Christmas in April

...or at least Christmas prep. I woke up with snow on the ground yesterday (seriously--on April 28) so why not work on a Christmas quilt? A couple Christmases ago, I was at my mother-in-law's looking through all her quilt magazines (as you do) and fell in love with these animals designed by Gingiber. I ended up ordering a set of cards with these animals and bought the fabric panel. (I never track things down that I see in magazines so I was seriously smitten.)

I also liked the designs and soft colours of the coordinating fabric line. By the time I discovered it, the fabric was getting old so it wasn't stocked in many places. (The danger of looking through older magazines.) But I did manage to find two layer cakes (a set of 42 10" squares). The layer cakes include of all of the fabric from the line.

I figured two layer cakes would be enough to make a quilt if I added a contrasting background fabric (like white).

And what pattern did I want to do with this fabric? Well, during the same magazine perusing I found a pattern in a different magazine where one of the "alternate" colour schemes was in this fabric. I liked the pattern and decided that was it.

Then once I was home, I couldn't find it again. This past Christmas I was looking through magazines again at my mother-in-law's and found it! I asked if I could borrow it and she gave it to me. Yeah!

This past Saturday I was signed up for a book class (a button accordion book - what?) but it was cancelled because there weren't enough sign ups. I decided I was going to claim all of that time (plus the 1.5 hours of driving it would have been) for quilting time. But then instead of waiting until Saturday, I started on Friday.

I had organized the fabric before - enough to be pretty sure I wasn't going to have quite enough. But I decided to proceed anyway and see how far I could get. After cutting most of the print fabrics for the blocks, I thought I should try a block or two to make sure everything was going to work out. I sewed the two grey blocks first:

(They overlap a little - they are the same.)

Everything seemed to be just fine!

I cut the rest of the fabric, including the white on Saturday. I had to get creative by the end. I was feeling some embarrassment that I was going to have to sew smaller pieces together to get the right size. Like it was shameful that there were going to be a couple extra seams in the quilt. (Ones that you will be hard pressed to see, I might add.)

But I did a quick turnaround on that feeling. Piecing bits together is resourceful and creative and that's how I'm going to see it. A bit of a tangent, but this reminded me of some embroidered blocks I picked up recently. In one of them, the background square was sewn from two pieces. My first thought was not "Shame on you"; it was more "Way to solve a problem; good for you."

For the last red block, I had to get very "creative" let's say. I'm supposed to have two squares of the same size that I can sew together (red and white). Well, in some cases I had red pieces the right size, but white squares a bit too small. But they weren't two small for a different method of making the same piece.

So here you see a red triangle (itself pieced together) being sewn to a smaller white square, and two smaller white squares sewn to a proper size red square.

After I cut them to shape and trimmed them, they all looked the same as the ones done "properly".

In another case, I didn't have a big enough piece for the center square. You're supposed to have a 6.5" square. But if you look at the blocks above, you can see that the center square actually has all four of its corners chopped off to turn it into a diamond.

So instead of doing the math to figure out the size of the finished square and sewing fiddly triangles on, I cut a piece of paper to 6.5". I folded it twice for reference points, and then cut a piece of grey fabric,

You can see I had pieced the grey fabric together and was
planning to cut the 6.5" square from it. But I decided to
do this foundation paper method instead to
save one extra seam (and use less fabric).

big enough to cover the center in the diamond shape.

Now when I put the square on the corner to make the triangle, I can line it up with the edges of the paper, sew on the marked diagonal line, and everything will be easy peasy and good as new. (I'll sew through the paper and remove it later.)

(I haven't sewn this block yet so I can't show you the final result.)

By Saturday night, I had a red block too.

And after today, I have six blocks done - all the red and grey ones. That means I'm half way there!

The blocks are 18" finished and seem huge to me. I got tired of overlapping them on my poster board so I taped them on the wall. They take up a lot of surface area!

Things are going pretty fast; it may not be too long before I have a quilt top!

Blue and White All Over

I've started a new quilt. I thought I'd post an update today and found out I haven't posted about it at all yet. So get ready for a long one because I'd hate to miss one step. :)

I did sketch out a design, or maybe I should say the outline of a design. I'm sure I'll be adapting as I go.

Of course it's obvious what this
quilt will look like, right? :)

RING 1
The place to start was the center medallion. The very centre was a circle quartered by a cross. I put it together with English paper piecing. It was a challenge to do the narrow white strips since the seam allowance was wider than the piece itself, but I managed.

I then sewed it inside a piece of white fabric. As I recall, I did it with a freezer paper method. (More on that below when I used it again.)

RING 2
The next ring was put together with foundation paper piecing (again, way more on that below) and then sewn to the centre circle.

RING 3
I was using a different set of blue fabrics for each ring. There wasn't so much contrast in the first two rings but the next one had a lot more:

I couldn't figure out how to get the result I wanted with this ring so I did a two-step process. First, I foundation paper pieced some triangles.

Then, I appliqued more triangles to the ring to fill in the empty spaces:

Here the triangle is pinned for
basting.

Once the ring was done, I cut a piece of freezer paper with a hole in it. The hole is the exact size of the opening I wanted. I then centred it on the ring and ironed it down.

After that, I trimmed the fabric in the middle to an even width (about 1/2" from the edge of the freezer paper). No more pictures, but the next step is to clip the seam allowance and then press the allowance back over the freezer paper.

Once the seam allowance is pressed back, you place the piece onto the centre circle and glue it in place. (Gluing the "right" side of the seam allowance to the "right" side of the circle.)

Next you lift up the ring enough to fit it under the sewing machine needle and sew right along the edge of the freezer paper with a zipper foot (or similar foot). Clear as mud? Oh ya, and make sure you remove the freezer paper.

The process looked straight forward on the video and the result looked so precise, but it wasn't quite all that when I did it for my first time. (No surprise.) Anyway, here was the result on this piece:

RING 4
The next ring was a series of blue and white blocks with some curved edges. I decided to use English paper piecing.

When it was assembled, I attached it to the centre circle by hand applique. Since the edges of the ring were already turned under, I just had to put it on top of the centre circle, pin it in place, and sew.

Showing the appliqued ring
from the reverse side.

Once sewn on, I trimmed the seam allowance of the centre circle so it was nice and even:

And here it is from the front:

It was now about 12.5" across.

When I put the circle against the pattern, the size was a little off:

RING 5
When I copied the outer ring it became obvious that my printer had not been copying at 100% - it was using some "fit" formula! Arrgh! This didn't make such a difference on the smaller rings, but it was very obvious on the largest ring. It also explained why my circle didn't quite fit.

I used another copier to get a true copy of the outer ring. I cut the ring into three segments and used the paper for foundation piecing. It was quite a production as I did the three segments at once. (That way I could chain piece and didn't have to cut the thread after each seam.)

Step one - line up the next piece of fabric with the edge of the existing piecing, with the paper pattern folded back out of the way.

Step two - flip over the paper and pin the pieces in place:

Step three - sew along the seam line.

Step four - trim the seam allowance.

Usually I would trim to a 1/4" allowance but in this case with the seam so close together, I actually trimmed an angled allowance, leaving only 1/8" at the centre and 1/4" on the outside edge.

Step five - flip over the new piece and press. (I used my little wooden "iron".)

Step six - fold paper pattern over on the next seam line.

I used a piece of cardboard by lining it up with the seam and pressing the paper over it.

That may seam unnecessarily fussy but I find it the easiest and quickest.

Step 6 - trim the fabric 1/4" from the edge of the paper.

And then you start over lining up the next piece with this edge. Sounds like fun right?

You can see here how I had the three segments going in sequence:

Once they were all pieced, I sewed the three segments together and made a ring. Then it was time to remove all the papers.

Sounds like more fun, right?

The final ring turned out to be a little large - the circle wasn't big enough to allow for a seam allowance. I was stumped for a minute, but then I realized that if I just removed a few segments of the final ring, it would shrink a little bit, and probably enough. So that's what I did. I took out only four blue segments, and the circle fit. (Hurray for fudging!)

I ended up hand basting the circle onto the ring along the seam line and then sewed the seam by machine. It wasn't ideal because I hadn't pressed the seams correctly, but I've decided it will do.

Here is the final medallion on the design wall:

Next up is a border to make this circle a square.