A lot of WIP

An almost finish Echino baby quilt, just to take my mind off a not so beautiful week.

Unfortunately, my walking foot died. Again. And I was just not going to believe it. So I quilted and quilted, somehow hoping in the end it will look good. It didn't. I have a strong feeling I have to take all the quilting off and do it again.

[remember the little fellow that won't help me with pics? here he is again]

So I got even more angry and I cut.

And rearranged a hundred times

And even super cleaned the sewing machine.

And cleaned the threads' box

And started 3 awsome baby quilts.

[baby blue]

[baby smile]

[baby princess]

Now I am [not at all] patiently waiting for my walking foot. Isn't it a little too much 3 walking foots in one year?

My first linen - WIP

My batting is still not here, nor the white kona, and we all caught a nasty virus and sew nothing this week. So I was thinking to tell you a little story about how I make a quilt. And that's how 90% of my quilts are done. I have no ideea what dimension it's going to have when I start and I rarely have an ideea about how the quilt is going to look in the end. Most of the times I just play :)

No, I don't have a design wall. And truth be told, I don't even have a stash :D That's all my designer fabric stash :D

Anyway, last week I decided to cut my Echino scraps. I use Echino for MeiTais (if you're new to babywearing or know nothing about, you must check thebabywearer. Or go visit my romanian site and understand nothing :)) ) and I had very few scraps that I kept safely for a quilt :).

I started with this quilt in my mind. It was another immage but I seem to foget to bookmark a lot these days :D.

First of all I must say that in a very mysterious way I decided I need 13" blocks. Really, I have no.ideea.at.all how did I get to that 13.

Anyway, I than decided I don't want to chop my scraps too much, like I needed for that kind of pattern, so I decided to make 6,5" squares. Ha! 6,5" suck. Really :) They looked horrible. And 4 squares block?

Not really.

Ok, maybe 2 squares in solid and 2 in print?

Neah

Maybe 4 squares block on the middle and than 2 squares block on the sides?

Maybe

Neah, not now

Later on I realised I must use that linen so I decided to cut the squares in two rectangles (3,25" yes?) and make a quilt in the same pattern and style as Rita's chaos quilt.

Layed everything down and ... hmmm ... let's just say ...

no.

Finnaly, the block. The good one. Did you folow? I said 3 1/4" x 6 1/2" rectangles. What dimension is this? Anybody?

Ok, so the block. I then remebered I cried a little last week when my natural Kona arrived. And I so hated it. Not white, not gray, but a natural that doesn't fit any fabric in my stash. Until now. Mu-ha-ha :)))

The blocks sashed in natural looked unexpectedly (:P) good.

Than some border with the rest of 3 1/4" x 6 1/2" rectangles. (I like to write it down, it looks so complicated :D).

See that last strip? It was supposed to be the last...Not after this...

Anyway, I am thinking about adding more horizontal stripes. I think I will have a lot of time to think about this until my batting arives :))) And than I'll show you the quilt. Of course, after I take a deep breath and do some straight line quilting on linen...

Charm pack quilt

So I ordered 7 CP. I am not sure if this was one of the greatest ideeas or I'm just stupid :D. Ok, not that it really matters or that I would actually want to find out. :))) But I needed to get out of the solid square/ print square thing.

Of course, I was sure I reinvented the wheel.

I took 9 squares and divided them in 3 groups, 4, 4, 1.

The first 4 stay like this,

next 4 are cut in 2,

the last one is cut in 4.

And here's the block.

Now the problem was the sashing. I tried white, dark gray, red and green. They all sucked. Really, it was nothing modern about this quilt, at least not as modern or bold as I was dreaming.

So after white large sashing, white tiny sashing, red large, red tiny, gray large, gray huge, gray random, tiny green, tiny gray, large green, wonky squares, I decided to put them all togheter. Just like this.

Now the question is: after my 5' of glory when I thought I actually found something new and after two hours, one last night and one this morning, when I found no sashing to like, how much was I actually influenced by Andi's quilt? I mean, come, on, take a look. They're like sisters. Twins :). Ok, not identical twins, but still :))

[Photo uploaded on Flickr by Patchandi]

Really!

A hard to make quilt

It all started very very well. And it finished the same. But the process...ah, the process...almost dried me out.

I started putting favorite fabrics two but two, not knowing what I was going to make. Went to two colours pinwheel, aborted, then to print plus white pinwheels...



... moved them about one hunderd times, found the perfect spot for each, found the right amount of sashing, basted to death with hundred of pins and...

Well, that's pretty much all the fun part. 'cause at some point, my sewing machine decided to get stucked in a tiny thread caught somewhere under the bobin.



One night and 2 hours trip to Brother later, nobody was there to fx it.
Another night and another 2 hours trip to Brother later, the machine was cleaned.
Another night and half quilted quilt later, the machine started leaving black oil staines all over the quilt. And the fact that I decided to quilt around the squares, therefore move the quilt a lot, did not help at all. Nor the fact tha I somehow didn't see the first staines and things got only worse as I kept quilting.




Hours of crying later, the quilt was washed but still had one black point.



Then a nother fun part came along with a great ideea, to hand sew a little.




Despite my anti-washing-quilts-before-giving-policy, I really think that this quilt might just be able to leave my house at some point. But only after I am really sure I really really really don't need another quilt, because, well, I love it!

Don't sleep and sew

I grew up with a work at home mom. Designing, sewing, crafting. I learned to sew just like I learned to talk: with no training, just by watching and playing. And I never got into sewing grammar :) until 20 yers later. So every now and then, after improvising, free sewing a lot and getting all covered in thoughts while sewing (that's the sleep while you sew phase), I get an epiphany.


As I said before, I don't really like borders, but I also don't like having the binding bite from the quilt's design. I tried adding another tiny white border, as almost all my quilts are sashed in white. But as I was finishing my not-so-pink-after-all quilt, it stroke me: the binding wasn't the only one biteing, it was also the qulting that was deceiving.



So after I quilted it, instead of cutting the excess batting and back up to the front's dimensions, I left another 1/4" all the way around, from backing fabric and batting.


[lousy pic, i know)

Also, I made the last row of quilting not 1/4" from the edge, but 1/4" from another 1/4" left as the sewing allowence, that doesn't really exist when you talk about the edge of the quilt.

Well, the ideea came half way quilting, so 2 edges are quilted 1/4" from the edge, the others - 1/2"


You can actually see the difference between left/right and up/down.


I really really like the way it looks now, I feel it looks like somebody thought about all the details before making the quilt, witch is not really true in my case :D

And here's the closeup of the good edge.



Yes, definitely a good day!


P.S. When i say 1/4", I obviously mean 4mm. Or 5. Sometimes 6.

Not so much pink after all

Yes, I decided to give up that much pink, and put some next to white. The sewing machine is in service, but can't wait to get it back (today!) and finish the pinky :)

Upgrade to the love (and hate) quilt

I might have found that thing that really changes the love& hate into I love this quilt.

I added some hand stiching. It was quite challenging to find a way to hide the threads because I did it after the quilt was finished. It turned out quite nice and I am tinking about adding an orange touch. Just thinking, for the moment.



Now I'm having another dilema. Is there such a thing as too much pink?
In quilting, of course. I'm sure everybody knows what too much pink in real life means.

Blockage

One of the things I love in quilting is that I do it for pleasure. I create whatever I like and, if somebody else like it and eventualy wants to buy, that's fine. Ok, it's more than fine :). But I could never see myself making a quilt for somebody, or making a quilt with someone's fabrics. At least not in the near future.

So I decided to make a gift, for a friend with a 3mo baby. Things were really ok until I started thinking what would they (the parents) like. And from that moment on, things got only worse. I can't, for the love of God, decide what to do. I have less than 48h left and i cannot move a finger. I have too many ideeas but none of them seem to fit them enough.

I already stopped one quilt in the process, the frame on the squares seems too big for I wanted and now, of course, I don't love the colours anymore. Or prints. Or blocks. Grrrr...

The solid is actualy a Moda Teal, so the colours are very wrong in this pic. Still doesn't say anything to me :|

Scraps and fireworks quilt

A while ago I found in a very small store in my (very small) home town some fabrics and bought a lot of them for about 1,5$/m. They're all quite thin, thinner than regular quilting cotton and also have a satin finish so it's quite hard to work with them. But I like them a lot and today one of the, just poped up when I was in desperate need for a backing.

A few days ago, when I made the love&hate quilt, I tried using piano claps for the border. I realised they were way too big, but the leftovers reminded me of Rita's tutorial. The moment I finished the first quilt, I started cutting pieces for the scrap quilt. Of course I didn't measure, just looked at how big I would like them to be and then realised I have a problem with the middle white squares, they were 3 5/8". Nice number to work with...


I used the tutorial until I got to quilting. I am not too found of diagonal lines, so I went with simple straight lines, just the way I like it. At some point I realised my walking foot is making me problems again and, to avoid any bulk fabric when crossing the lines, i decided to do a little hand quilting too.




I love hand qulting but with the right needle that I didn't have, so my fingers are still in recovery after only 4 rows of hand stiches on a baby quilt.
Note to self: go buy good needles.


I used again Rita's binding and it's getting better. One thing I did different from the tutorial, was adding a little white border before the binding. I like it better when the binding doesn't bite the edge squares. I'll try make it invisible next time (putting the white border exactly the binding width so the design remains unchanged and the white doesn't show), but I have to fix my walking foot before this.





Of course, every quilt makes me learn something, usually that there's still something that can go wrong that I didn't think about. But, at some point, all the surprises will finish. Hopefully :)

Did I mention what I found when I was changing the foot? A power miner with a snowtrooper mask. A classic ...

Love and hate quilt

I know that people like different things and what's ugly for some might be gorgeus for others. But when I make something that I consider ugly, I guess I'm in title to say it out loud :)

It started really nice, with White Kona and my all time favorite, Wendy Slotboom. Small butterflies that made me smile looking at them.







Did I mention I always have at least one lego guy watching?


Things stopped pretyy much here because I only had a small piece of Breeze and couldn't find something to mach them. Than one evening I decided I have to many QIP and I need to start finishing them. And something very bad happened: I decided to use a fabric I do not like. At all. Even if it was the binding only, if you add a not so inspired border, it's the key to failure.




Funny thing, though, the minute I started taking the pictures, I rememberd why I loved this quilt before the binding (and border) and right now it doesn't seem so ugly anymore. I guess it will be forever a between-love-and-hate-quilt



Plus, it was my first time trying Rita's binding and, although I thought I will never be able to do it, or at least I'll have all my fingers bleeding, this didn't happen. It's almost perfect, much better than I immagined. And I realise I can make it perfect, so it must be a good quilt after all.





And the back...well...I love this fabric. It's way out of my confort zone with too big prints for me, but the way it feels and the way it completes a small scale quilt...well..I'll be using it again for sure.