Spring Bloggers Quilt Festival Fun

It's been a while since I've had my act together enough to post a quilt to the semi-annual Blogger's Quilt  Festival that Amy hosts each spring and fall, but this time I'm ready. Well, I was almost ready. The festival opened on the 16th and I finished binding mine last night!

I've entered my Goose Tracks. I started it after our friend Sigrid passed away in 2005 and it is special in so very many ways. It is the first of my quilts that is all pieced by hand and is the first where I 'went off the grid' of making quilts with identical blocks.

In true Sigrid fashion I used several prints for the block backgrounds and to make up the setting squares, which gives it a really comfy, old-fashioned feel. 

The variety of cream fabrics continues in the saw tooth border and the combination of the creams and the wider pink border fabric ends up giving it a lovely lace effect. The backing and the binding are in the same pink as the outer border.

It's also hand quilted. The ladies at our church quilt one or two each winter as a fundraiser and I picked it up last Thursday, just in time to bind and post it. It measures 82" x 94".

I didn't want a lot of quilting on it so the setting blocks have stitching lines set about 1 1/2" apart running vertically through the quilt, and then just enough stitching in the blocks themselves to accent the fabric but not have overkill. In the pink border, double rows of stitching that begin at the base of the saw tooth blocks run perpendicular to the centre.









It didn't start out with a plan for how the blocks would go together, I just started making blocks that I liked and figured out the final layout when they were all finished.















It was a beautiful quilt to work on and I am thrilled to have it finished and to be able to start using it - I think it's totally dreamy. Thanks Amy, for the incentive to finish it off! This one is in the Hand Quilted category but there are several categories, so go check them out on the Festival page and have fun picking your favourites....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

I Need To See It

Because I fret so much about how to quilt my quilts I tend to need to draw out the stitching pattern before making my final decision, so Sunday was spent with pen and paper in hand.

This is the final plan. Most, but not all of the pieces in the block will be outlined with a 1/4" quilting line then I'll stitch right next to the block's edge. For the alternating 4-piece blocks I'm going to stitch vertical lines 1 1/2" apart.

There is a nice picot border in pink & cream so I'll stitch on the cream just where the pink & cream meet and then run two lines of stitching from the base of each picot to the edge of the quilt. I always think of this as a small quilt but it's 82" x 94", so it's no shrimp.

It's all marked now so the gals will get a call today and hopefully they are happily stitching later this week....M

Sunday Sewing

We're into the dead of winter and the gals at the church are chomping at the bit for a quilting project so I'm going to get them to quilt my Goose Tracks.

I've washed the backing and now need to get it sewn together. As is always the case for me, there is a little wringing of hands as to how to quilt it, but I think I'll go pretty traditional - a quarter inch line around the pattern, maybe cross hatching in the alternating squares and then a diagonal line around the border that ties in with the saw tooth border.

I've also picked up quilting on Stephanie's Confetti again and would like to buckle down and get the stitching done on it sooner than later. It's cold out today so maybe the time is right to sit by the fire with needle and thread in hand and a warm quilt draped over my lap.

I might need to dig in to the decadent Valentine cupcakes that Julia made for the Official Cookie Tester and I to keep me going - that is if he doesn't beat me to the punch!....M

Making Tracks

Part of the reason that I started my blog was to spur me to finish off a few of the projects that I have on the go; it seems to be much easier to start something new than to wrap up projects that have been started. Today I have my biggest success yet to share with you. You will recall a while back that I goofed and stitched part of the picot border onto this quilt backwards. Well, the ripping and re-sewing is now done and this week I got down to the business of applying the final borders to finish the top. Yup, after more than 14 years in the works, it's done!

Why this one took so long is a bit of a mystery but it is the first quilt that I hand stitched and it has followed me through our first years of marriage and a few years ago a move to our new house, every now and then popping its head up to remind me that I had some unfinished business to attend to. This summer I decided to bite the bullet and finish up the last two blocks and then figure out what I was going to do about the borders.

This is the one that I credit with changing how I look at and construct quilts. The pattern is called Goose Tracks but I like to call it my Sigrid quilt after a close friend of ours who provided the inspiration for my new approach. Sigrid was a great friend of my sister Betty and a prolific quilter. She loved to stitch by hand and was seemingly constantly stitching, using wonderful colours and patterns to create spectacular, rich projects; she also did beautiful cross stitch. I remember her loving Jinny Byer (take an online tour of Jinny's home). Sadly Sigrid passed away quite suddenly several years ago and we still miss her dearly. Betty inherited her wonderful quilt frame which had been made by Sigrid's husband Bill, and she constantly puts it to good use.

Shortly after Sigrid's death I started this quilt. Up to that point my quilts were relatively standard - all the blocks were identical and the fabric choice fairly straighforward. For this one I loosened things up, incorporating more flexibility into the palette, piecing the 'solid' alternating blocks using 4 different cream prints, using a selection of prints for the pieced blocks rather than making them all the same, and taking the same cream prints and randomly incorporating them into the picot border.

Don't get me wrong, I still love two-colour quilts and a certain format/structure to my quilts, but now I find myself drawn to using tones of colours rather than restricting the layout to a limited number of prints - your eye is constantly moving around the design exploring the mixing and matching.

Goose Tracks

So here it is. I found the pink outside border fabric this summer not really knowing what I would use it for but I think that it is ideal and absolutely LUV how it looks! I'll back it with more of the same. It's also the first time that I have tried making a picot border and it was lots of fun to do. The whole thing harkens back to my Grandma's aprons - I just find it totally old fashioned, soft and welcoming and the blend of fabrics reminiscent of how quilts were once made with whatever was at hand.

Goose Tracks

I'm not sure how to quilt it yet but I am thrilled that it is now a complete top and one huge step closer to being on a bed!...M

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others

You know the feeling...the one where you're whipping along nicely on finishing up a long-awaited border, you're all smiles and full of self-congratulatory talk, and then, in the glow of the finish you take one last look and realize that you've sewn it on backwards. Drat! Take a look. Can you tell which one is wrong? Unfair question because  you don't know what the next border is. I'm making the final border the pink print so the one on the left is the wrong one - the pink triangles should be on the outside so that they transition into the pink border.

Well, as our Australian friends say, time for a little 'unpicking'. I'll do that and then be back with more details on this quilt but in the meantime I thought I would tease you with a peek at this little number that I've been happily plugging away on. Did someone say more hexagons?

Candied Hexagons

And I'm delighted to report that my Comments box is now working (just click on the comments link in the grey box below), so feel free to share your thoughts - I'd love your feedback and your insights. Unfortunately, I don't think that you can go back and put entries in the posts where the Comment Box was not activated so you'll only be able to hear it from this point onward.

Oh, here's a recap on the Holly Bazaar recipes that I wasn't convinced about in an earlier blog: the butter tart square are delicious but you can easily use only half a batch of dough without losing anything but the banana chocolate crunch cookies are a little on the dry side - it could be the whole wheat flour or maybe I needed a bit more banana. I think I'd give them another try some time.

...M