Please, Oh please...send me some easier quilts!

My back aches. My left hand is throbbing from the excess of ruler work. My neck needs a brace (and about 18 uninterrupted hours in bed-ha!). You get the picture. I am 14 hours into the 2nd Stars for a New Day miniature in 2 weeks. The end is joyfully in sight, which is good. The deadline for entering this into MQX is looming at 5 days away, and the client really wants/needs to have it done. Her's just happened to be the 2nd one I quilted by the random nature of it being on the bottom on the hanger. I don't want her to miss her MQX experience and debut because I was having technical glitches.
By technical, I mean for some reason, this is the quilt that just about would not allow me to quilt it. I did the 1st of these rather seam-heavy, double-batted quilts without so much as a broken thread. It was completely smooth sailing. Then, between the two mini-monsters, I stitched a lap quilt (albeit a pantograph), and had no issues with th stitching. It looks great. Then as soon as I started this quilt, it was as though the voodoo curse of the quilt was in place. The thread broke about 15 times in my first hour of stitching. This is immensely annoying to have to pick out the stitches in order to knot and burry every break! I got to practice all kinds of vulgarities and obscenities though while the kids were at school. Fun being able to vent one's frustration without having to softly mutter nice things in a growly voice. I asked plenty of great quilters for advice on this problem, but all indicators were that it had come out of timing. I couldn't sew right to left OR bottom to top, whatsoever. Freaky. But, off on another quilt sandwich, it sewed like a dream in any direction. More Freaky.

OK, so it is something about this particular quilt that is causing the problems. Maybe the thickness is slightly different/more than the 1st quilt. Or maybe the white-on-white fabric is part of it (more problems on this). Either way, I have to do customs, and I have 2 king sized ones next in line. My guess is it is a combination of thickness and thickness. The quilting on the center of the feathered star broke 4 times. There is a LOT of bulk here.

You can see from the pictures that I am getting it quited. I have slowed my stitching down to a practical crawl speed to avoid the breaks. It's annoying...there are times on straight sections that you just want to zoom. I have not done those 3-hour stars (between the feathers),and I am really dreading them. I must formulate a good plan for how to do them without to much screaming. You may also notice that I have stitched the sections of this quilt differently than the first quilt. It's not been easy, because I like certain motifs. I have not been able to do the cross-hatching whatsoever on this quilt, which frustrates me. It is so lovely and versatile. Hopefully it will be equally as impressive as the other quilt. Nobody wants to think that they got the less desireable quilt. And hopefully I meet the Tuesday deadline!

Oh gosh golly... I just spoke with the owner of the quilt. She's so sweet to call, but she was concerned that the quilt is getting my body & may sanity. I feel bad...The quilt is coming along lovely, rest assured. And I will make it through the process fine as well. I'd rather have a challenging day quilting a custom any day of the week than be stuck with only an endless pile of pantographs! I just don't want to do another miniature for a while :-) I love your quilt; your technique is amazing. Thanks for bringing the quilt, and thanks for caring.

A First for Me

Most people that know me know that I make "Art" quilts, as opposed to "doll" quilts. Who would dedicate hours of creative mind and precious sewing time to making a blanket for a DOLL?? I make my mini's to either hang on a wall or to use as table pieces. Dolls, hummm, I really don't think so. Or so I thought.

OK, so this is a first. My very soon to be 3-year old daughter has been on an orange kick. Every clothing store we shop in she pulls the orange pieces off of the racks. Same is true for when we are at the fabric shops (which is considerably more often than when we shop for clothes). While I was at the Maine Quilt Show a few weeks ago, I picked up some fun orange prints - some from Mendocino, and from Farmer's Market, and a few others. I thought Sophie'd get a kick out of them. She did, only she was not too keen on me cutting them up to make anything, so I did it rather discretely.
We celebrated her 3rd birthday yesterday, and she got a bunch of homemade baby doll clothes from my mother, another baby blanket from her, and I made her this baby quilt (aka doll quilt). I had no idea my mother was at her machine too. The curved piecing was liberating and fun. I had no pattern, just wanted the piece to have movement. The quilting took 3 hours surprisingly. I'm not sure I'll ever quilt a piece so much with my walking foot. Mine does not feed perfectly all of the time, so there are places when the fabric was bias and wanted to pucker a tad. My green sashings show this more than anywhere else. Had it not been for a silly doll I might have panicked.

It sort of reminds me of corduroy. It definitely carries that feeling of water movement. It's a quilting that I'd love to do with a long arm. I've tried it on my machine but have not been able to move the fabric evenly enough to keep spacings.

Stay tuned...I'll show more sewing that was done for Sophie's birthday this week. I was busy the last 5 days preparing for her party so my sewing machine was off collecting dust this week. Not for long; I am preparing a number of scrappy kid-friendly Project Linus quilts to complete prior to a September 19th event where I will bring all of the ones made this year (thus far it is 46).

A Completed UFO & Matching Pair

For the last 11 months, I have made blocks for the birthday block swap, hosted on About.com's forum, and hosted by Kate. I've been in 2 groups, making three blocks most months. Some of these months have been great fun, and others it has been a total chore designing & sewing the blocks. Because one of the groups is more advanced, we had more challenging blocks assigned. Three people in the swap requested New York Beauty blocks, including me. Now, I do sew curved seams, but I'd never done much paper piecing, and I'd never done an NYB before. I was undaunted!

My month was November. By January I had received all but 2 of my 11 blocks. A couple people graciously sent two because they questioned their color choices or because the first block made had small "issues". It's hard to make these truly square or to not lob off part of the last points, so I have discovered. I made a few of them myself, and rationalized that those last two just were not coming. Oh the swap ettiquite!...

So last weekend, my mother asked if I'd done anything with the blocks yet. Of course not - they were sitting patiently in a bag awaiting the other two, because, afterall, what could I possibly make with 14 of them?? Then the magical solution hit me. A matching pair for the dining room! My walls are at critical capacity and I am very POKEY at changing my mini's seasonally. But there's a hanger in the dining room, and I do swap them out in there with regularity. Voila! So here's a fuzzy (damn my camera and it's operator) look at the two pieces together - 4 blocks for the mini, and the other 10 for the table topper.
I'm totally in love. The colors are hot, and vibrant. I fixed the ailing blocks I had received, and ignored the tips I had to nip off. I love how I chose to remove the last arc on the ends so as to make it oval. It's so perfect (grins).

....double click for a marginally better look

I wish I could give full credit, but I only remember the blocks made by Kate, Julie, Amy, Anne and Helen. But I assure you those by Michelle, Terri and Joy are gorgeous too. Here are a few closer up shots of the blocks in the runner...

Be gentle on my quilting. I more or less just sat down with a blank canvas and a sewing machine and let the NYB speak to me. Each block is quilted differently. There's a lot of ditch stitching, which I am still working on being more patient with as I sew.

I placed the blocks with curved geese at the ends of the runner. Love it!

I used a King Tut variagated red, yellow and purple thread ordered last fall. It worked out just great. In fact, I ran out before the mini was done so I had to get more. Here you can see the bits of leafy vining quilting and some feathering.

This is a block Julie sent which she wasn't sure would play well with others. It's color is a bit marroon and yellow, rather than red and orange, but it blends pretty well. I like the many pointy spikes.

Here is the 20"x20" mini. Many of the swappers sent swatches of their fabrics. I had intended on making a large wall hanging, and doing a flying geese border around it. In the end, my hanging is much smaller and fewer geese were needed. And much to my TOTAL disgust, as I was finishing the quilting, I discovered that the right hand border was sewn on upside down, and the darn geese were flying north, not south! Tell me I was not something ticked!!

The two bottom blocks were made by me. The quilting of this piece is similar to that on the runner - flames, vines, circles, feathers, etc.

details....

This is one of those projects that is best seen in person. In retrospect, I ought to show a picture from the back, but I'm tired of trying to get a shot with decent lighting for today!

To all of you that contributed blocks to this project, my sincere thanks. I love how it all turned out!

A Valentine's Ice Sculpture & More

Sophie and I took Saturday & went to my mom's house. I needed a break from parenting the boys (middle kid is challenging my desire to be a mother these days). Upon my return, was this lizzard-like thing, sculpted from ice in the front yard (what you cannot see is the 3' high snow bunker off to the left of the lizzard!)! There was undoubtedly a little fabric shopping that day, but it's not all that scintillating!
Finishes for the last few days...
I have quilted and bound the "Love" quilt. It turned out well. It has just a simple large meander quilting pattern. This becomes number eight for my 2009 Project Linus donations. Not too bad...averaging right at one a week. At this pace (which will most certainly fall off soon), I'll nearly double last year's donation count.

I did another top solely from my strip box. The strips are all widths so this is not a traditional bento box pattern, but my adaptation. It is 48 6-1/2" blocks, and a three inch border. The border is bright pink check. It kind of reminds me of Peppermint Patty. Maybe that is what I will name this. Sadly, this barely made a dent in my strip box, and more than made a disaster of my sewing space. There are small scraps everywhere that need cleaning up.

Last week I also made this. It is a thank you gift for my son's speach therapist. Next week he will have his last session with her. He's seen her for 19 months now, and with his sister starting speech also, it is great to see him finish. She has a huge lilac bush in her yard, and Bryce used to comment about the scented lilacs well after they were blooming (when there was snow on the ground in fact!). She also likes purple about as much as I do. Her house is tiny, and since Bryce couldn't tell me well enough what size table she has (I'd planned a runner or center-piece), I opted for a small hanging. It's 19". The nine squares came from a piece of material I had - I just cut them out of it. They are odd shaped, not really square or rectangular, so I hope they don't look too wonky.

I did a little detail quilting on each square, some are outlined, others just have the leaves quilted. I think that JulieAnn will be pleased. It definitely looks like something to usher in spring (once the foot or more of snow we have melts!!)

Swap Quilts

As challenged by Toni to show what swap quilts I have done and received in the past year...Here goes (I'm down to the wire, as today is the last day!)

Here's My Four Seasons quilts...
I made this for Linda last Fall, entitled "Fall in Love with Fall".


and received this from Luisa. It remains my all time favorite, being hand appliqued, embroidered and quilted. It just flows.


I turned around and made this for Luisa pf Portugal for the winter. It has a snowflake quilted into the design. "Let it Snow"


For the winter, I received this from Maria, of Brazil. It is more lovely than the picture, entitled Birches in the Snow.


I made this for Tami in CA for the spring. It's one of my favorites that I made, all hand embroidered and hand - quilted. "First Blossoms"


I got this from Janice in New Zealand. It's gorgeous raw-edge applique. This quilt whet my appetite for trying that techinque om my summer quilt. "Spring Tulips"


Here's the summer quilt I made for Ginger in IN. It is raw-edge appliqued, and reminds me so fondly of my home, Maine.

I received this "Plant in Full Sun" from Emma of Adelaide Australia for the summer.
For the Miniature Booty Swap 1, I made this for Lisa. My partner was a flake and did not make anything. I received the quilt that Jan sent to her (but I dont have a picture of it). This is Lucky the Turtle.

I made this for Marlene for Miniature Booty 2. It is hand sewn, appliqued and quilted. I absolutely LOVE this piece! It is named "Stop and Smell the Flowers". I have not yet received my Booty 2 quilt.
FOr Kate's Another Little Quilt Swap, I made this in May for Lynda of the UK. I called it "Frog in a Blender" because the red and greens. The name may be a little sick and twisted, but I thought it fit the quilt perfectly. It has some fantastic green fabrics Janice sent me from New Zealand.


I received this bold lovely from Kate in return.
I did the Doll Quilt Swap 3 this past spring. This top was initially pieced for my partner, who has 2 young daughters adopted from Asia...the angels represented them, whereas the red hearts represented China. She bailed from the swap so I finished the quilt for my neice.

Though not a swap piece, I finished this for my other neice. The one below is what I actually sent to my partner in the DQS2 - Marianne. It's called "The Lazy Lily".
Here's the piece I received for the Spring Fling Round Robin Session 1...made by Julie, Tami, Jeanette and Marisa.

I did the quilting on this quilt in that RR, (also sewn by 3 others) - It went to Dorian.I participated in Ginger's About Forum Doll Quilt Swap also this summer. I made this for Christine in Florida. It is all of 1930's and is hand quilted. I named it "Memories of Summers Past", as it felt very nostalgic and old fashioned.
I received this sweet number from Ginger. Hand quilted, it graces my daughter's pink bedroom beautifully.
Most of these quilts are hung up my stairs, except for Kate's which is in the dining room, Ginger's that is in my daughter's and a couple other's that just are not up yet! I use straight pins in the corners and dbl stick tape to hang.