There's Gonna Be Pinning

Final assembly on Miss P has begun, and true to form for this pattern, it's slow going for me, but it will be so worth it.

There are 6 seams along each side of of each block that are not conducive to nesting so use of the pincushion is in full swing. By the time I sew the rows together there will be 36 pins per row!

Because the blocks have been sitting around for so long, I've been giving each a good press to help re-establish crisp seams and hopefully make for better joins along the way. That includes pressing the corner seams open so that they lie flatter.

It's been so much fun revisiting every block.

And coming across wee surprises like this little bee (I'm easily entertained).

And even more fun to see actual progress. The two rows to the left are together now but not yet sewn to each other....M

Finally!

Well, Miss P's time has finally come. The blocks have been sitting at the end of the small ironing board that is to the right of my sewing table, most of them for the better part of a year, and I've had a few on a small design wall behind it to enjoy as I worked on other stuff. After the Homespun stars came down off the wall I wasted no time in putting them up before some unsuspecting squirrel butted into line.

There wasn't a lot of thinking, I just wanted to get them up and then see what might need to be moved around. LUV. My design wall is wider than it is tall so I've been having to crane my neck to imagine what it will look like vertically, but I am really liking what I see. And it also received high praise from The Official Cookie Tester, so that was good too.

It has had a bit of time to 'steep' which has allowed for the odd block twirl or switch-up to ensure that all of the darker backgrounds are well distributed. The one block that is giving me a bit of grief is the deep purple in the upper right corner, and it has since the day that I sewed it. I feel that it's just too dark. In hindsight, I probably would have been smarter to make the background on it in a lighter fabric so that it didn't carry so much weight. I'll live with it for now but if it really starts to bug me I might just make a replacement.

Time to start stitching!....M

Homespun Happiness

Often when I'm closing in on a finish the blocks stay up on the wall for seemingly forever, but not this time!

I wasn't thrilled with having to pin all of the connecting seams in these Homespun blocks, but there were stretches that allowed for a good 6 - 8" straight run so I just decided that a little patience would get me a long way. And so it did.

Happy, happy, happy! Once it came upstairs into the natural light I liked it even more than I did while working on it. All of those bright colours just make me happy. 

I'm still really happy with my decision to stagger the blocks.

I like it so much that it has me wondering if this one will stay at home, but I have some time to think about that.

The remainder of this mauve was made into a binding right away. Love using up a piece of fabric.

It needs a good press and then it will be ready for quilting.

On to Miss P!....M

Homespun is Getting Close to Coming Off the Wall

My mission to clear the design wall continues. Remember back in January when I started playing with the scrappy Homespun stars? Well, I just kept playing with them off and on. 

I really enjoy the pattern and liked seeing the result of new colour combinations.

Slowly they added up to enough for another Quilts for Survivors flimsy, but how to lay them out? I had just made blocks in colours that I liked with no real plan, and when I started to lay them out I wasn't that keen on butting them up squarely to each other. Ah, the joys of just starting to sew without a plan!

How about staggering them? I liked that. 

So I ripped two blocks into halves, and made a few more half blocks to fill in the gaps along the top and bottom.

But there is still the question of colour placement. I tried transitioning from pink to yellow to green to blue but ultimately decided that it wasn't working for me. 

So on a whim I nestled all of the pink/yellow blocks in the centre and moved the blues and greens to the top and bottom, and I liked that. Stay tuned!....M

Anne Made a Happy Flimsy, Too

Great progress has been made on cleaning off my design wall so that I can move on with Miss P, but before I go there I'll share another Happy flimsy for Quilts for Survivors, this time made by Anne.

She started with the pretty black print that's at the centre of each block and then added a couple of coordinating reds, a green and a white, all from her stash.

I expected it to look very Christmassy, given all of the red and green, but it doesn't. It's bright and fresh and I think the black helps on that front too.

I've said it before and will likely say it again: this is such a great charity quilt pattern because the blocks comes together so quickly. It's basically the first step in a Log Cabin pattern. And it can be made in any number of sizes. Mine were closer to 16" blocks but I think that these are 12", and no need to add borders given that we are working to provide lap quilts. She just finished it off with the same black sashing strips.

If memory serves me correctly, there will be five versions of this pattern in our bundle this year - I've made two, Anne made one, and Jean has made two (not sure that I've shown you Jean's, but they are lovely). There's still a few months to go before we ship our donation so who knows, there might be more happiness on the way....M

Clearing the Decks

Now anxious to dig in and get my Miss P (Posh Penelope) flimsy together, I have a few projects on the design wall that need to be dealt with first so that I can use it for my layout. My second Happy quilt went to the top of the list because all it needed was a few more sashing strips and a border.

The colours for this one are very similar to the first, but I switched out the orange Kaffe fabric for this brown harvest-themed print of baskets of bread and sheaves of wheat that I bought from Linda several years back.

I was using up a piece of beige and wasn't quite sure that there would be enough so the sashing and first border are cut at 1.5", which is narrower than for the first.

Most of the remaining colours for the blocks are the same as I used for the first quilt...

but the black in the bread print led me to using this orange check for the border which has a narrow line of black in it. There are a few pieces of this orange in the blocks as well.

So that's another Quilts for Survivors flimsy finished and ready to be quilted. They both originated from me wanting to use a piece of this lovely cinnamon scrap from our church quilters. I did, and that makes me 'happy'!...M

Who Am I?

Not surprisingly, Roberta was the first to the finish line with her Miss P, and what a masterpiece it is! The multi-coloured petals seem to shimmer on the breeze and the various depths of the block backgrounds make it appear as though it is being seen through dappled light. It is spectacular.

The real piece de resistance is the backing that she chose. She's a longarmer so there were a lot of options at her disposal. She chose a very vibrant and graphic one - an absolute explosion of bright and colourful blossoms with lace doilies scattered throughout. This is interesting because she's a devout Kansas Troubles kind of gal, always drawn to very traditional colours and prints, so when she landed on this as her backing no one was more surprised than her. I seem to remember receiving a "Who am I?" text 😉.

It is just so perfect.

And just to prove it, Miss Ivy gave it her seal of approval.

What's even more perfect is the black and white striped binding that she finished it with. Lots of squealing going on over at her machine...

So her quilt has been finished for several months now and mine is still a pile of blocks. Seeing these photos again has just reconfirmed that the time is nigh to put mine together....M

Tricky Curves & Batch Processing

Four pairs of petals build out into a beautiful blossom in each block of this quilt and choosing which four prints to use in each block was a lot of fun.

I started out making one block at a time to ensure that I got things right but after a considerable stall, and needing 42 completed blocks, around 15 blocks in I moved to batch processing to get things moving along faster, first four at a time and at some points, eight at a time.

As more and more blocks were sewn it seemed a good idea to decide on all of the colour combos for each block to ensure that I had fabric mixes that suited rather than doing that as I went, so eventually I did that.

It was a great way to visualize how much was left to do and also helped serve as an incentive to keep moving (not that the box didn't often get set to the side).

You can see where the colours in Roberta's blocks were much stronger than for the wall quilt she had made.

And she didn't seem to have as much of an issue as I did with integrating those darker backgrounds.

Sewing that long curve is actually very forgiving. Thanks to a little help from the bias cut, it felt almost like a straight line when the pieces were matched up.

It was when you went to match the two pieces that the fretting set in. I am a pinner so I worked very hard to make this seam work, but there was often an inevitable fractional slide. 

Initially, I was very concerned when they weren't absolutely perfect, but eventually I realized that they were close enough. Once it is quilted it will be even more difficult to tell if there is a slightly bigger gap between some of them....M

Getting Things Going

I'd be fibbing if I said that I just jumped in and started sewing the blocks for Miss P. The block has a number of steps - 5 pages, to be exact - and I spent more than a little time pouring over them before finally taking the plunge.

There's also an excellent video tutorial from Sew Kind of Wonderful and it too got several views just so that I was comfortable with the process before starting anything.

Both Roberta and I made each of the four quadrants of our blocks from four different fabrics and that mixing and matching part makes for SO much scrappy fun!

Add in selecting the strips and corner triangles and it's a little piece of scrappy heaven in every block.

That little 1" centre square was just the icing on the cake.

Where I struggled a little was using the slightly darker backgrounds for a block as I tend to use a soft neutral most times.

But once I saw them combined with the lighter blocks I could really start to see how they provided depth and interest (there might have been a few little squeals of delight happening at this point...).

The thing that really makes this quilt special for me is that it combines fabrics from both of our stashes, creating something truly wonderful. Interestingly, this phrase from a selvedge was tied around a bundle of neutrals that Roberta had wrapped up for me: Happiness held is the seed; happiness shared is the flower. How apt....M