Slow Sunday Stitching

Welcome to the weekly hand stitching party!

We are in full summer mode here, with long sultry evenings and lots of time for stitching in full light.
My friend Barb and I took a road trip to Trout Creek to visit our friend Deanna and Barb's sister Louise. Slow stitching will be on the agenda today for sure. Here is a photo of Deanna last evening working on some hand stitched hexies.

These are Barb's hands trying to figure out how to use this cute little bird shaped needle threader. She seemed to like it and got it working well.

I was finishing up a mini quilt that I just started yesterday. I was supposed to be working on my Scrap Dance quilt but got distracted by the scraps and found myself making a mini quilt (more about that later in the week).

Here's a typical label that I make, just a square folded in half, tucked in the bottom corner on the back of the quilt, stitched across the diagonal edge and then the binding is stitched down on top of the label. 
Today we will be in Deanna's gazebo working on our hand stitching projects and I'll finish up this miniature quilt. I'll show more about our Slow Sunday Stitching next Sunday. 

What are you stitching today? Link up your blog post below and share your progress with us.


   

    An InLinkz Link-up
   

Quilt Label

I finished my version of Bonnie Hunter's Orca Bay mystery last month. But a quilt isn't really finished until it has a label, right?!?

Inspired by a beautiful label I saw on the Votes For Women blog using selvages, I made a label with some of my quilt's fabric selvages. I just took a piece of fabric, sewed selvages on all 4 sides, turned the edges under and appliqued it to the quilt back.

Here you can see the scrappy backing I made for this quilt using up the leftover blocks and fabrics. And the new label in the corner announces that the quilt is now truly finished! 
So now I can mark is down on the UFO list on my right side bar as DONE!

Bowties Finish

In 1997 (yep...14 years ago!)  I participated in a 6" bowtie block swap. Just look at my cute little 5 year old son helping me put the blocks together!
Then I went in search of the perfect sashing fabric. When I found the sashing, I put the project in the closet and let it age perfectly, until the time was right!

This year I got the bug to make bowtie blocks again. I remembered that I had some bowties aging somewhere, and went in search of the blocks. When I found them, I quickly sewed them together and sent the quilt top over to the senior's centre for hand quilting.
Here are some of the ladies working on my quilt. I quilted with the ladies one day and worked on the block on the bottom left, because that's where the empty seat was!
I had bought some Warm and White batting because there was a lot of white in the quilt, and this batting package said there was no glue or resin, which I thought would be good for hand quilting. This was NOT good for hand quilting...in fact, it was terrible. I could barely get my needle into it. Even though I LOVE Warm and Natural and use if all the time for machine quilting, I won't buy the Warm and White again.


We tried that 1/4" quilters masking tape to avoid drawing pencil lines on the white fabric, but that drove me crazy...my thread kept getting stuck on the tape. Back to the pencil and ruler!

This was a perfect compromise for me...I got to enjoy some of the hand quilting, but the group finished most of the work for me, so that the quilt could be finished in record time...14 years!

Here is a bad photo of the finished quilt. I've been waiting for some sun to get a better photo, but we haven't seen the sun for a long time!

















And how do we know a quilt is truly "finished"?!?!?








It has a label!

Finished Stashbuster Quilt

This is the photo of my finished Stashbuster quilt.

I pieced the blocks together in July - click here to read more about that. It was a quick and fun project to make and would be perfect if you were looking for an easy Christmas gift to make! (If you need to get the pattern for this quilt - click here.)

For the machine quilting, I had planned to try an allover "E" design like Paula did in one of her quilts - click here.  But when it came the moment to put the quilt under the needle, this is what happened!
In Diane Gaudynski's reference book, she calls this design "bouncing bananas" and whereas she seems to join the banana ends and creates a very tight, organized looking design, these banana bunches are definately out of control! But very fun to quilt!

Then I wanted to make a bias binding using my 2 remaining co-ordinating fat quarters and consulted this website to remind me how to do this since it had been a while (I always make a double fold binding).  This is what it was looking like, but somehow (and I'm sure it's magic) it turned into a lovely binding.

Then I tried to use Bonnie's method of joining the ends and that's when the magic ended, which resulted in this binding mess...ooops!

And what's on the back... the leftover pieces that didn't get used on the front! All the leaves are falling from our trees this week, and I couldn't resist a photo op in the backyard!



Did you notice the label in the bottom corner?
That means the quilt is truly "finished"!

I liked this quilt so much that I asked the Buttonberry girls if I could teach this quilt pattern at the senior's centre and they generously agreed to let me do this.

Here are the ladies with their projects:

This was the perfect beginner's project and they made such a great job on each quilt. Many of these new quilters had to overcome personal and/or health challenges to be in this class and I was so inspired by their efforts. Thank you again to Emma and Lisa over at Buttonberry for the use of this fun pattern!

A Finish!

I finally have a finish to announce! These are relatively rare for me, since I do love starting quilts more than finishing them. But I must say how much I enjoyed working on this quilt. You can read about the beginning of it here and although I didn't enjoy piecing the blocks at first, I learned the tricks as I went along, achieved nicer looking blocks and started having fun. One of the trickier things about this pattern is which way the seams should be pressed to get a flat block, and then quilting in the ditches, which always switch direction half way along. Don't know if you can see it in this close up block, but again, once I got used to this, the quilting was easier. 

It was also fun deciding where to quilt, sorting out which quilting lines I like the look of, which ones I didn't like and needed to unstitch, and when is there "enough" quilting. 

I tried to control my tendency to "overquilt" and here you 

can see the quilting from the back. 

And when I say "finished" I really mean completely done...l

abel and all!! Woohoo!

I really want to open up one of my other John Flynn kits and start piecing, but I am a little motivated today to get a

 couple of other UFO's finished, and clear off my work table. We'll see how long the self discipline lasts!

Quilt Labels

The stashbuster topic of the week is quilt labels. I label all my quilts and don't consider them "finished" until that is done. Sometimes, if the quilt is really small, or if I am really busy and know that I won't have a chance (or the interest) to make a "proper" label, I just write on the back of the quilt with a Pigma pen like this label on the left.

I do prefer to have a "proper" label on all my quilts and it is my goal to make one for each quilt. The photo on the right shows the way I most often make my labels. I fold a square of light coloured fabric on the diagonal, write the quilt name, my name and the year on the triangle of fabric, and pin it to the bottom corner before I sew down the binding. Then I hand stitch the diagonal fold and stitch the label right into the binding.

Sometimes if the quilt is going to be submitted to a challenge or show, or if I really like the quilt and want to make the extra effort, I make a label to applique on the back of the quilt like the one on the left.

But my favorite method is a photo transfer label. You can see a label I made for a photo transfer quilt that I wrote about last month, by clicking here.

I have made a lap size quilt for my 11 nieces and nephews. For those quilt labels I made a transfer of a photo of myself and the baby/child and appliqued it to the back of the quilt. My sister once told me that when my niece Ellen was a preschooler, every night at bedtime she would look at the photo transfer on her quilt's label and say "Goodnight Aunt Kathy". I loved that story and have made the same kind of label ever since! Here is the one on the back of my nephew Matthew's flannel dog quilt.