Tiny Little Dresden

My obsession with tiny pieces of fabric has spilled over into the cuttings from Hugs & Kisses - a teenie, tiny, adorable little Dresden Plate.

There wasn't much left from my cuttings but all you need for each petal are scraps 1" x 1.5" so I had enough to make at least one, especially with the addition of a few new fabrics. I think there will be enough for a few more.

I have no idea what it will be used for but just couldn't resist the temptation to try one. I thought maybe as the blossom to go atop my baskets but it's too big for the block.

There are 19 petals and the plate itself ends up just about 4.5" wide. Sooooo adorable. There's a downloadable tutorial on the Crafty Fox blog if you are feeling anal...

So many different looks from the same fabric. I'm thinking that there might be a bit of a sampler quilt that comes from all of these little experiments that I've been undertaking. Whatever it will be it's fun!....M

Unfinished Business

Sometimes we get lessons when we least expect them, and today was one of those days.

A few days ago I started to bind the Dresden Plate that mom made. It's been sitting patiently for almost a year waiting to be finished (yes, it can take me a while to work up to binding a quilt!). This one is huge but 434 inches later as I was happily looking at the finished product I realized that there was a little unfinished business to deal with - one corner was missing a flower. After practicing avoidance behaviour for years it was time to step up to the plate and try my hand at appliqué.

I remembered seeing the pieces for the blossoms all cut and stored in a little zip lock baggie somewhere, but a thorough rout of the sewing room produced nothing. Maybe I was just remembering seeing them from when mom was working on it...

Actually, I shouldn't say I found nothing. I found the box that mom had been using to store the quilt while she worked on it and there was everything in there except the blossoms - a copy of the pattern, tons of extra leaves, more sashing strips, extra fabric, and even a little spool of thread.

It was quite touching going through the box and it left me a little wistful. Mom had left notes and instructions and just seeing her handwriting again was very comforting. And it brought back great memories as well, including the fact that we had decided to change up the border (which explains all of the extra sashing); the sketch on the left is one that I had done up for her and I remember helping her lay the borders out shortly after we moved into our new home.

Still, despite all these treasures there were no blossoms cut and ready to sew. What to do?

I found the yellow that she had used for the flower centres and two pieces of the pink floral in the sashing so I ripped them out and sewed them together to create a square big enough to cut what I needed, but despite several digs through bags and boxes and shelves I could not produce any of the blue for the second layer. I finally found a close substitute and plunged head first into needle turn appliqué.

It took me a while and it's not perfect, but I think it came out quite nicely (mine is the bottom blossom); I now see why some find appliqué so addictive. This opens up a whole new world. YIKES! Can you imagine how long my TO DO list is going to be now?

Maybe it went so well because my little visitor for the day was there for moral support...

Anyway, it felt like it was meant to be and that, in some small way, mom was there guiding me through the steps. Maybe, maybe not, but it's a nice thought, and timely too; tomorrow is the anniversary of her death.

I gave the quilt a little test drive this afternoon and snuggled under it for a snooze on the sofa but now it moves to our bed for the summer. Such a long time coming....M

Baby Steps

I'm closing in on the last of the Broken Dishes baby quilt, but have taken a few sidesteps along the way so it is taking me longer to finish it up than it probably should. The bias binding is now cut (with all of my fingers still in tact this time) and applied, I just have to do the hand sewing.

It's always a bit of an exercise for me to work up to making the binding for some reason, so while I was in the zone I decided to tend to some unfinished business and cut the binding for the Dresden Plate that mom made - this one is waaaay overdue in getting the binding on it but it will be nice to put on the bed now that Spring is coming.

Then I enjoyed a friendly tug of war with it to get the binding sewn to the quilt - this quilt is just HUGE! In the end I won and it was well worth it because I think it's going to really finish off the quilt nicely, so there is a second one that I have ready for hand sewing.

And, since the gals at the church will likely soon have the quilting on my Goose Tracks finished, I decided I might as well get the pink binding for that one ready as well....M

A Closet Full of Memories

As I was waking up in Beijing one morning I realized that I was staring into a closet full of quilts. In all of the excitement of getting there and travelling around it had taken a bit of time for it to register just what I was looking at, and the longer I looked at them, the more I realized what a time capsule they represented. I knew I needed some pics to share with you so I tried to get a few without totally disturbing the entire pile.

On the very bottom was a Dresden Plate that mom had made using old men's ties. It is rich in colour and each plate is beautifully embroidered with a feather stitch - onto wool blocks, if memory serves me correctly.

Sitting just above it (you can see just a corner of it in teal/green/purples) is the Log Cabin that I made for their wedding gift. This thing is huge. Michael is a very tall man and we don't like our quilts skimpy in our family, so I wanted it to be large enough. Even though it was made on the machine I remember sewing on it and wondering if I would ever finish it. Had it been pieced by hand they likely still wouldn't have it, and they have been married 20 years...

The orange quilt on top of that one is from Denyse Schmidt. She and Lili became friends when Michael and Lili lived in Connecticut and when it was time for them to move to Helsinki, Denyse made her a quilt as a goodbye gift that Lili had admired from one of her shows. Hard not to like friends like that, isn't it?

It's beautiful slabs of various orange fabrics with narrow winter white strips running through it and lined in a blue/grey. Unfortunately, I didn't get a good shot of the front but love the quilting pattern that she used on it.

On top of the pile was another one from mom, a Postage Stamp chock full of all kinds of wonderful scraps. I remember her stitching it in the car on a road trip down to Connecticut to visit with them, so it's fitting that they now have it. Sorry it's a little fuzzy but you can make out the X and O pattern that she quilted it in.

And last but not least was the quilt that we slept under. This is another one that mom made; she was very prolific. The bed was covered in luggage when I took the shots so I only got one corner to show you, but all in all there are approximately 12 strips of geese.

Actually, they are HST Flying Geese and hand pieced as well. Lots of love and scrappy goodness in one little closet....M

Auditioning

Mom's Dresden Plate has been folded in the living room, patiently waiting for its binding. I had planned to do the binding in the same yellow polka dot as the backing but when Betty dropped in and had a look at it she suggested going with something either blue or turquoise, so down to the stash I went.

This blue is a gorgeous colour, almost periwinkle, and would work nicely...

...but I think this blue & green check even more so. I luv a bias check binding and really like that the scale of this check is considerably larger than the gingham that mom used for the stems in the so it won't be matchy matchy (is that even a word?). I like a bias binding but the check is woven on the bias so I will need to cut it with the grain to get the bias look that I want.

Today is the start of a long weekend for us so, with any luck at all, by Monday night I'll be well on my way to having this baby finished!....M

Home Sweet Home

Mom's Dresden Plate is all quilted and has come home to be bound and used. It was a huge job and I owe a great big thank you to the quilters at the church who hung in there until it was all finished. I think it even surprised them how long it took to do.

At one point they wondered if they would have any quilting to do this year but I think this one made up for any doubts that they might have had.

One of the comments that came back was that they weren't convinced initially about  quilting the plates in concentric rings - they'd never seen that done before - but once it was all done they quite liked it. They even thought it really looked like a flower :).

The primary reason that I went with that design was because there was already so much quilting throughout the rest of the quilt that I was trying to figure out a way to make the plates go quicker than outlining each petal.

Half way through marking it I began wondering if I was being silly putting so much stitching into it, but when I see it finished I am so glad that I did.















You'll remember that the backing (and soon the binding) are in this great yellow polka dot.

Now to make the binding and get it onto our bed.

I haven't done a whole lot of baking lately but last week I tried a new recipe - French Apple Cake. I had 4 apples that were riper than I like to eat raw so I was on the lookout for a good recipe to use them in, and I found it. Not only that, it was both quick and delicious. There's 2 tablespoons of rum in the batter, which gives it, as the author says, a lovely je ne sais quoi flavour. I used Royal Gala apples and they tasted more like pears than apples when it was baked.  It calls for 3 very large apples - I used 4 and could probably have added another one and still had a lovely cake. I'd highly recommend trying it.

It was best still a little warm from the oven but you could toss it into the microwave for a few seconds to get the same effect. We enjoyed it with a dollop of French Vanilla Bean ice cream but a Devon custard or warm butter rum sauce would be nice too. Isn't it great to have options?...M

Getting Close

I snuck downstairs on Sunday after our service to see how things were progressing with the quilting of mom's Dresden Plate, and, by the looks of things, I will be sharing pics of the finished product with you very soon.

It's been rolled down to the last two rows and those are well on their way to being finished. I can't wait to see the entire thing and put the binding on it. You could spend hours just looking at the great collection of fabrics in it.

This one has taken much longer for the gals to do than the one they did for me last winter - I do hope that they aren't getting tired of it.

Almost looks a little dangerous, doesn't it? :)  For anyone who hasn't put a quilt up on frames like this, they use a knife to pry the tacks out of the side boards when the quilt is being rolled.

Soon, very soon....M

A Sneak Peek

The ladies at the church continue to keep themselves busy quilting mom's Dresden Plate and I've been anxious to see how it's progressing. Yesterday I had a meeting in the church hall so curiosity got the better of me; I snuck into the back room and took a few photos to share with you. It is quite densely marked so the border has taken a fair bit of time but they are now starting to work on some of the blocks. Here's my sneak peek...

Tools of the trade

Starting to quilt the plates



The time tally, so far

Booster seat



Tacks

 

I'd love to be able to work on it with them but they quilt during the day and I can't get away from work. They seem to be doing fine without me though...M

Nothing Like a Deadline To Move Things Along

I often find that as I close in on the end of a project I will slow down or set it aside, wanting to move on to something else, and my Dresden Plate has been no different - this explains all the UFOs in my universe. All that marking has put me in the mood for sewing, but sewing small blocks, not big backings. So the thought of putting together the backing for it wasn't really high on my list but I did want to get it to the gals to start quilting this week so I buckled down and got on with it.

Recently I picked up yardage of a mottled yellow with white polka dots on sale (I hate paying full price for backings!) and it works well. I had toyed with using a blue & white fabric that I have, or a turquoise, but this one worked best, and I think there's enough to bind it with too.

Because the quilt is so large there was no way that I could just use the width of the backing fabric, either vertically or horizontally, so I inserted a row of bricks the same size as those used for the sashing on the front and bordered it on either side with white. It's nice and it was a way for me to put my stamp on the quilt with fabrics from my stash.

I really like how it turned out. It would be a nice way to make a baby quilt, and fast too.

So, it was all packed up last night with the batting, the thread and a few instructions on how to quilt it, and left at the church this morning for the gals to have their way with it. They are perfectionists so I know they will do a lovely job of quilting it....M