keeping up with Stars for a New Day

Well, no I'm not really keeping up with Stars for a New Day, as this was the Quilt Show b.o.m. for 2009, but I am keeping up my own new schedule of sewing one month's instructions every month!  A variation of this quilt is also offered at a few quilt shoppes as Washington Medallion, with a few less stars!

Sue Garman designed this quilt with excellent instructions...all of the star blocks are made with"paper pieced" half square triangles to make up the flying geese units and points...while this works very well to make up the colours and patterns she's suggested, it is unfamiliar to me.  I almost always make my hsts and flying geese the traditional way, with triangles cut and sewn together without any sew, cut, sew methods.  The hst grid which is provided with the patterns is a different way for me to work, but I'm enjoying the difference, and as Sue's cutting and layout instructions are all based on this grid, it doesn't make sense to try to convert everything to my usual way of doing things.

So here's my work so far...the next few months are more of the sawtooth stars, and what Sue calls border stars, which are sawtooth star variations.

Summertime Variation, quilted

I wrote about this quilt on my blog here.  I got the quilting done, and hung it up in a hallway before taking a picture.  Since then, I've been waiting for the right time to ask for help to take it down, and take its picture.  Well that doesn't seem to be happening, so here's the picture at an interesting angle.

And a close up picture, trying to show the quilting.  Its hard to have a picture show the quilting!  I just did a straight stitch design in the churn dash blocks, and some outline and squiggle free motion quilting on the applique blocks.  If you click on the picture once, it gets bigger, and click on it again, it should get bigger again. 

The big discovery for me was the border.  I started off making a free motion line connecting a kind of flower doodle...but it didn't fill up the space right, and it looked kind of skinny and lonely.  So I made a second squiggle line that overlapped and kind of ran parallel to the first line - I'm really happy that it turned out okay - better than having to rip and re-stitch!  The binding was sewn to the back first, then brought to the front. To sew down the front of the binding,  I decided to a machine blanket stitch to match the applique stitching.

Just Kisses...

Yesterday I wrote a bit about making the crossed leaves blocks of the Hugs and Kisses b.o.m. pattern at the Quilt Show. Here's what I've done to date -

When I first started playing with the crossed leaves design, I thought it might be fun to make the stems curved and casual, rather than straight and formal.  I kept thinking of wind. I started out making some trial leaves and stems prepared for machine applique with turned edge and starch...I quickly realized that that method wasn't going to work too well due to muscle fatigue and pain from the repetitious movements of the iron and tools. 

I then thought I would use glue stick to turn the applique edges, but I didn't want to remove the freezer paper after sewing (I have done that on another project, and never again!).  I decided to try the wash away foundation-applique paper  from C & T (amazon.ca sells it for a good price).  It certainly made preparing the leaves quick and easy - with a little help from Beth Ferrier's book, Hand Applique by Machine.  I think it even made the machine applique a little easier, as there was a definite edge to the leaf to follow with the presser foot.  The only thing I am not sure of, is that the finished applique blocks seems to be a little weight-y...I'm tempted to wash one in the sink and see what happens!

I made a drawing of symmetrical curved stem lines, to fit the block size.  I've used that to lay out each block...I had to lose one leaf on the inner curve of each stem so it wouldn't be too crowded due to the curves. My intent is to make eight of the crossed leaves blocks (repeating two), and one of the wreath blocks, set in a 9 block setting, something like this:

The fabric I'm using is from the Golden Afternoon collection at Connecting Threads, and a salmon colour from my stash instead of the yellow from the collection.

The Fabric Shuffle

Since January, I have been looking at, studying really, the applique b.o.m. from the Quilt Show.  I very much liked the blue and green fabrics - the colour, print, style.  I very much liked the crossed leaves blocks ("kisses") - but I wasn't at all sure about the wreath blocks ("hugs").  In an effort to end some indecision, I order the fabric kit when it went on sale.  But...I didn't want to make the quilt exactly as shown.  Days and days of mucking about on EQ, and playing with paper templates, and wondering what would I do with the kit fabric if I made the quilt with some other fabric?

In the end, I played with some red and green fabric to make a variation of the crossed leaves blocks.  I liked that so much, that I knew that the blue and green were going somewhere else.  The background fabric went to the Whimsical Quilt Garden blocks - the white on white dots were just perfect!  In the end, I've used the blue and green for a block from Honouring Emma, by Lori Smith.  I'm going to like making this quilt in these colours...in this picture I have used the yellow from the kit as an accent, but I'm thinking of changing or adding a bit of purple...there is a slight big of purple accent on one of the blue fabrics.  I've done this block as hand applique, tomorrow I hope to finish machine applique on the fourth crossed leaves block and post a picture of the ones sewn to date.

July 23, 2010 - where did the time go?!

I haven't written or posted pictures on the blog for a while...but it wasn't until now that I see that the last blog posting was May 31!  Wow!  I've been gone so long, that I see pop ups all over my blogger page to show off improvements to the service.

June I guess just slipped by...followed quickly by most of July!  Middle daughter graduated from high school, daughter in law won  2nd place in our provincial bowling championships, youngest son continued to struggle with school and finding a place for himself.  My mother has increasing dementia-like symptoms and my sisters and I are coping with how best to give her continued freedom while planning for the future.

I've been working on various quilt blocks and quilted a wall hanging.  EQ7 arrived, which had me mindlessly preoccupied for quite some time!  My favourite new feature is improved drawing tools, which makes it so much easier to trace scanned applique images.

So, here's a picture for today.  It's the first block of Piece O Cake's My Whimsical Quilt Garden pattern - it's a b.o.m. kit from Homestead Hearth - so I can't take much credit other than for the hand applique sewing!  I  don't  do "cute" blocks, and I don't do "bright" fabrics - so this is a real change for me.  I love the birdie!  The bird's tail isn't sewn down, it is meant to be overflow the block and be sewn onto the sashing, so I prepared the edges with starch.  The beak and legs were done with a dmc floss and satin stitch.