Quilt Shop Hopping

 On our way home from Washington state, we decided to take a short detour and do a little quilt shop hopping in Missouri.  We visited both Missouri Star Quilt Company in Hamilton, MO, and Quilting is My Therapy in Liberty, MO.  

I really haven't ordered much fabric from Missouri Star in years, but I used to order regularly.  It was really a lot of fun to visit the shops there in person.  Missouri Star actually encompasses several building in the little town of Hamilton.  It is a nice quiet place with lots of beautiful fabric.  I'm really glad we stopped and explored there.

 

 

 

We also went to Quilting is my Therapy, which is a much smaller shop, but also nice.  I've been watching long-arm quilting tutorials by Angela Walters, the shop owner, on YouTube, and I wanted to get one of her quilt-along panels to try.  I also bought one of her quilting rulers (Elvira).  I got a ruler base for my machine just before we left for Washington, and I'm looking forward to giving it a try.

Over the Rainbow

 

 

I finished the binding on this little quilt while we were traveling home from Washington state last week.  I went round and round on a name for it.  I finally settled on "Over the Rainbow," because I like to name quilts after songs and that song mentions both rainbow and star, so it seemed appropriate.

It is machine quilted on my new Moxie XL long-arm quilter.  I used rainbow variegated Isocord thread on the top and black cotton thread from Hobby Lobby on the back.  I quilted it in an all-over meander pattern.  I'm still working on getting the tension just right, but I'm really pleased with how it turned out.

I decided to make the label for this quilt with my embroidery machine, which currently lives in our condo in Washington.  I haven't used it much, but making quilt labels was the main reason I bought the stupid thing, so I figured I'd give a try.  It turned out okay.

 

This quilt makes the 7th UFO that I've finished this year.

Merry & Bright

 

 

This wall hanging is made up of blocks from the Vintage Christmas book by Lori Holt. Back in 2019, the BOM group that I was a member of did the full quilt from the book.  I decided that I didn't want another full-sized Christmas quilt, so I just did a wall hanging.  I've since remodeled my living room, and don't really have a good place to display seasonal wall quilts anymore, but that's okay, too.  I'll find something to do with it now that it is finished.

It is free motion machine quilted (by me!) with a loops and holly motif in white King Tut thread.  I'm still getting the hang of using my new long arm machine, and the little holly berries are far from perfectly round, but I like how it turned out.  The quilt finished 36 inches square. 

This is the sixth of my UFOs that I wanted to finish this year, so I've met my target!

Across the Finish Line

 

 

After possibly 20 years, this quilt is finally finished.  I really don't remember when I started it, but the copyright printed in the selvage of the fabric was 2002.  I know I started it when we lived in the house before this one, which we moved into in the fall of 2008.  It's been a long journey, but I finally got it across the finish line (Ha! Ha!).  The name was my husband's suggestion, and I thought it was a good one.  I gave the completed quilt to my son last night.  He said that he's really not into NASCAR, but that he didn't mind having another blanket.  Maybe at some point I'll make him a quilt that represents something he actually likes.  And maybe it won't take 20 year to make.

Anyway, the quilting was mostly about practice and trying out motifs.  The outer border is a large meander.  The inner border and sashing is done with cursive Ls.  Reading left to right and top to bottom, the block motifs are still water, circles/cobblestones, swirls, leaves, stars and loops, and flames.  The cobblestones show up too much, mostly because the thread was too light a color for that much quilting on that fabric.

Since this was the first actual quilt that I quilted on a long-arm machine, it was a learning experience.  I was just using thread that came with the machine and learning to quilt in a new way.  If I were doing it over, I'd use a medium gray thread instead of the white and gray variegated threaded that it's mostly quilted in.  I ran out of thread before it was finished and I bought some light gray thread that matched what I was already using the best that I could.  

Also, if I were buying the fabric for this quilt today, I probably wouldn't have bought black and white checkerboard fabric for the binding.  I think I would have done it in red.  I decided to cut the binding on the bias, because I thought it would look better.  I think that was a good idea.  I did the binding completely by machine, but I sewed the label on by hand.  The label also has the bias checkerboard around the outside.  I really wouldn't want to bind a whole quilt by hand with that fabric.  Mostly because in many places you are sewing black to black, which is very difficult to see.

A new toy

 

This is me with my new Moxie long-arm quilter.  I've actually had it for a couple weeks now, but this was taken the day they came and set it up (Fri., June 28).  I've quilted a few practice things so far that I'll picture below.  It's a learning curve and I definitely don't expect to be a master at it right away.  I've also had some issues that seem to be a problem with the machine itself, but I suppose it could be user error.  My thread keeps breaking and the thread keeps getting tangled in the bobbin area.  It also runs a bit rough at times.  Someone from the shop is coming out on Monday to check it out.  

This is the practice panel that came with the machine.  The little colorful pieces on the side are for testing my tension.  They had some quilting suggestions - the e and l shapes, the meanders with hearts and stars, and curved lines.  The rest were things I tried based on YouTube tutorials I've watched.

This is a fat quarter that I decided to quilt for practice.  It's hard to tell much about the quilting from the picture, but there is a continuous feather motif around the outside and flowers and loops on the inside.

I guess I no longer have any excuse for not finishing my UFOs.
 

NASCAR quilt top

 

This quilt top is one of my UFOs that I wanted to finish this year.  As it turns out, it wasn't actually a completed quilt top.  The borders still needed to be cut and added.  

It had been so long since I last worked on this quilt, that I had forgotten exactly what the plan had been.  There was far more of the Jeff Gordon fabric than the Dale Earnhardt fabric, and I needed to use the fabric for both the borders and the backing.  Since the panels alternated between the two, I decided to have both represented in the borders and the backing.  I didn't take a picture of it, but the backing is pieced with large cuts of the two different fabric - 18 x width of fabric for the Gordon fabric and 18 x 20-ish for the Earnhardt fabric.  For some reason that I totally don't remember, I had cut off about 3 inches all along one selvage edge of the Earnhardt fabric.

Having the side borders cut wider than the top and bottom was intentional, because the quilt seemed a little oddly narrow.  I decided to cut the border based on the grid-work in the fabric, so the sides are twice as wide as the top and bottom.  It might would have looked a little better if I had made them a little closer together in size, but it's fine.  It's not like it's going to be displayed on a wall or anything.  Anyway, the quilt top ended up measuring 54 x 64.

Quilted Flower Pillow

 

This is another orphan block creation.  I made this block for a guild "competition" to create a Cotton Rose block.  I really didn't want to make a whole quilt out of it, mostly because I didn't want to make more blocks in this same size.  It's a lot of small half-square triangles.  So I decided to add a little border to it, quilt it, and make it into a new pillow cover for the small pillow I keep on my bed.  I like how it turned out, and I enjoyed doing the free-motion flowers.

A Jazz Quilt

 

 

My free-form scrap quilt is finished!  I continued to use scrap fabric to make the sashing pieces that join the blocks and rows together.  I used leftover pieces of binding strips to make the binding.  I did the binding completely by machine this time.  I attached the binding to the front, turned it to the back, and then stitched in the ditch from the front, to secure the binding on the back. It measures 50 inches by 62.5 inches.

 

Here is a look at the back of the quilt.  Ideally I would have spread out the darker blocks and not put same fabrics side-by-side, but this quilt wasn't about ideals.  It was, in fact, an attempt to get away from ideals, so I made no effort at all to arrange the blocks in any particular order.

It is very busy, colorful, and loud.  It is nothing like what I usually make when I am quilting, but I really enjoy it.  I like looking at the quilting that I did on it.  It was a learning experience and a liberating experience.  It's good to get away from the idea of perfection and the fear and anxiety that goes along with it.  I'll probably end up donating it somewhere, but for now I'm just enjoying that it's finished.

I guess you could say that I'm already working on another one, because I'm still sewing together scraps, but not as a full-time project. Instead of using a single piece of scrap fabric to sew over when I'm taking something off the machine, I just sew two scraps together.  I'm just putting them aside for now, but ultimately they'll probably end up in something.

An Experiment

 

 

I watched a YouTube video a few weeks ago where a woman sewed her scraps together to make scrap fabric.  I didn't want to make a bolt of scrap fabric like she did, but it inspired me to make a free-form scrap quilt.  

I used several of my orphan blocks and scraps out of several boxes, bags, and bins (but nowhere close to all my scraps) to make blocks that were roughly 13 - 14 inches square.  I didn't worry at all about color, though I did think some about light and dark when sewing together half-square triangles.  Occasionally I did make the scraps into recognizable blocks, but mostly I just sewed pieces together based solely on size and shape.  It was a little difficult for me at first, but it really was liberating to just sew and not worry about if it was "right" or not.  I also used up odds and ends of thread that I had around.  It was an anything goes kind of project.

Once I had made 20 blocks, I used scrap batting pieces, and some miscellaneous fabric from my stash as backing, and quilted the blocks.  I wanted to practice some free-motion quilting, but I was always worried about messing up a completed quilt top, so again, this was a liberating experience.  I didn't have to worry about getting things perfect.  I could just practice and have fun.

When the quilting was all done, I trimmed the quilted blocks down to 12-1/2 inches square.  Pictured above are the quilt blocks laid out in the general configuration for the quilt.  They won't necessarily stay in those exact places in the finished quilt. 

I plan to use a quilt-as-you-go method that I learned in quilt guild to put the blocks together.  I will use narrow strips (1-1/8 inches) on top to join the blocks.  This will make the blocks butt up against each other and not make a thick seam like if you sewed them directly together with all the layers already quilted together.  Then I'll use a 2 inch strip, folded in half, to cover the gap on the back.  That is another technique I've been wanting to try and this seemed like a good opportunity.  

All around this has been about learning, experimenting, and having fun sewing.  I'm glad that I did it.  I'm looking forward to seeing how it all comes out in the end.