On The Table

Here's the Peppermint Swirl quilt on my dining room table. I was pleased as I was designing it to discover how perfectly it fit on the table.

As I've been showing this to friends and coworkers since I finished it, they've all asked where this one is going. "It's staying with me," I say.

"I'd keep it too," most of them have replied.

The idea for this quilt came a little over a year ago when I was talking to my friend Julie and I told her I wanted to make a red and white quilt for my table to use in February, as an homage to Valentine's Day. I didn't have enough reds then, and didn't have any idea of a design. When I don't know where I'm going, I don't just jump in. I set the idea aside to germinate and grow. The idea percolated in the back of my head until August and September, when I finally got fabric and got going.

I remember when I was making it and I just wasn't sure it was working at all. Check out this post, and this one, when I finally got it. I didn't give up, I didn't settle. I just kept pushing. I knew there was a great quilt in there somewhere.

Now it's in great company. Literally!

Peppermint Swirl, done.

I don't usually finish the binding on a quilt in one day, but if you're snowed in, and something good is on TV, it helps.

I would like to take beauty shots of this quilt in the new snow.


Happy Birthday Rubylocks!

Back in the Saddle...

 

OK, I'm home from sunny California. I've unpacked, done the laundry and put everything away. I've done the groceries, paid the bills, cleaned the litter boxes, and planned the menus for the week. I've made granola and I have bread rising as I write this. I've also changed all the clocks and given Millie enough attention to last her maybe an hour. Amazingly enough she stuck to me like glue the night I got back, and even slept beside me, which she never does.

I'm making the binding for the Peppermint Candy (Peppermint Swirl?) quilt. With the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells on TV this week, I won't be short of something to watch while I hand stitch the binding down.

Peppermint Swirl, Quilted

My Peppermint Swirl quilt is back from being quilted. I am really happy with the way it came out. I've trimmed it down and will use a red fabric for the binding.

Red Around

Now that my sewing machine is back, I can get some real work done. I've made the binding for the pink baby quilt and the bright slashed squares quilt, and I'll show those in the next couple of days.

I also added a 2-1/2" strip of various red fabrics around the perimeter of the Peppermint Candy quilt. I think it really finishes it off nicely. I cut the red strips about half a WOF and joined them at an angle. I started at one side and worked my way around the quilt, so the different colors rotate and look continuous.

This red border does a couple of other things, though. It stabilizes the blocks that have bias edges along the outside of the quilt and allows me a bit of leeway when it comes time to trim the quilt after it gets quilted. I didn't use any of the really "busy" prints along this edge, because I didn't want to draw the eye to this outer border. I also did not use the fabric I intend to use as a binding, because I want that to be separate.

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I've added another "page" to my blog. You can see the links just under the header. The new one is called "Details & More Organizational Stuff" and it is meant to be a place where you can find specific information about the tools I use. Information is there about my sewing machine, cutting table, the pins and irons I use and the thread I prefer.

I've also added photos to the Inspirations page, added links to the Friends and Good Stories pages and added the Mini Slashed Squares tutorial to the Tutorials page.

I've also added a link to a post about my stash and why I buy the fabric I buy to the Inspirations page. This should probably be in the details section, but for now it's staying where it is.

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I have two things I can't wait to blog about, and one of them has absolutely NOTHING to do with making quilts. (Neither of them is about my granddaughter.) But those will have to wait until later next week.

Red In & Out

I never get tired of watching the trees turn colors in the fall. This is the view outside my living room windows.

I ironed the backing fabric for the Peppermint Candy quilt, then got it ready to be sewn into a backing.

This used to be my favorite ruler. It's what happens when you stick it in your back pants pocket during a class and then sit down on a wooden chair with a hard back. Damn.

Home Again & Some Leftovers

My quilt, Too Much Chicken, is back home from the AQS shows in Syracuse, Chattanooga (where it won an Honorable Mention), and Des Moines. I've got to enter in the AQS shows for 2017 and sew on the labels from the shows where it has been exhibited.


I'm expecting a couple more quilts from the long arm quilter (Chris) soon.

The pink baby quilt, I made for my granddaughter, Deco Rose,
 

and the colorful Slashed Squares quilt I made last January. I'll be finishing those up. I have to choose binding for each quilt, but I am not worried.

I've decided to add a bit of red all around the Peppermint Candy quilt as a narrow outer border. It will give me a bit of wiggle room when I have to trim it after it's been quilted.  Problem is, I didn't have enough of the reds, so when I ordered the backing...

... these ladies in red evening gowns... I ordered more of a few of the reds too. I'll figure out which one (or ones) to use when they arrive.

While I wait for all this wonderful stuff to get here, I really have to bring my sewing machine to the sewing machine "spa" for a bit of rejuvenation. The thread cutter needs adjusting and it probably could use a little fine tuning as well.

For the latest photo of my darling Little Miss, check out Millie's blog today.

Peppermint Candy Flimsy Complete

Since getting a finished flimsy back up on the design wall can be an exercise in frustration if you are alone, I decided to see what it looked like on my dining room table. 

Damn, it looks good, and it fits so perfectly. Almost like it was meant to. Which it was, sorta. LOL.

This is funny because I never measure. I just wing it. OK, not really, but when I was designing the blocks I knew they were "about" five by ten inches or so, so I just calculated how many I would need to cover the table with enough to drop over the edges on all four sides. It worked out to about 100 blocks. I made a lot more than that, so I knew I was in good shape. Always better to have too many than too few.

I was at my sister's house last week and she said, "Hey, that red and white quilt on your blog, if it doesn't have a home, it can come live here."

I'm pretty sure I snorted. "I don't think so. That one is staying with me." 

Sorry, Sis.


Not. :-)

Peppermint Candy Comes Together

Oops. You may have to look closely, but there are two red fabrics next to each other (in the upper left corner) and that had to go. It meant a bit of rearranging of some blocks, but since I had plenty of extra it was no big deal.

Adapt, Improvise, Overcome.

This is how that corner ended up.  Yeah I have a block with two WOWs next to each other, but nobody will notice THAT once it is quilted.

This is one of those things were the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I MEANT to take in process photos of this, but once I got sewing that all went to hell.

At any rate, the flimsy is complete (although I think it will get a smallish red border....) and you can see photos tomorrow.



BTW, I do not know how yesterday's post got duplicated. No, I did not do that on purpose, but since there are comments on both posts, I won't delete one of them. WTH, stuff happens.

A Quarter Red

I've sewn a quarter of the Peppermint Candy table quilt flimsy. It looks great. Of course, the weekend tasks (groceries, bookkeeping, laundry, house cleaning, etc.) can't be ignored.

 And here is the latest photo of my darling granddaughter, wearing what else? A red and white hat!

Peppermint Candy Layout Complete

Yup, I love this, and this is how I am going to sew it up!

Red Grows

I've trimmed all my blocks, and am now arranging them on the design wall. There are a couple of "rules" in my head for this, so it is taking a bit of time.

First rule, the BLOB rule. Avoid putting too many dark fabrics together. They will blend together and look like a hole in the quilt. It will draw the viewer's eye like a bull's eye, and the eye will get stuck. That's not good. This is the most important thing about arranging fabrics in any quilt.

 Second rule is that I don't like it when the same fabric touches itself in another block. Why? It can create a smaller blob, and that isn't good either, plus it can disrupt the pattern of the overall design.

These two rules are paramount in my quilting. They are the ones I follow for every single quilt I make. These two almost take care of themselves if you use a lot of fabrics, and if they have a good variety of pattern and scale.

Next are the rules I have for this quilt. See those red squares where four triangles meet? Notice how I have tried to vary the light/dark and pattern in each one.  That's no accident. If I am going to have big solid shapes made from several blocks, I want to break them up a bit. Yes, I want to make them more interesting, but also to follow rule #1.

Another rule for this quilt is to have one of the multicolor fabrics in each of the big light pinwheels. I'm not quite sure I have enough blocks to do this, but I have extra fabric and I'll make more blocks if I need to.

The quilt will be six big blocks across by eight down, and once it's on the wall, I'll fine tune it.

Trimming Red

I am trimming the Red blocks down to size. (Duh!)

I use my big cutting ruler marked with blue painter's tape to guide me.

I have about one third of the blocks left to trim.

Most of the time the trimmings land in the wastebasket.

These are the blocks I have trimmed so far. I can't wait to start sewing the blocks together.

Good and Bad

I finished assembling the blocks for the Peppermint Candy (Red) quilt. Finally.

Then I tinkered, measured, and trimmed a couple of blocks, then sewed a sample pair together. This pair of blocks is WRONG. It's what happens when you keep working past your bedtime when you really should have gone to bed. You can count the squares to figure out why.

This pair is GOOD. (Again, I'll let you count the squares to figure out why.) **

So now I know what I am going for. The layout on the design wall can now be rearranged to evenly distribute the reds, and to avoid the dreaded BLOBs, or areas of "too much dark" or in this case, "too much busy" together. (A geeky aside: a BLOB is a real term in computing, specifically in database management. It means "Binary Large Object.")

Once I get the layout nailed down, (I need two more rows to the design in Saturday's post to get the size I want for my dining room table), I will start taking the blocks off the wall, trimming them to size and sewing them together.

To Nancy, who wondered if I could fix the first pair: Yes, of course, but I have to unsew the two long rectangular blocks from each other, then trim to size, first. Which I will likely do later.
 


** OK, I'll tell you. A pair of blocks when sewn together should be a square, that is, with the same dimension on each side. The original block is what I call a "long rectangle." For the rest of the discussion on this blog, a pair of long rectangles sewn together will equal one block. For them to be sewn together properly (every other block rotated 90 degrees), the block needs to be square.

PS: Check out the SSOBB barn exhibit from AQS Chattanooga at the Build a Barn blog, and at Teresa's blog.