Circa 1998

The second of my Friday Fall Flimsy parade is actually the first flimsy I ever finished, Circa 1998. It has been packed away since then with the vague intention of using it some day for free motion quilting practice. When I had to move everything after our spring flood, all the boxes on the bottom ended up on the top, exposing the sordid underbelly of my early quilt experiments:

Not too bad from a distance, but I can tell you that pretty much everything that could go wrong did go wrong on this quilt! Even when I started starting quilts in the late 70s, my feeling was that if I could set in a sleeve, sewing a quilt would be a piece of cake. So I had no lessons. How hard could it be? But, as most of you know, putting a quilt together takes a lot more precision than sewing clothes.

Living in California in the mid to late 90s, I started this, my third attempt at quilting, with a collection of small scale yellow and pink florals. Every fabric is a floral. Some are from proper quilt shops, but many were very cheap fabrics from Joann's.

Mistake #1: I didn't pre-wash the fabrics.

Mistake #2: I used a steam iron to press the blocks as I worked. Imagine my dismay when some fabrics literally shrank before my eyes under the iron! But not all of them, of course. So none of the pieces, or finished stars, were the same size. But, that was a problem even before I ironed anything, because...

Mistake #3: I didn't know to add extra seam allowance for rotary cut triangles. So none of the triangles fit properly, and some of the seam allowances are very scant. It is amazing that most of the stars look as good as they do.

Mistake #4: I took "scrappy" too far:

For the most part I think I had a good understanding of value, and these really wild blocks were deliberately wild. But, I realized that I was going to run out of my first sashing fabric (seen here on the top and right side). So I decided to make the sashings scrappy too. But, I couldn't find that same yellow, and I ended up with four different yellows in the sashings. The disaster was spreading, and I couldn't go back, because...

Mistake #5: I was attaching the sashings as I went along. This was really an attempt to correct Mistakes 1 through 3. Since all the blocks were different sizes, I reasoned that I could adjust the width of the sashings to even them up again. Which kind of worked, because the quilt is almost exactly 72.5" square. But most of the joins look like this:

Yeah. You know that quilt judge criticism, "straight lines should be straight?" Not so much:

There was a plan to add a Flying Geese border, but it was all too, too much at that point. Like Kenny says,

You have to know when to hold 'em

Know when to fold 'em

Know when to walk away, and

Know when to run!

I guess I'm finally ready to improve my free motion quilting, so the plan this fall is to get this basted and least partially quilted. It will be a good warm up for the others!

Collector Flimsy

Here's the first Friday flimsy from the sewing I did over the summer. Collector is finally sewn together!

At 77" x 59", it barely fits on my "design wall" (two Ikea wardrobes and a flannel sheet). I laid it out horizontally rather than vertically because it is most likely to be used as a throw on the sofa. I am glad that I didn't make it 77" square like I originally planned! It is plenty big now.

Except the backgrounds and setting triangles, all the fabrics are different.

My mom noticed that the kitties are eyeing the fish!

The layout took me a full day, it was quite a puzzle. The original design by Cosabeth Parriaud in Quiltmania had alternating stars and squares in the white blocks. When I reduced the size I had more squares than stars, so I decided to scatter the stars along the diagonal in a hopefully loose and creative way. Plus, I wanted it to be lighter in the middle, and I had to balance out the really strong prints like those three large circles. Then, when I started taking photos, I noticed that the blue prints really pop, so I had to balance them too. But, I got there in the end, and I was glad to get them numbered and down off the wall! The good thing about a design wall that has to come down at the end of the day, is that it forces you to make decisions. No dithering!

I took my time sewing it together so that everything stayed in order. Probably 75% of the points on the stars are a little cut off, but after all this, I am perfectly fine with that! I think the problem was with the way I trimmed the flying geese units, so I'll remember that for the next one. It's not very noticeable anyway:

When I pulled this project out again last spring, and I saw how much black it had, I thought to myself, "Ugh, I am so over black!" My Sedona Star colourway also had a lot of black, and they were designed at around the same time. I felt like my taste had evolved since then.

But, now that it is all together, I can see that the original concept paid off. I wanted it to sparkle, and it really does. That's from all the high contrast prints, on top of the high contrast design. So, will Sedona Star 2.0 still be black? Yes it will. And sparkly too. :)

Otherwise, it's just fun to remember where and why I bought all the fabrics in the quilt. Many of the darks, like the strawberries, were bought for this quilt, because my stash was low on them. But these tiny red hearts...

...were actually bought for Sweet Hearts, a long, long time ago. The sunflower prints are even older:

Remember Kaffe Fassett's first quilting book, before he started designing quilt fabric? I was very inspired by that red diamond quilt with the sunflower fabric, and bought mine around then. I owe a lot of my inspiration to Fassett, first as a knitter and now as a quilter. And of course, there's a heck of a lot of Kaffe fabrics in this quilt too.

So that's done and dusted. The back is pieced and ready to go, and now it's waiting for its turn to be quilted. It feels good to get one of these old projects done, and it is nice when the theory works out too!

What I Did This Summer

...And What I Didn't...

This foundation-pieced pine cone was designed by Cyrille Zellweger, who has an Etsy shop full of cute camping-themed paper piecing patterns. I bought several of them last fall...

...and promised myself that I would make them this summer. Full of enthusiasm, I started the pine cone right after my last post in June. I'd really enjoyed all the paper piecing I'd done previously, so I thought I would take it to the next level. My plan was to make the entire project with fabric by Art Gallery, which is really beautiful -- lightweight and with a high thread count. And it is great for paper piecing. The only problem...

...is that they seem to have banned forest green from their production line. So that didn't work, but fortunately I still had a lot of my trusty Kaffe Aboriginal Dots in forest green left over from Sedona Star 1.0. I used that in the first photo above, and also in my second block:

You can also see that I used a medium scale modern print for the aqua sky. The colour in the pine cone photo is more accurate. It was an experiment, but I think it worked quite well.

But, even though they didn't take too long and all the problems were solved, I lost interest at that point. The thing I like best about paper piecing is the rhythm of sewing all those points. You can pre-cut your strips, and just sew -- light, dark, light, dark. When I looked at the rest of the blocks, I could see that every piece was a different size, and that templates would probably be needed, and it looked more like stop-and-go city driving than driving on the freeway. So I put it aside. I'm not saying I won't go back to it, but it wasn't the big summer project that I planned.

The big event in Toronto this summer was the Pan Am/Parapan Games. Although I didn't seek them out, the Games still found me. Near the end of the last week I was driving home from the grocery store, far from any of the venues, when I passed a couple of cyclists from Chile dressed from head to toe in their team colours. They caught up to me at a red light, and I could see that they were having a fantastic time, laughing and smiling from ear to ear. Toronto cyclists are not usually that happy, lol. It was like seeing a couple of flamingos among the pigeons, and a very nice moment.

It was also in July that I became very motivated to work on Texas Star again. Surprised me! After reading EPP guru Karen's blog for a while, I noticed that she sections her large quilts in rows, and then joins the wide rows at the end. My diamond section experiment was a total failure, but I decided to try Karen's approach. So far it's been a lot easier to manage, and I now have 245 of the stars joined up:

That's 99 more than last time, and there are just 88 left now. Isn't it funny how the numbers keep working out?

In my Summer Break post I thought I might work on Down in the Garden (DitG), Jacks and Cats, and Best Friends Forever (BFF) over the summer, but I've done very little on any of them. I think I need to pack DitG away for a while, because I've totally run out of steam on it. I may still pick up Jacks this fall. BFF is on hold until Texas Star is done, and I'll probably be happy to get back to it by then. I'm embarrassed to say that I still haven't bound those Homegrown placemats, but at least the potholders are done:

I really like them, actually, they're like fun little mini quilts.

And, over the next three Fridays I have three finished flimsies to show you, starting with Collector. I was hoping to bring that up to five, but I promised myself that I would make a big push to get some things quilted this fall, so that's a higher priority. But then again, after less than a week of catching up in Blogland, I was captured by the Ad Hoc Improv Quilter's link up that Ann and Kaja are starting. I knew immediately what I wanted to make for that! And then the next day this order of Laura Gunn's Painters Canvas, for a completely different project, arrived in the mail:

It is awesome, so you can understand how I am torn between too many options.

I know it seems like I am picking up right where I left off before the summer, but the long break from blogging was actually very helpful, and I will probably do it again next year. It gave me chance to step back and gain some perspective on all my projects. I'm tired of working on ideas that are three or four years old, or more, so I'm very motivated to clear out some old UFOs this fall, and get more current with my projects. We'll see how it shakes out!