What's Up?

I know I've been MIA for a while, so I've been going through my camera this morning to see what I can share with you all. I've got some "progress" photos on the last round of the Gwennie Medallion, and my new guild challenge fabrics.

First, though, the autumn colours have been particularly good this year:

Outside, everything is looking beautiful. Inside, well...

The final clue for the Gwennie Medallion is "something fishy." My plan for the fishies has been the same since I read the clue. But, I still haven't started them, because I am wrestling with how to handle the corners.

I thought it would be good to carry the diagonal line of the light/dark log cabin layout into the final corners. I've saved this large triangle of background fabric from the basket block in Month 1. Maybe it could be the start of my corner blocks?

I made some strategic cuts.

The all-blue corner was not too bad. Don't ask me why it's so wide. I'm sure I had a reason.

I paired the blue triangles with some solid red to carry out that diagonal line, and built the block out log cabin style, as I did with the bear claws.

Since the project started my plan has been to have a wide solid red border after the final round. The idea with this corner was to transition the diagonal line out into the solid red.

"If I keep adding strips, eventually it will look right," I thought.

"I have to actually put it up on the wall and see how it all looks together," I thought.

Well, yes, those bloody red triangles were horrible, and no amount of building out would fix them.

Then I thought I would put my initials and the date in the corners instead. I unpicked all the blocks so I could re-use the strips for the letters.

I was happy with that plan, but yesterday I realized that another week had passed, and I still hadn't started. Back to the drawing board!

What I've been doing instead is my new guild challenge project. These three fabrics, from the "Charlotte" collection by Deborah Edwards of Northcott, have to be 50% of the quilt top. It's a small project, with a maximum perimeter of 120", (e.g. 30" x 30" (76 x 76 cm)).

The soft, traditional style has felt like a relaxing contrast to all these Gwennie shenanigans, so I've been spending a lot of time on it. Plus, it's due at the end of February, so there isn't a lot of time for deep thought. Unfortunately, I cannot share any progress photos at all, because it will be blind judging.

So, that's what's up with me, Next week may be a busy one, with a little playing around for AHIQ, the Cardinal Stars finish, and maybe the fishies too!

Brinton and Butterflies

Turquoise, green and hot pink butterflies!

It's time for the October Kaleidoscope of Butterflies link up, and I've done nothing at all on my "official" butterfly project, Down in the Garden. I can't believe it will soon be two years since Ink Week (really Ink Fortnight), and I still haven't finished embroidering the blocks. Oh, the shame!

Yes, well, maybe I would have more finishes if I actually did feel shame.

This project, however, Brinton Hall, is steamrolling over everything else. Today I made the 60 3" hsts that I'll need for the second border. The fabrics were all chosen and rough cut over the summer. Today I just had to pair them, sew, and trim.

And a few of them even have butterflies! Out in the real world, I'm also seeing the Monarch butterflies steadily heading southwest along the lake shore again.

I was careful to make sure every hst was a unique combination of fabrics. It was a fun day!

They will finish at 3", and I will set them with 1" warm beige sashings. Leigh Latimore's design uses 1/2" sashings, but I feel like these strong prints need more room to breathe. Plus, the math worked out perfectly! That is always my sign to stop tweaking the design. :D

In fact, I have been redesigning, and tweaking, and redesigning again, this project since the beginning of the summer. I've changed it so many times that I lost track of the different counts. So I had more hst fabric cut than I needed. And, apparently my final design will only need 16 of the hexagon rosettes, even though I made 20!

But, the end is in sight, because I have simplified the final border by removing all the handwork. None of the handwork in Latimore's outer border is in the original Anna Brereton quilt, so that was an easy decision to make.

I will make the pieced "square in a square" block, because that was in the original, and I think it is a good looking block! I am keen to get started on that, it should be a good challenge. Lots of quarter square triangles!

So, this has been 54 of the 60 hsts. I made them in sets of 10, but 9 fit so nicely on my rotating mat there.

Now, I really have to crack on with Something Fishy!

OMG for October

Just a short post for today. One Monthly Goal (OMG) has been going since January, but this is my first time participating. This month I really want to get the binding sewn onto my Cardinal Stars quilt. I quilted it six months ago, and it has been languishing because a) summer is too hot to sit with a big quilt in my lap, and b) I want to make a fancy two-colour binding, and I haven't been 100% sure of how I want to do it.

But, now the weather has cooled off, and I think I have a reasonable plan. The binding strips were cut long ago, and when I opened the box, I was surprised to see that I even ironed the red ones in half already! So I am primed for success. :D

Here's the before photo:

Check out all the other goal-setters at the October link up, right here.

Log Cabins and Stars

For the Gwennie-Inspired Medallion quilt along, the theme for Month 3 is log cabins, and the Month 4 theme is stars. I hoped that my bear claw blocks, that I rejected in Month 2, would still be useful. This is their chance! Mama bear and baby bear are now Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the two most familiar constellations in the northern sky.

In North America we know the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, which are the brightest parts of Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. In Europe they see it when it is rotated around, and call the Big Dipper the Plough.

The Big Dipper has seven stars, and the Little Dipper has six, so I chose seven big bear claws and six small ones, and filled them out with some log cabin piecing. Two for one!

But really, it was the "log cabin" theme that unlocked the entire design for me. I thought it would be different to wrap strips around the whole medallion, log cabin style. A few others had the same idea! From there it was a short hop to the idea to continue the light/dark layout through all the borders.

I also sewed together all the small "crumbs" that were left over from the log cabin strips, and used them to fill in a few of the gaps.

And I used the brown and grey printed plaids from the centre block to make two 1/4" (6 mm) key line borders. I've been keen to try this tutorial by Barbara Robson for a skinny border, and I'm happy to say that it is easy and it works!

Those are the same plaids, by the way, that I've been using to make rosettes for Brinton Hall.

The last theme, for Month 5, is "Something Fishy." That will fit perfectly on the remaining two blue sides of the medallion! It's all coming together now. :D

Fortunately for me, Lori says the final link up will be open all month. I'm going to take a week or so to finish it up before my next post. Might as well do it right!

Childhood

Knock knock

Who's there?

Olive

Olive who?

Thank you!

I love you too!

For the non-English speakers (or you know, those who may not remember), "olive who?" sounds like "I love you." So you have just baited the other person into confessing their love! I remember my little sister telling this joke with glee when she was about five years old.

So, this is my solution for Month 2 of the Gwennie-Inspired Medallion quilt along. The theme is "Childhood," and I think a silly riddle checks that box. I was able to continue my "olive" theme from the first month. Improv letters like this are not uncommon in Gwen Marston's quilts either. And, I'm migrating to mostly solid fabrics, which is another thing many of Gwen's quilts do.

The theme for Month 3 is "Log Cabin," and you can see that foreshadowed in the way I'm attaching the borders:

And, since childhood was a long time ago, I did go ahead and use hourglasses in the corners as well.

So, I'm very happy with it now!

Remember these bear claws that I made and rejected for round 2?

This was a story about going camping and seeing a mother and baby bear running through the campground one night. Childhood memory + baby bear = twice as good, or so I first thought. But I've realized the problem was simply that the colours were too dark, too soon.

Now I know that they aren't bear claws at all. They are stars.

Months 3 & 4, log cabins and stars, coming soon! In the meantime, check out the other improv quilters at the Ad Hoc Improv Quilters' monthly link up, right here.

It's a Warm Finish!

It's Warm Inside is finally a finished quilt!

This poor quilt has really had its ups and downs. I designed it to be Quilt as You Go (QAYG), with the narrow white cotton sashings. But, between the fluffy flannel log cabin blocks and all the loose batting, it was way too dusty for my allergies. So, I pieced it all together and took it to a longarm rental place to quilt it myself.

Wait for the chorus...

That turned out to be a really miserable experience that started with a friend of the owner setting up a quilt on the machine I had reserved, and which went way downhill from there. I should have walked out right then, but alas, I was not as smart as the song. The clincher was when the owner told me that my quilting idea was wrong and looked bad, when I was about half done. Fortunately, there are other fish in the sea!

But, despite all the hardship, in the end I think it's a likeable quilt. The snowmen are jolly, and the simple quilting works fairly well on the flannel logs. I circled around all the snowglobes in the border, which made them quite puffy:

The fat red binding stands out well too. I had a couple of yards of aqua, white and red Christmas fabric that I think I meant for a border at one time. But it matched perfectly, so I used it on the back here, and filled in the remainder with the leftover snowmen fabrics from the front.

I have Mimi Dietrich's book Happy Endings, which includes this idea for piecing the label right into the back:

Since I had to piece the back anyway, it made sense to me.

So, I'm glad to have it done, only two years later than planned! I'm catching up. :D To see all the posts on this quilt, please click here.

The gnome? He kept his thoughts to himself.

And Some Dots

It's been two weeks, and I just have a little hand sewing to share today for Slow Sunday Stitching. The day after my last post, I was smoothing out my Gwennie Medallion basket block on the bed for this photo...

...and my back cracked and folded. Two days in bed, two days mostly in bed, but the good news is that I heal well, and the x-rays are clear.

I have not been back on the sewing machine since, but it has given me time to re-think that wavy border. I unpicked it a few days ago. Today, with luck, I will straighten out the sides, re-attach it, and move on to the first border. With luck, I will be appliqueing more olives by the end of the day!

While I was recovering, I did manage a little EPP for Leigh Latimore's Brinton Hall. When you really can't think at all, EPP is the perfect activity! I need 20 rosettes for the first border, and I ran out of plaids. Rather than repeating fabrics, I thought some dots would work:

So that will brighten things up!

I have one more suitable dotty fabric, this blue. Then I think I will have to repeat one of the plaids, probably the bright yellow from the last post.

I am still not 100% decided on the background and floater fabrics, or even on the design. The original Anna Brereton quilt, which inspired Latimore's design, has octagons, and I happen to have suitable octagons in my EPP stash. I've sewn up a few, but the way is still not clear.

But, I have to shelve that for now, because if I have any chance at all of meeting the October 1 deadline for the Gwennie medallion, I have to get back on that horse!

Fun with Plaid

Now that the centre of my version of Brinton Hall is done (see here), it is time to start work on the first border. Leigh Latimore's design calls for 20 squares of dark beige backgrounds, 8 appliqued with hexagon rosettes, and 12 with eight-pointed stars.

Although the pattern does not say so, I could see in the photos that some of those hexagon rosettes were fussy cut. That seemed like a good plan to me too!

But, the Kaffe Collective fabrics that I used in the centre tend to have a long repeat, and I didn't want to make small holes here and there in otherwise good yardage.

I needed a fabric with a short repeat, and I thought of these printed plaids. They are the Mix It Up collection from Connecting Threads last year, and I bought quite a few! I love plaid.

The centres, though, are Kaffe's Zinnia design, which I had for something else but then didn't like. But, it is perfect for this! I cut 8 hexagon centres for the hexagon rosettes, and 12 circles for the centres of the star blocks.

As I played around with the plaids, I realized that I could cut some of them to make an interior star. It is subtle in this olive green plaid...

...but I hoped it would be clearer in this red. And, I thought I should take some photos to show how I do it.

I have a homemade cutting template that includes a 3/8" seam allowance. It is important to do the exact same thing 6 times in a row, so make sure you have enough time to do it all at once.

Then something felt wrong when I started basting the fabric to the papers.

Oh no! They don't make stars at all! They go in a straight line!

Why? Because I distracted myself by taking photos, that's why. Pride before a fall...

Fortunately, the seam allowance is so large that I can just turn the paper the way it's supposed to be and baste again.

Here it is fixed. You can see that I still baste with the thread entirely on the back of the paper. I leave the thread in, and just pull out the paper once it is stitched all around. The thread is ancient gritty polyester thread, and it holds really well.

This fabric looked so good that I used it twice.

In fact, I'm loving all these plaids. Even the grey!

And these are the stripes from the same collection. This is the rosette I was starting last Sunday.

I know I have more of these plaids somewhere in my stash. So, I've decided to skip the eight-pointed star blocks completely, and make 20 of these hexagon rosettes instead.

I could even re-purpose the circles I cut for the stars, and baste them to hexagons too!

Here are the first nine rosettes:

Cute, eh? Three more are cut and basted, and then I will have to start digging through the boxes in the basement.

It will still take me a while to finish the rosettes and do all the applique. But, this is the end of the handwork for the quilt, because I'm changing the last border too.

In the meantime, though, please check out all the other hand stitching happening for Slow Sunday Stitching right here at Kathy's Quilts. Happy stitching!

Sunshine Flimsy

I finally got it all together today:

60" x 81" (152 x 206 cm)

When I first edited these photos several hours ago, I was having doubts. But now that I see it again, it makes me laugh. So that is a good thing! Silly and fun, I would say.

On the whole, it is darker than I expected, considering it's supposed to be a yellow and white quilt. But, it's probably more practical this way. And it is meant to be functional.

I didn't put it up on the design wall for the layout, because it is pretty big. So, these two inverse-match sunflower blocks ended up beside each other right the middle of the quilt. This was the lesser evil, because once again, those ginghams were very eye-catching, so they had to stay separated.

I hope to get this quilted and bound by the end of the month. Fingers crossed!

Brinton Hall Medallions

I am looking forward to catching up with the Slow Sunday Stitching crowd today! Last time, in June, I had made a start on Brinton Hall, a pattern by Leigh Latimore which was published in Quiltmania 107 & 108. It's been my main project this summer -- easy, lightweight stitching, perfect for the heat. The hexagon centre is all done! I have several photos. :D

The feature fabrics in the medallions are all Kaffe Collective. Well, a couple are so old they are really just Kaffe. Four of the border fabrics, the citron, purple, coral and blue, are blenders from different Tamara Kate collections for Michael Miller. I mention this specifically because they are a perfect match to the Kaffe Collective fabrics! I could not believe it. They must be the same dyes, and the weight of the fabric is perfect too. I bought them for Down in the Garden, but I think a good portion will be going in this quilt.

The dark beige "path" hexagons are leftover backing fabric from Hen Party. The fabric is much heavier, but, with the English paper piecing it went together fine. I hoped that the dark beige would make the bright colours glow, and it does!

The temptation when fussy cutting those large feature fabrics in each medallion was to put one big flower or leaf in the middle. But I found it was more interesting to have both foreground and background visible in each medallion. It seems to give a lot more depth.

The random hexagons that fill in the corners ended up with an overall impression of "red," even though there are not a lot of red fabrics in there. That was pure accident, but I'm very happy with it!

You can see that I was able to fussy cut a few of those corner hexagons, but the rest were make-do. All the Kaffe fabrics in the corners are small pieces from the scrap bin.

In fact, I was so happy with that motley red effect in the corners, that I started to think about a change in direction for the rest of the quilt. I was going to ask you all for some feedback, but yesterday I came to my senses. I will stick with my plan! Even still, I am deviating from Latimore's design, but I'll talk more about that later.

For now, here's the whole hexagon centre:

The next step is to applique it onto a solid medium blue background (Kona Blue Jay). But for today's slow stitching I am making hexagon rosettes for the first border:

Another surprising match from my stash! But much more on that next time.

Now, don't forget to check out the rest of the Slow Sunday Stitchers in the link up right here. Happy stitching!