Thread Basket

Do you waste a lot of time picking pieces of thread and lint off of your fabric – only to somehow find it back on the fabric a few minutes later?  This was my story.   😦

Threadcatchers that hang near your machine are great, but I was gathering these threads at the sewing machine – and at the cutting board, the ironing board, and the design wall!  Last week I had a small epiphany and decided that a little bag, lined with batting, would do the trick, especially if I pinned it directly to me!  This way, it’s always handy – whether I’m at the sewing machine, the cutting board, or the ironing board.  The threads cling to the batting where they wait till I’m ready to empty the basket.  I can easily scoop out a thread ball and toss it into my garbage pail.  I don’t have to worry about cleaning out the basket thoroughly – those threads aren’t going anywhere.

Here is a photo of me wearing my thread basket. I’m using a 24 year old diaper pin, but I’m sure there are cuter pins out there.

One thing I will change if I make another will be to use flannel lining rather than batting.  The batting is a bit bulky and almost too ‘sticky’.

Also, I have a vague memory that I may have seen something like this at a quilt retreat a few years ago.  In which case, why didn’t I make one sooner!  😦  I’ve been using it for a week now, and it’s working great.  If I forget to pin it on when I enter my sewing room, I miss it right away.

An effort to make Pot Holder Loops – maybe a tutorial

I like potholders with loops because they can become kitchen decoration as well as a useful kitchen tool.  Because I’m a major worrier, I don’t like those little plastic circles that you can stitch onto the potholder.  The stitching could come loose and the potholder could fall onto a hot surface!  So I’ve been thinking hard about how to stitch a loop using the binding itself.  Here is my first effort.

[Later]  I took a lot of photos, and captioned all of them with instructions.  1. The captions disappeared.  2. I don’t like my technique for making potholder loops.  And 3. I don’t have the energy or interest to recreate all of those captions.  So I’m going to add a few of the photos, and most of you will be able to figure out the general idea.  I’m already on my third effort to create an elegant pot holder loop, so I will try this tutorial again in the future.  But for now:

 

Calling it done.  🙂

 

Around the World Blog Hop

I like the asymmetry of this design combined with the simplicity of the colors.

I was very kindly invited by my friend and fellow blogger, Claire at KnitnKwilt, to participate in a blog hop.  Claire has a great blog covering a variety of topics all of which are interesting to me – quilting, design, books, and Portland.  All good things so please check out her blog!  In turn, I’ve invited Debbie Scroggy, local long-arm genious to share her blog, AllQuiltedLLC.  Debbie is an amazing designer and has won awards for her long-arm quilting right out of the gate.  She also did the quilting of my quilt, Zen Umbrellas.

This is my first blog hop but apparently the key is a series of questions that everyone answers.  You can read back through the blogs and see a wealth of responses on how we feel about our art.  The following are my responses to the questions.

1. What am I working on? Right now I’m working on a red & white baby quilt for my niece Taylor who is expecting in January 2015. I’ve wanted to design a quilt using half square triangles to make asymmetrical chevrons, and I’ve wanted to make a red & white quilt, so the two got merged in a baby quilt. Here is a photo of the layout I chose – along with some that I considered.

I like the asymmetry of this design combined with the simplicity of the colors.

Pinwheels, or stars depending on your perspective. This one was definitely too ‘busy’ for me.

I’m also working on the Aviatrix Medallion quilt-a-long from Elizabeth Hartman. I’m on the final border, but I want to expand it to queen size so I’ll be working on it a while longer. Here is the last photo I took of that quilt showing border 5 (the next to last border) laid out.

Poor quality Instagram photo,#aviatrixmedallion, but you get the idea.

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre? I don’t know that it does differ. What I do know is that I’ve got a lot to learn about color. I struggle with getting enough variation in my fabric selections. I take chances on color combinations that I later regret. But I like taking chances and failing more than going a safe route that doesn’t break any new ground for me.

3. Why do I create what I do? I’ve been quilting for over 25 years, but only sporadically. A few years ago, I knew I needed more creativity in my life and it didn’t take long to decide on quilting as my medium. Since then I’ve been working very hard at quilting. I now have what my husband calls my ‘woman cave’ and others might call a ‘sewing studio’. I spend a lot of time in there. The challenge is going to be fitting my husband into my quilting life! I also feel this sense of urgency to make quilts for each of my children and for my nieces and nephews. So much to do!

4. How does my creative process work? Hmmm. Mostly I look at photos of quilts and see things that I admire. I borrow magazines from the quilt guild and books from the library. This all gels in my brain till something bubbles to the surface that I just have to try. I haven’t historically followed a particular designer or pattern – I prefer to design something that I can call my own. The current Aviatrix Medallion quilt is an exception.  Folks following the quilt-a-long can post their work on Instagram, and it’s been fun to see the effect of the various color selections.

Here is an example of my creative technique: In June 2012, I had started to reconnect to quilting, and I had pieced a mostly traditional quilt for my son. I was seeing quilt patterns everywhere. My youngest daughter and I were in DC being tourists, and we went to the Hirschhorn, the Corcoran, and the Smithsonian Museum of Modern Art among many other wonderful places. I took lots of photos of things I found inspiring. The following painting in particular has stayed in my mind, and recently I knew that it would develop into a quilt in the very near future. I’ll have to look up the artist. Does anyone know who painted it?

I remember this painting to be a little different than this photo, so maybe my brain had already started to redesign it into a quilt! But isn’t it cool!

Thanks for reading my words, looking at my photos, and please visit Claire and Debby!

Making the simple more difficult – a tea cozy case study

For a recent Michael Miller challenge, I made a tea cozy. I figured this would be cool as who else would make a tea cozy! (Someone did. And hers might, just might, have been nicer than mine.)  But I digress. This is a little post to show you how I made my tea cozy.

I measured my tea pot.  I did some calculations.  I thought long and hard about how to create the dome shape I was looking for.  I think my first thought would have sewn up as a cone.  Here is a photo of my pattern.

I cut 8 petals of fabric for the outside and 8 petals for the lining. The cozy ends up being reversible.

Here is the layout I used for the outside.

I cut 16 smaller petals out of a thermal lining material found with the interfacing at a fabric store.  I didn’t buy the one with the metal insulating layer because I was worried about how it would quilt.  I spray basted (505 spray) a lining petal to the wrong side of each petal, both the inside set and the outside set.  Then I sewed the set of 8 inner petals together along the long seam.  I left the final seam open.  Separately, I sewed the set of 8 outer petals together along the long seam.  This is about the time it became clear to me that I’d created a really difficult way to make a tea cozy.

I nested the inner layer against the outer layer, mostly matching up an inner petal against an outer petal, and I hand basted densely.  It looked like the photo below when I was about half way through basting.

At this point, the inner petals are nested against the outer petals and some petals have been basted.

I left the one side open so that I could machine quilt the two layers together.  That looked like the following photo.

The machine quilting went fairly well despite the petals wanting to curl in. I didn’t quilt right up to the unfinished edge as I would need to fold this edge under before sewing the final seam.

To sew the two edges together, I used a machine to sew a seam on one side and then flipped it over and carefully tucked the edges under on the other side and then hand-stitched that side together.  I forgot to take a photo as I was concentrating too much on making it work.  My hand sewn seam is not a consistent width as the petals weren’t perfectly lined up, but all in all it came out pretty well.  It wasn’t that difficult to do some final machine quilting over the last seam.  Here is the finished project, with the tea pot I measured in the background:

I particularly like this view. Two petals were placed next to one another on the fabric and then cut out. They were able to maintain the integrity of the flower pattern in the fabric.

If you actually try to make this (and please let me know if you do because I want to meet someone as crazy as me!) you’ll find that there is a round hole at the top about the size of a nickel.  I made two small loops, hand tacked them down to the edges of the hole, then hand appliqued a small circle over the top to hide the edges of the loop.  One tip is to sew both the inside and the outside loops to the cozy before you do either the inside or the outside appliqued circle.  I had to do some un-sewing because of that little mistake.  Of course you can see that there is binding around the bottom edge.  No special trick needed for that.

One of the great things about this design is that it is fully reversible.  There are no rough edges anywhere and all of the polyester-type insulation is fully covered by cotton fabric.  There was something about having uncovered poly next to my steaming tea that bothered me.

I’m very content with my new tea cozy.  🙂  Here is a final photo showing the fully reversible nature of the cozy.

FINAL NOTE:  Due to the dome style of this cozy, my children, the youngest of whom is 17, have taken to wearing the tea cozy around the house as a hat.

Local snowstorm leads to massive amounts of sewing

I’ve had a fabulous time the last four days! We’ve been encouraged by the city to not drive unless necessary – and I have complied. I haven’t even left the house.  I have sewed, and sewed, and sewed. I work full time so I usually have to fit my sewing into the weekends. The snow storm has allowed me to stay tucked contentedly into my sewing room, and I’ve finished several projects. I think there has probably been a lot of sewing all over Portland during the last few days, and I’m looking forward to seeing what has been created. Now that I think about it, snowstorms have a reputation of creating other things as well… little things that take nine months to develop… but not what this blog is about.  🙂

Anyway, here is my Cafe Wall Illusion quilt. I had the top pieced six months ago, but over the last few days I quilted it and applied the binding. The binding I decided on was complicated – and further complicated by the fact that I wanted the front and the back of the binding to be different. This binding took FOREVER. Looking back, I don’t know if I would have attempted it without the storm giving me lots of time.

Cafe Wall Illusion quilt – The horizontal lines in this quilt are parallel to one another. All of the squares, except for those in the binding, are the same size. The illusion is that the squares get smaller toward one end of each row. How cool is that!

 

This is the back of Cafe Wall Illusion. If you look carefully at the top you can see I added a hanging sleeve. I meant for the sleeve to line up with the cross design, but when I laid it out I must have had the quilt upside down. By the time I noticed the error, there was no way I was ripping it out and starting over to get it right. I think I’ll continue to be amused by this particular error.

This is a closeup of the “Complicated Binding”. The front mirrors the alternating dark and light blocks found on the front, but the back of the binding is solid. I did this because the backing fabric isn’t actually black and white, but an off-white. I thought the white-white of the blocks on the front would clash with the off-white found on the back. So I came up with this design solution.

 

Zen Umbrellas

A rough layout on the design wall. I will need more blocks.

This is a new design I’ve been working on.  It will be a twin size bed quilt for my niece, Ellie.

Here are the things I’ve learned from this effort:

1)  I love working with flannel.

2)  Flannel from Joann’s has washed up wonderfully and feels thick and soft.  (They had a fabulous flannel sale on Black Friday – 75% off!  I got a lot of fabric for $1.75/yard.  Just sayin’.)

3)  I like designs with only a few different fabrics so I should have bought more yardage of each fabric in order to make a twin size quilt.

4)  It’s more time consuming to cut out a quilt with wavy lines than one with straight lines.

I will have a steep curve learning to post ‘how-to’ photos, but here goes.

Make ‘banners’ with alternative fabrics. The squares are sewn together with wavy black strips in between.

Cut out large triangles with like fabrics on opposite ‘sides’ of the triangle.

Overlap the triangles over another black strip. My strips are about 2 inches wide. The triangle overlaps it about 1/2 inch. The process of sewing the original squares and strips together to make the ‘banner’ is similar to this.

Cut a wavy line through the two layers of triangle and black strip. I think I’ll try my next version of this pattern with less wavy-ness.

This is what it looks like once the wavy cut has been made. Carefully fold over so that ‘hills and hollows’ match and sew 1/4 seam.

Square up the blocks. Some of my blocks are significantly bigger than others and I’ll be figuring out how to add inches so that I can make same size squares.