WIP Wednesday: Chained 5 Patch, Thrifty Treasures

Hey quilters, I have a little bit of progress to share for WIP Wednesday. I managed to sew up a couple blocks for my 5 patch quilt (I need to think up a new name!). They really are fast blocks, which goes to show how much time I've put towards quilting this week with only 3 new blocks to show. And one of them isn't even completely sewn, lol - that's a hardcore "work in progress" picture for ya!

As for that white space.. it looks so awful, I can't stand it! HMMMMMM!  Did I not learn my lesson on the wonky square rings? Didn't I say I don't really care for white space? I'm rolling my eyes at myself right now and trying to remember that I'm always questioning myself until the entire project is finished. Maybe some colorful hand quilting will spruce up those white areas?

I went thrifting again last week.. I found only one new piece of fabric for my vintagy themed stack. I thought it appropriate to throw a picture in here because this fabric stack really is a work in progress! I could always go to etsy and purchase some vintage fat quarter packs, but it's so much more fun to go on the treasure hunt yourself.

I am hoping nobody saw the look on my face when I spotted this pretty yellow pillowcase! I was overly excited, I might have snatched it off the rack a little too fast, as if somebody was trying to beat me to it!

I found this other one two weeks ago, but it doesn't really go with my color scheme so I'm just tucking it away in the stash. I love how a pillowcase costs 99 cents and ends up yielding between a half and full yard of fabric! Sweet.

Thanks for popping by! :D  I'm off to design some custom labels for the wine bottles for my wedding (labels nobody will notice and will end up in the trash.) My mom is pretty much forcing me. Okay, she's not forcing me at all LOL, she just seemed really excited about it and thought it would be cute - I felt too bad about saying no! :P

WIP Wednesday: Guest hosting on Freshly Pieced!

 

Hey guys! I'm guest hosting over on Lee's blog, Freshly Pieced! Come check it out! :D

WIP Wednesday: Giant Retro Patchwork Flower

Hey guys! Bit of a slow week quilting-wise - we are really ramping up our wedding planning now that it's a month and a half away. If you knew how much I still have left to do you'd think I was insane. I just happen to think relaxing with a book in the sun, quilting, watching hours of Battlestar Galactica#nerdalert, and gardening are more fun ways to spend my time than choosing napkin colors and centerpieces! 

(I'm finally getting around to reading "Insurgent", by Veronica Roth, if anyone is curious. I've also just finished an amazing book called "Below Stairs", by Margaret Powell. The true life story of a kitchen maid born in the early 1900's. It reads like a funny grandmother is telling you stories about the good old days. If you like Downton Abbey, you would really love this one!)

Many of you showed support for my starting yet another project, thank you. :) I started sewing up the patchwork quilt I was dying to get going on, and out of the blue an idea fell into my head to use The Sometimes Crafters "Retro Flowers" pattern, but huge. (It should end up being slightly larger than throw sized, about 70" square.)

I had to draft it out and blow it up, and print out a large template. If I had thought this through, I'd have realized that it would have been better to make this block out of four pieces, as in the pattern, but I thought I'd save some time and just sew one big curve around the whole thing.

It did work, but I think it resulted in more wrinkles than were necessary.  (I've since ironed it out and it looks much better than these initial photos, and the wrinkles that are left will probably just blend in like usual after the quilting process.) Now I have to decide if I should keep going with this method, or do it the right way for the rest of the blocks. (Always a learning experience!)

And here is an approiximation of how it might look finished, through the magic of photoshop!

So that's in on the quilting front. I've been getting outside a lot more lately, now that the weather has become more bearable. We have so many neat things growing this year! I've made some chamomile (second photo below) tea and it's wonderful. Some of our corn (a special, decorative variety) is over nine feet tall right now! We have peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, bush beans, onions, carrots, peas, and hopefully soon the cucumbers and watermelon will be ready.

And just to get even more off topic...a cat. :)

I am linking this post to Freshly Pieced, though as usual I am late to the game and have a pitiful showing this week! Lol. Thank you for coming by! :)

WIP Wednesday: EZ Dresden, Mario, Patchwork

I spent the weekend with family at my mom's lake house - I had a homemade birthday cake with a certain dreaded number of candles - ugh, just take a look...

I have been telling people for the longest  time that I was a year younger than I actually am, to delay the dreaded three-oh, but I can't escape it any longer! The duping is over! I am not exactly sure what is going on, because I feel like I just graduated college. I suspect trickery.

I have made an embarassing amount of progress this week. My EZ Dresden (above) was my biggest accomplishment - it's almost done! I just need to sew three more rows. I am hoping to be done with it very soon, I know exactly how I'm going to quilt it.

I finished my Mario block. It was a LOT easier to work with a smaller section, much more manageable. This time I used a piece of damp muslin to lay overtop of the blocks while I ironed. It worked beautifully. Another improvement I made was ironing the seams open!

It wasn't exactly fun, but it made sewing the block a lot easier. Speaking of ironing.. this is my new iron! I love it! My fiance gave me a few presents today (he is spreading them out over the week, yay!) and one of them was the iron I really wanted. It's very small and lightweight, but it irons wonderfully and it's much easier to get into little areas to press open seams.

Mr. Mario isn't 100% accurate, you can see where some of the seams got a little wonky.. and his foot is sorta messed up.. lol. But when you are looking at it as a whole the mistakes sort of blend in and you don't notice them. I think the next block will turn out better. I can tell I'm going to be behind on this quilt a long!

Okay, I need help guys! Help as in sewing management therapy. LOL. I have a strong urge to sew a patchwork quilt. I am repressing it, because I have so many WIPs that need attention, but this stack is very tempting! I cut these out while I was making a charm pack to give away - check it out! If you already have, thank you for entering! :) First giveaway - so exciting!

I am linking up with WIP Wednesdays, hosted at Lee's blog, Freshly Pieced! Thanks for stopping by! :)

WIP Wednesday

I am always late to WIP Wednesdays! What the heck. Anyway, I've made some progress, not a lot.. and I sure won't make any this weekend - going out of town! It's my birthday next week, so I'm going to see my family and float around on the lake and stuff. :)

I am having the most fun ever making these "half log cabin" blocks. They are fast, they are so bright and colorful - I just love them. I decided to go with the purple, grey, aqua, orange color scheme. Six blocks out of twenty four done.

"I'm a cat, so I gotta walk all over this." 

Next up - Mario! I wrote a post on this yesterday. I better finish this block!

No progress on Dresden, or my Liberty of London wall hanging. Sad popsicle.

Linking up to Freshly Pieced!

WIP Wednesday, Quilt Top Complete!

 WIP #1: Party time! Checkit. It's a finished quilt top! Man, that feels good. :)

Here are some things I learned while making this quilt.

1. I don't like white backgrounds as much as I thought. Something about all the white space bothers me. I think that's why I like patchwork so much, it fills in all the space with color! I wish I could go back and use a greige (gray/brown) color instead. I think it would warm up the quilt, and make me feel better about snuggling under it with a glass of red wine. (This is a very important and practical consideration!)

2. I really wish I had used a "design wall". I laid the blocks out for this quilt on the floor, and I thought they looked good. When I see the quilt held up I realize some of the blocks would have looked better in a different orientation. I think you might get a better (or at least different) perspective viewing the quilt on a wall, because you can look at it as a whole, straight on. I have the room for a design wall, I guess I better get to work!

3. Buy good fabric. I bought a cheaper kind of white fabric than usual (I usually get the Kaufmann stuff from JoAnn's, but they were out so I just grabbed something). If you look closely (below), the fabric puckers along the seams with white fabric. :( I didn't experience the puckering with the prints, or any other time I've sewn, so I can only assume it's the cheap fabric?? The only other thing I can think of is that I really need a new iron. My iron is really large and heavy, and doesn't work very well without steam. But if I do use steam it steams like craaaazy. That might have caused the cheaper (thinner) fabric to wrinkle like that. Anyone have any suggestions for a new iron?

4. Learn how to use my friggin DSLR camera already. I bought it, I kind of know how to use it, but my pictures are always really blurry and I have to fix them in editing. Not good. I have a Canon Rebel Xsi. If anyone has any tips on photographing quilts with that guy, (ie settings) I'd love to listen! :D

5. (Phew, I sure learned a lot on this one!) I need to figure out a better way to photograph my quilts. I don't always have someone to hold them up for me, so I am going to do some brainstorming on how I could hang them.

Now I just have to decide how to quilt it. I have an idea, I just have to figure out how to do it! I am having trouble finding an example of it, or a tutorial. I've seen it on one (or more) of the really big modern quilting blogs. It looks like this:

It's just random lines with turns that cross each other. I'm thinking I'll just have to do some practicing.  Has anyone tried something like this?

WIP #2: EZ Dresden Challenge
Not much progress on this one. I'll be tackling the rest of this guy in the upcoming week.

WIP #3: What's next? I am thinking I am going to need to make a quilt using 100% of what is in my stash. My quilting "budget" has taken a little bit of a hit lately! But ya never know.. :P

I'm linking up to Freshly Pieced, hosted this week by Amy, from Sukie, Don't You Know Who I am?  I'll be stoppin in to as many blogs as I can to see what you are up to! Thanks for stopping by! :)

Hey house guests, mind if I do some sewing?

Not a lot to report this week. We have had company from out of town staying with us, so I haven't had very much time to sew at all. Last night we all drank frozen margaritas and play board games. One of the categories I got during a game of "Outburst Jr." was, "things you would find in a sewing basket" - can you believe I only got 7 out of 10?! How could I forget "pincushion"? Lol - that was pretty fun. 

I managed to get one strip of my Dresden quilt done. With the exception of the pointy pieces, it was easier than I thought it would be to piece together. Sewing the points is tricky, because you want to have a 1/4" of gray after the tip, to account for the seam. It's really hard to make it exactly 1/4" - I am going to have to settle for being okay with imperfections in this quilt!

Here is how I made the strip. I cut a 9" wide section of the Kona Coal. I laid one of the blocks down (face up), being careful that the bottoms and tops of the fabrics lined up straight. Then I traced a line along one of the edges.

I flipped the block over and used the line I drew as a guide to sew along.

Finally, I trimmed along the seam and pressed it open. I'll probably end up with quite a bit of scrap of the gray - at least it's a color I'm sure I'll find good use for!

So that's it! :) I'm a bit late for the WIP Wednesday linky with Lee @ Freshly Pieced, and I'm not sure I'll have time to visit very many blogs tonight, so I'm gonna skip out this week. I have plans tomorrow night and Friday night with our guests, but I'll have my freedom back Saturday, so maybe I'll make some good progress over the weekend! Hope you guys are having a great week so far. :)

Dresden Progress

My mom finished her 37 year career last month, and is now happily retired. :) Over the weekend my fiance and I drove to the other side of Michigan - where my sister, brother and all of our extended family threw her a big surprise celebration party Friday night - it was a blast! I danced my pants off and ate tons of cake. When we got home, my Dresden template and "Quilting Modern" book were waiting for me in the mail! So I was able to make some progress on the Dresden Challenge quilt I've been planning.

I thought I'd show you guys how I'm going about making this one, because it's a little more complicated than the patchwork stuff I've been doing.

The first thing I did was make a giant log cabin block - 54" square. Another option would be to sew 54" strips together until you get a 54" square block. You could use any size, it really doesn't matter - but probably 36" at a minimum.

 Using the Dresden template, this is what the cutting lines look like laid out on the block.

I started drawing the cutting lines (with a washable pencil) by locating the exact center of the block. I drew a little dot, and then I put the Dresden template down on the block, along with a straight edge. The first time you lay the Dresden template down, you want the bottom of the template to be parallel to the sewing lines. The template doesn't have a pointy end, which I didn't know when I planned out this quilt. It will still work, but you have to fuss around a little to get the template and straight edge in the correct location.

I worked my way around the block, until I had all 20 wedges drawn in. I needed to use the straight edge to continue the lines down from the template, since it isn't long enough to trace all the way to the edge of the block.

The next step is the fun part - cutting out all the wedges. My cutting mat isn't nearly big enough to use a straight edge and rotary cutter, so I used my shears to carefully cut along the lines I drew.

Eventually I had 20 wedges.

After they were all cut, I had to make them all the same size. I found the first wedge I drew (the one parallel to the sewing lines) and laid that down with 4 other wedges under it. First I cut the scrap off of the other wedges, so all 5 wedges were the same size. Then, I divided the length of the wedge by three. This ended up being 9".

I repeated this step until all of the wedges were trimmed and cut into thirds. And that is where I ended up, with three stacks of pieces like this:

I think it's going to be tricky to sew the pointy pieces and keep the sharp point, hopefully that will work out okay. I feel like the pointy triangles might be a little too skinny, but we'll see.

I don't think these wedges are all that impressive until you lay them out on the Kona Coal. I love how the gray makes everything pop! The next step will be sewing the grey fabric onto the pieces to create rows. First I might want to tidy up my sewing room... LOL. It's pretty yikes.

I hope you all had an awesome weekend. Thanks for stopping by! :)

Wonky block update and a Dresden beginning

For the first time, maybe in ever, I have two WIPs!

In the past, I've made quilts like I read books - start at the beginning, read all the way through, move on to the next book. (Unless the book sucks, then I'll just toss it aside. I'm not one of those people that will punish themselves and read to the end no matter how bad it is!) Right now I have two quilts going on because I finally decided what to do with my Poetica fabric and I'm really excited to see it come to life!

WIP #1 Wonky Square Ring Blocks

I thought it'd be cool to give this quilt a twist by adding one just-red block. Like a cherry on top.

I have 7 blocks out of 16 done - almost halfway there! I really should have made more progress on this quilt, but the weather was too nice this past weekend to stay inside very much. What's interesting about these blocks is that each one takes almost exactly half an hour, so I like to turn on HGTV and listen to one episode of a house hunting show while I sew. Works out well!

WIP #2 Dresden beginnings...

I made an Amazon purchase (it was $25.10 - just enough for the super saver, yeaah!). I've been following the EZ Dresden challenge blog hop, and I am so inspired I've decided to participate. The template was 7 bucks, and well.. something else on my Amazon wish list just happened to be $18, sooo... what was I to do?! lol The numbers were aligned, can't mess with fate. :D I'm really excited to get the Quilting Modern book in my hands!

I went to JoAnns and bought some coordinating solids to go with my Poetica prints. I love looking at them! They are so juicy together all on their own I'm half tempted to complete the quilt solely with the solids!

Here are all the fabrics together..

(I do not know what green I ended up buying, hence the mystery.)

Okay, here is what I am thinking... what if.. (p.s. it's too late for what if's, I've already started!) I made a GIANT log cabin block... like this (though it isn't nearly big enough yet)..

Then, what if I used the Dresden template to cut the giant block into 20 wedges, and then cut those wedges into thirds. Then (are you following me? lol) what if I were to sew those pieces back together into rows using Kona Coal as my background/separator fabric.

This is what I am thinking. I really like it, but it doesn't look very Dresdeny, does it? I am not even 100% convinced this is all going to work out... but I will just go ahead and see where it takes me. :)

A tidbit about me and a question! I'm an industrial designer for a living so I know CAD programs inside and out. I use them (Solidworks if I'm at work playing around on lunch, Draftsight, which is free, at home) for laying out quilting ideas - it makes it so I don't have to think about the math! Is there some kind of software that quilters commonly use? I'm curious to know how people plan out their designs.

So that's what's going on this week. As a side note.. I thought I'd say thank you to Therese, from Birdie & Maryse for the fabric she sent me and the sweet little card... I won her Sew Mama Sew giveaway, and I'm really happy to have these cute fabrics added to my stash!

Today I'm going to link with Heather and Megan from Quilt Story. Tomorrow I'll be linking with Lee, for WIP Wednesdays, as usual. :)

Thanks for taking the time to stop by!