A Brief Update!

Well, this is the beginning of this new quilt which I was determined to make a little scrappier.  I must say that it was easier said than done!!  For this block to be successful, you really have to have a firm delineation of light, medium and dark.  Normally when doing a scrap quilt I play around with relativity and will use a medium as a dark or a light.  It just doesn't work with this block.  I used my phone to determine whether the cut strips were dark, medium or light by converting the colors to black and grays and whites.  Even doing that, I had to take apart two blocks as the contrast was not enough and fabrics picked as lights really worked better as mediums  Sewing them together in the right order requires me staring at the blocks on the wall to make sure I do them in the right order.  

You only sew three of the hexagons together as you eventually put them together in rows so there are no Y seams.  I am imagining other interpretations and mixing these hexagons with some stack and whacks.  We shall see.  I think I just like hexagons in any form!

I have updated two of the rosettes so still making progress on the Passacaglia!  Currently my approach is the same as I do with many scrap quilts.  I make a whole lot of individual pieces, finishing about 3/4 of the top, put them together on the design wall and then more carefully select what the remainder shhould be so that things look balanced.  It drives me crazy if there isn't some rhyme or reason to a top!  I can't imagine hand quilting this monster so will carefully machine quilt it if I ever get it done!!

I am still forcing myself to de-stash and am daily finding some surprises like large pieces of leather and suede I found today.  What was i thinking?  Also found a piece of 50 year old Marimekko fabric which is quite stunning. 

 
 

Inspiration!

This is the box of fabrics that I am currently pulling from for the Passacaglia quilt.  I think I have the whole rainbow there!  Making progress but nothing new to put on the wall for awhile as I am doing the cutting, ironing, glueing steps right now!

This top is almost done.  I just need to add a yellow border and then a green/purple flower fabric border.  It will be about 40 x 90 when done, enough for a cot.  I didn't bother to try to find a specific arrangement or attempt to put colors next to each other but did twist the blocks around so they weren't all going in the same direction.  Just too lazy!!

I saw a quilt on Scrap Quilter Enthusiasts on Facebook and loved the look of it. It is a variation of the Tumbling Blocks quilt -- Ill call it a box in a box  It looked like she cut the individual pieces but looking at it, I decided you could do it in 2 color strips.  I grabbed a piece of paper and decided how each 60 degree triangle was made and saw that you could do three strips sets and then cut the triangles using a 60 degree ruler.

The hexagon triangles were:

1. medium/light,

 2. dark/light,

 3.dark/medium,

 4.light/medium,

 5. light/dark and

 6.medium dark

You could make these combinations with three sets of strips: 1 + 4, 2 + 5 and 3 + 6.  

These are the three strips:  dark/medium, light/medium and dark light.

These are the resultant triangles cut with a 60 degree ruler.

I used 2 1/2 inch strips which should result in blocks about nine inches across.  I have literally tons of 2 1/2 inch strips already cut at my other home and will for sure make some of these quilts as they are super easy to put together and have a stunning look I think!  

I spend at least an hour every day working or cleaning out my stash before I allow myself any playing with blocks or cutting the pieces for the Passacaglia quilt.

I want this quilt to look more scrappy so will use shorter strip sets -- 22  inches wide instead of the full width of the fabric as I do like variety and much prefer a scrappy look!

Like many, I look at Pinterest and Scrap Quilters on Facebook for inspiration and then I try to find an easy way to construct the quilts.  I have been collecting a lot of 4-patch designs and recently half square triangle designs.  So many make complicated looking blocks when they are easy.  I play around with Electric Quilt to figure out the block and piece sizes and occasionally a color arrangement.  The temptation is always to just figure I am finished when I get a decent design using the software!

Taking a Break from De-stashing

I was going through plastic bags of "stuff" during my clean up and found a bag with bunches of these pieces and two completed blocks.  I hadn't remembered making a quilt from these but looking through my quilts on Pinterest, I found the quilt and remember it now.  It was too  much temptation and so I made a few more blocks.  

An hour later, I had nine blocks!  But I decided I needed more variety so went through some of the boxes I had and found some more different purples, greens and orange/yellows.

So now I have 16 blocks which if I had a two inch border will make a baby sized quilt but I am contemplating doubling that for a cot sized quilt.  I, of course, have lots and lots of pieces left. 

Each block is made up of 1 2 1/2 inch x 9 1/2 in strip, 3 3 1/2 inch squares and 2 5 inch squares.  I will be moving these pieces around as it looks best when you have some of the fabrics butting up next to each other in side by side blocks.  Then the blocks disappear.  It makes up very fast!

I actually have at least one more of the  larger rosettes done since taking this picture.  You can see I am progressing on the Passacaglia quilt.

I am trying to spend 2 hours a day groing through my fabric and selecting those that I will keep and those that will be sold or given away.  I also spend about 2 hours a day doing the hand sewing on the Passacaglia while watching mindless television!  
 

 

Catching Up!!

 It has been a long time since my last update which is a rarity for me!!  Yes, I am still alive and thriving and actually doing a  little work.  My biggest accomplishment has been trying to tame my stash of fabrics and sewing gear!!  I plan on having a sale this year to hopefully get rid of a lot of it.  That which isn't purchased will be donated to various charitable groups that either sell craft related supplies or groups that make quilts for charity.  Last year I decided I only wanted to work with fabric that I loved and not because it would look good cut up!  This applied primarily to all those "stack and whack" fabrics I have collected over the years.  I also have found that I don't have the same palette taste that I had when living up north full time. 

I have been diligently working on the Passaglia "rosettes" each day though and have made significant progress and may actually get this done some day!  This was where I was at the beginning of May.  It takes me about two hours to do those first three rows of hand stitching and there is a lot of wonkiness which hopefully will be less noticeable when all the papers are removed (if I am ever able to get them out!).

You can see the progress.

I am almost done with the rosettes and have taken the pattern and decided how to vary it from the original.  I will have eliminated several partial rosettes and will be constructing some of them a little differently.  The big block in the center is one of four that has more rows around it and I am working on the second of these now.  I still have a couple of more rosettes to complete as well.  The remaining rosettes will all  have some partial row of the stars around them, some more than others so the design wall will definitely be in  use so that I don't have any blaring color combinations as I have used the rainbow of fabrics here, good scrap quilter that I am!!

I have boxes and boxes of stuff to sell or get rid of and I couldn't face another day of doing that so I started machine quilting one of the "one block wonders" (the Canada goose) the other day and am happy to get back to some machine sewing.  It will hopefully inspire me to keep going on the "de-stashing".  Besides my sewing room, I also have my basement to deal with.  I was taken aback to find I had four more rather large boxes of hand dyes down there and may just include them in the garage sale but will keep whatever remains rather than donating.  I thought I had brought all the hand dyes either to southern home or upstairs!  One box is filled with just millions of shades of browns from golds to rusts.

Just a couple of spring pictures from here in western NY  This is the magnolia in the front yard in full bloom.

This is one of our Japanese Cherry trees.

My daughter's yard is full of babies this time of year.  She has had red shouldered hawks, Canada goslings, bluebirds and opossum in past years.  This year there are two families of Canada Geese as well as this nest with baby cardinals she discovered in a bush right next to her house.  She has had to monitor her cats closely until they fledge.

A Couple of Days of Extreme Overdyeing!

Well, this weekend was a marathon extreme overdyeing session with my friend Dianne.  We haven't done one of these massive dyeing sessions in quite some time. So we dyed 70 yards of fabrics over two days and resulting in 35 different colors.  I let her pick the palette this time and she picked mostly brights from my dye book.  We substituted a couple of colors so we would get something a little different.  I used some sateen I have had for probably 40 years -- not pfd but they used to give me pretty good results.  Dianne had Kona and hers were definitely darker in some colors.  This grouping is the colors we did the first day, They were (ProChem names) Boysenberry, Grape, very very dilute Strong Orange, Basic Blue and Leaf Green (which I don't think they make any more).  The Basic Blue was very light so I suspect is was getting over the hill.

The second day we overdyed each of the above colors with Fuchsia, Lemon Yellow, Golden Yellow, Turquoise and their new Navy (which I really like). 

This bunch is the above colors overdyed with fuchsia.  The differences are very subtle but they are there!

This is the Lemon Yellow overdyeing the first bunch of fabrics above with Lemon Yellow (top 6) and Golden Yellow (bottom).

This is the very first bunch overdyed with ProChem's new Navy (I think 420).  Again, the differences are subtle as it is pretty overpowering and there were some very light colors dyed the first day.

This is those first colors overdyed with Turquoise.  I think they are a little darker than it looks in the picture.

This is the whole pile of 35 different colors.  I was relatively pleased with the results even though some colors were a little closer than I normally get.  I can easily see a quilt made with those paler colors and some white! 

This is the chart that shows the dyes and results.  The one that is missing is still at Dianne's but I assume it will be a kind of deepish orange when I add it!

 

My Passacaglia Process

 

It seemed like the time to document my process for making the Passacaglia quilt featured in Willyne Hammerstein's Millefiori Quilts book which I bought a few years ago.  I really don't know what possessed me!!!  It can really only be constructed with hand piecing or English Paper Piecing which is the approach I chose.  It is really a complicated quilt to say the least and I hadn't touched it in quite some time until I picked it up about a month ago.  Unfortunately at that time, after searching the house, I couldn't find the book and decided I had left it back north!  Luckily, I had been a iittle compulsive when I started and photocopied one page of the book and had all the templates stored in their respective envelopes with notes on how big a strip or piece I needed as well as how many I had to made for each row (I call a row one round on the quilt).  I glued a copy of the piece contained in the envelope on the front.  There are only five different shapes in the quilt but the smallest and most frequently used is only 7/8 in finished!!  They are the star points.

Until this week I was cutting out the pieces individually.  A lot of the pieces (the fussy cut ones) still demand that but this week I decided to try those little clips that people use for attaching quilt binding to hold my plastic templates on the fabric.  Wow, did that improved the speed of cutting!!!  I pile up 8 - 10 pieces of fabric, put the clips on, make a cut and then re-arrange these little clips.  You really need to use at least 2 of the clip to stabilize and it does a great job!  This was after the first cut.

After the first cut I move the clips around.  I do this with both the fabric and the papers and it really moves things along.

After I have cut all the fabric and their corresponding papers (1/4 to 3/8 in smaller all the way around), I was at first basting the fabric onto the papers (I use freezer paper and iron it on) using water soluble thread which you can see in this close-up if you look at the center of this rosette.

I tried using glue some time ago (Elmer's which is water soluble) but it was too hard so searching on line I found a couple of water soluble glues to try and finally settled on Roxanne's.  So while watching tv, I patiently glue the 1/4 inch seams down.  Again, at first I was putting the glue on the flap of fabric but now I put it on the paper and press down the flap of fabric.  This works much better.  I believe I saw this hint on a Tula Pink video but not sure.  

A couple of days ago I got some sewing magnets in the mail (which I think was another Tula Pink hint) and I use those on either side of the two fabric pieces I am sewing together.  This works really well to hold those little pieces in place so I can do the whip stitches.  It also traps those little flaps that the thread often gets caught on.  

Another thing I am doing differently (and I know this was a Tula Pink idea) is to make a simple knot at the beginning of stitching.  Impossible to explain it but it is the knot I use when finishing off a row so I was familiar with it. 

This is the sum  of the rosettes that I have done so far.  The big rosette is one of three.  The two with the stars around the outside are the beginnings of two more like the big one and then there will be one more like them.  There is one more big block which has much more of a partial series of rows than this big one.  The two small rosettes will have different numbers of stars around them and you make about 25 of these.  The big rosette is about 20 inches across to give you an idea of size.

Yesterday I actually put an Excel spreadsheet together to keep track of what I have to do.  This was easy as in the process of cleaning up my dining room table, I found the book!!  So now I have a better idea of what I have to do as it gives clear pictures of the remaining rosettes and how many you have to make of each.  

One thing that makes no sense whatsoever to me is that the last step in making the quilt in the book is to trim away large chunks of rosettes that you have carefully pieced.  No way I am doing this and my last step will be appiqueing however much I finish onto a piece of fabric.  I decided if you cut off the last point of the stars on the outside rows, you have a nice easy to applique edge.  So will have to do some more calculating.  

The Brown Tote and More Progress!

I have piles of 2 1/2 inch brown strips, a bunch of which I used for the last quilt.  I am going to give them away.  I have a pattern for a tote that uses the kinds of strips from which I made a rug a couple of years ago.  I always cut up leftover batting and tried to give that away but no one wanted it so I decided to give the pattern a try.  I had bought it when I won a jelly roll of beautiful batiks figuring I would use them.  I hated to use them before testing the pattern out.  I just started sewing the batting in the strips and then sewing them together.  The pattern called for 40 strips so that is what I did.  It was quite soothing.  I wasn't in the mood to baste baby quilts and needed something different to do.

Here is a bunch of strips sewn together.  I started using tape to keep them straight as the middle was beginning to bow a bit!  The tape worked well so will be using that again.

Here is the bag with the sides sewn together and a pleat in the bottom so that there is some depth to the bag.  I trimmed off all the extra as the strips were all different lengths.

Here I have added the band around the top.  The instructions were not very good on the pattern for how to join the band but I winged it and it is okay.

I decided to just use two more of the strips as the handles and that worked just fine although I will put an additional row of stitching the next time I do it.  It measures about 18 x 18 and is about 6 inches deep.  That is bigger than the pattern shows but she had you cut it down more which seemed like a waste to me.  It stands up by itself but is a little beefy!  I may do another one as it did substantially decrease my stash of the strips of batting!!  You can actually see a little drop in the bag of brown strips as well!

Making progress on the Passacaglia quilt as well.  Working on the next rosette now.  Not sure just how much I will do or how I would fill in areas.

I finished a couple of baby quilt tops with strips I had cut out some time ago but had to supplement them.  They are tops in the these pictures but I basted and machine quilted them today.  Still have a little to go with some free hand quilting on this one.  

It took a couple of afternoons to iron all that fabric!  I also over-dyed the very green looking black with green.  A couple in the gradation of grays were okay so didn't dye them all.  Realized after the fact that I had done a gradation of the new blue a couple of months ago so may overdye that blue as well at some point.