Block-a-Day Project and a very Pretty Finish

Janurary is over. That was fast. But I feel like I had a good go at all the projects I have to tackle.

First up my 365 Day Project: Block-a-Day

Pheww!!! That was no easy task! Jumping into making myself make a block a day, even if I was nice and didn't really give myself too many rules, was hard! I need to practice making it routine. Pick a time of day. This month I found myself doing well in the first two weeks, then I'd slack and have to play catch up. I played catch up for the rest of the month! Not to far behind, only usually a day or two. And proudly, they were all finished by the last day of the month.

Here they are.....randomly placed on the design wall.

I'm still unsure about the end results. Originally I thought I'd put the months worth of blocks all together in one quilt, ending up with 12 quilts at the end of the year. Now that I see them all together, I want more to play with!

So for now I will keep them in a nice gift box, and keep pondering. I could put Jan-June together and split it into two quilts also. I just can't decide as of yet.

I have made a page (see menu above) to keep all the blocks as I go. I'm still not happy with the layout of the page either, so be patient as I change it around until I like it.

January was fun! I put my arse to work and joined in with some BOM's mentioned in this post.

I got two of my four BOM's done, which is not too bad since I started mid-way through the month. Some more catch up to do indeed!

For Pat Sloan's Globetrotter, here's my center block for January.

MMmmmmm!! I am so in love with my color choices for this block. I also stumbled across some quilting inspiration for this block here. Now I can't decide if I was to quilt-as-i-go or wait. Hmmmm. Check out the Flickr group for the Mystery BOM, so many different variations!

Happy Febuary Everyone! 

For the first of the month....

I'm linking up with Lily's quilts! Check these out!!! What a great opportunity for small scale bloggers to meet and greet! Spread the love people!

Friendship Everlasting

I really can't believe that it's already October, but I'm glad. My birthday was over a month ago and I am barely putting away the pile of fabrics I purchased on the birthday trip.
I hadn't been sewing much, so the studio was slightly neglected.

I scored some nice Robert Kaufman prints on sale at my favorite fabric mecca, M & L Fabrics in Anaheim, the cows, chairs, and citrus prints. I'm still not so in the groove of paying attention to what is what when I buy fabric. I have designer prints all over in my stash and I only become aware of them when I pull them for projects. A lot of them are older designers and collections from when my grandma was building her stash, but as I become more and more obsessed with the idea of designing fabric and incorporate my love of blog surfing, I've found that I am becoming more familiar with fabric designers and collection names as well as companies. It's exciting to start memorizing the details. 

Of course I purchased all that fabric (15 yards approx.) I had not a single project in mind but rather colors that I'm lower on in my stash. (There's an addiction for ya!) Orange. It's still a mysterious one for me. I enjoy it. It's uplifting and positive, but I can't manage to find prints I like. Not to mention that I don't really use it often. So, I have something orange brewing in my mind, October is helping.

What also helped was the special visit from my BFF for the last 23 years! She drove down from the Bay area for a weekend of sewing and girl talk. When she arrive with her machine in tote, I was blown away to discover she'd never made any patchwork blocks/traditional quilts before. (Art quilts, yes!) So we set to making friendship wall hangings. 

I've had flying geese on the brain so we started with those. I tested out a method I'd found on the Connecting Threads website. The tutorial was excellent, easy to follow and makes four units at once!

We made dozens, then decided that we needed a central block. I knew of an easy one, Saw Toothed Star. She and I each made a center block, and traded. We had tons of fun mixing the Flying Geese we made into a nice boarder. Not too bad for our first time (I hadn't made Flying Geese before either).

We picked out a special egg print on black originally from my grandmas stash for the backing and decided we'd each quilt them up this week. It was an exceptional weekend! She is such a dear friend, I'm so happy she was able to sneak back down to our hometown for a sewing retreat!

It definitely helped me harness my sewing mojo again. I spent the following two days after she left cutting and sewing 64 more Flying Geese units to make a plaid version that I've been gawking over.

And after getting my friendship quilt (that we lovingly named the 'A''A' Quilt for our initials and the amount of beer consumed that weekend) basted, I decided that I'd hand quilt it, since I need some practice with that as well. 

Here we are with our projects!

WIP Wednesday

It's raining today which always makes me feel a bit more productive. I got up and got to it today, taking pictures of things in progress. Did some more rows of quilting the the nearly finished quilt (Worldly, see below)

I have so so so many W'sIP that i should stop looking at all the wonderful inspiration the internet has for me....I became obsessed with English Paper Piecing when i saw this tutorial for the Rose Star on SelfSewn (a great quilting blog!) and the flickr group really didn't help but make me want to make one more and more. So being rather ingenious, i decided i HAD to make some rose star blocks to make a border around a WIP. Ha! So though it's a new little project, it's actually part of a larger project. I'm bad. I know.

I really couldn't help myself. I love drafting geometrical patterns and i absolutely love hand work. So there. My first rose star coming together much quicker than i had imagined. Plus, i found this perfect little three tiered plastic box, just the right size for the e.p.p. project making it completely portable. I'm going to make just 9 blocks, i swear.

And in an attempt to keep my brain from loosing it completely over the amount of scraps taking over every nook of the studio, I've been trying my hand at a couple of the blocks from The Scrap Attack Quilt Along. The Japanese X + block caught my eye immediately.

There's an awesome tutorial found here on another of my favorite quilt blogs BadSkirt, plus an ever inspiring flickr group.

I've only made two, but i can tell it's going to be a long love affair, this block is super simple to piece and a good use of scraps.

Here's to the work in progress!

Linked!

http://freshlypieced.blogspot.com/

A Homemade Block Tutorial

 

The other night, I was flipping through quilt magazines, mulling project ideas and fell in love with a quilt called "Equivalents" based on the traditional "Moon Over Mountain" block. The quilt was made of mostly soft hued batik fabrics and was so gorgeous.

I got the itch to design my own. The finished block above is a smaller, tighter version of what I saw in the magazine. It reminds me of progress, success, and all things going up. So I'm giving it a strange name, "Health Meter", mostly because I was thinking about my health while drawing it out.

So here follows my first attempt at writing a quilt block tutorial. I've made one block off the pattern I drafted, pieced by hand and it didn't turn out so bad. I'm a novice at curved piecing on a machine, we'll try that another day.
 So here we go:

Health Meter Block Tutorial
finished size 8.5 x 5.5

Materials Needed:

Copy of Templates (found here)
Fabric Scraps at least 7in. sq. and smaller
Thin cardboard
Scissors/ Exact-O Knife
Pencil/Fabric marking chalk
Glue Stick
Hand sewing needle
Thread

Cut from Fabric:

1- 3in. x 4in. (for template A)
2- 2in. x 3in. (for templates B)
2- 2.5in. x 3in. (for templates C & Cr)
2- 1.75in x 5in. (for templates D)
2- 4in. x 7in. (for templates E)

Bottom right and going counterclockwise Pieces A-E

A note about fabric selection: You'll notice that i used seven different fabrics for my block, but it's really up to you. This block could be made using 2- 8 different fabrics. So play a bit, don't be scared!

I glued my block copy onto thin cardboard to make sturdy templates because i'd like to make an entire quilt of these blocks and I need them to last multiple tracings.

Cut out the template pieces along the black lines, I used an Exact-O knife to make nice clean and far more accurate cuts.

Once all you've cut apart the template you're ready to trace your templates onto the fabrics.

Keep in mind, since you've cut your templates from the "finished" block, when cutting out your pieces, add a 1/4" seam allowance around each shape. The drawn template line will act as a nice stitching guide line but don't forget to trace it on the "wrong" side of the fabric.

Sometimes lightly finger pressing the seam allowance around the template helps as well.

Once all your block pieces are cut out including a seam allowance, you can begin hand piecing in the order shown on the template. The numbers 1-5 indicate which seams to stitch and in which order.

Staring with C and Cr, right sides together stitch together using a running stitch and making a few back stitches at the beginning and end. 

I try and make my stitches as small as possible to add strength to the seam.

As you finish each seam, finger press them lightly. 

When putting the curved seams together, I lightly creased a center line in each piece to help match up and pin them together correctly. 

                             

Place a pin at the center where the pieces match, then slowly ease the edges to meet and pin loosely.

      

I am by no means a pro at curved piecing yet, but as far as I can tell, it's just a slow, take your time process. I just stitched slowly, making sure seams matched where they needed to.

When the curved seams are finished, it's very important to clip the edges a bit to allow the fabric to settle into its new curving shape.

And since this block is mostly curves, it's really best to take your time and go slow (did i say that already? haha). I did finish hand piecing the whole thing in under two hours.

Basically the seams are done in order,

pieces C and Cr, and both B and D seams are marked 1.

Next the C/Cr unit is attached to piece E marked by 2.

Then piece A is sewn to the other E piece marked by 3.

And that's it for the curved seams!

Now for the final seams of the block. Start with the seams marked by the 4's. Don't forget to match up the seams of the inner circle and hold with a pin.

When you're stitching by hand, you can go slow enough that matching up the seams is simple. For the final seams marked by the 5 on the diagram, I matched the circle seam lines first and then the point. I just started up one side, slowed at the point, and back down the other side. 

I did have a slight bulking of fabric at the point that i clipped very carefully. And as you've noticed, I failed to take a picture of the set in seam. So you'll just have to try it for yourself!

After the block was finished, I did some pressing and squared up the block to the finished size of 8.5in. x 5.5in. and love how it came out! 

I hope you try it out and share! I'll be opening a Flickr group soon for the Mammal Chupie tutorials. Hope you enjoyed this little block. I can't wait to make more! And boy, it's not easy making these tutorials.....I just knew i'd forget to photograph at least one step haha! Oh well. Pretty good for my first one.