When it Doesn't Work

 

I made a few gray and those jewel toned blocks and put them up on the design wall. I wasn't too thrilled. It would have been "okay" but nothing special. I always tell my students that when we get it right, we know right away. When it doesn't work at all, we usually know that too, but it's that in-between time when we are not sure that is the hard part. In this case it simply fell flat. 

So if I want to use the jewel toned colors of purple, blue and green, I'll need another color other than gray. Creams and whites with colors would also work, as shown above.

The grays with lights would work also, but I'm not much interested in making a mostly gray quilt.

This is a detail of Partly Sunny, the quilt Julie made for me. Yellows would be a great pair with the grays. It would also be a quilt I could use as a table quilt when I display the Partly Sunny quilt in the living room.

So I pulled warm yellows out of my stash, and will use those.

Now I am excited!

Gray Macnas Plan

 

Earlier this year Julie sent me a box full of gray Macnas pieces. I liked them and cut some gray blocks of my own.

I had the idea of mixing the grays with violets,

blues,

and greens.

So I'm wrestling with that idea.

Since last posting, I've decorated the house for Christmas, gone to my arthritis swim classes regularly, done a few jigsaw puzzles and read a few books. Here is my Christmas cactus. It really liked being out o the front porch this summer.

Snow and Tell

We got eight inches of snow yesterday and last night. Looks magical out there. So happy I no longer have to worry about shoveling the driveway and getting to work.

 This is a Tourtière. It's a French-Candian meat pie. It is made with various kinds of meat and mashed potatoes. My grandmother used to make it. I haven't had one in years and decided with the snow falling outside that it would be a great dish to make. My grandmother had a little gizmo that made those rosette openings in the crust. Gosh it was good, and really took me back.

I finished the Scrap Slab Triangle Rainbow flimsy. I'll have to think of a name and order the backing for it.

Memere to the Rescue!

 

Every time I go to California to visit my son's family. we take a trip to the South Coast Botanic Garden. This photo of my granddaughter was taken in August of this year when we visited the butterfly exhibit. I give my son and his family a membership to the Gardens each year. I love visiting as much as they do.

Yesterday my son texted me, "There are dinosaurs at the botanical gardens! And we lapsed our membership!"

HOLY TERROR BATMAN!

I tried to remember when I renewed the membership. I couldn't recall. So I got on my phone and brought you the Botanic Garden website and gave them a call. Discovering the membership had indeed expired, I renewed it for another year. After the staff person told me the membership was reinstated I thanked her, "Now I need. you to do me a favor. I need you to go out to the ticket office and tell the clerk that the membership for my son's family has been reinstated. I'm pretty sure my son is out there waiting with my granddaughter!"

She laughed and did just that. 

A few minutes later I got a text from my son, "Thanks Mom, they just let us in."

Turns out membership renewal notices are sent to the members, so my son probably saw it and thought, "Oh, Mom will take care of this." Now I have set a notice on my phone so I will renew the membership in time next year.

Memere to the rescue! 

OK! Christmas gift for the family... CHECK!

Happy granddaughter... CHECK!

Rainbow Triangles

I feel like I cheated for this one. All the triangles were already sewn together, and I had the side triangles all cut out.

I don't like to work on long rows, so I sew my blocks together in half rows. This is the upper right quarter of the quilt. Much easier to work with.

The top half of this is all sewn together. When I added the side triangles, I put then together so they created rhomboids. I should have this all sewn together before Thanksgiving.

This is a terrific way to use up all your scraps. You can get the tutorial here, at my Etsy shop. This is the fourteenth quilt I have made from these scrap slab triangles and they are all different.

More Scrap Slabbing

 

When I clean my workspace, I often make slabs of whatever color fabrics I have. I have stacks of these triangles in many colors. Back in March I toyed around with them but wasn't feeling this love for this.

I tried alternating the blocks but I wasn't excited about that either, so I packed the pieces away. Lately I have been watching my pal Julie tinker with the same idea and I decided to revisit these colorful blocks.

Taking a page from Julie, I divided the blues and greens into lights and darks, added pinks and put the blocks up on the wall. I knew I'd have to add some blue green triangles way over on the right, but I didn't have any blocks I liked, so when I went into the studio the other day, I made a stack of them.

I was happy with that, so I started adding some creamy light side triangles. I will sew these together.

I've made thirteen variations of this quilt. You can get the tutorial here, at my Etsy shop.

Me, Moving (not that Moving)

Around the end of August I pulled something in my back and got a terrific case of sciatica. It was brutally painful. Nothing would ease the pain, not painkillers, not heat, not cold, nothing. 

I knew that strengthening my "core" and stretching was the only way through. In my small town there is a professional physical trainer who opened a small business called Flexable, offering Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation (PNF) stretching, which according to his documentation, is "a technique that relies on the body's own reflexes to produce deeper stretches with its contract-relax method."

I won't bore you with how I discovered them, but I booked a appointment and was matched with Madisyn, a young woman 50 years younger than me who did more magic in that first 60 minutes than I could ever have believed. My pain was instantly less. It took two or three more visits before I was almost completely without pain, so I was more than just a little bit impressed.

The long term answer, of course, was to MOVE. Madisyn certainly helped me get to back to "normal" so I could move. I joined the local YMCA, (I am embarrassed to say it is literally next door,) and now I am going four to five times a week.

There is an "Arthritis Swim" class/workout every weekday at noon. It's mostly full of gray haired ladies like me. I go three times a week. Sure, I'm up to my chest in 95 degree water, but lemme tell ya, I get a workout. On the other two days, I go to a Chair Yoga class. Don't let the chair part fool you. It's a full workout. After Christmas a new session of Tai Chi will start, and I will join that. Right now I'm taking "baby steps" to build my strength and endurance.

I had a swimsuit, but I had to get some swim shoes so I could stand up in the pool and not slip around. I bought a microfiber towel that was super absorbent and didn't take up the whole gym bag. I had to buy a gym bag. I bought some "croakies" so my glasses wouldn't fall off when I was in the pool (because I needed to see the teacher.) I had to get a lock for the locker.

I love going and the workouts don't really feel like work. They are also fun. It's a good way to get out of the house and "get social." I've already noticed that it's easier for me to pick up something off the floor.

I've been told that the most important thing to do as I age is to "keep moving," so I'm doing it. One of my neighbors fell in her home and she couldn't get up, and had to call 911. That is not going to be me.

So let me ask you, how are you keeping moving?

 

Assembling Mom's Bird Quilt

 

Assembling the bird quilt, because the birds aren't aligned in neat rows and columns, is really fussy.

I have a plan I work out and try to follow it as best I can, but sometimes I make changes when I think of something better or easier to sew together.

It's important to keeps things straight and square and my laser level helps me make that happen.

Things change, and I have to adapt.

So here is the finished flimsy. It's about 60" x 78".

My Mom will love it. I have the backing ready so the quilt is ready to be quilted.

Chirping Away

It's that time! I have made all the birds for my Mom's bird quilt and now I am beginning to put them all together.

This is kinda sorta the layout I have decided to sew together. I did not use all the birds I have made, and I needed one extra. (I'll show you that in a bit.)

Since I do not make my birds exactly the same size, I can't (nor do I want) to line them all up in neat rows and columns. I think that's really boring. I like it when some of them face each other like they are talking. I like having them on different levels. I like tall birds facing shorter birds. I really try to make them so the legs are not one long column, so I shift them around.

Because all the backgrounds are WOW, it's really hard to see, but since the blocks are squares or rectangles, there is a limit as to how I can sew them together. I don't want to cut off any wing or beak tips. The legs are another matter. I make my birds with longish legs because I know I can always trim them down, because adding to make them longer is out of the question. 

Yes, set-in squares are often required. You can see how to do them here, and here.

Once I know how I want them arranged, I take a picture, and then try to draw the outline of the shape of each block, then I try to work out how to sew sections together using only straight seams. I generally have to add fabric to each block to make it fit into a row or column. In the photo above you can see six birds, sewn into two panels that are ready to be sewn to each other (right down the middle). You can see all the places where I added strips of fabric.

It's a laborious process, made all the more complicated because each block or panel has to be exactly "square," which means the sides are absolutely straight and the corners are exactly 90 degrees. I've said it before, and I'll say it over and over again as many times as it takes. If you sew something perfectly straight to something else perfectly straight, your finished flimsy will like flat as a pancake with no ripples and your longarm quilter will absolutely love you.

I also use pins. I use a lot of them. Go ahead and laugh, but it helps me get the precision I want.

The "bad" thing, at least in my case, is that the quilt will look so perfect everybody will think it was paper pieced, which it is most assuredly NOT. Every class I teach, every lecture I give, somebody interrupts me and asks, "Is that paper-pieced," and "how did you get everything so perfect?"

The short answer is, my friends, I pay attention and make absolutely sure everything is straight before I go from one step to another. If I sew a strip to one side of a bird, after I press it, I put a ruler up against it. If the edge isn't 100% perfectly straight, I trim it so it is. I do a lot of trimming. Nobody is perfect.

This yellow bird is the last bird.

Because of the way I put the bird blocks together, the position of each bird might shift a little bit. That really can't be helped, and I do often change my mind as I work my way through it.

The Last Birds?

I made a few more birds for my Mom's quilt. These don't represent any person or idea. They are just birds based on fabrics that I liked and thought they were fun. 

This one has Laurel Burch fabrics. way back when, my Mom and I both had Laurel Burch jewelry.

The wing fabric on this bird was fabric I used in the backing of the Harlequin Scrap Slab Triangle quilt. I added some black on white fabric for the bird's breast, but something niggled at my memory. Turns out I used the same fabric combination in a bird with a green background, and it is in the Green Birds quilt. I made this bird facing in the opposite direction and I made sure the beak was a different color.

This reminded me that very often I would go shopping and later show my mom my purchase and she would say, "Oh, that's gorgeous! Can you get one like it for me?"

The wing fabric in this bird was fabric I included in the Needle in a Haystack quilt. The legs are fabric that shows a lot of drawing and drafting pencils, because my Mom and I both specialized in pencil drawings.

I've had the wing fabric for this bird for well over ten years, probably more. I liked the Art Deco feel of it, but haven't used it in many quilts. It seemed perfect for a bird.

I don't usually buy Fat Quarter packs, but the wing of this bird was part of a pack of Jane Sassaman fabrics. Both of the other fabrics are batiks, and were already in my stash.

These are all the birds. There are 43 of them. These are not arranged in any particular order, That will come next. 

You too, can make birds. They are an awful lot of fun. You can get my tutorial here, at my Etsy shop.

Sewing Bird for Mom

 

I made a sewing bird for my Mom. She made all my clothes until I was eight years old so I wanted to do a sewing bird for her.

More Birds for Mom's Bird Quilt

 

Now that I have made all the birds based on members of my family, I am making birds based on things I know my Mom likes. She likes the color Orange, so I made this bird.

She also really likes the color Yellow, so I made this one.

My Mom isn't necessarily a Pink fan, but years ago when one of my cousins got married, my Mom wanted to make herself a dress to wear to the wedding. She said she wanted to be "demurely elegant." The dress she ended up making was Hot Pink. So I had to make a bird to commemorate that!

You too can make birds. My tutorial, available on Etsy, tells you how. You can get it here.

Mom's Art Bird

I tell my students all the time, "Don't buy fabrics you fall in love with UNLESS you have a definite plan to cut it up and use it in a quilt."

Great advice. But we all do it. I bought a lot of J. Wecker Frisch's fabrics and while I have used bits of them very judiciously, I still have an awful lot of it.

As my Mother spent a lot of her career as a professional artist, it was clear that I had to make an Art Bird to represent her in her quilt. I was able to cut into my J. Wecker Frisch fabrics and put together what I think is a nifty bird that represents my Mom.

Can you say "fussy cuts galore?"

If you want to make birds, you can get my tutorial that tells you how. It's on my Etsy shop, here.

The HOW and the WHY of Fabric Choices

 I am opinionated. I believe that all other things being equal, fabric selection determines the success or failure of a quilt. 

There are lots of ways to make something look good. There isn't only one right answer. The right answer depends on what YOU want.

Having said that, I really want to make sure the quilts that I make or even simply the birds that I make are as great as they can be. And believe me, sometimes even I have to do it over to get it really right.

To wit:

I used this fun fabric on the back of the PRIZM quilt, and I thought it would be fun in a bird for my Mom's bird quilt because my mom loves FUN and a good joke. So I cut a big triangle and searched through my stash for breast and beak fabrics.

I was probably thinking with only half my brain. The wrong half. I thought the orange would sort of echo the patterns on the cats in the print. And the green would echo the green cats. But seriously, there is nothing to connect the three fabrics together, and compared to the fun cats, the orange and green are pretty boring and don't bring anything to the party. (Also, and more importantly, they don't share any OTHER colors with the fun print, and there's nothing connecting the wing fabric to the breast fabric to the beak fabric.)

Another issue was the pattern of the cats wasn't really being taken advantage of in the best way. 

BACK TO THE CUTTING TABLE....

Fiddling around a little bit (Can you say FUSSY CUT?) I found this fun green guy, and then it was OBVIOUS I had to use some fun green fabric for the bird breast.

And, OH! Look what I found for the beak! These colors repeat the colors that surround the silly green cat!

This is SO MUCH BETTER! And when I found that strip of bird legs with the colored blocks, I knew I had a winner. Silly and fun, here we come!

But you know, sometimes one idea generates another one, and you know me... gotta follow that!

So here are more silly cat-like animals having fun. The breast fabric here is leftover blue fabric from the backing of the Blue Ribbons quilt I just finished. The legs are gray, and they seemed to fit perfectly.

But check out that beak fabric! Yes, those colors are in the funny animal print too....

See anything familiar?

When I say look at your fabric for what it CAN BE instead of just WHAT IT IS, I am not joking.

Here are the two fabrics next to each other, so you can see how much they have in common. This kind of similarity is something you have to be on the lookout for.

You too can make birds: Get my tutorial here, at my Etsy shop.