Another finish! Baby Quilt #2

What a week. I did some protesting last weekend which, go figure, being outside all weekend in the pollen-filled air, subsequently felled me for much of this week. I did go in for my COVID-19 test as suggested for all protestors and it came back negative. I wasn’t expecting anything else. Everyone was masked at the protests and although we weren’t always able to keep the 6’ distance with a couple of thousand of us marching through city streets, it was still pretty amazing that no one even bumped into me. I’d say we were keeping 3’. All of my symptoms this week were my regular ol’ allergy symptoms—sinus, fatigue, itchy eyes, etc.

So, unfortunately, although I’d planned on finishing baby quilt #2 last weekend, I didn’t feel up to doing anything with it until this afternoon.

Yay—it’s done!

To recap: This started out as a way for me to play with some of my (at the time brand-new) Accuquilt dies, and a fat quarter collection I’d had for a long time, focused on the alphabet fabric. I scanned the fabric and did a quick design in EQ8 to figure out fabric layout.

I then miscut the fabric that was supposed to be in the corner squares of the star blocks, and didn’t have enough left to be able to fix it with the same fabric. Lo and behold, I decided to fussy cut some valentine fabric I’ve had in my stash for years, not using any squares that had “Feb 14” on it so it could be more generically lovey-dovey. Don’t like it as well as the original posy fabric but it works and I’m glad to have that fabric out of my stash.

When it came to the border, the butterfly fabric was the only thing I had that was even close to the right red. Again, wouldn’t have been what I picked if I were in a quilt shop with all sorts of options, but it works and, again, nice to have that fabric out of my stash. (I believe both fabrics came from the same scrap box from Fat Quarter Shop or wherever I used to periodically buy those from. Neither of them are anything I’d have selected myself for my stash.)

I dug into my strip stash for the binding and found four strips of the same mottled red that works just about perfectly. Phew.

In the grand question of “do you buy for a project or do you buy for a stash,” this project is an excellent example of why it’s handy to buy for a stash. I created this whole quilt on impulse without buying a single piece of fabric. We won’t include the money spent on the AccuQuilt, of course.

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If you remember some previous waffling I was doing about this, I did end up doing the whole binding by machine this time.

I watched a quick refresher video from Jenny Doan (I’ll post it below) and realized that in my past efforts I’d chosen stitches that required me to stick right along that seam line and have everything lined up with a precision that just made life more difficult than I needed. After watching the stitch that Jenny Doan used, I decided to use a fun loopy stitch on my machine and life was ever-so-much simpler!

And can’t beat the speed. I had the whole binding put on within 30-45 minutes. Sure, it’s a small quilt, but still. Love that kind of a finish.

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I’d mentioned during my “waffling” comments that I’d had difficulty with the corners in previous attempts at machine binding. That was the only reason I’d gone to the Jenny Doan well, to see if she had good tips. And sure enough she did—just sew right over the top of them! So I got my miters folded down neatly and then just continued the design right around the corner. It worked really well, 50% of the time.

Best corner in image on top; worst corner in image on the bottom. The other two were pretty dang good and not quite so bad, respectively.

The worst corner was the last one, and I think I was having problems with stuff getting a little stretchy by then. Plus I was wearing out (still allergy-ridden), so I wasn’t being quite as patient and careful.

But what do we say? Altogether now…

“Baby quilt. Baby quilt. Baby quilt.”

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And in the same theme of using up my stash, the backing was a random yellow flannel sitting on my shelves that I can’t identify at all. No idea where or how it came to be living in my sewing room. Apparently it was waiting for me to have a new baby niece.

You can see the extremely simple ditch quilting I did on this puppy. I really wanted this to be as worry-free a baby quilt as possible for the parents, so I made an effort not to make an effort, if that makes sense.

Now that it’s done, I’m going to toss it in the wash with a handful of color catchers and a prayer that all that red stays exactly where it is.

Baby quilt. Baby quilt. Baby quilt.

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Making progress

What do you do when your preferred method of basting is basting spray and you realize you’re fresh out, so you need to make an online order and then wait for it to come before you can finish the baby quilt you’ve started?

Why, start another baby quilt, of course.

I believe I mentioned in the last blog post that I’d rediscovered a set of fat quarters in the search for mask materials and decided to make a little playmat for my baby niece, in addition to the quilt I’ve already got in progress for her. “Playmat” just means I didn’t have enough fabric to make an officially-sized baby quilt, so it’s just a small quilt for a baby. A newborn-sized baby quilt, perfect for a little girl who’s just about 6 weeks old now. Playmat just sounds slightly more intentional.

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I refreshed my memory as to how to scan fabric into EQ8, chose two blocks from my GoCube AccuQuilt block set for which I had all the dies, and played around with arrangements until I hit on one I really liked. This was the original.

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I then looked at the fabric requirements and realized, nope, didn’t have quite enough for that size, especially as I was working with fat quarters, not quarter yards (WOF), which makes figuring the cutting amounts a little different.

So it got a little less square and a little smaller overall. More playmatty. 16 blocks down to 12. I had just enough fabric to make that work.

Which means you know what probably happened next.

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I have conference calls every night this week, multiples in a row, so I’ve been taking mornings for myself to balance. I’m finding it relaxing to spend time in my sewing room before work.

Sunday, I found the white fabric in my stash to supplement the fat quarters for the design, and I cut some of the pieces for the Uneven Nine-Patches. Monday morning, I finished the cutting of the Uneven Nine-patches that I’d started on Sunday, and I got the blocks sewn together.

I’m not entirely sure what happened with the tone-on-tone white rectangles.

If you look closely you’ll see some of the rectangles had to get eased in a little bit. I cut them all with the AccuQuilt die. I am pretty sure I double-checked to make sure I was putting the grain in the right direction, but it’s possible something got off. However, I will say it’s a fabric that’s been in my stash for a long while, I have no idea where or when I got it (definitely quilt-quality, though), but it looks like it’s a lower thread count than the other fabrics. Might that have been the issue?

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Nevertheless, I persisted.

This morning I was fairly overtired from last night’s Zoom calls, but I was looking forward to getting back to my sewing room. Grabbing my AccuQuilt dies and the posie fabric, I started cutting the 2 1/2” squares.

Or I thought I was.

Turns out, I had grabbed the wrong die. I had looked at it briefly and thought, Yep, squares. Turns out, Nope. Not squares. Two rectangles instead, and narrower than 2 1/2”. By the time I realized my mistake, I had already cut enough of the fat quarter into the wrong size that I couldn’t regroup and fix my mistake. Dang. The posie fabric had been my fave in the design.

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Back to EQ8 and my stash. Revision 3 of the design…

The posies are gone replaced by a Valentine’s Day fabric I’ve had in my stash for years (scanned into EQ8 to make sure it would work okay). It had come in a scrap box from…was it Fat Quarter Shop that was doing those for awhile? Are they still doing it?

In any case, it was the only fabric I had that was at all similar in feel to the rest of the fabrics. I don’t love it the way I really loved the posies, but when I cut enough squares so I could selectively use the ones that didn’t have “February 14th” emblazoned in them, and only had all the other lovey-dovey wording, it works. My SIL will probably adore the fact that it has XXOO and “sweetie” and such in it. Who knows? Since she’ll never have seen my original design, she won’t know this is slightly less-than.

And the fabric is now no longer in my stash. Always feels good to use something that’s been languishing, and I’m sure the fabric will have far more fun playing with a baby than sitting on my shelf.

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So with that quick switcheroo, I completed cutting the pieces and have started sewing the blocks.

The AccuQuilt really shines when it comes to triangles. Wow, were those flying geese pieces easy to sew together. Loved it.

I will have to pay attention to the directionality of the words in the corner blocks now. I’ll either have to make sure I have them all going in the same direction, or I’ll have to switch them every-which-way so it looks random. Only having a couple going the wrong way will just be annoying.

But that’s a problem for tomorrow morning, when I’m progressively even more tired from evening conference calls. That’s an exciting thought.

Time to start getting ready for my work-day. Happy Zooming to all of you!

Saturday Doings

This isn’t quite as exciting for y’all as you didn’t see the “Before.”

This morning, I took all the fat quarters out of this drawer and took them down onto the kitchen table for my family to choose which fabrics they wanted me to use for their masks. When I brought the stash back up to my office, I decided this was the perfect opportunity to restore order in what had become an extremely dysfunctional drawer.

Over the last couple of years, as I’ve been getting Sew Sampler boxes and other things but not having time to do much with them, this upper drawer got stacked. The few times I rummaged through the fat quarters themselves they’d gotten every-which-way and I’d not been good about putting them back systematically.

Now they’re separated and sorted by color again within their categories, as they used to be: batiks in the far left; regular cotton fabrics on the far right; and a few collections that I wanted to keep together plus neutral batiks in the center. Much easier to use. I also sorta-kinda took a pot-shot at cleaning up the drawer below it so at least I can open and close it now. But the only help for that drawer is to actually use a bunch of the scrap strips, jelly rolls, and charm packs that are crammed in that one. Now that I’m back to sewing, I have hope!

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In other news, I’ve spent most of the week in EQ8 finding or drawing the blocks from the Eleanor Burns GoCube Sampler book that came with my AccuQuilt. The blocks were super-easy to draw as they’re all based on traditional grids. I just had to move lines around from one block to the next. Now I’m just doing the tedious work of importing them into my Favorites library so I have them ready for easy and fast quilt design. I’m hoping to have all of that done by the end of the weekend.

Meanwhile, I scanned into my fabric library one of the sets of fat quarters I’d rediscovered, and played with designing a small baby quilt/playmat with them, using some of the Eleanor Burns sampler blocks I already had in there. I went for something that would be really fast to put together, and it turned out kind of adorable. I’m ready to rock n’ roll on this cutie!

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Look, ma, no gray!

Off-topic, I finally bit the bullet and did my own in-home hair dye job this weekend. I have vivid memories of my Mom doing her own hair when I was young. I hated the smell, and I could see what a mess it was for her to do, so I’ve always avoided it like the plague. When I started having my own hair colored, I was stylist-done all the way. Things have been getting desperate, though, so I “put on my big girl panties” as a friend of mine often says, ordered my color kit online, and tackled it this morning. It was relatively easy and turned out great and I can’t recommend Madison Reed hair color enough! My hair looks fantastic. The gray is completely gone, and my hair is so shiny! What’s best? NO SMELL. And no, I don’t get a kick-back. Just always happy to pass along a recommendation when I have one.

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The family’s choices of mask material.

And yes, I spent more time on masks today. This time, though, I tried a pattern that includes a pocket for adding filters. And then I looked at another pattern—the proportions are different on each. I’ve finally ended up doing a pattern mash-up using a modified pocket instruction from one with the rest of the design from the other. But now…I’m almost out of elastic. I have enough to do one more tomorrow (I ran out of steam today), and then it’s pause for a bit.

And yes, I know I have options, but the 1/4” elastic ear loop is my preferred style and my family prefers them as well. And we’re not in a rush.

So I’ve got a handful done but a boatload more I need to get done just to cover the immediate family and my mother-in-law. I guess I’ll just have to stay inside until we get enough elastic to get everyone else’s done, and then mine!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

I was able to grab about an hour and a half in my sewing room today, which was enough time to finish piecing the top of the baby quilt I had set aside in order to play with the AccuQuilt. No sense in making myself new projects while I still had the baby quilt guilting me from its place on the design wall.

If I’m in the mood tomorrow, I’ll do the backing and basting on it. I hate hate hate doing on backing, although for a baby quilt it’s not as bad. (I hate dealing with large pieces of fabric.) I hate only slightly less the basting process. So I’ll have to stay on top of myself to keep myself from procrastinating at this stage.

And then it’s been an awfully long time since I’ve machine quilted so I have to do a couple of practice sandwiches first just to make sure I’m back in the grove. I think I’ll just be doing a mid-sized meander on this puppy. We’ll see what I get in the mood for once I’m working on the practice pieces.

I used this as an opportunity to test out some pins I’d gotten in a couple of Sew Sampler boxes recently. One was a small collection of double pins for doing seams. I’ve never used those before, so I figured, what the hey. The only seams I was trying to match were with the cornerstones.

I’ve decided I hate double pins.

I went back to the way my mommy taught me to pin seams.

Then I tried another set of pins, this time with cute unicorn tops.

There were only 10 in the package, and they’re somewhat thicker than the pins I typically use.

They’re cute, but not particularly functional in my sewing life. I could see, someday, if I ever make any of those adorable pincushions I keep seeing patterns for, sticking these in it and gifting them. So I’m not getting rid of them, just not using them much.

Anyone have cute ideas for what to do with them in the meanwhile?

A little bit on a Saturday

So the nice thing about having a clean sewing room is that I can actually sew for a few minutes when I get them. Today I did my usual morning Saturday things but by the time I got home from the grocery store and had lunch, I was ready for a nap. No idea why—I feel like I’d slept fine last night and I didn’t overly tax myself this morning. However, since I didn’t have any pressing reason not to take a nap and since tomorrow will be a full work day again (visiting a church in the morning and doing a Q&A with them during adult ed time, then attending a church dinner with a different church tomorrow night), I succumbed. I didn’t nap for too long but it was somewhat helpful.

However, it did cut into my planned sewing time.

That being said, after doing the easy Tetris puzzle work of the die-cut blocks of the month yesterday, I felt ready to tackle something very, very complicated: a baby quilt that’s all big squares and rectangles, LOL. The baby is due next weekend, if she’s on time—which her mother is anxiously hoping she will be at this point. I’m doubting I’ll get this done by the time the little one comes but it’s a quick-to-piece pattern so it shouldn’t take all that long.

I got about half the cutting done today. Isn’t the sloth on the left just adorbs? That’s the fabric that grabbed me—I’m using it as the backing too. I just went with the rest of the prints from the line and added in a couple of tone-on-tones for the sashing. No real thought went into this. In fact, I think I’m even using the pattern that was hanging as a store sample above the line, although I’ll give myself a little bit of credit as the sample was done in other fabrics. See? I can think for myself, at least a little bit. Still, it’ll be stinking cute and I don’t feel the need to have a ton of pride in the “Lookie what I can do” department when it’s done.

After all, as I said a couple of posts ago, my main goal is to just have fun these days. And this is fun, mostly because I keep grinning at the ridiculously cute fabric.

Okay, time to figure out what I’m making for dinner—probably one of my “open the package and toss it in the oven to cook” pre-fab dinners from Wegmans—I’m still a little sleepy. Besides, that way I can get to the sit-with-a-novel-and-tea-while-it-cooks part of dinner preparation a little faster.

Not sure what my schedule is this week but I’m going to have to grab some time off at some point as I’m booked all next weekend. So if all goes well, stay tuned for Random Sewing Reports in the middle of the week!

A Finish!

And finally I'm able to officially present the completed Rapid Fire Hunter's Star project, which I have named after its recipient so I can't share the actual name here. In any case, for those of you who may have just arrived at the party...

Let's get into our Wayback machines to the day I won the Deb Tucker Rapid Fire Hunter's Star (Petite) ruler from AJ of The Quilting Pot podcast. "Woohoo," I thought. "That's the one I wanted to win!" She had a couple of things it was possible to win and I actually got the one I was hoping for--I rarely win in the first place, and to win the one I wanted, well...gravy! 

I was so jazzed that I set right to putting a top together, using scraps from the baby quilt I'd made for this same recipient. I have to say, the ruler is a beaut. It really was fast. It really was pretty straightforward. It really was pretty dang accurate. I'd have been pleased had I spent money on it. But to get it for free and still be that happy for it? Join me in a jig, will you?

It only took me a weekend to get the top together, as I recall--and that was with a whole lotta breaks to do other things. But then it sat, and sat, and sat. The recipient chose it for herself when it was hanging on my design wall (she was a wee little baby at the time and its colors attracted her--I've told the story on my podcast a couple of times, I think, so I won't go into it again here). 

Finally, a few weeks ago the date for the recipient's first birthday party was chosen and I had a deadline. I always work better to a deadline. I used Angela Walter's "Dot to Dot Quilting" class on Craftsy for quilt design inspiration, and you can read that story here. It took me awhile to have enough energy to finish getting the binding on, but it was done and through the wash earlier this week. With a whole week plus to spare before the deadline. Aren't I good?

I'm glad it's done, and I hope the recipient is still as into the colors now that she's a Big Girl One-Year-Old as she did back before she knew how to crawl. 

#BFSI Report--Baby Quilts Finally Done and Delivered!

The two baby quilts are finally both done and delivered--woot!

Baby Quilt #1 started out as a Jacob's Ladder quilt.

As per episode 133 "In Which I Have a Story of Heartbreak and a Rotary Cutter", it had some issues. (You can't see the issues in this picture. So let's all imagine it was beautiful and now has a happy home being a quilt somewhere.)

Baby Quilt #1 became Baby Quilt Remix. And although (as per episode 134 "In Which It's Just Snakebit") it also had some issues, a little judicious hand-stitching dealt with the problem and it was duly mailed off a couple of days before Thanksgiving.

It's a Disappearing 9-Patch, arranged randomly, made from the scraps of Baby Quilt #1, with a few more added in since I didn't have quite enough of all of BQ1 fabrics left. (If you want to know about the colors, etc., you'll need to listen to the episode--don't want to take up space on that here again.)

I did a very light quilting in the ditch along the block lines and inner/outer border.

Hopefully it will provide many days of warmth and comfort to my little step-great-nephew. Or great-step-nephew. Or great-nephew-step, which is a dance craze soon to cross the nation. (Let's just call him my new little GSN and move on.)

And so I moved on to Baby Quilt #2 for my newly born great-niece. This one started out in my head as a completely different quilt. However, after all the grief of Baby Quilt #1, I seriously scaled down my plans and reminded myself with some vehemence, "It's a baby quilt! It's going to have all sorts of bodily fluids on it within a short period of time! Make it quick, simple, and highly washable!"

Thus, another Disappearing 9-Patch, named "Admit One." I chose to do this one in red, white, and black, which is good for babies as those are reputedly some of the first colors a baby can see. I can't swear to that. My babies couldn't tell me these things at that age.

I quilted straight lines diagonally across the quilt, varying the widths between lines. I don't know that I'd do this again on a baby quilt. 1) It's amazingly hard to quilt in a straight line diagonally across the quilt, and 2) it made for a slightly stiffer quilt. I didn't think I was doing enough quilting to really change the drape of the quilt, but it's definitely not quite as soft as the first baby quilt. I'm not sweating it--it just would've been easier to stick with ditch quilting, so I'll do that next time.

(You might want to pause here for a moment and compare the two quilts. Both Disappearing 9-Patches, looking completely different with different fabrics and a different layout. This design is just too much fun to play with!)

Oh, the "Admit One" thing? Here's the backing fabric. Mom is in theater, so it just had to be done. As my BFF/BQF Kate said when I found this fabric, "And now you can name the quilt, 'Admit One to the Family!'" Perfect! Hadn't even thought of that!

Here's the one who got admitted to the family. Looks like she likes her new quilt.