Under the Needles

Got the first border on the Triple Chain:

 

This flimsy can rest for a bit on the rack while I think about what the 2nd border might be. Something solid, probably, followed by the final border made from the 1.5"x2.5" bricks that have collected.

"Coach" is quilted

Today was the first time in a couple of weeks that I didn't spend most of my waking hours trying to avoid clawing the skin off my bones. I think I'm on the healing side of this hellish encounter with urushiol, although the carnage wrought on my forearms is still pretty awful looking.

Because I finally had the energy and focus to do something other than feel sorry for myself, I was able to finish the quilting on "Coach is Calling for the Heat" today. As I suspected, trying to stipple a mostly-black fabric with black thread turned into a nightmare in very short order. The tension was off too, so I wasn't sorry to pull out the first line of stippling (it wasn't hard!)

I've been wanting to work through Leah Day's Free Motion Quilting Project (one quilt pattern a day for a year), and her 2nd day's pattern is "Etch n' Sketch". That seemed perfect--a new technique for me, but one that marches evenly and methodically across the fabric. It would be easy to keep track of where I'd been and where I was going. Because of black-on-black, I'm showing the stitching on the back:

Pinned

Finished pinning this thing, and thought I'd share my final pin-around that has been very helpful:

I roll the excess backing and batting toward the front and pin it close to the raw edge of the top. This keeps the batting from shedding all over my work as it gets wrestled under the needle and around the table, and the excess backing doesn't accidentally get folded under and inadvertently stitched into the quilting.

Had to take this shot before moving this to the quilting table:

Label inserted, as mentioned in a previous post

Instant Quilt Fort: just add child.

On the pinning table

At long last (20+ years), this mind's-eye project is well on its way to becoming a full-fledged quilt!

Imagine two furry butts parked at one end of this, and that's the view I have from my recliner as I type this.

I had to pop out and get two more boxes of basting pins (300 pins each), but I've been needing to add to that particular stash for some time anyway. Watching an episode of NCIS took my mind off opening every. single. pin before tossing it in the tin. The pin tin.

I'm thinking that I'll be using up beaucoup partial cones of variegated threads, as there's no one dominant color on the back and many, many colors on the top. I might do some initial straight line stitching on the diagonal through all the taupe triangles (near the ditch) with an innocuous color, then take a beat to decide how I want to quilt the pinwheels. I've got plenty more pinning time to ponder the possibilities!

10:15 pm
Fuzzbutts: 2
Human: 0

 I'm going to bed instead.

ZigZag finish

While I had a willing and tall(er) volunteer this morning (my son), I had him hold up last night's finish, fresh from the dryer:

54" x 72"

Herding chickens

Once I decided to use this egg piece on the back of the pinwheel project, a plan formed itself almost without effort: I would create the back out of all the chicken-themed fabrics I have in my stash.

That's a lot of chicken fabrics, half of which have been languishing because they are so chickeny. I measured each piece, digitalized it, then played with my graphics software to come up with a plan:

The prints aren't to scale, but that's immaterial (ha!)

It turned out that I had more chicken fabric than needed, so I returned the non-obvious and easily-worked-with pieces (such as the olive-green seen behind the red in the middle picture) to the stash. Because of the fill option of the software, the scale of these images is really thrown off: the original egg fabric is shown here as the medium brown piece to the left of the red&checkerboard panel!

Nearly flimsied

Sunday I double- and triple-checked all my math, then finally took rotary cutter to fabric and cut eight 2.75" strips from the remaining 23"x35" piece of the "Zen Chic" moda. This would be the next border after the Sairey Strip egg fabric.

Most of the writing is about a coffee order. Zen?

The main trouble with using the "wrong" side of a fabric is that the default is to sew "right" sides together. I was 5 strips into the eight, joining them end-to-end for one long strip, when I realized I was sewing them together incorrectly. I had this problem with the egg borders too--sewing the egg blocks onto the "right" side of the fabric as I inserted the filler pieces. What a frustrating waste of time and thread!

Egg borders

I've been here, but too busy with chorus-related construction projects (both fabric- and wood-related) to make or devote time to either blog or sew for pleasure. Before I was dropped into that time-suck, however, I had made good progress on some borders.

When I unfolded the 2 potential border fabrics, it was clear there wasn't going to be enough of either to make a substantial border.

The tan eggs fabric was too blah anyway, so I decided to use it on the back. The black piece, however, was bold enough to stand out. There wasn't much, and it was printed crookedly, so some careful fussy-cutting was involved, but I got enough out of it for a Sairey Strip.

Auditioning for visual impact

Organic eggs

From free range chickens? Not exactly.

From a yard (I think) of speckled black fabric (on which these first egg blocks are laid)(ha!), I cut several 1-5/8" and 1-1/4" strips. I then eyeball-sewed them onto the top and bottom edges, respectively, of some of the 3"x4" rectangles of the scraps I had saved that looked like egg shells, deliberately not measuring carefully--very "organic" in their construction.

Then I went into my stash and found a wonderful green/blue-dyed fabric that reflected the range of colors of the eggs our Araucanas laid. I also cut up a hunk of tan muslin created in a class in dyeing fabric. It had turned out too medium for my tastes and had languished in my stash for years (decades?), but it's perfect to represent brown egg shells! (Did you know that brown eggs are more prevalent than white eggs? Why, then, are they priced higher, as if they were rarer?)

Fifty-five egg blocks were constructed. There's just enough of the black to make one more egg block, if needed. The original plan has them arranged thusly:

I'm thinking now: not so much.

Pinwheels, "The easy part" two

Now that the right side is completed (with a line of stitches 1/8" from the edge to secure all those seams), the chewed-up left edge is exposed to light.

Not really knowing what to expect--or for that matter, what I was doing--when I started this reconstruction project, I was very careful to keep as many seams intact as I could. As it turned out, it wasn't always necessary.

Pinwheels, "The easy part" one

It's time to construct and finish the right side of this flimsy.

Since I was working with completed 4-segment pinwheels, it fell out that constructing the new right side would be easiest by making 4 strips: 1-segment-wide, 2-segments, 2-segments, 1-segment. That way, I wouldn't have to unsew any of the already-constructed pinwheel middles.

In reality I was working with far more single segments than the virtual mock-up showed, so the construction of the 2-segment strips went like this:

There was a lot of going from my sewing chair to the design wall and back to my sewing chair in this process, but I figure every little bit of exercise helps! (I don't fitbit--I have all the nagging I need with 2 cats in my life.)

Virtually 'Wheeling Along

So, where was I? Ah yes: four bottom rows removed, partial sections removed from top and sides.

It was a chewed-up looking flimsy when all the partials had been removed from the edges! I'm sorry I didn't take a picture of it.

Let the reconstruction begin!

The Continuing St-o-o-o-o-ry

The unsewing has begun:

Four complete middles with their 4 "wings", and 5 sets of 1/2-blocks picked out from top and bottom and paired up again.

During the picking, I noticed some junctions were extremely bulky, with the seam allowances ironed to one side instead of alternating. Even 20 years ago I understood how nicely bulk was distributed if you could "twirl" the seams where 4 corners met. How had I gotten so off track with this top that I couldn't accomplish that?

Doing Unto Myself

That's not as selfish, or as ... well, it's not as selfish as it sounds! Not in a bad way, at least.

I considered the various steps possible to create as many whole pinwheels as I could to widen the existing top.

~ I could remove the bottom 4 rows and get four entire pinwheels out of that (and shorten the top to a mere 6 feet), adding them to one side to create more width.
~ I could pick out the 5 segments from the top rows to complete the bottom 5 pinwheel blocks (which can also be moved to the side), replacing the pick-out squares with others that didn't have to match with anything at the bottom (as they do now).
~ I could do the same with one long side, rejoining the separated pinwheels into whole blocks again, then replacing the removed squares with a set of different fabrics (e.g. remove the 4 medium-blue half-triangle squares on the left, join them to their mates on the right, and replace them with, say, four red HTSs that don't match up with anything but themselves).

That's a LOT of undoing. Is it worth it?

Then it struck me: if a friend with 20 years less experience than I had, or a friend who had "inherited" this, were to come to me with this top and say 'I don't know what to do!', I would (and have) give 100% attention, enthusiasm, and expertise to get it fixed. Why then can't I treat my 20-years-younger self with that same generosity?

Simple answer: I can, and I will. Game on!

On the Design Wall: MEQ 3--Coach

In my post about Mind's Eye Quilts, this was third down on the list (and on the rack):

I pulled it from the rack and placed it up on the design wall for further progress analysis:

45" x 82"--what an odd proportion to create! I apparently had a lap quilt in mind for myself, given the length. In truth, I'd grown bored with this top, not really liking the taupe background. I pondered what I could do--is it long enough to create 2 lap/throw-sized quilts of 45" x 41" (plus borders) and donate them? I'm not a fan of lap quilts for donations, preferring to donate things that can cover a bed. What to do, what to do?

MInd's Eye Quilts

It would appear that 20-some-odd years ago I felt the need to immortalize(?) the ideas for future quilts or wall-hangings rocketing around in my head. I found a MEQ folder in my permanent storage device, with these projects in it:

"Bottle" MEQ

"Challenge" (quilt guild) MEQ

"Coach" MEQ

"I Spy" (duh!) MEQ

"Jewel" MEQ

"Roses" (ya think?) MEQ

Today, two of these are no longer even in the running, two are still baggied up as they were 20 years ago, one is due to revisit my Design Wall, and one actually became a completed wall-hanging! To have 1/3 of one's ideas come to (or close to) fruition in a span of 20 years--is that a good percentage? I suppose one can always say, as one does in the blogosphere, "I can get a blog post out of it!"