Three more quilts bound

Took a little longer than I hoped but 3 more quilts are bound and ready to go back to storage. Well that isn’t quite true, one is currently having a wash. It had sat so long it really needed it. I had titled It “dog bed”, it was an experimental piece, pieced on the longarm. It served the purpose but it’s not what you would call a show quilt. It is apparently an excellent cat bed, so I will hang on to it and sling it on a sofa for the cat.

This one is large and is going back to storage. It is a sample for one of my patterns that is designed for big prints. Getting it put of the house will free up space. Along with it will be Speed 1. I am kinda thinking I might need to make a Speed 1.5. A bigger quilt based on speed 1. Of course the more I think about it the more chance there is it will mutate so far that it ends up as speed 6 or 7, dang I need to check how many Speeds there are.

Not managed any more clearing today, been viewing houses which takes an absurd amount of time and energy. Still progress is being made so I can’t be too upset. Meanwhile dinner seems to have exploded and maybe, just maybe the worst will wipe off the bottom of the oven if I get to it while it’s warm.

Todo list just keeps growing

More progress on sorting out my longarming space, but that means more quilts to bind more scraps to cut down and a design wall to finish making. The latter I did manage to do, admittedly partly to use up a spare piece of wadding. Seemed easier than finding another home for the wadding as it is tooo big to throw away but too small for most quilts.

Sorry I can’t get far enough back to photograph the whole design wall. I had been looking at portable design walls and to be honest none get stellar reviews. Then one of the comments gave me an idea, why not just make my own. A few plumbing supplies and a little cutting, its pretty easy really. When I have a permanat base I will glue the joints. For now they are push fit with a little masking tape for extra security. Over the frame I have a piece of cotton wadding stretched. I stitched it to have pockets at each short edge. It is very lightweight and I can easily move it about.

The piece on it is something I found while cleaning and it used up a binding offcut I had. I am not sure yet what I will do with this, thinking I might keep it as it is so narrow and thus easy to find space to hang. Four of the quilts waiting for binding are now trimmed ready to go, and I have made 30m of binding today that will work on 3 of them. I am hoping there may be enough left after that for one quilt that I have in my queue, but to be honest I think I will be out of luck. It is a lot easier to bulk produce binding it is also very very boring.

As predicted

The starting to do list did indeed shrink, but in the process of cleaning in the long arm room I found more jobs to do. I have several quilts waiting for bindings. When I make piped bindings I always make a generous amount. I hate wondering if I have enough for then last side, and I am sure I fit it tighter the more worried I am. As a tight binding will distort a quilt I feel it’s better to make surplus. However that leaves me with lots of offcuts of binding. So 2 of those are now on class samples. They may not be the colours I would have chosen but they work and will stop the edges fraying which in samples is the main requirement. I do still have 3 more quilts to bind added to my to do list, um no make that 4 quilts.

Random piecing

There are a lot of times in patchwork when we want a random distribution of our fabrics throughout the quilt. It is something a lot of my students say they find very hard. This is how I do it when I have a lot of pieces.

I have precut a lot of these pieces to make a one block quilt. They are all odd bits of batik I had no plan at all to how many of each or even what colours. I split my big stack of pieces into 9 piles, yup I know there are 6 in the picture. These are my 6 main draw piles. I am working on 9 rows at once, each was started by picking 2 fabrics from the 6 top ones. Once the 9 pairs were made I added a third to the first pair I stitched. the only rule I have is I can only take a top piece, no searching through the stacks. Usually that works fine, but evey so often the stacks may get similar and be the same as both ends of th next row I need to add to. If that happens I use the 3 emergency stacks. So far I have 9 rows each with 15 pieces and I think they are all pretty random. It isn’t perfect randomisation. This way does mean I never get the same fabric next to itself. It’s close enough to random to lool the part.

For those who are really challenged by random the best solution I have found is to put all the pieces into a container you can’t see into and pick blindly. Then you may set the rule that if it is the same as the one you need to stitch to you put it to one side and draw again. Just don’t forget to put the set aside one back in the container as soon as you draw one that is different.

Good luck with random, it can look amazing.

Simple block, simple problem

Some time ago I decided I wanted to make this quilt. Well OK the original is not quite the same proportions but close enough. I followed the idea but with bigger starting rectangles of the background. I started making blocks several years ago while I was doing a lot of traveling and thought it was time I finished the project and cleared the box for something else.

I showed you one of the blocks a couple of posts back. I noticed the first few blocks I had made were not very good. So I started again, thinking I must have been tired or rushed or something, but my new blocks were still not right. They were better, much better, but not my usual standard. I figured what the heck, I wasn’t going to show it so who cares. I will finish it, use it and not worry. When I started putting the blocks together I finally found the issue. The precut jelly roll strips are not accurate. They vary by at least 3/8th of an inch. With 3 widths of that in each direction in each block there was no way I could get the blocks right. some of the joins between blocks are way off but thats just how it had to be at this point. These were cut by a reputable company, so in future I think I will have to measure every strip from every roll.

What do you do in the holidays?

Today is the first day of my Easter break, so what do I get up to? I start planning what I think I might be able to get done while I am not teaching. For me this is prime work time, less travel less human interaction I can really get on with things at home.

This time my focus is very much on tasks about the house. We want to move and that means I need to get stuff sorted and get rid of what I can. I also need to get som work done, both customer and my own show quilts. So my starting list, well here is the first stack I thought of

• Clear the cutting table
• Clear the sewing table
• Service back up machine and get it set up
• Finish borders on woven quilt
• Finish show quilt that is on the frame
• Finish sorting and clearing the storage in the longarm room
• Quilt 2 customer quilts
• Clean teaching gear and prepare for next term
• Start cataloging and maybe packing paperback books
• Finish binding on show quilt
• Quilt 2 of my quilts

I strongly suspect as I complete stuff more jobs will add themselves to the list. Will I complete everything before classses restart? Not a chance, but I can make progress. Today I have done the first 4 on the list. This should mean some of the other items become a bit quicker to do. It also gives me a space to work on pieceing while I am cleaning out the longarm room. In between these jobs I will also be looking for houses, viewing them and trying to catch up with some house work. Wish me luck.

It’s not just you

Just a quick post to hopefully reassure some of my students. Why can I look at your seam and spot an error, because I look at mine and find them too You don’t get to find mistakes by being perfect, you find mistakes by making them so often they smack you in the face when you see them.

As you can see while Iwas sewing this seam I seem to have taken a brief excursion. Still nothing that couldn’t be fixed by resewing it, and no I didn’t unpick it. Yes maybe in the future someone will look at it and say even back then people made mistakes and had to fix them. I hope it makes someone smile one day.

Unmaking part 2

The unmade is now back together and on the frame. The quilting is going slowly, my joints have not allowed me to have long days, but I am very pleased with how it is going. It will have a lot of colour and texture from the quilting. I was a bit worried that would swamp the piecing but it seems to be holding its own very well.

This is just the start of the first row, it is taking a couple of days per row, though now I have the pattern set I think I will speed up a bit, but with the amount of ruler work it won’t ever be fast.

I did get one more foundaton pieced star done before I switched projects. I had a few days of looking at it and not doing anything before I worked out I needed to switch, no idea why I am so slow on the uptake Anywhere here is the other block that is done, and expect to see this quilt again sometime.

Other than that, why the delay in blogging? well mostly I am house hunting and it takes hours. The market does seem to be a bit slow at the moment and I think I may finally have cought up with it, maybe from here on I just need to look at new listings. It is amazing how similar houses start to look after a while, and even more amazing how fashion works. Several houses have the same bathrooms, which makes things even move confusing when you are trying to compare them.

Unmaking

I had a plan. Which is probably where it went wrong. I thought I was going to load a quilt today. It is a top that has been waiting a bit over a year, but each time I look at loading it I do something else. While I was clearing up I found some leftover blocks from this top and tucked them in with it. No real idea why. The top was done with all its borders and as big as I can load. This morning I took another look and I still didn’t want to load it, but I had a plan, it was going on the frame. So as you do in this situation I procrastinated and looked at the spare blocks. Playing with them I decided the outside border was too plain and would look much better with some of these blocks in. Before you know it I was chopping up a perfectly good quilt top to fit in the leftover. I got the cutting done and the blocks added it just needs one more border then I am ready to quilt it. Well that and I have decided I want wool wadding in it so I need to go via my storage unit. I suppose it is progress of a sort. I just wish I had had this revelation before I had put it all together.

Prepare to foundation piece

Some of you probably already know that I have a large cabinet full of projects in progress. Let’s just say I probably have more in progress than most people would be comfortable with but it works for me. I am struggling at the moment to really focus on big project so each day I do the work part of the day then grab whichever project I feel like. Seems that I focus on one for 3 or 4 days then hop to another. No none of the projects will be done quickly, but at least they are all progressing.

This is the last 2 days’ work. One large block from a kit. It was supposed to be a block of the month, but well it has taken a bit longer. It was one of my van projects and with no van it went on hold. I hope to get a couple of the little blocks done before I move on again.

Gravity now has all its crystals on. It was more than I thought but I think it is still pretty subtle. I won’t know for sure until I see it hanging. I now have a binding that needs finishing. Joy. On the other hand the last of my all machine sewn bidnings got finished today as I am well on the way to having a stash of quilts for shows this year.

I listen to a lot of radio in the car. Recently I keep catching things about preparing, either for Brexit or the fall of civilization or maybe even the zombie apocalypse. I am far from convinced that this is needed, and somewhere between impressed and disgusted by some of the companies capitalizing on this. However there is a possible upside. Maybe if the disaster doesn’t appear on time people would consider donating their stashed food to food banks rather than letting it go off. I would guess that a food bank might have a better idea what to do with tins containing 40 servings of a meal than most families, especially in an emergency with a power outage. Now the question is, how can I spread the idea?