Friends’ projects… Inspiring hexagons

I had the chance to see some great projects by my friends Anne T. and Olga P., two very talented quilters. I wanted to share pictures of their work–especially the paper piecing they are doing by hand. Both are working on hexagons by the dozen! Olga created her own stars as well using freezer paper pattern pieces. Also pictured here: a gorgeous leaf bowl made by Anne and her “mystery quilt” in Amish colors. Hats off to you both!

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My Geese Can Fly

I made more than 80 flying geese units for this quilt, a wall hanging size piece. At least I proved that I could! The soft floral fabrics came from a Moda charm set. They are delightful and make me think of having high tea on a flower-filled patio on a warm summer’s day.

I liked the technique, which came from Carrie Nelson’s Schnibbles book – you just cut squares, layer them, sew and cut. No cutting of triangles needed. It seemed quite accurate.

October and November slipped away from me in a flurry of birthdays and holidays. And now it’s December. Perhaps I’ll get back to this project in January, after the hustle of the holidays and the deadlines of work ease up a bit!

Also on the horizon: another charm square project, using batiks; some pouches; and, eventually, trying crazy quilting. (Because yes, I am crazy!)

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More Modern Blocks, and a Helper

I’ve churned out some more of these orange-yellow-green “modern” blocks in the past couple of weeks, and I’m still smiling each time I see the contrasting colors. I have a little friend who is helping me do this job quicker and save my shoulder/neck:

It is a “wooden iron,” a triangular-style tool that allows me to fake it in the ironing department. Since these are such simple blocks, simply pressing down the seam to one side with this wooden implement can pretty much do the trick. Then I press them all later.

In other news, I REALLY need to organize my crafting space. As I was sorting through various boxes and containers that I have on hand to help neaten my stash, I found an old Tiffany’s box–I believe my older daughter got a baby gift in it. The box was just too gorgeous to throw out, and I was storing maps in it. I noticed how closely that color matched with some of my new blocks:

Speaking of fun colors, check out the new “stack” of 10-inch-square fabrics I got from Connecting Threads–it’s their “Around Town” line. Fun, huh? I have to think of something cute to make with these this summer! Send me your ideas, please!

 

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Quilt Assembly, California-Style

It is February, and in much of the country a thick layer of snow blankets the ground. Things are different here – in Northern California, we were lucky enough to have a week of spring-like weather, around 70 degrees. So I decided to blanket my driveway with a quilt.

As you already know, I am NOT a big fan of basting quilts – that is, connecting the top, batting, and bottom fabric of a quilt before you sew through all three layers. It’s really a drag. The traditional method involves lots and lots of safety pins. I do like the quilter’s brass ones, shiny gold-tone pins that are very pliable. And you can use a spoon to close and open the pins to save wear on your fingers. But to pin-baste a quilt that’s bigger than crib size (in this case, about 60 inches square) takes just about forever.

So I turned to an alternative: 505 Spray & Fix adhesive. Many quilt-makers swear by this stuff, I’m told. I had used it once before and it worked pretty well. You spray the batting (NOT the quilt or fabric) and it gets sticky, and then you place fabric down and it adheres. Although it has no CFC’s, the spray does contain chemicals and I was kind of concerned. The manufacturer recommends using it in a highly ventilated area. So it occurred to me: what better space than outside?

I hadn’t thought of one potential problem: Wind. My older daughter helped a little when a light breeze threatened to lift the corners of the top fabric. And I weighted one corner with a bottle of something I found lying around by the garage. If I’d had an adult helper, this would have gone quicker. There are a couple little bubbles on the back, but overall, this was fairly successful, except when kids nearly ran over it with their bikes while I was working!

This quilt is for daughter #2. She loves strawberries and requested a project built around them. I went with a bright green to highlight the strawberry stems and to contrast with the red and it looks very Christmas-y – which was not my intention. The brown tones it down a bit.

I’ll try to machine-quilt it in the coming week. Here are a few closeups to give you a sense of the blocks and fabrics. This pattern came from Simple Style: Easy Weekend Quilts by Sara Diepersloot. That version used a watermelon theme and had a fun picnic-y feel.

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Sampler Quilt: Homeward Bound

I have finished my first “sampler” quilt, and here it is! I’m calling it “Homeward Bound.” The “house” block in the center of the quilt represents the house I grew up in, my home for some 18 years until I went off to college. It was a sky-blue stucco, turn-of-the-century house, with a distinctive pink roof, in the suburbs outside Chicago. The old homestead definitely had character. Its colors inspired this quilt’s blue, red, and green (for the big trees and bushes surrounding it). Here’s an image of it from 2000 – it doesn’t really do the house’s colors justice, but nice all the same:

Sadly, as they say, “you can’t go home again” – several years ago that old house was torn down and replaced with a McMansion. I haven’t seen the new building, but I’ll back go there to check out the state of things this spring. More to come on what I discover.

Even if our childhood home is no longer standing, we’re all still “bound” to it somehow. In my case, I wanted to show my affection for that old house and all that we learned and experienced growing up in this gift quilt for my mom. An added reason for the name: I always loved the classic Simon and Garfunkel song and happily used to listen to it in that old house.

Here’s the house block up close:

I used a pattern from Alex Anderson’s Keep Quilting (the older edition) to complete the blocks. Going through the steps of making each one is meant to be a learning experience, and it was. Here are a couple other blocks:

I free-motion quilted in the borders with a star pattern. Here’s a fun tip: I stitched each star around a star-shaped Post-It Note that I picked up at Target! I loved NOT marking up my quilt to do this!

This is the quilt back: I didn’t have enough of the dotty fabric, so I added some white with pale green flowers to its sides.

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The Continental

Happy New Year! Thanks so much to my readers for a great year. It’s been a great thrill sharing crafting ideas. I really appreciate that you take the time to stop here, and I love the feedback you give me. WordPress (this blog’s lovely host) told me today that this blog has received 2500 views, a nice milestone.

And now back to our scheduled programming: today, knitting technique!

I am sure I’m not alone in remembering the great Saturday Night Live sketch, “the Continental.” A seemingly suave gentleman (played by Christopher Walken) opens his apartment door to a lady, seen only as a gloved, outstretched hand, and proceeds to descend from the sublime to the ridiculous in a series of clumsy attempts to seduce said-lady. One constant: he always offers her “fine champagne” (pronounced the French way – sham-pan-nya). Pretty hilarious.

I am channeling that effervescent energy this week in an effort to learn to knit continental-style. I’ve often wondered about this super-speedy knitting technique. Since aches in my neck and shoulder have put a stop to much of my knitting this past year, I’ve decided it’s time to try a method that could take the strain off my right hand and arm.

With continental knitting, you hold your yarn in the left hand, not the right, and you essentially “pick” yarn to form each stitch instead of “throwing” or “wrapping” it as in the more-common English style of knitting. I watched this CraftSanity video to start me off. They do mention that knitters with arthritis and other physical problems should consider continental knitting. And apparently it’s really fast because it requires fewer movements per stitch.

I’m working on a red DK-weight wool hat for my older daughter now as an experiment with this technique. It’s a pretty simple basketweave pattern. Here is how I’m holding my hands to knit continental (I am trying out a few different ways to hold the yarn, but overall this seems to work). Apologies for the grainy images!

Here’s a photo of the work-in-progress.

If any continental knitters care to share their experiences or advice, I’d welcome your comments! I’m also curious if it has helped folks with a neck, shoulder, hand or other injury to continue to knit.

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John Flynn’s Double Wedding Ring Class

In his brown cowboy boots and faded jeans, John Flynn looks more like a Montana outdoorsman than a quilting expert. But don’t judge by appearances. Flynn is a celebrated teacher for quilters around the US. He goes to about 12 quilting festivals a year, so he’s a pretty busy guy. A former engineer, Flynn has now filled a warehouse in Billings, Montana with lasers that cut his cool pre-cut fabric sets. Aside from that and teaching some unique piecing techniques for traditional quilts, he also manufactures quilting frames, and these are a mainstay at his festival booths.

Flynn thinks like an engineer. He “constructs” his quilts in the most efficient way and has developed new methods in the process. He said his most popular class—the one that always sells out quickest—is his Double Wedding Ring full-day course. That’s the class I took. Here’s the result of about 6 hours’ worth of work:

Traditionally, quilters making Double Wedding Rings would put together small, slightly curved rectangles of scraps of fabric, delicately hand-piecing each little rung in each ring, and then carefully cut the curves of the background fabric, and piece that together with the bands of the rings.

Flynn has sped up this whole process. First, you take strips of fabric and sew together 6 of them in long rows. Then, you subcut those rows, creating the bands of fabric. But wait, these bands are still straight, not CURVED like a wedding ring needs to be!

Enter the DART – Flynn’s brilliant way of making curves out of straight lines of fabric. You’ve surely seen darts in clothing before—it’s basically a way to create an upside-down V by making two separate seams that meet as a point. Using the top of the straight seam at the head of the rectangle as the point of the V, we were told to make another seam, diagonally, off that starting point, creating these unfinished triangles of seams. If you do that at each point on the band, you end up with a curved band! I’ll try to get a good photo of this to add soon.

He gave all the students in the class a little piece of red and white tape that would tell us how big the dart should be, which we attached to our borrowed sewing machines. Then we all patiently sewed individual darts on each rectangle of each band, creating curves in the bands where none had been before.

Pretty neat, huh?

We all were assigned a Janome machine. My first one was a Horizon, a new high-falutin’ machine with far too many features for my non-techie brain:

I guess the machine didn’t like me too much either, and it sewed everything with a weird gather in the bobbin thread. Eventually I traded it out for a Janome Memory Craft 6600. Now that’s a beautiful machine!

Only thing it was missing as a quarter-inch foot to create our lovely seams. It just had a regular foot. Well, I’m used to one with a little metal guide on the side that gives me a rather EXACT quarter inch seam allowance each and every time. Flynn got a little mad at us (me and classmates) for not being accurate enough with our quarter-inch seams, and therefore messing up the entire plan for things fitting neatly into each other. But he still agreed to sign my copy of his book 🙂

By fixing my work a bit, I was able to create 4 “footballs” (yes, this class was taught by a guy), which I will later assemble into one ring. LOTS more to go. Will I finish this project? I have all these lovely precut background pieces and strips, so I guess that will take me pretty far….

Here are some quilts made by Flynn to inspire us all. He handquilted them, too.

This is my absolute favorite. It’s his “Amish” version:

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A handful of hand-quilting tips from Jean Brown

It fascinates me that Jean Brown told us about a guild she’d heard about exclusively for hand-quilters, who do every part of their quilt work by hand. Heck, even the Amish have been machine piecing their quilts for a hundred years! But I can understand this trend. We are surrounded by technology in our society. Everywhere we go, we rely on some type of machine. And wherever we are, things are constantly beeping, ringing, vibrating, whirring, and running on gas, electricity, or battery. You get the point: the world is too much with us, as Wordsworth wrote over 200 years ago. We do need to unplug.

On the other hand…. I punctured my thumb with a hand-quilting needle the other night, and dang, that stings. Plus, my Hawaiian curves and points are not going well.

But for those of you willing to pursue the fine art of hand-work, here are a few tips that Jean Brown, hand-quilter extraordinaire, offered.

Her binding secret is that when you get to the corner of a quilt’s binding, you want the mitering around the corner to look nice and not pull too tight. So when folding the mitered corner, do not lay the fold straight flush with the quilt’s top edge, but move that fold up by about an eighth of an inch, and then sew the mitering down. She showed us this trick. The difference was rather amazing. Jean’s mitered corner looks bigger, better, and is less finicky to finish off.

She’s also a big proponent of the “Aunt Becky tool” for hand quilting. Made in Oregon, it’s a metal “teepee” you put on your finger and hold below the quilt while you are making stitched. Essentially, you do not move your right hand, but let your left hand move tool back and forth, creating ridges, which puts the stitches on the needle “for you.” I think it would take some practice to get used to. I bought one to try it out at home (at about $5, it’s not a big investment!).

Another tip from Jean is that she always uses low-loft polyester batting—it’s easy to hand-needle, she says, not to mention cheap! And she loves #10 Jeana Kimball straw needles for appliqué and Hawaiian work. She doesn’t recommend washing her quilts often, since she thinks of them as decorative, not utilitarian.

Next post: John Flynn’s Wedding Rings!

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Going Hawaiian

(Pacific International Quilt Festival XIX part 1)

Picture all hues and shades of batik fabric slowly opening up like paper snowflakes that have been neatly folded and cut in quarters… revealing the lush shapes of tropical flowers.

That dramatic moment was the highlight of my Thursday night. Jean Brown, a petite woman in her late 70s, brought a touch of Hawaii (with a slight Texas accent) to Northern California last week with her Hawaiian Quilting class at the Pacific International Quilt Festival XIX in Santa Clara.

I have visited Hawaii just once—on my Hawaiian honeymoon, a cliché that was, in real life, a very wonderful thing—and I’m hopeful I’ll return. It’s a gorgeous and, indeed, very dramatic place, filled with color-bursting flora, unique fauna (I’ll never forget the NeNe birds running across the road!), shocking volcanic landscapes, and, naturally, outstanding beaches. But until I can actually fly off to the Islands, I’ll try Hawaiian quilting, a craft that focuses on large-piece appliqué and hand-quilting.

My big reveal showed me hibiscus flowers’ silhouettes. I’d carefully traced a pattern on my quarter-folded pink and red fabric with a white quilting pencil, then cut around it with my trusty Gingher scissors, leaving a quarter-inch seam allowance. Opening it up—tah-dah—I saw this:

Then came the hard part—hand-appliquéing the shape in place. I first basted it with light thread, and then began to try Jean’s technique for appliqué. Rather than using freezer paper (impossible on such large and complex shapes) or needle-turn methods, Jean folds the edges of the fabric under slightly and pins them in place using long quilting pins. She said this method was passed on by her grandmother and has never been bested.

I am not certain yet whether this method will agree with me. I like freezer paper immensely; and in fact, a woman sitting next to me at the class said she prefers using 3 layers of freezer paper when she hand-appliqués a shape. Jean’s method seems a little finicky at first, although I do think it is a lot easier than straightforward needle-turn, where you are constantly pushing fabric under with your needle. I wasn’t too good at that technique! In this case, the pins hold the seam allowance in place, and they sure are easy to remove after you sew the shape into position.

My next post will fill you in on Jean Brown’s quirky tips for hand quilting and binding. Then I’ll tell you about my second class, a Double Wedding Ring full-day affair with quilting guru John Flynn. I’ll also upload some pix of the remarkable quilts on display at the festival.

Now, back to that appliqué… based on how slowly it’s been going, I’ve calculated that if I really focus on it, I might complete this block in about a month. That is, if other projects don’t get in the way!

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Top 5 Counter-Intuitive Tips for Sewists and Quilters

In the spirit of popular books exploring hidden truths that seem to go against the grain—think Freakonomics or Outliers—here are some of my unexpected thoughts and tips for sewing crafts. Of course this is purely from my point of view. (In other words: Please do NOT hold me accountable if something goes terribly wrong!)

1) I like to use my left foot pedaling my sewing machine.

I am an undeniable righty but my right side is causing problems these days. especially my neck muscles. Somewhere I read that it’s more ergonomic to use your left foot to press the foot pedal as you sew. Lo and behold, it is true! Somehow it causes less strain on my neck and right side generally.

2) I am firmly against pre-washing fabrics for quilting!

For many quilters, prewashing fabric is considered a near-sacred act. But I have been trying to make a quilt with fabric that I prewashed for a few months now. It is going nowhere. I realized why the other day: the prewashed fabric is so floppy that it’s not really holding its shape! The fabric stretches all over the place, willy-nilly. Blocks are turning out wonky and it’s really annoying. Yes, I did spray the fabric with some starch-alternative, but that did not help. Sure, I could try some sort of vigorous starch bath for this fabric, but do I really have time? In contrast, I’ve made numerous quilts now with unwashed fabric, including batiks and bright reds, and washed them in my home washing machine. The world has not ended. In fact, the colors have not run noticeably at all. When I washed them, I did use a fabric dye catcher I bought at Target just in case, and it picked up a bit of dye, but not too much.

3) Instead of a fancy iron, get a cheap, lightweight steam iron.

This has been another idea that has helped save my neck from renewed injury…  A heavy iron is very hard on your wrist, arm, shoulder, and neck. My advice: Ignore the ads for pricey, hefty irons. Save yourself some money and some aches and get a cheapo model. Just make sure it is lightweight and features steam. I have a $10 Black & Decker that I prefer to my $60 fancy-pants iron. I actually like the fact that the inexpensive one does not automatically power off after a few minutes, too; it’s less safe, but more convenient for a quilter’s ironing needs. Just be sure to get a good ironing board or it’s all for naught.

4) Invisible thread is not all bad.

The first time I used it, I thought it was fishing line. It was so thick and tough to wind on a bobbin and so finicky about staying threaded in my needle. No fun at all. Recently, I gave it another try with Colette, my slightly-more-advanced sewing machine, just in the top thread. Works wonders when you can’t quite “color inside the lines” to do quilting on a multicolored project. But I don’t bother with winding a bobbin of it. That’s too frustrating. Instead, I use a neutral or matching color for the bottom thread.

5) Oversized blocks are, well, amazing.

At first I thought that making blocks too big and trimming them to size would be a terrible waste of time. But I have seen the light. With certain patterns, you can get a lot more accuracy with block size by making each block a bit bigger and “squaring them up” later. (If you own or borrow the right-sized ruler to square them with, it’s a breeze.)

Hope this helps a reader or two… happy crafting!

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