What I'm currently working on

These are some of the blocks I'm currently working on from a BOM I took at the Quilt Barn in Puyallup, WA. There are a total of 12 pieced and 12 appliqued blocks, but they didn't all fit up on my design wall. Of the pieced blocks, all but one are done and since I fused the first 4 months of the applique blocks I decided (instead of redoing those by hand) to fuse the remaining eight blocks as well, which means they all need satin stitching now.

For the satin stitching I had to change my usual machine set-up from my Juki, which is a pure straight stitch machine, back to my Pfaff Quilt Style. Once everything was set up I used a 2.0/.3 zig-zag setting for the satin stitching and tear-away stabilizer. It's quite time consuming (about an hour per block), but it just makes some of the lighter fabrics "pop".

I think the top will be large enough without the use of sashing, but I haven't made a final decision on that yet. Since I have to buy fabric for the border and backing anyway and the blocks are not all done yet, I will let inspiration hit me whenever it comes. lol

Two quilts done

Looks like I totally forgot to update my blog with my two latest finished quilt tops. Both of these tops have been sitting in my UFO pile for quite some time, so it feels good to have them done.

The first top is my comfort quilt for my mother's passing from cancer February 13th 2005. Members from WASIQ had sent me the heart and flower blocks for this top. To make it large enough to really snuggle under it I added two of my own blocks and then alternated the blocks with wow (white on white) plain blocks that provided a great quilting surface. Each of the plain areas has a different design on it, using Pam Clarke's method.

On the back I used "Quilt for the Cure" fabric.

The second quilt below (African Queen) was made from a BOM at the Shibori Dragon in Washington state. After the blocks for 12 months were complete I used EQ5 to design the final layout. The quilting on this top was also done using Pam Clarke's method.

And how's this for the backing?

Time sure has been flying this last month, but stress seems to bring out the productive side in me. When I know I have a lot of appointments with waiting time coming up, I always try to have at least one project ready, that's portable, so I don't just sit around, wasting time. So if you should have wondered about how I get a lot of quilty things done, that answers the question. lol
First off I wanted to share a picture of the finished table runner I was working on in the Quilt University class by Nancy Chong. It's on our dining table right now.

Since I had dabbled into drawing my own Celtic design and still had oodles of self made bias strips, I prepared my fabric for the next project:

If you remember, this is the doodle that I created. The left side shows my drawing with highlighters, because I wanted to see how many fabrics I'd be able to use for the bias and the black line drawing to the right eliminates the "stop marks" I used for the designing process. It gives a better overall impression of the design without distractions.











I then created the real size drawing using a 2" grid that I drew on some drafting paper. This step is more time consuming, because it involved quite a few more steps than just redrawing the original line drawing at a larger scale. When you click on the picture to get the larger view you can see that I had to draw the lines to the left and right side of the design line, then I had to create the over/under effect and finally to make the tracing on fabric easier for myself I traced over all of the lines with a Sharpie.
After this step the pattern is ready to be traced onto fabric and the appliqueing can begin.





After several days of appliqueing all of the required bias strips down by hand, this is the top I've created:




At this point it's "aging" on my design wall as I am working on other UFO's. I've decided I want to completely finish at least three more projects before the year is over and I think I'll be able to finish more than that, but three is my minimum goal, but I'll share more of that in my next posts.