Baptist Fan Design on a Sitdown Longarm

Have a few new quilts to quilt from the Orange Tree Quilters group. The first one I tackled is a scrappy quilt made out of Patience Corner blocks.

Looking at it I thought an allover design would be best as I did not feel like stitching in the ditch around all those blocks. Against all better judgement decided to do a Baptist Fan design. Have done this once before on a scrappy quilt...must have forgotten how finicky that can be.

This time though I used a combination of rulers rather than all of the Handiquilter Ring templates for the whole lot. I used my new Amanda Murphy 3in, 5in and 7in circles and then the Handiquilter 9in and 11in. Must say that the circles are definitely easier to hold and manage. The large rings are not that easy to hold stable and alignment is somewhat tricky.

A ruler set that does only Baptist Fans would be probably very useful, however I do not do this design often enough to really justify this.

Made a start...The key to this is really letting go of any kind of perfectionism...you just cannot achieve this. Not sure how difficult this is on a longarm frame machine, but I imagine similarly tricky. On the sit down machine, it is difficult not to slide over a little bit particularly when using those large rings. To counteract this, I frequently stop and adjust my hands, however it is almost impossible to avoid a bit of drifting. As I have done this before, I am not too worried about this as long as my alignment to the to the row underneath is approximately right. The lines itself vary slightly in width, depending how well I aligned the whole thing and whether I drifted over a bit. Again I don't worry too much about it as long as it looks somewhat consistent over the distance.

Sounds all very sloppy, but this is a very forgiving design and when it is all done the eye does not notice those inconsistencies.

Looking good so far. Definitely the right design for this. Stayed mainly on track but I think two of my fans are slightly smaller than the rest by about 1/8in. I do stand back after each row and have a bit of a look whether I stayed on track measuring the height and looking whether the starting points for each fan are lining up with the rows underneath. Will try to fudge the missing 1/8in a bit in the next few rows, however as the piecing is slightly out here and there as well, it will not be noticeable I think. By the way, the wiggly lines you see across the fans is my basting...I do baste my quilts after pinning so that I can get rid of the pins and concentrate on the quilting. It is more work, but I find it easier to quilt undisturbed by pins.

As always really enjoying pushing myself out of my comfort zone a bit, particularly as I am such a perfectionist at heart. 

Karin

New Listing in Etsy Shop

Always takes me about a day to put up a listing in Etsy, even though the process is pretty streamlined. Taking photos takes me the longest time and I always have to chose my timing quite carefully to get the light right. The editing of the photos takes even longer and I often discover things that I can do differently or a little bit better. 

I have put the little quilted nursery panel up for sale. The panel is from the Hello World collection designed by Cori Dantini for Blend Fabrics. To make it a bit bigger I attached an outer border using a fun dotty print that I had left over from a different project. Initially I thought that there was too much white, but turned out really cute once I had the green binding attached.

The small quilt measures 29-1/2in x 39-3/4in (75cm x 101cm)

Useful as a small drag along baby blanket, playtime floor mat or even as nursery wall decor.

Close up of the cute animal characters

I quilted an overall clamshell design over it...really love that for small baby quilts. It's easy to do and goes quite quickly. For this quilt I used a softly variegated yellow thread which goes really well.

Head over to my Etsy shop if you want to have a bit of a closer look.

Karin

A cute little quilt

I bought a couple of baby quilt panels when I went to the last quilt show. Apart from being really cute, I  find them really useful to practice designs on and they are also very handy when you need a baby quilt unexpectedly.

For this little panel I decided on the clamshell design. I used the Handiquilter Multi Clamshell tool for this.

The panel I used is smallish, so this time I marked a 4in grid over it only to realise after that I was going to have only half of a clamshell on each side of a row. So in reality I did not follow my grid at all but used the ruler to keep my design straight and in line with the clamshells underneath. For this purpose I extended the center line of the biggest clamshell right through the writing of the ruler as I needed that line to align the clamshell to the one underneath. Given this was such a small quilt, this worked very well and I more or less stayed on target. A little bit of fudging was needed here and there when some clamshells seemed to become slightly larger...in that case I just stopped in the center of the clamshell and slightly shifted the ruler over to elongate it a little bit. This worked well and there is no way that you could tell this unless you went ahead and measured.

This was incredibly quick to execute...took me just a few hours and it was done.

I would have liked to find an orange binding that matched the border in the quilt, however no such luck, so in the end I decided on the green binding which I think goes quite well.

Bit cloudy today, hence the photo got a bit dark.

Here is a close-up

The clamshells are 2in x 4in which seemed an excellent size for this project. Quilted with a yellow Aurifil 50/2 thread in top and bottom.

Too cute!

Karin

A Year of Stars with Natalia Bonner

How quick does the month go by...we had 1 week of lockdown in between which was somewhat unsettling. Had a few appointments booked in which all needed to be re-scheduled, however in the scheme of things not really a big deal (just felt like it when it happened). We have come out ok in the lockdown, unfortunately the same cannot be said for other parts of Australia.

I have lost the plot a bit in terms of this quiltalong as I already have finished the entire quilt (just need to attach the binding). Very hard to remember to post the individual blocks at the beginning of the month as I have moved on to other things. 

So, a year long quiltalong obviously does not work for me...too long and drawn out. I recently saw that Natalia is holding another 9 Patch quiltalong. You can find the information HERE. Anybody wanting to get into ruler work, I can highly recommend her workshops. Thoroughly enjoyed the first 9 Patch quiltalong. The quilt was easy to construct and the designs were really interesting.

Anyway, here is the Midnight Star block for the month of August for the Year of Stars quiltalong.

Happy quilting and stay safe everyone.

Karin

Update and New Project

Have not posted for a while because all sorts of things are going a bit haywire at the moment. My midarm has developed a fault and a time had been set for possible repairs...then we went into lockdown due to the Covid Delta strain. On top of that I developed a migraine which always takes me a few days to get over. Our lockdown is hopefully only for a week, but of course I had all sorts of appointments which all had to be cancelled and re-scheduled which left me somewhat 'out of sorts'. Structure, plans...all gone out of the window, not something I cope with very well at all.

So, all in all, a very unproductive week. In the end I started on a new pattern for my Etsy shop which should be quite fun to put together.

My test blocks

Even with that I made a mistake with my migraine brain. Cut out all my fabric needed for the pattern and then did several test blocks to work out how to best press the seams and check on accuracy, meaning I then had not enough to actually do all the blocks, then mis-cut some of the red fabric...the list goes on. You have to laugh sometimes. Today I have a clearer head and we are back on track. Found some more red fabric in my 'bitses box' which saved the pattern and in thinking this through realised that I can make do with what I have. Was able to knock off the Woven Ribbon blocks and am starting on the other block. Should come out nice and colourful. Even made some notes as I went along so the write up of the pattern should not take that long.

Hopefully things will start to settle down and our lockdown will finish next week so that I can get back on track.

Karin

Bits and Pieces

Finally finished the Charity quilt. Just now have the binding to go on that one and another one. Had some machine issues so this was a bit of 'stop and go'.

Did a simple wavy feather border which looks quite nice. 

When I went to the dealer the other day, they had Amanda Murphy rulers in the shop. Could not believe my luck as I have been looking at them for some time, but could find nowhere in Australia where I could buy them. I was after her circle ruler set. I have a Handiquilter circle ruler that I got last year via the Internet however that one is rather large measuring about 10 1/2in x 4in. It has a number of circles in there which I thought was great, however it is awkward to hold on a sitdown machine when doing just one size circle in a row. Ever since then I have been on the lookout for something different. When I saw a video of Amanda Murphy demonstrating her circles, I thought that that would be easier as the circles come in individual sizes.

So took them for a spin the last two days

These rulers have a non-slip backing and are very easy to hold. Apart from a number of alignment lines they also have the finished circle drawn on in four directions. When doing a row of circles I found this particularly useful as it helps to align them without much effort as you can see your stitched circle overlapped by the drawn one on one side and another drawn circle on the other side that you can line up with the space to be filled. I stitched a row of different sized circles a number of times on these samples, each in their measurements (which you probably would not do as it needs to fit exactly) and found it very accurate.

The only drawback of these circles is that you need to be able to lift your presser foot to get in there and if you are planning to use two different sizes in a row you would need to tie off to get out of them. I was aware of that and it is not an issue for me, as I wanted them mainly to do rows of circles in sashings and the outside of course is hassle free to use like any other ruler. Did some arcs, overlapping designs, orange peel designs and some scallops. Easy peasy...

Karin

A Year of Stars with Natalia Bonner - Spider Star

And another month has gone by...

This is the Spider Star all dressed up

Head over to Piece N Quilt if you want to find out more about this monthly quiltalong.

Karin