2020 Planning Party: First Quarter Update

If I went through the trouble of doing some planning for 2020, maybe I should go through the effort of some updates too! (For the original list, see this post.)

After the first quarter of the year, here are status updates for the projects I listed:

1. Quilting my Nocturne Star: no progress. The top, back, binding, and thread are all still hanging out in the same box. I haven't used the batting intended for this quilt, so I still have all of the necessary pieces.

2. A wall hanging from an orphan block. At the retreat in February, I sorted through my blues and yellows to see what I had from the first wall hanging and what else may work

and then cut up a lot of little squares.

Not long after getting home, I sewed the first border of rectangles together and attached them to the center block.

I couldn't find enough of the fabric I wanted to use for the next border. It was a light orange with blue flowers that was perfect in the first block. I did some more looking but never did find any. (Except for the squares of this fabric in my plaidish quilt. I was giving them the side eye for sure.)

When I finally decided I couldn't wait any longer for some to magically appear and wanted to move forward, I worked with what I had. I had enough for 10" of the 12" border. So I grabbed another fabric that isn't the same but I kept mixing them up in my mind, so I figured they were close enough to the same. I put the new fabric in just the corners, leaving the center for the orange fabric.

Not terrible.

Then I decided to press on and sew on the next border, which was also a set of squares. It would have been smarter to strip piece this--make one set 6" wide and then cut them into 1.5" strips--but I didn't think of this on time. So I sewed little 1.5" square together, one by one.

And then they were too long. By a good amount:

I think I can make each seam a smidge bigger and make it fit, but for now the whole thing is in time-out.

3. Sashing Lucy Boston blocks
This got seriously derailed by the Third Block contest in February, but I was able to finished 4 so far this year

and am working on the fifth:

This last one will be block #28 to be sashed, which means...I'm half way! Wow, imagine that!

4. Joy to the World quilt bottom (back)
Good news here, I got the back done!

This got a big push by the #sewthescrapoutofMarch sew along on Instagram (and being home all day every day) and I definitely wanted it off of the design wall.

Here's a close up of the border print:

Carefully chosen by the fact that it was the only red fabric I had enough of to do the borders.

5. Antique red fabric quilt
I bought more fabric for this quilt, bringing in some teals that I think will really help, but nothing else done. If I do the Boston Common pattern I'm looking at I really will need that design board the Joy to the World quilt just vacated.

6. Cashmere "memory" blanket
I got a good start on this one at the retreat in February. The blocks were cut and sewn into rows. Soon after getting back, I sewed the rows together.

I started the hand embroidery to sew down the seam allowances on March 3 and finished in about two weeks. (Another reason my Lucy Boston blocks were slowed down.)

I finished the label just in time to say I did it on this post. I hope to deliver it on Thursday.

Although intended for a couch, here it is
laying on my queen sized bed.

7. Calligraphy
I completed the online "drills" course I started. That was a great start. I did not sign up for any of the following (not free) courses that actually teach letters. I just looked at examples and started. I made these 4x6" cards to hang on the prayer board at church.

I am interested in hand lettering, which is a great thing to combine with calligraphy. Here's the design I put on the postcard I swapped at the retreat.

I'm learning that calligraphy and hand lettering are more about the layout than how well you can make letters. (Although of course you need both.) I took a class on hand lettering at Make South Bend a couple years ago, and both of these experiences have taught me that it's more like drafting than writing.

Here's a fun habit I picked up from the calligraphy drills instructor:

She loves to decorate her envelopes, and apparently I do too. It takes a long time though, so please don't be offended if any mail you get doesn't look like this! :)

I am not keeping up with regular drills so I'll have to "get in shape" before I do any serious calligraphy projects. I also haven't experimented with the "big" brush pen. I could do the same drills with the big tip pen and see how that goes.

8. Skate more
I managed to skate twice in January at the new local skate park:

And a picture to prove I was there:

It was nice. I think after that the weather was iffy and I had things that filled the time gap where I would have went skating. Apparently it is a good thing I didn't get the season pass.

9. Take a trip with Troy: no progress
And now that we are self-isolating (self-isewlating in my case), getting to the grocery store is considered a major trip.

10. Pray more.
I'm definitely doing this, and with all the time at home that I could want, I have lots of opportunities for it. I have kept up a daily practice of Lectio Divina each morning, and small groups that I was getting together to pray with are trying it on Zoom. It's not great, but it's not horrible either.

Well, all in all, not bad I'd say. This might have been a better goal list for the first quarter of 2020, than for the whole year! But then again, I do have that whole quilt to quilt (#1).

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...