Some Semblance of Self

I'm going to take a page out of Lane's book blog and insert anything political, that I feel I must get off my chest, at the bottom of my entry under a line of asterisks. I am also giving a hugely grateful "Thank you!" to Nann and Caroline for their comments of support and virtual hugs. Those, along with reading some of my favorite bloggers (The Bloggess in particular) and having Real Time conversations with friends (of both persuasions), have helped me work out and through my feelings and get back to a semblance of my normal, bubbly-but-sarcastic self. I'm singing again, ready to perform for The Great Unwashed in our upcoming Holiday gigs.

On a completely surprising note, in the midst of my utter depression I had a dream about making a colorful quilt from a panel of this fabric I have on hand. There was hope yet, and I clung to it!!

Shuttle bobbin

In preparation for using my Singer 128 (knee controller) this month, and to refresh my own memory, I'm reposting my tutorial for threading the shuttle bobbin.

Singer 128 Model

First off, this is not an intuitive bobbin. The thread doesn't go where you think it's going to go. So rest assured, any problems you're having aren't your fault.

Frankenbatt

That's what you get when joining batting scraps into one large piece: a Frankenbatt. That's also what was taking up valuable real estate on my cutting table--elements of my next Frankenbatt--and it was high time I either sewed those scraps together or put them away!

First, though: figure out if I have enough pieces to cover a 40"x58" area.

Well, it's a start. The excess hanging off the left piece can be cut off and sewn on elsewhere, and there were still more scraps.

Trip Around the World, Nestling Seams Tutorial Tweak

Bonnie Hunter at Quiltville has already created a great tutorial for a scrappy TATW, called "Scrappy Trips", so I will credit her but not steal from her. This post contains the various ways I deviated from her instructions, and in so doing managed to make all the seams on all the blocks nestle with each other, no matter which direction a block was turned.

It was at this step

that I discovered two key points to making nestling seams. 

A whole lot of boring stuff about string blocks

I took a bunch of pictures as I went through construction, trimming, and arranging my mindless string blocks. I paid closer attention to what I needed when starting out, and what was useless when finishing up.

Lessons Learned

§ I need 3-5 times as many long strips as I'm prone to think. Once the middle strip is positioned, it needs a strip on either side to anchor it, and there's little difference in length between the three (or five, depending on the width of the strips.)

 

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.

Binding with planned corners

My intent was to extend a long (but not long enough) hunk of the brown stripe binding by cutting up the last triangle of that fabric as far as I could. I didn't pay attention to direction, my personality won't allow a join of incorrect stripe directions, and it turns out there wasn't enough to go around the quilt anyway. I was still short by several inches.

So this cutting error gave inspiration for an elegant and easy solution: make the corners from a different fabric, effectively separating each side's binding so the "wrong" stripe will never be noticed, and extending the overall length of the binding so there'd be enough of the original hunk to go around the remaining 3 sides. There's a bit more stop-'n'-go sewing using this method, but it's worth it.

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.

Stringin' along

I cannot open my blog one more day to the sight of TFI. This has been sitting in Drafts; time to finish my thought and get it published!

I've been playing with more "neutrals", still getting comfortable with Bonnie Hunter's definition of the term. I also wanted to try a new-to-me technique of making string blocks: using a fabric foundation square instead of telephone book pages. The nice thing about string blocks for donation quilts: there's no wrong answer!

Bowties

Peruse the web, and you'll find a bazillion patterns for bowtie quilts. Here's one more.

I was captivated by Bonnie Hunter's Cheddar Cheese quilt, but there were 2 things about it I felt needed to be changed:
     1) Orange,
     2) The pattern called for 2" and 1.25" squares.

After spending hours upon hours organizing my scraps (using Bonnie's Scrap User System) into 1.5", 2", 2.5", and 3.5" squares, bricks, and strips, I had no desire to trim yet again! So rather than use her measurements, I chose to rummage in my 2.5" and 1.5" boxes for matching and complementary squares.

That's when I started to ponder the possibility of using the 1.5"x2.5" bricks to achieve the two little corner pieces (the "knot" in the bowtie), and discovered that it works beautifully and has very little waste. So here's the pictorial tute:

Bowtie block, using 2.5" squares and 1.5"x2.5" bricks