Blogger's Quilt Festival

Well, better late than never... I have been so preoccupied with my scrap reduction obsession that I nearly missed this.

I am going to enter my Dresden Plate table runner in the Mini Quilts category. Lots of you would already have seen this, but the web is a huge place, so many of you would not have. Anyway, this little quilt evolved out of an idea to use up some leftovers from a very pretty Jelly Roll. I always wanted to make a Dresden Plate, so off I went, thinking this would be a 'quick fix' project. Needless to say, it was not...while not difficult, I had no idea how finicky this little project was to become. However, it got finished and turned out very pretty, I think, well worth the effort.

 Here it is

Some stats:

Size: 21.5"x 47"
Fabric: Moda Jelly Roll Chateau Rouge, French General
Quilting: Outline quilted around the Dresden Plate and some FMQ on the inside of the plate to emphasize the transition from dark to light fabric.

Check out the entries in the Festival HERE. As always, there are some gorgeous entries and choosing will be near to impossible. Voting starts on May 24th

Karin

Scrap Happy

I am in my own little world at the moment...still continuing on my scrap reduction mission. Even using up many of my filled bobbins in an attempt to free up a few more bobbins (can't remember what I used taupe thread for but had several bobbins filled with this, so just started piecing with it). I also did do a few more of my spiderweb blocks and while sorting through the endless supply of strips and cut offs, I stumbled across the chicken print. This is about 7 years old...I have made one major quilt out of this, fussy cutting the individual chicken and setting them into a Churn Dash block. After that I made also a table runner...in the end I was left with all these oddly shaped cut offs.

Could not resist and cut the whole lot into squares, then dug deep and found some leftover pieces of the chicken wire fabric, then some left over green squares from above quilt and a few more coordinating prints and so designed this very simple quilt. I know "country" is not that popular at the moment, but I just love it (hence most of my fabric has some sort of country theme).

Apart from the border fabric, all scraps

Had a lot of fun stitching this together while watching some TV...so relaxing! Only took a couple of days, and finished it today. The quilt is small, measuring only about 38"x 45". Finally used up that sunflower print that I once bought on impulse. Very, very bright! Not sure exactly what I will do with this, however know exactly how I am going to quilt it. I send away for a Fine Line Quilter's ruler from Accents in Design that you can FMQ with - want to try this out a bit. Saw this over at Amy's Free Motion Quilting Adventures and thought this was a great tool to have to do some grid work (maybe even stitch-in-the-ditch?).

Linking up to Anything Goes Linky Party at Stitch by Stitch.

Karin

Cheryl's Quilt - Finished!

I am so happy to announce that Cheryl's quilt is finally finished (read the story of this quilt HERE). It's only been about a year... Feel like the quilt whisperer...after some agonizing when first confronted with her quilt, which was pretty much ruined, I bit the bullet and undid most of it. This involved

• taking the entire quilt apart - that was a huge job!
• taking all of the borders of and getting rid of one border
• cutting some width of the borders to straighten them
• undoing the center of the quilt top and re-sewing it
• squaring off the quilt top
• re- joining the strips of the inner border
• reinforcing some of the seams in the quilt and re-sewing some seams altogether
• substituting one strip of the outer border with a new piece (luckily Cheryl had some leftover fabric) to get rid of a tear
• blocking the quilt and managing to get 1/4inch in width on top and bottom
• sewing and attaching a new binding.

This is what it looked like before

Sorry, the photo is not that great. The quilt had puckers galore, some tears, the quilting design was just awful and the stitching quite bad...it just looked really bad.

The quilting design that was used

 The end result of the rejuvenation

Texture of the quilting

The finished quilt

Luckily, Cheryl had given me complete artistic license to do what I wanted with it. She did not care much for this quilt...not entirely sure whether this was true as the fabric was just beautiful and of really high quality (except for the white...I think that must have been an add-on as it behaved entirely different when stitching over it). I felt it was a pity...I actually really liked this quilt and the colours she had chosen. However, let me tell you, cutting into this quilt did not feel good at all...I had visions of completely stuffing it up and some anxiety around whether this would turn out at all and the thought that this was not my quilt always hung over me (as I do on occasions make those inexplicable mistakes that render projects UFOs...in the department of "oops that did not work!").

Anyway this turned out really nice. The dense quilting is hiding most of the imperfections as the eye is drawn to the texture rather than the detail. Learned heaps from it and actually was reminded of some fundamentals in quilting. The one thing that Cheryl did very well was the outer border. She cut this on the lengthwise grain which is absolutely correct. When I first started quilting I did that a couple of times as well, however than got a bit more lazy and started cutting it on the crosswise grain. Sewing the binding onto this quilt, Cheryl's outer border was absolutely flat and beautiful to sew and it reminded me to maybe pay a bit more attention to my work and starting to cut the borders on the lengthwise grain again...it made such a difference.

Overall, it turned out pretty straight...I was quite surprised by that as the middle continued to remain a bit bulged out. When I was blocking it I had a variance of about 1/2inch on top and bottom, but managed to stretch it down to about 1/4inch. Also was a good exercise in challenging that perfectionism of mine. When I attached the binding, I had to accept that this would not be entirely straight, so stopped fussing and just attached the binding and I must say, this turned out absolutely beautiful...better than on some of my other quilts where I fussed over the straightness.

Let's just hope that she will like it and more importantly, use it.

Karin

Cheryl's quilt - Update

Well, my idea of using my Sensormatic FMQ foot was an epic fail. Had I thought about it a bit more, it would have been obvious that this was not the right foot to use. Had a bit of a 'duh' moment ...

Anyway I started off and the foot was gliding over the quilt until it hit the first major intersection where several seams meet. Could not negotiate this, so I altered the pivot height to 1 and then to 2...more mucking around. Finally I set it to 3 to get over all those humps and bumps, but then the thread started to break a couple of times. When I thought about it, this made sense...this foot does not raise and lower with every stitch when going fast and while going over an even surface this is fine, but with Cheryl's quilt there were issues of bulk at the intersections and also some bulging out over certain areas...this was not going to work with this foot.  As I lowered the speed to avoid the thread breaking, it started pushing the fabric too much for my liking. Not sure whether these problems were just due to this quilt or whether this is a problem in general. 

After one row of pain, I switched over to the Dynamic FMQ foot and off I went. I quilted half the quilt in 5 hours...no thread breakages and no issues with the bulk. I must say, stippling remains one of my favourite designs. I know that it probably is a bit boring but for this quilt I was really grateful that I chose this design.  I never noticed this before but stippling is the design to go to when you want to quilt out some problems. I was able to adjust my meander as I needed to get rid of some bulk, turning in the opposite direction to pull the fabric down a bit, then going for some sharp turns to even it out a bit. Or, on occasions when I could see some suspicious fullness coming up, I just made my meanders a bit bigger and more generous...I was very impressed with how well this worked. I quilted the top fairly densely to cover the seams, as Cheryl had sewn the seams with a wider stitch which had become precariously loose in some parts.  Also managed to go over some holes, so this baby is not going to come undone.

Action!

About 1/2inch scale meander

Several hours later

Linking up to Let's Bee Social Over at Lorna's Sew Fresh Quilts

Karin

Cheryl's Quilt

Remember Cheryl's quilt? You can read about it HERE . This goes back to last year...bit of a disaster.

I spent quite some time undoing it and then analyzing what the problem might be. Apart from the shocking longarm job for which Cheryl unfortunately paid good money, there were several problems with straightness and how she put it together. I ended up taking the borders off, re-doing the center seam, reinforcing some wonky seams, eliminating one border, fixing up some holes and sewing it back together again. See HERE for a before and after shot.  Unfortunately last year I had to stop at this point due to a health issue and after that other projects somewhat overtook this quilt.


So I finally knuckled down to pin baste Cheryl's quilt ready for quilting this morning.

Was a bit nervous about this as the quilt is not entirely straight and bulges out in the middle a bit...however this turned out well and it is laying very nice and flat

 
So, on with the show...I am ready to FMQ this. Initially I thought I would FMQ some motifs or similar, however looking at it now and re-evaluating, I decided to meander all over it. The reason for this is that I actually only got about an inch and half on two of the sides, so heavy quilting is probably not a good idea as I cannot predict with certainty how much it will shrink (and the batting is wool which has a bit of puff to it).

I am going to use my Sensormatic FMQ foot for this...wanted to have a bit of a play with this foot for a while

It is very unobtrusive and open in the front, so visibility is very good. On the Pfaff 4.2 (as on the Pfaff 4.0) you have a special Sensormatic FMQ setting for this (as opposed to the Springloaded setting). Have not used this that much..at low speed this foot will raise and lower with each stitch to hold the fabric on the stitch plate. At higher speed, this foot starts gliding over the surface of your quilt as you gather speed...so it is ideal to use for designs where you need to have a bit more speed. With more speed of course, you need to be wary to stay in control of your stitching, so this should be interesting to give this a workout. Had a bit of a play this afternoon...good fun.

I am on a mission to finish this by next week...will then need to hunt around for some binding though as Cheryl had cut her binding on the long grain which would have amplified the bulging out of the quilt, so I don't really want to re-attach this.

Anyway, that's all from me today. Linking up to Anything Goes Linky Party at Stitch by Stitch

Karin

Val's Quilting Sudio

There is always one more Linky Party to join in

I found Val's Quilting Studio recently where you are invited to link up your old sewing/quilting posts.
There is a theme list on the side bar for the month of May. This week the theme is cats and Charity quilts and I have just the post to link up with.

Head over to Val's Quilting Studio to check it out.

Karin