Cat's Quilt

 

I picked up Cat's quilt from Janet-Lee yesterday. This is a quilt for a hip 20 year old girl. She chose the colors.

Here's a close up of the quilting.

A bigger detail shot.

I've got the binding all ready made for this, so I should get to it soon.

I'm doing a lot of behind the scenes work to protect my tutorials. The best thing I can tell anyone is to purchase my tutes on my Etsy shop. That is the ONLY place I sell them. One of the advantages is if you have an Etsy account and your copy of a tutorial gets corrupted or damaged, or lost, or your computer or device dies, you can simply log into your Etsy account and download it again. It will ALWAYS be there for you! Pretty cool, huh?

I have to set up a professional Facebook page and that's taking up some valuable brain cells. Since this whole scammer/stealing experience is causing me sleepless nights, it's taking a bit longer than I'd like. Bear with me. That's on my To-Do list for today.

Bird's the Word

 

I'm going to have to beef up my presence on Facebook if I want to combat the spammers who stole my tutorial and direct readers to my legitimate sales location on Etsy. To that end I'll be posting a lot of bird stuff over the next few days. If you do Facebook, go over and follow me, please. I'm Lynne Tyler over there.

***Update: Apparently I've got to set up a Professional profile in Facebook. I find it incredibly confusing and it's taking some time. Please bear with me. I SO appreciate your support. 

I've also decided to update the bird tutorial with a few little hints my in-class students have suggested, so I'm working on that. Also, Susan suggested I write a sort of Birds, Part Two tutorial that includes instructions on making hummingbirds and flamingos, and other bird variations, so I'm working on that too.

Thanks for your support. And if you want to buy any of my tutorials, they are 25% off for the month of January, go to my Etsy Shop, Patchery Menagerie, here.

Pizzazz is a Flimsy at Last!

 

I added a border to the Pizzazz quilt. Now it's a flimsy. I'm really happy with it.

Scam Alert

 

As you all know, I sell my tutorials on Etsy. I sell them nowhere else. If you find a website that purports to sell my bird tutorial that isn't Etsy, then you are being scammed. 

Somebody is posting a link on Facebook selling my tutorials for fifteen bucks with a warning the price is soon to be raised to twenty. THIS IS A LIE. My tutorials on Etsy sell for no more than $12 USD (Except for the letters tutorial). IN FACT, right now I have a 25% off sale on ALL my tutorials.

I don't know who is doing this. I have tried to contact them, but the telephone number as well as the web URL is bogus. Somebody is stealing from me. I've heard from several folks that this has happened, but I'm not having any luck getting whoever this is to cease and desist.

If you see any link anywhere where this is happening, leave a comment saying this is FAKE.

Thanks.

If you want to buy Lynne's Liberated Birds tutorial, click this link.

Pizzazz, All fixed and finished

 

Here I have circled the blocks that were wrong. I knew about the three at the lower left and only one at the upper right.

In this picture, these are at the blocks at the upper right. I have tried to make notes on the blocks that are wrong.

Here I have fixed all the mistakes, and added an extra vertical row at the far right. Now the flimsy is 60" wide, which is the width I prefer.

Almost Perfect

The flimsy Pizzazz, is complete.

I think I counted about 40 unique fabrics before I got confused. I really like it.

After I put it back up on the design wall I sat back and looked at it.

And found four mistakes.

Oops.

Three I will fix, but one I shall leave as it is. And I'm not telling you where they are. 

Oh well.

Next up: winding bobbins.

 

Where & How

 

My Rail Fence quilt is made according to Sujata Shah's instructions in her book, Cultural Fusion Quilts, which is still in print and available at quilt shops, and many online places, including Amazon.

It was Sujata's technique of cutting pieces with gentle curves that let me to this. I love the technique and have used it several times, including Lightning in the Night Sky, Waltzing Matilda and Carnelian.

Sujata suggests "gentle" curves in her book, but I rather take that to the extreme. I like them really cuckoo and extreme. As always, YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary), but I think the technique makes much more interesting quilts.

Here is the quilt so far. The left half is all sewn together. The right half all the blocks are sewn into rows, but I haven't put them together yet.

One friend thinks this has a lot of Pizzazz, and I thought that was a great name until somebody else suggested Shockwave, which I think I like better!

Incidentally, I have updated my profile picture. This is what I really look like now, with longer hair!

Ready, Set, Sew!

I've done a lot of tinkering on this. You'll have to enlarge the photo to look more closely, but I have worked hard to ensure that the same fabric does not touch each other throughout the quilt. It was quite an undertaking. After a lot of work, this is what I will sew together.

 

I don't sew a whole long row of 14 blocks together. I sew half of it. It's easier (for me) to sew two big chunks together rather than do long rows of 14 blocks, which is about 56 inches long. In the strip above, there are seven blocks, and 14 unique fabrics.

As we all know, a design tightens up when sewn together. Here are seven rows of 7 blocks each. This is looking really good.

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Fourteen blocks equals 56 inches wide and I like my couch quilts to be 60 inches wide so I have set down an extra block at the far left edge of each the top ten rows shown above. I'm not 100% sure I'll add those extra blocks. I'll make that decision later.

My pal Cherie says this quilt has a lot of "pizzazz," and indeed it does. I think she has named this quilt.

Moving Along

 

I figured out the pattern for this quilt design and worked out the easiest way to finish the design of the quilt.

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I made an assortment of blocks. I had them on the recliner,

the table near my design wall,

and the stepladder.

I've covered the design wall with blocks and while the pattern is complete, now it's time for some tinkering and fine tuning to get this really humming.

And yes, I know this is crazy.

Black Rail Fence Variation

 

When I conceived this quilt I knew I was not going to make traditional rail-fence style blocks. I knew I wanted to make long zig-zags, like this quilt, River of Light, that I made back in 2023.

My plan was to have the zig-zags that go from corner to corner be bright prints on black, and on either side of them will be brights on white and then I want ever other zig to be whites on black, and then another zig of black, and then the brights on whites, etc, which you can sort of see in the photo above.

Now, when you make strips for this quilt, you pair a light with a dark, but in order to divide the white zigs into colored ones and black on white ones, you have ate be a bit sneaky. Which of course you all know I love to do. So notice the fabrics in the zig-zags above - they are not all the same fabric. My goal (in pretty much every quilt I do) is to make you LOOK and notice things. I try to use different fabrics that LOOK the same but aren't.

Anyway, that's the plan.

As you can see, I have a lot of work to do.

New Year, New Quilt

 My studio is clean, and I took a small break from working in there. I wrote a few quilt stories, but writing isn't the same as working. I'm planning a new tutorial, but that won't happen just yet. I didn't know what my next quilt would be.

Inspiration always pops up though. This is the back wall of Studio C, where my Chair Yoga class is held. I've been taking the class for the last ten weeks and looked at this wall when I walked in the door, and it never really hit me until yesterday. That arrangement of three windows over two has possibilities, so before class I got up to take a picture. Needless to say everybody wanted to know why. I don't know what I'll do with it yet, but that's not my concern. Something will pop up.

I was writing the story of the Lightning in the Night Sky quilt, and I love working with those curved blocks. I thought, I'll make another one! But as my friend Janet said to me the other day, when I commented about the size of my stash, "You have to think of it as, 'I can't die until I use that all up!'"

So I looked at my stash. What did I have a lot of that I could use up?

The answer was Brights on Black. And what to use with it?

That answer was Black on white, but I also wanted to use up some Brights on White.

Now fear not, those aren't the only fabrics I chose. Each pile of fabric has ten strips in it, so you can't see 90% of the fabrics I chose.

The object was to cut as many strips as I could from the fabrics that I chose, like this one. I can get one WOF strip. The rest I will cut into Macnas sized blocks for a quilt sometime later. Although this did reduce the quantity of those fabrics in my stash, I still have a lot of quilts to make before I made a serious sized dent in the stash. But one step at a time. you don't eat a whale in one sitting.

This is a small preview of where I am going, but even this doesn't tell the whole story. This was as far as I got, but hey, I cut 70 dark strips and 70 light strips in one day! 

Happy New Year!

Working in the Studio

 

I spent the last couple of days cleaning the studio and preparing backings and bindings for the quilts I have been making.

Next up I'll be sewing the binding on the Green birds quilt.

For those of you who haven't made birds yet, you can get my tutorial for them here at my Etsy shop.

Blitzen

 The Christmas Macnas quilt is a finished flimsy. I've decided to call it BLITZEN.

Merry Christmas!

The Sticker

I was shopping at the Night Owl Quilting Studio when I saw this sticker for sale. 

Yeah. Had to take that home with me.

I stuck it on my sewing machine. I sent the picture to my friend Julie. and she asked if I could get one for her.

So I did.