Playmates

Part 8
This clue has good news and bad news.

The bad news is: More Flying Geese. They will be raspberry, blue, and aqua (RBA, for short).

The good news is: No cutting! We are going to use pieces - but not all of them - from Part 4 (aqua QSTs) and Part 7 (raspberry and blue HSTs) to make RBA Flying Geese.

After sewing the RBA Flying Geese, I combined sets from earlier Parts to make two kinds of mega-sets. 

• Type A has the green Flying Geese from Part 6, and the RBA Flying Geese I just made in Part 8, and the Pinwheels from Part 7, and the HSTs from Part 4. 
• Type B consists of the green Flying Geese from Part 6, and unsewn RBA pieces from Part 4 and Part 7 that match the pieces I used to make RBA Flying Geese, and HSTs from Part 7 (i.e., the unsewn Pinwheel HSTs) and HSTs from Part 4.

It sounds very complicated. It was so complicated I forgot to take photos. But, it really wasn't as hard as it could have been, because the raspberry, blue, and aqua pieces within each mega-set matched! 

All of these pieces played so nicely together! And it's not too late to take photos now. Here are two of my Type A sets:

Play It Again, Ma'am

Part 7

For Part 7 I had to cut a lot of blue and raspberry Half Square Triangles. Then I had to sew half ot them together into squares, just like I did for Part 3 and Part 4 and Part 5. 

Oooohkaaaay. I can do that. But first I have to go to the fabric store and buy more raspberry fabric. I didn't get enough initially. And I didn't get enough different raspberry fabrics. I think this quilt will look better with more variety. That's one reason I don't make all of the pieces in a part (or clue) the first time through. If I end up getting more fabric later, I want to be able to distribute it evenly throughout the different parts. If I just plowed ahead and sewed all of the parts in each clue, I might run out of raspberry in Part 5 and the find out the shop where I bought it is now out, and I would get something different and then clue 7 would have only the new raspberry, and clues 1, 2, and 5 would not have any of the new raspberry, and it might not look good. It's possible it would still look good, but I don't want to take any chances.

The reasons I don't buy all the fabric in the first place so I can avoid running out are:

1) I am always hoping I will find another fabric that I love before I am too far along
2) The instructions don't usually specify how much is needed for each color

I might run out anyway because I made a mistake and wasted some fabric, or because the instructions were wrong, or  . . . . It happens.

These are some of the things that makes a mystery quilt interesting.

So, I was talking about making squares. After I made lots of squares, I had to take some of the squares and make them into pinwheels. 😾 I really don't like pinwheels. They are so hard. I can never get the points to meet in the center. There is always so much bulk in the center. Ugh.

I followed Bonnie Hunter's directions very carefully. I measured whenever she said to. Bonnie says to keep the line on the ruler up on the fabric, and I did. Bonnie says to allow for the fold in your measurement, and I did. Bonnie says to trim slivers using the Simple Folded Corners Ruler after you sew the squares, and I did.

And you know what? It worked. I am VERY pleased with how nicely my pinwheels turned out. They are flat, and the correct size, and the points meet in the center. Whooppeee! These are my best pinwheels ever.

Double Play

Part 5
All I had to do was some half-square triangles. They are almost the same as the HSTs from Part 3. Easy peasy!

Part 6
Flying Geese. 😩 They are so much work. I always end up having to redo a lot of them. It's hard to keep the three parts aligned in a straight line.

The green fabric is finally making its debut now. It is going to be a "constant" fabric, so there is only one green fabric. I was beginning to wonder when we would use it. The green fabric will be cut into HSTs and combined with the blue QSTs from Part 4.

The blue QSTs are already in sets.That makes it easy to make the Flying Geese in sets.  Each finished set of Flying Geese has to be placed back into the group of pieces those blue QSTs came from. 

Once again, I made good use of the Essential Triangle Tool to cut my wing triangles from green strips. 
 

I had fewer redos[1] than I have had in the past. Maybe I am finally getting the hang of this.

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[1] The Blogger editor doesn’t like redos. I looked it up and the internet thinks redos is the proper plural of redo, although redo's is also acceptable. Note, however, that when redo is a verb, redoes may be appropriate in the case of third-person usage. Note, also, that redo should not have a hyphen.

Even though I didn't have many redos, these pieces took forever. To make things worse, Bonnie slipped Part 6 in as a second part in a single week, so I also had half the expected amount of time to complete this part. I now understand that I am not going to catch up to the live mystery. Oh, well.

Play by Play

Part 3

Part 3 of the Frolic! quilt calls for half-square triangles with a neutral fabric for one half and either dark blue or light blue for the other half. I used Bonnie Hunter's Essential Triangle Tool to cut the pieces from short (for greater variety) fabric strips. There are other methods for cutting half-square triangles, but I really like this method because it seems to minimize waste. It's also fast, because you can cut both halves of the square at the same time.

Some of my half-square triangles

Part 4

In Part 4 I finally got to use some of my aqua fabric. I found a really fun print that I am going to use as an aqua. I almost could have used it as a neutral. It has accents of raspberry, dark blue, and sage green (coming up eventually), and the pictures are soooo charming. (OK, so I realize they won't be that charming after I cut the fabric into a lot of little triangles, but I will know what was there.)

Part 4 was very complicated. I had to make a number of sets of blue and aqua. Each set has 4 half-square triangles, which I had to cut out and sew, and 4 blue quarter square triangles plus 4 aqua quarter square triangles, which I did not have to sew (yet). Each set can (and, for a scrappy look, should) be different, but the blue and aqua fabrics within a set have to be the same for all the pieces in the set.

I can't show you a picture of a complete set because I used certain elements of each set in a later part. Here are some of my completed HSTs. Each one is from a different set.

There is a way to cut out both the HSTs and QSTs from a single strip (if you are careful!) using the Essential Triangle Tool. I had to make some adjustments, but I was able to do it.

The Essential Triangle Tool

One aspect that was especially tricky was getting sufficient contrast between the aqua and the light blue. I like contrast a lot, and I wanted to have as much contrast as possible, so I tried to avoid certain combinations of aqua and light blue. I am probably going to end up with about 70 to 75% of my sets being made with dark blue, but I think I will like that. Here is a pairing that I made where I didn't love the contrast.

Here is a trick for studying contrast. Change your photo to black and white and see what the contrast looks like.

It's actually not as bad as I thought. 

But look at the contrast between aqua and dark blue. It is much stronger for the five dark blue HSTs than for the light blue one in the upper left corner.

 

I am going to trust Bonnie Hunter and keep some light blue in the quilt. What do you think?

Playing Catch Up

I thought if I worked hard, I could get caught up to the group quilting-along with Bonnie Hunter on the Frolic! mystery quilt. I decided to try to finish between 25% and 50% of the pieces in each clue.

The clue for Part 1 called for making four-patches using raspberry, light blue, and dark blue. Here are a few of mine. The lighting was bad and the colors do not appear accurate in the photo. But you get the idea.

 



I followed Bonnie Hunter's "nesting method" to make these four-patches. It speeds things up, but what I really liked about it was how nicely the center seams aligned.

Part 2 was pretty easy. I made these pieces with raspberry and neutral. I have quite a lot of different neutrals. I even tried using a neutral that was a plain solid.

Part 2 pieces

The colors are much more accurate here. 

I started out over 5 weeks behind. I don't seem to be catching up. :(

Merry Play

Wow, it's been a while since I posted about quilting. I've been traveling more and sewing less. Now I have a little time to sew and I have a new project I am working on. I know. You are wanting to see a picture of the finished Good Fortune quilt, or the surprise piece I am making for my friend. Well, unfortunately, I haven't made much progress on those projects.

Meanwhile, while we were away on our last trip, Bonnie Hunter started a new Mystery Quilt-Along. This one is called Frolic!. As soon as we got home I tried to dive into it. It took me a while to get the fabric. We are down to three local quilt shops plus Jo-Ann's. One of them is downtown and caters mainly to tourists with primarily Alaskan-themed fabric that I don't often use. The second shop, Seams Like Home, has a buyer whose tastes are the polar opposite of mine. Lately I haven't been able to find much there. That leaves one good quilt shop, The Quilt Tree, plus Jo-Ann's. (I recently heard a rumor that Jo-Ann's is going to move into a smaller location and the two local outlets are going to consolidate. Can this be?)

Now that I think about it, there are actually two quilt shops in Eagle River. I have never been to them and I don't like driving out there in the winter, but I must remember to check them out soon.

So, I wanted to start Bonnie Hunter's new mystery quilt-along because I love the colors she used. After about 5 trips to three of the four local fabric stores, I had enough fabric to start. Here is a good part of it:

My Dark Blues

My Raspberries

My Light Blues

In case you're wondering, one of the definitions of frolic is "merry play." What a perfect description of how I feel when I'm quilting!