A Finish, and SO MUCH FABRIC

I finished Baby R's quilt finally! Remind me to never do a quilt with this many pieces again...or with pieces that finish this small. Uggggggggggggg. Seriously.

Overlook all of the missing points...

The main blocks are a design I pulled from my copy of 5,500 Quilt Block Designs - design number 2460, "Rosie's Purina Whirligig." I drafted the alternate blocks myself, with the small squares finishing to .75", and the center square finishing to 2". Again, why do I hate myself? The fabrics in the chain of the alternate blocks are the same as the sashing in the recipient's older sister's baby quilt, though, and I didn't have much of it to work with.

It got a little warped hanging over the rocking chair.

I backed the quilt with a light blue fabric with brown polka dots on it I'd gotten on clearance from Fat Quarter Shop, and just so happened to have a perfect binding to go with it - a brown batik with light blue grass blades on it. I love when my stash comes through for me!

I love the binding!

Judy over at Patchwork Times isn't doing a stash report link-up anymore, but I really want to keep track of my fabric usage. I made a HUGE purchase at Joann's this week, and while everything has a project to be a part of...it's a LOT of fabric. So I've got to make lots of quilts to get back into the black! I did finish another quilt this week, but it's currently in the wash so I'll have to blog about it later. I'm counting its yardage, though - I need all the help I can get!

Fabric Used This Week: 11 yards
Fabric Used Year to Date: 22 yards
Fabric Added This Week: 30.25
Fabric Added Year to Date: 36.5 yards
Net Fabric for 2017: 14.5 yards gained

I also bought batting, since I was out of crib-sized batting and I still have 6 more quilts to make for friends, family, and coworkers. Here's a picture of the fabric I bought:

Most of what I got was from the clearance rack. I have 3 distinct themes for my next quilts - a green/pink quilt (the greens at the bottom, and the backing second from the top in the back pile), a school-theme quilt (the two fabrics on the right, and the backing is the third in the pile), and a pink/red/gray poppy theme quilt. I had very few lighter reds, and almost no grays in my stash. This is no longer teh case. And I found the best backing ever - poppies on a gray plaid background.

Hold me accountable, people...

Work In Progress

My quilting time is pretty scarce these days but I have been doing what I can when I can (okay, not always...the internet is far too easy to get lost in). But I am making a lot of progress.

Baby J-kwelin had a baby sister born on my birthday last year. Of course, since her older sister had one of my quilts this little girl needed one too. There was a block design in my 5,000 Quilt Block Designs book that actually had her name as part of it, so I picked it and haven't looked back. Funnily enough, this design is VERY similar to J-kwelin's design...like turn four half-square triangles in a different direction similar. So the sisters will have similar but different quilts.

Five blocks to go, then the alternate setting blocks.

I love how the design is turning out, even if every block pretty much has at least one place where a point has been chopped off. Seriously, it's a block made entirely of half-square triangles and flying geese. It's going to happen.

In other news, I won some fabric two weeks ago (but didn't have time to post last week)! Annie of Annie's Ruby Slipperz had a giveaway for 5 fat quarters on her blog when she recently came back into blogging. I won! I got to choose the color I wanted so I picked *gasp* neutrals. This is what she sent me - they'll be perfect for adding some variety into my stash. I've been using a lot of neutrals.

Yay new fabric!

Finally, I've been doing leaders and enders almost since I got seriously into machine quilting back in 2009-ish. For several years, my leaders and enders have been paper-pieced blocks from The Civil War Love Letter Quilt book by Rosemary Youngs. I've finished 34 blocks from the book so far. My book didn't come with paper piecing patterns, but I used phone book paper and drafted the blocks based off of the picture/pattern in the book. Some of these have some really small pieces and paper piecing definitely makes me more confident about the way the block will turn out in the end. My current block is this one:

First of five of these stars complete

What the block will look like

I've changed the colors from what they are in the book on all of these blocks. I'm sticking to a similar color scheme as the log cabin quilt from my last post - brown, green, orange, and blue.

Finally, my stash report:


Fabric Used this Week: 0 yards
Fabric Used year to Date: 11 yards
Fabric Added this Week: 1.25 yards
Fabric Added Year to Date: 6.25 yards
Net Fabric for 2017: 4.75 yards used


I'm still in the black! I've got a lot of quilts to make (this one, 3 friends are due in April and May, my neighbor's daughter in law is due in April, and a coworker of hubby's is going to be welcoming his first sometime soon as well) so time to sign off here and get sewing while I still have a chance!

Linking up with Stash Report Sunday and Design Wall Monday at Patchwork Times!

It's been a while since my last post...and I feel like I spend every post's beginning saying that. But oh well! I have lots of confessions and lots of exciting things and lots of pictures to show you all! So that being said...

Baby C's Quilt


I have a friend, whom we'll call K (yes, I use a lot of initials, but I don't want people to be angry about their identities appearing online...I'm a big fan of privacy) who has now just had a baby. She has an 18 month old son, E, and a newborn son, C. I've known K as long as I've known A and M from the previous post. I found out this winter that she was pregnant and I obviously was going to make her a quilt. She's dabbled in quilting and has made a top but never quilted it. She does do rag quilts and such though. So anyways, I was going to make her a quilt. The baby room was going to be done up in Mickey Sports stuff but she wanted a "bright quilt like you [I] make" so I had to oblige her. I went with a simplified bento box design that I had played around with in my spare time. I went bright and colorful and somewhat gender neutral with the colors and loved the result.

I just quilted in the ditch on this one. I thought about filling in the parts of the boxes with quilting but decided I wanted to leave the design to shine through without the quilting hiding it. I love quilting but sometimes you just don't want it to outshine the quilt itself.

Front of the quilt:

Back of the quilt:

Front and back folded together:

Binding:

All folded up and ready to give to mommy!

Baby S's Quilt


This quilt has been almost a year in the making. It was 7 months late, but his mom didn't seem to care. Her inspiration for the baby's room was this bedding set. I did log cabin blocks last June and got the top made up right before I started my international move. I took the top with me on my traveling before leaving the country and bought backing and hand-quilting supplies (mine had long been packed up at this point) to hand-quilt on the driving and flying to get to Germany. JoAnn Fabrics had the PERFECT backing fabric - a striped fabric with all of the colors (green, orange, brown, and blue also with a bit of white and yellow mixed in) which I used. I hand-quilted it with white thread in a combination of loops and stippling. It started out as stippling but I like it crossing over itself every so often...I like the circle-type shapes it creates. Because this quilt was hand-quilted, it got put on the back burner a lot, but it got pulled out more than a few times for driving. My husband usually drives when we're going on a trip, so I sit in the passenger seat and sew or read. This quilt finally got finished when I was back in the states at the beginning of June. I hand-sewed the binding, got pictures of it, and sent it off to the family who emailed me about a week later thanking me profusely.

Front of quilt:

Back of quilt:

Front and back:

Baby SM's Quilt


Baby SM's father is a coworker of mine. She (initials are of her first and middle name, to distinguish her from baby S) is the fifth baby and the first girl. So her quilt had to be girly, that's for sure! She's due August 1 and I've completed the top. I used Bonnie Hunter's Random Ohio Stars pattern and scaled it back from 12" and 6" stars to 9" and 4.5" stars. I tried to arrange the colors a bit like a rainbow, so the mostly red ones are at the top and the mostly blue ones are at the bottom. It isn't a perfect gradient but it's close.

My problem with this quilt is that I have NO IDEA how to quilt it. How do you quilt something like this? I can't just quilt in the ditch without spending a significant amount of time turning the quilt around to go around the sides of the triangle pieces. I can't do straight line stitching based off of the edges of the blocks since they overlap and don't go straight from one side to the other. I've only done one quilt (the doll quilt I entered in the Blogger's Quilt Festival) with free-motion quilting so I'm hardly an expert on that, but I'm thinking I need to figure something out to FMQ on it. But what? Will I have to do separate designs in the stars vs. in the background? I'm stuck. I don't even know if I'm going to do one of what my husband calls my "traditional" backings where I slice it up and put mini versions of the same thing as on the front in a row across it. This quilt just has me stymied! Also, I just used the word stymied. Any ideas ya'll have would be greatly appreciated! Oh, and I just noticed (it's hard to see in the picture but it's there) that one star has one set of points turned 90 degrees the wrong way. It's not in an easy-to-fix place so I'll just leave it as it is. My husband convinced me not to tear the whole top apart to fix one piece on a small star, somehow. Oh well, I guess it's got character like a lot of the old antique quilts you see.

The Wanna-Be Farmer's Wife Quiltalong


If you haven't been hiding under a rock or in a cave for the past two weeks, you've probably seen that there is a rather large group of quilters doing the Farmer's Wife Quiltalong right now. I really wanted to do it but don't have the book. Rather than buy the book and do it, I decided to instead do the Civil War Love Letters Sampler Quilt. My now Mother-in-Law (I think this was over the Christmas break where my husband proposed to me, but it might have been the year before, I'm not sure ) bought it for me as a Christmas present. My book, however, didn't come with a CD so I've been tracing the pictures in the book and teaching myself to paper piece with them. It's been a little rough but things are turning out okay. Some of the ones with more pieces are turning out slightly smaller than they should be, but they're generally working out okay. It's definitely fixable with some creative fudging on my sashing (whatever I choose for it). The best part is that I'm using all scraps (I've had to pull the bigger piece of one of the fabrics out when my scrap wasn't big enough one time so far, but other than that my usage is all scraps) from my brown, green, blue, and orange bags. My husband really liked the colors from baby S's quilt, so he requested that I do this quilt in those colors. This quilt will be for out bed so I'm going to do enough for two extra rows to make it rectangular. I have NO IDEA how I'm going to quilt this since I only have a tiny machine - maybe I'll find someone around me with a long arm that they can teach me how to use so I can use it? This quilt will most likely end up sized for a California King sized bed (our future bed when we get back to the states) so it's not going to fit in my little Jenny the Janome. *sigh* Maybe I should save up for a longarm? I can't imagine that I'll be able to save up enough for it to make it happen now or anytime relatively soon but I can always hope, can't I? My husband thinks it's cheating if someone else quilts my quilts, so getting it longarmed by someone else probably isn't an option. I don't know...maybe the size of this one will change that. We'll see.

The blocks I've finished so far:

Block 1: Enthusiasm

Block 2: A Secession Ball

Block 3: Healthful Region

Block 4: March in the Mountains (this one won't lay flat...it's not as funny-shaped as it looks like it is)

Block 5: Sorrows of War

Block 6: Liberal with Furlough (newest one finished and it really won't lay flat yet

Stash report number whatever it is...

Used this week: 2.5 yards
Used year to date: 13.0 yards
Added this week: 52 yards
Added year to date: 60.8 yards
Net usage for 2011: (47.8 yards)

Fabric Used:

.75 yard - binding for baby C's quilt
.75 yard - binding for baby S's quilt
1 yard - top for baby SM's quilt

Fabric Added:

50 yards of FQs (200 FQs from 2x100 FQ sets from Keepsake Quilting...some of it is visible in the picture above...some of my husband's present is also visible on the left)
2 yards of Fox print fabric also from Keepsake Quilting (I love foxes)

Back in the negatives again, sadly. And I have a TON to use up here before I am back in the positive. So help me use it. Give me ideas for quilting the Random Ohio Stars quilt for baby SM so I can pull a backing and quilt it. Help me come up with ways to use more fabric, because the year is half over and 47.8 yards of fabric is a lot to use up. I will get back in the positive...somehow...

Thank you, Shelly!

In case you don't know, Shelly of Prairie Moon Quilts is doing a series of challenges to start the new year off right sewing-wise. The first one was easy - locate your oldest UFO and do something (anything!) about it. That was easy for me because my oldest UFO is the biggest UFO/WIP I have. It's lowest on the totem pole, but I took it out, looked at it, and put it back into the corner of my sewing room where it will live until I finish the quilts with due dates attached. But Shelly counted that as doing something - after all, unlike her (until she did her challenge) I know where it is!

Second challenge was a bit harder - clean off a flat surface in my sewing area. My sewing table was covered in stuff as I've been doing hand-sewing lately, not touching my machine. All of the stuff you see here in this picture (except for the suitcase that's holding my thread) was on my sewing table surrounding my machine:

My sewing table is really small - it's a little card table, so it was rather covered. You can't quite tell, but most of the stuff was scattered - pins, bags with holes in them, three pairs of scissors, my thimbles, my thimble with a hole in it (someday, it will be a necklace - after all, how many of you have used a metal thimble so much that it developed a hole in the tip?), etc. - all over the table until you couldn't work there if you wanted to. Now, it's organized on the windowsill (after all, I can't use the windowsill for much else!) and my sewing table looks like this:

Hooray cleanliness! I also cleaned up the floor in the room. You can see in the bottom right corner my fabric basket, my tote bag of scraps, and my tote bag of batting scraps. My poor curvy cutting mat is on the table, and my wonderful red Ikea lamp (doesn't it look like the one from the beginning of the Pixar movies?) shining on Jenny the Janome. 

In case you were wondering, the quilt on the left and the one on the right were made by my Grandmother. The one on the left was my garden - at night as I was in bed I'd imagine wandering through the garden, thinking about what beautiful flowers I'd see. On the right is my little bunny - he was my pet until my parents actually let me get my own pet (an adorable little white mouse named Treasure who was tame as can be and that I loved beyond imagining). In the middle is my first quilt - aptly named "Primus" ("First" in Latin). It was made from designer fabric swatches (not even kidding!) that we got from a friend of the family that was an interior designer. It was completely hand-sewn and is totally falling apart, but it's my inspiration because of how far I've come.

So thank you, Shelly, for getting me to clean my room. My husband thanks you too! This year I'm going to try to finish all of the projects that were started last year. So there's one baby quilt, a Quilts for Kids quilt, and my bed quilt. Plus I have to finish my brown bag quilt challenge, one and probably a second baby quilt, and hopefully my sister's quilt. Hers is simple - it's a wholecloth front, but there is going to be a TON of quilting. I can't wait to start it, and I promise to post progress pictures as it'll be awesome.

Happy New Year, and I wish you all happy sewing in this coming year!

In which I try to post from my phone

The Internet won't be turned on until September 7. Luckily, I can post from my phone!
The house is still a wreck and all I will post for now is a picture of what came in the mail today.  The colors are off as they were taken on the phone at 9:30 at night.

In which I missed my fabric store

Today, on the drive home from Zugspitze (tallest mountain in Germany), my husband and I decided to stop by München (the German spelling of Munich) to hit up a quilting store. Now, quilting stores in the good old USA aren't that rare. Heck, you can even go to your local Joann Fabrics or Hancock Fabrics and find good quality quilting cottons, or even cottons in general. Bolt after bolt of fabric, all of which could potentially find a home in your quilt. Any one of them might be the perfect color or print!


But here where I live, I don't have that luxury. There are 3 fabric stores in town, but they have very very limited selection on quilting fabrics. Two of the stores have a scant collection (less than 10 bolts) of cotton fabric, but it's mixed in with all of the other fabrics and you have to feel every bolt to figure out which ones are usable. There is one store that has its "quilting fabric" separate from the other ones, which is nice, especially since it has over 50 bolts of various fabrics. 


Then I came across a blogger from München named Uli who told me about a quilting store there in München! I visited their website and was excited beyond belief. It was what I was trying to find here - a store full of just quilting fabric and other quilting paraphernalia! So, on the way home, my husband graciously offered to drive through München to visit the store. But I mis-typed the address into the GPS and it took us to the wrong side of town and, by the time we found the store, it had closed half an hour earlier. I looked into the window and it looked amazing - the setup seemed a bit like Quilting by the Bay, with fabric all along the walls, on display shelves in the middle of the floor, etc. I was really disappointed that it was closed, but at the same time I'm really excited for whenever I get to go back! 


That being said, I probably won't be back for a while...I could go tomorrow, but I may try visiting a fabric store in a closer city. München is a bit farther than I'd like to drive just to go to one store, and besides, I don't have my fabric! It's with all the rest of my stuff, waiting for delivery after I move into my new house. It's very hard, not to have fabric, and not to have a sewing machine. You don't know how much you'll miss it until you don't have it and won't have it for at least a few weeks. 


Anyways, enough whining...it's a beautiful-ish day (okay, so maybe that's wishful thinking...rain, thunderstorms, and partly cloudy all day), and I have some hand quilting I can work on. So enough rambling on the blog!