Design Wall Monday Bow Ties

The sign up for Barb's block swap is coming up soon, and the (self imposed) pressure is on to sew up the blocks from last year's swap. Deadlines are good motivators for me. Here are the bow ties from last year on the design wall.
Next will be a 1" or 2" muslin border followed by a border of mini bow ties.

Here are a few blocks that I have sewn so far and a stack of pieces cut and ready to sew. The block on the bottom left is one of the swap blocks from last year. 
And see those cute little blue scissors and matching tape measure that Julie sent to me for participating in the Log Cabin Lunatics link up? I am putting them to good use!

To see more design wall postings, hop over to Patchwork Times.

Slow Sunday Stitching

Welcome to Slow Sunday Stitching where we celebrate the art of creating hand stitched works of art. 

To celebrate our Slow Sunday theme, I have a video to share with you today to remind us to enjoy every minute of every precious day!




I have been working on my next Life Is Beautiful block and have made progress on the multitude of circles in this block. Today I will be outlining the creature (is it a ladybug?) and stitching the words. This is block 27 of 32 applique blocks, so I am starting to see the finish line on this step of the project (you can see the first 13 applique blocks on the design wall here).
What are you hand stitching today? We love to see your project and encourage you on your slow stitching journey. Link up your blog post below...

   

    An InLinkz Link-up
   

Scrappy Saturday

The August colour for the Rainbow Scrap challenge is light purple, otherwise known as lilac or mauve or lavender. It's not a colour I know very well, but I do happen to have a few scraps to work with. I started out this month making 2 more scrappy sprout blocks, for a total of 14 blocks.

And here is the garden of sprouts that is growing in my sewing room. They look way better than plants I've grown this year. I totally gave up on my garden this year, so am enjoying my fabric sprouts instead. No rabbits will eat them, no weeds will choke them, and no drought will kill them!
If you would like to sew your own garden, the block pattern is free over at TraceyJay Quilts.
To see more Rainbow Scrap Challenge projects, hop over to SoScrappy.

It's Friday!

Friday is Circa 2016 day around here, when I post the blocks I've made from the mostly recently released pattern. Last week was an interesting block called "formal garden". This pattern is new to me, and is made from 8 HSTs and a square. These blocks look like a fan to me ... or maybe it's just the hot weather that has me obsessing about fans!?!
To see this week's pattern, hop over to Temecula Quilts.

Indian Orange Peel Update

Long time readers of my blog will probably remember the IOP project from 2010. It has been severely neglected even though it has been hanging on my secondary design wall for years. The pattern is by Karen K Stone and is by far the most challenging project I have ever tackled. 
You can read about the drama here.
When I was visiting my friend Louise last week (BTW I have two wonderful quilty friends named Louise... perhaps I should change my name to Thelma!) she was finishing her Indian Orange Peel quilt.
Yes... Louise is finishing her IOP! Here she is hand stitching the binding, with her sister, who is the infamous Barbara. 
Barb and I both have versions of the IOP in production because we took the same class together all those years ago. Barb won't even talk about how her quilt is coming along, or where it might even be stored! I think she's blocked it from her conscious awareness as a trauma response!

Here is Louise's almost finished Indian Orange Peel quilt. I just love this quilt! She has done an incredible job of colour and value placement. 
I wonder if she would notice if I swapped my block parts with her finished version?!?
Or I could just force myself to work on mine?!?

Okay okay! 

Here is my poor old dusty Indian Orange Peel on my secondary design wall, with pieces falling onto the floor. I sat and forced myself to stare at it a long time. Poor thing! 
First I will gather up the pieces that fell on the floor and then figure out what my next steps are going to be to make progress once again.
A big thank you to Louise for the inspiration to begin again!

Clarissa Block Formations

Clarissa is my new leader-ender hourglass project initiated by Bonnie Hunter's annual challenge. 
First of all, blog reader Vicki told me that you can buy a real pattern for this quilt over at Hoopla. I don't know what the measurements actually are for this pattern, and I am making up my own based on my math (which we all know is seriously flawed, but in a really creative way!)
When I saw the Clarissa quilt, I only took 4 close up shots of the blocks.  Why I didn't take a photo of every single block, I don't know. I'm sure it had something to do with not wanting people to think I am crazy. Which I am!

This week I really studied my photos and the block formations in order to learn what is was that I liked about her block designs. This is what I see:

-each block is made up of 36 hourglass units. 

Clarissa Quilt Block #1

-at the centre of every block is a four patch unit, and some of the centre blocks have a very pronounced pinwheel which is made by altering the value of the fabrics in the hourglass units.


-every once and a while she pops in a high contrast wild fabric, like this polka dot navy fabric.

Clarissa Quilt Block #2

-some of the blocks have definite colour rounds. Here you can see a blue round and a pink round. Also she randomly throws in a different colour, like a white triangle where a pink should be.

Clarissa Quilt Block #3

-the position of the hourglass blocks is usually alternated every other block on every round. You can see it clearly on the middle round where every other block has the dark fabric up/down or left/right. 

-when using a patterned directional fabric (like the striped fabric) she made sure that it went every which way.

Clarissa Quilt Block #4

-she sometimes used similar colours/value and yet made it totally scrappy. Look at the outside round and how many different fabrics there are!

Are you sewing a Clarissa block and/or quilt? Many people commented and emailed that they would like to experiment with this block/quilt design. You will have to either purchase the pattern or make up your own, since due to possible copyright infringement it would not be wise of me to post instructions on how to make this quilt.
If there are enough people making this pattern, I will host an occasional link up so we can see the progress and encourage each other. Let me know!

August UFO

July's UFO saw a bit of progress last month, but it is definitely not close to being finished. However it was not for lack of effort! The seam join problem was fixed, and then I machine quilted the right side border and attached it to the quilt. This is how it looked at the end of the month. Close, but no cigar! So I'm putting it away again for a bit of a break and bringing back the UFO from May called Triangle Stars.
I started this quilt two years ago, and a lot of progress was made on it in May when it finally became a quilt top. It was too big of a goal to finish the top and the quilting all in one month. Now it is the UFO goal for August. 

Here is the work pile - the quilt top, the white batting, and the white backing. I don't think I've ever made a quilt with this much white.
I purchased a white batting because my regular warm and natural beige batting showed through and gave the quilt top a beige tinge. The backing is just plain white yardage pieced together. Getting these three items to this point is already a major accomplishment!

The pin basting is the next step in preparing for the machine quilting. Lots of people really detest this step, but I don't mind it. I put on some great music and it goes really fast using the Kwik Klip tool.
To see more UFO goals for August hop over to One Monthly Goal link up.

Design Wall Monday

Last summer Barb hosted a bow tie block swap and I participated in the Civil War group. The 82 blocks I received are wonderful and right now I am highly motivated to finish my Civil War bow tie quilt. Why now you ask?!? 
Because Barb is going to be hosting another block swap in August, and I want to finish up the project from last year's swap so that I can be a guilt-free participant this year! 
I went totally scrappy with the layout, pulling the blocks randomly from the pile and sewing each block to the next one in the pile.
(see the blocks I made for the swap here). 
This is a bad photo of the start of the layout on the design wall. Going random does not mean that the colours will be evenly distributed, so there are too many yellow/golds in the upper right quadrant.
I'm not going to sew it that way of course... some modifications are going to be made to this "random" layout right away!
And also I have an idea for a fun border that I want to make. Last year Sharon posted a photo of her bow tie quilt (see it here) and when I saw it, I knew that I would try the same design. I really liked the idea of making smaller bow tie blocks for a border. 
The block swap bow ties are 4", which means the border bow ties will be half size at 2". And it just so happens that an anonymous "angel swapper" sent along two mini blocks last year, so I have two to start and only need to make about 80 of those.
To see more design wall postings, hop over to Patchwork Times.

Slow Sunday Stitching

We are in the midst of the lazy hazy days of summer here. It is too hot to go outside midday, and some nights it is too hot to sleep without air conditioning.  The weather forces us to move more slowly and to take life at a slower pace. It is also too hot to do any hand quilting under a big heavy quilt, so small stitching projects are the order of the day.
I have been putting in some stitches on my next Life is Beautiful block but mostly I have been working on an old treasure that I excavated this week when cleaning a closet.
I found a half finished baby sweater! This is a great old knitting pattern called "Leaf and Lace" and in my pre-quilting life I made it many times for baby gifts. You can read more about this pattern here. 
I was happy to find this treasure and motivated to finish it. I have spent a lot of time this week locating the mistake that resulted in it's exile, pulling out stitches, and trying to figure out how to resume the pattern. It's a really nice change of pace for me and I remember now how much I enjoyed knitting before quilting took me over.
There are so many interesting things to learn in life and so little time to fully pursue them all!

What are you working on today? Remember that we only want to see your hand stitching ... there are lots of other link ups in blogland for machine made projects and the weekly Slow Sunday Stitching link up is for hand stitching only. 

   

    An InLinkz Link-up
   

Scrappy Saturday Pinkness

We had 5 weeks of pink goodness in July hosted by Angela over at the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. But still I had to scramble to get all my pink blocks done this month. My favourite block this week is the newest Maverick star block. 






Here are all the pink scrap blocks on the design wall...


*Mad City Mama at the top.

*one more little 5" double nine patch block for Omigosh.

*one more Maverick Star.

*one more scrappy sprouts block.

Phew... that was a lot of sewing and I am delighted with the pink production this month!

To visit the RSC link up hop over to ScScrappy.






And I just have to show you scrappy quilters the fabric license plate that my friend Barb picked up for me when doing the row by row. Love it!

Friday is Circa day and FNSI!

I have been enjoying making the Circa 2016 blocks each week since the sewalong began in January. This week's block was called "Birds in the air" although that's not the pattern I know by that name. Here are the new blocks on top and the blocks from last week on the bottom.  I wonder what we're sewing today?!? Hop over to Temecula Quilts to see the new blocks.

Tonight some quilters are coming over to party sew. There are only two more days left in the month... I hope I make some progress on my UFO of the month!

Clarissa was a Superstar

That's the name of my new leader-ender project, but I will probably end up calling it "Clarissa". You can read more about the inspiration here. 
I redid the math on the block pieces since the first block I made was too small. I finally got the four patch hourglass blocks to be the size I wanted. 
The plan is to cut out scraps whenever they appear in my sewing room, and to always have a pile of triangles beside my machines to sew at the beginning or ending of every bit of sewing I am doing on my primary projects. The key to being successful with leader-ender projects is being organized, and having all the pieces ready to sew together without any thinking required.

I experimented with different ways of constructing the hourglass units and decided on using the Companion Angle ruler to cut the triangles. (To read Bonnie Hunter's lesson on how to figure out the math click here.)  This ruler is quick and easy to use and gives me an hourglass block that works with this design.
Now I am ready to roll!
Each block needs 36 hourglass units, which means I need to cut 144 triangles to start!

Aurifil BOM

On the 15th of each month the new Aurifil block pattern is posted. This month is an unusual design called "Sparkler" by designer Wendy Sheppard.  You can get the pattern at the Aurifil blog here. Here is my version in my favourite red and white fabrics. It was fun to sew and I can totally see this as a great Rainbow Scrap Challenge quilt block... can't you?!?

This pattern has lots of small pieces, so you can use up some smaller scraps making this block. I cut the whole block, pinned the pieces together and very carefully sewed each quadrant. It would be very easy to get the design mixed up which would result in overuse of the seam ripper!
To see more fun variations on this block pattern, hop over to Pat Sloan's link up.

Log Cabin Loonies

Julie is hosting a fun Log Cabin Lunatics link up where quilters can post about their log cabin projects. 
I have only sewn 1 log cabin block recently. It is one of the July Shop Hop blocks, and probably was my favourite one of all the patterns. They give you the fabrics, so all of the 1" scrappy strips were precut for me! I did pick a different background fabric from my stash and impressed myself with how the horizontal pattern in the fabric lines up fairly well across the block.

Design Wall Monday

While I have been visiting a few of the stores on this year's July Shop Hop and collecting the new blocks, I have also been working on my blue blocks from last year's hop. 
Here are 9 of the 15 blocks on the design wall. If you want to see all the creative layout designs hop over to the July Shop Hop photo page.


The top right block was a bit of an ordeal. I traced the pattern onto freezer paper to paper piece. There were 8 components to the block and this photo shows one of them.
So I traced all 8 pieces and started to sew them without any difficulty. But when all the pieces were ready to assemble, I realized that because of the reverse issue in paper piecing I didn't have the colour placement right, and the white and light blue were mixed in some of the blocks. I thought I would remember which colour went where since there are only 3 colours, but apparently I didn't! It was a reminder to always write on the pattern which colour goes in each section, because obviously I can't rely on the old memory bank anymore!
 
Here is the finished block, and you can see if you look closely that I had to sew some scraps together to get big enough pieces to use after all that sewing and unsewing of awkward angles.
C'est la vie!
On to the next block...

To see more design walls, hop over to Patchwork Times.

Slow Sunday Stitching

It has been a very busy summer so far at Kathy's quilts. The last three weekends were spent in 3 different cities, with a lot of driving in between, lots of visiting of family and beloved friends, and of course slow stitches have been made in every location. 

Life is Beautiful block #26

I finished the hand embroidery on block #26 for Life is Beautiful. If you have been thinking of buying the pattern for this project, I finally found a source in Canada. There were two complete pattern sets for sale at The Quilting Bee in Fonthill (no affiliation, just a customer happy to see the patterns available locally!)
I finished this block while visiting with the Fabric Piranhas this past week. They are quite a bunch of crazy quilters and I am so honoured that they let me join their adventurous group. 

They are all avid hand stitchers so of course we spent time stitching in the gazebo and talking about our projects - the ones we are currently stitching, and the ones that we are dreaming of starting. In this photo we have Deanna stitching hexies, Barbara ("I don't like blue") with an embellishment project, Louise hand binding her Indian Orange Peel (more on that later this week), and me starting the embroidery on block #27. It was a wonderful (but always too short) time of laughter and stitching.

What are you hand stitching? Treat yourself to a little creative vacation today, take a few stitches on your project and link up below to share your slow progress with us. 


   

    An InLinkz Link-up
   

Scrappy Saturday

Another Mad City Mama block is finished. This pattern is from Bonnie Hunter's book Adventures with Leader & Enders. It's quite a labour intensive block using 148 scraps! But it's really fun if you like scrap piecing (which I clearly do!)
You can see the first 4 blocks of my collection here. 

I finished this block while visiting with some quilting friends who call themselves the "Fabric Piranhas". They are a little scary and totally hilarious! I will post more about them tomorrow, but today I wanted to show the photos that I took of my block while staying at Louise's house. In one of her gardens she has an old treadle base turned into a table. The sewing machine is long gone but the base is still in great condition.

See how the actual treadle says "VERTICAL FEED" which means it was once operating a Davis sewing machine. I wonder if my herd will ever include one of these rare machines?
To see more scrappy projects being created, hop over to the weekly link up at SoScrappy.

Circa 2016

The Circa 2016 blocks were easy this week. These are called Yankee Puzzle, but look like an hourglass block. They don't have a good centre seam join, but after yesterday's block fiasco, I decided to call it "good enough" and move on!
To see what we're sewing this week, hop over to Temecula.

New Leader-Ender Challenge

Everyone knows I am a huge fan of Bonnie Hunter and her revolutionary leader-ender method of making quilts. My leader-ender project for the last 4 years has been the small Alamo Star block and I keep making a few of those every month. Every year Bonnie announces a leader-ender challenge and twice I joined in on her project.
Here is the list that I can remember:
2015 Tumblers (I made a mini version called Tiny Tumble) 
2014 Lozenges
2013 Split 9 Patch
2012 Spools (I am working on my spool quilt layout)
2011 Cheddar BowTies
Bonnie announced the 2016 leader-ender challenge this week and it's the hourglass block. At first I wasn't tempted because I was thinking that I've made so many of those blocks over the years. 
But then... I remembered the Clarissa quilt. 

Clarissa quilt

On the way to the Vermont Quilt festival in the Spring of 2011, I had the opportunity to see an amazing quilt at the Shelburne Museum which became one of my all time favourite quilts. Here it is! I posted about it here and have always thought I would love to make a variation of this quilt. It looks like now is the time to start my own leader-ender Clarissa hourglass quilt.

This quilt was made by Clarissa White Alford and contains 6,048 pieces of fabric!
It was made by a woman who raised 9 children of her own, plus 6 children from her husband's 1st marriage for a total of 15 children. That makes her a total superstar in my opinion!  Can you even imagine her life back in the 1800's??  It is believed that she made the quilt while living in Quebec when in her 80's. It's amazing not only that she survived all those years, after raising all those children, but that she still managed to create a lasting work of art in her last years.

I looked at that quilt a long time in 2011. I was inspired by the story of it and by the beauty and longevity of the quilt. Here is a close up of one of the 42 blocks all made with hourglass units...and hand quilted!
I don't know how many blocks my Clarissa quilt will be, but I started the first one today.

The first block was pieced on my Singer 301 short bed sewing machine named Ethel. The sound of this 301 machine is soft and lovely... it's such a calming pleasure to sew with her!

But look what happened! First of all, because I don't have a pattern and am making this up based on a photo, my math was off (big surprise!) and my first block turned out to be too small. 
And secondly, how did the bottom right hourglass block not work out as planned?!?
Clarissa made everything in life and in quilting look easy, and it's not. I think I'm calling this quilt "Clarissa was a Superstar"!

Not a Quilt

I made a "quick" gift yesterday for a bridal shower tonight. Honestly I don't know why I do these things! It would have been so much quicker and cheaper to just buy a gift. But no.... I have to make something and it turned out to be a bigger challenge than I thought it would be. 

It's a tea towel... how hard can it be?!?
I got the kit for this project at Kindred Spirits Quilt Company. Making the hexagons went well and attaching them to the quilt was all good.



But then came the ruffling part, which I have never done before. 
Not fun.
Not even in the same league as quilting fun!
Oh well... it's done now, and I learned that I don't enjoy making ruffles!

And there it is.
The request for the shower was to bring "a tea towel that describes your personality or has a funny story attached to it". A quilter has to give a quilty kind of towel, so this definitely qualifies and she will know exactly who it's from. Hope it doesn't fall apart in the wash! LOL
And now back to our regularly scheduled quilting projects...