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 

Miss P: The Early Days

It wasn't until I started digging into my Posh Penelope pics that I remembered that Roberta had started one in the spring of 2022 and then convinced me to join in, which I did in July.

She has such a fabulous stash. Lots of time was spent trying to figure out what her colour palette might be, borrowing a lot from Lori Holt and then adding in her own touches. 

This was a trial run - a wall hanging - to see if she was prepared to make a full sized quilt. Very soft and dreamy.

And after it was quilted it took on another layer of softness.

A summer quilt if I ever did see one....M

Say Hello to Miss P

Not only do many of my projects take a long time, I also seem to have a genuine knack for dragging my heels on sharing them. Case in point, Posh Penelope by Sew Kind of Wonderful, or Miss P as she is known to Roberta and I. Like we did for Holiday Forest, we decided to work on this one together hoping that the buddy system would keep things moving (I need all of the help that I can get!).

Believe it or not, we started this quilt three years ago and I don't think that I have shared anything about it with you. It is made using the Quick Curve ruler but 'quick' is a bit of a misnomer for me (Roberta's a different story) as my blocks are all sewn but still need to be sewn into a flimsy.

Wanting to have as much variety in our fabrics as possible because we needed 168 assorted fabrics for the petals, we decided to each cut and then swap pieces; three years ago today was the date of our swap. We had more than enough variety so each of our final fabric choices were far from identical.

This was my fabric pull.

And this.

And these are the neutrals/low volume, mostly solid prints that I used for the bands that cut across the corners.

It was like klepto quilting (basically 'shopping' in someone else's stash for free) but even better, because everything was cut to size! These are some of the 1" squares needed at the centre of each block.

Where we differed in our approach was how we treated the narrow strip that runs across each corner - Roberta went with strong prints...

and mine were more neutral/low volume. It's interesting to see the difference in the final product.

More to come in the next few posts...M

The Borders Make All the Difference

Autumn Leaves is not a pattern that I would have chosen for myself, but once the borders were attached it really came into its own.

A narrow brown border and a wider multi print piano key border finish it off. From the fabric bits that came in the box it appears that the brown print on the left was intended for the narrow border but it just seemed a little flat. There was a piece of the orange that you see in the upper right, but it wasn't going to work either, so I dug into my stash and found the brown in the bottom right corner. It was warmer than the first option and went nicely with all of the prints.

The pattern shows that brown border as being 2" finished but I narrowed it down to 1" and was happy with the effect - no so clunky. 

Little or no thought was needed when sewing the slabs for the outer border together, which things along nicely.

And the corners required no special treatment which was another stroke of good luck. Soon it was all together.

I took it back to the gals at the church before taking a shot of the flimsy, but apparently it's all marked now and ready to be quilted so it's time to make the backing. I'll have photos of the entire quilt for you later, but this beautiful Jacobean print is what I will be using for the backing, which was also provided. A sticker is still on the bolt and it looks like she paid $7/metre for it - bargoon!

All in all, I think it's going to be a great raffle quilt for the Holly Bazaar later this fall....M