Full of Soup

In my last post, I posted a pic of the Scrappy Star pattern I’m planning to make. The quilt is made up of 10 smaller stars, and one large central star. I used the bundles of solids I bought in Lancaster as my starting point, and then I started pulling out fabrics from my stash to build the ten stars.

I started ironing and laying out the fabrics to cut them, but then I chickened out! I’ve only ever cut at a 90 degree angle, and cutting at the 45 is intimidating. As I’m writing this out, however, I’m feeling bolder. How different could it be? I’m still cutting straight lines! We’ll see.

There are so many wonderful fabric shops in Lancaster! We stayed in the town of Bird in Hand, just a few miles from Intercourse, and both towns had so many great shops.

A few of my favorites are The Log Cabin, The Old Country Store, Zooks Fabrics, and Burkholders.

I went to Lancaster with my Pinwheel project ready to go, so when I went shopping, I was keeping an eye towards my next project. This pattern from The Log Cabin absolutely blew me away.

I have been dying to do a star quilt since I went to the Super Star exhibit at the American Folk Art Museum. This one seems a bit ambitious, but the instructions are very clear and I am excited to start. I also bought a few fabrics that I just thought were beautiful:

I bought enough yardage of the pink flowers fabric to make a skirt. Now I’m on the lookout for a pattern!

The Country Store was such a wonderful shop with a great collection. I bought two bundles of solid fat quarters. I noticed there are a lot of solids and tiny prints in the Star Pattern, so I’m using these as a base to pull all my other prints together for that project.

I also found the backing fabric for my Bounce quilt. It’s an electric blue that I absolutely love. I have to start pinning all the layers together soon!

I also found this chicken pin cushion. She is filled with walnut husks and she sharpens your pins as you use her.

As we were driving home, we stopped at Burkholders. It is about 45 minutes away from Bird in Hand, but we had heard it was worth stopping by on the way out of town. The shop is plopped in the middle of miles and miles of farm land. We weren’t sure what to expect.

This place was room after room with rows and rows of fabric. It was insane! I had already purchased all the fabric I planned to purchase, but I bought a few packages of batting.

As we were checking out, the man behind the register told my mom and me to each take 10 rolls of fabric from a bin near the register.

Indy LOVED my choices.

I spent the past week in the town of Bird in Hand, PA with my mom and her quilting group.

I learned SO much and had a really wonderful time. I feel like I’ve been sucked into a bit of a quilting vortex. I barely communicated with the outside world for six days.

Just lots of these guys everywhere.

There’s my mom cruising.

We sat across from each other. My pinwheels and I are on the right. You can see my mom and I have different organizational “styles.” To be fair, I was using her machine because I forgot parts of my machine at home, so my organization style is definitely flawed.

Many of the women worked on this project. The picture doesn’t do it justice because the fabrics have shiny gold in them and the projects were coming out lovely. It was a really manageable project to complete in six days.

My mom worked on this log cabin quilt. She bought these fabrics when we went to Lancaster three years ago, so she was happy to finally piece them into a project. The picture, again, doesn’t capture the shiny gold in the fabrics which give this project a very rich texture. She left the top of the quilt in two separate parts so they would be easier to hand quilt. She’ll put it together once the quilting is finished because she is a wizard. I didn’t get  a picture of the other quilt she was working on which is quite sick. She brought it to the store to search for a border and the Amish ladies were gathering around with praise. Rain check on that pic.

I finished my pinwheel top!

Most days, my mom and I were the first ones in the sewing room and the last ones out. She was with me after everyone packed up their machines and left helping me mark the rows and iron.  She cheered me on as I sewed the final rows together.

The cows were surprised to see me on their fence.

As I was pulling the project together, I started freaking out about the colors. I really didn’t see how it would all go together.

It was a major case of cold feet. I worried I worked all week on something I wouldn’t like. (Wouldn’t be the first time…)

But in the end, I’m really happy with how it came out.

And by the “end” I mean, I still have to add borders around the edges, pick a fabric for the back, and quilt the whole thing. I have a lot more to say about Lancaster, so stay tuned!

I’ve been working really hard on my little Kenmore the past few weeks when it suddenly started stitching like this:

Which looks fine, except I heard a terrible clunkedy clunk sound while I was stitching and when I turned the fabric over, I found this:

I pulled it apart and cleaned it.

Then I asked Anthony to look at it and pull it apart and clean it.

Then I asked my brother, Michael, to pull it apart and clean it. We found a lot of this:

However, removing “this” did not mean the machine would start working again. I found a local repairman to tune it up, but it meant spending a few days without my machine. I dusted off my Singer, and started thinking about a project I’ve been putting off for some time that would require the Singer’s strong, straight stitch.

Pants!

These are Anthony’s old pants, which I’ve been collecting and keeping under my sewing table for months.

They are too damaged to give away, but I love the colors and the softness of the broken in khaki.

In my defense, that wasn’t a legitimate attempt at a repair job. We were just messing around with the Singer to see how tough it is.

I cut the pants into pants into “square,” ahem, panels.

Then I laid the “shape cut” over it.

And cut strips in 1″, 2″, and 3″ sections.

After I decided on a pattern, fabrics, and the technique for my next quilt, I was ready to start ironing. And ironing and ironing.

The quilt is made up of two sizes of pinwheels, so after the ironing, I cut a set of 3 & 7/8″ and a set of 6 & 7/8″. There are hundreds of pinwheels so it was a few days of cutting, and I am careful not to have any of that work go to waste so I keep everything very flat and organized.

I keep my things in a shoe box. The larger the foot, the better.

Keeping everything in one place makes it easier to start and stop my projects without worrying about my cats getting into everything. They fit snugly, but they aren’t squished.

After I remove my leftover fabrics, I’m left with my two sizes of squares.

The green fabric on the right is all the same fabric and it will make up a background for pinwheels made out of the blue and grey fabrics on the left.

Because I will use one green piece and one blue piece for each pinwheel, I only had to mark the greens. (Don’t make me do all the work, see previously linked technique)

The larger pinwheels won’t have a background color, but two competing colors. I only had to mark half of them, but I obsessively made sure an equal number of each fabric is marked.

So now she’s all cut out and marked. Time to start sewing!

I bought some new toys at the quilt show.

I was recently cutting out a quilt with stacks of different fabrics and wishing I had one of these boards. I would line the fabrics up by the top fold, then make a cut down the right side of the fabric 90 degrees to the top. I would then have to pick up all the fabric, flip it over so that I could make a cut three inches to the right of that straight edge. With this board, I can keep everything as I originally lined it up, and just spin the board around so the fabric all stays in place. A couple great things about this model is that the mat isn’t attached to the board, so you can just buy a new mat once it gets all cut up instead of buying the whole thing again. Also, as soon as you put pressure on the board, it has a lock so it can’t spin. I was worried about it spinning while I was trying to cut, but it’s not possible. I wanted to purchase this board at the last show I went to, but it was sold out. This time, I made sure to hit up the vendors first.

I saw kits similar to these online just before Christmas time for $45! I think they would make great little gifts for friends or just nice storage for my quilting things, but I was not about to pay $45. This pattern was $8

I also purchased 3 clasps for about $5 each. So pretty!

I love the newer army camo print and I was wondering how I could get my hands on some. I was so happy to score this! I’m not sure what it’ll become.

I have been pulling together ideas for a pinwheel quilt for the past couple months.

I really love this one, but I was worried I wouldn’t be able to pull off the blank space between the pinwheels.

The intricate quilting is showcased so well in the solid fabric. That type of quilting would take me twelve long years, so I was thinking about other ways I could lay out pinwheels “on-point” (diagonally, rather than square), without having a blank square.

This quilt breaks up the solid square by splitting them into stripes which I thought had a really interesting effect.

This quilt is square, but I liked the idea of using two different block patterns in one quilt. The criss-cross block, in particular, forms almost a basket weave around the stars. This kind of turned me on to my final idea: a criss-cross sashing between the diagonal blocks.

I started sketching out my own pattern, but then I came across this one in Kaffe Fassett’s book, Country Garden Quilts. The pattern is available for free here.

I love the idea of tons of tiny pinwheels framing the larger ones. I gathered a pretty extensive collection of blues and grays that I wanted to cut up for the smaller pinwheels (aka the sashing), but I wasn’t sure what color to choose for the background, solid fabric in the sashing. I headed to City Quilter!

I auditioned maybe twenty fabrics and four different women who worked there all walked up and down the shop pulling options to help me. I felt like I was buying a wedding dress. In the end, I went with this limey-green.

One of the women suggested that I decide on a fabric for the larger pinwheels and pull out an element of the large pinwheels to use for the background fabric.

Genius, but I was hesitant because that is a lot of things to choose in one day! I knew the larger pinwheels would have to be a somewhat different color scheme so the sashing pinwheels will pop, but I didn’t want them to clash and I wasn’t quite sure how to do it.

Hello, my beauties. I had originally wanted a burnt orange or brown to be the opposite color for my blue/grey sashing pinwheels, but I wasn’t able to find exactly the right shade. I loved the way the middle print, above, looked with the fabrics and then decided that maybe the brown/orange scheme was better for the large pinwheels.

When a woman helping me (thanks, Andrea!) picked that second fabric from the left, we had our first hints of a green element! I chose a punchier tone of green for the smaller pinwheels that I think will really pull this whole thing together. I’m really excited about these beautiful fabrics, but a little nervous about how they will all fit together. I am trying to remind myself that I remained nervous throughout the entire piecing of my last quilt, but I am super happy with how that top came out, so let’s see!

I may have woken up extra early before work this morning just to pull them all out, lay them out, and refold them again.

At long last, the Bounce top is finished!

I decided to take some pictures with some New York City architecture that echos the circle motif.

St. Vincent’s Hospital.

The Maritime Hotel.

The Cabana bar outside of the hotel.

Hotel’s porthole windows.

In early December, Nova posted her pattern for Pillow Pockets.

The pattern was so incredibly cute, I just knew I wanted to make one for my niece, but I wasn’t sure I could pull it together in time for her birthday. I kept seeing the pattern pop up all over the internet and read about how fun and simple this pattern is to complete, so I thought I would give it a try.

After an evening pulling out all of my fabrics and choosing colors for the Dresden Plate, I spent some time trying out different backgrounds for the pillow. I really like the high contrast between the background fabric and the Dresden Plate in Nova’s samples.

I also liked the idea of something more harmonious.

In the end, I decided on the strawberries because pink is the girl’s favorite color and I’m not sure what other project lends itself so well to hot pink strawberries.

The Dresden plate was straightforward to piece together, but I had never made a pillowcase before, so I anticipated pulling out a lot of stitches stitches and trying to figure it all out. Indy settled in for a long evening, but the pattern was actually a snap.

I found every step of the way so rewarding. Each night I worked on this, I went to sleep pretty pleased. I have had a couple dud patterns recently, so I am grateful for the clear instructions I know I saved myself a lot of headache.

Finished with hours to spare before her party!

I kept the quilting super simple.

I used a complimentary stripe for the fabric in the back. I just added this to my stash after visiting (read: paying extremely high prices for little bits of gorgeous fabrics) Britex in San Francisco.

Okay, EXTREMELY simple quilting. Don’t mind the cat hair.

I received a stack of Robert Kaufman Poseidon solids for Christmas and the one I tried out as a background fabric ended up making a perfect for the binding.

I repeated the stripe inside the pocket.

I am really happy with the final product.

The birthday girl was pretty happy too!

I pulled out my fabric stash with some of my recent purchases and threw together some things I thought looked nice together.

I’m thinking about making some mini-quilts, or, as they would be used here, cat mats.