Coffee Anyone? is finished!!!

A month has flown by since I dove in learning to use Marti Michell's templates to make her Lazy Afternoon. I kept at it and with this past Saturday's monthly Marti & Me class fast approaching, I spent Friday at the HQ16 quilting my Coffee Anyone? quilt. I wanted to have it as done as I could to take to share with the class. Miracle of miracles, the quilting was done, quilt trimmed, and the big tables put up in the living room and taken back down and stowed in the garage before midnight! In fact, before 10pm!!! After class I went home and sewed the binding on and last night and today worked on hand stitching the binding down. It's nice to have it done and I'm happy with how it turned out.

As a followup to my post about using the soluble stabilizer to trace-and-stitch my quilting design, after sleeping (and dreaming) on it, on Friday morning I decided I wanted the quilting done with more precision, so I ripped it all out and started over. Thank goodness I had only quilted one block!  Instead, I used the same design as before, but used my ruler and chalk roller to draw all the lines very straight and then used my Stitch-in-the-Ditch ruler as a guide to keep the lines straight as I sewed. I was able to adapt the design to fit the four outer star blocks specifically as well. It was fun to get it all figured out and stitch each block completely with only one jump from the small inner square to the outer square in the center of the main design. The entire quilt was pieced and quilted with Aurifil 50 in either ivory, light blue or dark brown, with the exception of the ditch work done with clear YLI Wonder Invisible Thread on top.

Here's a closeup of the geometric quilting design in one of the star blocks. I modified the center star design slightly for the four outside stars so that the quilting goes up into the points. For the four corner Jacob's Ladders, I ditched the triangles, stitched a single line diagonally from the top corner through the three central squares and on through the adjacent small tan square as well. Then I waffled the tan triangles to give the block some texture. The cups border print on the top and bottom have stipple around them and a single outline of each cup to help them pop.

I even pieced the back with leftover striped prints from the half-yard cuts in the original bundle of coffee fabrics. I'm loving the color play and how cute it turned out!

 

This was a fun little quilt to make. Today while I was sewing the binding down, Jacob kept coming over and burying his head in the quilt and giggling, and then started pulling on it! I still had a needle in it, so I couldn't let him take it. When I threw another quilt over him, he just tossed it aside and came back to the Coffee Anyone? I guess he likes it! He's not a coffee drinker yet (he's only 13 months old), but his folks sure are! With both hands busy keeping the needle out of his reach I didn't get a pic, but will try to snap him with it next week when we start our fall semester daycare routine up again.

More Coffee is on the design board and will be talked about later in the week probably. It's the second quilt from this box of fabrics and there's plenty left for yet another one or two! I think scraps multiply when we're not watching! Or I may take a break from this theme to work on the next Marti & Me, the Seven Sisters quilt. I've pulled a bunch of Christmas fabrics to play with on that one. Should be fun!

More snippets from the sewing room soon,
Liz

Trace-and-stitch experiment with wash-away stabilizer

I read a tip recently in some quilting magazine (looking at stacks of quilting magazines, both new and new-to-me around my house, who knows which one!) that one way to get your quilting designs onto the quilt after sandwiching is to trace the design onto soluble stabilizer, pin it to the quilt, and just stitch through it by following the lines. After you quilt it, the stabilizer will easily tear away and any left behind in the stitches will wash away when you wash the quilt. Since I do all my own quilting on either my regular sewing machine or on my HQ16 sit-down model, anything to make the quilting process easier is worth trying!

In the past I've printed quilting designs from my computer onto regular paper, which I found was too thick and hard to remove even with the natural perforation of the stitches. Then I had foundation paper recommended to me, which I used to stitch the feathered heart on Heartfelt Love and that worked well for the most part. There were a couple of drawbacks with that method. First, it's difficult to truly center your design because you can't see through the paper. I cut the design out close to the stitch lines in order to better see where I wanted it to go on the block, but then had problems keeping the quilting foot from catching on the paper at the edges and tearing. Although not as bad, even the foundation paper was hard to remove in some cases where stitches were built up and bits of paper were left behind. I had to go after several spots with tweezers and pins to get all the bits of paper out before I was truly satisfied.

So, I've been looking for another method of getting fun designs onto my quilt tops. I've collected some fun books of quilting designs including some great dinosaurs that I want to use on my grandson's quilt, but haven't done anything with them because I just didn't have a good way to trace them. Using a soluble stabilizer seemed like a brilliant idea when I read it, but I needed to try it for myself to see how it really works. Here's what I learned from tonight's experiment.

I recently purchased a roll of Pellon Sol-U-Film Lite, a wash-away embroidery stabilizer. Initially I had planned on using it as a topper for my machine embroidery projects and probably still will. Since it was sitting on my cabinet in plain sight (my other soluble stabilizers are still lost in the shuffle of my last move) and I had a quilt ready to be quilted with designs from my computer, I figured it would be a great place to start in trying out this technique. First I found a star design in my EQ7 quilting designs that fit the block style I was trying to fill. I printed it onto regular paper in the dimensions of the target block, taped the tiled image together (10" design that fit the star in the 12" block), and then taped the Sol-U-Film Lite over the printout on my cutting mat. The first thing I noticed right off is that this particular product is definitely a LITE version! It is almost as flimsy as the old saran wraps of the past that made my mother say words she didn't typically say. But I continued on since it was purely an experiment and I wanted to know whether this technique would work at all.

I tried several different pens and markers and the only one that would write on the film was a Sharpie--green happened to be the color that was in the pencil cup on my desk. I was a little worried about that since Sharpies are permanent, but I made sure the ink was completely dry before taking it anywhere near my quilt (rubbing across the traced lines with my hand didn't turn it green). 

A problem I didn't really consider when I started this experiment was the fact that I was working with a 10" design and this particular roll of film is only 7-7/8" wide (looking online I see that it also comes in 12" widths  *Sigh...). I was already setting myself up to fail on some level because it wasn't quite big enough for the design I wanted to transfer; however, since it was only two points (I think you can see where the film didn't reach to the edges of the top & bottom points on the first picture), I figured I could probably wing it and stitch the points without the lines drawn in those spots. 

Most of the designs I use typically have a lot of curves to them, so they're much more forgiving than the design I picked for this quilt. I prefer those curvy designs, but this one fit the block so well! As you can see I just drew the lines and didn't use a ruler to be sure they were all straight. Being in a hurry to try it at the machine, I was sloppier than usual and, although the lines are all there and pretty close, a little more precision in the tracing before would probably make the end results a little better. But, hey, it was an experiment!

After the design was drawn and I was sure the ink was fully dry, I pinned the film onto the quilt. I'm so glad I had the design on film that I could see through because once I put the design on the block, I realized I liked it much better tilted with the sharp points in the corner blocks instead of straight up the way it printed. I probably wouldn't have been aware of that subtlety had I been using foundation paper. After centering and pinning the design over the block where I wanted it, I began stitching, starting with the center square, jumping to the next square and continuing to add rounds until it was complete. As expected, the two points that weren't on the film were a little problematic. On one point when I stitched off the film, the foot got caught under the film when I sewed back towards the center. I had to hold the film down securely while moving the quilt to get the needle & foot to bounce over it and not get caught further and pull the film askew. Otherwise, it worked just fine and the traced lines were visible even on the black background fabric.

Once the stitching was done, I was able to tear the film away as it was perforated along all the stitching lines. It tore away easily and even the pieces on the interior of the design came up easily once the outer piece was removed. There were only one or two spots at v-shaped joints where I had to dab away any remainders of the film with a damp cloth.

The quilted block looks great! I'll do this again only using a roll of stabilizer film that is wider than the block I'm working on. For 6" or 7" blocks, this roll will work fine since I can easily secure the film over the entire block without worrying about stitching off the edge. Overall, this is a great way to get the designs from a program like EQ7 or fun designs from books onto a quilt without having to plan ahead and use a light box to trace before sandwiching. I typically let the quilt speak to me as I go, so rarely do I get a top marked before I'm at the machine with the quilt sandwich ready.

Here's a few things to keep in mind if you try this:

• Experiment with quilting designs with dry- or wet-erase markers on a piece of plastic sheeting laid over the quilt block first (laminating plastic sheets, clear placemats or even a piece cut from a Ziploc freezer bag will work). This lets you try out different designs before committing them to the quilt. Note: The wet-erase markers don't smudge as you draw, so have worked better for me in the past, and they wash off easily so you can reuse your plastic sheet.
• Use a soluble film or light weight wash-away stabilizer that you can see though. This allows you to center the design on the block easier than when using foundation paper that you can't see through. 
• Trace all of the designs before you go to your machine so you can pin them on in progression and streamline the quilting process.
• Try different products to see which one works best for you. In the 12" width, this product probably would have been great, even with its flimsy nature. It's my own fault I tried it on a block wider than the roll. Next time I'm going to try Super Solvy as it has a little more body to it and isn't quite as flimsy as the Sol-U-Film Lite that I tried. A little more body to the stabilizer would make it easier to trace on. I had to hold this film pretty securely with my other hand so it wouldn't shift as I traced the design. I think I'll put this roll back with my embroidery stabilizers for now.
• This appears to be a great way to transfer the designs from those fun books of quilting designs onto quilts--just trace onto the stabilizer and then stitch through.

I'm giving this "trace-and-stitch" technique two thumbs up! It was fun trying something different. When I bought the Sol-U-Film Lite I didn't know what texture or weight it would be, I just knew it was a wash-away film that I could trace and stitch through. I'll be looking at other wash-aways to experiment more as I truly like this technique. It just needs a bit more tweaking as my experiments continue.

Regardless of what technique you use to get designs onto your quilts--FMQ without lines; stencils with soluble pens, chalk markers, or pounce; tracing before sandwiching with a light box; or using this technique of trace-and-stitch on wash-away stabilizer, just be sure to have fun!

More snippets from the sewing room soon,
Liz

WIP Wednesday--Coffee Quilt #2

It's Wednesday already and time to post something for WIP Wednesday hosted by Freshly Pieced. Last week I worked on a Marti Michel pattern with a cute selection of half-yard cuts of coffee themed fabrics to make "Coffee Anyone?" Well, that quilt is pinned and ready to be quilted and I still had a box full of coffee fabrics. Yesterday my new pattern arrived in the mail from Eleanor Burns' 2013 Signature Pattern Party and it looked like a great way to get rid of use more of the those coffee fabrics. It's not quite a quilt in a day, but it's close!

This morning I went to the weekly gathering of the Stitching Grannies at Quilter's Paradise in Baldwin City and took the box of coffee fabrics, my rotary cutter, and the new pattern with me. I got all of the strips and units cut out before lunch! Yay me! After a yummy lunch from the Mexican place next door, I went home and jumped in at the machine to get this thing put together.

By late afternoon I had all of the 4-patch units together and started assembling the 70 double-four patch units for the throw size. String piecing them was quicker than I expected and I spent more time pressing them open than sewing. It's sweaty work being that close to the steam iron for what seemed like hours!

 

I had purchased several mixers to use with the coffee fabrics, but didn't use the browns or blue stripe prints shown here and only a little of pink fabric. This quilt is using lots more of those extra mixers with some fun effects.

The blue stripe with stars is going different directions in each connecting section of setting triangles. In the morning I'll stop by the quilt shop to pick up another bit of that in order to complete the horizontal stripe row. Oh joy, I'm sure there will be yet more scraps to use another time! Now to decide what to frame it with for the border. Maybe another brown that doesn't blend too close with the pink & blue side setting triangles. It's interesting that the actual coffee fabric isn't nearly as obvious in this one since it's only in the 2" chain blocks. Every quilt turns out different and sometimes the subtleties make for a whole different look than expected. 

It's been a busy day with fun time visiting with the Grannies this morning, a couple of phone calls while stitching (thank goodness for bluetooth hands-free talking!) and lots of Beatles, George Harrison, and Traveling Wilbury's on the iTunes to keep me company. Looking at the box of coffee fabrics, I see there's still plenty left over for yet another scrappy coffee quilt!

I wonder what pattern will inspire me for the next round of coffee? Or have I had enough? Maybe I'll  throw them all a string piecing project that's on the list of things to do. For now, I think two coffee quilts is enough, thank you very much!

More snippets from the sewing room soon,
Liz

Prismatic Progression is another finish!

It's taken me months to complete this quilt, but as UFOs go, that's not bad. This year I signed up for Eleanor Burns' 2013 Signature Pattern Party, receiving a pattern once a month with a live feed video showing how she does her magic and displaying lots of variations of each pattern made Eleanor and by different quilters in her entourage. I got caught up in life and have only made the first pattern from this year's series, but plan to do the others over time. It feels great to finally finish her Zig-a-Zag that I started some time ago... like maybe back in March? So, here's how it started--getting the several-year-old jelly roll out of a tote. And then completing the top, going on to the back and quilting it. And finally finishing the last couple rows of quilting and binding, and it's done! Hurray!

It was almost twilight when I went outside to take pictures. After hanging a rope across the fence dividing the patios my neighbors & I share, I took pix of the front and back. I love the way the leftover pieces look chained together in the floating border. I didn't try to make them go all the way around, but instead started two strips at one corner and pieced them across the top and down the side as far as they would go and the same down the side and across the border. It adds character, don't you think?

For the back, I decided to use some of the bundle of rainbow hand-dyed fabrics I had purchased at the MQS DreamCatcher Quilt Show in Wichita, KS, earlier this year. I wanted to add some sort of splash to the back and one strip from each piece, staggered down the center of the back worked just the right amount of magic I was looking for. 

What I didn't expect, but should have, was for those fabrics to bleed. I hadn't used hand-dyed fabrics before and so, even putting a couple of color catchers in with the wash wasn't enough to keep it from bleeding to the front. Fortunately it's only noticeable in two places along the yellow stripe where you can see where the green and red bled through.

Unless you look closely, it's not really noticeable, which for a quilt I plan to keep and use, is okay by me. I'll know better next time!

With summer winding down, my time will only be my own for a couple more weeks. Then Jacob comes back three days a week when my son-in-law starts school again. Jacob will be in daycare two days a week to start him getting used to being around other kids and to give me a little more flexibility to be working on my own school work and quilting projects. This weekend Ali & Ross went out with friends to celebrate her birthday and Jacob spent the night with me. I guess he has spent so much time in my glider with me when he was little, he thinks it's his! Every time I turn around now he's climbing into my chair and reaching for the remote. What a little man! 

I'm happy to share it with him as we read books and watch Sprout together. The summer has been great fun, but I'm happy to be getting back into the routine of having him here as well.

More snippets from the sewing room soon,
Liz

Coffee anyone?

It amuses me that I fell in love with a line of coffee related fabrics since I don't drink coffee myself. I grew up in a family that loves coffee, but it just never took with me. My dad made what my brother Wayne refers to as mud. And he'd reheat it until it really was mud and still drank it! Dad lived to be nearly 96, so I guess it didn't hurt him. Wayne drinks his coffee much weaker--it looks more like tea coming out of his thermos. On one visit home Dad offered to make him some coffee to refill his thermos for the 3-hour drive home. Wayne accepted and off he and his family went with full mugs of coffee to keep them awake on their trek home. The next visit when Dad offered again to fill Wayne's thermos, he declined telling Dad, "The last time you made me coffee, I was awake for three days!" My oldest brother Ken drinks his almost as strong as Dad, but he buys nice custom grinds instead of Dad's Folgers. To each their own... I'll take instead those lovely little coffettes, little foil & cellophane wrapped sweet coffee-flavored hard candies. That's as close as you'll get me to a cup of coffee!

Back to my project... To get to know the local quilters where I'm now living, having recently moved closer to my kids in northeast Kansas, I joined a Marti & Me Club at Quilter's Paradise in Baldwin City, which features patterns by Marti Michell that use her Perfect Patchwork Template sets. Joining in month 2, the first pattern I received was Lazy Afternoon with template Set B. Knowing my sewing room is FULL of fabrics that I could use, I listened to the teachers, watched the video, and studied the pattern. Then I went home and started hunting and pulled out a half-yard cut collection of coffee themed fabrics.
 

Several years ago while still living in California, I saw the "Let's Do Coffee" line of fabrics by E.E. Schenck Company on sale online. I loved the colors and thought it would make a great quilt for someone. So, I purchased half-yard cuts of each which arrived and got put on a shelf for at least two years, moved from CA to KS in early 2012, and sat for another year. The original line had two background shades of the coffee label fabric, the mugs & cups on cream fabric, four solids to mix, and two border prints--one with a cream background and one with a black background (you'll see them in the quilt pix below). Once I started picking fabrics for this project, I realized I needed a small print or two to use as mixers and a little more color to brighten it up. So, I went hunting at area quilt shops and found the two coffee bean fabrics, and then matched the pink and blue from the prints to throw in some pizazz.

I couldn't decide on what layout to use since, true to my nature, I almost never do exactly as a pattern says. I like to make patterns mine! Don't you? I not only messed with what fabrics went in which blocks, mixing & matching them to my taste, but I also experimented with layouts, turning the corner blocks to different angles, and even switching them to the center outside position to see what I liked.

Original Lazy Afternoon layout with corners blocks across the corners

My alternate 1 with corner blocks rotated and pointing out

My alternate 2 with outside blocks in switched positions--more of a pinwheel

I decided on my alternate 1 with the corner blocks pointing out as my favorite layout. As I was cutting out the fabrics, I decided to fussy cut different cups from the black background border print to use in the center of each of the five star blocks.  It seemed like the right thing to do and I like the results!

And so the layout progressed and I started assembling blocks, playing with the new mixers I'd selected. Another thing I know about myself is that I really don't like making square quilts. So, that meant I either had to add more rows, not my first inclination, or add some borders to help stretch its length. That's when I started cutting up the border prints to add rows of the cups and the border stripes to the top and bottom. And this is what I got. A fun quilt with coffee beans adding some character, a splash of pink in the center block, and the blue as the background for the pieced blocks to float over.

For the back I decided to use as much of the fabric up as I could in this project, so I took the larger chunks and a few remaining strips of the border fabrics, added blue to each end to get the width I wanted, sashed them with a 1" strip of pink, and bordered the whole thing with the coffee label fabric. I think it turned out fun!  All I have to do now is sandwich & pin and then decide how I want to quilt it.

I have no idea who this little quilt will go to, but it was fun to make the top with Marti Michell's templates! The blocks went together so easily and there was very little trimming or squaring up to do as I paid close attention to matching the corners and keeping accurate 1/4" seams.


I'm looking forward to this month's Marti & Me class when we will get a new set of templates to make her Seven Sisters quilt which I have long admired. Just think! Beautiful stars with no set-in seams! That's my kind of quilt!


More snippets from the sewing room soon,
Liz

Jacob's Jungle in this week's Quilters' Show & Tell

I have been watching the Quilting Galleries' Quilters' Show & Tell events for awhile now. I entered once before, but was just starting this blogging thing and didn't get many people to visit the site and vote. So, this week they were asking for Quilts for Little Ones and so I found the best picture and posted Jacob's Jungle! It's one of my favorite quilts that I've made and was such a fun challenge to figure out how to make all the rows even. It definitely challenged my math skills adding strips & sashes to square up those intentionally uneven framed fussy cuts.

Having been gone most of the weekend, I'm just now getting back to it and realized I needed to post the link so people can go vote for my little Jacob's quilt. Here's the blog post to vote for the Quilts for Little Ones. Many thanks to any who go vote for Jacob's Jungle!

More projects are in the works and will be posted soon. Until then...

More snippets from the sewing room soon!
Liz

WIP Wednesday... Angel in Heaven memory quilt

It's WIP Wednesday and I'm posting for the first time in what feels like ages... again... Since last time I wrote, I finished my move and then left for nearly a month vacation to California and back again. It shouldn't take that long, but that's another story and another post.

I'm hooking up with Freshly Pieced's WIP Wednesday for those who want to browse around and see what I and other bloggers are up to this week.

[Note] Update August 8, 2013. Project complete, shipped, and received as planned. I've updated some of the photos below to the completed project and added some detail.

This week I am up against yet another deadline. My cousin's granddaughter Betsy contacted me on Facebook to ask me to make a memory quilt for her sister Shelby whose 2-year-old daughter died two years ago. Betsy sent me a whole box of fabrics, a few squares already made, and asked that I incorporate what I could of that collection into the quilt.

Betsy indicated in the note she sent with the fabrics that some had gotten wet and had molded. Despite this hurdle, finding there was mold on most of the pieces, I washed them all and did whatever magic I could think of to remove the stains, and then started cutting around the worst of the remaining spots.

Of the eight pieced blocks included made by the girls' Gramma Connie (my first cousin), only four were useable. This one was so cute, but those stains were just too over-powering.

So, I raided my stash for fabrics to use for background for the 12" finished blocks I planned to make and then started playing. This quilt includes piecing, applique, photo transfer, and machine embroidery. I started with McCall's #M6412 as my inspiration and pattern for the applique blocks, added the other blocks I wanted, incorporated the pattern's triple sashing with contrasting 9-patch cornerstones, and this is what I came up with. Shelby's "Brooklynn Shay: Angel in Heaven" memory quilt.

Below are updated closeups of the completed quilt (top & bottom halves) and a couple of blocks.  I found the poem stitched around the angel on a picture in Shelby's Facebook album and thought it fit with the embroidered angel. The stencil I used is a modified Dresden Plate with radiating lines that fit three blocks perfectly. On the applique blocks, I echoed the outfits and did a loopy doodle around the paperdoll and her dresses. The frames around the photos were quilted with a heart design in a pale pink variegated thread.

I printed several pictures Betsy had emailed me onto EQ Printables Premium Cotton Lawn inkjet fabric sheets. They worked beautifully and feel so natural! Not stiff like some of the printable fabrics I've tried in the past. I was able to quilt around the figures on the photos with a monofilament thread on top to give shape to them and to quilt the 8" photos.

 I was able to incorporate bits and pieces of seven of the original fabrics shipped to me, plus four of the pieced blocks that I sewed together 4-patch style and trimmed down to my 12" finished size.

The box of fabrics also included quite a few pieces of flannel, which I am using to make a pieced back. Once again, the mold stains were throughout and hard to miss, but with a very pale pink flannel with rosebuds as the background fabric, I'm using the others to make and add pinwheels for a fun pieced back.

The pieced back came out cute and I was even able to incorporate some of the Noah's Ark fabric that was only a 9" strip into the smaller blocks.

So, did I meet my deadline? YES! I was able to finish it completely and had it in the mail by August 5, just a couple of days later than I had planned. The target presentation date is August 10, which would have been little Brooklynn's 4th birthday. Here's a picture of me peeking over the top while holding the completed quilt up at the retreat where I finished the binding up on the weekend.

I can't imagine the hurt Shelby and other young mothers who have lost little ones must feel. I keep her in my prayers always and hope this quilt will bring her comfort.

More snippets from the sewing room soon,
Liz