Full of Soup

I can finally report a somewhat successful evening of quilting! Full Disclosure: I went to a full day workshop with my mom’s quilting teacher, Margaret, who has been teaching quilting for 30 years. She spent a full hour holding my hand and wiping my tears and teaching me how to do this.

Step 1: Find a lot of things that are circles!

Take a piece of fabric and a piece of fusible web and put the “right” sides together. The right side of the fusible web is more course and has all those spots of glue. Pro tip: When someone gives you a bunch of free fusible web so you can go home and start right away without forgetting how to do this, don’t lose that fusible web then go to an overpriced quilt shop and pay top dollar for Designer’s Lite Luxury Apparel Fusibles.

Trace a circle on the fusible web side of things and pin it all together.

Quilt exactly on the line. EXACTLY, I SAID.

Cut about a 1/4 inch away from the line you just showed. Don’t ask questions about why my demo includes three different pieces of fabric. We will stick to this fabric for the rest of the demo.

Cut a slice through the fusible web. Do not cut the fabric.

Turn it inside out. Now you have the glue side on the back and the fabric side on the front. You can cut more of the fusible web off if you are worried that it will affect how your finished quilt will feel as long as you leave about an inch around the edges.

Last February, my mom and I went to the Stockbridge Ramsdell house in Newbergh, New York for a two-day quilting retreat. The hostess cooks dinner on Friday, three meals on Saturday and breakfast and lunch on Sunday. We didn’t need to leave the house for the entire time and could truly focus on our quilting.

The dining room was cozy for our small group.

The hostess was really accommodating for special dietary needs and made delicious, healthy meals and delicious, not-so-healthy desserts each day. In the evenings, wine and cheese were served in the parlor.

The parlor had a lovely view of the Hudson River.

This is the view from our room on the third floor:

Downstairs, there is a porch with a large selection of fabrics for sale.

The inn-keeper is also a quilter herself and she shared with us some of the antique quilts she collects.

The woman who made this quilt of hexagons fussy cute each floral hex so they would match perfectly.

This was another hand pieced gem, but the quilter never finished her project and the inn-keeper intends to add the backing and quilt it herself.

This quilt is called a Crazy Quilt, which is a style of quilting I had never heard of, but dates the piece back to the late 1800s.

The quilting room is fitted with really bright Ott lights and of course plenty of daylight and that view of the Hudson.

After working with those lamps, I’m a convert. I was able to work a lot longer without feeling fatigued in such a bright work-space. As you can see, I am still surrounded by polka dots and snowballs as I continue to work on my Bounce quilt.

The inn-keeper is working on her own Dear Jane quilt and has just about a dozen blocks left to go!

My mom finished putting together a top she is making for her friend who will be retiring in the fall. She left the workshop just needing to add the borders.

One of our retreat companions was working on this beautiful flying geese pattern she designed herself. The square will be the center when she’s finished.

She was also working on her version of a One Block Wonder. It was so fun to work surrounded by design walls so we could quickly throw our work up against the wall and see how it was all coming out.

The other woman on the retreat had recently finished a take-off on the Trip-Around-the-World pattern and she was deciding whether or not to extend the zig-zags and what type of border would work well with the quilt.

I didn’t have anything to hang up on the walls in the end, but I was proud of my headway on the many, many snowballs.

I signed up for the Dear Jane workshop at City Quilter this summer. Dear Jane is a sampler quilt and the book has 225 patterns from 1863. The workshop meets just one Monday evening per month from May through August and we will learn a different sewing technique, such as paper piecing or applique, at each class. At home, we can choose patterns from the book that use that technique and practice making a few blocks. The blocks are small- just four and a half inches. From what I understand, the patterns are pretty tedious to work with, but I think this is a great way to get a lot of practice.

Here is a beautiful example from Bridgett’s photostream:

I went to the Kaffe Fassett workshop on Tuesday at the City Quilter. Many of the quilts from his latest book, Simple Shapes Spectacular Quilts were hanging throughout the shop.

I know I’ve never been able to take a picture of my own quilts that do them justice, but I always wondered if Kaffe’s quilts were enhanced by the professional photographs in exotic locations I’ve seen in his books. But I have to say, in person, even under florescent lights, his quilts are even more spectacular than they appear in a stylized photo shoot.

Bounce, in particular, is spectacular in person. I saw this quilt in his book and I wasn’t drawn to it at all. I admit I was disappointed to when I found out this was the quilt we were going to workshop.

However, once I got to the store and got to see this quilt, I was so excited about the workshop. In this workshop, we didn’t sew a stitch. We simply cut out our fabrics and put them up on design walls and edited our designs with the help of Kaffe.

I loved getting to watch everyone else progress and their stacks of fabric turn into neat little squares on their design walls.

The woman on the left gesturing is Liza Prior Lucy, and I believe she is the one who turns Kaffe’s designs into actual quilting patterns. She is the co-author of his latest book.

I like bright colors and I picked out a wide range of polka dots for border of the quilt, but I was hoping to get some input on which fabric would be a nice center to pull it all together. Kaffe took me shopping in the store and picked out this tennis ball fabric. I am not a huge fan of novelty fabrics and I really had a hard time getting over the tennis ball theme. I put it up on the wall to get an idea  of how it would look. Also, see Kaffe on the right in front of his version of this quilt.

I told Kaffe I didn’t think I could do the tennis balls, and he suggested these strawberries instead. I loved them, but I was hoping to NOT make a pink quilt for once. He asked me why one would ever NOT make a pink quilt. I admit, I agree.

After a break, some women in the class decided not to go with the design Kaffe suggested. He gave us a pep talk about how they could always go with their own designs, but for this workshop, to try his designs. “Listen to me and your quilt will be beautiful.” After that, I decided to brave it with the tennis balls. I also kept in mind that we were not sewing the pieces together, so I always had the option to change things.

I do love that bright, neon green color and I thought it would bring together my other prints better than the pink. In this shot I’ve divided up what I believe are my light fabrics (at the top) and my dark fabrics (at the bottom) so I could begin an alternating checkerboard border.

I have never worked with a design wall, so it was really interesting to be able to throw all the fabrics up there at once and really play around with them. I am so hooked on this process.

I added in some of the corners just to get an idea of what the snowballs might look like. I felt really happy with the design at this point.

The best part was getting to see how many different interpretations we all made of the same quilt and how they EACH were so beautiful and inspiring.

This woman chose Japanese prints. I really love the fabric she chose as her background. I think it ties together all the shapes in the quilt so well.

This woman shocked the class at first. How can you design a black and white quit at a Kaffe Fassett workshop? In the end, her quilt was SO much about color. It reminds me of the Wizard of Oz.

Each and every fabric in this quilt is beautiful. I love the color combinations.

The two designs on the left were made by sisters and used mostly Kaffe prints. I think their checkerboards were so successful. We started our designs with just the center pieces, and I was amazed how much the checkerboards changed the whole look of the thing.

This quilt started out as a tremendous pile of scraps and I really could not envision how they would all come together, but lo, they are beautiful.

At the end of the class, we all gathered around and looked at each person’s design and Kaffe offered feedback about what worked and what didn’t work. The quilt on the left will be a wall hanging and is smaller than the ones the rest of the class was designing.

This class was so incredibly inspiring. Picking up a Kaffe Fassett book was one of the reasons I really became excited about being a quilter in the first place. I knew my taste was loud, so I was not prepared to have that loud taste stretched even further by choosing a tennis ball print, but I am so happy that happened. I feel such a new sense of freedom in picking out fabrics now. I can’t wait to get this quilt to size.

In January I took a class at City Quilter on machine quilting. I machine quilted Gwendo’s quilt prior to the class, but I used a walking foot to create a meandering line, which I now know was definitely the hard way. The introduction to machine quilting workshop gave me a lot of practice using the walking foot for STRAIGHT lines.

She also showed us how to make a quilt sandwich using two pieces of muslin and batting and then how to baste the sandwich using safety pins. I am really interested in machine quilting some of my lap-sized quilts, but I wanted to test the waters with a smaller project.

I began by taping the back of my quilt (right side down) to a large, hard surface. The instructor suggested using tables pushed together at a local school or community space because the floor is bad for your back. I prefer the comfort of home and am lucky enough to have just enough square footage of hardwood to do this project.

The bottom layer should be pulled taught. The second layer is the batting.

This is the cottony layer that makes the quilt warm and fluffy. This layer doesn’t need to be tight, just smooth.

I use Quilters Dream, which is a really soft all-cotton batting that is easy to sew through. I could also get away with quilting my lines far apart using this high-quality batting. I probably could’ve gone with a more budget brand since this quilt which will most likely be hung up or tossed around and not used for warmth.

Finally I laid the quilt top on the sandwich and smoothed it out flat. Here’s where my mistakes started!

I’m using an orange thread that will show up brightly on the back and front so I didn’t want to just stitch in the ditch. I planned to quilt a quarter inch in from the seam so the quilt would have a lot of little boxes within boxes. That is why I placed all the pins in the center of the squares.

When pinning the quilt, you are supposed to start in the center and move outwards.

I used curled safety pins to pin the quilt. These work well because as soon as you pop them in, they are curved up to pop back out. The label also promises they are “quilt safe.”

However, when I took them out:

Also, after I put them in, I realized the patchwork of the quilt seemed kind of web-like, and I decided to go with that theme and quilt a bunch of diagonal lines to make the orange thread look like a spider web across the whole quilt.

I wasn’t brave enough to wing it, so I had to draw guide lines AFTER I pinned it.

With the lines in place, quilting it actually happened pretty quickly.

Again, I started in the center and moved outwards.

I was able to finish the top in one rainy afternoon. The results look good from a distance, which is usually my goal.

Up close, I was unhappy with how the knots looked where the sewing started and stopped. The workshop leader said we could just shorten our stitch length as we got to the end, but I think even stitching is important throughout the quilt. I ended up just setting my stitch length to zero at the end and getting these balled up knots. I am not sure what the proper way to start and end a machine quilted stitch, but it’s something I definitely have to figure out before I put some of my more complex quilts under the needle.

Overall, I’m very happy with this little buddy. I got the goblin wizard panels and coordinating fabrics from a Quilt Show on Long Island this summer. I got the solids from The Cambridge Quilt Shop and the people helping me there were awesome. I went there with no real pattern in mind, but they were able to give me the right amount of fabric to make this all work.

I am tucking this away until it is closer to Halloween when I will curse having to work on the binding to finish it off.

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.