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.

Not So Merrily

I've been working on the blocks for my Merrily Christmas quilt steadily. (Some might say obsessively, but you know, tomayto, tomahto.) By last Friday I had all twelve blocks done. After the red and grey ones I showed in the last post about this quilt, I finished the two brown and four green ones:

I pinned all the blocks to my design wall so I could work on arrangements and see what I had. I planned each block individually working with the limited fabric I had but after seeing them all together, I made a few changes.

One thing I did was change the position of the light and dark on the corner units of this block. (It's the top left block in the picture above):

I also switched out the center of one of the green blocks where I had used grey. I realized I could use white there instead. (No, I don't know why I didn't think of that in the first place.) It brightened up the block a lot.

I also swapped the centers of the two grey blocks (link to picture). The center of each block used the same fabric as the outer corners. By switching the centers, I got a little more variety within the blocks.

You can see the animals inserted as
blocks in the magazine.

Once that was done, I worked on the animals from the panel. Since the animals appeared in this very quilt pattern in the magazine, I didn't expect any more trouble than making sure I cut out a proper square.

Well. Not quite.

The four animals came on a panel of fabric a yard long. This makes it easy for shops to sell one yard and everyone gets all four animals. Now a little simple math. A yard is 36". Since the animals are printed 2x2 on the yard, each animal is half a yard, which is 18". My blocks are 18.5" (unfinished). I'm sure that was simple enough for you to notice that my 18" animals blocks weren't going to be large enough to be sewn to the 18.5" blocks. I let that realization sit over night.

I had a few small scraps from cutting the height down to 18.5". Fabric is 42-44" wide so the animals were about 21" tall. Cutting them to 18.5" gave me an inch and a half if I was lucky. (I know the math doesn't work there, but you lose some of the width from squaring the block and removing the selvage.)

I used the four widest strips to add width to the blocks even though that would add an extra seam. (Boo!)

Of course, the strips were only 18" long so I had to piece in a patch to the patch to get the full 18.5" length:

But once you have one seam, what's adding one more? (That was sarcasm in case my sarcasm font isn't working.)

I put them all up on the wall to see how I liked it:

I can get over the extra seams, but one of the strips wasn't really wide enough. The text on the edge of the block below will mostly get caught up in the seam, but there's a line printed to the left of the text and that won't be in the seam.

I put it on the back side, but since it's a light fabric it will be visible on the front. I'm not sure I want to live with that.

As an alternate arrangement, I could put all four animals in the center of the quilt. With a frame around them and between them, they would be wide enough.

I could use white for the frame or I have some yardage of one of the green fabrics from this line. I don't like this option as much as the first layout, but it's always good to realize you have options.

PS: Aren't these animals adorable!? So cute!

Bright Diamonds Quilt Top Assembled

When you last saw this quilt (in 2015), it was scattered over the floor after it fell off my flannel sheet design board. I thought the cotton just didn't stick to the flannel, but I later realized the window was open and the breeze would get behind the flannel and flick it against the wall, effectively tossing off all of the blocks.

I got busy with work or whatever and put these blocks in a box and didn't take them out again until last week.

It being winter (and freakishly cold), I didn't think an open window would be a problem if I used the design wall. I laid out the blocks again, moved them around a little bit and ended with this:

The diamonds have to be sewn together in diagonal rows. It's not any harder really, but it does take a little more thought to make sure you don't mix things up. I took the blocks off the wall from top to bottom in the rows from upper right to lower left. I pinned a number on them to indicate which row they were and then managed to sew them together. (I only put one row on upside down and caught it soon enough that I didn't do any more seam ripping than necessary.)

I put the completed top back on the wall and decided it was too narrow. I'm aiming for a single (I think that's the same as a "twin") and it was less than 60" wide. I decided to add half blocks to fill in the spaces on the right and left sides. This meant putting together more blocks.

I pulled out the fabrics and put together five more diamonds. I cut them in half to use one half on each side and cut two of the halves in half again for the four corners.

The quilt police would say that you can never make a block and cut in half to use like this because it doesn't allow for a 1/4" seam allowance. So you're supposed to make a partial block just a little bigger than a half block. With this pattern, I just don't have to be that fussy. The points of the main diamonds (the inner ones of each block) won't be cut off and no one will care that the border is cut off 1/4". Now that I've proven to the quilt police I know what they know, we can move on.

On the first side, I tried to "insert" the half diamonds with Y seams and without taking out any of the existing seams. I got it done, but it's not very pretty. On the other side, I did the extra step of undoing a couple inches of the existing seam before adding the new half block. It did take a little more time but it was less fiddly.

I thought about ironing all the seams between the blocks open so that they would be nice and flat and no block would be more dominant than another, but I ended up pressing to one side and furling the seams.

You can see the intersection circled in white. Sorry to keep showing it, but I still love the effect of this method! And since each block ends up with two seams pressed in and two pressed out, none of them dominate.

While I was inserting the blocks, I discovered that one of my border strips had a little cut in it. The fabric was cut just about to the seam.

This is probably an "overcut" from cutting a previous piece that I missed when cutting this strip. I decided to mend it instead of replace it, and just stitched it to the other piece of fabric in the seam allowance. Now there won't be any pressure on the cut and it shouldn't tear any further. The seam allowance will be slightly thicker but it won't be noticeable.

Once the top was together, I trimmed the points from the edges and sewed a line of stay stitching around the outside.

This helps prevent the quilt from stretching at the edges, helps to lock any seams that weren't backstitched to prevent them from popping open, and keeps seam allowances in place as you layer the quilt.

And then I could call the quilt top done:

I think I know how I would quilt this and (unfortunately) it isn't really suited to using a longarm machine, so that means quilting it on my home machine. But I am also considering having it done by a professional longarmer with a computerized machine. I have an idea how I would like that done as well so I'm going to get a quote.

So how long does it take to make a quilt? I bought the fabric over a couple days in 2014. I cut and made the blocks in a week in 2015. And I pieced the quilt in a week in 2018. So that's four years for a quilt top, right? :)

While I was adding the half blocks on the sides, I stitched some scraps together in between each seam. (This saves you from pulling out a few inches of thread at the end of every seam and saves you from cutting those ends at the beginning of each seam.)

I ended up with a 10" block and some units that can be used in a future block or other project. Slab blocks like this are so much fun. Sticking with one colour at a time makes them surprisingly versatile, but I have no particular plans for this one.

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!)

Sashing Through the Snow

I know I still have two more blocks to show you from my Farm Girl Vintage quilt (and yes, I'll get to it; I'll get to it). In the meantime, I have been looking ahead to the next step--sashing and putting the blocks together.

With some calculations about what it would take (I was surprised it was more than 3 yards), I realized I didn't have enough of any one fabric for all of the sashing. So, first good chance I had, I was off to the fabric store! :)

I pulled out fabrics I thought would work and then spread them out on a table in the classroom to audition blocks on them.

Some options included a classic red with white polka dots.

A soft blue with larger white polka dots.

A small print on black. Not very traditional but I thought that the blocks might really pop.

A pale orange...not a colour I really thought would click but I wanted to try something unexpected in case it worked.

I was really tempted by this busy brown print. I know it's not the prettiest option but I somehow thought it was closer to what would be available at the time. It felt more "authentic" to the 30s repro prints in this quilt.

A darker blue with the white polka dots.

And a similar blue with the smaller polka dots. Obviously I had a thing for polka dots!

After multiple comparisons, I narrowed it to two finalists: the busy brown and the darker blue with medium polka dots in white:

I made my choice, added a completely different fabric for an outer border and made my purchases.

I couldn't start cutting or sewing right away because I had to determine a layout and I had to decide how I was going to do the sashing. I like to add a strip to one side and the bottom of each block but this wouldn't help me hide the fact that my blocks vary in size by 1/2". Instead, I planned to sew a narrower strip on all four sides of each block, which would then form the right width sashing when I sewed two blocks together. (Got all that? Don't worry if you don't!)

First step is the layout:

I had to know where the blocks were going because the strips on the outside edges had to be the full width of the sashing. I laid the sashing fabric on the spare bed and arranged (and rearranged) the blocks. Yes, I know, I know...you're all happy I picked the blue sashing. Me too! :)

Once I had the layout, I did all of the calculations for how many strips I would need and what sizes they would need to be. I ended up having to cut 176 strips with 5 different dimensions.

A few of my many, many cut strips!

Then I pulled the blocks off the bed in groups that were sashed the same (such as corner, left side, bottom, etc). I added the correct sashing strip to all four sides and moved on to the next set.

Instead of the most common way to border a block (sewing strips on opposite sides and then sewing strips on the remaining two sides), I decided to sew on the strips rotating around the block. This way the sashing didn't dictate a vertical or horizontal vibe to the quilt and all the blocks would be the same.

Here's how I did it in this quilt:

Start with a bare block.

Place the first strip on the block, matching one end of the strip to the edge of the block. You then have to start sewing in the middle of the edge somewhere and sew a partial seam. You can't start sewing at the start of the seam.

And you get something like this. You may note that the top edges are not exactly aligned. I "overshot" the edge on purpose and then cut it even with the block edge after it was sewn. It's much more accurate than trying to match up the raw edges. (It shouldn't work that way, but it does.)

Then, since the lined up edges were on top, you rotate the block clockwise and add a sashing strip to the edge of the block and the edge of the first sashing strip. You can sew the whole seam this time.

 This is the result.

Rotate the block in the same direction and add the third strip, same as the second.

Three sides done, one to go!

Rotate the block one more time in the same direction and add the fourth sashing piece. I went ahead and pinned back the loose part of the first sashing strip to make sure it wouldn't get caught in the seam.

And now it looks like we're done.

But of course we're not, because the first strip is still only half sewn!

But now that the fourth strip is in place, we can flip the first strip so it is right-sides-together with the block and sew the remainder of the seam.

And now we're done!

So far, I have finished all four corners, the four 12" blocks (which needed yet another size of sashing strips), and all of the outside pieces. (Hmm...it almost sounds like I'm putting together a puzzle!) All of the blocks on the outer edge needed thicker strips on one or two sides. By only working on blocks that were oriented in the same way and by adding the wide strips first, I was able to keep track of what I was doing.

Now I have only 14 interior blocks to go and they have the same four pieces on all four sides. I'll just have to continue to make sure that I rotate the sashing in the same way and that they get back into the layout right-side-up (as in not up-side-down).

After that they will all get a good pressing and then be cut to size. I made sure the sashing was sized for the smallest square and that means I'll have to cut most of the blocks down--the price to pay for being able to assembly-line sew this step. It also means I'll be able to make sure each block is centered in its section no matter what size it is.

Also, I have one more surprise in the setting of this quilt that this method of sashing allows for! :)