Lap blanket

My parents live in a fairly rural area of central California.  Not so rural that you can't see the neighbors, but the people around the corner keep sheep and alpacas and up the road is a heard of long horn cattle.  The town is more like a village, and they live in what passes for a suburb.

One of their neighbors, a couple just a few years older than they are, have become good friends, particularly of my dad.  The husband helped quite a lot with my post-wedding brunch, makes amazing cinnamon walnut bread at the holidays, and was just diagnosed with an aggressive form of lung cancer.

There's not much any of us can do to help, he's undergoing treatment and seems to be in good spirits.  But wanting to offer what comfort I can from so far away, I decided to make him a lap quilt he can take with him to his treatments or just use at home.  A good friend of mine and fellow quilter on this side of the country is going through the same thing with her dad, and she very kindly shared some of the scraps from his quilt to supplement what I already had for my project.  We both like the continuity of that, somehow it seems as though they will both benefit from the prayers and well wishes directed at the other.

I decided to keep things fairly simple as I want to get this quilt sent out as quickly as I can.  Starting with a basic strip quilt idea, I added in some scrappy log cabin squares, strewn across a strip ground.  This was my first attempt at log cabin and I think the results were quite good.  They are kind of fun to do to, even though I felt like I was doing a whole lot of ironing.  I went with blue and green batiks for the strips, partly because that's what I had, but they seems like healing, calm colors.  The log cabin squares are done in darker shades with bits of brown thrown in, sort of like stepping stones in a stream.

Today I will quilt and bind the blanket and hopefully be able to get it mailed off by Wednesday.

Wall Hangings

OMG I am cranky.  2014 can, so far at least, go to hell.  It seems like things have not been going to great for much of anyone in my little circle of friends.  Sure, on a small scale there are plenty of nice things but we've had far more than our share of death, cancer, and other miserable chronic illness to deal with.  So, 2014, enough already!  We are done.  It's time to get with some nice weather, and give it a rest already.

On a personal front, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia last month.  This was actually *good* news, as I've been dealing with a whole range of stupid, annoying, painful and sometimes scary and terrifying symptoms which have been getting steadily worse and more numerous for the last 4 or 5 years that no one has been able to explain.  Finally after much poking, prodding, and inconclusive tests, my neurologist asked if we had talked about fibro.  I just about started to cry, I was so happy so finally have a test come back positive.  Not that I am glad that I have an incurable condition with no known cause that many people don't even believe exists, but at least I now know what's wrong with me, and there are things I can do to make it easier to cope with.  It's a relief in a really strange way.  Yeah, I still feel like somehow has been beating me with a stick most of the time, my head still hurts most days, I still talk like a Muppet or Kryton from Red Dwarf sometimes, and I can't remember the names of things, but at least I know why.  And I know that whatever it is isn't going to kill me.

Somehow in the midst of all this I am still managing to get my creative on, and that is a good thing.  Probably a better thing than ever, at least according to my therapist.  It's harder to make the kind of progress on anything than I would like most days (especially since it's been so cold lately), but I did manage to get two wall hanging quilts done so far this year.  The first I did for February, and actually finished about a month ago but somehow failed to post pictures off.  I cut out the hearts using my new Go! cutter, which I love.  The applique was fairly easy, but I still a ways to go before I want to do that on a quilt that will get a lot of wear.  All of the materials for this came out of my scrap bin.  I'm very pleased with the results, it's bright and cheerful but still modern and young looking.

The second quilt is based on the one of the wall hangings from Vintage Quilt Revival: 22 Modern Designs from Classic Blocks .  I love, love LOVE this book!  So many wonderful ideas!  Once again, I used the Go! cutter to so do all the HST's.  Probably this was not a great idea, even though my GAWD it was quick to cut them out, but it turns out that it cuts them with the bias going the wrong way, so when I sewed everything together I ended up with the bias edges on the short ends of the triangles.  Maybe this really does not matter, I don't know.  I think I'm going to try doing a couple of sampler blocks with the cutter and see what went wonky.  Really the main problem I had was getting the corners to line up and things pulling strangely at the intersections, but there are some other things I might be able to do to fix that.  We shall see.

Other than the cutting, I am pretty pleased with this.  The black and white prints are prints I stamped myself, so I wanted to show them off with some nice, bright semi-solids.  I was amazed at what a difference using the lighter color binding made.  It toned down the whole thing.  I also had a lot of fun with the actual quilting, using a sprial design on the black and which sections and inset squares on the colored blocks.

Little Dogs Strip Quilt

This quilt was so super easy to make it's almost embarrassing, but I am very pleased with how it turned out.  The colors are so cheerful and happy, it's the perfect thing to cuddle up under on all these miserable, cold grey days we've been having!

I did this one twin sized, which I find I much prefer to the standard throw sized quilts.  Maybe that's because I'm on the tall side, or maybe it's because my two little dogs are blanket hogs, but we just don't fit too well under the throws.  I also used wool batting with this one which makes a huge difference in the warmth.  It's actually warm!  I think going forward I will stick with either wool batting or flannel backing, probably not both, but I don't find the cotton batting to be warm enough.  Nice for a summer quilt but even them I get shilled very easily so something a bit warmer would be nice.

The best part about this quilt is the back.  I tried piecing the back (well, part of it anyway) out of scraps for the first time and I am really happy with how it came out.  It's so cute I can flip the whole thing over for a different look if I get tired of the wild pink.  The whole project took a weekend.  Overall, a big success!  The dogs are happy with it too!

Dresden Plates, a modern take

Of all the crafts I do (most of which I write about over on my other blog), the one thing I do that is just for myself and my own enjoyment is quilting.  I don't have to please anyone but me with my quilts, and this is a joy that I have lost hold of in the last few years.  This fall, I connected with a new friend who is an avid quilter and rediscovered the joy of creating something just for the joy of it.  Making something to please myself, exploring my own sense of color, design and texture without a care for anyone's approval is deeply satisfying.

One of things I really enjoy about quilting in particular is the blend of very old, traditional patterns with new, modern sensibilities.  Exploring that idea, I came up with this take on the traditional Dresden Plate quilt.  Using scrapes of fabric left over from a range of projects, I made a series of Dresden Plates and arranged them asymmetrically to give the feeling that they were slipping off the quilt.  I had a lot of fun working out the quilting pattern itself, following the lines produced by the plates themselves, and interlacing them where the plate rays overlapped.

I am very pleased with the results.  The quilt is pretty, and with a nice flannel back it's a warm, snugly blanket to curl up under on cold afternoons with a book and a cup of tea.

Design wise, this is the most complex quilt I have done to date.  Making the plates was not difficult, but required more precision than any of my other quilts, and I also had to applique them in plate which I had not done before.  None of this was difficult but it was advanced than anything else I've done so far.  I am particularly happy about having used up so many scrapes, both for the plates and for the binding.

Quilts!

I've taken up quilting in the last year or so, because I really need another craft in my life.  It's actually sort of fun, and I have a lot of scrap fabric that I can't use for costumes or much of anything else.  Using it for quilts, I feel like I'm being a good hippie and reducing trash.  Of course, I also end up buying a lot of quilting fabrics but I was doing that anyway, I just didn't have much to do with the fabrics I was getting.

Anyway, the first real quilt I did was a gift for my brother last year.  This summer, I finished #2 and #3.  I'm quite pleased with how they turned out, though I need to get better at the machine quilting part of the process.  Trying to wrangle a 70 inch square quilt through my machine is tricky and I ended up with some funny little bubbles on the backside.  Using the walking foot on my machine helped a lot, I suspect the rest is just a matter of practice.

The first quilt is lap or throw sized, I didn't really bother to measure it but I think it's about 50x60 or so.  The whole thing is done in nice cozy flannel, so it's very soft and will be great this winter.  The dog loves it already.  The piecing was easy, but for some reason the the boarders at the top and bottom get a little stretched out so they don't lay right.  I think the flannel may have stretched some when I was piecing it and I didn't really notice until I was doing the quilting.  The whole thing is scribble quilted, which was fun to do and worked well except for where the boarders didn't fit right and in one spot towards the end where things puckered.


The second quilt was even easier to piece, though the way the pattern was written a lot of waste was produced.  This made me upset, but the end result is nice so I can sort of let it go.  All of the fabrics are Asian-inspired prints I've been collecting over the last year or so.  The whole thing sort of reminds me of the trip I took to Kyoto in 2008.  I wasn't sure about the colors and prints together, but in the end it looks pretty and I'm very pleased with it.  For the actual quilting, I just stitched in the ditch, which created a really nice diamond pattern on the back.  The whole thing is a 70 inch square and I wasn't feeling comfortable with my quilt-wrestling skills to try free motion quilting on this.

Now that these two are done, I'm working a smaller piece that's based on a shoji screen quilt I saw I one of the local fabric stores.  It's going to be a gift for a good friend who just bought her first home.  The top is all put together, I just need to decided on a backing and do the quilting.  Because the colors are so high-contrast I'm having a hard time deciding how to quilt it.  I think I may try some of the invisible filament thread they have now and do free motion scribbling on it.  We'll see.  I'll post pictures one it's done and sent off.