Peonies!

 

I have sewn all the blocks together for the Peonies quilt. I have decided to add a narrow light border all around. 

I have been thinking about the backing and binding for this quilt. Finally I figured out it should be green. I thought it should be dark green but when I went shopping I found some of the lime-green, so I have ordered that. There will be a light border and then I have decided the binding will be the limey-green as well. So it's all on order.

Oops!

 

Oops. 

Can't have that!

That's better. 

The blocks are all sewn into rows, and now I am sewing the rows together. The top six rows have been sewn together in the photo above. The flimsy ought to be done by the end of the weekend. 

Mavis's Bird Quilt

A few days ago I got an email from Mavis. Her bird quilt, named "Who's Watching Who?" won 3rd Prize in her category at Quilt Canada. 

Mavis said she worked on her quilt for several years.

Mavis was thoughtful in her use of the fabrics that changed from being in the sun to being in the shadow. It's easy to forget this is patchwork, and the two reds in the bird's breast, above, are two completely different fabrics.

Mavis hid fun things in the quilting. She gave the binoculars the 'brand name' "I C You", as a play on the whole idea of the quilt - who is watching whom?

This quilt has so much to commend it. The creative birds, the concept, the surprises, all the things I love best about quilts. It's why I tell quiltmakers to make their own quilts. Wonderful things happen when you do.

Congratulations Mavis!

If you want to make birds, you can get my tutorial here, at my Etsy shop. 

 

Peonies & This & That

 

Here is the final layout (minus one row) of the Peonies Quilt. As you can see, Cherie, I have arranged a few blocks into diamonds, and there are now 4 light green flowers.

The new refrigerator is terrific except for one thing. Maybe you can tell what it is. The front is NOT magnetic. EEEEEK!!! The sides are magnetic, but that's an awful lot of naked stainless steel. I'm going to have figure out what I want to see, and tape it to the front.

Inside it's almost the same layout as the older one, but it seems like I have more space. It was 101F when this was delivered so emptying one fridge, and filling the new one were exercises in FAST. That means I just threw everything in, and I have to do a bit of rearranging.

I went to see the movie THELMA, and I thought it was great. There is so much of it that is outlandish, but a lot of it is so true. 

My friend Pam and I went out to eat before the movie and got out so early we went to the local Barnes & Noble. I bought a jigsaw puzzle. This was a rug pattern designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It wasn't a big puzzle, and I got into it. It was appealing because it had some special pieces...

Some of the pieces were quite large. I have put them above the puzzle so you can see. You would think that these large pieces would have made the puzzle easier, but actually it made it quite a bit trickier. I enjoyed it.

My Mom was admitted to the hospital last week. She was diagnosed with AFIB, and they decided to do a cardioversion, which is restarting her heart. Yes, you read that correctly. It is normally a pretty straightforward process, but do remember my Mom is a month short of 91. The procedure was successful, they kept her an extra day. She's home now, but she's really tired. So, keep her in your thoughts, please. The doctor gave her an excellent prognosis, but the older we get the longer it takes us all to bounce back.

More Peonies

I was tinkering with the Peonies quilt and decided to make some light green "flowers." 

I started filling in the side triangles, and decided to make some more light green flowers. I did more tinkering, I rearranged some of the lighter green triangles and I filled in the rest of the empty spaces, but that's going to have to be enough for now.  

The famous heat dome is covering us right now. This was my indoor outdoor thermometer Wednesday afternoon. The 101 is bad enough, but Tuesday's high of 104 really freaked me out. 102 is the highest I had ever experienced before, and that was in August about sixty years ago.

Peonies

I decided that I was going to put the green blocks on the design wall, and then decide where the pink "flowers" were going to go.

Something told me I needed some darker green blocks, so I made some. Originally I conceived of the darker greens as kind of leaves right next to the pink, but that would have drawn too much attention, and I thought it looked a little weird. But then I made it a flower and I knew I had the answer.

I put all the green triangles up on the design wall, and just to make it easier, I set them the base of the triangle down, but then realized that if I wanted the lighter green blocks to look like leaves I should arrange them pointed side down. At this stage I knew I liked the dark green "Flowers."

Here I have arranged the light green triangles pointing down, and then rearranged the flower blocks. Now I like where those are, but the placement of the blocks may change so I can more evenly distribute the prints and fabrics around the quilt. I may or may not leave the light green triangles pointing down. 

Since there are pink peonies blooming in my garden, I have given this quilt the working title of Peonies.

This is a scrap slab triangle quilt. This is the 12th one I have made, and they are all different. If you would like to make one, you can get my tutorial here, at my Etsy shop. 

Exit, Refrigerator

In November of 2018 I bought a new refrigerator. I got a French door fridge with the freezer at the bottom. I loved it.

A month or two after I got it, I noticed some plastic parts on the floor. It seemed to be a cosmetic issue, so I didn't think much about it. As time went on, more plastic fell off, but the fridge worked fine for years. 

Then one day I opened the fridge and the right hand door seemed to sink down a bit. When it closed, the doors were no longer aligned. It still worked. But by then it was beyond the warranty. 

Last November it stopped closing smoothly, and I had it jog the right side door up a bit to get it to close. I called the repair guys and they asked about the problem and to send them a photo. Without even coming to my house, they said the part could not be replaced and that I would need a new refrigerator door. The cost was $750.00 with another $150.00 for freight. That did not include the cost for installation. I had paid $1100 so I wasn't going to spend $900 on a five year old fridge out of warranty. I considered just getting a new fridge, but my son suggested that the engineers where I work could fabricate the part with our 3D printers.

So I talked to one of the mechanical engineers and she came over, took the door off the fridge, made some measurements and fabricated a replacement part.

That broke within minutes.

We've since made more new parts, and tried filling the empty space, but nothing has worked. 

We now believe the door was defective. We think the foam insulation was not properly installed and left a gap. We think the door started to fail as soon as I started using it - the weight of the items stored on the door and the movement of the opening and closing of the door caused that interior hinge area to fail. 

So the refrigerator is going, and a new one will be delivered tomorrow. Naturally I did not buy the same brand, and did a bit more research before buying a new fridge.

And yes, a letter to the manufacturer is in the works.

The New Scrap Slab Quilt

I decided that the best way to figure out where to put the pink pinwheel blocks on the new scrap slab quilt was to cover the design wall in green slabs and then fill in where I wanted the pink ones to go. Then I decided to make some darker green scrap slab triangles because leaves aren't always the same shade of green.

This is where I was went I went to bed Saturday night.
 

One Quilt, Two Quilts, Pink Quilts, Word Quilts

 

Way back in January I packed my quilts for my talk to the SeaBreeze Quilt Guild. The talk was postponed due to inclement weather. I eventually spoke to the group in May. When I got back after the talk I brought the bags into the house and left them there.

My task for the past weekend was to put the quilts away. 

First though, I had to unpack them.

The quilts above are (clockwise from top) Partly Sunny, Greensleeves, Prism, Asterisk, Picnic Table and Snow Day. You knew that, right? (LOL)

It's a corner closet. I put the smaller quilts on the left.

The tallest quilts are to the far left of this side, the Christmas quilt are at the far right. The others are grouped together by pattern. There are 48 quilts in this closet*. (I counted.)

I displayed my favorite pink quilts on the quilt rack.

I also have nine quilts hanging on display elsewhere in my house, one on the dining room table, and two in the living room (one on the couch and the other on the back of a chair.) One quilt lives on my bed. Another one is ready to fly to its new home. But that is a semi-surprise. The new owner knows the quilt is on the way, but my readers will have to wait and see. One other is waiting for beauty shots.

Another Idea

 

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In the past I have tried to avoid arranging the triangles so they create this pinwheel, but this time I think I'm going to play with those. I've got so many greens I think I'll make it look like a garden.

I'm not sure how I will arrange the blocks, but I think I am going to have fun figuring it out.

I'm not planning to have more than eight of these, but their placement is up in the air too. They certainly won't be placed regularly.

Yellow Scraps

 

I have finished with the limey green scrap slab triangles. I have 82 of them. Next up is yellow. The first thing I had to do was separate the golden yellow fabrics from the yellow orange ones. I'll make those triangles separately. Once I had them sorted I had to iron them, and then straighten the edges and pair pieces of fabric together.

Then I had to press those pieces and pair them up. If the pieces of fabrics were large enough, I cut triangles.

I cut 20 triangles before I called it a day. I have a lot more yellow scraps to go through.

Earlier I watched the Men's Final at Roland Garros; washed one of the windows in the living room and cleaned the mini blind of that window, made my lunches for the week ahead and cooked fish chowder for dinner.

I've made over 10 quilts with these scrap triangles. If you want to make one (or two or three), you can get my tutorial here, at my Etsy shop.

Scraps, Slabs and Triangles

I've just finished four quilts in a fairly short time, and now I have to figure out what to do next. Since I have some big bins of scraps I decided to make scrap slabs and then cut the into triangles. I've got a few different layout ideas rolling around in my head, this is a good start.

Sometimes I'll make a slab and I know I can get several triangles out of it but while I am making up my mind I lose track of how I planned to cut them out. So I have these two blue triangles I use as "placeholders". I can move them around while I figure out how I want them to look when I cut the triangles.

When I cut scrap slab triangles like this, I work on one color at a time. Today it was light, lime-y green. I really want to use up the fabrics in my bins. I group the triangles in tens, and then stack them on my worktable. This is six stacks, so sixty blocks. The average Scrap Slab Triangle quilt has 120 triangles, so this is half a quilt.

I am always amazed at how much fabric is in the little bins.

 
 

River of Light, Beautifully

 

This is the River of Light quilt. It's a wonky rail fence inspired by Sujata Shah in her book Cultural Fusion Quilts (?). The blocks are designed to be sixteen blocks four by four. I thought, why? Then I rearranged them in long diagonals, and had a lot of fun making them crazy, irregular and over-the-top. It's definitely over the top, but when something heads in that direction, you'd best let it go. (In the photo above the quilt is sideways.)

This is such a fun quilt.

I made the backing with leftover bits from the front and from my stash. I love the back too.

This is an example of a beauty shot that didn't look like it was going to work when I saw it in my camera. I took only one photo. I figured I'd need to come back earlier in the day to get the shot I wanted, but the more I looked at it afterwards the more I liked it.

After I take beauty shots of my quilts outside I always bring them home and run them through the washer and dryer to make them soft and wrinkly. More than once I have discovered a tick on a quilt, so I never put this off. At any rate, the photo above is the three Color Catcher sheets that came out of the washing machine AFTER I washed the quilt. Now I wash every single piece of fabric that comes into my house before I bring it to the studio, so that this happens ought to be reason enough for everybody to wash their fabric first, and then when the quilt is finished, use Color Catcher sheets whenever a quilt gets washed. While these used to be easy enough to find at the grocery store, in the last few years I have bought mine on Amazon.

PRIZM Beauty Shots

 

This is the PRIZM quilt. It's a Zebra quilt in the Ribbons version. I just love the way the bright colors sashay across the quilt.

Here's another shot.

And you thought this was easy!

This is a Zebra quilt. You can get the tutorial here, in my Etsy shop. 

Beauty Shots Asterisk Quilt

 Got home from work on Monday and I did not feel like making dinner. It was sunny, so I packed some quilts in the car and went out to take some beauty shots.

In the full sun you can lose a lot, but this looks pretty good.

It's really nice to see all the true colors in this.

It always interests me that a photograph you almost didn't take, or think will totally not work, turns out to be the definitive shot. Like this one.

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After I was done, I brought the quilt home and washed it. It is now soft and wrinkly, and if possible, even prettier than it was before. I wasn't quite sure if this was a quilt for cuddling, but now I am convinced.

Incidentally, although I wash every single piece of fabric before it comes into my studio - and I wash it in WARM water no matter what the label says, I always throw a couple of color catcher sheets in the washing machine when I wash the finished quilt. These two pink sheets came out after washing the Asterisk quilt. And I washed it in cold water.