Some Good Sewing Advice

Here's something a little different to brighten your day!  A friend found it somewhere on Facebook:

It's funny, because I perfectly agreed with the first paragraph.  I think "Good results are difficult when indifference predominates," is exactly right.  Even the beginning of the second paragraph made sense - "When there are urgent housekeeping chores, do these first so your mind is free to enjoy your sewing."

But after that I lost it!  I don't know how many times I've answered the door covered in bits of thread!  And I have no idea why you'd want to get French chalk all over your fabric.

This newspaper clipping is old and yellowed, but even when it was printed, however long ago, they clearly thought this advice was already funny.  I hope you did too!

Piecing the Snowball Blocks

As I mentioned yesterday, I decided to scale down the snowball blocks for my Hen Party quilt to 6" finished.  When I looked around I found snowball blocks made with different sizes of corner triangles.  I like the block best when the corners are 1/4 of the size of the block, so I needed 1.5" corner triangles.

The block is easy to make.  I cut a great many 2" squares, which is 1.5" plus the seam allowances on both sides.  I drew a diagonal line from corner to corner, and pinned all four corners to the block at once:

Then I sewed right around the block, stitching on the lines, in one pass.  After all the blocks were sewn I went back and trimmed all the seam allowances down to 1/4 inch.

Some people will recommend that you don't trim the seam allowances here, but just iron up the corners so that there are 3 layers of fabric.  I tried it, and it does help to keep the block square.  However, I really wanted to be able to iron the seam allowances towards the dark fabric, so I opted to trim off the excess.  I was glad that I did it, too, because the blocks nested together beautifully when it came time to assemble them.

There is no doubt, though, that keeping these blocks square when you are ironing them is the biggest challenge. I was finally able to use the mini iron and Steady Betty pressing surface that I bought from Keepsake Quilting a few months ago:

I had my doubts about these when I first got them, but they turned out to be very helpful.  The Steady Betty pressing surface is covered with thin foam, which clings to the block.  It also drags a bit on the iron, which is a drawback, but not a huge one.  So it helps keep the blocks square when you iron them.

The mini iron is also great.  It gets very hot, so I was able to just let the heat do the work rather than using a lot of muscle.  Because it is so easy to handle, I didn't burn my fingers once!  And because the iron is very lightweight, I was able to press all those corners while seated, which is another bonus.

Tomorrow I'll show you the borders!

New Project - Hen Party

Today is my mom's 75th birthday!  Part of the reason my blog posts have been scarce recently is because I've been secretly working on her birthday present.  It's a lap quilt, although once the borders are added it will be up to 70" square.  Here's the centre:

I wanted to get the whole top done before today, but I didn't quite make it.  The borders are done but not sewn on.  I hope to get it all assembled by the end of the week.  I make no promises on when it will be quilted...

I got the idea for the quilt from a pattern in the last issue of Sew Scrappy magazine, which I reviewed back in January.  I have modified it so much that I think you can call the design original now.

The quilt in the magazine used 8" snowball blocks, but when I looked at the scale of my fabrics I thought that 6" blocks would be better.  You can see that the larger chickens are framed perfectly.  There was a LOT of fussy cutting!  Even the smaller chickens were fussy cut so that no heads were cut off, although there is one block where I couldn't avoid it.  I will try to do less of that in future!

My original plan was to do the corner triangles in black and white.  I worried though, that such a strong contrast might distract from the chickens, so I opted instead for brown and cream.  The contrast is still strong, but they blend quite well with the other fabrics.  So I am happy with that choice.

I'll show you the construction over the next few days, and hopefully by the end the top will be finished too!


Related Post:

Sew Scrappy Review

Hexagon Hiccup

The centre panel of my little wall quilt is finished:

But it's not going to stay this way!

My original plan was to square up this centre panel by sewing straight borders over the wobbly edges, and then applique the borders.  However, there was a problem with that.

As I described earlier, I have been basting and stitching the hexagons in one step and with one length of thread.  This works great and I still love this method.  The catch, though, is that you cannot remove the basting without unravelling the whole thing.  Why would I want to remove the basting?  Because I want to open out the seam allowances to attach the borders.

I could just sew over the folded seam allowances, but I think that will add a lot of bulk, especially along the top and bottom, which will interfere with the applique.

I was explaining my problem to my parents and showed them the work, and they were amazed that I wanted to cover up the nice shapes of the hexagons at the top and bottom.  I realized they were right!  I have already modified the original pattern, so why not keep the hexagons whole and applique the centre panel on top of the borders?

So the half hexagons in the corners are definitely history, and I am also considering removing all the halves along the sides.  Plus, this will be great practice for my Botanic Roses quilt, because I have already decided to applique the centre to the borders on that quilt.

The funny thing is that as soon as I started to fill in all the half hexagons along the sides, something felt wrong.  Now I feel back on track.  But I don't think I would have understood the problem until I went a ways down the wrong path.  Live and learn!

Celtic Spring Progress

Yesterday I showed you where Celtic Spring stood a week ago before I took it out of the frame.  This is what I've managed to achieve with four or five days of steady stitching:

Taking it out of the frame has turned out to be very motivating!  It is SO much easier and more comfortable.  I am fairly strong despite my dodgy back, so I was able to hold the Q Snap frame for about three hours before my left wrist became tired.  Out of the frame I was able to sew for much longer.

It is also much easier to stitch accurately.  With the work in hand, it is easy to come up through the fabric in the right place because your left hand can help guide the needle. As I mentioned yesterday, I am still stab stitching the cross stitches, because my stitches just aren't as neat when I stitch entirely from the front of the work.

When I stitched the aida there was no difference between the stitches worked in hand or on the frame, but on the lightweight linen evenweave there IS a slight difference.  It is harder to get the two strands of floss to lie beside each other rather than overlapping.  If you look closely on the photo you can see the stitches on the skirt below the line are not quite as smooth.

But that is a price I am willing to pay, because everything else about it is better.  It also seems to put less stress on the gold metallic thread, so that actually looks better in the new part of the stitching.

The other challenge with this project is that there are a lot of beads throughout the entire work.  I couldn't imagine how I was going to bead the whole large piece in a frame. Now I don't have to worry about saving the beads to the end, I can alternate between beading and cross stitches to keep everything fresh.

Sometimes you will see someone's cross stitch that has been puckered or distorted because they worked it in hand.  I haven't noticed any problem with that.  The wrinkles in the photo are just from handling the linen.  It may be that because I am stab stitching rather than stitching entirely from the top it is easier to maintain the correct tension.  I am sure there are practiced stitchers who get beautiful results that way, but I am not there yet!  But I can say that I am retiring all my frames for the foreseeable future!

Cross Stitch Without a Frame

I am so, so far behind with my blog posts!  I have been busy but disorganized.  Now, though, I am going to start catching up!

I have been going through a cross stitch phase again recently.  Celtic Spring kind of ground to a halt around late February when I filled up my 11" x 17" Q Snap frame and debated the best way to proceed from there.  Up until a week ago it looked like this:

In the past I would have done a large project like this on a scroll frame.  However, when I discovered Q Snap frames I swore I would never go back to scroll frames.  Scroll frames are so heavy, and I am constantly either banging my arm or catching the thread on the knobs.  With my dodgy back I have to lean back in my chair, so I can't use a seat or floor frame comfortably.  This project does fit into a 17" x 20" Q Snap frame, but the frame was so big I couldn't fit my arm around it!  So as an interim measure I put it into this 11" x 17" frame which was easier to manage.

Once I started using the metallic gold thread and I realized how important it was to maintain the crinkles in the thread, I started to worry about what would happen to the gold thread when I had to move the frame over the already stitched areas of the work.  I thought about doing a test patch, but I never got around to it.  While I was dithering about that I decided to work on something easier:

This may well be the first cross stitch pattern I ever bought.  I bought it back in the mid 1990s from June Grigg herself.  She and her husband had come all the way up from Atlanta to Toronto to have a booth at the Creative Sewing & Needlework Festival, which is now called the Creativ Festival.  I remember because they were both very nice.  It seems to me that the festival used to be more fun back then, with a wider range of vendors.  It was before Christmas, and I think it was held in the old Automotive Building at the Ex.  The whole place was strung with white fairy lights above the vendor stalls.  My friend and I went up to the mezzanine where you could look out over the lights and the entire festival - it was quite a sight!

These patterns have always been reasonably high on my cross stitch bucket list, but when I had another look at the leaflet last fall I worried that the large flat areas of colour might be too boring.  Then I realized that sometimes easy is a good thing, so I went ahead and bought the materials.  Another tv project!  I put it into a small Q Snap frame.

What I discovered, though, was that stitching the 18 count aida actually took more concentration than I wanted to give it.  For some reason, when I did my Kittens project on 18 count last fall I didn't notice the concentration needed to make the stitches, probably because I was already concentrating a lot on the counting.  The whole thing was feeling awkward, and I was remembering how much easier my redwork became when I took it out of the hoop, so I took the plunge.

The very dark brown and the green parts here are cross stitches, and the mahogany on the left and pale yellow and green on the right are half cross stitches.  I did the half crosses entirely from the top of the fabric, going down and up in one motion.  With the cross stitches I found it was better to still do stab stitches even with the fabric in hand.  When you look at the mahogany part especially you can see that the stitches are not too even.  However, it is so much faster that I will probably continue that way!  With the cross stitches you cannot see the difference at all between the stitches worked on the frame and the stitches worked in hand.

I have gone on for long enough now, so I'll show you how this worked on the linen evenweave of Celtic Spring tomorrow!

Related Posts:

Tips for stitching with metallic thread

 Redwork out of the hoop

Fabrics for Prairie Star

You know, just as I wrote that heading, I realized that this will be another quilt with "Star" in the title!  Oh well!

It is only a couple of weeks since I received the pattern for Judy Niemeyer's Prairie Star quilt.  I think it took me less than 24 hours to come up with the colour scheme!  For me, that is by far the funnest part.  Although, the fabrics arrived today, and that has been pretty fun too:

This quilt will be for my dad, who loves bright colours, and fortunately is ok with flowers.  He has been very clear that he wants a "lively" quilt!

You may recall that the original pattern looks like this:

Judy's design is done with batiks, but I knew that my dad wanted red and yellow, and I didn't like my options for batiks in those colours.  Once I decided on prints I went to the Collecting Threads website just to see if they had anything I could use, and they had just posted their new Riviera II collection.  I knew it would be absolutely perfect.  Talk about synchronicity!  So most of the fabrics above are from that collection, with a few from their older Folk Heart collection, which I'm glad to include because I loved it too.  And there are a couple of lights from eQuilter to round it off.

Judy very kindly included a blank layout of the quilt so we could do our own colourway.  I LOVE it when designers do that!  So here's the plan:

You can see I have gone back to a more traditional Lone Star colour layout.  I think it is going to be pretty amazing!  Fortunately my dad likes the fabrics, so I'm off to a good start.  But not right away, hopefully!