Quilting Again

The dyes I ordered arrived mid-week, but by then the temps had cooled down, and Friday it rained all day. So I used that time to finish piecing a back for this striped quilt, and load it on the frame.

I'm using a quilt design called Logo, from one of Darlene Epp's little books. It is like a swirl, but with blunted tips on one side of each swirl. It is giving nice texture, and goes very fast. 

My sister Ann is back making concrete, but posted a couple of pictures of her vacation, and the quilts I sent for her husband, daughter and son-in-law.

Another one on the frame

I loaded this on the weekend, and started doing the stabilizing. I plan to use several different threads on the top (and also the back), so I did stitch in the ditch on the whole thing first. That way I can roll back and forth and do all the quilting for each thread before rethreading.

I finished the ditch stitching yesterday. Today I switched to a variegated King Tut thread. Even though I tested the tension on a scrap off to the side, when I stitched the first block there were lots of bumps and ladders on the back. So I'm having to rip that out before going on.

What's Up?

It rained over night, but today is blue sky and fluffy white clouds. Some of those clouds could still dump rain, because the next dry phase isn't supposed to start until tomorrow, but it is pretty in the meantime. I put away the last project I had on the design wall. It was just not inspiring to work on, perhaps because it was fall-like colors in the heart of spring. So, after a couple of weeks of no progress, I packed it all away in a bag (including the pattern), so I could work on something else.

I have been quilting though. This is another medallion of Carol's. Unlike the first one, she did all of this herself and it makes a real difference. The other was well-made and lay flat, but some of the color and design choices had me scratching my head. This one is much more cohesive and pleasing. I still spent quite a lot of time choosing thread colors and designs. While waiting on that, I stabilized the whole quilt by stitching in the ditch between every border.

Now I'm working my way back through the quilt and adding the quilting designs to each border and the center block.

Friday

So much for spring weather. Yesterday there was rain, hail, snow, thunder and then sun. Today I woke up and it was snowing. Oh well, it won't last long.

Same flower, now with snow on the ground.

What I'm working on: a quilt for my friend Trudy. It will be donated to the Humane Society for their spring auction. The focus print has puppies in many breeds, and the surrounding fabrics have little paw prints and bones.

Quilted

I finished quilting Carol's round robin top. Round robins are challenging to quilt, because I feel the different borders need different treatments, and that requires stopping and starting as you move down the quilt. It could also mean quilting with different threads, but I try to minimize that.

I used a variegated thread for most of the quilt, but switched to a tone on tone yellow for two of the borders. Here I had finished quilting most of the quilt, but needed to go back and add a little more in the green and white border.

The whole quilt. At 62 x 62, it's a little too big for me to photograph on my design wall, but you get the idea.

A closer view of one corner. The two outer borders are such busy fabrics that the stitching barely shows. I knew that would happen, so I did a loopy, swirly design for texture. 

Frame Friday 2/1

This is what is on my quilt frame, and has been for almost 2 weeks now. I'm quilting it in a very simple design, so it should have been finished already. But the top thread keeps shredding and breaking. That means that I have to unpick the stitches to a point where the threads are long enough to tie off. Then re-thread, and start again. It's very frustrating. The tension looks good and I have tried everything I can think of to reduce the breakage. It may be just one of those thread/batting/design combos that is difficult.

But I will persevere.

Next Borders

I've finished quilting this, and here are some pictures of the border sections.

It's a little tricky quilting round robins or medallions like this. Not only do you need to come up with different quilting patterns, but also try to keep them consistent and similar on all 4 sides.

Still need to tie off a few threads, trim and straighten the edges, and then put on binding.

Brent and Evan are coming over in a little while to drop off Peco, so they can go on an overnight sea kayak trip. It's kind of gloomy day, with rain earlier, and a power outage because of someone hitting a pole. But maybe it will get better for the rest of the weekend.

Weekend Quilting

I started this simple rail fence a month or so ago, just for a diversion and to have something to practice on. At the show a couple of weeks ago, I bought some orange batik for the outer border and got the top done. But even with the stash I have, I couldn't find anything for the back that I liked, and was large enough. So last weekend, I went looking for something simple and found an olive green 'Dimples' fabric that seemed perfect. I washed and pieced it during the week, and was ready to load the quilt Saturday morning. The Red Snappers loading system make that process so much easier and quicker. Well worth the cost in my opinion, as pinning the quilt to the leaders really made my back ache.

I'm trying out an all-over design based on Sally Terry's book, Hooked On Feathers. It makes it look sort of like feathers, without having to back track or make individual feathers that don't overlap. I am having some problems seeing where I'm going though. The variegated thread blends too well with many of the fabrics. It shows up best on the light yellow and on the peach.

March 6

Happy Birthday, Mom!

We've had some wild weather the past few weeks. Winds (one night leading to a 3 hour power outage), snow, hail, black ice, frost... finally this weekend feels like spring might be on the way. It's not all that warm, but there have been sun breaks, there's no wind, and the birds are singing.

Last weekend I loaded Melissa's round robin quilt on the frame and started quilting it. I had only said I would do all over quilting, but with all those borders, I just couldn't. So I compromised with a single variegated thread for the whole quilt, but been trying to come up with different designs for each border. It's still freehand, no stitch in the ditch or ruler work.

As Promised

Here are a couple of pictures of the most recently finished quilt, City Harbor. I posted about it earlier, it's a pattern from Cherri House's book, City Quilts. I'm really pleased with how it turned out.

For the quilting, I attempted the Dwirling pattern from Dawn Ramirez' DVD, Pajama Quilter Reloaded. It was fun and easy to do. I did get stuck echoing the waves too much of the time so that in places it looks a bit like mattress pad quilting.  But other places I got more swirls and changes in direction in so that looks better. And it was really the first time where I felt I could move while I was quilting, instead of having my feet planted, quilting as far as I could reach (and lean), and then stopping to step sideways.

More Quilting

I did finish quilting the previous quilt, but I haven't gotten around to putting the binding on. I'll have to get on that soon, so it can count towards my finished quilts for 2010.  But I offered to quilt this boy's quilt for my friend Carol's grandson. It's very dynamic with bright primary colors and black and white. It also has a really cool alien print as the outermost border. I quilted some continuous curves, some zig zags, some spirals and a flame border.

Here the finished quilt is draped across the frame. This photo was taken tonight after I got it off the frame, so it's kind of dark.

The back is this really fun robot flannel.

Next Up

The next quilt on my frame is called City Harbor. It's a pattern in the book City Quilts, by Cherri House. The book became my favorite this summer, and still hasn't left my bedside, where I look at it frequently and dream about which quilts I want to make. Usually I adapt patterns rather than follow them exactly (much like I can't follow a recipe exactly when cooking but have to improvise), but on this one, I came pretty close. The only changes I made were to substitute one color from those listed, and to make a lot of the strips a little longer so it would be a longer quilt. 

I finished loading it Saturday morning and quilted off and on over the weekend.

Spring Braid

Woo-hoo, another finished quilt! This is a lap-sized French Braid quilt, adapted from the Baby Braid pattern in the French Braid book. I'm calling it Spring Braid, because the colors seem spring-like, although it's inspired by the hydrangea fabric used in the centers and outer borders, and hydrangeas are really summer flowers. It's the second French Braid quilt I've pieced, but the first to be quilted. I'm trying to work up the nerve to tackle the larger one.

Here's a close-up of some of the quilting. I did wavy lines along each braid strip, with a loop in the little square, and then back down along the same color strip. I did connected spirals in the inner border and sashing. Both were done in King Tut Hieroglyphs.

In the outer border, I used King Tut Lapis Lazuli to stitch this spiral with petals. It hardly shows on the front side, due to the busy print, so I took a picture of it on the back. The bobbin thread was So Fine Brooke, a nice medium blue.

Ditch Quilting

The next quilt on the frame is this French Braid that I started piecing at the spring quilt day. I decided to try stabilizing around the inside borders and sashing before free-motioning the braids and outer borders. Stabilizing, in longarm quilting lingo, means stitching in the ditch to hold everything in place. It's harder than it looks, and definitely harder than the same technique on a regular sewing machine. I guess that's because the machine is faster and you're further away from the very precise line you want to follow. You can use special rulers to help keep the hopping foot in line. The one I'm using here is a Versa Tool, and it has a straight edge for ditch stitching on one side, and the other sides have curves and angles that can be used for guiding other kinds of designs. It takes practice, and slowing down!

Nine Patch Done!

So finally I got the binding on this done, and threw it in the washer and dryer last week. By the time it was done, it was too dark in the house to get a good picture. But it crinkled up nicely. This is based on the Nine Patch Lattice pattern on the Oh Fransson! blog. I wanted it a little bigger than the pattern, to be more of a true lap size, but I didn't want to make the patches bigger or add another row of blocks. So I made the outside blocks 12-patch rectangles instead of 9-patch squares, and then enlarged the plain blocks accordingly. I think it worked out well, and I'm pleased with it.

Here's the back, with extra blocks. This was also in the pattern, I just had to make sure the back was big enough for the beefed-up front. The solid fabric is the same as on the top, and photographed in the same location, so I'm not sure why the color looks so different. It really is a medium dark gray blue, so somewhere in between these two pictures, at least on my monitor.

And a close-up of a plain block, showing some of the prints, some of the quilting, and how it crinkled up after being washed.

Bummed

Since the weekend I've been quilting another small practice quilt, a French Braid design. It's been a little challenging because I have to bend over it to see where I'm stitching and that makes my back ache. So I've only done 1 pass on the frame at a time. Tonight I did one braid after I got home from work. When I turned off the machine to take Nikki out, I thought the on/off switch felt rather soft, and it didn't click. It did seem to turn off the machine, but I turned it on and off again a couple of times to make sure. The second time, there was a little hiss and sparking, and the switch FELL OFF. I just got new back handlebars a few weeks ago because they died, and now this. I'll have to call my dealer tomorrow and see what to do, but I'm guessing the machine will have to be sent back to HandiQuilter. Not too happy about this turn of events.

Getting up to Speed

After completing my first two quilts on the Avante, I realized that I need considerably more practice before quilting some of my waiting tops. There are a few that I can tackle soon, I hope, but I decided to make some simple tops to practice various techniques on. The first one is a pattern I found on the blog Oh Fransson!. I made a few changes to it, which I'll explain when I show the whole quilt. The simplest quilting is free-motion overall or edge to edge designs. This can be as simple as meandering over the whole quilt, meandering with loops, or designs with increasing levels of difficulty. I didn't think that meandering or loops would be much of a challenge, although they can be useful. This is a simple leaf and tendril design. These photos are both of the back, as there are a few nine patch blocks pieced into the backing. I'd say the blue is somewhere in between the two shades the photos show.

I was a little nervous to start this, but it was relatively easy, forgiving of mistakes, and fast.

Another One

I also finished the quilting on this one over the weekend. The quilting is deliberately a little wonky, partly because I knew I wasn't yet able to make it perfectly smooth, and partly because the fabrics are so bright, the quilting doesn't show up much anyway. I was improving as I went along, so I'm eager to tackle the next one. However, this and the previous one really need to get bindings on them before I load a new quilt.

Close up of some of the quilting.

Catching Up

So it's been a busy few weeks, with changes and stresses at work keeping most of my attention even evenings and weekends. However, I have been doing some quilt-related things here and there. I finished the quilting on the Signposts quilt. The wavy water design helped control some of the fullness left between and outside the leaves previously quilted.

Here's part of the back. It's a large-scale modified log cabin, with a painted and batik print plus various solids that were also used in the front. I'll try to get pictures of the whole front and back once I have the binding on.

I did start quilting the next quilt (next post), but in between, we had our semi-annual quilting day at Carol's. I was stumped on what to work on, but a couple of days before I pulled out fabrics for another French Braid quilt. This one is smaller, and spring colors instead of autumn. I didn't even start cutting the fabrics until that morning, so it took me until this week to finish the braids. I'll have to make some decisions on sashing and borders before I can finish the top.

Trying to Finish

I loaded William's quilt on the frame yesterday, and did some quilting today. I actually started quilting this one almost a year ago (and blogged about that here) but I ran into several problems. It was frustrating, and I finally put it away for some time. So it was already at least half quilted and has some waviness in the borders as a result of how the first quilting was done. I'm hoping that the water design I'm quilting in the background will tame that, and I can get it finished. The leaves were done before, on my regular sewing machine.