Cardinal Nine Patch: Finished!

Spotted "in the wild." As soon as I had the last stitch
in the binding, this quilt was on the bed!

You know my nine patch quilt is done, since I've already told you so all that's left to do is to sum up and show lots of pictures!

Troy was willing and available to help me hang the quilt. Thank goodness, because there was no way I could manage this big thing on my own. My porch came with nails along the inside edge (presumably from the last person's lights or decorations) and at some point I realized they would be perfect for hanging a quilt. I use binder clips to hold the quilt. They're strong enough, but just barely. All this is to say that you can't just start at one end and clip, clip, clip. You have to hold up the weight of the quilt until you get enough clips on, etc. So all this is to say, thank you, Troy, for helping.

Of course, once I got him involved, he couldn't leave the quilt alone!

Obviously it needed a good inspection. :)

Here's a view of the quilting from the front:

and the back:

I was disappointed with how the colours look in the photographs. In real life this quadrant, for example, just glows with oranges and yellows.

In the picture, you can barely tell that there are oranges and yellows there. It's also hard to see the progression of colours and their organization into an orange quadrant, green quadrant, blue quadrant and purple/pink quadrant.

But you can see the general pattern of darker blocks in the centre and lighter blocks on the outside...until you get to the last row on the right and left. That's where, after hours of placing each block just so, my sister and I threw on two more rows when I realized I had extra blocks and decided to make the quilt a rectangle!

Let's look again at the binding that I put on the quilt:

A pieced checkerboard to finish the edge without boxing in the design.

On the back, the pieced border is attached to a strip of fabric to reduce bulk and make sewing easier:

Here is a shot of the entire back:

Calculations showed that I would need nine yards (yes the whole nine yards) of fabric to cover the back and I couldn't imagine buying that much more to finish this quilt. So I pieced together some leftover blocks and some extra of the red fabrics I had collected. I thought a nine patch would be the way to go with this quilt. :)

When I ran out of pieces big enough to do a section, I used smaller pieces of mostly similar reds to make nine patches for the remaining two corners. I wanted reds close enough that they would essentially read as the same colour, but with enough contrast that you could still see the nine patch. Because, you know, more nine patches.

Here is a final view of the entire quilt.

Since Troy was helping out, I could get a picture of myself with the quilt. :)

Project Stats and Facts:

• There are 255 nine patches on the front of the quilt.
• That means there are 2,295 2" squares, plus another 96 used for the binding.
• I spent 10 hours at the long arm store doing the quilting.
• The project was started in July, 2016 and finished in March, 2017. (Pretty quick for me.) I started it thinking it would be a slow project over many years. Then I got obsessed...
• Most of the blocks are hand sewn, although any with batik fabrics were done by machine.
• I worked on the quilt in two countries, at least six houses, my car, two churches and a library.
• A lot of the squares are from true scraps and leftovers, but I also purchased some 2.5" "charm packs" that appealed to me. Most of the reds were cut from my ever-added-to-and-never-used red fabrics.
• Originally referred to by the practical moniker "Red Nine Patch" because there is red fabric in every block, I changed the name to "Cardinal Nine Patch" because an early plan was that the nine patch blocks were going to be the "back drop" for a beautiful batik fabric I bought--deep red with a black cardinal design. As I worked, the nine patches took over and now I'll have to think of another project for the cardinals!

Nine Patched: Trimmed and Bound

Last time I wrote about my Cardinal Nine Patch, it was quilted and waiting to be trimmed. I was looking for a place to do it because you really do need to layout the whole quilt. Right now I have no space in my house where I could do that.

I debated bringing it to my church which has rooms I could use, but it's too far away to just run there for an evening if I don't have to.

And then I thought about my local library, which seems to do a lot more than lend books. (I've noticed they have a lot of local groups that meet there regularly and it was there I participated in a free exercise program. It was the one that convinced me I am never going to do an exercise class again. I truly hate it.)

Back to the quilt...I called them up and explained that I was hoping to use a large room to do this one step on my quilt. She checked the calendar and told me they had a room free for me to use. Hot dog. So that night, I packed up the quilt (I had to use my largest rolling suitcase), my cutting mat and cutter and whatever else I thought I needed. What I did not bring was my camera so these pictures from my phone may not display very well.

The room did give me space to layout the quilt when I moved a few chairs out of the way:

I measured it in three places in both directions to see if it was mostly even. I think neither side was more than a half inch difference. Over 90-100", I thought that was ok. (The diagonal measurements checking for square were further off, but there's less I could do about that.)

Once I decided where to cut, I then crawled along on the floor with my cutting mat, ruler, and cutter trying to cut a straight edge on all four sides that was square with all the other sides.

In theory, I should be able to follow the edge of the quilt but real life is not that simple. Some places stretch out, some are pulled in, and so it goes. If you have a solid border of any width, you can even it out pretty easily. But I didn't want to cut into my squares very much because the difference in size would have been very obvious. (And for the hand sewn squares, it would have made the seams become unstitched!)  I made compromises and did the best I could.

Then it was time to think about the binding. I told you I had a great innovative idea and now I would see if it would work.

First I took extra 2.5" squares that I had from the quilt and pieced them into long rows, alternating lights and darks.

I also cut long strips of a solid fabric, wide enough to give me a final binding of 2.5"

I cut the long strip of squares in half and then sewed them to a strip of solid fabrci:

Here is a shot of the back after I stitched the seam:

The seams were pressed to the side so they would nest with the seams on the quilt.

After pressing the long seam toward the solid fabric, I had some 2.5" binding ready to go...

The great advantage of sewing a solid piece of fabric to the squares is that I wouldn't be sewing through the multiple layers of the seams when I sewed the binding to the back. The solid piece was wider than the squares and would carry past the fold. Oh, and it meant I didn't have to sew as many squares together!

Now that the binding was ready, I needed more space again. I would be sewing along all four sides of the quilt and there was no way I was going to be able to handle that in the space I have. Fortunately, a couple events came up so I was busy in town for the morning and evening of the same day, but had all afternoon to kill.

I brought everything I needed to the church and set myself up with four long tables. Yes, it took that many to be able to move this quilt around without it wanting to pull itself to the floor.

Then I started on the work, first pinning the binding to the quilt, one strip for each side. I was so eager to try out the binding and see if all my squares would line up, I forgot to fold the binding in half!

Fortunately I noticed before I sewed the seam. In the above picture, the solid fabric was folded up so the raw edge met the top edge, yielding a double binding strip. Then I could sew it.

Since I wanted all the checkerboard squares to line up, I didn't think I could do a continuous binding. I just didn't think I could figure out the exact length I would need to turn the corner and match the next intersection.

So I sewed a separate strip to each side and then did something I've never done before--sewed a mitered corner. I sewed a "V" shaped seam on the wrong side so that when I turned the corner right side out, I had a nice sewn mitered seam:

(I may or may not have used the hashtag "micdrop" when I posted this on Instagram. I was excited...)

Although it's pretty slick and I get the impression that it's what the judges want in juried shows, I'll stick to my folded continuous binding method. Since I have to trim the seam so close to the stitching line to reduce bulk, I think this method is actually less durable that the unsewn corner.

I managed to finish sewing all of the binding and corners in the time that I had that afternoon. When I left, all I had to do was sew the binding down on the backside. It was a long process, so it made it to a couple IG posts:

When I just started and had 382 more inches to go.

Nearing the end and on the home stretch...

But finally, last night, at well past my bedtime, it was done!!

I couldn't imagine a better binding for this quilt:

I love it.

You can have Boston and New York; I'll take a quilting marathon any day.

I had my quilt top and backing ready. I had my lesson on the long arm machine. I was ready (and eager) to get this quilt going. I'll be gone next week so I was also anxious to get it done before then. I didn't want that much time to pass between my lesson and applying the lesson. And of course, I was just excited to get quilting and didn't want to wait. :)

So Monday (almost two weeks ago now), I decided with two weeks before I went on vacation, I could afford the time to take a day off (and use up some of my comp hours that are burning a hole in my pocket). I called the quilt shop to see if any days were better than others to rent time or if some days were definitely out before I proposed a particular day to take off to my boss. I was very concerned that I may not get the whole thing done in one day, so I also asked what day could I get the maximum time in.

It turned out that Friday was out because they had a class, but some of them usually worked late one day and, even though the shop wasn't official open, I could continue quilting while they were there. That day turned out to be Tuesday. As in "tomorrow" when I was talking to them.

So long story short, I politely let my boss know that there was an opportunity at the quilt store I had to take advantage of the next day and I would be out. He took it gracefully. (He knows as well as I do how many hours he owes me, so what can he say?)

Tuesday dawns. I pack up the quilt top and backing into a suitcase and head to the store. I get there around 9:30. They gave me a lot of help setting up the quilt on the machine, basically walking me through all the steps again. I chose wool batting. (They sell it there--how convenient! Even better is that they pass on the wholesale price.)

Here it is loaded onto the machine. This is  after I've quilted quite a bit of it, but you get the idea of how it goes on.

The highest bar, in the back, is called the take up roller because it takes up the quilt after you are done quilting each section. The arm of the sewing machine runs over this one.

The lowest bar, at the front of the frame, is the quilt top roller. As you can see, it holds the part of the quilt top that you haven't quilted yet. You can use it to keep the right tension on the quilt top, although apparently some people quilt with the top not in tension at all. In that case, you can let it hang down, or roll it up to keep it out of the way, but not pull it tight.

Just above the quilt top roller is the payout roller. (The one with the red stick on it.) It's also called the belly bar because that's the one your belly is always hitting as you lean over. :) This is the roller that holds the section of quilt backing that hasn't been quilted yet. It also maintains the tension of that layer.

And in between these two layers lies the batting. It isn't held in tension at all and you can see that it is just hanging down. When you're just starting, there's a lot more batting which piles up on the floor and gets in the way. If you look closely, you can see some purple fabric hanging behind it. They call it a hammock and it is tied to both sides of the frame. You stuff the batting in there to keep it out of the way until you need it. Low tech, but effective.

Once we had it on the frame, we chose a thread colour. I knew I wanted red (what else?) but didn't want a bright take-control red. We ended up going with a dusty rose colour and it worked really well. It was not one of the colours that I could just buy what I needed (they charge by the size of the quilt--they don't actually measure what you use) so I ended up buying a whole cone. So now I have a lot of dusty rose thread to use.

I was pretty focused during the day so I didn't take a lot of progress pictures. I knew I would have to keep it moving to get it done. I did have some issues with the thread breaking which slowed me down. I was advised to quilt only from left to right and that stopped the breakage. But it meant that at the end of each pass across the quilt, I had to cut the thread and restart on the other side. On the plus side, your muscle memory is not the same moving in both directions so I think I got better a little faster because I was always going the same direction.

I love how much texture is added as soon as you do some quilting. I think you can see how the closer squares in this picture are flat, but the ones further back look like little hills.

It just brings the quilt alive. It's an exciting process. (Keeping in mind the context. It's also the tedious repetition of a thousand curved lines. :)

After the first couple times you've filled the area with quilting and rolled the quilt on the take up bar, you can see the design on the back of the quilt. This is from the front of the frame:

 Below, you can see a little more of the design from the back of the frame:

 Here is a quick peek under the quilt:

This was taken from the back of the frame. This is the part of the quilt that is lying flat ready to be quilted. (You can see the belly bar in the back (bottom of the picture).)

Then, 10 hours after I arrived, I had a quilt completely quilted:

This is Doug who stayed late. They told me he was working late anyway, but I didn't see him do much more than a couple phone calls, so I think he was essentially staying so I could finish. They were very gracious! But I think he was also glad that he got to see the whole quilt because he came in after I had it rolled up on the frame and he told me part way through the day that he couldn't wait to see how the colours moved across the whole quilt.

I thought ahead enough to pack a lunch and snacks. I knew they had water in a fridge there that I could purchase. I tried to take a break every two hours but honestly spent most of the time quilting. I was very determined to get it done. (I did do some yoga cat/cow in the bathroom at some point. That helped my back a lot!)

For most of the day, it was very uncertain that I would get it done, but after about half way things started clicking. I had many fewer thread breakages and just had to deal with the bobbin running out. (I went through 7 or 8 bobbins in the project.) I also got into a groove with the quilting and got faster. I think the first half took me until about 4:30 and I did the second half in the next three hours. (My best guess.)

As for the quilting, I certainly wouldn't be happy if someone charged me and I ended up with these results, but since I did it myself and it's my first one, I was certainly happy enough. Right from the beginning, it was obvious that the quilting wouldn't be "perfect". And apparently it didn't bother me because I caught myself almost laughing every time I did a wild curve or really missed the mark. (Like "ha ha...that was a good one!") And when you step back, you still get the idea of the pattern.

I'm looking forward to getting some of my other tops ready to quilt. I think they'll need a little more custom quilting than this one did and I'm going to make sure I have two days in a row available so I won't have to drive myself quite so hard!

As for this quilt, I need to find a place where I can trim the edges (it's a little overwhelming how big this thing really is) and then can apply the binding. I've got some crazy plans for that too...something I've never seen done before. (Oooh...the suspense!)

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Bonus footage: Here is a short video of their bobbin winder, a truly slick little machine.

Once you get it started, it runs by itself and stops when the bobbin's full. You load the next bobbin, flip the arm down and it does it all again. If I'm not careful, it's going to make me think filling a bobbin on my sewing machine is quite dowdy!

Putting it Together, Front and Back

<= This is how I spent a lot of January: watching football playoffs and sewing all my nine patches together. (Two of my favourite things, so yay!)

First I sewed all the seams in one direction (without cutting the thread between pieces) and I could throw the top over the couch and it (almost) looked like it was done.

But of course, it wasn't done yet. Only about half.

So I doggedly worked on the seams in the other direction. As I did so, I had to decide which way to sew the opposing seam allowances. Notice (below) the longer horizontal seam just in front of the needle:

Does it go forward or back?

You have to look at the seam on the opposite side of the square--if it goes forward, then the one you're sewing goes back, as seen below.

You could also say that they are both going away from the middle of the square. If, on the other hand, the other seam goes back, then you sew this one forward (and they both go toward the center of the square). Got it?

What also helps, is that the direction is always going to alternate from one square to the next, so I could get into a rhythm if I wasn't interrupted by replays.

Once I had the whole top together, I was left with long horizontal and vertical seams that needed to be pressed:

But I couldn't press them until I picked all the seams inside the seam allowance to allow me to furl every single last one of them. That got me a whole quilt that looked like this:

It really is a shame all of that great care has to be hidden on the inside of the quilt, but that's how it is.

After I sewed around the outside to stabilize it and pressed it, I threw it over my couch and I had a finished top:

Yell a cheer (woo hoo!), take a breathe (in...out) and then on to the next step: piecing a back.

I checked my numbers a few times, but the back of the quilt really was going to take over 9 yards of fabric. I still can't really wrap my mind around that. I certainly didn't have nine yards of one fabric to use and I was not interested in buying a piece for it. So I looked through my box of red fabrics and started on a plan.

The plan started with some leftover nine patch blocks that weren't used in the top. Instead of doing solid nine patches, I alternated them with squares of one fabric.

After sewing all the seams, I was left with some pressing decisions. On the first seams (vertical in the picture below), I chose to iron toward the solid piece of fabric. Makes sense because I don't want to press a seam back on itself if I don't have to.

But now if I try to do the same thing on the horizontal seams, it leads to trouble at the intersections. In order to furl the seam allowances, they have to all go in the same direction (clockwise or countercw) and that's not going to happen if I press toward the solid square.

So it was time to choose my poison: press seams back on themselves on all the nine patches in order to furl the intersections OR press seams back on themselves on half the nine patches by pressing the seam in one direction. Both would lead to some bulky spots. This was on the back of a quilt where there were already a lot of seams on the front. If they all lined up in an unfortunately way, it could lead to problems when sewing through all the layers.

So I choose a third bottle of poison: I cut the seam allowances and pressed them all away from the nine patches. There were still some bulky spots, but not as many. So I snipped on one side of the intersection:

and then pressed:

A compromise I was  happy enough with.

You can see the checker board section in the centre of my pieced backing:

which is essentially a giant nine patch!

I was going to cut the four dark corners from the same fabric because I had plenty of it. I had enough of it that I used it for the plain squares alternating with the nine patches in the middle. (Cue the ominous music...) Yes, after I had pieced the middle section, I cut out the large pieces for the other sections and did not have enough to do all four corners. Apparently I used just enough for the centre section that I was short, by about 3". :( If only I had really measured because then I could have used a different fabric in the middle and the four corners would have matched.

So enter another compromise, I mean solution. I didn't have enough of any one red to cut out the third and fourth corner pieces. So I cut smaller squares of a bunch of fabrics and made nine patches of similar reds to use on the last two corners. Are my nine patches in nine patches in nine patches getting fractal yet?

In the end, I did manage to put together a back for this quilt. It was sized about 6" bigger on all sides which is what I needed. And I met my very firm goal of not buying more fabric for the back.

When Good Enough is Good Enough

Last time I showed my Cardinal Nine Patch it was hanging on the design wall, which turned out not to be big enough.

I took all the blocks down, more or less in order, and then took them all with me to my mom's when we went home for Christmas. After all the excitement and festivities, my sister and I had an afternoon to hang out at the church and use the large floor in their fellowship hall. My sister worked on cutting for one of her quilts while I worked on laying out this getting-to-be-overwhelming project.

First I laid out the blocks I had on the design wall (the far side of the photograph, on the floor near the table). Then I laid out the rest of the blocks. I started on the table, but of course that was not big enough and then laid them out on the floor. My niece helped with that and we put one in the center of each floor tile. Because OCD tendencies don't run in this family for nothing!

I then looked and looked and thought and hemmed and hawed and decided that I just had to start over. For one thing I didn't see how I was going to work all of those loose blocks into the existing layout. (There's a reason for that but I'll get to that in a minute.)

The second thing was that I had noticed that I had a lot more blocks on the light end of the spectrum than dark. So although I would prefer to have the quilt move from light in the center to dark on the outside, that didn't make sense if I had more light blocks.

So I started a new layout a few feet away with the darkest blocks in the center and worked out from there. I started with the orange tones in one quadrant. I shifted to yellow on one side and green on the other.

Each time I finished a section or got stuck, I pulled Kim from her cutting and we talk it through. It took a couple hours (really) but we ended up with something that mostly followed the light to dark pattern and the colour gradations I was thinking of.

We had to accept a lot of decisions that were "good enough" though. The blocks available weren't always in the colours we needed. I really did no planning as I sewed scraps together so this wasn't really a surprise. One thing I didn't think about was the decision to make nine patches instead of four patches or sixteen patches--this meant that block placement was constrained by whether it had five dark squares or four dark squares. If I had done four- or 16-patches, I could have put any block in any position. File that under "Live and Learn".

Since the whole idea was to make a scrappy quilt, none of this was a tragedy.

The big surprise after all my counting, figuring, and writing things down--I had left over blocks!! I didn't count them but in the neighbourhood of 12 to 20 leftover. This is after we decided to throw an extra row on the top and bottom just to make the quilt more rectangular. All I can say is it's better that it was too many instead of too few. (And now I have some starters for the next project!)

I found the last photograph a little hard to get a good view of the whole quilt, so I did some work in Photoshop to adjust the angle and proportions:

I think it's a little harder to see in the photograph than in real life, but the orange dominates the lower left. Green takes over the top left and shifts to blue in the upper right. I didn't really have enough purples, but they mix with the blues in the middle right and shift into some pinks as you move down. I had to mix in more greys in the purple and pink section so it's not quite as colourful as the other side where the oranges are.

The red doesn't anchor the quilt like I thought it would. Next time I would/will definitely stick with one tone of red (all mediums or all darks, for example) and let that be consistent while the rest of the colours change.

I converted the above picture to black and white to get a look at the contrast and tones:

It does generally move from dark in the center to light on the outside. You can really see the top row was added later as there are many more blocks with dark squares than the second row.

I don't think it is the most "successful" layout these blocks could make, but I was pretty happy with it at the time. I thought about redoing it to incorporate the blocks from the top and bottom rows better, but I think in this case good enough really is good enough.

I started to sew the blocks together, and so many of them still please me so much. I think I will really enjoy this quilt sitting over my lap or when I'm laying under it and can just see small bits of it. It's really not made to hang on a wall. So, yes, good enough is good enough.

It was good to have Kim helping me. First of all, she was the one to give me the push I needed to get out of my mom's comfie living room and go to the church to work on it. And she gives good advice that I often take, but she doesn't mind when I ignore it to do what I want on my own quilt! :)

Kim hamming it up.

As I said, I started to sew these blocks together. I have five or six columns sewn together. I thought I was doing well when sewing the first two columns together, to mind which direction the seams were going in so they can all interlock correctly. Well, I noticed I did well on all but the top row. So I need to remove those blocks, take them apart, and then sew them back together in the right orientation and then carry on. Yup, that's where the project is stalled. (My excuse is that the overhead light was disconnected while Troy was doing some electrical work.)

I expect I'll get back to it soon. I'm hoping this will be my first quilt on a long arm machine after my lesson on January 13. So I have to get it together and then figure out a backing. (Perhaps that's where my extra nine-patches will be used!)

Nine Patches

If you work on something steadily, eventually it has to get done...even if it's 225 nine patch blocks! That was a task better done by breaking it into smaller groups and taking it one at a time.

But as I got closer to being finished, I was getting more excited about laying out this quilt. I was looking forward to figuring out how to put all these colours and patterns together.

When I was finished all the blocks that I was going to hand sew and was left only with blocks containing batiks, it was time to pull out the machine.

Instead of moving into my current sewing room (and away from the woodstove and the TV), I moved the sewing machine onto the coffee table and sewed from the couch. No, Troy doesn't get to use very much of the living room but that's why we built him a shop, right?

So I sewed and sewed and sewed and couldn't stop working on these blocks. And then one day I was done. 225. Well, if I counted right before. I didn't recount them.

At that time, I was still working long hours and had other stuff going on so I promised myself that I would get to lay out these blocks over Thanksgiving weekend. On Sunday, I got started:

I think it was going ok. You can see that it's lighter in the middle and gets darker toward the edges. Although I don't think you can make it out in the picture, but it's also organized by color (other than red). The blues are in the top left; yellows near the bottom; oranges going to the bottom right; pinks and purples in the upper right.

But my design wall is just not big enough. There are only 14 rows top to bottom and less than that side to side--I need 15 going both ways. Plus I need room to spread out the blocks that aren't in the layout yet so I can see what I have. I could possibly do that on the floor, but not where this wall is located. So I admired it for the rest of that day and pulled them all down--more or less in order so it hopefully will be less work to start next time.

I'm thinking I may take it to my church and lay it out on the floor there. Not as good as a wall, but better than what I have here. You don't think anyone will notice all the little thread tails that will be left behind, do you? :)