A finish

This was pulled from the dryer yesterday morning and hung on our side fence this morning for its photo op (Thing 2 is in Columbia at the moment, unavailable for display purposes):

"front" ~ 72" x 90"

"back" (also ~ 72" x 90")

I do NOT heart this

I'm working my way to the finish of the Heart You QAYG top. The ten rows have been measured and the average length calculated (with butted seam allowances, they tend to grow).

I Heart You

As I move one or two Community First! projects to the flimsy stage (or better yet, to completion), I like to create a kiddie top for Sleep in Heavenly Peace. After the previous haul of novelty fabrics, I felt there were finally enough heart fabrics to create a top.

I also had some thin corduroy that was too stained to use as a backing, so years ago I had cut it into 9.5" squares to use in QAYG blocks. I'd only need 80 of them, so I could pick out any badly-stained blocks and use them for dusting furniture.

Behemoth, both sides

After washing this, I flang it on the guest room bed and basically forgot about it for several days. It's been properly photoed, folded, and stored now, instead of getting gradually buried under small boxes (the "guest room" is really my ebay shipping center).

A second posting of the randomly-placed back/fleece side:

And finally, a closer view of the three blacks I used for the joining strips:

Behemoth

I finally have all 99 blocks assembled, and the nearly 400" of binding is in the process of being sewn down. Sometimes you just gotta take a break, you know?

85.5" x 104.5" (each square = 9.5" and no seam allowances are 'lost')

As soon as I had all the rows assembled, I took this picture of the fleece side (with its completely random placement), then weighed that bad boy. It seemed ridiculously heavy when I was wrangling it under the needle, and the scale showed 7.7 pounds (pre-binding). I flang it on the bed to see if it was too heavy to sleep under comfortably, but it really wasn't! It's a nice weight--like a quilt and a half. Not as heavy as the two quilts I have on the bed right now, but cozier than a single quilt.

The label, sewn onto the top right corner (in the picture above), is one of those I made for 2019. Since most of the construction was done in that year (and calendar years are pretty much a meaningless human construct anyway), I used up one of the three I still had remaining.

I had planned to set this aside as a donation quilt, but I'm growing quite attached to this one (especially now that I know I won't be smothered in my sleep). The finished quilt--the planned side I showed in this entry--will be photographed and posted when the binding is done and it's been through the wash.

CATalyst

I lost my sewing mojo at some time between the disappearering act and the Impeachment Act; I've got it back now, thanks to little fix-it projects around the house and the cats' persnickety ways.

When I made this tower, I was under the (well-researched) impression that cats love to scratch sisal rope.

They certainly loved scratching the upholstery-fabric-covered posts (Franklin is sniffing one of them), but they never ever touched the sisal post, little pills that they are.

QAYG layout

Thursday last I had the day and evening to myself (all-day classes keeping The Loud out of the house and busy teaching), so I had the luxury of trimming up the 99 QAYG blocks on the dining room table (bar height and bigger than my usual cutting area, so it's more comfortable) and planning a layout.

See the light blob in the upper right quadrant? He's planning mischief!

I decided to group the prints to make whole squares, and let the flannel/fleece side of these blocks fall where they may.

Wraith helped.

Still Q-ingAIG

(Quilting As I Go)

Securing the fleece is probably the most important prep step, so a quick baste around the two outside edges is best done before any of the strips are sewn on.

Also, with fleece I like to position the fabric with the fuzzy side showing. That's the soft side that's meant to be worn against the skin, so it makes sense to me to have it available to the touch.

Preparing to QAIG

As I was making the previous QAYG (Quilt As You Go) project, I was making mental plans for the next one which would use up a huge roll of bright pink fleece and a quick 'n' easy muumuu/shift my MIL had left behind after a visit. She didn't want it back, it was too small for me, and it was made from 100% cotton. As it was a tad flimsier than quilting cotton, I was loathe to cut it up and put it in my regular stash, but I was also loathe to just throw it out. Instead, I gave it a home in the drawer with the pink fleece with the intention of combining the two some day.

The day(s) arrived. I needed another piecing project so I could keep Leadering-and-Endering (heaven forbid I treat those pieces as a "real" project with sewing time devoted solely to them!) Elaine's been having such fun with her QAYG projects, that I got the bug too.

From a large hunk of brushed denim-like fabric I cut as many 9-1/2" squares as I could (99) to use as foundations (instead of batting). I had tried using this as a backing a while back, but the more I unrolled it, the grottier it revealed itself to be. THIS was something in which it could be useful.

CA-bound #1: Reversible Quilt-As-You-Go (QAYG) String Quilt

Quilt #1 sent to Robert Kaufman for the #quiltsforCA drive.

This is a QAYG (Quilt As You Go) reversible quilt, using strings and chunks of fleece fabrics I had either intended to make sweats with, or had made sweats with and saved the scraps. Since the likely targets of my intentions (a couple of little boys) are now in their 30s, it was pretty ridiculous to keep hanging on to these.

With the fleece were coupled strings, scraps, and chunks of non-100%-cotton (n1c) fabrics. For each fleece triangle, strips of n1c fabrics were used to fill the opposite corner. Likewise, for each triangle of n1c....

Typical QAYG blocks have you sewing strips onto a whole-cloth backing fabric. Somewhere along the way I learned a different technique, one in which both sides of the block were stringing along. I didn't take pictures while I made this with an eye toward creating a tutorial, but I'll try to drop enough hints that anyone interested in the technique could probably piece together enough information to duplicate this method.

Honorable Mention

This wasn't the oldest UFO in my collection (I can think of a wallhanging that still needs finishing, started when the boys were mere ... boys), but was pretty darn close.

As near as I can tell, this was started a few years before the turn of the century, making it at least 20 years old. Someone on the RCTQ newsgroup was selling a yummy floral fabric that I fell in love with. I decided to make a reversible quilt, using the yummy floral on one side, and all the chicken fabrics I'd been gifted (or with which I'd gifted myself) on the other. At the time, we were raising chickens so all my friends knew what kind of fabric to give me!

Geocities 7-1998: Mary's Quilt

This is an experiment in republishing html pages I created for my now-extinct GeoCities account, back in the day.

Mary's Wedding Gift quilt

"1,000 Pyramids"

This shows most of my sister's wedding gift quilt "1,000 Pyramids" from Diana McClun/Laura Nownes' book "Quilts! Quilts!! Quilts!!!". Except for the batting, this quilt was made only from material I had on hand. I managed to complete it in just 5 weeks, mailing it to Mary and Jim in plenty of time for their wedding. All machine pieced and quilted. Measures approximately 85" x 101".

The general color theme of this quilt was blue & white. "Blue" ranged from green to blue-violet, "white" was anything from white to dark tan. Various other colors snuck in too -- I'm sure there's some pink in there -- but that just adds to the charm.

Done, done, and done!

Done, ...

Whoo, baby! The project I'd been SO close to completing before/for the Australia trip is finally done and on the wall!!

This was a challenge wuh* I'd "completed" for the Rio Grande Valley Quilt Guild Challenge and show in 2002. The challenge fabric can be seen in the butterfly wings. The other element of the challenge was to use the "Flying Geese" pattern/block. The only quilting done on it was in the wings of the captive butterflies, and a tiny meander in the free butterfly's journey. All of that was done with metallic thread (I look at it now and wonder, "What was I thinking?" and "How on earth did I manage to do it so well?!?")

*short for "wallhanging", in honor of a certain Magpie who canNOT bring herself to say that word or create that item.

The only thing it really needed was more quilting in the body of the quilt, and a sleeve for hanging. I popped it onto my new-to-me quilting frame and free-motion-quilted a larger meander over all the rest of the piece. Going back and doing more quilting, on a frame, on a finished and bound piece can be a challenge in itself, but my Brother Quilt Club 1300 ("Sister") loves her new 'long-arm' status and quilts whatever I put on the frame with little to no problems or arguments. (Some long-arm quilters claim their machines are "thread snobs". I refer to Sister as a "thread whore"--she's yet to meet a thread she doesn't like!)