Random Bits: Vol. 8

In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four and twenty hours. –Mark Twain

Identity Crisis
March is having an identity crisis. I wish it would mistake itself for June instead of December.

{We woke up to a good 4" of snow today, completely covering all the spring bulbs that had started blooming. It continued to snow until nearly 2:00 pm. Then the sun came out and by 4:30 pm had melted most of the snow away.}

{Sidebar: I can't take credit for that beautiful bit of prose. A friend posted that on Facebook before the snow and it was so perfect I had to use it.}

The Continuing Saga of the Tortoise and the Snail, or Friday Night Sew-In Progress Report
My goal for Friday Night Sew-In was to finish the straight-line quilting in the white zig-zags of Miss Butterfly's quilt and to wind the bobbins for the FMQ in the colored zig-zags. I had three full zig-zag rows, two half rows {at the top and bottom}, plus one line of stitching left in a row to finish. I did make progress, but I still have one complete zig-zag and a half zig-zag along the bottom of the quilt. My bobbins are all ready to go, though. Never mind that three of the four were already wound.

In the past, I've never tried to strategically place my embroidered quilt labels on the back of the quilt. I just stitched them in along the seam and called it good. With the Pinkalicious and Little Boy Blue baby quilts, the piecing and quilting offered an opportunity to place them so that they wouldn't be stitched over. It was kind of frustrating, though, because the ultra-cuddle I used on the back of the quilts was stretchy and shifted. So when I set out to position the label for this quilt so that the colored stitching wouldn't intrude too much on the white label, I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. I was surprised at how well it lined up. Horizontally, it is right on. Vertically, the label should sit ¾” of an inch lower, except that when I cut the top piece of backing, I forgot to add the extra allowance and instead cut it exactly where I wanted the label to be. Measure twice, cut once never rang truer.

Favourite Things Friday: The Frontrunner {a week and a day late}
Last Friday, the Not-So-Little Bugs had the day off from school. I took the day off work and we set off on an adventure. With high spirits, ample snacks and entertainment, we set off to visit my mom and dad via Utah's light rail, the Frontrunner. We arrived at the platform early, bought our tickets and patiently waited for our train to arrive. Upon boarding, we picked seats with a table so that we could play the game Grasshopper brought.

Grasshopper refused to smile, and if we look a bit rough, well, that's because we were. Part of our adventure was to get hair cuts, all three of us {and I got a color}, from my sister. The ride took 1 hour and 57 minutes, traversing 81 miles. This is 37 minutes longer than it takes to drive, but I was all for taking the train since that meant that I didn't have to drive. Before we were barely underway, though, I got a mite queasy. The motion sickness triggered a massive migraine, which I tried my best to medicate and ignore. After our hair appointments, we had a little party at my parents' house. My dad cooked hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill and the weather was so lovely {mid-60's; see also, Identity Crisis} that we ate outside. All of my siblings and their kids were there, except for one sister and her family who live in Idaho and who did not have the day off school. It was so nice to be all together. We played games after dinner, and the Not-So-Little Bugs and I caught the last train home. It was definitely a favourite, in my book.

Friday Night Sew-In Report

Q. What do you get when you cross poison ivy with a four-leaf clover?
A. A rash of good luck.
–Unknown

I had a really nice Friday Night Sew-In. I got the rest of this cute little wall-hanging that my mom made quilted. It was a Block of the Month at the quilt shop near her. She and her friend signed up together. It was $5 for the first kit. If they finished their blocks and took them back the next month, then they'd get the next block for free, and so on. But just after they signed up, her friend's husband found out he had terminal cancer. So my mom did both blocks each month and finished this one for her friend. She's going to surprise her with it for her birthday next month.

You can get a better look at some of the details below. I think the stripey front door is my favorite. I set a little button doorknob on it to see how it would look. I had fun adding details to the building. I put shingles in the roof, quilted along the lines in the brick fabric, and did pebbling in the sidewalk. I quilted the window above the door to make it look like stained-glass and added some details to the “quilt in the front window.”

Here are the other blocks. I fiddled with the contrast on the photo of the sewing machine so you could see the quilting. It is nothing really exciting. I wasn't really inspired with a great idea of how to quilt it, so I did a bit of “chicken scratch,” which is a term I borrowed from the automotive world. Chicken scratch is a bit of free-hand embellishment along the pin-striping of a car, or sometimes near the door handles or other trim. I did a tight meander in the background and like the little fan I quilted in the hand-wheel. I had more fun with the little tomato pin-cushion. The loops in the background set it off nicely and I had fun sewing in details to make it look like the real thing. The rotary cutter was fun to do as well. I tried a bit of McTavishing in the background, added a bit of detail in the handle, and did a swirl in the black center of the cutter.

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Checking In

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
–William Shakespeare

I have a loosely set schedule for what I blog. It helps keep me organized. And it is very useful on those days when I don't have something quilty to post about. Sometimes though, I almost feel tied to my schedule. Certain posts are kind of time consuming to put together. I'm so particular about what I put out there that just a regular, everyday kind of post takes a minimum of 30 minutes. If there is photo editing involved, you can add at least another 30 minutes to that. There are so many things competing for my time; work, kids, homework with the kids, cooking, laundry, gardening, dishes, blogging, quilting. This sort of sounds like an apology for not doing my regularly scheduled Wednesday and Thursday posts this week. I'm probably the only one who noticed. I love doing my scheduled posts and plan to continue. But other things are vying for my time and I'm trying to find a balance, so I may mix it up once in a while and post something different or not at all on days when I have a regularly scheduled feature.

This week, I've been enjoying the lovely weather and spending a bit of time in my gardens. I ♥ digging in the dirt. All kinds of green things are peeking up and pretty soon the bulbs will be in bloom. Actually, I already have a few things blooming in the sunniest parts of my yard. I've also been helping the Little Bugs with LOTS of homework and I've been doing some quilting.

This is a wall hanging my mom made for a friend. It was a Block-of-the-Month at the quilt shop near her. She and her friend signed up together. It was $5 for the first kit. If they finished their blocks and took them back the next month, then they'd get the next block for free, and so on. But just after they signed up, her friend's husband found out he had cancer. So my mom did both blocks each month and finished this one for her friend. She's going to surprise her with it for her birthday next month. This is such a cute wall hanging. I love the stripey front door. It probably needs a little button doorknob to finish the look. The quilt hanging in the front window is really fun too. I wasn't sure if that was another quilt above the door, or a window. I decided it was a stained-glass window and quilted it to look like that. I loved doing the shingles on the roof. I just did stitch-in-the-ditch for bolts of fabric upstairs {don't look too closely}. I'm going to quilt some clouds in the sky, but I'm not sure how, yet. I don't know if they are going to be puffy clouds, or if I'm just going to quilt lines to create texture.

Besides the quilt shop, there is a tomato pin cushion, a sewing machine and a rotary cutter. I've quilted the filler around the sewing maching {just a stipple}, but I'm not sure what to quilt in the machine itself yet. I've got the tomato pin cushion figured out, but not the filler around it. I'm really happy with how the rotary cutter turned out. I did an approximation of McTavishing around it, and you can't see it, but I did a swirl in the black part of the rotary cutter. As I was editing photos, I realized that I hadn't finished the details in the handle, so this needs a little more work.

The fun thing about quilting something like this is that it is small, and you can work on it in little snippets of time and still feel like you're making progress. I only had about 30 minutes yesterday, so I did the pebbling in the sidewalk in front of the quilt shop. I'd like to get this finished up in the next day or two, so my mom can have plenty of time to get it bound and to her friend by her birthday. I'm going to work on it during Friday Night Sew-In tomorrow.

Friday Night Sew-In

When we seek to discover the best in others, we somehow bring out the best in ourselves. –William Arthur Ward

I haven't done Friday Night Sew-In for ages. Not that I haven't been sewing on Friday nights, because I usually am. But I don't usually think to link up. I had big plans for last night. I did the ditch quilting on the polka-dot quilt.

I used water soluble thread because I really like the stability that ditch quilting provides, but I don't want this particular quilt divided up by that stitching when it is done. After I finish the decorative quilting and run it through the wash, the stitches in the ditch will disappear. But while I'm quilting they will keep the quilt nice and stable. Hooray! I'm excited to finally be quilting this quilt. And now that the ditch work is done, I can start with the fun stuff. I'm actually off to work on that now.

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Various and Sundry Monday: Vol. 4

We’re caught up in the crossfire
Of heaven and hell
And we’re searchin’ for shelter

Tell the devil that he can go back from where he came
His fiery arrows drew their beat in vain
And when the hardest part is over we’ll be here
And our dreams will break the boundaries of our fear
The boundaries of our fear
–Brandon Flowers, Crossfire

Friday Night Sew-In: Sudoku Quilt
I got a late start to Friday Night Sew-In this time around and didn't get a super lot done. As a matter of fact, I signed up on Friday night right before I sat down to do a little sewing, so I didn't even post about it beforehand. Even though I didn't get much done, as Angie pointed out, a little sewing is better than a lot of cleaning!

A little over a month ago, P. made a Sudoku quilt for a friend of hers. I fell in love with it and got the pattern from Sarah. I rooted through my stash and came up with the perfect combination of fabrics for my own Sudoku quilt. In the meantime, P.'s already finished a second Sudoku quilt top. She's awesome like that. So, I decided that I'd work on my Sudoku quilt for FNSI. Technically, I'm not supposed to be starting any new projects, but does it really count as a new project if I didn't buy any of the fabrics {except for the outer borders, back and binding }? Anyway, I got all my fabrics pressed and then I got four of the nine cut into 4½" squares. I think that's a good start on the quilt, and not too bad for the small amount of time I worked on it Friday night.

Tweet Tweet
Friday was the first day last week I did any actual sewing. It was a topsy-turvy week. The Little Bugs were home for Spring Break and Mr. Bug and I had to juggle our work schedules with only one car. Also, I was just plain stuck on this little Tweet Tweet quilt. After I got my rows of coins together last weekend and decided it was pretty scary, I asked for opinions on several layouts and then incorporated them into several more layouts. This quilt didn't come out how I'd visualized it and I just did not like it when it came together. The solid pink coins just threw the whole thing off, so following Amy's suggestion, I made a pass with the unpicker and pulled out only the fabrics I really loved and put the rest in a discard pile. I laid the coins out again and still didn't love it. I made another pass through the discards with the unpicker, pulled out some more coins and rearranged the layout. I still didn't like how they looked together. So then I pulled some more coins out of the discards and incorporated those into the layout. By Friday evening, I was still debating about how to do the sashing and not loving how it looked. I was thinking that I would just put this project away for a little while, but Saturday morning I woke up with this quilt in my head.

I decided to go with my original plans for the sashing fabric, with Vicki's added suggestion of adding a narrow strip of solid on either side of the sashing. It is interesting in this layout how much the greens stand out. I think I like it. And I've got an idea or two for quilting, so I think this quilt might come out after all.

I ♥ Tulips
Spring is officially here. The tulips have started blooming in my {north-facing} front yard.

I've had tulips along the border on the south side of my house for a couple of weeks, but tulips in the front means spring is here. I went out to the back yard and cut some tulips in a little area I planted specifically for cutting. It is on the west end of the house and it is blocked from view in the front by a fence and if you want to see it from the back of the house, you have to walk over there. I have a really hard time cutting my flowers to bring into the house. It puts the balance off on the 'arrangement' outside. And once you cut them they start to die, which is sad. But no one is enjoying the beauty of these flowers at all, and that is even sadder, so I brought this little vase-full in. The three hyacinths make my kitchen and living room smell heavenly. I think I'm going to cut a bunch to put on my desk at work.

Monday Music Spot: Crossfire
This morning, I heard this song on the radio and just loved it {while Charlize Theron totally rocks, the video is a little weird so you might just want to listen to it. Brandon has a truly lovely voice}. It just seemed to kind of fit me, to fit my life right now.


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Friday Night Sew-In: The Official Report

The world is wide, and I will not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum. –Frances E. Willard

I talked a little bit about what I worked on during Friday Night Sew-In in my Favourite Things Friday post. I started FNSI as soon as I got home from work yesterday afternoon. I got the binding on my Cosy Posies quilt and got it washed and dried and wrinkled and ready to give to a very special aunt.

I took a little break, had dinner with Mr. Bug and then got back to work. I pulled out a quilt top I've had finished since last July. It is made from the same fabric line as the Cozy Posies quilt {and Baby Frolic}, and it was so much fun to make. When Frolic came out last spring, I absolutely fell in love with it. And I bought my first Jelly Roll, along with a few coordinates. I used the Jelly Roll put together this quilt top {using this tutorial, which finally made a Jelly Roll make sense to me}, as well as a few other things. After finishing Cozy Posies, I decided it was time to finish Magic. I stayed up way too a bit late getting half of the straight line quilting finished. I'm happy with how it is coming out.

As today is National Quilting Day, I am going to ignore everything and everyone and quilt to my heart's content hope to squeeze in a little more quilting time.

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Favourite Things Friday: Stripey Bias Binding

Success isn't a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire. –Arnold H. Glasow

I am one of those people who like to do the binding on a quilt. It is hard to say, because I really love everything about quilting, but I think that it is my favorite part because it means that a quilt is about to be finished . And that is a fabulous thing.

My favorite kind of binding is stripey binding, cut on the bias. It just makes me happy. I do continuous bias binding {someday soon, I'm going to update that tutorial with better pictures and make a downloadable PDF version}, and it is way easier than cutting individual strips of binding and sewing them together one by one.

I am finding that another of my favorite things is free-motion quilting. After I quilted my first free-motion quilt about eight months ago, I remember really disliking it and thinking that I would probably never do it again. I just finished quilting my eighth quilt, Cozy Posies, last night . And I absolutely love how it came out. I tried feathers for the very first time. Can I get a whoop whoop ?

I'd originally planned to do an all over loops and flowers meander on this quilt. It was something a little different than quilting I've done previously, but still familiar enough to be safe. But Wednesday morning as I passed it laying on the living room floor up on my design wall, I had a flash of inspiration. I thought that feathers would be really great in the rows of coins. My motto is Go Big or Go Home, and after the last quilt I did, where I stuck with something I knew rather than branching out a bit and trying something different, I decided to go for it. I sketched out a few rows of feathers, but was anxious to move on. I stitched a few rows out on a practice quilt sandwich and then I just went for it.

For Friday Night Sew-In {which I started the minute I got home from work, just after 2:00 this afternoon}, I did the binding and then I threw this baby in the washer. I think I've been converted to the throw that quilt in the washer as soon as it is finished camp . I just pulled it out of the dryer a bit ago and there was still enough light outside to get a few good shots of it {thank you, Daylight Savings Time }. Isn't that stripey binding so much fun!?!

And here's the back. I'm really in the Frolic groove, so I think I'll spend the rest of my Friday Night Sew-In working on getting my other Frolic quilt finished. Then, I ABSOLUTELY PROMISE that I'll work on Mr. Bug's T-Shirt Quilt. Cross my heart and kiss my elbow .

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Too Busy Quilting to Blog . . .

To quilt or not to quilt, that is the question. –Variation of Shakespeare

I'm humming right along with the Cozy Posies quilt. I'd planned to do an all-over loops and flowers meander, but yesterday as I was getting ready for work, I had a flash of inspiration. Feathers! Michelle, over at The Prairie Quilter was my inspiration. She started out her FMQ career with feathers and has done some really beautiful things with them, so I decided to do feathers in the strips of coins. I bought my thread yesterday afternoon and got it all pin basted last night before bed. I started quilting when I got home from work this afternoon {don't ask me what we had for dinner because then I'd have to tell you that I fed the Little Bugs Ramen noodles so I could have more quilting time}. I really like how it is coming out. I have four of the five strips finished and I'm dashing off to do the last one now and see how much of the border I can get done before bed.

Oh, and I'm doing Friday Night Sew-In again this month. I'm looking forward to it. I hope to finish the Cozy Posies up. I'm torn between two projects after that. I know I PROMISED that Mr. Bug's T-Shirt Quilt would be the next thing I work on, but I'm kind of loving the Frolic {and the feathers} and have another Frolic quilt top that has been begging me to finish it since last July. I guess I'll have to see what kind of a mood I'm in tomorrow.

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P.S. If you haven't already, check out my Civil War Fabrics giveaway.

Friday Night Sew-In: Gracie's Pinwheels

Trust that little voice in your head that says "Wouldn't it be interesting if..." And then do it. –Duane Michals, More Joy of Photography

I have been looking forward to Friday Night Sew-In all week long. It was a really great way to unwind after a long week. I was able to leave work early {i.e. on time}, get a few errands taken care of, do a little blog reading, feed the family something quick and easy and by 6:53 pm, I was settled in for an evening of sewing. I decided to work on something completely new and never before seen on my blog. You see, in direct violation of the No New Projects policy, I'm trying to squish one more quilt into my list of quilts to finish by the end of June. Nevermind that it is already February 19^th and I've only finished one of the seven I've set out to do. A friend bought the fabrics and asked if I would make a quilt for her daughter's {toddler} bed. I'm just a girl who can't say no, so here are they are washed and ready for pressing and cutting.

And after an embarrassingly large amount of time, here are all the pieces necessary to make this quilt cut and ready to go. I used my Go! cutter and the starter die to cut that stack of 144 HST's in 15 minutes. It was definitely the fastest part of cutting.

Then it was time to get down to business. I got my pinwheels all put together and started to add the borders around them when Grace positively refused to take another stitch. She insists that I am working her too hard and she wants another spa retreat . I have a problem with this because if her manual told me where to oil her, she'd be getting the proper treatment that would prevent these little protests of hers. The only thing the manual mentions about oiling is where not to put it. So I dust the lint out very regularly and every once in a while I drop a tiny bit of oil down the holes in the face plate. I'm afraid of oiling her too much in the wrong places {because there is no indication of where the right places are}. I went on-line and Googled to see if there were some instructions out there, but no luck. I opened Grace up to see if I could be a little more strategic with where I put the oil so that she'd loosen up. But that didn't help much. So, I put an on-line request in to the manufacturer for instructions. Grace quit long before I was ready to, so this is as far as I got with my Friday Night Sew-In.

I haven't heard back from the manufacturer yet {I know. I'm a bit impatient}, but I'm anxious to get back to my blocks. So this morning I'm going to completely strip her down and see if I can find the sticking spot so that I can get these pinwheel blocks finished. This quilt is going to be like Grandpa's Candy Dish, only the blocks between the pinwheels will not be pieced from strips. I want to say the blocks will be solid, only the fabric is a print, so that is a little confusing . I think it is going to be really fun, assuming I can get Grace back on board.

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