Full of Soup

Last week I visited my friend Michelle in Roxbury, Massachusetts. She showed me a quilt her great-grandmother Clara Fougere made.

Clara immigrated from Nova Scotia, but this quilt was found at her home in Medford, MA. Michelle said there were many more where this came from. Clara never bought fabric for her quilts, instead piecing together clothing her family no longer used.

She sewed all the pieces together and quilted it by hand.

I commented to Michelle how Clara’s life must’ve been kind of simple and nice. I mentioned the story about Nellie who lived on a farm and sold vegetables when she created the Around the World Quilt I am replicating. Clara had a different life. She had nine children and worked in a factory in Portland.

She also made chests full of these. I love the beautiful details in the border and the corner of the quilt.

I woke up to this today.

And this.

I spent the past week putting together packets of fabric for my Around the World Quilt and today’s snow gave me the perfect excuse to spend hours sewing them into rows.

I keep the stack of fabric in the arm of my machine and then get to work on sewing the rows. I am not naturally organized, so having a system is really important for me to keep everything in order.

I keep the previous row unfurled as an extra check to make sure the row I am sewing will match up correctly. I still think I probably pulled out and redid half the stitches I made today.

I ironed the seams of the rows in alternating order left and right. I also had to re-iron the seams many times.

All while being silently judged.

Kaffe Fassett is leading two workshops at The City Quilter this spring. Because of the huge response, they decided to raffle off slots (even though they still charge you $175 to get in the door). Anthony happened to be at the City Quilter around Christmas time (good man!) and he left my name in the raffle and I won! So on April 13th I have a seven hour workshop about design and fabrics. The workshop is based on a quilt called Bounce, but the book with the pattern hasn’t come out yet. I’ll get instructions for the workshop two weeks before, but the description says the quilt is best completed with, “an obsessive collection of some kind of fabric patterns, for example, ALL dots or ALL stripes or ALL flowers.” I do not have an obsessive fabric collection. I am a newer quilter and I like buying my fabrics at the start of each new project. I have to say I’m kind of thrilled to think about picking up a new “obsessive” collection though because I loved picking out all those 20’s prints from Lancaster. I think a trip back down will be in my future.

My current project is a repeating Trip Around the World pattern that uses 1,599 squares. I was inspired by a quilt I saw in the book Massachusetts Quilters.

This quilt was completed by Nellie Edna Towne in the late 1930s. She won a blue ribbon in the county fair for her efforts. I used a bunch of 20’s reproduction fabrics I bought in Lancaster and at Patchworks in Sayville on Long Island to try to get the same effect I saw in the original quilt. I bought the blue framing fabric at City Quilter.

Aside from the picture of Around the World from my book, I’ve been alone putting together how I want this to look. I cut the squares 2” x 2” but with the ¼ inch seam, the final square will be 1.5” by 1.5”

After I cut all my pieces, I took one of each piece and arranged them from dark to light on pieces of loose-leaf paper. I chose a crayon that I felt matched the fabric color closely and marked it on the loose leaf. I used those crayons in a grid I created:

When I started making the grid of how I wanted the fabric to be arranged, I found using similar crayon colors really helped me envision how the quilt would come together. I also realized that the color alone wasn’t going to work. I didn’t trust myself to be able to distinguish between all the different colors once the grid was done. Instead, I gave each color a two-character code. G2 is the Green fabric that is placed second when I ordered them from dark to light. I put these codes in the boxes of my grid so I knew more specifically which color I meant when it came to piecing the actual fabrics together. I started choosing the colors starting in the middle. I tried to use all the fabrics equally, so I marked down if I used the fabric in a group of 4, 8, 12 or whatever was needed.

I organized all my fabric into a big flat box in color and number order so I can easily access them when I’m assembling each row. After I put the quilt away for a while, I forget which fabric is B6, so I can easily just count the sixth blue fabric in the box without having to look to my original reference sheet.

I have been sewing this quilt by rows from top to bottom. This is the long thin box I keep my rows in after I pin them together, but before I sew them. I pin together five rows at a time, sew them, iron them, and put them together.

So far, so good! Toes!

This is the first quilt I finished from top to bottom all on my own. I finished it yesterday- 25 months after Gwendolyn was born.

The Gwen quilt story is similar to the Luke story in that this is the second quilt I made for her. The first one was started sometime in 2007 before she was born when my mom and I didn’t know what gender she would be. I picked out the fabrics from Sewfisticated in Somerville and pieced together the top with the help of my mom.

This is the quilt in its current state. I am close to finished, but I still have to quilt the bottom row. I printed out a simple outline of a sun that I found on Google images and traced it onto freezer paper. I ironed the freezer paper onto the fabric and cut out the suns and appliqued them on the setting squares. My mom embroidered the face of the sun.

For the quilting, I stitched in the ditch on the 9 square and around the face of the sun in the setting squares. Unfortunately, I chose the wrong batting for this quilt and each square took me about three hours to quilt. The nine slow hours it would take to finish the last row, plus the time it would take to finish the border quilting caused me to give up.

Now that I know a little more about machine quilting, I think I might be able to zip through the last few squares and the border on my machine. Anyway, this quilt has lived tucked in a drawer for three years, so lets get back to the main event.

I bought most of the fabric for the quilt I gave to Gwendo as a package from FabricWorm. I also used a stripe fabric I had lying around.

I got the pattern from Oh Fransson’s etsy shop. The pattern was very easy to understand and well illustrated. I started by pressing the seams open per her suggestion, but then I spoke to a quilting teacher who told me this actually weakens the stitches in the quilt and it’s better to simply press the seams to one side. I liked the idea of making the square about a 1/2 an inch bigger all around so I had space to trim perfect squares, but that process is a bit fussy for me and I’m not sure I would repeat it again. I’d prefer that the quilt came out a bit bigger.

What I really learned from making this quilt, was a lot about how not to machine quilt.

This was my first foray into machine quilting and I used the wrong foot. The walking foot tightly clamps the three layers of fabric so that the quilter can easily quilt in straight lines. Unfortunately, this is NOT the foot to use when making meandering lines all over a quilt. I had to pull and push and shove this quilt to get this affect. I think it looks nice, but there is some bunching in the back and it certainly isn’t the easiest way to achieve this look.

I got the backing fabric from the City Quilter months after I had put the top together. I am pleased with how it matches and hides my mistakes.

I made a tree skirt for Christmas for my Aunt Betty:

I finished the project at my sister’s house without my usual supplies. I used her sewing machine and a regular sewing foot to quilt in the ditch.

I bought the fabrics at City Quilter at the end of November and the pickings were slim. I made up the measurements for my own skirt, but used VMJess’s post for inspiration. I cut the fabrics 3″ wide and I did a whole bunch of math about circles so that the skirt would be about 5′ across when it was finished. Unfortunately that project was so long ago, I can’t remember the exact process. I’m hoping to be able to document my process of making quilts AS I make them from now on.

Also, have to tip my hat to my mom again. I threw up my hands on finishing the binding on this project. She came through on Christmas Eve.