Blogger's Quilt Festival

I've put this off for a while out of indecision but time is running out, so here it is, my entry into the Blogger's Quilt Festival.

I was a bit torn between a few quilts - the quilt I made for my best friend's baby was my first choice, because it features both rainbow and HSTs, and they're my two favourite things at the moment. And then there's my most recent quilt (well, quiltlet really) a crazy-pieced ode to my favourite mathematical equation. But it's still not bound, and the lack of energy I'm stuck with due to a nasty cold I've got at the moment means it probably won't be any time soon. In the end it was that same cold that led to my decision - I'm going to go with the quilt that I've had wrapped around me for the last two days, making me feel warmer and better-er.

I did the bulk of this quilt about two months ago, over the course of about two weeks. Having finished the top, I angsted over piecing the back, eventually deciding not to. I usually piece my backs at a diagonal, so that I don't have to match my quilting lines, but I had decided to quilt alongside the seams of the top, and they run at a diagonal too. Fortunately I happened to find a lovely blue-grey chambray that was 145cm wide.

And, having quilted it, I left it, trimmed and unbound, for quite a while. Binding is my last favourite part of a quilt, but I made the binding and put it aside for the right moment, which came about a week ago, when I felt like sewing, but my current project was at an awkward stage, and it seemed good to do something boring to get a run up before tackling something tough.

It is, in my opinion, pretty much the perfect size quilt. It was small enough to quilt pretty easily on my little old machine, but it's big enough to cover me from neck to feet when I'm laying down, and wide enough that when I wrap it around myself, it reaches halfway down my legs.

I've already assembled another grey and blue bundle to re-make this quilt someday, as well as a pink and brown bundle, and a green and orange bundle.

And now I'm off to sleep under it again :)

Because I haven't done anything exciting tonight, either.

The Blue and Grey HST quilt, bound and washed, chilling out in our incredibly photogenic woodshed. I'm thinking I might photograph all the quilts I still have out here over the next few weeks.

Detail section of the back of the math quiltlet - I sewed the first night's work with white cotton, because the only black thread I had was poly and I didn't want to risk it melting, knowing how much ironing I had to do on it.

What I've been doing tonight: crocheting in my unique, cackhanded way. Clarification: I'm not a lefty, instead, I'm SOOO righty that I can't even have the thread wrapped around the fingers of my left hand, because it all gets tangled and stuck. I'm going to try make myself a beanie, when I get to the point of decreasing, I'll just skip a stitch occasionally.

I've had a fairly big day:

I bought some fabric.

Half price, and then another $40 off of a $100 spend meant this $200 pile cost me $60

I bound a quilt.

I realised last night that it's easier to try out tricky stuff If you use boring stuff as a run up. I'd already made the binding, so it just needed attaching.

And I finished piecing the math quilt.

I quilted it too, but it didn't photograph well.

I also did some other shopping, ate quite a lot of food, had some spontaneous visitors, took about 1000 photos (I'm gunna write up properly how I do my binding) and, as I said above, I've quilted the math quiltlet - just boring, evenly spaced vertical lines. I've cut the remaining rainbow fabric into strips to bind it, and a bit of fabric to make a hanging tube.

I'm pretty happy with my efforts.

Dontwanna.

I hate binding. I don't get people who are all "I love doing the binding! It's the best bit... I spend a week sewing it down by hand and really savouring the process..."

Blergh. I know you can send a top off to be quilted; I wish I could send off my quilts to be bound. I've worked out probably the quickest, neatest method imaginable and it still feels like it takes forever. One day I might time them both, and see which actually takes longer - the quilting or the binding. There's so much faff to binding, there's cutting and pressing and pinning and folding and turning and sewing really carefully.

To that end, tonight I trimmed my edges, zigzagged them together and cut the binding strips. Just doing that took 20 minutes, and I haven't started the complicated stuff yet.

I need a binding fairy.

Working out my issues.

So last night I lay awake angsting over my backing angst. Yes, I angst about angst. I'm pretty meta. But eventually I realised why I was so unwilling to make a start on piecing a back.

Normally, I quilt on the horizontal and/or the vertical. Straight lines or wavy ones, but really, in a maximum of two directions on the one quilt. Which means that I can do very intricate pieced backings (often leading to arguments over which is the back and which is the front) as long as they are set on point, or at least, much nearer to a 45 degree angle, because this way I don't have to match up any quilting lines. But this design has quilting on the diagonal too. Both diagonals in fact, in different parts of the quilt. So pretty much anything I pieced would have to either line up perfectly, or else be cut on some really weird angle, in three different directions, so it didn't line up anywhere.

And because I'm lazy, both of them seemed too hard, and because it's only 120 wide, I went to spotlight in my lunch break (they were kindly open till 8 tonight, and had 30% off everything) and bought a really really really nice cotton chambray that was 140 wide and only $7 p/m. And you know me, I love a yarn dye, and because this was navy and white it looked grey, cleverly making the backing both grey and blue at the same time.

Having resolved that issue, I got home tonight, basted it all then quilted it.

Pretty quilt lines... I must confess, looking at solid backs makes me want to do something whole-cloth, even if it's just wavy line quilting in a rainbow variegated thread on some black.

Yet another thing to add to my to-do pile. It's getting pretty big.

Video crack.

Yes, I did have to tidy the end of my bed somewhat to take this picture.

But it's all sewn now (not pressed, but yay progress) even though it didn't get done till after 4am becasue I got distracted by youtube.

Damn you youtube!

Bribing myself.

Tonight after I got home from the gym I told myself that I had to at least sew the strips of the blue and grey quilt before I started sketching 2D handbags.

It worked. But my clipping it up didn't, really. I need more coathangers (what look like the across seams are sewn.the down ones aren't, but the threads between the strips are still attached, so it's like a big net at the moment)

And I've started sketches too.

Bag with flap won't need a zip = yay, but single handles make me sad.

And now that I'm going to bed, I'm not going to draw any more bags till after all those seams are pressed out, at the very least. And pinned too, preferably.

And again with the monsters...

Tonight I laid out all the blue and grey HST units so I could pin them together and start sewing them. Naturally, I had a sudden dislike of my positioning, and spent an hour sitting on the floor moving sqaures till I was happy. Well, happier.

It's a lot easier to do a shuffle when the HSTs are still HALF square TRIANGLES. Once they're a whole square, it's a lot harder, since you've got to be happy with the position of both fabrics. And when I look at old quilts, it's never the slightly off points that get me, rather it's the positioning of the various fabrics, especially if they're randomly placed. But there has to come a point where you go, "Suck it up Sara, and just start sewing the goddamn thing already."

And since it's pretty much all new fabrics, if it all turns to shit I will simply sacrifice another $30 of my moneys and buy all the fabrics again and start over.

And:

Tie-Dyed Flannel

The little yellow guy looked like a Bee Gee before He got the massive arms. Now he doesn't.

Spotlight now has cartoon-style safety eyes. Only used on one monster, and I'm still not sure about them.

The little guy with the purple horns is purple on the back too, but the back of his horns is green.

The fabric of the big guy was horrible to use because it was so lightweight and shifted like crazy when I was trying to sew it.

The centre lady is the only monster so-far to get a name - Rosa (der)

Possibly father and son?

The problem with double sided batiks and nearly-but-not-quite-symetrical body shapes is that sometimes you get them half pinned before you realise it's back-to-front.

The one on the top had a spontaneously occuring hole just next to his right underarm, so I had to handsew him a wider seam allowance to contain it, and then I had to do the same to the other side so he was symetrical. That's why his arms are so close to his sides.

These two are toats my favourites.

Monsters!

Only a couple of them have been handsewn though.

Hi Ho (Hum)

Well, my holidays are pretty much over. In 10 hours time I'll be back at work, for a 9 hour day, no less. I think that the first half of your first shift back should be holiday-paid too, so your first day back is a half-day, to help you ease back into it.

And yes, I know it's only been two weeks, but they've been a fairly full two weeks:

I learned how to make shoes, culminating in spending the last two days wearing a pair I made.

I quilted a mid-sized quilt, and the binding's 3/4 done too, but I've run out of pink thread.

I made (as in, fully completed) two baby quilts.

I'm about half way through 25 monsters.

I made three skirts.

I pieced and quilted a pillow case.

I cut and began piecing a 4th quilt.

I went to four parties, and a country music festival.

All in 17 days.

Worse, I feel like I'm really starting to build momentum, like if I had another week off I could fully double that output. Though I will confess, both weeks I had a Monday/Tuesday slump, so maybe I'm just imagining it.

Anyway, no photos of the grey version of the peach spotted skirt I made yesterday, because it got vomited on by Anna's dog. Luckily I had packed the peach one too, in case of something like that happening, so I just switched halfway through the night. And then my shoes really did coordinate with my outfit, since I'd made them in the same peach fabric.

I realised last night too that the skirts really really needed to have pockets (I kept putting my phone down and freaking out 30 seconds later), and even though it took me a bit of thinking today, since I hadn't done pockets in a long time, I eventually got them worked out.

Not that you can see them in the photo. The fabric is a very lightweight poly-cotton blend, that I don't love the drape of as much as the rayon, but which I love the retro browns of. The crinkle made it hard to cut straight too.

I spent a couple of hours tonight sewing the faces to the monsters, and I've found that the keys to raw edge applique are to have your machine on the slowest stitch speed, and do something else every other hour, lest you go blind and/or insane. All the black around the eyes and the big smiles is done, now I just need to do the whites of the buck teeth and then the associated mouths.

In between the two hours spent turning fabric in circles watching a needle bob slowly up and down, I cut all my HSTs for the blue and grey quilt I bought for earlier in the week.

And it seems the key to correctly cutting an entire quilt is to only use new fabric that can be replaced tomorrow if any mistakes are made. None were, and after my second hour at the monsters I laid this out.

And I'm so in love. Here it's laid out at 1.4 by 2 metres, but there's pretty much 4cm of seam allowance for each block, so it'll become quite a bit smaller. That's the worst thing about HSTs, you lose 2cm in the 45 degree seam and then if you sew with a wider allowance so it's easier to do neat points, as I do, there's the same gone again. Still, it's going to be at least 1.6m long, and that's nearly as long as me, so it's plenty big enough.