Finish It Up Friday

For such an easy quilt, this one has taken awhile to finish!

Quilt #15 for 2012, "American Valor" is the cover quilt of the January/February 2012 issue of Fons and Porter's Love of Quilting.  It took longer to collect all the fabrics from various etsy and eBay shops than it did to piece the quilt. 

I made this quilt for a sailor on my son's ship, the USS George Washington.  When I sent My Little Sailor his "Jacob's Ladder" quilt, he said "Everyone likes it, they want you to make one for them."  Well -- there are more than 5000 people on the ship.  SO I made one quilt for them to raffle, and I hope they will use proceeds from the raffle to support one of their community relations projects on their summer cruise.

Quilt #14 - Spiked Punch

Here it is, the sample for the March Strip Club:

Details are on yesterday's post.  If you're in Colorado, come on down to High Country Quilts the last Friday of the month and join the High Country Strippers -- Stripping With a Purpose.  There is no fee for this class, just buy the pattern.  We've been stripping for more than five years, and we always laugh and laugh at Strip Club!  I love wearing my "High Country Strippers" t-shirt; someone always approaches and asks hesitantly, "Can I ask about your t-shirt?"  What?  You don't think middle-aged housewives should be strippers?

At Last -- a new WIP, and a Honey Badger

There was a Honey Badger (warning bad language) in my sewing room last night:

The completed stealth knitting project which was drying on the blocking board?  Covered in cat hair, several snags and jumbled around.

The charm pack waiting on the wet bar for today's project?  Torn apart and wet from the overturned water bottle.

Box of pins foolishly left open on the sewing machine?  Well, you can imagine.

Chocolate Mousse' (aka Honey Badger)?  Resting on the high shelf and looking completely innocent.

However:  There is joy in all the land.  The stealth knitting project is complete (photos tomorrow) and the quilting can recommence!  Today's  WIP Wednesday is underway.



Here is the March Strip Club project.  It is a Tula Pink pattern I picked up at Tula's Mom's shop in Stewartsville, Missouri on my home from Ohio last September.  The jelly roll is Half Moon Modern by Moda (I got mine at High Country Quilts) and the background is the ubiquitous Kona Ash.

I do have a hint for our strippers:  The method for this quilt is unusual.  When you sew your cross-cut  "blocks," don't add a short piece to a long piece.  You want more back and forth "motion" in the colored strips.  I haven't sewn any rows together yet, so I'm hoping I can move things around so the prints don't line up quite as much.

But now I have to go rescue a sweater . . .

Oh! My! Goodness!

You know when you make a comment on someone's blog and you have to type in some nonsense word to verify that "you're not a robot?"

It doesn't have to be that way!

Thanks to the wonderful Claire Jain of  Sewing over Pins,  I have turned OFF "Comment Word Verification."  And I am SO sorry I didn't know before that my blog even HAD Comment Word Verification, let alone that I could turn it off!

So now, comment away and I believe in you, and I believe you are not a robot!  P.S. click on "Sewing over Pins" above to learn how to turn this annoying big-brother setting OFF on your own blog!

And:  I only have 10 more decreases on the sweater sleeves (why, yes, I do knit sleeves two-at-a-time, so they wind up the same length) and I will be back to the sewing machine and my 52 quilts!

Pezzy Print Pinwheels

How fun is this?  My half-square pinwheels out of Pezzy Print (get yours here) with a Michael Miller border print from High Country Quilts.  I'm re-stocking my stash of baby quilts, someone will love this one!

I think next time I will make the center row of pinwheels "spin" the opposite way.

Won't this make a darling backing? It's kind of hard to see in the photo, but I will piece in one row of border print.

Quilt #13 for 2012! 

WIP Wednesday -- All Pinwheels all the Time

Today's WIP is the beginning of a pattern test.  This cute little quilt features two sizes of pinwheels, made with two different techniques.  Both sizes are made from half-square triangles (HSTs), and start with two 5" squares, one from print and one from background fabric.

The larger HST is the classic "draw a line from corner to corner on the wrong side of the background fabric.  Sew 1/4" away from each side of the line and cut on the line."  I like to use this nifty tool, the Quick Quarter ruler.  It comes in two sizes,  8" long or 12" long.  Just slap this puppy on your right-sides-together squares diagonally and draw a line along each side of the ruler:

Sew right on each line:

 I place the 1/4" mark of my regular 12 1/2" ruler on one of the pencil/sewn lines and cut the block in half corner to corner:

 

The smaller pinwheels are made by sewing all the way around two 5" squares placed right sides together with a 1/4" seam.  Then cut corner-to-corner one direction:

And the other direction:

Four HSTs at once!

To make a pinwheel block, first press the HSTs carefully toward the darker fabric.  This is a bias seam, so don't be over-energetic or you'll mis-shape your HST.  Lay them out in the pinwheel -- notice that since I am using a directional print, I have the opposite HSTs going in the same direction:

Sew the top two HSTs, then the bottom two. Because the HSTs are pressed toward the dark fabric, the diagonal seams will snuggle nicely together.

 

Then flip the left two HSTs up and the right two down, like this:

Finger-press the seam on the left down, and the one on the right up.  Then when you sew them together, the top seam will face toward your presser foot.  This will make the seams snuggle up nice and tight:

 

When you press,  if you open the last two or three stitches on the crossing seam, it will make a mini pinwheel, like this:

 

Which will result in a nice, flat center to your pinwheel!

 When you join multiple pinwheels together, make the seams between the blocks also "spin" and all your blocks will lay nice and flat:

 

Of course, if I had read the directions first, I would have realized there was supposed to be sashing between the large pinwheels -- oops.

I'm posting to Freshly Pieced's WIP Wednesday -- go look at some other great Works In Progress!

Mystery Monday

No post since Wednesday?  I've been knitting, not sewing.  And no, I can't show you what I'm making because it's a surprise.  I'm almost done, so I will be back to the sewing room full-time soon.

I did cut the pieces for Step 2 of the BOM for my Wednesday Block Party.  Because there are a lot of strips in the step, I used Debbie Caffrey's Power Cutting technique.

The trick is to cut as many strips as your ruler will fit.  In this case, I am using my favorite 8 1/2" X 12 1/2" Creative Grids ruler.  I can cut three 2 1/2" strips by placing the ruler at 7 1/2" and cutting one strip.  Then sub-cut at 5" and 2 1/2".  This is faster and more accurate than cutting each 2 1/2" strip individually.

I like the Creative Grids rulers because the lines are very thin, but easy to see.  Some rules have lines thick enough that your cuts can be almost 1/4" off  if you cut multiple strips at once.

Here are the pieces for Step 2:

And here is what they look like sewn together.  Notice that orange square sewn to the background triangle?  The dog-ears are 3/8" -- now that's a mystery!

And here is what they look like pressed and trimmed.

My friend Mary and I have a bet that the strange-looking quarter-square triangle is going to result in a three-quarters square triangle.  But we have to wait to find out!