Callie's Baby Quilt

 My niece, Callie, will be having a baby this spring, and I have decided to make her a baby quilt.  I have plenty of time to whip up a small baby quilt for the baby shower in April.  

I have seen a baby quilt of the 3 bears in a bed, everyone snuggled in, sleeping. (Hibernating?)  I am going to make a variation of that.  I start with sewing 9-patches  into a "quilt" for the bears.

Next I make freezer paper bears for my applique patterns:

Add the bears's quilt back in to see how it will look.  Size and spacing looks good.

I start making the bears.  The parent bears will be sleeping, but the cubs are mischievious and will be awake!

I remove the bear applique pieces and finish sewing the bed:

The quilt is done except for putting the bears on.  It's a quilt of a quilt!! 

The bears go on, some details are added and it's ready to sandwich, pin, and go under the longarm.

Here is the finished quilt!

 Preparing a T-shirt for a T-shirt Quilt

 I have two grandchildren who are going to graduate from High School this spring.  Both have been very active in school sports and activities, and so I am going to make each of them a t-shirt quilt using their collection of t-shirts from their events.  I collaborated with the parents, who gathered up 16-20 t-shirts for me.  (The graduates were informed of this, just in case there was a favorite t-shirt that they wanted to keep for wearing.) 

There are many ways to prepare a t-shirt for use in a quilt.   You can view this topic in YouTube. I'll tell you about how I did it.  It's maybe not the easiest, but it works for me.  Use clean t-shirts, preferable with no fabrics softener or dryer sheets.

First,  cut off the sleeves, the shoulder seams, and  sides of the quilt, keeping the "design area" as large as possible.  I  am making 12" blocks (12.5" unfinished), so I kept a lot of space around the  design area. You may be able to use the front AND the back of the t-shirt, depending on how it's printed, so you might be able to get 2 blocks from one t-shirt.

Lay your t-shirt  section out flat on your cutting board, and smooth out the wrinkles.  Center a quilting square ruler over the design, centering it as best you can vertically and horizontally.

Center a clear ruler over the design.

Trim around the t-shirt,  about an inch or so from the ruler, cutting off the neckline, the sleeve, any excess fabric.  I call this the "rough trim," and it doesn't have to be measured. This is the area you will apply fusible web to and you want it a little larger so when you trim it to size, the entire area will be fusible.  We need to add fusible to the back of the t-shirt block because it keeps the block from stretching out of shape.  T-shirts stretch in all directions--good for comfort, bad for quilt blocks!

Rough trim

Next, put a few pins around the outside of the ruler to define the area. You will want to see where  the design is when the t-shirt is upside down on your ironing board.

When you remove the quilt ruler, your design will be outlined with those pins.

Take you t-shirt to the ironing board.  Lay it face down.  Put a piece of fusible web, glue side down, on the back of the t-shirt, making sure all areas within the pins is covered.

You may remove the all pins now, or remove them as you go.  Do not iron the pins!  Also, you should PRESS, not iron. (press = up and down with the iron, not side to side or sliding the iron across the fabric.)  Follow the instructions for the kind of fusible you are using.  

Press the fusible to the back of the t-shirt.  Don't over iron.  Some t-shirts have heavy waxy printing, or rubbery foam printing.  This can melt. 

Press the fusible to the back of the t-shirt.

Once the fusible has been applied, check to make sure the edges are all tight and that there are no "bubbles" in the fusible. 

Take your block back to your cutting mat. Center your quilt ruler on the fused t-shirt and trim to final size you need.

Voila! A finished fused t-shirt block for your quilt!

A side note-- you can use a couple of smaller pieces of fusible to use up larger scraps.  Overlap them slightly.  This works well for darker t-shirts, but may be visible on white t-shirts. 

A Tutorial for Framed Circles

 This post is especially for my daughter who needs to learn how to do this!   How do you sew that circle into that square with a hole in it?!  This might look complicated, but it's not if you just take it step by step. 

When you do circles (or curves), there should be templates with your pattern.  On those templates, there are usually marks that you need to transfer to your fabrics.  It's important to do this, so you can get the spacing for aligning and attaching your pieces. 

If there are no marks, you would simply make a a mark on your fabrics at the half, quarter, and maybe eighth (if it's a big piece) of the way around your curve. You would fold your piece in half, make a pencil mark to mark the point, then fold in half again for the quarter point, make your pencil mark, etc.  You would do this with both the circle, and the frame pieces.  Then you will be matching up those marks for pinning, and then sew.

My templates had marks already on them, and I did ransfer those marks onto the fabrics.  I used a Frixion pen (your marks iron right off!) for the lighter fabrics, and a gray chalk pencil for the darker fabrics.

 

To sew the circle into the hole, remember, RIGHTS SIDES TOETHER!  It seems too basic to state, but logic says,  put the circle on top of the hole, and somehow sew it there!  It seems counter-intuitive  to do it properly, but it needs to be that way, right sides together. 

Start by spreading out the frame.  Match a mark from the frame to a mark on the circle. (If orientation is important to your finished circle, make sure you match your marks accordingly.)  I want a certain color spike in the corner, so I will start there.  Match the marks, align the raw edges, pin.

Move to the next mark, and do the same.  Match, align, pin. Do not worry about aligning all the fabric all the way around just yet (see that yellow fabric sticking out in the picture below?)  You will align that little bit as you sew.  For now, just make sure your pins have the two raw edges aligned. You can add more pins later if you feel the need.

Continue going around the circle, matching your marks, aligning raw edges, and pinning the points.

I thought this needed more pins, so I added an extra pin between the marks to help hold it:  

 

front of circle                                  back of circle

 

Because I have really skinny points on these spikes, I am going to sew on the back of the circle so I can see where the tops of the points are.  Also, all of the paper pieced spikes have the seams going in the same way, and I want to cross those thick seams in the same direction.  You will want to sew slowly and as smoothly as possible, trying to follow the curve of the circle at the quarter-inch mark.  You can't see if puckers are forming on the backside, but you can feel your fabric as you sew, and often can feel if he fabric gets thicker.  Also, you can watch for "folds".  You can lift the fabric with the needle down to see if it is clear sailing ahead, or if you might have to smooth it out under there.  I did this often, every couple of inches.  If you see a fold, or a potential fold, stop sewing, and try to smooth it out before you sew over it. This is a slow process, but take way less time then having to pick out a pucker. When you finish sewing all around, check both sides for puckers.

As careful as I was, I still had one tiny pucker.  I picked out a few stitches and resewed.  

  

Press your seam carefully.  Press, don't iron.  Press means iron goes up and down, not sliding sideways. Ironing can stretch fabrics slightly, distorting it somewhat and this is especially true if there are bias edges.  Circles have 100% bias edges, so you don't want to stretch it out of round.  This would be easy to do with all those bias edges!  Also, do not use steam or spray starch.  Either could cause some shrinkage, which results in wrinkles or little "waves" in the fabric.

Here is the finished result:  

I hope this was helpful !

  

Round Two

 The second spikey circle of Beauty proved to be quite a bit easier then the first!  The paper piecing took a little longer as it was a bigger circle, but like I said earlier, the bigger the circles, the easier they are to sew.  So attaching it to the inner circle went well, even though I did have to pick out a couple small puckers..  Here is the second round of spikes:

The next step is to add corners to this circle to make it square.  I cut the fabric for the corners, sewed them into a square, and here is how it looks:  

Now to make that circle fit into that square's hole!
(I will go into detail on how I did that in my next post. )

Here it is!  Voila!

I'm gonna have to take my sewing machine into the Fix-It guy.  There are some mechanical problems that I need to take care of.  In the meantime, I can use my old faithful Brother machine to work on more of the paper pieces-- LOTS of spikes to make!

 

Jack the Ripper

 Beauty is going to be a really Challenging quilt!  I have re-done several parts of it, multiple times.  Perhaps it is the perfectionist in me, but I want it to be perfect!  My seam ripper is getting a lot of use! I have since decided that "good enough" will have to do!!  

The paper piecing is going well. The small tight circles are the problem. 

That center yellow appliqued circle turned out horrible! You can see that it is not round!  I edge stitched it because the applique stitch on my sewing machine is not working.  (What the H happened with that??)   I watched some YouTube videos on how to make a nice round applique and tried again, with much better results.  Jack the (seam) Ripper got into action and tore out the wonky circle.  I made a turning circle with freezer paper (watch the video to see how and why,) HAND SEWED the new yellow circle into place, and proceeded with the next step, adding the black ring.

Again, the result were not satisfactory.  So many puckers in the black ring!  I tried to iron them out.  Big mistake.  You cannot iron out a pucker-- you HAVE to pick the stitches out, and rearrange the fabric! Also, in the process of ironing, and not getting the pucker to lay flat, I tried some spray starch to "help."  Bad bad bad!  After I did that, the fabrics wrinkled even worse, and I completely gave up at that point.  Walked away.  But a few days of absence allowed that frustration to dissipate, and I was able to climb back into that saddle and, as my 5 year old grandson would say, "Try again!"

The yellow circle stayed (I had already replaced the wonky center circle with a new, more "round" one), but I had to completely remove the black ring and make a new one.  By redoing all these sections, I am hoping it will not come back to bite me at the end when I run out of fabric because I made two of everything at this stage!  I am not worried about the black fabric.  I have plenty of "Amish Black" and it's a common fabric, so it's easy to buy more.  But these rainbow batiks... that's another story.  I suppose I could get more with a close enough color that it might not be noticeable.  I am hoping that this quilt kit will have enough extra fabric built in for mistakes like these.  Some wiggle room in the yardage.  I did another quilt kit by this same designer, Jacqueline DeJonge, and if I recall correctly, there was plenty enough fabric to recover from an error or two.  Anyway, I finally got it all sewed together, and it's much better.  Not perfect, but decent.  I'm really glad I took the time to redo it.  I feel so much better about it all, and am ready and enthusiastic to continue with the next spikey circle!

The next circle should be easier because it's larger, and the curves won't be so tight.

Brilliant Beauties of Joy

 Now, again, my design wall is empty.  There are NO quilts under construction in the Piecing stage.  I started a new project.  I took a long awaited quilt kit from the UFO box.  I have been wanting to do this quilt for years, but other projects seemed to take priority.  But as I started looking at the beautiful batik fabrics, and the 32-page instruction book, I remember why I have not started this particular quilt.  It is OVERWHELMINGLY COMPLICATED!  The instructions are confusing, translated from Dutch or Danish (?), the entire thing is paper-pieced, and there are curves and circles, and rainbow sequences...  A picture is worth a thousand words, so here is the rest of the discussion!

This quilt is designed by Jacqueline de Jonge, (https://www.becolourful.com/ ) the same designer who did Something Blue, which I made awhile back and now graces Dianne's home.   I figured if I could      do Something Blue and have it turn out beautifully (it even won a View's Choice Award at the Darlington Quilt Show), I could do THIS one too.  Yes, it will be challenging, and take a long time. Regardless, I put on my big girl panties and started with page 1 of the directions and now I have a Quilt-in-Progress.  I am hoping to finish part B today (the center spikey circle).  I will post an update if that happens.

UPDATE:

Yep, got it done!  

2021 Agenda

 Now that the new year is FINALLY here, it's time for setting the agenda so I can hopefully get some of the UFO's finished.  Here are all the things I'd like to accomplish in 2021.

    1.  Finish Fan Quilt
    2.  Sandwich/quilt Summer Sampler
    3.  Sandwich/quilt Irish Rainbow
    4.  Finish Gravity
    5.  Work on Denim quilt
    6.  Start Beauties of Joy
    7.  Shenandoah Baskets
    8.  Christmas Pixels
    9.  Starlight Mountain
    10. Star Jewels
    11. Desktop Potholder-of-the-month

I think I'll start with Star Jewels, since this quilt is already pinned and under the Q20.

Next, the Fan quilt.  This quilt was a joint project with Dianne, each of us making half the blocks.  They are on the design walls, each column is sewed, but they now need to be joined to make the quilt.  Not much to do here, just sew the columns together, make the sandwich, quilt and bind.  Ok, that's a lot! 

Gravity is an almost finished quilt top, I just have to sew 2 halves together, than the quilt top is finished.  Then sandwich/quilt/bind.

The Summer Sampler and the Irish Rainbow are both finished quilt tops, with backing already bought, just waiting for their turn to be sandwiched, etc.

The Denim quilt is a Work in Progress, I have half the quilt blocks, Dianne has  half.  We needs to finish sewing the Cathedral Window circles, and sew the rows together.

Beauties of Joy is a quilt kit that I bought probably about 3 years ago!  I am excited to get started on it.

Shenandoah Basket is also a quilt kit I bought in 2015, so, six years ago.  A pretty Jinny Beyer quilt with a LOT of applique.  Beautiful colors, but all that applique.... ewww! what was I thinking!

Christmas Pixels and Starlight Mountain are two new patterns just recently found, still in the planning stage, but pretty quilts.  I have not bought fabric for them yet.  Christmas Pixels will be scrappy using my Christmas fabrics, hopefully finished by Christmas so I can give it as a gift to someone.  Starlight Mountain is a sort of Southwest looking pattern, I'll need to buy 3 yds of turquoise fabric, but the rest can come from my stash.  These will stay in the planning stage for awhile because there is plenty of other projects to do.

Desktop Potholder-of-the-month is nor really a potholder project!  It's a set of little wall hangings about the size of a potholder.  I made a set for Dianne, I'd like to make another set.  I have the little stand to hang them on already,  it will make a great Christmas gift next year.

So, there it is.  An ambitious agenda for what looks to be another COVID year.  That's a VERY ambitious agenda.  Also, there MIGHT be a Graduation quilt for Kaylyn, and maybe another for Aidan, since both are graduating from High School in May.  I started a precedence with Bailey, and then Alayna, so now their siblings are expecting a graduation quilt too... ohhhhhh!  I expect this agenda will be modified before too long, but it's a good starting point.  It'll keep me focused!