Finally Quilting!

There are a lot of things I could update here, but let's take on the biggest project making the most progress: my Nocturne Star quilt:

I started the blocks in May, 2016 and had them finished by July. I assembled them into the star and added the border in November and December. I pieced the backing and basted the quilt in June, 2020.

I couldn't start quilting until I had something that would hold the cones of thread I bought for this quilt. I sent a link to Troy for one as a suggestion for my birthday, and he, like any self-respecting maker would do, decided he could make one far better than what was offered for sale.

By February, his creation was ready to use:

It's very pretty and has a very solid (read: heavy) base.

It's working great.

So I could being to quilt. I started by thinking about the center star. It works better to start quilting in the middle of the quilt and it's also the hardest to do so it's nice to get it done first. The first part of the design I settled on was doing ribbon candy inside a diamond frame down the middle of each arm of the star.

I auditioned designs (and practiced the motion of making them) on a piece of glass and a dry erase marker. Then I tried some options to fill in the outside.

And settled on the wave like lines (upper design in the picture below).

Having that settled, I started stitching. In preparation, I had ordered a new foot for my machine that is designed to ride along the edge of a special ruler. (They're both sized so you can't slip and slam your needle into the ruler. Don't try to use just any ruler you have.)

In some ways, it's a little rough. I'm a beginner and the ruler is shorter than the distance to be travelled, so I have to keep moving it while maintaining the straight line. And the stitching is 1/4" from the edge of the ruler so that takes some learning. In some ways, I found it very straight forward and had no qualms about doing my very first ruler work on this special quilt.

Progress was made.

They say consistency of texture is more important that having perfectly placed and symmetrical lines, and I am choosing to believe them. :)

I am very happy that the center lies perfectly flat:

For breaks from that quilting, I sometimes worked on the light squares.

I added borders 1/4" from the edge and filled in an area with various designs based on circles or half-circles.

In general I would have liked to have kept the density of the quilting mostly the same, but in fact the designs do vary quite a bit.

I tried various ways of marking the gaps, including just relying on the markings on the ruler, water soluble pen, and a hera marker. They've all got their pluses and minuses (and I could use more practice with all of them!)

When I couldn't take doing more of the light squares, I started on the outer dark diamond shapes (the "wheel" in the Carpenter Wheel pattern). I auditioned patterns and practiced them on glass again, and ended up with a feather variation.

Something I thought I would never quilt because I wasn't that crazy about feather quilting, and it is deemed "hard". And to be honest, my earlier efforts where pretty bad! I think "modern" feathers are more forgiving and I've learned to go a lot slower and to look ahead. It's helped.

I recently gave a push and finished all of that quilting.

The center area of the light squares was left to do. I was dithering about what to do there. I wanted simple and something fairly dense to make the gaps between the borders pop. I wanted it consistently dense so nothing pictorial. I had settled on traditional crosshatching when a video about the spiraling square came up on my feed.

I decided that was it. It's back to ruler work after a lot of free-motion quilting but this is a little easier since the ruler can span the length of each line.

I've finished it on four of the twelve small squares. I'm not sure I'm going to do the same thing in the larger squares but I have a little time to think about it.

If by some heroic effort and the miracle of nothing going wrong, I have this done in two weeks, I'll be able to enter it in the county fair. If that doesn't happen, my next deadline is mid-August when I'll be traveling to see family. The quilt is destined for my sister and she has been waiting a long time (like since 2016--she had no idea it would be this long!) and I'd like to finally deliver.

Scrappy Trip Around the World Blocks

Remember this project?

This was how many blocks I had done in August.

For the next set, I matched up more strips sets sorted by colour.

My sister had given me this color tool and I finally thought to use the red and green filters to check values so I didn't have to take a hundred pictures and convert them to black and white.

That saved a lot of time!

By the end of December, I had this many blocks:

At this point I was running out of darker fabrics because the blocks use a lot more of it than the lighter fabric. So I thought, maybe I should make some light blocks, like this:

I put it on the wall to see how it would look:

I also wondered about making every other block a light one.

We'll see.

In mid-January, I worked on the heart. I didn't like the dark lines going through the middle.

I made some replacement blocks:

but I still didn't like how it looked. The diagonal lines didn't match up; the red is too thick on those blocks. So I took apart the blocks and reassembled them:

That's better!

I'm not promising this quilt will even have a heart on it, but if it does it will be one I like! ;)

And now the blocks are packed away in a box as I needed to put my Lucy Boston up on the wall. The ideas can marinate while I work on other projects.

Scrappy Trip Around the World Begins

Remember the Quilty Adoption Event in April? I wrote about the first item I adopted -- a quilt top that I disassembled and sewed the blocks in a new layout -- and in that post, I mention a second item, but haven't written about it since.

If you follow me on Ingstagram, you will recognize these strips that I adopted:

It was a big box of single 2" strips, loosely sorted from light to dark and a bunch of strip sets already sewn together. There's a project the sewn sets were intended for and I'm still deciding if I will go ahead and make it, or use these strips for something else.

Meanwhile, I took the single strips and sorted them in groups from light to dark.

I then sorted those groupings into five gradations I called light, light2, medium, medium2, and dark because I needed five different groups to make a trip-around-the-world (TATW) block.

I have become enamored with the scrappy TATW blocks popularized by Bonnie Hunter. (Link to her tutorial.) These blocks I'm making have a similar effect but with a little more order to them because of how the lights and darks are placed.

For the first set of blocks (above) I created sets by pulling similar colours from each of the five categories. That was enough to show me that I was going to have to do a little more pre-sorting if the sewing was going to be any fun.

So I took the five gradations, and sorted each one into different colour families.

Some of the strips are in more than one colour group, and sometimes it's a stretch when a fabric is multicoloured but I had to put it somewhere. Above, clockwise from top left, is, purple, blue, red, yellow, and green.

This was the first layout I tried on the design wall, just to have a proof of concept.

The project sat for a while then and while it was sitting, I thought I would try to make strip sets ahead of time so the sewing would be even easier. It was just too hard to see if the fabrics contrasted enough when I grabbed strips while I was sewing.

So, recently, I sat down and pulled out one colour group at a time and made some sets. For the first colour group, I did it just by eye, but then realized I should be putting my camera to use.

In this photo, the strips in colour are a bit of a jumbled mess, but when I convert them to black and white, I think the contrast is just what I need. (In this case, M-M2-D-M2-M, as in medium, medium2, dark, medium2, medium.)

In this next set, I think it looks good in colour, but the black and white shows that the first two fabrics are pretty close in value. (I think I used this set anyway because my choices are limited.) This strip set is L-L2-M-M2-D.

In the next photo, I'm going for another L-L2-M-M2-D, and I think the fourth fabric looks darker than the third in colour. But in black and white, I think they are too similar to use.

The next picture is an example of M2-D-M2-M-L.

In the fourth position, there are actually two fabrics (buttons and a floral). I was trying to see which was better. Even though I think they are the same value, I think I went with the buttons because there was a little better contrast. The floral seemed to mush in with the other florals. And I think it's clear that even though the two reds in the first and third position look different in colour, in black and white, they are the same value.

The fabric strips are all different lengths and it didn't take long to realize that I needed to pay attention to how many inches of each combination I was going to get. For each inch of one strip set, I needed 2 inches of the other two strip sets for each block. I didn't worry about getting it exact but I couldn't be way off either. I sorted a lot of fabric and ended up with sets ready to sew.

Another day I tackled sewing some of the strip sets (below). I had tried to match strips of similar length, and just cut them to match the shortest length for easy sewing.

Once they were sewn I figured out how to iron the seams the right way, and cut each set into 2" pieces.

I stacked up the pieces to make blocks (seen at the top of the picture above), and then sewed those strips together.

And here we have my first set of blocks sewn from this process:

I have since sewn sets from two other colour families, and here they are on the design wall:

I don't know if this will be the final layout, but it's a fun way to put them on the wall for now.

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Linking up with Oh Scrap! hosted at Quilting is more fun than Housework.

Where Have all the Elephants Gone?

I went looking for some information about my blue and white elephant quilt on this blog, and you know what I found? No final post! Well, I can tell you it is finished. You probably knew that.

But just to wrap things up, let me give you the whirlwind tour.

The quilt started as these chicken scratches.

Scratch that. The quilt started as a shower curtain! A gift from my sister--a nice fabric shower curtain with four bold rows of plodding elephants and mandala-type designs.

As soon as I saw it, I knew I would make a quilt from it one day! :) When I saw a call for blue and white quilts for an exhibition by Quilts, Inc, I thought I'd give it a try.

I drafted a 100% scale drawing of the center, interpreting elements from the mandala designs.

I used it to make paper parts for all of the rings. The center was pieced with English paper piecing and then I used reverse applique to apply the outer white ring.

I made the next ring with foundation paper piecing

and again used reverse applique to attach it to the center.

Next was some more foundation paper piecing to make a ring of triangles.

I wanted interlocking triangles with some pointing in and some pointing out. I couldn't do it with only foundation paper piecing, so once this step was done, I appliqued the remaining triangles on top.

Then, you guessed it, used reverse applique to apply this ring to the center.

Next up, a ring of hourglass shapes. I made this ring with English paper piecing because the curves were easier to handle that way.

 Since all the edges were set up for hand piecing already, that is how I attached it to the center.

Next was a lot of foundation paper piecing to make a ring of even narrower strips.

This is where I discovered that my printer did not default to 100% scale when copying. My ring ended up too large, but I was able to use what I had by removing a small section. More hand stitching to attach it to the center.

Then I reverse appliqued the center circle to a square of dark blue and bordered that with a narrow white strip.

So that was the center 20"x20" (or so) section of the quilt done!

The next round was more foundation paper piecing. First I did it wrong:

Then I fixed it:

After I added that to the center square I adding some white triangles to all four sides so that it was now "on point" and finally was able to add the rows of elephants that started it all!

It hung like that in my bedroom for a long time while I decided what to do with the corners. I drew several full-size designs--colored them even--to audition and finally settled on this:

I was hoping it would look like layered squares behind the center, but I'm not sure that came through.

You may have noticed the corners weren't big enough...you are right. They needed a border sewn to the outside:

with white cornerstones. One of the mandalas from the shower curtain was reverse appliqued in the middle. You can see how the center design was taken from this.

Sew the corners onto the center, and I was getting really close to a quilt top!

But one more border was called for. I cut and pieced lots and lots of blue and white rectangles. Then I organized them from lightest to darkest.

(I really can't help myself! But seriously, you can see that the rows of elephants are not the same: there are four different shades of the blue. So I made the outer border reflect the transition from light to dark.)

I bordered the strips with white on each side and sewed them on.

The corners were curved and I sewed the striped part with foundation paper piecing.

So a quilt top done.

Then the quilting. The entire quilt was done with free motion quilting on my domestic machine.

From the center:

I outlined the center cross and circle, the wedges, and the triangles and filled in open areas with free-form circles.

I outlined the curved wedges and the narrow strips and filled in the blue corners with an echoed teardrop shape.

I filled in between the larger triangles with more circles.

And I drew a detailed rising sun design in the blank white areas. Here's a closer view:

Again, I took elements from the center--like triangles and wedges--for the quilting design. A few areas are very dense, but in general I kept the quilting pretty loose so that the quilt would not become stiff.

I was really unsure how to quilt around the elephants and ended up outlining the elephants and doing an echoing squiggle around them. I outlined a little of the shape inside the elephant like the ears, eye, and shape of the back leg.

I did another rising sun in the center part of the triangle area. I does not show up well against the different fabric colours.

The center section was done in a double wishbone and I  put dot-to-dot quilting in the outside row.

I decided to go with quilted stripes in the blue border, with circles that echo the circle in the cornerstones.

The first time I did the cornerstones, I repeated a three-petal shape also featured in the center of the rising suns.

But I didn't like it. So I took it out, and did it again,

making it continuous with what was going on in the blue border:

I put the binding on next before I quilted the last border. This made it much easier to quilt right up to the binding, or at least not go under the binding area. I outlined the blue shapes and filled the white with more circles.

Instead of sewing full circles (which forces you to sew half of each circle twice to move to the next circle), I sewed one pass with a scallop pointing up, and then a second pass of scallops pointing down. When the "points" of the scallops meet, you get a circle! (You could also do two sine waves, one starting with an up curve and the other with a down curve, but I was worried I would flatten the curve too much.)

Once that was done, I could sew the binding down on the back.

And here it is!

The deadline for the exhibition really forced the completion of this one. I did get the application submitted on time, but the quilt was not accepted.

Last week I saw that the Holland Tulip Festival quilt show had open applications that were due that week. I quick got an application together and mailed it--the only way you could submit--only to find out that the festival is cancelled. (Naturally; but remember last week it wasn't so obvious as it is this week.) You may recall that I did enter it in the county fair last year and it won "People's Choice"! :)

Of course, it doesn't really matter because I really love this quilt. Even if it is on the spare bed because I am scared to use it in case I spoil all that pristine white!!

What an adventure that was. A lot of creative energy expended on figuring out what I wanted and then figuring out how to get it. And then figuring out quilting designs and figuring out how to do that too! My free-motion quilting is not great, but I am happy to have achieved this. If only I remembered while I was sewing that slowing down is going to get a better result every time!

Project Summary
Started: July 22, 2018
Finished: February 2019
Size: 92"x92"
Wool batting.
Free-motion quilted on my domestic machine.
All blog posts about this quilt: link

May 2020, shared on: