I eventually will learn what key I hit that causes everything to disappear that I spent 15 minutes typing.
This is the beginning of a vegetable stack and whack. I have had this fabric for years and made a quilt out of it probably 20 years ago -- the only quilt I have ever sold!! I decided it was time to use the rest of the fabric which was enough to make these smaller 8 sided kaleidoscopes -- 51 in all and also to make larger 5 inch triangles which resulted in 27 motifs. I wanted to do a different setting for these 6 inch (5 1/2 inch finished) blocks so decided to set them on point and 18 would make a nice sized quilt top.
This is the fabric which has a 16 inch repeat. The above motifs used a 3 1/4 inch triangle.
Here I am testing my idea for filling in the sides and the sashing between the blocks. I initially decided to use orange for all the cornerstones, figuring red would make it look like a Christmas quilt.
I decided that all orange was too much so alternated it with the green for the cornerstones.
Almost done!
I finally finished this quilt top and kind of like it. It is about 45 x 57 inches. I have decided not to add any more borders and will probably use a dark green for binding. I don't have enough of either the orange or green.
I decided to take a break from the kaleidoscope quilts and work on our club's mystery quilt. The first month's clue was the cutting directions. The second month resulted in "flying geese" using the shortcut technique. The July clue resulted in these "square in a square". You can see that I decided to go scrappy (what a surprise!!). I originally had orange instead of the off white but was afraid that somehow it would end up too bright as I didn't know what the proportion of the colors would be and yellow and orange go a LONG way!. It will be interesting to see what everyone does. I still have to press and trim up the square in a square but will be good until August!
Posts
