2020 Planning Party: First Quarter Update

If I went through the trouble of doing some planning for 2020, maybe I should go through the effort of some updates too! (For the original list, see this post.)

After the first quarter of the year, here are status updates for the projects I listed:

1. Quilting my Nocturne Star: no progress. The top, back, binding, and thread are all still hanging out in the same box. I haven't used the batting intended for this quilt, so I still have all of the necessary pieces.

2. A wall hanging from an orphan block. At the retreat in February, I sorted through my blues and yellows to see what I had from the first wall hanging and what else may work

and then cut up a lot of little squares.

Not long after getting home, I sewed the first border of rectangles together and attached them to the center block.

I couldn't find enough of the fabric I wanted to use for the next border. It was a light orange with blue flowers that was perfect in the first block. I did some more looking but never did find any. (Except for the squares of this fabric in my plaidish quilt. I was giving them the side eye for sure.)

When I finally decided I couldn't wait any longer for some to magically appear and wanted to move forward, I worked with what I had. I had enough for 10" of the 12" border. So I grabbed another fabric that isn't the same but I kept mixing them up in my mind, so I figured they were close enough to the same. I put the new fabric in just the corners, leaving the center for the orange fabric.

Not terrible.

Then I decided to press on and sew on the next border, which was also a set of squares. It would have been smarter to strip piece this--make one set 6" wide and then cut them into 1.5" strips--but I didn't think of this on time. So I sewed little 1.5" square together, one by one.

And then they were too long. By a good amount:

I think I can make each seam a smidge bigger and make it fit, but for now the whole thing is in time-out.

3. Sashing Lucy Boston blocks
This got seriously derailed by the Third Block contest in February, but I was able to finished 4 so far this year

and am working on the fifth:

This last one will be block #28 to be sashed, which means...I'm half way! Wow, imagine that!

4. Joy to the World quilt bottom (back)
Good news here, I got the back done!

This got a big push by the #sewthescrapoutofMarch sew along on Instagram (and being home all day every day) and I definitely wanted it off of the design wall.

Here's a close up of the border print:

Carefully chosen by the fact that it was the only red fabric I had enough of to do the borders.

5. Antique red fabric quilt
I bought more fabric for this quilt, bringing in some teals that I think will really help, but nothing else done. If I do the Boston Common pattern I'm looking at I really will need that design board the Joy to the World quilt just vacated.

6. Cashmere "memory" blanket
I got a good start on this one at the retreat in February. The blocks were cut and sewn into rows. Soon after getting back, I sewed the rows together.

I started the hand embroidery to sew down the seam allowances on March 3 and finished in about two weeks. (Another reason my Lucy Boston blocks were slowed down.)

I finished the label just in time to say I did it on this post. I hope to deliver it on Thursday.

Although intended for a couch, here it is
laying on my queen sized bed.

7. Calligraphy
I completed the online "drills" course I started. That was a great start. I did not sign up for any of the following (not free) courses that actually teach letters. I just looked at examples and started. I made these 4x6" cards to hang on the prayer board at church.

I am interested in hand lettering, which is a great thing to combine with calligraphy. Here's the design I put on the postcard I swapped at the retreat.

I'm learning that calligraphy and hand lettering are more about the layout than how well you can make letters. (Although of course you need both.) I took a class on hand lettering at Make South Bend a couple years ago, and both of these experiences have taught me that it's more like drafting than writing.

Here's a fun habit I picked up from the calligraphy drills instructor:

She loves to decorate her envelopes, and apparently I do too. It takes a long time though, so please don't be offended if any mail you get doesn't look like this! :)

I am not keeping up with regular drills so I'll have to "get in shape" before I do any serious calligraphy projects. I also haven't experimented with the "big" brush pen. I could do the same drills with the big tip pen and see how that goes.

8. Skate more
I managed to skate twice in January at the new local skate park:

And a picture to prove I was there:

It was nice. I think after that the weather was iffy and I had things that filled the time gap where I would have went skating. Apparently it is a good thing I didn't get the season pass.

9. Take a trip with Troy: no progress
And now that we are self-isolating (self-isewlating in my case), getting to the grocery store is considered a major trip.

10. Pray more.
I'm definitely doing this, and with all the time at home that I could want, I have lots of opportunities for it. I have kept up a daily practice of Lectio Divina each morning, and small groups that I was getting together to pray with are trying it on Zoom. It's not great, but it's not horrible either.

Well, all in all, not bad I'd say. This might have been a better goal list for the first quarter of 2020, than for the whole year! But then again, I do have that whole quilt to quilt (#1).

Joy to the World Continues

I finished making all the words for my Joy to the World quilt (back of the Merrily Christmas quilt). I got as far as the first four lines of the verse and thought that was probably enough; I didn't need the last line to make the point and I thought things might be getting too crowded. (And I hear you should always leave them wanting more! :)

To test my theory, I took the Merrily Christmas quilt and laid out the words on the back of it. That way I could see exactly how the words would fit in the space.

I moved them around a bit and liked the result. To record the positions, I took pictures of all the spaces with a ruler laid out. Both word spacing:

 and line spacing:

It's hard to read like this, but zooming in on my camera works just fine. And we're not dealing with very precise measurements. Once I had numbers for the length/height of each word and the spaces, I laid out a plan in Excel.

I already had some 10"x10" squares made so that is why I used blocks of that size across the top and bottom. The other areas were broken into chunks that I could make separately and put together like a puzzle. The four outside strips (including the top which was broken down into 10"x7" pieces on the plan) will be continuous strips of one fabric. (Or one fabric each side.)

I started with the smaller spaces between the words. Then I started to make chunks of "made fabric", attach them to the words, and put them together.

 This is what my work station looked like:

Tiny pieces on the side table (in the lid), strips in the container, and larger chunks to the side of the machine. I enjoy the raised work table for the flat sewing surface, but sometimes I think the best part is that I can keep stuff on the table and it won't encroach on the sewing area. (I also have two levels to hold stuff.)

In a little while, I had this much done:

Felt like a lot when I finished sewing but doesn't look like as much when I see the whole quilt top!

I really wanted a design wall so that I could see how it was coming together, what colours (maybe "shades" would be more accurate?) or accents I may need to add to keep it balanced, etc. But I really couldn't think of any place in the house. When I decided to settle for the spare bed, I realized it should work fine. Right now, anyway, I don't have to lay out the whole quilt, just the centre part, and it fits on the bed just fine.

Part of why I wanted to take a break from sewing is that I was loosing track of what reds I had. When I went though my fabrics, I had sorted out some smaller chunks (smaller than a fat quarter), which I would use in this quilt, and fat quarters/larger chunks, which I would store with the other fat quarters. But when I started sewing, I found three piles! What was the third pile? I'm not sure but it might have been a pile of additional fat quarters that I decided to use in the quilt. Obviously I lost track of what I was doing!

Anyway, skip ahead to where I laid out all the fabrics I had:

Now I know exactly what I have and won't cut into a larger piece when I have a smaller piece of the same fabric. It looks pretty and organized now -- I'm sure it will be a big pile of mess once I get sewing again, but in the mean time I feel like I'm on a little firmer ground to start again.

All the Quilts; All the Time

It's perfectly normal for me to have many quilts on the go, especially since I tend to work on a quilt on and (mostly) off over at least a few years, bringing it out and packing it away for each new session. But this week I've taken it to a whole new level.

I'm sure this is the first time I've had four different quilts out and going, at the same time! Phew.

It started with an idea I had for the back of my Merrily Christmas quilt. I think I've mentioned that I wanted to make a second top to put on the back instead of a plain back. I'm not going to have many Christmas quilts about so I may as well get double duty out of this one. :)

I came across this book at the thrift store when I was visiting my mom:

and I was intrigued. Soon after I had the idea to sew up the words of the carol Joy to the World. Not so long after that, I was well on my way!

I really enjoy the improvisation of the process. The process uses strips of fabric in various widths and you build the letters up step by step, no measuring or figuring. This is my work station:

Sewing on the left, cutting/trimming in the middle, and ironing on the right, plus all the strips laid out on the parts of the ironing board I don't need to press on. Everything close and convenient. I did start to make myself stand up for pressing just so I would move around more. (I just read a book on ergonomics so it's still running through my mind.)

Making the letters is a prime opportunity to do some leader/ender sewing. The idea with leader/enders is that when you get to the end of a seam on the main project where you can't follow with another piece, you sew a seam of the secondary project. It works better to start sewing a seam when there's fabric under the needle and it saves on thread too, if you're counting that.

Well, as soon as I saw the Plaidish quilt pattern on Instagram, I knew I would be making it. You can click the link to see some samples--it's made from scraps and uses light, medium, and dark values to make a sort of plaid pattern.

The pattern was offered for free, so I downloaded it right away. Following the cutting instructions, I went through all of my scrap stash and started cutting pieces.

There are three different blocks and each requires three or four pieces so I kept them all organized in jars and whatever containers I could find while I was cutting (including an empty Kleenex box!) I got all of the pieces except a few of the dark squares from my smaller scraps! That's a win right there.

I put everything in a cookie sheet and set it by my machine so I could sew a seam whenever there was a gap in the main project.

 I had laid out some of the pieces to see if there was any way to organize the colours

but determined that with this many colours, it was just going to have to be random. But I couldn't do it all random. After sewing pairs together (like a rectangle or square to a narrow strip), I did some planning of what would be sewn to what. I wanted to maximize the contrast and not have the same fabric together in the same block.

I'm pretty far on this project by now. All of the A blocks and B blocks are sewn, and I'm working on the C blocks. Once the blocks are all sewn, I'll lay them all out to determine their placement. I'm sure I won't be able to put them together randomly.

Truth be told, I am really itching to get this one done; I'm excited by it. So sometimes I force myself to make some more letters just so I can piece more of these blocks! The letters take a lot more brain power and get tiring after a while, but having this project gets me fired up to go again the next time.

In the middle of July, I was getting a lot of quilting done on my bright stars on black quilt, including the borders, which obviously weren't quilted the way they were marked!

But then we had company coming and I thought that we might want to use the living room (where I was working) so I rolled it up and put it on a chair:

Which is were it has been sitting. I have the majority of the quilting done, but I was slowing down because I knew I couldn't get any further before I made the brightly coloured flange I was going to put along the binding.

Well. While I was going through the scraps for the Plaidish quilt, I came across a nice pile of leftover brights. So I started cutting them up too.

They are mostly left over from the bright diamonds quilt I made, and the pieces that were already cut into strips were the width I was going to use. Boom. That saved me a lot of cutting. After getting it cut, I measured about 500 inches of strips, so that will be enough to go around my 95 inch square quilt. Next step is to decide what is going where and to piece the lengths together.

And. Then. I could no longer wait to work on my Lucy Boston quilt. I had bought the solids I wanted for the sashing in July with my sister. (She patiently helped me pick out the perfect shades of grey among the many options. And then once we had a group picked, I saw three on the shelf that blended much better. They had more of a brown tone than the others, which is what I was trying to avoid, but the blend was so good, I went with it. So a lot of fussy work to narrow it down and then a 3 second decision to go with this other set. I told you she was patient with me.)

Another reason this project was on hold was that I was debating using another system than cutting shapes with a template and gluing the fabric to paper shapes. Linda Franz has a system she calls Inklingo where you print lines on the fabric for cutting and for sewing. This way you can sew the pieces together without the steps of gluing it to paper and removing the paper later. It was very tempting because it's a very slick system. But the very fact that I hadn't gotten to it was telling me that it was not the method for me. I enjoy the paper method.

So, I cut some strips and then cut some honeycombs:

I'm not going to cut them all out because I need over 1,300. I'll make them as I go. I got enough to start putting them on the first block,

 and just finished it last night.

One down, 55 to go.

I missed having a project to sew while sitting on the couch too brain-tired to sew more letters. And I missed working on these blocks. Besides, football starts tonight so I need some hand work to do! This project should be more than enough to keep me busy through the football season.