Laden with Blunders

The pictures I am showing are of my 38" quilt.  I can be overly critical because it's not your's.  I can explain my errors in the comfort of knowing that I made them on my own quilt.  Mostly, these are not huge "errors"; they are more a matter of personal pickiness, or cases where the stitching didn't turn out as symmetrical as I would have liked.  Whatever the reason or excuse, it is frustrating me because each time I quilt the last couple days, it seems I make many hours of pickout too.

This corner is actually coming along pretty well.  My brown thread arrived yesterday.  Then we got snow today, kids got school delayed an hour and my daughter ended up home today with an eye infection.  As a result, not too much quilting.  For the entire day, only the sections of curved cross-hatching on the brown.  Oh, I say that, knowing that I did start on the center star only to realize it was going to have to be picked out because I hated it.  

 Yesterday was full of ups and downs.  Pros and cons.  I DID manage to get the bottom 2 corners quilted.  And I even like them.  That's a definite plus.  The downside, however, is that they (see below) are not exactly like the top two corner stars.  Translation: Some Pickout Required!  I decided that I like the single 1/4" of outlining on the inter-connected blocks (below) better than the double-line (above).  That's a relatively quick and easy fix.  I also decided that I don't particularly care for what I did on the 1/2" narrow border (above).  If I quilt on this at all, I will use a coordinating thread not the gold.   I am always going to be my worst critic, and sadly, won't be completely satisfied until this looks right, even if my right is different from your's.

 Only a little bit of the center red star shows, but it's all coming out.  I have been sketching away this afternoon trying to come up with something I like.  I want motifs that I have repeated elsewhere to make it cohesive.  That will come, and is by far and large the smallest of the quilt's demons right now.  What I discovered last night is that the filler that I am putting on top of the pieced stars has distorted the lines of the piecing in a few locations.  I didn't stabilize each seam before stitching the fill because I didn't want all those extra lines.  But another quilter noted today that I could have done it initially with water soluble thread (insert whack of forehead!).  It's not that it is an extremely huge area should I decide to rip it all out.  Afterall, this quilt is only 38" square, but it is, Ah... (in my best nonexistent Maine accent) wicked tightly stitched.  It would make me curse some fierce obscenities, and probably make me create some new bad 4-letter words. None the less, there may be no getting around it if I hope to have this in top showing condition.  If you double-click on the next picture, and look at the lower left points of the star, you can see what I am talking about.  That line ought to be straight.

So, thanks for all the great comments recently, and be patient with me as I stew in my frustration.  I know that much of this quilt is insanely unique.  It's just the other areas that leave me rolling my eyes that I must deal with :-)  Hope you have a good week-

Back to work

Though I have not posted in over a week, I have most definitely been busy.  I have several quilts finished for my clients, and am now working on a small wall-hanging of mine.  I'm really not at all convinced that I like this before the quilting, but I will finish it before I opt not to bind.  My goal was to create a quilt from solids that can be shown at quilt shows in a small quilt category (under 40" per side).  Hindsight tells me that the Moda Crossweaves may have not been the best fabric to use.  A batik or mostly solid would have been better.  None the less, I am quilting the heck out of it, hoping that I will like it better in the end.  After today, I have a sore back and wrists, but no added love!

Yesterday I went to A Quilter's Gathering show in Manchester, NH.  I had 3 quilts there, but only Zen Garden brought home quilt bling.  It was the only quilt to receive more than 2 ribbons, so that's pretty cool.  It received 1st in Color Compatibility, 2nd in Machine Quilting Excellence and 2nd in Overall Craftsmanship.  This is a smaller show, but it attracts some pretty big name quilters, both hand and machine quilters.  Several of them I know from the machine quilting show circuit.  Since I posted many of my pics to my Facebook page, I won't repost them here.  Best of Show was another Linda Roy hand quilted masterpiece.  Seems it was one of her's that won last year too.  It was fun getting to meet The Megan Farkas - even if it happened because I overheard a conversation where my name was mentioned.  I'm not nosey...just curious!  For those of you that don't know Megan, her quilt is the one here of the Japanese Ladies (maybe you've seen it in a magazine...).  I'm a fan of her quilts.  Yesterday was interesting listening to the much divided discussions over crystals on quilts.  I don't remember too many of them in the show that were twinkled up, but Zen Garden does have lots of very tiny crystals - 3mm ones.  It just twinkled because it was hanging beneath a bright light fixture and a skylight.  It almost seemed that the guests had been listening to the pre-election crap too long.  The crystal-no crystal discussion was taking on an election tone.  None the less, this quilt was appreciated and it was fin talking to people about it's making.

The quilt shows for 2012 are over now, and the planning for 2013 is in progress.

Colorweaves Top is done

I am finished with this little 38" quilt top.  Though I like the look of the pure solid colors, I am SO ready to get back to working with batiks, or other fabrics that are thin and non-ravelly.  I appliqued the curved mustard-colored section down by hand so that I could piece the outer 2 borders in a way that the stripes remained perfectly straight, but the crazy fabric nearly raveled off in my hands.  I am 50-50 with whether I really love this.  Since it shouldn't take a huge amount of time to actually quilt it, I will finish the project and hope for the best.  I had been designing the quilting all along, and now just need to tweak a few things, finish a few client quilts, then I will quilt it.

Tomorrow I finish a client's 3rd quilt and I hope to have some great eye-candy to show.

Bordering

I puttered a bit as I came up with this graded pink border.  Problem is, I think I puttered too much, and completely over-thought how to do the corners.  Tomorrow, I will remove the red, and replace the 3 pieces with a single triangle.  It will (1) be simpler, (2) have less seams, and (3) stand a change of having the corner point match well.  Aside from that, I think it is coming along.

I have a ton of client work right now, and much of it is custom.  As a result, I have been hitting my limit of how long I can stand to quilt at about noon or 1pm each day.  That is 5 hours of quilting for the day, which is plenty.  Then I get a walk (a little forced fresh air before we have snow is a good thing!@), and then I am free to play with some piecing.  This solid quilt is at 25", and will end up at about 40", eventually.  Time to go cut some foundations while my youngest whines some more over doing any homework...sigh

Solid Play

Yesterday, since the big green monster is of the longarm, and I was awaiting the arrival of 3 new quilts to quilt, I took the day to play with something new.  I know, what on earth am I thinking, another project???!  Yea, I hear ya, but who cares.  I have been thinking about solids for a while and wanted to play.  The color of the picture is horrible - the background is somewhere between celery and light taupe.  There are several other tones of this background color that will be in the quilt, making it look better.  These fabrics are from Moda's discontinued crossweaves collection.

My blocks are just under 9" finished, and were a bit finicky to make.  That's mostly my doing, being the anal retentive quilter when it comes to points.   Now, I have been a quilter and a piecer for a very long time.  I have made more than a hundred quilts, and I know quite a bit about how to piece accurately.  Or so I thought I did.  This project as taught this old dog a new trick though.

 My blocks above look pretty good.  The points are there, all shapes look like they are in good alignment.  But in the quilt I had designed, they would be placed on point, as below.  It is there that I have discovered I should have done something differently.  I should have devised the piecing so that diagonal rows were sewn, not the crossways ones (ie, making the block as a square).  Any slight meanderings of the diagonal seam are evident.  Live-n-learn.

I have played with what to do with these a lot.  I wondered if I could redesign the 40" quilt to have then not on point, but it just loses so much interest to do that.  That small of a quilt leaves no space to dither around; everything counts.  My final thought is that I hope that when the blocks are quilted (on point) that they look good, and don't show the things I see here.

Now, onto figuring out the rest of the quilt.  This is, afterall, supposed to be a "simple" quilt.  We all know, though, that I don't really know how to do simple :-)