Bonus, not Waste

While making blocks for my Merrily Christmas quilt, I ended up with a lot of extra HSTs (half square triangles). These are literal waste because of the way the block is put together. Well, I can't let that fabric go to waste. (It doesn't help that they're small and look so cute! I'm a sucker.)

The pieces all comfortably cut down to 2.5" square so that's what I did. Some people find this tedious and not worth the effort but I enjoy it.

HSTs are nice because you can arrange them in so many ways. I decided on zig zags, doing one across and one up and down. I sewed 12 HSTs together and had a good start for two mug rugs.

I layered in some leftover batting, also "waste" cut off of another project. With a small project like this, I don't bother sew the pieces together; I just lay them side by side and pin the layers. I used white fabric for the backing because I wanted it simple, wanted to save time, and the white fabric was out and convenient.

I quilted both pieces following the zig zag lines.

I had wide enough strips left over of the grey that I did a machine sewn binding. I made a great discovery that made my corners so much better.

I usually pin the binding clockwise, the same direction I sew. But when I pinned it counterclockwise and tucked the first side under the second (right side under the left side in the picture above), the miter lined up so that nothing shifted as you sewed it. When I did it the other way, the right side was on top and the zipper foot just pushed it out of position as the needle got close.

I'm still not super neat with my machine sewn binding, but this technique will help a lot!

I didn't have very wide scraps of the red, so I hand sewed it.

2 inch binding on the red, folded in half, machine sewn on the front, folded to the back and hand sewn. 2.75" binding on the grey, folded in half, machine sewn on the back, folded to the front and machine stitched.

I was inspired to make these mug rugs because I have two gift bags to fill that will go to a boys club for them to give to their mothers. I thought a cute mug with the mug rug, a treat and a coffee store gift card would make a nice package.

Family Crafting Retreat

I had the great pleasure of meeting a couple of my sisters, my mom, two cousins and an aunt for a crafting retreat this past weekend. This all came from my cousin posting her quilts on Facebook, our comments, and a chance remark about getting together to quilt (and craft). The snowball rolled from there.

And speaking of which, it snowed non-stop all weekend. I went out for a couple walks, but otherwise didn't have to be out, so I didn't mind at all. But it was surprising to look out the window for three days and have it snowing every single time. Thankfully someone else was taking care of snow removal.

The building where we were staying.

What did I work on over the weekend? Glad you asked because otherwise I wouldn't have much to talk about here.

First was the quilt I am currently calling Bright Stars on Black. I got it organized before I left and had already cut the parts I would need and pieced a lot of half square triangles (HST). I started by sorting them into sets of 8 for stars and sewing them into pairs.

Then I added the center black square:

Or I put two sets on the black square, anyway. My preparations neglected to include cutting the smaller black squares needed for the outside corners. So that was as far as I got with that. But that took quite a bit of time, so that's alright. Part of the time was spent pressing all those little seams.

Troy and I finished a new travel ironing board just in time for this trip. It has legs so it can be set up on a table, but I quickly realized it worked great sitting across my lap. I really can find a way to do anything while sitting on a couch.

Obviously I'm not pressing the HSTs in the picture, but the parts for the large stars all still needed to be pressed as well. It was a good chance to sit and talk.


I discovered a few of them hadn't had the outer corners trimmed, so I did that and immediately made some scrap blocks from the cut off triangle pairs. I didn't trim them to size or anything. I just ran them through the machine and matched up what I could.

These squares will finish less than 2" - piecing this small isn't crazy if you do it right away while the scraps are still fresh and the two triangle pieces are already matched up (as these were). Of course, I would be crazy to put these aside for using later. They are too tiny.

Although my aunt would say it's all crazy. (In fact she did say that on the weekend about someone else's quilt with small pieces. She was voted off the island.)

What will I do with these little squares? Who knows. For now they're in with the scraps (bigger scraps) and will get put into some slab block or scrappy project. Meanwhile, they're cute!

I did finish sewing and pressing all the large star pieces for this quilt and had been hoping to lay it out while I was there. But the building really didn't have any spaces large enough. I left it alone for a while, but it was nagging at me so I finally tried it on the kitchen table.

First I laid out all the star sets, organized by colour:

I figured out how many I had of each colour group and worked with some options on paper for what I could do with them. After I chose an arrangement, I picked out the best blocks for the layout.

Somehow I made twice as many star sets as I needed for one quilt, so there were plenty enough to choose from!

Then I laid out the pieces one row at a time and sewed them:

None of the rows are joined to each other yet, but I think you can get an idea of how it will look. I have to cut some black filler blocks for the edges too, and I didn't have the fabric with me. I was very happy to make this much progress.

In the time when I didn't think I had room to lay out the quilt, I did some playful sewing with scraps:

I got as far as I could with red scraps in making a slab block. It's not up to 10" yet but I can add more later. The squares on the right were cut offs from the quilt my sister was doing. She doesn't keep scraps that small. Again, these are not intended for anything yet, but things like this have a way of being perfect for something (one day).

Holding gifts that a few of us made for each other--
mug rugs, pin cushions, and matchbook needle cases.

A close up of the mug rug I chose.

We also worked on a puzzle - of a quilt of course.
Mom made it her first priority to get it done!

You can't really see it in the picture (right) but my sister is holding a blanket she is knitting. It's covered in cables and I showed her how she can do them without using the cable needle. (Essentially by permitting yourself to take the stitches off of the needles for a moment.) She sent me a note later that said it was one of the best things I ever taught her. :)

When I wanted something simpler I could do while sitting and talking, I pulled out this sweater.

I bought it at Goodwill to harvest the wonderful yarn. It will be perfect for a Wool-Aid project. The sweater was slightly felted so it was going to be a two person job to ravel it -- a perfect job for me and my mother.

One of us would pull the yarn from the sweater and the other would wind it into a ball.

By the end, I had four satisfying balls. (And we both had tired arms because we were trying to "keep up with" the other.)

A project I started over the weekend was a new shawl:

I got a little further than this but I have realized that I'm going to have to add the beads the pattern suggested. I thought yarn-overs would be enough, but they're not. So I have ordered beads and will have to start this over. I'll give more details about it in a later post, but if you're curious you can see the Ravelry project page by clicking here.

And finally, when I wanted to work on some hand sewing, I pulled out my Lucy Boston's Patchwork of the Crosses blocks. On the last night, I laid them all out - some sewn, some partially laid out, some partially sewn - and pulled out the new fabric I purchased on the drive there.

I had this block laid out except for the four feature pieces:

I found the brown fabric with orange flowers at the shop and added them. I sewed it together over the weekend.

I purchased some of this fabric:

and cut out and shaped this border from it:

Nothing is pieced, so I could still separate the sets of 8 matching pieces. We'll see.

Here's another border I cut out from a new fabric.

I'm not sure I'm going to keep it with the green center.

And finally, I tried out a different layout of pieces I had already prepared:

I like the spiral and sewed it together on Monday when I was home. I'll be playing with this some more.

What a fun weekend it was. There's talk of doing it again next year, so that would be great.

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.

Block 38: Welcome Block

This week's block was my final 12" block. It is so odd to switch from the tiny pieces in the 6" blocks to these (relatively) large pieces. I did decide to piece it on the machine since the seams would be longer and I thought the result would be better done by machine.

Here is the Welcome Block:

 Here is the back, if you're curious.

A few open seams, but mostly I pressed to one side or the other with and furled the main intersections.

After sewing some "flippy corners" for units in the block, I sewed the triangles that you normally discard into half-square triangle blocks. I had some fun playing with what I could do with them:

Not sure what will become of them, but they're safely in a bag in my scrap box waiting for the right project. :)

Here are all of the blocks I've done so far in a virtual layout:

Sure looks better with that last 12" block filled in, doesn't it!

Won't be too long now and all of the blocks will be finished!
_________________________
Here is Kim's block:

I think it looks like a flower!

2016 County Fair Block: Corn and Beans

Thank you to those of you who completed the poll of designs for the county fair block. If you would like to see the results, you can click here. Here is a recap of the options:

and this is my summary/interpretation of the results:

-A majority chose design 2 as first place (6 out of 8)
-If you combine the two diagonal designs, they were picked first place twice but six people picked them for second place.
-Design 1 was chosen last place four times, the most of any one design. I think I did it a disservice by showing it without a border. I actually think in a quilt, it would work the best (assuming the white is a common or main background color of most blocks), especially with sashing between the blocks.

Given that the diagonal designs seemed the most popular and I felt it was an interesting option, I chose Design 4, the better of the two diagonals, in my opinion.

And without any further drama, here is my block!

I received the green bean fabric on Friday and had time on Saturday to do some quilting.

I thought about doing a trial block with other fabrics first as I have done in the past, but I just couldn't make myself do it. Or, rather, I was too excited to make the block with the actual fabrics to stop myself.

I oversized all of the half-square triangle pieces and the triangles and then cut them down to the exact size needed after they were sewn together. I was determined to get a full 12.5" block this year!! You can't use this trick with every pattern, but it's great for half-square triangles. (HSTs are the squares that are made up of two identical triangles sewn together from point to opposite point of the square.)

I will tell you, I still undid quite a number of seams while putting the pieces together. After each quarter was assembled, I checked the measurements again. One was off enough that I had to make adjustments to the seam. It gets a little skinny in one section, but it will hold. And even when it was all done, I had a little gap on one side and I decided the black triangle was sewn on with a crooked seam. So I took half of that seam out and resewed it too. That fixed the problem and I have an honest 12.5" square now. Hurray!

The theme was Farmers Market and the block is called "Corn and Beans". Obviously the corn fabric and bean fabric emphasize the name of the block. I am happy with it. I'm sure they are looking for appliqued scenes, but piecing is what I like to do and I stuck with it again this year.

The block has been washed, starched and ironed. I'm going to cut the loose strings off the back of the block, but otherwise it is done and ready for the fair in August! Can I get a "woo hoo" for no last minute sewing this year!??