Birds @ Night Owl

 

I taught Bird making to the crew at the Night Owl Quilting Studio recently. They had a great time.

.

.

.

What always excites me is the bright smiles on their faces!

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

Niece Bird

My niece is tiny. I mean, tiny. She is small boned, short and rail thin. She may be small, but she is fierce.

For a bird based on her, I gave her really long legs. She is very focused on the environment, so this bird is green.

If you would like to make some of your own birds, you can get my tutorial here, at my Etsy shop.

 

The Second Nightingale

 

The second Nightingale quilt is back from the longarm quilter and has had the binding added and is now complete. This one has a home and it will be going there soon.

It's bound with bright dots on a black background.

I know it's "black" but it's amazing how bright it really is! This is the easiest quilt to make - you just need a wide variety of brightly patterned fabrics on a black background. You can get my tutorial here, at my Etsy shop.

I'll be speaking and giving a workshop at the Connecticut Piecemakers Quilt Guild on September 8 and 9th this year in Trumbull CT. This particular meeting of the guild is open to visitors so if you are nearby, come on down!

My Mom Wants

 

My 91-year old Mom has asked me to make her a bird quilt. Who am I to say no? Her timing was perfect. I have just finished the Big Red flimsy. So I dug out my bird bits bin and found a lot of extra birds I had made and threw the up on the design wall. But then my brain kicked in. My students love making birds based on people they know. I would have to make birds based on family members for my Mom's quilt.

So here is the first one, it has a dinosaur on it, so CLEARLY it is to commemorate my granddaughter. And I gave this bird long legs because she is going to be TALL!

I have been thinking about how I would make birds for each of my siblings, my niece and nephew and of course, Mom's boyfriend.

Stay tuned!

PS, if you want to make birds, and lemme tell ya, you really do, you can get my tutorial here, at my Etsy shop. It's an instant download so you can get started right away, and it's a great way to use up scraps.

Big Red & More

 

I finished sewing the Big Red flimsy together. I knew I would add a red binding to it, so I added a white border. When I started this quilt I didn't expect to like it as much as I did. But now I really like it.

I picked up three quilts from Janet-Lee Santeusanio, my long arm quilter. This is the second Nightingale quilt.

This is the Needle in a Haystack quilt. The quilting on these is very nice, but you may need to click the photo to enlarge so you can really see it.

This is the orange Carnelian quilt. I like all three quilts, and I don't really have a favorite, but I like this a lot.

I've already made the bindings for all these quilts, so I have quite a lot of binding in my future. 

Which is fine, because I've got new flooring being installed in my kitchen and hallway, and I'm also having the carpet removed in the dining room and it will be replaced with a hard surface floor. I'll need to keep out of the way of the workmen, so I will be in the studio.

Stay tuned!

Assembling Big Red

 

I've done a tiny bit of rearranging, and then I started sewing the blocks together. I'll finish sewing this together in the next few days. 

I've got to pick up a couple of quilts from my long-arm quilter over the weekend and add the binding to them. 

I've also got some long planned work being done in my house next week and I have to clear out some areas so I have had to figure out where I am going to put the stuff I have to move.

It'll be a busy two weeks, and I may not post as regularly, but I'll do my best to keep up!

Big Red

 

When I was cutting blocks from the Lights bin, I was surprised to find how many red-on-white fabrics I had, or how many blocks I cut. It seemed obvious to make a RED quilt. So after I finished sewing up the Nonchalant flimsy (White Macnas) I went through all my bins and cut up red Macnas blocks. I cut up blocks that were mostly RED or Red with White.

Then I sorted the blocks by print. After that was done, I started pairing blocks, matching a white one (at the top) with a red one below. I started at the upper left of the white stacks, took one piece, then picked the red at the top left of those. I matched up the next white with the next red, and kept going that way until I had 112 pairs. I need 270 for a quilt the size of the Nonchalant quilt.

Then I sat down and sewed them up, then pressed them, and then put them up on the design wall in no particular order.

I stopped for lunch, then went back into the studio to match more pairs, sew them up and put them up on the design wall. I need to cut more blocks, but you can see where this is going.

Lynne's Liberated Letters Class

Here are the ladies from the Liberated Letters class on Saturday at Night Owl Quilt Studio. They had a grand time and they did great work, as you can see.
 

Nonchalant is a Flimsy

 

The Nonchalant Macnas Quilt is a flimsy. It is 56" x 72". I guess there were more creamy WOWs than I expected. The sun was hiding behind the clouds when I took this picture.

But the sun came out briefly so I could take this photo of the quilt in the sun!

The Laser Level

 

I use a laser level I bought at one of the big box hardware stores to establish a horizontal line on my design wall. This is it.

I don't know the model, or how much it cost. It takes two AA batteries, and I don't use the wedge shaped plastic protractor in the top picture. This is magnetic, but it has holes for tacks so I can stick the tacks (which are included) into the homosote of my design wall.

Here you can see the red laser line of the laser level. It only shows up on stuff it hits, so it's hard to see here, but it works well.

I taught the Liberated Letters class yesterday at the Night Owl Quilting Studio and a good time was had by all. I'll write about it later.

Nonchalant

 

After some very minor tinkering (removing some blocks I thought read as too dark and moving some darks and lights around so I'd have a better balance) I decided this is what I will sew together.

The quilt also has a name: Nonchalant, because this quilt is not full of itself, and not overly fussy.

So I started where I could reach, and sewed the blocks together in largish chunks.

Here are the sixteen blocks I sewed together first. These fit in the empty space in the photo above this one.

When I stopped to have dinner, I had two-thirds of the top half done.

After dinner I sewed up the last third of the top section. I have to sew the three parts together, but oh gee darn, that won't be hard at all.

I hope to get the flimsy sewn together over the weekend, but I'll be teaching on Saturday and am having some work done in my house that may start next week and will need some things moved before that can happen, so we'll see. At any rate the flimsy should be completed in short order.

Here is a closeup of a section of the quilt. The WOWs are self-explanatory - you know I love them and use them at random. The "Lights" are bright colored prints on a white background. That's all this quilt is.

The quilt is based on Julie's "Macnas" series, and you can read about them here and here.

3, 2, 1... Blast Off!

 

Once I decided to actually DO the Macnas dance, I had to work out how big it would be and set a vertical and horizontal line so I could properly line up the blocks on my design wall. A plumb line helps me work out the vertical line, a laser level helps me set up a horizontal one. Then I set out some blocks to help me work out how many across (14) and how many up and down (18.)

Then it was time to start making blocks. To do that I had to cut more WOW Macnas rectangles, and I did that from yardage. Once I made a bunch of blocks and pressed them, I literally put them in a stack and started working from left to right, one row at a time, and I put the blocks on the wall in the order they were in the stack, so there was no rearranging or designing. I just wanted to fill the space. It took about an hour to match, sew, press the blocks and put them on the design wall.

Well that was so easy, I just decided to keep going...

Woo hoo! This was fun!

Another hour or so later and I had covered three quarters of the design wall. But I needed to cut more WOW rectangles, so I did that.

And because you know me, in for a penny in for a pound, I just had to keep going until I filled out the entire design wall.

THAT WAS FUN!  Next up: fine tuning. But don't expect anything fancy. The whole point of this is to do something that looks fresh and free and isn't formal or stiff.

Plans for a Macnas

 Last Monday (June 16th), I texted Julie and asked her if the Macnas rectangles were 2-1/2" x 4-1/2". I had been looking at her blog posts about her Macnas quilts. (duh)

"I am thinking of going through the big bins and cutting up those scraps into that sized pieces and making them into a bunch of semi-scrappy quilts."

As you know, I have been doing that.

A few days later I texted Julie again, "You know what would be pretty? A White Macnas. Half White with colors and...  half Cream with colors.  Or half of the first with WOWs."

Julie said she'd go with WOW and White with prints.

I couldn't go with either because I was still sewing up the Green Deco quilt. Before I made blocks for anything else, I had to get the green quilt off the design wall. Which I finally did.

Before I sewed up any of the rectangular pieces I needed white rectangles. So I dug out my WOW scrappy bin and cut a whole stack of rectangles from that box. I also got rid of a lot of stuff I couldn't use (like long strips less than one inch wide...)

Anyway I finally grabbed some fabrics, paired them up and stuck them up on the design wall to see what it  might look like.

Yeah, that's a GO!

Squirrel??

It shouldn't surprise anybody (certainly not my regular readers) that Julie and I influence each other. She is now making a pinkish version of the Deco quilt and I have been cutting up my scraps into rectangles like her Macnas quilts. 

I have a big bin in my studio that has scraps of light fabrics. Some leftover backing bits, some pieces that

are too small to go back on the shelf and some that got thrown in because I couldn't figure out where else to put them.

I saw the lovely collection that Julie is making and when I looked at this bin, I knew there had to be a quilt or two or three in there.

So knowing the wicked hot heat was coming, and that simply having the iron on heats up the studio, I dug some pieces out of the box and ironed them before bed the other night. I planned to cut them up in the morning.

The result was the picture at the top of this post. I had a stack almost six inches tall. Woo hoo!

Thus motivated, I prepared another stack of fabric for the next day. Not as big as the first, but still pretty good.

On the THIRD day, I cut a stack of fabric almost SIX and a half inches tall.

And this is just the LIGHTS bin. I have other bins. And sadly, or not, depending on your viewpoint, the Lights bin is not anywhere close to being empty.

So here are all my pieces more or less organized by color. I have resolved not to begin to plan to sew any of them together until I have gone through the entire LIGHTS bin. Already I have some ideas.