February PhD - A Start and a Finish

                                     

In February, I spent lots of time at my sewing machines. Partly practicing machine quilting and getting to know my machine, and also pursuing various goals for the year.

As a part of the Table Scraps Challenge, I finished the Honey Bee Table Runner.

And I have my first UFO finish - the Dogwood Table Runner.

I am pleased with my progress thus far (2 new starts finished and 1 UFO for 2021). I anticipate as I work through the FMQ coursework, I'll branch out to complete other UFOs lingering on my list.

Linking to PhD in 2021 - February Report.

Honey Bee Table Runner - Sunny Saturday / Table Scraps

 

The sun has been trying to come out this week, still a bit overcast but signs of improvement for the weekend.

Somehow I missed sharing block 70 last week in my modern block wrapup.  Featuring the pink and yellow floral from January, the backside of a hand dyed fabric from a fun afternoon with my bee and a yellow first featured in Celestial Circles (circa 2013 - but will hopefully make a comeback this year when I finally quilt it). Looking forward to seeing which blocks come up to be featured in green for March when I open the Random Number Generator.

My other big project this month is the Honey Bee Table Runner.  I told Joy at the beginning of the month that I was delighted with yellow as I had an idea percolating.

I found this layer cake by Riley Blake and immediately thought of my sister, a budding beekeeper.

I spent some time at the start of the month staring a pictures of table runners, and started leaning towards more modern designs. There are lots of cool ones out there. I originally thought of log-cabin blocks with fussy cuts of the focus fabric and fortunately asked Beth to send me the measurements of the table. Turned out it was narrower than I remembered (Dad built it decades ago), so I started to look at other options. Once I found a picture I liked, I worked to reengineer as the pattern it linked to was no longer available. The downside to working with the layercake is that I only had 3 pieces max of a fabric (and only 2 of the honeycomb in a given color). To surround the focus pieces by bees or honeycomb, I was short by about 1/2 piece. So I substituted a strip of honeycomb under each focus piece.

I played with various orders for assembly based on the focus fabric.

When I went to 'square' them up before stitching them together, I discovered that in my multiple calculations for the honeycomb strip, I wrote down the wrong width, so disassembled all six blocks and cut 1/2 inch off then reassembled. Now my blocks would finish at 12 inches tall, and I much prefer the narrower strip.

Next question, to sash or not to sash. Ultimately a 1/4 sashing strip between blocks won out. I think if I had been able to surround with bees, I might not have wanted the visual breaks. 

And then the fun started. Pulled out scraps of batting to discover non long enough - so I made frankenbatting.  I also spent a ridiculous amount of time matching up the pattern on the backing as I only had a yard of the fabric, and the runner is a few inches longer then the width of fabric, so that wasn't an option either.

Quickly basted it with binder clips holding the backing down, and several cutting mats underneath so that I had a solid surface for the pins and didn't catch them in the padding on the table.

I quilted a loopy meander in the background, wonky squares in the focus and a squiggle on the sashings.

Because I wanted the pop of a black binding, I couldn't just wrap the ample backing fabric around the front this time. I'm not sure why I repeatedly sewed strips back to front and repeated the mistake - both in initially joining strips and in trying to join them once the binding was on the quilt. I was working with a very small overlap because I trimmed the joins before realizing that I had done them wrong.

Happily it all worked out. I'm very pleased with my quilting motif. 100 weight silk thread by YLI in antique gold.

The full runner is roughly 12 x 43 and will be winging its way to the Tennessee mountain top shortly.

Linking to:

February Table Scraps Challenge

Rainbow Scrap Challenge - Scrap Happy Saturday

One Monthly Goal - February Success Story - The Dogwood Runner

 

My one monthly goal for February was to quilt the borders on the Dogwood Table Runner and bind and finish the runner. Success!  I mailed it to Florida on February 10th.

Back in 2013 after I finished the top of the Dogwood Runner, and quilted the flowers and leaves, I found a dogwood motif online which has been floating around my sewing room for the past 8 years. I kept intending to pull this out and finish it, especially as every time I moved it, I got stabbed by the pins along the borders.

The initial quilting was done on the flowers and leaves in 2013 or 2014.

I don't like marking my quilts with inks that might accidentally become permanent. So that leaves me with white chalk, which would have worked except that it is a slightly complex motif that I didn't want to draw over and over and over, or my choice for this quilt of Golden Threads paper.

In my February Goal setting post, I described how I prepped the quilt and transferred the motif from the printout to the Golden Threads paper.

These are my lessons from the table runner.

• The paper is fragile and rips easily as you stitch over it. That could be a plus as it eases removal, but a minus if you aren't comfortable with your motif.
• It is possible to catch the foot under the paper tearing the motif away, which negates having your motif there to guide you. You can carefully rip a little more to solve the problem.
• The paper blocks the view of your stitches, making it harder to gauge stitch length to spot check stitch quality while stitching unless you stop to lift the paper (you can, of course, still check for tension on the back). For me, on the runner, it resulted in much smaller stitches than I intended. Someone more comfortable with their machine and stitching small motifs may not have the issues I did this time around.
• Extremely small stitches trap the paper, and this does not dissolve. An alternative to Golden Threads would be a dissolvable stabilizer - but that is more expensive. 
• PATIENCE and TWEEZERS and a really good lint roller are necessary for removing the bits of paper scraps. I think it took longer to clean up the runner than it did to stitch the border areas.
  

Aside from the tiny stiches and the Corgi fluff, I love the way this turned out. And once it was washed, you can't really tell how small the stitches are unless you get uber close with a magnifying glass. The lint roller was good both for tiny paper bits and Corgi fluff.

I was almost done, looked up to see what was on the TV, turned a corner and sewed the quilt to itself. Because of the location of my oops, and the aforementioned really tiny stitches, I opted to trim the 'excess' fabric off and then pull it out from under the stitches with my handy tweezers. A good reminder to pay attention to what I'm doing.

I decided to bind the quilt using the backing fabric. As I didn't plan that in advance, I had batting left to trim. In order to avoid accidentally cutting my backing I pulled all of it underneath the runner and squared up. I then trimmed the backing to one inch around and pressed it in half and then over the top. Once pinned, I machine stitched it down for a tidy finish.

A quick trip through the wash, with a color catcher that is now a delightful raspberry in color, and I realized the one strip next to the yellow flower on top should have been quilted with dogwoods as well as that little strip puffed up and looked silly. So back under the needle it went as I luckily had an extra strip of the motif already punched.

On my way to ship it to Florida, I stopped for a quick outdoor photo.  Mom is thrilled with it, and I am pleased both with the way it turned out and that it is finally done!

Linking to One Monthly Goal - February Finishes

Sunny Saturday RSC 2021 - The Sun peeks out again

 

This week was marked by more time behind the sewing machine than the iron and rotary cutter.

Block 54 features flying geese, one of my least favorite blocks, offset by stash garnet and my new favorite Moda Grunge in Mustard.

Block 75 has a stash fabric of iris that I used last month as well, more of the Mustard and scraps from a miscut block in the Camo quilt.

Block 86 is framed in nearly the last of the Mustard Grunge, with more of the textured yellow and a revisit of the pink and yellow batik used last month.

I also pulled out the layer cake of feature fabrics for my Table Scraps Challenge table runner. More on this next week.

Linking to Rainbow Scrap Challenge 2021

Not so Sunny Saturday - RSC21

 

It is sunny in my quilt cave. Not so much outside... rain, mud, cold, more rain... so the rest of the weekend will be spent playing with fabric.

After finishing this stack, I found another, and another - so there are still a few fabrics to cut from.  I'm cutting bricks off the 2.5 inch strips, and then using the rest as strings/crumbs. The 2 inch strips are being set aside for a future project. Happily I have several empty project boxes waiting to be used.

This week has been more cutting, pressing and organizing than actual sewing. Thursday night on a zoom call with friends, I spent over an hour cutting strips from 32 different yellow fabrics and a few new pinks.

I did sit down and start some large and small string blocks last night, and promptly mislaid one of the finished yellow blocks. I will need at least four in each colorway for my Xing quilt. I started another supersized pink block with more color saturation as I wasn't wild about the first pink one. And started playing with yellows for that supersized block.

Look at the luscious strings I get to play with! Eventually they will make their way into a project box so that I don't keep lifting them from place to place.

Linking to RSC21 Scrap Happy Saturday

Sunny Saturday - RSC21 - February

 

This month we feature Yellow. A color I was hoping for as I have quite a bit, and there are fabrics I want to use in my table topper for this month.

I spent Friday evening and much of Saturday pressing my yellows. There are several more that I overlooked earlier. Much of this stack was hiding behind the garnets, so I didn't pull them into my blocks for the month.

Earlier this week, I opened the random number generator and the first six numbers that met my criteria (one from each of the 6 chapters and has not already been made) were 9, 19, 54, 70, 75 and 86). Then came the harder parts. Last Sunday I chose the fabrics for four of the blocks and finally picked the last two sets today.

After pressing and cutting off 2.5 inch strips from my yellows, as well as a multitude of pinks (holdover from January), I had to clear some space on my table and pieced two of the blocks today.

One stash fabric, from my collections of garnets/reds and Moda Grunge in Mustard - a fabric that will appear in most of this month's blocks.

The Moda Grunge Mustard with a funky retro that I got in a box lot when I was trying to collect scrappy fabrics when I first started. I almost relegated this to the 'too ugly to use' pile and then decided I like it.

I have four more blocks to make - and a plethora of strings and scraps to have fun with for the rest of the month.

Linking to RSC21

OMG - February Goals

 Building on a successful January, I'm ready to get going in February. This month, my plan is to complete the Dogwood Table Runner.

Back in 2014, in an effort to finish in time for our guild's show (a deadline I completely missed) I completed the quilting on the dogwood flowers and petals and then set this aside. In 2019 I intended to get back to work on it before our house started falling apart and I had to move in to my quilt space which blocked access to machines, supplies, etc. I did a lot of knitting and cross stitch in 2019 and 2020 instead. 

I started this quilt at Thimble Pleasures, now sadly closed, in a class taught by Annette Ornelas (Southwind Quilts) in June 2013. The pattern is Carolina Dogwoods.

This week, I started pulling out threads, and surprisingly, the brown was the best match to blend in with the fabric on the sashing and back of the quilt.

I knew I wanted to quilt a dogwood motif, and sometime in 2014 I searched out a drawing on the internet. I enlarged it in several sizes and thankfully tucked the pages away with the quilt as I have gone through several computers since then and I doubt I would find this again.

I tried my hand at drawing the flowers, and decided that was not going to work. So I pulled out my roll of Golden Threads Paper and attached a stack behind the design. I then turned to Bernadette and unthreaded her so that I could punch the design in the paper. I have used this in the past and made the mistake of making really small stitches, which made it a bit harder to remove all the paper. I'm hopeful that I do better this time around.

Last night, I pinned the pattern to the quilt. As I would like to send this off in time for Valentine's Day, I am hoping to spend this weekend finishing the quilting and finally cross this off my UFO list.

Linking to February One Monthly Goal