Anti-Resolutions?

Well, I'm taking off early this year, so I'll wish everyone a happy winter holiday now! I did not have time to finish all the placemats from the last post, but at the least the potholders were finished before I packed it all away:

My internet access will be sporadic, but I'll still be sewing, I hope!

And, let me be the first to ask you, have you been considering any New Year's resolutions? I have! Last night I heard a local radio DJ who has resolved to gain weight over the holidays, lol. This made me think that maybe it is time for a whole new attitude to New Year's resolutions. Feel free to leave any of your "anti-resolutions" in the comments, and I'll be back around the New Year with mine!

Homegrown Kitchen Set, Part 1

The other day I was looking back through the last few months of posts, and I realized that there have been a lot of Best Friends Forever posts, and not much else! Except my big finish, of course. I figured it's time for some variety!

So today I pulled out this Homegrown collection of fabrics from Connecting Threads. A few hours later, I finished a potholder!

LOL. No, there's more than that!

You can see another potholder coming in the centre of the mat, and at the bottom right are strip sets that have already been cut 2.5" wide, ready to be added around the edges of these...

...which will be placemats.

The vegetable print is more like a light home dec weight than a quilting fabric. Perfect for placemats and potholders. It's almost all gone, but I see there're still some kits left.

I adapted the patterns from the kits to my own sizes, and I was able to streamline the construction by using the same strip sets for both the placemats and the potholders.

Normally I put everything away at the end of the day, but today I am living dangerously and I have left it all out and hope to finish the construction tomorrow. They probably won't be quilted until after the holidays. My plan for the new year is get more serious with some FMQ practice, so these are the first to be prepared for that.

See you again tomorrow, with luck!

BFF Month 2.4 Stitching

Without further ado, here's the final motif for Month 2 of Rosalie Quinlan's Best Friends Forever:

I am continuing with the Northern Cardinal colouration on all the birds, even though they don't all have crests. Northern Cardinals mate for life, and they are rarely far apart, so they feel appropriate for the best friends forever theme. Plus, they are one of the few species of birds that stay near our house all year. The others tend to fly south for the winter, or north for the summer.

I know the photo is dark again too. Yes, it's still very cloudy around here! I had to use the flash for the next photo:

The next steps for Month 2 will be to wash the whole thing again, cut the motifs apart, line them, and piece them into the blocks. Plus, Month 3 is already underway!

BFF Month 2.3 Stitching

Here's the apple tree from Month 2 of Best Friends Forever, all finished. I think I've already said it all about this one! I will admit, though, that the solid apples in padded satin stitch do look pretty nice. :)

You can see by the dark photo that after an early taste of crisp January sunshine and snow, we are back to our usual grey and rainy December weather here in Toronto!

The last motif for Month 2 is also almost done, but I ran out of the grey-brown thread, DMC 840, so I'll have to dash over to the store some time this week. It's annoying, because somehow when I stocked up on thread for this project, I forgot that one! Well, I guess I'm lucky to have the option of a nearby store, I know many don't. On I go!

BFF Month 2.2 Stitching

Here, finally, is the next instalment of the Month 2 stitching on Best Friends Forever:

I did a lot of experimenting on the big hearts here before I hit upon a stitch that looked the way I wanted it to. I wanted a lot of texture so the hearts would stand out even though I was using a light colour.

When I'm "shopping" for a new stitch, I always come back to Country Bumpkin's A - Z of Embroidery Stitches, vols. 1 & 2:

These are probably the most used books on my bookshelf. They are spiral bound inside the cover, so they lie flat, and the detailed photographs are excellent.

Twisted chain stitch turned out to be perfect for this design. It works up quickly, and I found it to be very forgiving -- it creates a fairly straight line even when your stitches aren't! It's worked on both sides of the line...

...and can also be used for applique.

For the flowers I stuck with the stitches I've been using since Month 1:

The petals and leaves are done in back stitch with four strands of floss, the flower centres are tiny chain stitch, and the stems are stem stitch, naturally!

Regular readers may be wondering what happened to the apple tree from Month 2? After much procrastination it is now well under way! Here's another preview:

In the long run I think the padded satin stitch will prove to be a bad choice here, because I'm sure it will catch on something. But I'm committed now! Hopefully the whole tree will be done soon. ;)

In the mean time, happy stitching!

Finished!!!

I have been writing this post in my head for two years, but now that it is finally time to write it for real I've forgotten what I meant to say! In any case, it is two years since I started this blog, almost two years since I started this quilt, and well over 30 years since I started starting quilts, and this is the first one to make it all the way to the end. 100% finished!

Nine Patch Jubilee, 54" x 66"

The sun was not co-operating today, but it was too cold to stand out there for long! I made one attempt to style the quilt before I hurried back inside:

Yes, that is a small dusting of snow around the garden pagoda.

I named the quilt Nine Patch Jubilee because the filler squares and the backing are from the Jubilee Garden collection by Connecting Threads, which they had a couple of years ago. And it seemed right to celebrate my first finished quilt.

With the red and white colour scheme, it felt appropriate to do the label in redwork too:

The quilt is machine quilted (yes, by me) in channels the length of the quilt, 1/4" on either side of each square in the nine patch block, and carried through the solid squares. The binding is machine sewn to the front and hand stitched down on the back. I miscalculated the width of the binding, so it is a little wide on the back, but I think that's fine.

I also tried out a sewn mitre technique for the corners of the binding that I saw Ricky Tims demonstrate on The Quilt Show. It uses this tool from Animas Quilts:

There is a video demonstration of how to use it here. Two of my corners came out perfectly...

...and two did not, lol. But the problem was that I had miscalculated the width of the binding, so the corner didn't hit in the right place. Those corners are a little wrinkly, but again, everything can't be perfect on the first quilt. I have concluded that I do like the tool, and I will continue to use it on large projects. The big advantage for me is that you only have to sew the binding on one edge at a time, so each length of binding is more manageable, and I can take a break after each long seam.

So, yay! And, whew!

Recent Photos

My plan tonight was just to update the Texas Star Ticker in the right sidebar, which you can see is now up to Number 120. But I found two weeks of photos on my camera which provide an interesting (I hope) cross section of what I've been working on, so I thought I'd share a few.

Do you ever see inspiring quilt or stitching ideas on tv? I take photos! I hit pause, turn off the flash on my camera, and they come out pretty well. (Yes, I understand that this makes me a total fibre nerd.)

This still photo is from the tv drama Betrayal, on ABC in the U.S. and on City here in Canada. If you've been watching, you know it is about an affair between two married people, Sarah and Jack. The quilt is an interesting prop here. In the scene Sarah is sleeping in her studio after her husband has discovered the affair and kicked her out of their apartment. To me, the use of the quilt implies that by leaving her marriage Sarah has returned to a more wholesome way of life. Throughout the series, so far, there's been the suggestion that the affair is somehow more moral than their two marriages, his to a corrupt developer's daughter and hers to an ambitious prosecutor who's using her to forward his career. It will be interesting to see how it ends!

The other still is much less deep:

I think this is a Leapfrog commercial. But look at those cool drapes! They could be a stitching design, or a quilting design, or even an applique design. Plus, they remind me a lot of that Orla Kiely fabric and wallpaper design that has become an instant modern classic.

I found a bunch of poorly-lit photos of another new stitch that I'm using on Month 2 of Best Friends Forever:

I've been doing the hearts in twisted chain stitch, which I'm very pleased with, but more on that later.

Finally, I took some photos earlier today of the new background fabric that I bought for BFF:

Last time I showed you the solid light green background that was my first try. But I'm not sure if I like this either! It does tend to make the flower blocks look a little shady, doesn't it? I cropped the photo and tried a different angle to see if I liked it any better:

The blue looks very electric against the petals, which have a slightly grey undertone, and the olive leaves. It clashes, but just a little, and I'm starting to think I like that, the more I look at it. For a while now I've been trying to break away from "safe" colour schemes, but I'm not sure if this is the right way to do it. What do you all think?