Borders for Something Blue

My extra fabric for the Something Blue quilt came finally.  There was a  problem with the light blue I ordered for the skinny border, and I had to choose something else.  The fabric I ordered in place of my light blue raindrop fabric turned out to be too green, so booo, now what?  After auditioning numerous fabrics, I decided to use a strip of the backing fabric for this border.  What do you think?

The turquoise strip bring out more of the turquoise colors in the batiks of the quilt fabrics.  There's a good contrast too.  I love it!  This is the one!  Ok, back to the sewing machine I go!  There's lots to do if I want to have this done by the middle of September!

Whirligig is Finished!

There is a quilt show coming up in September, and I have been working to finish at least ONE quilt to enter in the show!  (At the quilt show 2 years ago, I entered 5 quilts!) I make a lot of quilts, but end up giving them all away! I will ask Aidan if I can borrow his quilt (Argyle) that I gave him last Christmas to put in the show.  I also gave a quilt to Drew (Asteroid), but won't ask him to send it up from Georgia. Too bad, that is a beautiful quilt too! I am working on Something Blue, but don't know if I can finish it in time.  The could be the Fan quilt to enter, if Dianne and I get it put together in time for me to quilt it. Sooooo!  Whirligig is my only entry so far! I finally finished it, and it turned out really really nice!

I quilted it with black thread.  This was, for me, a bold and risky color choice, as it WILL show --black thread against bright colors!  The backing fabric is black, so that looks great.  If there were any tension problems, you just can't see them!  I echoed the shapes of the whirligigs, but it's not a continuous line, so there was a lot of breaking of thread and knots.  I will do it differently next time. But it still looks ok.  Here it is:

How to Sew PARTIAL SEAMS

Here is the block I've called the "chained pinwheel."

The "frame" pieces in the Chained Pinwheel enclose the pinwheel in an offset way.  These need to be sewed with what is known as a "partial seam".

First, sew the Center Pinwheel entirely.

Next, sew the "frame strips", you'll need 4 of them.  You will be matching the squares which will form the chain links to the appropriate corner in the above pinwheel picture.

Next will you will sew the first strip to the pinwheel.  The first strip is only "partially sewed", thus the name "partial seam."  Match the colored square to the same colored triangle.  Sew until you are about 1 or 2 inches from the end of the pinwheel.  Backstitch to secure, cut the thread.  There will be a "flap" that you will be able to move out of the way later.

Rotate you block 90 degrees clockwise.  Align your second frame strip, matching the corner colors.  This strip will fit the block, sew the entire length as usual.

Rotate you block 90 degrees clockwise.  Align your third strip, matching the corner colors, sew the entire length.

Rotate you block 90 degrees clockwise.  Fold the "flap" from Frame strip 1 out of the way.  Align your 4th and last strip, matching the corner colors, sew the entire length.

Now you can go back and finish sewing the partial seam from the first strip.  Fold the flap back into place, align the edges.  In the seamline, find your sewing line and your backstitch.  Starting a little before that backstitch, about a half inch or so, do another backstitch to secure this new line of stitching, start sewing again, right over the first backstitch, and sew to the end of the strip. 

Voila!  Your block is complete, and beautiful no doubt!

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!