To Do Tuesday - 25/10/22

I only set one task last week, i.e.

📌Baste another charity quilt ready to be quilted.

Well, maybe I should do this more often. Actually basted and finished one charity quilt and am almost through the second one as well!

This is the first quilt

Must admit, did not like this quilt at all. The center is a panel with the most overwhelming colour arrangement...it has got those tiny flowers on white as a background. Most odd, it just feels too much. Really struggled to quilt this so I just outlined the star and ditched all the seams. I did a bit of ruler work in the Flying Geese but that was it, did not feel like doing any more on this. Really odd quilt, but hopefully somebody will like it.

Basted the second one and am almost through with the stitching in the ditch.

What a difference the colours make for me...love the combination of purple and green. Very tasteful, gentle quilt. I am in two minds whether to do a bit of ruler work on this, but we shall see. Will have to drop off the charity quilts on Friday, so really want to have this done.

My goals for next week include:

📌prepare another Mini Wholecloth using a dusty pink fabric with a slightly stronger thread that will hopefully show up a bit more; this is for the workshop next year...I might change the fillers a bit from the original one to see what that looks like.

📌start work on a new pattern; this pattern was supposed to be for Christmas and I will get it done...it's just a bit on the late side, but so be it. Need to get this out of my system so I can start on something else.

📌If time allows, continue on my cat blocks.

Linking up to To Do Tuesday over at Texas Quilt Gal.

 Karin

To Do Tuesday - 18/10/22

Belated link up for To Do Tuesday over at Texas Quilt Gal...

Well, this time I have got an excuse though...our cat ended up in vet hospital last week, which was very traumatic for all involved. She suddenly fell very ill last Sunday...it looked like a stroke actually, but when we took her to the vet they said that was uncommon for cats. Nevertheless they suspected a neurological problem, so she had to stay for a while. As the evening approached though, we had to go and transfer her to a 24/7 vet hospital. She was then put on a drip for the next 3 days and drugged to the eye ball. Initially it did not look good at all, so we were expecting the worst, however by Monday she made a surprising recovery...most of her neurological symptoms had disappeared and she responded well to the heavy pain relief they had given her. As it turned out this was a muscular issue somewhere around the neck which they likened to being hit by a car. The weird thing was though that nothing untowards had happened in the hours before she fell sick...everything was as per normal. So it has remained a mystery how she actually injured herself. All a bit weird...she was sent home having to have strict bed rest! Needless to say the cat was quite messed up from this ordeal and it took most of the week for her to get back to her normal self. She had a follow up the other day and all seems well. It's funny though...when she was so sick you tend to do a lot of reflecting. We have had her for 12 years by now and she is approximately 14 yrs old, so quite an old lady by now but the thought of  potentially losing her so soon had not crossed our minds up to then. Was all a bit of an emotional roller coaster.

But anyway, I did link up about two weeks ago and will just continue from there. My goals were as follows:

📌Make a sleeve for the show quilt ✔

📌Finish the feather quilting in the rose quilt above  ✔

📌Baste another charity quilt

📌Design a Mini Wholecloth for another workshop or at the very least have started that process (have about 3 weeks to do this).  ✔

I am finishing the last bits for the show quilt to hand it over next week. This will be a relief. I am always happy when the quilt is gone and I do not have to think about it again until I see it at the show. This should be interesting. Our quilt show will be held as part of the Australian Machine Quilting Festival in November. Looking forward to this as I am also booked into a couple of classes.

Finished the Rose Charity quilt but did not get around basting another one. Too much going on.

In between I spent some time designing and quilting out a Mini Wholecloth in preparation for another workshop next year. Of course things did not go as planned. I was rushing and trying to cut some corners to finish this quickly which did not work. Messed up my border and had to unstitch the whole border...this took the longest time! Finished it yesterday and it looks a treat

It is basic but I had to think about what was achievable in a workshop setting and the varied skill level of participants. Was really thrilled with the design and how I managed to print that out on the home printer ready to be used. Actually quite like what I have come up with and would not mind making this bigger for myself with more frames and feathers around the outer edge. I found the small scale a bit limiting, definitely not used to that. I probably will stitch this out again over the Christmas period using maybe different fillers and a different border treatment just so people can choose what suits them better. Still a bit of work involved in thinking this through, doing a bit of a handout, but plenty of time for that still.

For next week, I will not put much on my list (given it is already Thursday) ...feel I need a bit of a break.

📌Baste another charity quilt ready to be quilted

Linking up to To Do Tuesday over at Texas Quilt Gal.

Karin

Designing

Radio silence from me again for a few days. I have been designing which always takes me some time to do. I have been asked to do another class next year doing a Mini Wholecloth class.

Initially I had no idea what to do, so several days were spent just thinking about how to approach this. I needed to come up with something that was achievable for the ladies without being too difficult to stitch out but also not to difficult to get down on fabric.  Up to now I have been designing using pen and paper which would take me ages as I would change things as I went along, then start over and over again until I got it right. When thinking about this class I realised that I needed a printed copy of my design and started to think about how to get my drawing into a digitized format. While I have drawing programs on my desktop I have never attempted to do a full blown design using a mouse, so the Ipad came to mind.

In the past I have used a very good App 'Graphics for Ipad' to do drawings on the Ipad, however I recently discovered that this App has stopped working properly possibly due to the many updates for the Ipad that have happened over time. I really liked this App as it allowed me to smooth out curves, add measurements etc. However, the layer tap does not work anymore and without that, it is useless.

When I had Covid earlier in the year I spent a lot of time just sitting around. In order to keep myself semi occupied I started to look at the Procreate program. I had purchased that App some time ago but never really got the hang of it, so I set out to learn it properly. Discovered that it is extremely useful to quickly draw out a draft of something, e.g. like this

Not that pretty and not what I am going for, but I was just playing around with ideas and to familiarise myself with the program again. Spent a lot of time searching for a way to make a shape to scale and finally figured it out. When you highlight a particular shape in the Procreate program it will show you the measurement in Pixels. Took me a while but with the help of Google I found a formula to convert pixels into inches. I wanted my heart shape to be about 2-1/4in, so that meant that I had to multiply this with the dpi which was 300 which made that 675 pixels and...voila...I was on my way (Actually just found a pixels converter on Google which does the calculation for you). Once I had this, I also discovered that I could set the grid behind my picture in inches, so I made my grid 1/4in small so I could see how I would fill in the space that I had given myself for this Mini Wholecloth.

The drawing itself was actually not too difficult, just had to adjust the brushes to make my strokes as even as possible. Good thing is that you only need to do one shape and then of course can copy and paste as your heart desires. Here is my frame

Does not look like much but that took a while. Spend some time getting that first stroke right. Once I had that, I just copied, flipped and pasted it into place, tidying up some pixels as I went. Reduced that shape then by 1/4in to make the distinct frame which comes out to 9in. Once I had that, I worked out the size of the heart motif and put that in the middle and I was on my way.

Still working on this so I can't show you the full picture but the printing of this comes out 100% to scale which I am extremely happy about as this means I can just print it out at the end of it and trace from there. 

If you have an Ipad it is well worth your while to invest some time into something like Procreate. Even if you don't design full blown wholecloth quilts, it does allow you to quickly and effectively just jot down a draft which I always find very helpful. Like that first picture above felt like a good idea and would have taken me ages to draw out on paper...on the I pad it maybe took an hour to get the base shapes on there and then copying and pasting, a bit of rough filling to get an idea of whether I liked it which in this case I did not (would need more work around the angle of my feathers somehow).

Karin

The Rose Charity Quilt

I made a concentrated effort to get that Rose Charity quilt finished, again focussing in on minimal marking and keeping the quilt nice and soft. For this quilt I literally just wanted some embellishment as the fabric itself is quite striking and very patterned. So I mainly quilted in the black parts and just did a few line designs in the other parts to stabilise the quilt. This is what I like about these charity quilts. Not only are they a real surprise every time I open the packets from the Orange Tree Quilters group, they are also a real challenge in terms of thinking through how to quilt them, i.e. what are they likely going to be used for. For this quilt I could imagine that some older person might appreciate the quilt as a knee rug, hence it had to be soft and still with a fair bit of puff.

As you may have seen in a previous post, I quilted some feathers in the main dark grey areas of the centre of the quilt. Now I only had the black sashing left. The sashing was only 2in which presented a bit of a challenge as I did want some feathers in there as well. My initial thought was to go around with just a single row of feathers, however that proved too messy as I would have had my 'imagined spine' on the high side of the ditch and with grey thread that was not going to look any good.

Came up with this other idea...an older, more playful design which I had done some years ago involving a wavy line on which you travel putting in some feathers as you go.

Something like this

Hard to see but I decided to use the Handiquilter Wiggly Wave ruler to put the wavy line in. Well, that took a bit longer as I had to work out the corners, i.e. first what sort of shaping did I want in there and how was I going to achieve that with the ruler. Good exercise in really getting to know your ruler. In the end I started drawing from the middle out, stopping 1-3/4in from each corner, shifting the ruler slightly over to achieve the same look on all four corners

I first stitched out my wavy line with the ruler all around the quilt and then started my feathering...

Why did I stitch out my wavy line first? I made a little diagram to show you the difference in stitching path doing a continuous feather.

I stitched according to the first picture moving over my stitched wavy path. The areas where I had to overstitch (backtrack) are highlighted in purple. In one wave I only have two spots were I need to go over a previously stitched line. While you may have some wobbles here and there, the overall impression is one of consistency as the wavy line, of course, is stitched out neatly with a ruler.

Comparing this to the picture No 2 where you would stitch the wavy line as you go. As you can see there is an enormous amount of going backwards and forwards...you start off doing your first plume, then need to backtrack over that to do the second plume, then stitch backwards to make the wavy line and backtrack back over it to continue the wave. While this absolutely can be done this way, I felt that this was way too intensive with the backtracking. Even if I had used a 'bump back' feather there still would have been a fair amount of backtracking.

Happy with how this turned out.

I stitched one side at a time, breaking thread before each corner. While I could have stitched on over my corner to the next side, I decided not to do that as my corners looked surprisingly pristine, so I did not want to mess that up.

Well, here is the finished quilt

Finished the binding and label today and now it's on to the next one.

Karin

To DoTuesday - 27/9/22: Minimal Marking - Feather Wreath

Here we are again...another week has gone!

My goals from last week were:

📌Make a sleeve for the show quilt ✖

📌Finish the feather quilting in the rose quilt above ✔

📌Baste another charity quilt ✖

📌Design a Mini Wholecloth for another workshop or at the very least have started that process (have about 3 weeks to do this). ✖

This past week I worked on just one thing on and off, i.e. finishing the Rose charity quilt. The busyness really has not slowed down at all, so I am fitting the quilting in where I can.

When I first saw it, I thought that this would be perfect to practice quilting a feather wreath or similar freehand. I did an online feather class with Bethanne Nemesh earlier in the year and that was one of the first things we did. While I could do it, the beginning and ending of the wreath were always a bit of a hit and miss situation freehand, so I undertook to look a bit closer at how I could build in some sort of scaffolding to make that appear more consistent as the wreath on this quilt would be centre stage.

So I starting practising a bit...amazing what I found in my sewing room. I once bought a Westalee Design kit at a quilt show many years ago consisting of a wad of design grids out of paper and an acrylic square with the crosshair lines marked in. Have looked at this over the years and actually almost threw it out some time ago. Well, this became incredibly handy for this task.

Placed the acrylic square over the grid paper, lining up the crosshair lines with the paper underneath and just started drawing with a whiteboard marker on the acrylic square.

First one: did not like the inside and decided to make that circle guideline larger

...another one: better, but odd shapes on the inside

...and another one (and several others after that)

Tried to achieve some sort of consistency where I could use some of the lines as guidelines when quilting. This one above was actually not too bad and I could have oriented myself on the red lines, i.e. drawn those lines in in addition to the crosshairs and aimed for 4 plumes per section. However, comparing this to how I actually quilt my feathers showed a marked difference. I have quilted feathers for quite a long time and like with everything you develop your particular way of stitching feathers, i.e. I will stitch them at a particular angle and height/width in a mostly consistent manner. When I placed the picture above over a practice wreath I had stitched out earlier you could see the difference, i.e. my plumes were a little bit smaller in width, hence my nicely worked out picture above would likely not be replicated on the quilt. I likely would start quilting and not be able to keep to the guidelines set and end up with the last feather being weirdly squished in. If I was doing a quilt with several wreaths or where they were maybe not as prominent (i.e. matching thread) I would not have worried about it as much. In this quilt however, with the one wreath in contrasting thread, that is really the first thing you see, so it had to be somewhat consistent.

So, I needed to think of some additional scaffolding that I needed to build in. Had a look at my feathers again and saw that the rounded top corresponded to an approximate 5 cent piece, so put that into my drawing and that seemed to do the trick in terms of avoiding that awkward odd shape that you get at the end when closing your wreath. So I tried that with just the normal crosshair lines and the rounded tops marked in (a little bit of fudging here and there to fit them neatly in the space was needed but nothing too drastic). Marked my starting point which was on the 45 degree line on the right and off I went...

Tada...that worked well

Now it was time to go onto the quilt...fearless and confident! It's amazing how nervous one gets even after all those years. But I really did not want to do this several times, so one go it was!

Happy with that...maybe ever so slightly longer on one side (I swear I kept to my outside guideline!). Could also be the photo or maybe my angle in the plumes was slightly different as I went around.... but in any case I am not a computer and it is looking consistent enough.

Then came the setting triangles. Again, did not want to fuss too long around this and chose a very simple design which needed a curve (did this with one of Bethanne Nemesh' Lily Line rulers) and the eight shape marked in. For the markings on this quilt I used a Bohin pencil...I find that the chalk comes out easiest...you just brush it off and it's gone.

This is how that turned out

And finally, the center of the quilt all done

None of this is exact or absolutely consistent for that matter, but overall it reads consistent which is what I was aiming for. Very simple, clean look about it. In terms of time, this took me one afternoon to complete. Once I had my scaffolding worked out, it was rather easy going, just following my markings on the wreath and in the triangles I was aiming for the same amount of feathers on the curve which was not that difficult as I quilt them the same over and over again. Overall really happy with my efforts and keen to try other things that we learned in that online class.

So what's on my goal list for next week...pretty much everything that was on my list the week before😄

📌Make a sleeve for the show quilt

📌Finish the charity rose quilt above (thinking of just putting some small feather border in the black space, attach the binding and it's done)

📌Baste another charity quilt

📌Do some work on designing a Mini Wholecloth for another workshop  (have about 3 weeks to do this).

Linking up to Texas Quilt Gal for To Do Tuesday 27/9/22.

Karin

To Do Tuesday 20/9/22

Misleading title as it is Thursday here already. However, I missed last week's Tuesday and do not want to fall off by the wayside again.

On my list the previous Tuesday were these tasks:

📌Make at least one cat block during the week for my Elizabeth Hartman Kitten quilt ✖

📌Make a start on the charity quilts with the aim to get at least one done ✔

📌Make a sleeve for the show quilt ✖

One out of three...well, we had a family of four staying over for a number of days and afterwards things just got incredibly busy. Also ran the last session of my freemotion-quilting class last Friday, so all in all a very busy week. However, I did make a start on the charity quilts in between and got one done.

Enjoyed that one as the fabric appeared really quite old. Love how you can lift up a quilt like that with some very simple quilting.

Made a start on the second one today and almost done all of the ditching.

Interesting little quilt...the red roses are as red in real life as they appear on the photo. I am thinking feathers for this one in the black squares. Thought that I might practice what I learned in Bethanne Nemesh' Feather Fiesta class, i.e. quilting a feather wreath in the middle and some sort of feather arrangement in the setting triangles. Maybe also a simple feather border in the black sashing to lighten this quilt up a bit. As learned in the class that would be all mainly freehand with minimal marking. While I practiced this earlier in the year, this would be the first time doing that on a 'real' quilt. Normally I would have stencilled the wreath in. Hmm...a bit hesitant, but think that this is the perfect little quilt to practice on. 

Not sure what colour thread to use though. I usually go for high contrast but not everybody likes this. Mind you, if I go through the effort of quilting some feathers I actually prefer to see them. Thinking of a grey thread which will read as very light on this. Decisions, decisions...

On my list for next week:

📌Make a sleeve for the show quilt

📌Finish the feather quilting in the rose quilt above

📌Baste another charity quilt

📌Design a Mini Wholecloth for another workshop or at the very least have started that process (have about 3 weeks to do this).

My cat blocks will have to wait for a moment as there is too much going on, however they will be back on the list next week so that they do not end up on the UFO pile again.

Linking up to Texas Quilt Gal for To Do Tuesday 20/9/22 to  see what other quilters are working on. Always dangerous though as there is so much inspiration out there...

Karin

Current Charity Quilt

Missed out on the To Do Tuesday post, but we had people over for a few days so I did not get much done. Will link up again later this week.

Made a start however on one of the charity quilts from the Orange Tree Quilters. Always a surprise...I don't open the packets of quilt, backing and wadding until I am ready to quilt them...always a surprise! This one is a Disappearing Four Patch quilt in green and purple tones. The blocks seem very old, so I ditched every single seam of this.

Then I did some ruler work on this in trying to keep the quilting to a minimum to keep it nice and soft.

While I liked it, I was not happy with the purple sashing. The whole thing looked kind of ...bla...! I don't think the fabric was 100% cotton so it bulged out a bit, even with just the ditching and the ruler work. Kept looking at it for a few days trying to work out what it needed. In the end I followed my own advice (just finished teaching a Freemotion-quilting class) and kept it simple with a wishbone design in coordinating thread.

That looks fantastic

It's funny how simple designs like that can really lift the mood of a quilt. Finished the quilt off with just some lines in the border to stabilise that a bit and it's done.

Now onto the next one!

Karin