DitG Block 5 finished!

We've had some beautiful, clear sunshine today, and I was finally able to get a good set of photos for this block. It's the centre, Block 5, of Leanne Beasley's stitchery quilt Down in the Garden. Yes, I know it's wrinkly, but I don't want to iron it until I'm ready to assemble the quilt.

 

There has been quite a lot of "let's see what happens" so far, but in the end I'm well pleased with how it came out. I really like the double curve, ogee outline around both this block and the birdhouse blocks. I also like the way Beasley used the green sprigs and the outside points to suggest a diamond shape inside the curves. I chose the coral and pink colours for those flowers to emphasize the diamond, and I think that worked well.

My original plan for the small lazy daisy flowers was to make them dark blue, same as here. It was not successful, and I am sorry that I didn't take a photo to prove it! In the light blue, the small flowers provide some contrast and support for the large flowers. I was really surprised by how much better the large flowers looked once those little blue flowers were stitched! It was a good lesson to me. And, I think that same colour of blue is going to fix my problem with Prairie Star as well.

With all the stitching completed, this block has ended up quite a bit darker than the light, watery effect that I originally intended. This was mostly because the Tsukineko inks were too difficult to control when they were really watered down, so I had to keep them more intense and pure. I think this has also made the project more formal, and I'm not sure all those gingham fabrics that I hoped to use are appropriate any more. But the inspiration fabrics by Tamara Kate still work well.

It's a big block, 15 inches square, and a lot of stitching. I really like all the words and sentiments in the poem, but gosh, the words were boring to sew! Fortunately, my commitment to stick with just the one project made it easier.

I keep thinking that now I am mostly done, which is not true at all! There are still 3 more birdhouses, and all four of the watering can blocks to do. The applique butterflies on the watering cans are wickedly difficult, but I think I have them under control now.

In any case, my plan to focus on just one project at a time is a big success, even though I have changed it to two projects - one hand sewing and one machine sewing. Momentum is building, and right now I'm not even tempted to change projects. I'll show you the machine sewing project next time -- I think it will be a surprise!

Prioritizing

Sedona Star 1.0

For a change of pace, today's post is (mostly) about what I'm not going to make!

Early in January I had a big hunt through my stash for this orange fabric, which I wanted for My Country House. It is the perfect orange, not too gold and not too brown, but that's beside the point right now. The point is that my search started a whole process of digging through all my old quilty projects and making some decisions:

1. Keep going
2. Keep going but make some changes
3. Toss.

The result has been that suddenly I've been working on, and thinking about, a whole bunch of projects at the same time. There hasn't been much to show, because I'm spread too thin. For example, in February I set myself a schedule to get Texas Star to the flimsy stage. According to the schedule, I should now have 227 stars joined up. As of today, the total stands at 146...

...which is progress over last time...

...but not ideal. Still, although progress is slow, I think we will all agree that it is looking pretty good. 

What you may not remember is that this is Texas Star 2.0. In 2011 (before this blog), after about 25 years and two cross-continental moves, Texas Star 1.0 went in the bin. At that point there were about 250 machine-pieced stars finished and ready to join. But, it just had too many problems, including dodgy fabrics and dodgier sewing. About 16 months later, Texas Star 2.0 got off to a much better start, and it will definitely be finished. But for now, I'm packing it away, because as I said, I'm spread too thin.

As you've probably guessed, the project I'm not going to be finishing is Sedona Star, shown at the top of the page. In fact, those photos are all that remain, because it all went in the bin in February. It had many issues, but the biggest was that it was big -- bed sized -- and my colour scheme was more suited to a wall quilt. So yes, Sedona Star 2.0 will be smaller. It is all planned, but not started.

I've already mentioned that this project, Trick or Treat baskets, was abandoned last fall:

Baskets 1.0

In fact I had about 12 to 15 done, but there are no photos, and these went in the bin in February too. Gosh, I imagine you are saying, I know they could have been used somewhere. And surely something could have been done with all those pretty Sedona Star circles. Yes, I thought about that quite a bit. But finally I realized that I can't do it all, and it would be a bigger shame if my newer, and much nicer, projects didn't get made because I was still flogging a dead horse with these.

So, Down in the Garden will get the nod, and we will see what happens when I focus on just one project at a time. I think it will be a perfect summertime project. :D

DitG Tagore

In addition to the large embroidered blocks that anchor Leanne Beasley's stitchery quilt, Down in the Garden, there are little bits of stitching scattered all around it. I really like these little details that are stitched over printed fabric, so there are two layers of interest. The fabric is from Tamara Kate's 2013 collection, Flight Patterns.

I intended to use these medium dark blue flowers all over the quilt, but it turned out that they didn't work elsewhere, so this is the only place they remain:

The quote is from Indian writer and painter Rabindranath Tagore's Poems on Time. Wikipedia also has this nice piece of synchronicity, written exactly 100 years ago:

Who are you, reader, reading my poems a hundred years hence?
I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before.
In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years.

— The Gardener, 1915.[165]

These butterfly sections will be scattered around the quilt, while the contrasting bee quote is featured in the large centre block. You haven't seen it since the end of Ink Week last fall, but it is now almost done. I just have a little of the lettering left. But, I also want to do it justice with some good photos, so it will need some sunshine as well. With luck, next week!

DIY Mystery Quilt

The alternate title for this post is "One Step Forward, Two Steps Back," lol. But, I'm trying to stay positive!

It's been a month since I posted the first block of my "cherry tree of life" quilt, Hanami:

I mentioned then that I wanted to add an element of mystery to the quilt, but still keep some control over the design.  Once I figured out the layout of the entire quilt, I calculated how many HSTs I would need. I made them one dozen at a time using my homemade HST papers:

40 dozen in all! My hope with this project was that by doing all the boring work first, and saving the fun part until the end, it would have a better chance of a timely finish. The jury is still out on that!

The great thing about these papers is that they add to the randomness, because with a larger print, you cannot exactly anticipate how the fabric will be cut. Some triangles were quite light, some were dark, some were mostly pink, some were mostly green.

Once all the HSTs were made, the plan was to put them in a big bowl, and have a random draw for each tree. But, while I was making them, I started to think that if the draw is completely random, then all the trees will end up looking the same. If I wanted each tree to have it's own personality, then I would have to add some granularity to the mix. It's like the difference between baking sponge cake or muffins. Sponge cake batter is perfectly smooth, and muffin batter should be a little lumpy. To my taste, sponge cake is kind of bland.

So, I chose 13 fairly solid pink "feature fabrics" for my 13 blocks. Each block uses 22 pink HSTs in total, and I decided that 9 of them should be from the same feature fabric. "9" was a shot in the dark, really. I hoped it would be enough to make the trees distinct, but still allow for a fair degree of randomness.

I set up 13 plastic snack bags, as you can see in the first photo above, put in the 9 feature fabric HSTs, and then did a random draw for the rest of the pink ones. Then I had smaller pools for the brown trunk HSTs, and the light background squares as well.

Now I get to open one bag at a time and see what's in there! I iron open all the HSTs, and arrange them until they look their best:

I'm finding that it works best if most of the matching HSTs go around the outside of the tree to define it.

You can see that the brown trunk HSTs are divided into medium brown and dark brown. There are only six brown fabrics in total, so most of the tree trunks have some matching browns.

And, instead of a solid square in the middle of the trunk, I made 13 medium/dark HSTs to give the trunks the same level of "pieciness" as the rest of the tree. I didn't use the papers for those, I just made them two at a time with different fabric and a bigger variety of prints.

The assembly is straightforward from there. I join the squares into rows:

And then join the rows into blocks. Two more are done...

...but...

...I have realized that they are both distinctly rectangular rather than square. My seam allowance joining the rows is too wide. That is not too hard to fix, but it's still frustrating. And it does have to be fixed, or the final assembly won't work as planned.

So, that's slowed things down quite a bit. That's how UFOs happen, but, I'm going to try to get back on the horse soon...

...only, I did start something else this week...

First Birdhouse

Here's the first birdhouse stitchery that I've finished for Leanne Beasley's stitchery quilt, Down in the Garden. It will finish at 7" square, and there will be four all together, placed around the corners of the quilt.

Back in November this was the first block that I used for my Ink Week experiment, and the birdhouses were the reason for the ink in the first place. I was very concerned that the flowering vines would over power the birdhouse. So, I thought that colouring it in with the ink would keep things organized and clear. Even though the ink turned out very pale, I think it still helps.

The last time you saw this block, it looked like this:

The leaves and flowers were all in stem stitch, and the purple was DMC 209. Normally I like that shade of purple, but against the almost fluorescent green and blue it looked surprisingly brown and drab. It has been sitting around for months, but this week I took it out in daylight, and realized that it had to change. Here's the same section now:

I changed the flower colour to the periwinkle DMC 340, and stitched everything in back stitch instead. The yellow is true in the second photo, it is very light. I think it was much better to keep the stitching light and fresh too. I've revised the colours for all the flowering vines several times, and I've realized now that it will be best to keep them all bluish and cool.

Now that's all decided, I have fresh motivation for these birdhouses. For a couple of months I've seriously considered redoing them completely in applique to give them more oomph. But I think the real problem is that all winter I was looking at them in artificial light. It all looks different in the daylight, and I think it's finally coming together. (In my head, I mean -- there's still plenty of stitching left to do!)

Long Time, No See!

Remember those diamonds I made in March (here and here)? Well, this is what they are for. The last time I posted on this project was almost three years ago. Since then, it's been growing!

I have already written more than enough extensively on this project, and it went through many changes. But, the end is in sight and the plan has pretty much jelled. I started with these three cross stitch designs by Jim Shore:

They were stitched on raw linen aida instead of the perforated paper in the kit, and the plan was to stack them vertically and sew them into a long quilted banner. In 2012, the paper pieced borders were going very slowly, and the project got pushed aside.

Over a year ago I thought that a long, skinny banner didn't feel right to me. I decided to line them up horizontally instead, and add a couple of borders to make a wall quilt with some presence. The question was whether I had enough of the original fabrics:

The orange fabric was my main worry, because I knew I wanted it for My Country House too. Fortunately, I still had lots, and after searching high and low I was able to find all the other fabrics too.

So in January I easily finished up the last four of those green flying geese borders. My paper piecing is so much better now! I know it looked ok, but I have learned some things since then. The Quilt Show had a Carol Doak video available a year ago, which was very helpful. Also, the Judy Niemeyer instructions with Prairie Star had a surprising amount of good information, and improved my technique as well.

From the start the tricky part with this project was going to be joining the aida and the pieced sections. I used a narrow strip of dark green fabric to frame the cross stitch and transition to the quilt fabric. I carefully trimmed the aida and left a 4 thread seam allowance. Then I pinned the green strip to the front, and from the back I carefully (and slowly!) machine stitched four threads from the edge. Then I went back and stitched a second line three threads from the edge to anchor it:

By accident I found that if I lined up the pins along that fourth thread, it was easier to stay on course:

Then the last step was to trim the seam allowance down to one thread from the stitching:

So, it was a lot of slow, careful machine sewing, and I ended up taking a one month break in the middle, but I am happy with the result so far:

After I finished the hard part yesterday, I was excited to put it up on the wall and see how it looked with the second and third borders:

Why did that look wrong? It's just because I cut the light green second border oversized, I said to myself. Out came the tape measure. Argh! There's an extra diamond block in the top and bottom borders. How did I manage to make too many? I decided which two diamonds to eliminate and just pinned them under for now:

I'm going to applique some flowers in the light green second border. I spent the rest of the day yesterday auditioning fabrics and cutting out the appliques. That's when I really start to feel creative! After all that, I finally realized that the diamond side borders were wrong too! They should be one diamond longer, which accounts for the "extra" diamonds along the top and bottom. Argh again. That fix won't be quite so simple, and I'll have to juggle things around to keep it balanced.

But, the applique flowers are all figured out, so that will keep me busy for a while!

Early Crocus

Here're some shots of our first flowers, taken on Saturday. These early crocus are half the size of regular crocus, and they are about a week later than normal. You can see the grass is still mostly dead, but there are some new shoots showing up in the next photo:

No, not many!

It seems like spring photos are all around the blogosphere this week. Wanda in Illinois has forsythia blooming already -- we have maybe another week before we see that here by the lake, but they may be blooming in other warmer parts of the city. Daphne in Victoria has full grown tulips, but Victoria had cherry blossoms even before they did in Japan. Rebecca gets the prize -- it is still snowing in Alaska. Although, Christine tells us it can snow at Easter in Greece too!

As you can see, our snowdrops are still holding on. This week will be the first week where every day will be above 10 C (50 F), so they'll be gone soon. With luck, we'll see the full size crocus by the end of the week. Right now though, this is all we have:

Ah, spring!