Pinwheels ready for quilting

My June Bride: Rehearsal Dinner Pinwheels are ready for quilting.


Cold weather, snow, and a kitty cat not quite up to his normal little self to worry about gave me a lot of time inside to do the piecing of the red and blue border. My outermost blue border is actually a dressmaking cotton, cut somewhat larger than necessary. Making the last border extra large gives built-in insurance against the quilting taking up some of the required size, though I'm using a batting with less loft than I usually do, so it should not be much of an issue.

It's a happy little quilt - I think I like this one a lot! Now I have to figure out my quilting plan. This is the first quilt I've made in a while that was not designed specifically to feature quilting. I'll probably still do something elaborate-- it will just be secondary to the piecing design.

Oh, and the vet did not find anything obviously troublesome with the kitty this morning - that's quite a relief!

Pinwheel progress

I had decided I could only use fabric I have on hand to do these June Bride Challenges. For the Dresden Plate, I dyed some silk - but that's not cheating since I already had the silk and the dye.

I came up with several designs, but then I realized I had forgetten to include the pink batik, or I would color my design without using any challenge-required blue. Finally, I dug in the drawers and found a fabric with blue roses on pink, which pushed me to a traditional block design. After a glance at the calender reminding me I don't have unlimited time, I settled on an 8 inch block with the old pinwheels at the center of each. I fussy cut a stripe-patterned blue with pink fat quarter to give some interest where the four new blocks meet at the center.



The effect I was going for is called "transparency." In this case, I wanted to make it appear that the old fabrics are being looked at through a haze.

I did nothing to "correct" the piecing - until I put the block together that is now the upper right quadrant. This is the pinwheel I talked about in my last post. That block was extremely wavy and would have puckered and pleated in my quilting. For a quick fix, I released the original pinwheel's horizontal and vertical seams at the center, resewed the inner portion of the half-square triangle seams at about 1-16th of an inch, and released the original stitching on those as well. Finally, restitching the horizontal and vertical seams with a similar very small seam allowance lets the block lie flat. Some of the outer edges of these old blocks were also pieced on the very edges. Those tiny seam allowances would not hold together over time, but extensive quilting should stabilize them - I think I can do that! The funny thing about it -- that repaired pinwheel center came out a bit neater than the original hand-pieced ones.

After all those Civil War blocks, it seems odd to leave these wonky pinwheels with their seams not matching up with the new piecing, but I hope it adds to the charm of the piece. My aim was to give the original pinwheels a starring role, not have them hide in the "new" elements.

For the last two days, I've been hard at work on a series of borders that will bring this to the required 24 inches.

For my next Challenge

Next up will be another in Dorry's New from Old - "June Bride" series. The first was a Dresden plate - this time we each got a pinwheel block.

In the Longarm community, we often remind ourselves there is probably a good reason an old quilt was never finished. This block would be a good example of that rule of thumb. I forgot to take a photo before I separated the four segments - but you can plainly see why I took out some of the original seams. Well, first you might notice the points don't match at all, the use of the striped fabric is quirky, with two triangles having stripes going parallel to short sides, while another one has the stripes parallel to the long side, and on the last, the stripes are perpendicular to the long side. But those flaws are not fatal.


The real issue is visible at the lower left in the photo above. That muslin piece is all folded up and doesn't want to be flat at all. Wonky piecing of that magnitude cannot be quilted out. I thought I might take the blocks completely apart and re-piece them. It would be easy because they were hand-pieced, and the rules of the challenge don't preclude it; however, you can also see at the very edge, lower left, that the fabric is fraying like mad. The fraying really eats up practically all of the seam allowance. I pondered cutting the frayed pieces into smaller triangles and remaking the pinwheels, but, if I took them apart, I'd still be dealing with the nasty fraying issue the same as the original piecer. I made doll dresses back when I was in grade school with my mother's fabric remnants. One of those was a black and white woven fabric very much like this red and white one, and that dress fell apart at the seams. And taking it completely apart, well, that felt like it was not in the New from Old spirit of the challenge.

I'll talk about what I'm doing with this piecing question when I update with my progress.

Like the last challenge in this series (we don't know how many quilts Dorry has in store for us!) we were supposed to include blue in our finished piece ("...something borrowed, something blue.") Different from the last one however, she sent us a fat quarter we're supposed to use in the quilt.


Pink. PINK!!
Pink and BLUE!!!! I normally don't work in Pink and Blue by choice, so that's my real challenge!

Another kind of blanket!

Finished at last - it's 7 feet long, 54 inches wide.


Obviously I usually make quilts, but this yarn told me it would be the prettiest, softest throw for our living room.


Knitting drapes a lot more softly than a quilt.


The cats loved it while I was making it.



I think we'll love it, too.

I'm From the South

... that's the title native New Zealander Dorry has given her 7th International Round Robin quilt, which started with her requested theme of "South Pacific." There are a lot of pictures of this quilt already on my blog, but I think all the people who helped to make it for Dorry should see their individual contributions, so I posted quite a few more pictures now that it's quilted.

First an overview of the spiral layout I created for the blocks.


Dorry's block is the Tiki Man. He is the First Man for New Zealand's native Maori people. Dorry's Tiki Man did not need any embellishment - just a lot of outlining and stitch-in-the-ditch, with a fern encircling him to tie in with the spiral theme.


Heather made four six-inch blocks with Maori koru designs - I'm only showing two of them here. All four were echo-quilted to reinforce the strong design lines of her applique work. The blue and tan nine patch above Heather's blue block is possibly where the quilting of the colored spiral shows best in my photos.


Rhonda's block is in two parts: the upper scene of the Whangarei Heads includes the native Harakeke flowers on the coast. For quilting, the sky was treated with spiral swirls, the water got lines parallel to the shore to show waves, and the sand has pebbles. Below is the symbolic Silver Fern, simply outlined with a smaller spiral fill in the background.


Judy appliqued this flowing koru design that helps to keep the spiral moving around the upper corner. I echo quilted the white area and outlined the koru motifs on her green fabric.


Jo made this next block that combines the pohutukawa with another Maori koru design. Jo used two background fabrics, so the quilting is in two parts, with echoes for the floral side and the inside of the koru, and swirls on the outside of the oval-shaped motif.


This block by Dorry's sister Kerry takes the same pohutukawa flower and stylizes it to beautiful effect. The quilting consists of several lines of echos for some of the blossoms, then swirls to be consistent with the sky in other blocks.

Kerry also made this Kereru in a Puriri tree. I quilted some of the background fabric's leaves and curls, but kept the foreground leaves and bird simple so they would stand out in 3-d.


Kerry ambitiously made three blocks for her sister. The last of Kerry's blocks is Dorry's favorite Fish and Chips stand with a trio of Pukeko walking by. I quilted this scene with more swirling skies and pebbles for the road/sidewalk, and a lot of outline stitching.

For completeness, the John Dory (a species that might be served at the Fish and Chips stand) was my contribution to the quilt's blocks. In this photo you may be able to see the stylized fern background fill I used everywhere but on the colored spiral. You can also see how I used the Hoffman New Zealand Challenge fabric Kerry supplied me with to supplement all the swirling, spiraling, or leafy blues and greens in one-inch squares to fill in the background of the quilt.


And last is the border area. The 3/4 inch inner border has a little tiny leaf vine. The outer border got my quilted adaptation of a Maori border design.


The International Round Robin group has recently been tossing about for a name - "Remarkable Robins" has become the favorite - do you think it is a good one?

Fun Fur

A few years ago, I made a fun fur scarf for myself - it's quite toasty warm! When I was in Chicago two weeks ago, my brother Roger said he'd like one just like it - so Roger, it's in the mail -


A closeup of the furriness. It would be challenging to knit, if you were trying to shape a garment. But this stuff is really forgiving -- just knit garter stitch.


Photo taking was delayed because right after I set it up, someone moved in.

It's cat-tested and -approved, brother Roger. Lu sat there for at least an hour, until I tempted him off with some crunchy treats.

Whimsy? maybe not for me

I signed up for the President's Challenge from my Reston guild this year, which was called, "How Does Your Garden Grow?" We were asked to include each of these two fabrics....

...rick-rack, and a button in a small format quilt. The fabric on the right is more bright pink-coral than it appears in this fabric scan.

The rick-rack and button to me automatically make this a "whimsical" quilt. I always admire these when I see one, so I thought I'd give whimsical a try.


In my mind, I missed whimsy by quite a bit. It's not an awful quilt, and I met the challenge requirements. It will no doubt be very different from the other members' work. That's part of the fun of the challenge, when they display all the quilts and you see how different quilters interpreted the theme.

My garden is really a forest, so I made the quilt using this photo, taken on a crisp October morning, for the background. I traced the lines of the mountains for my pattern.


The trees were made by tracing and repeating one tree from a different photo. Although fabulous sunsets are not really what we have here, a hand-dyed fabric gives a sunset look that pulls in the required fabrics' colors. Violet belongs in my "garden" only by virtue of the native rhododendron, and there's really no place for the pinky coral.

Perhaps I should have made my own whimsical bear instead of using this realistic one.


The rick-rack is visible in the photo above, separating the mountain view from the stylized American beech leaves. I put each leaf on a larger coral or violet leaf shape to repeat the idea I used with the trees, where the required fabrics make the trees glow with the evening light. I have pink on the left and upper part of each tree's left-hand branches, violet on the right and the lower part of the right-hand branches.



The owl button I found and the windy sky quilting are the truly whimsical elements. I might try it again some day, or maybe I just give up on whimsy.

Flowers for John Herman

I haven't posted quilt photos for a couple of weeks, but it wasn't because I wasn't quilting - so I'll try to make up for it here. The Civil War Sesquicentennial quilt for Roger and Laurie went under wraps while I completed putting the blocks together and then quilting it, so that I could take it to Chicago with me this past weekend.


I have to post some photos to show the quilting I did, so here are a collection that I took while I had the quilt up on the display stand outside -


Since I posted the story of each block as I made it, I'll just talk about my quilting choices.

I knew I wanted to quilt feathers in the outer border and setting triangles, seen at the top of this next photo.


Some of the blocks got feathers, some got straight lines, some got a combination. And some were just stitched in the ditch of the piecing lines.



When there was a distinct background that I didn't want to play up with straight lines, I used a basic machine-quilting meander. Larger flower motifs that were fussy cut were quilted as though they had been appliqued.


I'll finish this series with this closest crop. The quilting in the sashing strips was the trickiest thing I did. Long diagonal lines (actually quilted in a zig-zag pattern back and forth) are just challenging. There's a meander fill between the two lines, which are spaced about 1/2 inch apart.


I took a photo of the quilt label when I checked to see if I could fit it in my rolling carry-on suitcase. It may not appear so, but there was actually some room to spare. However, my family had to see me in the same pair of bluejeans all weekend.

The title of the quilt, Flowers for John Herman, comes from the floral motifs of my fabrics, which were emphasized for Laurie the horticultural therapist. I dedicated the quilt to our great-grandfather who fought for the Union with the 82nd Indiana Regiment.

Laurie says the backing fabric, visible in the photo above, matches the bedroom paint color. I had not been upstairs in her beautiful home, just on the lower floor, so that was a happy choice.

Usually since we live away from family, I mail my quilts out. This time I wanted my own photo of the recipients with the quilt. Roger decided they should hold it up and recruited nephew Andrew to help. Andrew was lucky to get some height genes from his Mom.

Gallery Show

Dorry and other quilting friends in the Northern Virginia area have just finished hanging a quilt show at a gallery in Herndon, ArtSpace Herndon. The show is called Quilts; Collaborative Art by Northern Virginia Quilters and there are a few examples of my work in the show, on my own pieces and on some of Dorry's. She just sent me a few photos taken as they were getting the show ready.

Here is my quilt, Feathered and Other Fine Friends - the most recent of my Round Robin projects - put together by the five other members and Dorry, and recently quilted by me - hanging next to Dorry's quilt Purple Passion. Purple Passion won an honorable mention at the Asheville guild show a couple of years ago and was one of the earliest pieces I quilted on the longarm.


Carolina Waltz, the Old from New challenge quilt I made hangs in the lower row of this group. The other quilts in the photo are from the same challenge, where we all started with a vintage Dresden Plate block.

This next photo features two quilts I worked on for Dorry - Riverdance and Massanetta Mystery, center and right on the wall facing the camera.


The gallery and the quilters worked together to hang the quilts - the larger quilt in this photo with the orange background is one of Dorry's Round Robin quilts - I quilted it for her.


Most of these quilts have been shown previously - and Dorry's Riverdance and her Carolina Lilies were both in a large National level quilt show - but I think this is the first time our quilts are on display in an art venue.

Dorry and the other quilters had a lot of work preparing for the show - and it doesn't end there as they are planning to man the gallery at least part-time for the duration of the show, since the regular staff are not quilters. There's an opening reception this coming Sunday, January 15th from 2-4:00 p.m. for anyone in the area.

Putting it all together

This picture is not the most flattering - some of the top is put together, but some of it is awkwardly slapped on the design wall. At 8 feet, the top parts are out of reach for me, even from the step stool.

I chose an Oak Leaf and Reel for a center medallion because Brother Roger used the Oak Leaf as a campaign symbol when he ran for Forest Preserve Commissioner.


The four diagonal rows of blocks across the lower right are pieced together. I also have the 3-row section on the lower left attached to the medallion. Upper right there are a few pairs of pieces assembled.

I used 52 of the 53 blocks. They look far better to me this way than when the rows of side-by-side blocks with no relief kept growing on the wall.

There are going to be a couple of straight outer borders to help tie this together. I felt I was making great progress today, but it seems I have a lot of piecing yet to do.