I Talk...

 

I gave a talk to the Seabreeze Quilt Guild in Exeter NH last week. It was a glorious day, sunny and unseasonably warm. They wanted me to talk about my letter quilts, so I did. I brought fifteen quilts, including Too Much Chicken (behind me).

One of my all time favorite letter quilts is the Quick Brown Fox.

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I watched Project Runway from the very beginning, although I stopped after a few years. I always loved Tim Gunn's trademark phrase, "Make it work." He meant to use what you HAVE, not to go out and buy more stuff or change your mind. 

It reminded me of an Arthur Ashe quote I found in my notebooks as I was working on my talk. "Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can." That would make a great word quilt.

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Naturally I brought the Not Paper Pieced quilt.

Afterwards, a lady game up to me, "I almost didn't come tonight, because I couldn't see any point in putting letters on a quilt. But I'm so glad I did. I am so excited. I have SO MANY ideas. You have totally inspired me."

Afterward I got this text from the program coordinator from the quilt guild. Made my night.

One of the really nice things about the evening was that my mother was able to attend. She had never heard me speak before.

I wrote a tutorial about making free pieced letters. It's enormous, but comprehensive. You can get a copy here, if you want to make letters yourself.

Back White Back

I'm adding WOWs to the decorative panel I'm using for the back of the Holiday Banner. Because the banner is white, I didn't want to use anything other than a white so it wouldn't show through. 

Photographing anything white on a white background is not only hard, it's hard to SEE and looks like, well, a polar bear in a blizzard. I worked on adding all the extra fabric around the decorative panel I am using for the back of the new Holiday banner. Here I have added fabric to the sides and top of the backing.

Here I have set the completed backing on top of the banner itself on the design wall. 

This is the back of the flimsy. If you click to enlarge it you can see the details. Just because I am a liberated quilter, and don't use patterns or templates and my quilts are ABSOLUTELY NEVER PAPER PIECED, it doesn't mean my work is sloppy. Quite the opposite.

If you want to make some birds, my tutorial is available here.

If you want to make letters, my tutorial is here.

If you want to make asterisks, my tutorial is here.

Change Partners and Dance

 

Yeah, this star doesn't work either.

So when this happens, I have learned to let it go, and work on something else. Part of my plan was to have a row of trees at the bottom. The ones on the design wall are leftovers from another project, so I'll have to make new ones anyway. I thought I would have a great big tall one in the center and smaller ones on either side.

Then I decided to make the asterisks bounce up and down. Hmm. Three looked good. I made five. What would it look like it I threw the other two on there?

OK, so that looks good. But part of my plan is to have the letters N O E L in there too. So before I go too far down that road, I better put them up on the design wall so I can get a better idea of what's going on.

As usual, I can either sew or take pictures. An hour and a half later, I had letters, and I put them where I had orginally planned them, at the bottom.

Stepping back though, that row of boxes looks like a barrier as you work your way down. That will require some more thought.

OK, if you want to make some birds, you can get my tutorial for them here.

If you want to make letters without patterns or templates or paper piecing you can get my tutorial for those here. I tell you everything.

My tutorial for asterisks is here.

Not Paper Pieced is Finished

 

The Not Paper Pieced quilt is finished. I sat down on Saturday morning, and started sewing. I had found a really silly television show to stream - Holey Moley - about extreme miniature golf. Think miniature golf meets Wipeout, with crazy ridiculous trick miniature golf holes with near impossible tricks. It was just the kind of mindless thing I needed. I worked steadily, taking breaks to have lunch and strip the bed, throw the sheets in the washer, then the dryer, then remake the bed, then have a snack, then make dinner. So I watched ten episodes of season one. 

As you can tell, I finished the flimsy for this quilt in 2019, then brought it to Janet-Lee. We weren't quite sure how to quilt it, so it sat and sat. Now it's done and I'm happy with it, and it will be the centerpiece of my talk to the Seabreeze Quilters in Exeter NH on January 9, 2024.

Happy New Year's Eve!

Motto

I don't know how long ago I put the letters together for this smallish flimsy. It is made of leftovers and duds and other stuff I had hanging around. I finally squared it up, and added a border around the whole thing to keep the edges straight. I use it to bring to my letters classes to show two things - one, that dud letters are simply letters that don't fit where you want them to go; they are not necessarily BAD letters.

And two, I flip this over to show how the back of my quilts look. (I forgot to take a photo of it before I put it on the design wall, so the back of Not Paper Pieced will have to do for now...)

Which is to say, neat and tidy. No scraggly threads on the back of MY quilts. No ragged seams. Everything lies FLAT. Everything is neatly pressed. Free piecing or Improvisational piecing, Quilting Without a Net, or No Patterns, just sew one thing to another... whatever you want to call it, my craftsmanship is very good.

So "Don't be chicken; have no fear; just make super amazing quilts" yeah, that's a good motto for me.

Or anybody, really.

PS Happy Birthday Mary!

 

Quilts, Quilted!

Over the weekend I picked up three quilts from my longer quilter, Janet-Lee. Here is Greensleeves, a Zebra quilt.

and this is Prizm, another Zebra quilt. Check out the quilting on this one. I don't usually go in for fancy detailed quilting, but I am coming around. On a pretty plain quilt like this one, it's fun to have some detailed quilting in it. The quilting thread is lime green, which is pretty cool too.

The third quilt was Not Paper Pieced, which I made W-A-Y back in 2019. In the end we decided not to custom quilt it, but to give it a subtle all over design that would not detract from the message in the quilt itself.

I'm happy with all three of them and I have a lot of binding in my future.

You can get the tutorial for the Zebra quilts and a tutorial for my improvisationally pieced letters here, at my Etsy shop.

 

Scribble Scrabble is a Flimsy

 

Over the past few days I have sewn the blocks of the Scribble Scrabble quilt together.

All quilts look better when they're sewn together, and this was no different. Without the spaces between the blocks showing through, the design really pops.

I added a narrow light border of bright colored prints on a white background. That will be 1" wide when finished.

Next I selected eight different fabrics of mostly golds and browns on a black background and cut them up into roughly 20" lengths by 3" wide, joined them at an angle and sewed that to the quilt. I have already ordered backing fabric for this. I think this is going to make a terrific couch quilt.

And coming soon, a blast from the past...

Just in time for me to show off to the Seabreeze Quilt Guild in Exeter NH on Tuesday January 9, 2024, where I will be giving a trunk show of my letter based quilts. Perhaps I will see you there?

Letters

 I was talking to my pal Julie on Friday in one of our marathon monthly telephone calls. We talked about letters and somehow I got the idea to make KEEP IT SIMPLE in free pieced letters.

Why KEEP IT SIMPLE ? Because we have both noticed that my best quilt are quilts that I don't think too much about when I am making them.

So I got the idea of making several KEEP IT SIMPLE panels and put them together in one bigger quilt.

This was my first one.

I wrote a tutorial on "liberated" letters. You can get it here at my Etsy shop. Yes, it's a big tutorial, but I tell you everything you need to know to make all the letters in the alphabet in upper and lower case, as well as all the numbers.

JOY

 

I started my Holiday decorating. I brought the decorations out from the closet, and I went to the big box hardware store and bought some poinsettias. Heh!

This little pointsettia is on my bedside table next to photographs of my son and DIL and DGG. But that’s not what I want to show you.

I decided to make a cover for the small pillow for the red chair in my living room. I wanted to make something with letters, and the word JOY would fit perfectly. Plus I had a good selection of red holiday fabrics with which to work.

Here is the finished pillow on the chair.

It looks great! I got a small nutcracker and displayed it on the small table nearby with a Holiday Gizzy quilt.

The letters I make are “free-pieced” meaning they aren’t made with traditional patterns or templates. I wrote a tutorial to make these letters too. The tutorial shows you how to make all 26 letters in the alphabet, both upper and lower case, as well as numbers. You can get it at my Etsy shop as well. Click on the bird in the sidebar and it will bring you to my Etsy shop.

So Clever... Not!

 I had intended to post something rather clever and witty but I got sidetracked. A reader asked if I could list the dimensions of my finished quilts in my tutorials, so she could gauge the size and scale of them. I thought it was a very good idea, but the problem was I have not been as attentive as I should have been to measuring them and then storing those measurements in a place where I could easily retrieve them.

(Now my friend Julie has a perfect system, but then...  well, that's the way she is. Me, not so much.)

 

So I opened up my computer and started a document with the list of quilts for which I needed measurements. Then I had to go searching for where I could find them. I did not want to drag each quilt out of the closet, unfold it and measure it. Not only that, I am not in possession of all of them. First I went through the appraisals, then I searched my blog, then I dragged them out of the closet and measured.

And of course it took W-A-Y longer than I anticipated. Here is the list, and my dimensions are listed the same way paintings are catalogued by museums, Height precedes Width.

These are listed in no particular order, but as I was looking at the list something really struck me. I remember seeing Julie's Flying Monkeys quilt and thinking it was massive, but my Colorado Quilt is a bit bigger. Of course both are dwarfed by Valerie Levy's Kona Nerds Unite quilt, which is 100" x 81" (which is not on the list because THAT, I already had. Go figure.)

I'll leave you with a comparison of the Double Delicious and Magnum Amaryllis's next to each other. Magnum is quite a bit darker, actually closer to violet (or blue) than the other one. AND check out the base of the double one, just above the moss. A THIRD stem is sprouting. In all my years I have NEVER seen that. Tres cool!

 

IF YOU WANT to get your Amaryllis to bloom again, follow the instructions here.

Student Birds!

 I love it when students send me pictures of the quilts they make from my classes and my tutorials. Here are some that I have received lately.

This is Sara K's quilt. A lot of happy birds, clearly chatting with each other.

This is Sue P's quilt, and it includes some applique'd birds. I also love the striped chevron legs.

These are Bea G's birds, in a hanging that hangs in her house.

I am always particularly interested in students who make unique birds and push boundaries. This is the second bird quilt I have seen with a gray background. Here there are big and fat and little birds. I love bright colors and the triangles border.

One of my students described the birds as "bulletproof" and the next quilt really epitomizes that.

This is Ken with his quilt of birds. Now before you think, OMG, those are all wrong, let me stop you right now. This quilt has VERVE! It has JOY! It has PANACHE. It has EXUBERANCE. I think it is just FABULOUS!

A couple of years ago I sat at a dinner table with a teacher who teaches precision piecing. I told her she'd probably have a coronary if she saw how I teach and how I make my own quilts. 

I remembered a word of advice I received when I first started making quilts many years ago. "Always leave the evidence of your hand in your work," I was told. "You never want your work to look like it was made by a machine." 

Afterward I told one of my students (who was sitting beside me that night), that I want my students to be happy when they make quilts. I do not want them to feel inadequate. I want them to be successful with their work, and you can tell by the smile on Ken's face, that he's happy!

If you want to make your own birds, you can get my tutorial here, at my Etsy shop. I'll show you how to make birds, and I'll tell you how to make them yours! The tutorial is an instant download, so you can get started right away.

It's a Onesie!

 

Pin, pin, pin, pin, pin. And YES, when I sew big pieces like this together my pins are one inch apart.

Also known as "quilt wrangling."

The infamous "set in square." Honestly, if you do these the right way they are a piece of cake. Unfortunately it took me three tries before I figured it out remembered how to do it.

This is the wrong side. Notice two things. 1. It is neat. My threads are trimmed and my seams are pressed neatly. 2. This sucker lies FLAT with no bubbles or wrinkles. Ask me how I do this. (Oh wait, it's in the letters tutorial.)

This is a closer-up view of part of the back. Remember you can click, then click the photos again to enlarge them for more detail.

I have to trim the quilt, and then photograph it properly. I'll show it off tomorrow.

Love!

 

I made the word LOVE, and tried putting a heart in the O. It's cute, but that O doesn't "read" as an O.

This is the final word. I like it. I like the point at the bottom of the V, and the reddish purple color of the letters.

I made a pink asterisk. It came out a little cock-eyed, but I like it anyway.

My letters are made without patterns, or templates and they are not paper-pieced. If you want to learn how, you can get my tutorial here, at my Etsy shop.

Laughter

 I've made an asterisk and started sewing the letters together for the word laughter. I made the L bigger, too.

Right from the time I made the U I knew I wanted it to float slightly higher than the baseline.

I made both the T and the R wider. I knew I wanted to float the T. Regular readers know I like to use a variety of WOWs and I use them interchangeably. You can see that in these photos.

Trimming a l-o-n-g word is the biggest reason to have an equally long ruler to use when trimming. Sliding a shorter ruler along doesn't guarantee a straight cut.

Laughter is 41" wide.

I made a few orange-y asterisks, and I like this one a lot.

 

These letters are made without patterns, templates and they are NOT paper pieced. If you want to make your own, you can get my tutorial here at my Etsy shop. It's an instant download so you can get started right away.