I Love it When You Can Make a Set

I would have to admit that I am a sucker for a set. If something I see matches something I already have, I have a very hard time leaving it at the store (garage sale, flea market, wherever). I have more fun putting together sets than just buying everything all at once. (Feels too much like a kit--all the fun is already done!)

It looks like I didn't detail it here on the blog, but I had a red star block that I took out of my Bright Stars on Black quilt (based on the Pecking Order quilt). (I replaced it with a lighter pink block to flow better with the rest of the quilt.)

Feeling bad that this red block wasn't going to make it onto the quilt, I decided I would make a pillow out of it. I don't generally decorate with pillows, but how could I resist making one from this one (favourite) block!

In November I finished quilting the front of the pillow cover:

I layered the block with some scrap batting (literally scrap as I sewed two pieces together) and backed it with more of this black fabric (which will never end!)

I sewed the center with embroidery floss (two strands) the same as the blocks on the quilt:

And then with the machine, I went around the outside, "bouncing" from point to point.

You can see I marked it with chalk and still have to wash that off!

I avoided doing the back of the pillow for a while because I knew it was going to get involved. I was definitely going to use the same black (again, I have a supply for two lifetimes), but the pieces were all smaller than I really needed--too narrow to cover half of the pillow and too short too.

So I thought of a plan to cover the back with three partially overlapping panels. This also would avoid using a zipper, which I didn't have and didn't want to buy.

After patching in an extra piece of fabric to make four strips the right length, I hemmed one long edge on two of the pieces. The other two pieces, I put back to back and sewed them together along both long edges.

 I then pressed the seams to lock the stitches, and then pressed the seam allowances open:

Then I could turn this tube inside out.

Pressing the seams open before turning, makes it really easy to make a nice crisp edge:

Then I top stitched along both long edges for reinforcement.

After all that, I had three strips of fabric,

The outside ones (top and bottom) are one layer and hemmed on the long inside edge, and the center one is double sided and top stitched along both long edges.

Now I could layer them onto my pillow front. First the centre one goes on (more or less in the center):

Then the two other pieces go on, matching the edges of the pillow front and overlapping with the center piece. The good side facing down, of course.

Then I sewed all around the pillow. Yes, all around. I did not have to leave a 6 inch opening for turning. :)

Apparently Husqvarna is stridently metric because there are no inches marked on my machine. Since I had planned for a 1/2 inch seam allowance, I lined up the edge of the fabric with the edge of my walking foot and then moved the needle to the left until it was 1/2 inch from the edge.

You can see I'm now pinning from the "wrong" way too. A new habit I'm trying. Putting them in from right to left makes it easy to remove them both because I'm right handed and can do it with my right hand and because the pin head hangs over the edge of the fabric and is easy to grab. But since you're not supposed to run over your pins, this means you have to remove the pin before you get there. And usually the fabric is only too happy to move once the pin is gone. Not good.

I just watched a tutorial where the host pins as above and keeps the pins far enough to the left that just the tip goes under the pressure foot (not the needle). You can keep your pins in and nothing has a chance to move before you stitch it down.

I know many of you sew over your pins and have done so for years without any trouble. I used to too. But I have had my needle break because it came down on a pin. More than once actually. And that is when you run into risk of the needle shard flying around and landing somewhere--hopefully not your eye. So although the risk of it happening is small, the risk of it being bad if it does happen is high enough that I avoid it. (Hitting a pin can also throw off your machine's timing and that's no fun to fix either.)

I tried something new at the corners. I like to reinforce them and haven't found a good way to do it. This time I sewed one stitched past the corner, back stitched two stitches, then went forward one stitch and rotated the fabric for the next seam.

Then I did the same thing: stitched once forward, went back two stitches, and then continued the rest of the seam. I don't know if it will make any difference, but I wanted to try it.

I did trim my corners...not too close to the stitching.

And then like the good garment sewer I was taught to be, I graded the seam allowances to reduce bulk.

In this case, I trimmed the seam allowance from the pillow back. I'm not sure how much difference it made in this case since the front consists of two layers of fabric and the batting, but oh well, it didn't make it worse!

Then the easy time of turning it inside out through the slits in the pillow back.

 SO much easier than trying to do it through a six inch gap!!

Next it was time to stuff it with the pillow. I pushed it under the centre and one side,

and then squished it under the other side.

 Easy peasy!

Here's an overexposed shot so you can see what the back looks like:

And here's the completed pillow.

It is pretty well camouflaged sitting on the quilt itself, so I think I'm going to have to accent a chair in the room.

A Constellation

I may put a project aside and not work on it for a while, but it's rare that I stop thinking about it. If I know what the next steps are, I think through how I'm going to accomplish it. If I'm undecided, then I think about different options. Of course, sometimes during this mulling stage, what I think I'm going to do is replaced by another idea that occurs to me.

I got the bright stars on black quilt back on track in preparation for the family craft retreat in February. I completed the centre section of the top, finished up the border stars and laid it out to figure out where they should go.

But I spent most of the retreat working on my blue and white quilt. So this quilt came home in the same state it left.

Sometime between then and last Thursday, I settled on how I was going to arrange the little stars in the outer border.

The squares of the centre were cut at 5" and finished at 4.5". The stars in the border finish at 5", so I knew they weren't going to line up. I thought all I had to do was calculate the number that would evenly space the stars across the quilt.

Then I thought about spacing them unevenly, closer together on one side gradually moving to further apart on the other. I played with some numbers and found a series that not only fit within my idea, but worked out on even 1/2 or 1/4" measurements.

And boom! put it together:

It was super windy this day. (The beginning of the storm that brought snow the following night.) I clipped small books to the lower corners to keep it down and the wind happy waved them around like nothing.

I moved inside and was able to get a better overall shot:

The effect of the different spacing between the border stars wasn't as noticeable as I hoped, but it's what I could do within my constraints. (For one thing, I didn't want a huge space on the one side - that meant I couldn't make the space very small on the other.) And it's not so bad to have subtle effects in a quilt. :)

The other thing this uneven spacing did was spread out the border stars better. I didn't have quite the variety I needed, but I tried to match them to the colours in the middle of the quilt. I didn't really have enough purple (top left) or blue (bottom right). Putting the wider spacing there kept the blocks of similar colour lined up better. See why I jumped on this idea when it occurred to me? It solved a problem that was nagging at me and I thought I would just have to live with.

Next step for this quilt is layering and quilting. I thought about using a black batting (for my first time) to avoid any noticeable "bearding". (That's where batting is pushed through the fabric and visible on the outside, usually by the stitching.) But I've decided my bigger priority is to keep the bright fabrics bright, and a white batting will have that effect.

I have oodles and oodles of this black fabric, but it's all in smaller pieces (most about 12"x15"). I think I'm going to piece the backing out of it just to use it up and because I don't have a better idea. The binding will be black as well, and it's going to be extra wide to act as a final border around the outside of the quilt.

Hmm...or maybe I should add a black border and then do a bright scrappy piping inside a black binding. I'll have to mull that over for a while...

Spinning Stars (fixing a quilt top)

In a few weeks, I will be going to the second annual family craft retreat. This has me focused on what I want to bring and what I may have to do to have it ready to work on (so to speak).

One project that I didn't want to just pack up and take was the quilt I'm calling Bright Stars on Black. I did a lot of work on it at the last retreat, getting it to the point that the blocks were assembled, final layout was chosen, and the horizontal rows of the top were sewn.

After I got home, I had to cut a few more pieces from the black background and got the top completely assembled.

I put it on my design wall to take a look and discovered that I had rotated the centres of a few of the blocks. I had carefully positioned them to flow with the light to dark pattern of the quilt and they had gotten rotated when I sewed the rows together.

And there the quilt hung. For quite a while.

When I wanted the design wall for another quilt, I marked all the blocks that I wanted to change and took it off the wall. I put a safety pin on the top right of each block I wanted to fix (purple circle below - obviously the quilt was off the wall and rotated by the time I took the picture). Then I put a safety pin inside the centre at the corner that I wanted to face the top right (green circle).

Some were rotated 90^ and some were 180^ and this way I would be able to keep it straight.

And there the quilt sat for quite a while.

But thinking about bringing this to the retreat and basically putting the top together again did not sit well with me. So I pulled it out and decided that if I wasn't getting around to this at the sewing machine, I would do it by hand. The sewing part would be faster by machine, but the "surgery" part of it was most of the work and would be the same either way.

I pulled it out this week and got to work. One block at a time, I took out the seams around the centre square and rotated the it so the safety pins would line up.

From the back, I pinned the centre of each side to hold the block in place.

Then I pinned one side at a time to be sewn.

Normally in hand stitching you would mark the seam, but I just followed the previous stitching line.

At the middle of each side, four seams intersected. I reinforced the two that I wasn't sewing so that the stitching wouldn't come undone. Normally it would be held in place by the crossing seam, but I didn't trust the hand sewing to do that very well and a lot of them had already "popped" open and had to be resewn.

I followed a path at each intersection to get through it all efficiently without having to start a new thread:

However far the seam had popped open, I just made sure to overlap with the previous stitches about an inch or inch and half each time. I had to do the same thing at each corner.

When I made it around all four sides, I was done!

Next I pressed the seams depending on which direction the seams around it were going. Sometimes the block fit in perfect, but a lot of times I couldn't quite continue the left-right pattern of the pieces around it. (For example, at the bottom left, two adjacent seams are both pressed down.) The good part about hand sewing is that you don't sew down the seam allowances, so I could decide which way to press the seams after the sewing was done.

A final press from the front, and the block was fixed:

I didn't count but there were maybe 6 or 7 blocks that had to be fixed. I got them all done this week, which feels great.

Then I pulled out all the little stars I made for the border.

I have to decide where all of them will go. I'll try to match the rainbow gradient of the centre of the top but I'm sure it won't work out perfectly.

I haven't decided how far I want to get this before the retreat but I did order batting for it. Which means if I get the top done, I have the supplies to quilt it (and finish it?) at the retreat. The place we're going to this year is specifically set up for quilters so there are large tables to use. That would be a lot better for basting then anything I have here. Seems like I should take advantage of that. :)

Scrappy HST (Half Square Triangles)

I am working on a quilt based on the Missouri Star Quilt Company tutorial for the Pecking Order quilt. When I saw her make it with a white background, I immediately wondered what it would look like with a black background.

And what do you know...soon after that, I came into a lot of black scraps. (Seriously, we bought 300 yards at work to make some hoods, and I got all the cut offs. Lots of rectangles about 15" x 8".) So I figured I would give the quilt a try. (I talked about starting it in this post.)

I cut lots of squares from bright fabrics and sewed them to the corners of 5" black squares. At the right you can see a bit of the layout - I had to test that the layout in my head worked in real life and that it would be conducive to assembling the whole top. (And, check!)

I decided to take the quilt one step further and do a pieced border of stars as well. Finished size 5". (So lots of little pieces.)

These small border stars will be made with hundreds of HST (half square triangles).

I had a few done (above), but pulled it out the other day to work on some more. I needed the final piece to be 1.75". I make HSTs by sewing on both sides of the diagonal and getting two blocks out of two squares. (This means you never have to cut out triangles-thank goodness.)

Usually you cut two squares of different fabrics to place together and sew, but once I had the black squares cut, I realized I didn't have to cut the contrasting fabric to size. As long as I sewed along the line marked on the black square, it would come out right. I was going to be trimming all of the blocks after they were sewn anyway so why cut them twice?

The black squares were cut at 2.25" (because you're sewing on both sides of centre, it has to be bigger than the final size you want (1.75" in this case)). I had some 2.5" scrap squares and just put them together with the black ones.

But I also had weird scrap shapes and I just put the black squares on top of them too. As long as the scrap was the same size or bigger than the black square, it was good to go. (See top row, third from left; bottom row, first and third from left.)

At one point I had a fabric I wanted to use, but it didn't cover the entire black square. No problem...just line up a straight edge with the diagonal line and sew that side.

"Top side" when sewing. The centre diagonal line is marked
with a ceramic pencil. The other two lines are stitching lines.

For the other side, just grab another small scrap and line up a straight edge with the diagonal on the other side.

"Bottom side" of the same square. It will be cut apart
where the two fabrics meet anyway.

Maybe everyone everywhere has been doing this already, but I haven't seen it. I found it so freeing to just grab scraps to match with a black square and still get good results.

Once they're all cut in half, it was time to press them. Look, I'm using my new travel iron:

It's so cute! The small size is nice for working on the smaller pieces. (It may also be nice for larger pieces so that it doesn't mess up seam allowances in areas I'm not trying to iron, but I haven't tried it yet.)

Final step is the trimming. This is why some people don't like this method. The idea is that you make them slightly oversized and cut them to the correct size. It's a "cheater" way to get an accurate piece. (And by "cheater", I mean clever.)

Trimming scraps is no harder than if you had sewn two squares together.

1. Lay the HST so that the diagonal line is parallel to the 45 degree line on your ruler.

2. Line up the ruler so that the 45 degree line is on the seam and the full measurement of your final square (1.75") is on fabric.

3. Trim the right side and top:

4. Rotate the piece 180 degrees so the cut sides are now on the bottom and left side:

5. Line up your ruler so the 45 degree line is on the seam and the lines of your final measurement line up with the bottom and left side.

6. Trim the right side and top:

And you have a 1.75" HST ready for the next step.

And then repeat 255 more times.