More Fan Blocks

Now that my design wall is empty AGAIN, I made a few fan blocks for the quilt Dianne and I are working on together.  Here they are:

I'm supposed to make 22 more, and here are 8, so 14 left to go.  They don't take long, maybe around 15  or 20 minutes each.  The hard part is deciding what fabrics to use.  We are trying not to repeat any fabrics.  There are a FEW repeats though, because Dianne and I have some of the same fabrics, and we each used them.  No one will notice!  OR it could be a game.... "can you find 2 fabrics that are alike??"  I think I have run out of large enough scraps, and have graduated to Fat Quarters.  I like making these blocks, and all of them together are so colorful!  Who will get this quilt?????

Charity Quilt

While I'm waiting for my extra Something Blue fabric, I decided to work on a charity quilt that my quilt guild was talking about.  It's called "Hats of Hope," an organization that gives hats and quilts to babies in the mountains of the tropics to keep them warm.  Whoever thinks babies get cold in the TROPICS???  But they do, in the higher elevations.  It's COLD in the mountains!

 

The quilts have to be small, around 36-40 inches.  I whipped his baby quilt up in a couple days.  It was small enough to pin on my dining room table.  It's made up of a one-yard cut of "outer space and aliens" fabric, and the back is pieced from flannel scraps I had left over from another quilt.  The binding is also made from leftover scraps.

Detail of the Quilting.

The Finished quilt!

The Backing and Binding.

Back to the Blue!

I have enjoyed working on my Something Blue quilt, and had finished the quilt as it is shown in the kit.  It's beautiful!

It measures only 71" x 71", which I think is on the "smallish" size.  I like bigger quilts!  So I have devised a plan to add a border around the quilt, maybe like a 1" inner border and a 5" outer border, adding 12" to the quilt, so it would finish off at around 83" square.  Much better.  

Alas, I do not have enough fabric left over in the scraps to accomplish this.  The kit was very generous with it's fabric, you could easily recover from an error if you cut a strip too large (or 7 strips, which is what I did!  Oops!)  So I emailed the designer and asked her if I could buy extra fabric.  She answered immediately and sent me a link to a quilt shop in New Hampshire that sells her fabrics.  I went to the website and found the fabric I needed and ordered it!  Hooray!  Now I just have to wait for it to arrive!

Quarter Quilt

Our Quilt Committee has been working, and we have 1/4 of the raffle quilt put together.  Here it is.

I copied this photo into Paint, rotated it and pasted it 3 times to show what a finished quilt would look like.  Up to now, we really didn't have a good idea of what it was going to look like!  Here it is!

I'm not overly thrilled with it.  I think it has too much white in it.  But everyone else loves it, so that's good.  It's too late to change it now anyway. I'll be glad when this project is over.  I really don't like working on committees.  We had to redo several blocks that the girls from the quilt guild sewed, and there were three that we couldn't use.  Our "fudge factor" proved extremely valuable, because not only did we have that extra half inch all around to help square up the blocks, but we had made 3 extra kits for each block, "just in case."  Guess what!  Just in case happened.  The directions on the blocks said "DO NOT TRIM THE BLOCK."   Yep,  someone trimmed the blocks, and badly.  We did not have to remake those blocks because we had 3 extra, so we had enough.  Why can't people just READ and FOLLOW DIRECTIONS??  Committees frustrate me.  I thought it was a bad idea to have everyone in the guild make these blocks.  Maybe I am just too much of a perfectionist when it comes to making quilts. 

OK, enough of this rant.  It's not good for the spirit!

Quilt Guild 2017 Raffle Quilt

I am taking a break from my Something Blue...

I belong to a quilt guild, the Lafayette County Sew 'n Sews.  We meet the second Monday of every month.  Every two years, we have a quilt show in September.  Last time, I was one of 6 ladies on the quilt committee to make, promote, and raffle off a quilt as a fund raiser for our guild.  Time flies when you're having fun, and September is sneaking up on us.  We've been talking since January in the Guild about getting a committee together to get started on this year's quilt, but talk is all that's taken place.  Now it's getting closer, and time is more important.  A few of us started the committee ourselves.  We made a Facebook Committee page, posted our meetings, and invited the committee members from last time.

We decided on some kind of a log cabin quilt.  We chose this picture as a model for our quilt.  It's a version of the Broken Star quilt pattern.  We only had this picture to go on, no pattern. I have EQ7, so it became my job (somehow) to make up the pattern.  We had some fabric already that we wanted to use, fall colors, beautiful golds and creams and rusts.  Most of it with metallic gold flecks or specks.

 

The first thing I did was make a grid after studying the the picture, and discovered that there were 4 types of blocks, which I labeled A, B, C, and D.  "A" blocks were dark/dark, "B" blocks were light/light, "C" blocks were medium/light, and "D" blocks were dark/light.  From this, I made a block in EQ7, and after much experimentation, colored it with the appropriate colors:

The 4 center A blocks are slightly different form the rest, so that our beautiful black and gold paisley could take center stage.  This paisley will also be the borders all around, so we needed the black to separate that in the corners, so the paisley in the blocks wouldn't fade into the paisley in the borders.

Next, I made a pattern for each block. We then decided which fabrics would go where.  This step was actually done at a committee meeting at the local quilt store where we could pull other fabrics that looked good together and would complement our other chosen fabrics.  

I then made 5 sample blocks, one of each kind.

  

   

4 "Center A" blocks form a star.

One of the last things we did was calculate how much of each kind of fabric we needed, and cut our strips and pieces.  Whew!  What a process!  Sixty-four zip log bags now hold the directions and pieces for our blocks.  We will pass these out to the quilt guild ladies next week at our April meeting, so that everyone who wants to can help with this project.

 We made our outer strips of each block an inch wider than necessary so that we will have a built-in "fudge factor" when trimming the blocks to 12.5 inches.  We have learned from experience that 12.5" can mean anything from 11.5 to 13" or more!  Not everyone sews with the same accurate quarter inch seam!  After trimming the blocks,  the committee will meet again and sew the finished blocks into rows, and rows into the top.  Hopefully, all will be finished by June so we can promote the quilt and sell raffle tickets in advance.  We don't even know what it will look like yet.  This is a TRUE MYSTERY QUILT!!!!  I hope it turns out ok.  It's a lot of wasted effort if it turns out to be an ugly quilt and no one wants to buy a ticket for it!

The Fan Quilt

Dianne and I had long talked about doing a quilt together.  We found a paper pieced pattern we liked and decided to do it.  I went to Colorado to visit her recently, and we each had some of the blocks done individually (about 20 or so for each of us.)  We spent some time sewing together, making more blocks, and were thinking we'd be sewing it into rows before then end of my 5-day visit.  Turns out that we have 6 in. blocks,  so we're gonna need a LOT more of them than originally anticipated! We only had a picture to go by, no pattern, Probably the original was made with 10 or 12" blocks. By the end of the visit, we were 44 blocks short of our goal of 120 (a quilt of 10 across and 12 down) so we each have to make 22 more before our July visit!  "The best laid plans go afoul!"

Here is the start of our fan quilt:

Something Blue Progress

I have been working on the Something Blue quilt pretty much exclusively these days.  I have all 13 stars done, and most of the spiky "footballs" that fit between.  The stars are precision point perfect, even if I do say so myself!  They're beautiful.  I love paper piecing just for that reason.  Sewing the curves isn't as hard as I thought, so this quilt is going together nicely.  All these tiny pieces make the quilt labor intensive though, I've been spending a lot of time with it.   Here it is so far: