Partly Sunny Binding & Review

I am hand sewing the binding on the Partly Sunny quilt. Regular readers know I sew mine down on the FRONT of the quilt, because I like it better and my hand sewing is very good. Can you see my stitches? You cannot. If you want to know what propelled me to this decision, you can read this post.

If you want more details about how I do my binding, you can get my tutorial here, at my Etsy shop. It isn't just my hand stitching that makes my bindings successful. I will tell you everything you need to know.

In case you didn't notice in the photo above, the quilting on Partly Sunny is YELLOW!

By the way, I did not make Partly Sunny. My friend Julie Sefton did. You can read the quilt's story here. Be sure to read those posts, and make sure you read the comments I left.

How did I eventually get to be the owner of this quilt? It was something unexpected. Sorta. You can read that story here.

The story gets more interesting. I was preparing the backing when I made a startling discovery.
At the point, the quilt became a kind of collaboration. I love this quilt, and I love the story. I love my friend Julie.

Partly Sunny - Partly Cloudy

Here are my golden yellow blocks.

Julie gave me a boxful of grays, and I added these from my own stash. I waned a few grays that had some extra colors in them. One of the things that makes Julie's Partly Sunny quilt so special is her use of a wide variety of grays - lights, medium and darks. So I made sure to add some light grays and some dark grays.

Here I have randomly set out the gray blocks on top of the yellows just to see if I have an equal (or close)   number of yellows and grays.

Next up: I get to play matchmaker!!

When it Doesn't Work

 

I made a few gray and those jewel toned blocks and put them up on the design wall. I wasn't too thrilled. It would have been "okay" but nothing special. I always tell my students that when we get it right, we know right away. When it doesn't work at all, we usually know that too, but it's that in-between time when we are not sure that is the hard part. In this case it simply fell flat. 

So if I want to use the jewel toned colors of purple, blue and green, I'll need another color other than gray. Creams and whites with colors would also work, as shown above.

The grays with lights would work also, but I'm not much interested in making a mostly gray quilt.

This is a detail of Partly Sunny, the quilt Julie made for me. Yellows would be a great pair with the grays. It would also be a quilt I could use as a table quilt when I display the Partly Sunny quilt in the living room.

So I pulled warm yellows out of my stash, and will use those.

Now I am excited!

Gray and Yellow

For many years you couldn't buy gray fabric, but that has changed. I bought some to make a quilt years ago, but the fabric got shanghai'd into another quilt.

This flimsy, Partly Sunny, made by Julie Sefton, arrived at my house last month, but I've had too much going on to write about it. Julie designed the quilt back in November 2017, but she didn't sew it together this way because the thought of sewing 320 blocks one at a time was too daunting. You can read the story here. I fell in love with the original version, and was dismayed when she sewed the blocks in a different layout.

As often as we talk on the phone, I never told her what I thought of the original version until over a year later. Julie admitted she was not in love with her revised version, and several months later took the flimsy apart and reassembled it. You can read that story here.

I told her I loved the flimsy so much I'd give her money for it. (I'm pretty sure that went in one ear and out the other, but that didn't stop me from repeating it as often as I felt necessary.)

At the beginning of this year I made this flimsy, Geode, which, while it didn't thrill me, enamored Julie.

Now, Julie is my best buddy, and she and I have exchanged quilts, and even designed a few together, even though we live 1,127 miles apart (as the crow flies). There was only one thing to do. Put it in a package and send it to her. So that's exactly what I did, but I didn't tell Julie it was coming. I wanted it to be a surprise. It was. You can read about it here.

A few days later, Partly Sunny arrived on my desk. I had forgotten the HSTs were 3". All quilts are beautiful in pictures, and even better in real life. This one is no exception. I loved looking at the fabrics.

Over the weekend I made a trip to Quilted Threads and bought this lovely gray floral print. I'll use it for the binding, but I think I should get more and use it as the backing.

Quilty friends are the best.

Partly Sunny is Home!

I drove out to see Janet-Lee today and picked up the Partly Sunny quilt. I completely adore this quilt.

It CLEARLY needed to live HERE!

Here is part of the back folded over. I bought that fabric years ago, and this quilt was just the place for it.

Millie is in complete agreement.

My Mother's Day

 Mother's Day was a good one for me. First I received this convo from an Etsy customer who bought one of my tutorials.

It's easy to forget that I have an audience of readers and what I write matters to them. It always makes my day when I get messages like this (and your comments do too!)

My son and his family sent flowers, and we had a nice talk later in the day.

My Mom and her friend Mike came over for dinner. It was so nice to have company! It was so nice to cook for the three of us. We had salmon and asparagus and raspberry sorbet for dessert. While my Mom and I have talked regularly during the pandemic, we weren't able to have long visits, so she hadn't seen the quilts I had made in the last year. We spent a long while looking at them, and talking about them. 

We talked a lot about Partly Sunny, the long distance quilt Julie made and I finished. I also told my Mom about how I had written the stories of the Waltzing Matilda, Goose Rocks Beach and All Together Now quilts and had given them to the recipients when I gifted the quilts. It made me realize that the story of Partly Sunny should have that treatment as well, so Julie and I will be working on that in the next few weeks. To that end I spent Sunday evening bookmarking all the posts both of us had written about the quilt so I could work out the quilt's timeline. Turns out Julie started collecting yellow and gray fabrics in 2015 with an eye to making a yellow and gray quilt sometime in the future, so the quilt's story is bigger than I thought.

My Mom asked a favor. "Can I have a quilt for my table? I'd like one for spring."

My Mom loves (and asks for) every quilt I make, so I told her I would be happy to LEND her one! She took Tutti Frutti home with her, and here it is, on her table in her apartment.

It was a good day.

Partly Sunny, Done in the Sun!

The Partly Sunny quilt is done, and here is in on a large rock in my neighborhood.

It's bigger than you think! It measures 56" x 67", and those HST's finish out at 3".

And of course it looks gorgeous on the back of my charcoal gray sofa!

The Final Firebird & More

I replaced the border on the Firebird quilt yesterday. This is much better than the wimpy yellow that was there before. This quilt is now ready for quilting.

 I also finished the backing for the Partly Sunny quilt.

Here is the Partly Sunny quilt lying on top of the backing. It is also ready for quilting.

I made a cake yesterday. I didn't use the right decorations. I used nonpareils (or "jimmies" as they are called here in New England) instead of "sprinkles." Sprinkles keep their color when they get moist, jimmies lose it. So when I put jimmies in the cake, the dye ran and the cake looks really weird. Instead of a white cake full of colored sprinkles, it is a funny colored cake. But that is only a "cosmetic" issue. The cake tastes great.

I don't usually make a cake with frosting, but with everything going on all over the world, I wanted to make a bit of something fun, silly and totally frivolous. A cake with sprinkles inside and out (yes, I wanted to recreate the "funfetti" cake, but from scratch) checks all the boxes.

 The big surprise I mentioned last week is that I traded in my car. This is the new one. While I was at the town hall transferring the license plates the clerk asked, "Is your car white?" I said yes. "Well, it says here the color is Blizzard Pearl, and I wasn't sure." It is white, it is pearl, and I think it's pretty as hell. (The old car is beside it on the left. That one was "Brown Sugar.")

Purple Plan

 You all know that I don't start any quilt unless I kinda sorta know where I am going to go with it, and I don't work on more than one quilt at a time. With the Carnelian quilt done and its backing ready, it was time to start thinking about the next quilt, the purple one.

Just like I had never made an all Orange quilt, I have also never made an all purple one. So a few weeks ago I ordered a stack of purple fabrics. I ran them through the washer and dryer and pressed and folded them all, but I had no idea what I was going to do with them. I did know I wanted to do something I had never done before.

Turns out the inspiration for the quilt lt was living on the back of my couch. That is the Partly Sunny quilt. It has quite a story. Julie designed the top, had second thoughts, redesigned it, sewed it together and then had third thoughts. It languished in her studio for almost a year. It took me that long to get up the nerve to tell her I liked her original design much better and that I really, Really, REALLY liked it. It got to be quite a joke between us. After many months of good natured ribbing, Julie sent me the flimsy and I added the wide border and had it quilted and finished it.

ANYWAY... I thought, HST's! What an idea!

I know that a lot of quilters use AccuCut to cut HST's, but I do not have one, and I knew there are spiffy ways to make multiple HST's so I searched the internet to find some. Naturally, that was easy as pie.

I found a nifty way to make 8 of them at once. After I tested the technique, I started cutting my fabrics.

Here are the light purples. My HST's will be light and dark. I have about 20 - 24 darks and 15 lights I will use. I have some others that are a bit too dark to be light, and some that are a bit too busy. Some of these might push the envelope, but I don't want a humdrum quilt, so we'll see.

Now I might be a few more days before I get to blogging again because I have to do my taxes and we all know how much fun that is.

by the way, this is the jigsaw puzzle I'm working one. QUITE a challenge, this!

Little Brother Gets Bigger

 

I have been having fun making pairs of yellow and gray. These are just tossed on the design wall willy-nilly. I can't really start designing the quilt until I have enough blocks to cover the design wall.

While you can't see it in the photo, a lot of the grays look very light, and I wanted to add a few middle-range grays, so I chose these. In the end I didn't use the second one from the left, because it looked closer to purple.

Since the quilt is supposed to relate the the Partly Sunny quilt, I set that quilt on the floor so I can look at the two of them together. I'm having a lot of fun. This won't take long.

Alegretto in the Snow

 

The day after I finished the Allegretto quilt we had a bit of snow. When I saw it I hurried to get dressed so I could bring the quilt outside for some beauty shots. This was taken in my driveway. The day was partly sunny, but windy. Here the quilt is in the shade, which makes it seem much bluer than it really is.

Here the quilt is draped across the large landscape rock in my front yard. I love pictures of quilts in the snow because it is NOT where you expect to see them.

I like this picture because the tropical birds are NOT part of a snowy landscape. If you ever wondered why the shadows of snow on a bright day are blue it is because they are reflecting the blue of the sky. 

In this picture, the sun was behind the clouds, so the quilt has a decidedly blue tinge.

The wind blew the clouds away for a few minutes, and I was able to take this picture. It isn't perfect, but it was FREEZING! (It really was, the temperature was below 32F (0C) and it was really windy so with the wind chill factor it was about 15F)

You can see the colors a lot better, and you can see the quilting too.

When I showed my Mom the finished quilt on Christmas Eve, she said, "Oh, look, my quilt!!" Her partner, M, started laughing. My Mom and I have agreed that she can BORROW the quilt for 30 days at a time. You can read here for the background of that story. But she has to give it back.

Little Brother Macnas Quilt

 

The Little Brother Macnas quilt is back from the long arm quilter. I really like this quilt.

I love the quilting.

Here is the quilting as seen on the back of the quilt.

In case you don't know or can't remember, here is the Partly Sunny quilt, (made by Julie Sefton) which was the inspiration for the "Little Brother."

Murphy Visits

 You've all heard about Murphy's Law, right? Whenever something bad happens it will happen at the worst possible moment... or something like that.

Well on Sunday I was sewing two rows of my pink quilt together when some threads got jammed. I turned everything off, and took the cover off and tried to dislodge a thread that was stuck. It would not budge. I thought I fixed it, and finished sewing the seam, but looking at the seam I knew something was still wrong. It is past time to bring it for it's regular maintenance, so I packed it up, and got out my Bernina, and set it all up.

I sewed a row of blocks together, and then joined them and put them up on the design wall next to the others.

Can you see it? Let me make it bigger for you.

Yup. The row stitched on the Bernina doesn't match the two sewn on my Elna. (Now, let's not get carried away pulling hair out complaining THIS IS SO TERRIBLE or wondering WHY DID THIS HAPPEN, because that boat has sailed folks, and it makes no difference. We must move on to the solution with grace and patience because getting frustrated won't solve this problem.)

What to do? I can EITHER...

1. Take apart the row sewn on the Bernina, bring the Elna to be serviced and WAIT until it comes back to finish the pink quilt. (Now bear  in mind the repair shop is open Tuesday to Friday 9 AM to 5 PM and Saturday 9 AM - 1 PM, meaning I can't get it to the shop before Saturday, and I'd have to wait two weeks to get it fixed.)

2. Take apart the two rows sewn on the Elna and continue sewing the whole thing on the Bernina.

Either way I have to rip something apart.

Now you all know me, and know that if I ain't sewing I ain't happy, so I will save you all some guesswork and tell you I have elected option #2. I have already taken the two rows apart, and taken the pieces apart in one row and have resewn them together on the Bernina. Works just fine. I have been sacked out on the couch watching The Chef's Table on Netflix with Millie purring beside me, so it's all good.

My big takeaway is that my pal Julie deserves accolades of THE HIGHEST ORDER for taking apart over 300 HST's in a quilt and resewing them into Partly Sunny. As we both noted (almost simultaneously while texting each other about this) if it's important enough, we will do whatever it takes to get the job done.

~ ~ ~

HOWEVER, my comments and yours about BIAS have got me thinking. I will definitely be devoting a blog post to the topic of the BIAS in quiltmaking. Just don't hold your breath waiting...