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!

Quilters By the Sea January Meeting -- Linda Snow Presention!

We had a real treat yesterday with Linda Snow doing a program on the many many block exchanges she has participated in!!  There were so many beautiful quilts and lots of ideas for doing more scrap quilts.  This is the quilt that greeted us as we came in and was one of the latest.  Just gorgeous!

I am not including all of them in the post and she also showed baggies filled with leftover blocks she had as well!  I used my telephone camera instead of a real one so forgive the not quite as crisp  images!

She spoke a lot about the rules of the exchanges as what can go wrong!  I certainly am familiar with that having been on a few exchanges where there were workmanship and size issues!  It is fun to get to see all the different fabrics and interpretations though.

I have done one of this type.

Loved the colors in this one!

This was a pattern I had never seen before.

Here are a bunch more for your perusal!

Loved the colors!

 

Also one of my favorites!

I realize I have these in reverse order of the presentation as this is one of her earlier exchanges.

We also had show and tell.  I believe this was Judy's made from strips she got at a retreat.

This one was beautiful on both front and back!  Quilter is shown but I don't have her name as usual!

This was another two sided quilt made with t-shirts and it was pretty spectacular.  I have a stash of tshirts that I will get to at some point.  This was the back.  I wasn't quick enough to get the front too!

This is one of two mystery quilts that were shown.  

Following the meeting, a few of stayed, were social and worked on some projects.  I managed to finish a couple of Farmer's Wife blocks but managed to short myself on pieces for two others so hopefully will get those done today!

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!  

Death of a Friend - Priscilla Kibbee

I heard this week that my friend Priscilla Kibbee had died after a long bout with cancer.  Becausse of Covid and her move out of the area, I hadn't seen her in a couple of years. Here she is at her sale table at one of our quilt meetings.

 This was a quilt I did with one of the many, many beautiful molas as an inspiration.  I bought far too many from her over the years but the price was always right.  She traveled extensively in Asia and South America well into her 80s.  She designed beautiful garments which were highlighted in many Fairfield Fashion shows over the years.  This was after a successful career in nursing, writing and education.  I have 100's of pictures I have taken of her and her beautiful textiles over the years and will share a few.

Although she was certainly known for her garments, later in life she started doing art quilts as well and this is one of my favorites.

This was a quilt she made using nine of her beautiful molas which she bought directly from the Kuna Indians.

This is one of Priscilla's jackets being constructed.  I have made many jackets from patterns and techniques I learned from Priscilla who taught at many quilt conferences.  We were fortunate to have her locally so I got to spend time with her at another friend's house.

Priscilla loved bold fabrics and her is her with one of her quilts in process.  She really didn't make a lot of quilts until later in life.

She had a lot of tiger prints and was trying to figure out what kind of quilt to make with them.  

Like my daughter, she always had a Diet Coke nearby.

Priscilla with her mola quilt in the background working on the beginnings of a jacket.

Priscilla's creations and lessons will live on for a long time.  There are lots of us who purchased who beautiful textiles that she collected from India, South America, Laos,  andViet Nam .  She financed her extensive travels by selling many of these textiles and

The title I had for this one was "Priscilla's Toned down Piece"!

She really did get into art quilts with a vengence.  She never did anything halfway!

Another of her later pieces.

I understand there will be an estate sale sometime in the future, probably in the Binghamton, NY area where she moved to several years ago to be closer to her daughter.

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.