Just the colours I feel driven to use

Current world events are pretty grim at the moment (that is British English for downright dreadful) with the completely unprovoked, unwarranted and illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine.  There are many reports and videos demonstrating the indomitable Ukrainian spirit and I know that many quilters are choosing to work in blue and yellow to signify the colours of the Ukrainian flag and national flower - the sunflower.  Once again this month I want to work on a project that has been "resting", this time Bonnie Hunter's Mystery Quilt from autumn 2011 - Orca Bay, pattern available in her String Fling book. Bonnie's original quilt was made in blacks, reds, blues and neutrals, mine is in blacks, blues, yellows and neutrals, so what languishing project could be more appropriate to pull out and get done this month.

Bonnie Hunter's original Orca Bay - 2011/12 Mystery Quilt

My version as I had left it

 

In early 2012 I had got as far as assembling the main part of the quilt top and then ran out of steam, so I really don't have a lot to do to get the quilt top finished. This one will get sent out for long-arm quilting so my One Monthly Goal for March 2022 is to get this top finished up and sent out (or ready to send out) for quilting.  Packed away with the main section are most or all the little bits for making the borders.  My first task is to remove the remaining foundation papers from the string blocks, this would have been easier before assembling the quilt top, but then I would have been dealing with a lot of stretchy bias edges so I made my sewing both easier and harder!  Of course no work on one of my quilts is without my "helper"

In other news my amaryllis have been blooming giving a bright burst of colour - this photo was taken a couple of weeks ago but the second flower spikes have opened on each of these bulbs.

This last weekend was warm, in fact I was outside in my t-shirt raking leaves and looking forward to the arrival of spring, so maybe there will soon be splashes of cheerful colour outdoors as well as in.

Twenty years and done!

I knew I had started the current project a long time ago so I did a search of old messages from the rec.crafts.textiles.quilting newsgroup and found a posting I made mentioning it in April 2002, so yeah, 20 years... 

Snakes and Ladders (aka the black and white monster) is now finished! All quilted and bound (but not yet labelled - so is it really finished?) and in the washing machine to remove construction/quilting markings and dust and cat fluff of past and present.  My quilts all go through my washer and dryer - I can't be doing with something that needs super special care.  There were blue washable markings from 20 years ago on it that seemed to vanish OK when I dabbed them with tap water, so fingers crossed that everything washes out fully now.

Here is a proof of completion picture that I took before committing it to the laundry process.

Six ladders with feather and pebble quilting, nine snakes with five different patterns inspired by Native American snake designs, and a whole lot of black stippling on black fabric.  The feathers, pebbles and snakes were quilted with YLI White to Black machine quilting thread, the stippling with Aurifil black and I used The Bottom Line in black in the bobbin.  The batting is Warm and Natural.  Because of the dens quilting in the ladders the fabric was starting to draw up a bit so to prevent grief and puckers I decided to break the "rules" and after I had done the ladders I quilted the borders and added the binding before going on to quilt the final black sections in the quilt centre, it seemed to work - I haven't found any egregious pleats or the like on the back yet.

At the beginning of the month I set this as my One Monthly Goal and am delighted to be able to join the link up party for goals achieved!

Feathers and pebbles

Over the last two weeks I have made steady progress on my current quilt and have completed the feathers and the pebbles in the ladder sections. The pebbles were particularly challenging as it is very hard to see where you have already sewn with black/white/grey thread on black/white/grey fabric! I must have been crazy to decide on that colour scheme or I love my husband very much to indulge his monochrome preference in décor or, most likely a bit of both. On Sunday I took the quilt into his workplace while he was in and laid the whole shebang out on the big tables in one of the meeting rooms with lovely natural light.  

This was so that I could mark my quilting ideas for the spaces in between the ladders and in the borders.  As I was marking on plain black fabric I used a Clover white marking pen which I really like for this purpose. The "ink" is essentially a wax which shows up as the ink dries and disappears with a warm iron or moisture and does not have any chemical effect on the fabric.  The name of the pattern I used was Snakes and Ladders so having quilted my ladders now I am doing the snakes taking my inspiration from Native American art.

Today I added some extra pin basting along those edges to help prevent fabric shift and unwanted pleats, of course I had help for this activity!

With one full weekend yet to go in February I still hope to get this oldest UFO/WIP done by the end of the month.

A Belated Update and a Very Mature UFO

This is definitely a very occasional blog and often I seem to write when I am trying to make sure I don't let a project slip (back) into being a UFO (unfinished object).  I did get Christa's Colors finished last year and gifted it to my elder son's girlfriend for Christmas.  Here it is all finished, with some detail pictures too.

Last week I pulled out what is probably my oldest UFO to turn it back into a WIP.  I am not sure exactly when I started this but it was certainly well before we moved to the States in 2014, and from searching old posts from rec.crafts.textile.quilting it would appear that I was working on it in September 2002!!!  The pattern came from a book called "Quick Quilts to Make in a Weekend", a misnomer for sure, but I was suckered in by the title.  Once I had made the quilt top and sandwiched I was frozen into inaction by not knowing how to quilt it as it deserved.  Many years of piecing and quilting later I have acquired the skill set I needed then (probably could have done this some time ago but...) and also the confidence not to get hung up on imperfections that will not affect the functionality of the finished quilt.  My FMQ (free motion quilting) is definitely more controlled and I have started in on it.  Now my aim is to get it finished this month, so I am declaring it as my One Monthly Goal for February 2022.  Here it is under the needle last week and as it was earlier today after doing one of the six 6 foot long free form feathers and with the infill quilting on one side of the feather.

A google search on "free form feather quilting" led me to this site which has inspired me to do fill-in quilting between the feathers and the white bars.

Road trip equals knitting not sewing

My quilting is on hold for a couple of weeks while we travel cross-country and 9 states, each way!  We live in central Pennsylvania, our younger son is graduating on Saturday in New Mexico, and I flew out to Chicago for work yesterday (Monday).  My husband leaves from home, driving, tonight to pick me up tomorrow afternoon and then we hightail it in a southwesterly direction until sunset and beyond.  The idea is to take some vacation time after the graduation before schlepping all the way back to PA again.

I don't do much hand sewing, but I do knit and have one pair of socks that just need afterthought heels putting in and another pair of socks where the second needs to be knitted to the closing of the toe and then they too (two?) also will need the heels doing.  If I get all that done while we travel I have more sock yarn in my suitcase to be able to start in on something else.

Here is the pair that only need heels:

Apparently they have been in this state since 12th Jan this year (2021) so finishing them is my One Monthly Goal for May.

I shall add a picture of the other socks when I am not stuck in a laboratory :)

Christa's Colors - some progress

Life has been busy this month, particularly with work and associated travel, so not a lot of progress was made on the quilting front, but I have met my OMG of getting the yellow and purple bits of Christa's Colors quilted and moved on to some of the green.  I'm still having thread breakage issues while doing FMQ which has dulled my enjoyment of the process.  However here are some pictures showing what I did manage to achieve:

 And the start of filling the green wedges:

I am also now fully vaccinated against Covid-19 which is a relief with my business travel commitments, some of them due to be international this summer by the looks of things.

One of my sourdough loaves was really pretty this month too:

Some quilts are like fine wine.....

 .....they need to have time to mature.

I am currently working on Christa's Colors, a quilt that I started at a retreat 5 years ago in April 2016 designed by the highly talented Cynthia Spencer of Stitch Your Art Out here in Centre County PA. 

Cynthia's original quilt

Cynthia's original quilt was lovely but I wanted a bigger end product so firstly I decided to add more blocks but this took me almost a year to get around to!  With another retreat on the calendar I made the effort to have this ready to assemble there.

Not quite enough blocks

 

Enough blocks and the rows decided upon

 

After getting the rows sewn together I knew it still wasn't quite as large as I wanted so it needed borders, (almost) black borders - I had sufficient of 2 suitable fabrics in my stash so needed to audition them both and choose a final layout:

Squiggly grey on black or black Spraytime by Makower?

Without sashing?

Or with just a thinnish strip to separate the rows?

 

I settled on the squiggly grey on black for the setting and to have thin sashings between the rows.  Off I went to retreat and came home with this:

A flimsy!

I really liked the top I ended up with but had no idea how I was going to quilt it, and it needed thoughtful quilting to help those bright colours sing even louder, but I had an ideal backing and black batting so I even got it pin basted in May 2017 and then it became one of my PIGS (Projects In Grocery Sacks) and matured for another nearly 3 years.  At that point it started whispering to me, first who it wanted to be owned by and then how it wanted to be quilted, yes quilts talk to their makers, no we are not crazy, this is a real thing! So late in 2019 or early in 2020 off it went to my Tuesday quilt group where there were tables big enough for me to lay it out and mark it up for quilting, then covid hit and my quilting mojo decided to go into isolation without me :(

Pin basted

 

Fast forward yet another year and it is finally under the needle of my sewing machine being quilted, and I would really like to get it done in the next couple of months.  

There will be different textures for each colour

I think getting in all quilted in one month may be too ambitious, so my One Monthly Goal for April 2020 is to get all the yellow and purple quilting done with the red and turquoise (or whatever is left) slated for May.

In other news Smokey thinks the weather is nice enough to catch some rays on our Adirondack chairs in the back garden.