Back with a Finish

Hi, folks!  That was an unexpectedly long break...it has been a very busy start to 2016 and I can't see that ending soon.  There was no regular sewing time happening due to starting full time hours at  job #1, training a replacement at job #2, starting my position as Secretary of our Modern Quilt Guild, going to Road to California, spending time with our grandson, moving our youngest from our house to her own place across town, attending my nephew's wedding in Mammoth, and a "Sprinkle" for our expectant older daughter when we got back. Life has been pretty nuts, but the happy kind!

I have a finish to share, as in queen sized.  This quilt started with a bunch of gifted 9.5" bullseye raw edged blocks from Mary of Quilt Hollow.  I made more blocks and a small quilt top with some borders, but the project expanded greatly when my brother needed a bigger quilt for his new bachelor pad.  There was MATH, there was internet searching for additional appropriate border fabric, more bullseye blocks made and quartered and added, backing and batting bought.  Finally, in January I handed off the quilt to the quilter and got it back a month later. Binding was quickly made and applied and even a label got put on.  Here is Bullseye Quartered, a real quilt at last. 

Our tall neighbor and my husband held up the beast for some late afternoon photos.  The layout is my own design.  I favor diagonal lines and the quartered blocks were fun to play with.  This finished at over 100" in length with slightly less width :)

Truer colors in this closeup.  Lots of scraps and odd pieces were used up in this quilt.  It felt good to clear out some older stash.  See the yummy cables and swirls. Custom quilting by Georganna Hawley.

Delicious from the back, too.  I like a pieced back, but sometimes a wide single fabric backing is the best choice to show off quilting.  My local fabric store had this extra wide fabric so no waiting for ordering and shipping, another bonus.  

 Georganna's squiggles, swirls and cables enhanced the traditional prints and colors so well.

 

Mini the cat took the first nap on the quilt as it lay over the couch after being washed (poor nighttime lit photo).  The raw edges have fuzzed and crinkled and look wonderful.  Can't wait to see this on the bed. Oh, it's good to have a finish!  Next finish will be the Timber quilt--the top is complete and the backing in progress. 

Tuesday's Orts

Tuesday's Orts--bits and pieces of events and thoughts that land here occasionally.

• One of my two jobs had an office move, luckily while I was out of town, and things are slowly coming together.  Here's hoping the 90's reception room furniture will be gone soon, as it is killing the buzz in the newly painted and carpeted space.  
• Traffic Rant:  For heaven's sake, pull all the way forward into the parking space, especially if you have a big ass vehicle and are parking in a tiny lot--other people would like to get by.  Sheesh!
• Despite the incredible disaster area my sewing room currently is, I have been sewing.  After carefully measuring and cutting, the first of two outer borders went on to the Bullseye quilt for my brother.  I did have to ease the borders a bit, but it worked out.  Then the second outer border side sections went on.  I laid out the remaining border pieces over the quilt top and cut them to length.  Only then did I notice I had cut duplicates of the side pieces--which would be too short for the top and bottom sections.  I took the high road and decided this gave me a DESIGN OPPORTUNITY for corner blocks.  Since I had so many extra circles from cutting out the centers of so many blocks, it was natural to continue the theme in the corners.

The acorn print worked well with the brown inner border and the green final border fabrics, I thought, and unified the corner bullseyes.

 Lucy agreed.

After a local search for dark green print, the outer border fabric I ordered from an Ebay seller.  It is a Kansas Troubles print from a line a couple of years old and the fabric is simply yummy in quality and hand.  I think it goes well with the Thimbleberries print that was originally the outer border before I started expanding the quilt to queen size.  Both have small leaves scattered all over.  

• Halloween on Saturday night--that brought a mixed bag of  trick or treaters.  In years past we have had literally hundreds of visitors to our door.  This year was about 100.  DH Grant again resorted to giving out handfuls of candy, even earlier than last year.  My favorite costume was a little girl in a one piece unicorn with floppy legs that "ran" when she did.  Adorable.  My favorite trick or treater, of course, was Cove. 
•  Once again, DD Elaine and her friend came up with a great costume idea for their two boys.  

Here are Hans and Franz, ready to Pump You Up (Saturday Night Live lives on!).  Cove/Hans is flexing pretty hard right there. My contribution was making the weightlifters belts. 

 Cove appears to have gotten at least some of the chocolate in his mouth!

Assorted Flavors

Well, didn't mean to disappear for over a week!  I finished my KonMari purge of all the papers and got most of them organized.  There are still some loose papers that need corralling in binders, and some thoughtful contemplation for the extra bins and folders that have piled up. I've been sorting the mail as soon as I get in the door and will continue that.  

Although I had thought to get into my kitchen next, on reread of the chapter on Komono, or miscellany, the next category was CDs/DVDs.  This morning I have completely gone through my personal CDs and through the family DVDs with my husband.  The CD cabinet remains full with my husband's collection, but mine are pared down to only the ones that "spark joy", and all the DVDs now fit in two photo boxes.  Love that.  

The horrible heat that we've been having for weeks has put a damper on sewing, and especially ironing, but the Bullseye blocks don't require ironing as they are assembled.

I concentrated on adding green to the piles.  Some of the circles came from previous rounds.

 Final center round has now been attached and I will give these a quick pressing before cutting into quarters and laying out the border. 

 

I'm happy with how the diagonals are working out, even though I had to rip apart the blocks for one border twice and resew them to make the diagonal go the right way 'round. I'll have to be careful with this second row too :)  Once I get the next border on, I'll assess what additional border widths I need.  I have a brown print for a narrow containment border, and then will have to find a suitable green print for a larger outer border to get this to a queen size for my brother's bed.  

And for the big finish on this post, this week our DD Elaine and husband Chris let the rest of the world know the wonderful news we've been dying to share: 

Cove is going to be a big brother next year!  We are thrilled they are adding to the family and look forward to the new grandbaby, girl or boy.  Life is good!

Design Wall Monday--Moving along

On my design wall is another interrupted UFO, as well as one off the design wall that has moved along since last week.  

Our guild had a Philanthropy Sew In on Saturday and I took the completed L-sashed blocks to assemble into a top.  

I like it!  It's a bit small at 40" square so will need some expansion with borders--a problem for another day.   Guild members were working on assembling monthly challenge blocks into tops, and kitting up backing, binding, and batting for already completed tops.  I took some precut squares, extra yardage, and a kit home to play with from donated fabric piles  Funnily enough, in a pile of donated fabric there was one square of the kitty print! 

I set to work later on Saturday making Bullseye blocks.  My brother requested a quilt and I had a small finished top that I'm expanding with additional borders and pieced blocks.  

 I need a whole lot more of these to fit around the quilt top. 

Anyone who has made these blocks knows the circles multiply in smaller sizes as you cut out the centers of each round.  At least I got easier instructions from Mary of Quilt Hollow, who gifted me the original batch of bullseye blocks, to cut squares, fold them in quarters and use scissors to cut the circles, rather than my original method of tracing plates!   Here's the existing quilt, hastily modeled by DD Erica:

 I may duplicate some of the darker print backgrounds just for fun.

 The current outside border is an old Thimbleberries print.

I pulled the brown print and this rusty red to use for additional borders as well.  It should be quite a puzzle to get this all together, but I'll sew on...

See more design walls on Judy's Patchwork Times.

Design Wall Monday 6/29/15

On this last Design Wall Monday of June, I have a mockup of the block for the comfort quilt I'm making for our neighbor's son who has an osteosarcoma and is undergoing chemotherapy.

This is a variation of Jacob's Ladder that I found HERE (scroll down to the bottom for this version). Yesterday I got all the black and white 4 patches cut and sewn so will be ready for block assembly--I'm making 20 12" blocks.  My goal is to have the quilt finished in a week. The flannel I ordered from Connecting Threads has arrived and will be perfect.

I'm actually in the middle of three quilts for others.  My brother texted me a few days ago that he needs a quilt for his queen sized bed and I offered the bullseye quilt top I made last year.  Searching my pictures, it seems I haven't got a photo of the completed top.  I chose the gingham as an inner border and the Thimbleberries print as the outer border but in they were not attached yet in this shot.

However, it is far too small to cover a queen bed so I have pulled a lot of neutrals and old stash in colors similar to the above gifted blocks (Thanks again, Mary of Quilt Hollow!) to make an additional border of the bullseye blocks.  I'll decide on additional border sizes once these blocks are attached.  I seem to have plenty of stash to choose from!

Third quilt I'm making is for my sister-in-law.  My husband Grant's older half-brother Jan died suddenly in March from a recurrent brain tumor, and I offered to make a quilt from some of his dress and casual shirts.  This is the quilt I pinned on Pinterest with her in mind, which I found HERE. 

On Saturday we took a trip down the coast to see her and go through the closet to select some of her favorites of Jan's clothes.

 

It was an overcast day but still wonderful to drive down the Pacific Coast Highway and look at the ocean.  This large bed of seaweed caught my eye.  

I took pictures of at least three different flocks of pelicans cruising the coastline as we drove south.

Lots of people out enjoying the early summer weather in Malibu. Lots and lots of cyclists...

We had a good visit with our sister-in-law and she picked out some shirts and I chose others to coordinate, with Grant coming home with several suits and even a tuxedo, as well as some other shirts and slacks.  After a lovely lunch and a visit to Jan's boat in the Marina Del Rey harbor with her son and his girlfriend, we headed home, with promises to get together again soon for a harbor sail.  

 We got home near sunset and the sky was gorgeous. 

See more design walls on Judy's Patchwork Times.

Design Wall Monday

Several things going on in the sewing room this week.  First, I finished the little quilt for my Russian friend, with the help of my sister.  We swapped--I gave her the pink and white floral for a small quilt she is making for a family member, and she gave me some fun fur/minky type fabric that I think a 7-year-old will love.  We used spray baste to attach the batting and keep the fun fur from stretching during the quilt-as-you-go process.  It worked perfectly.

Sewing the strips with the walking foot with ease. Sooo glad a walking foot was invented!

Almost there...

I added some extra lines of quilting in the larger strips with the dolls, and in the side borders.  I didn't have enough to do top and bottom borders so left it just as you see.

This pic was taken at night so the colors are not as true.  A scrappy binding finished it off.  I want to use my machine's built in alphabet stitching to label the quilt but it has been so long since I did it I'm having trouble remembering how to do it.  I decided to tackle it tomorrow! This is a small quilt, only about 3 foot square, I estimate. I hope she'll love it.

Another project got to flimsy stage.  This is the bulls eye quilt made from gifted blocks. 

Borders are all on.  Again, nighttime photo doesn't give true colors, but you'll get the idea, right?

Finally, a shopping trip to Roxanne's A Wish and a Dream quilt shop, just up the coast in Carpinteria (featured in the current Quilt Sampler mag as a re-visit), was successful in the hunt for prints to go with batiks previously purchased for a gift quilt that I need to get started on.

My sister Kathy was a bit dubious about the selections I made, but I think they'll work well. There will be some editing, I have no doubt.  I bought half yard cuts of the prints.  This is going to be a really girly Willow Weave quilt, and the fabrics will be cut into 2.5" strips.  I should have plenty of leftovers to play with as well.  

See more design walls on Judy's Patchwork Times. 

Stitching and Avoiding

It was a very busy new-job-learning-curve work week after the holiday, and there was no sewing.  Mostly because of avoiding this:

 

The king sized bed skirt--not queen sized as I mistakenly noted in my last post.  I have the skirt part with the pleated corners all finished.  I even took it over to the kids' house and made sure everything would land where it was supposed to.  What's left is the tedious part of making the flat center out of a bunch of pieces (meaning more MATH), and that did not entice.  So I treated myself to sewing "just a couple of rows" of the bullseye blocks on Friday night. And of course a couple of rows led to a couple more...

 

I like to assemble several block rows and then make sections of several rows at a time.  I find that more project follow-through-friendly at the end not to have to sew all the long seams at once.  Today after errands and lunch that bed skirt again taunted me from the cutting table, but I was able to ignore it some more to complete the remaining bullseye block rows and assemble the sections en toto.  I did have one oops to fix. 

 I missed seeing this identical pair of  blocks touching when I laid out the rows.  So some unsewing and resewing took place.  I just switched two blocks so it was not too painful.  Thankfully these were on the edge of the quilt!

 

This older dark green leafy Thimbleberries print has been in the stash for awhile, and hasn't found a home yet.  I kind of like the darker print to contain the busy bullseye blocks.  And I'm leaning toward the green and cream check for a narrower inner border, probably 2"

 

Close up of the options.  Opinions?  Tonight's task will definitely be working on the bed skirt.  I want to be able to take it to my daughter when I go over to babysit Cove tomorrow morning, yay!

He loves to bicycle his legs and wiggle everything while crooning now, at 3 months old.  It's adorable!

Bullseye

Friday after spending some time on cleanup chores around the house, I spent some additional time crawling around on the floor.  But it involved playing with fabric, so I didn't mind :)

I have to back up and say I made one additional raw-edge bullseye block on Thursday night to make an even number of blocks for the layout.  It took longer to find circular items to trace for the different sized rounds than it did to make the block!  I then cut it into quarters.  There was a slight boo-boo in that I just sewed all three rounds on top of each other, whereas the other gifted bullseye blocks had the centers cut out of each layer from the back of the block before adding the next.  I had to finesse that method by trimming very very close to the stitching and pulling the fabric out of the stitching line for each layer.  Thank goodness it was only four quarters to mess with!

My layout is 10x12, which will finish at 40x48" once all the blocks are sewn.  I tried to mix up the blocks as best I could, but with four blocks of each bullseye, it was a little bit harder. I'm loving the diagonal rows. I can imagine starting this with layer cake sized bullseyes for a larger quilt. 

It is surprising how small a stack 120 blocks makes!  Today's sewing tasks include making a bed skirt for a queen sized bed, from a sheet set.  I'll be glad to have that project behind me!  I'm off to iron now...