Endplay

Part 9

Whoa, Nellie! This is a part to end all parts. A clue of great consequence and substance. It is ten pages long. It is very complicated. There are lots of steps. 

But, this clue contains The Reveal. It is the Final Clue. Bonnie Hunter's brilliance and talent is also revealed. As if we didn't already know how good she is.

The first thing I had to do was cut out a lot of neutral squares. Then I had to cut out some neutral rectangles. Then some blue squares.  

The second thing I had to do was make four blocks (large four-patches, really) using the four-patches from Part 1 and the neutral squares from Part 9 and the HSTs from Part 4 which are now part of the mega-sets from Part 8.

The second step

The third thing I had to do was take the Flying Geese from Part 6 and the Flying Geese from Part 8 and sew them together. Bonnie Hunter cleverly designed this so that the seams would nest when you sew the Flying Geese together. I almost missed it, because I didn't read all of the directions when I made Part 6. I just assumed I knew how to press the seams. Fortunately, it was an easy fix. I just had to press the final seam on each piece in the opposite direction.

The third step

The fourth step involves sewing the four-patches, the Flying Geese, and the pinwheels together into a large nine-patch block. Wow! It looks great. It is amazing how it turned out with all of the aquas, blues, and raspberries matching up so easily. I was so pleased with how nicely all the points turned out and how flat the final block is. There are a few bulky seams, but Bonnie figured out how to keep the bulk to an absolute minimum. I love this star block.

The fourth step

There are several more steps in this final clue. I am not ready to go beyond the fourth step yet. I have to make all of the pieces for Parts 1 through 8 and  have to make quite a few more of these star blocks.

This is the end of the clues, but not even close to the end of my work. There will be more blog posts, but I suspect there will be longer gaps between them. I have had a lot of fun playing with fabric so far.

Comes with Strings Attached - Good Fortune, Part 6

Are we there yet? Not yet. We have string piecing with neutrals to make this week.  I am close to using up some of my neutrals, and  I am still going to need some to finish up the pieces I must make for weeks 1 through 5. Fortunately, there will be sales at some of the local fabric stores right after the end of the year.

This time, our sets of strips are a lot larger and need either a full phone book page or a full piece of notebook paper.

I thought this would go faster, because it was string piecing. It didn't, but it was still fun. Maybe it was because Susan and Sophia came over to sew with me and too much talking happened. Maybe it was because it was hard to get a lot of variety in my blocks without enough variety in my fabrics. Each set of strips had eight to twelve different fabrics in it. I tried to achieve greater variety by varying the width of the strips, and, of course, by varying the order of the strips.

Is it okay to use the same fabric twice in the same strip set? I don't know, but I avoided this, for the most part. I also tried to limit the number of strips that had a blue or green design on them. I want these pieces to look overwhelmingly neutral. Yeah, I know. I'm putting way too much thought into this.

Let's see what the others did on Bonnie Hunter's Week 6 Mystery Link-up. And here is what I did:

Lessons Learned:

• It's harder to sew strings together in larger blocks and using full phone book pages. Be careful to keep the fabric flat on the paper so your finished size will be accurate. It slips around and bunches up at the ends. If it bunches up, tear off the paper before cutting the final blocks out.
• Don't use phone book pages with light colored fabric. Tiny pieces of the paper get stuck under the stitches and some of those have black ink on them.
• Each page has at least 8 strips, so the more fabrics, the better. Twelve different fabrics isn't enough.
• Sew with friends.

Beaucoup - En Provence Part One (#3)

I am now working on my third set of pieces for the mystery quilt. (This was Week One for most of my sister quilters.) For me it was a good time to stay home and sew.

If my car could talk, it would say "Stay home!"

 When I did last year's mystery quilt, Allietare!, I felt I made it a little too scrappy for my taste. I thought I would try to go less scrappy with En Provence. It seemed like a good idea in the abstract. It turns out that "Week One" calls for a large number of neutral four-patches. This presented me with two challenges.

First, I became aware that in order to make a half-size quilt I would need much more than half the number of four-patches specified for the full-size quilt.  It would require close to 75% of the number needed for the full-size version. Would I have enough fabric?

The first six neutrals I bought for En Provence

Second, and of greater concern, I was beginning to wonder if my idea of "less scrappy" was going to work for all the four-patches. Would I get enough variety with only 6 neutrals? To make a piece like the ones I made for weeks five and six, 6 neutrals would be more than adequate. But to make a variety of four -patches, I was going to need more fabrics.

To complicate matters further, I wanted to make every strip with one "darker" neutral and one "lighter" neutral. I was aiming for a subtle checkerboard effect. (I probably got something less subtle than intended.) But this plan really limited what I could do with the four-patches. I picked up a couple of extra darker neutrals and I fished through my paltry scrap collection for some of the lighter neutrals from Allietare!  (not shown)

After making dozens of four-patches and using up several of my fabrics, I decided the only way to do this was to buy more neutrals and mix them in before I finished any more four-patches. I didn't want to end up with two groups of four-patches, each lacking variety.

The day after a big snowstorm I went to a quilt shop and didn't find any fabric that I hadn't already seen. The roads were bad so I decided to skip the other quilt shops and stop at Jo-Ann's, which was more or less on my way home. I found some nice fabrics from their Buttercream collection and quickly retreated to my snug little sewing area to make more four-patches.

The top 3 and the bottom fabric are from the Buttercream line. The fourth one from the top is from the same collection as one of my lavenders and one of my yellows.

So, it took a while, but I finished a gazillion neutral four-patches, and I learned some good techniques in the bargain.

Bonnie had some great tips for cutting and for making the four-patches nest perfectly so that the center seams lined up exactly.

Perfectly nested

Bonnie also taught a very easy way to "spin" the seams on the back. I had learned a difficult way to do it and I always dreaded having to do it. No longer.

Spin, span, spun. Fun!

Here are the fruits of my labor and here is a link to Bonnie Hunter's En Provence Link-Up

A whole basketful

 
Lessons learned:
Scrappiness depends.
The line on the ruler goes up on the fabric, not next to it. 
Direction matters.

Mon Début - En Provence Part Six (#1)

It's been a while since I have posted. I have been quilting a little, and I have been traveling a lot. I think I am just going to start from here and move forward and not worry about trying to fill in the "missing" posts from the past.

I had another Sewing Day, and it was so much fun. I invited several people to come over and sew with me. It was just what I needed to get back into a sewing frame of mind.

I have been dying to work on Bonnie Hunter's new mystery quilt, En Provence. I was in Europe for Weeks One through Four and all I could do was read the clues that were published each week.

I was back home for Week Five, but I had not had a chance to buy the fabric. I am not a person with a large stash, so a project like this requires a lot of shopping. I made one trip to a quilt shop right after I got home and got a few pieces of fabric. I naively thought I could get all of my fabric there because I knew exactly what I wanted. The only problem was the fabric in my mind's eye was not in the quilt shop.

A few days later I went to some quilt shops with Susan. One shop was closed. 😞 Three were open and I found more fabric, but I still didn't have enough.  (At some point during this expedition I lost my clip-on FitBit.😧) 

You have to go around to all of the quilt shops and see what is there, then you sometimes have to go back to buy fabric after you have seen everything. So, after Susan and I had hit two shops we decided to go to the one I had already been to. I did find a couple of additional fabrics on my second visit there.

The next day I broke down and went to Jo-Ann's. I found a handful of prints that I could use. Some of them were not good quality fabric, but I have been everywhere in town. It's often a choice between good fabric quality vs. colors and prints that I like.

So here we are at Week Six and I am just joining the party. Here is a link to the party: Bonnie Hunter's Link-up

Here are my fabrics.

The colors

The neutrals

As I did last year, I will be making a half-size version of the quilt.

I had no trouble making the units for Week Six. I used Bonnie Hunter's new Essential Triangle Tool . It worked great. I like it better than the Marti Michell templates. It is easier to use because you are working with a large tool rather than a small template. You don't have to press so hard and it doesn't slip on you.

Week Six units

I did not remember to take photos of the all the projects that got worked on during my Sewing Day, but they were all impressive.
  Barbara (Our Third Thirds) made these clever wine glass coasters for her book club:


Lesson learned:
Sewing is better with friends

Andiamo! - Allietare Week One

Andiamo! Let's go! Let's see if I can catch up to the weekly clues.

Bonnie Hunter recommends the Easy Angle Ruler and provides good instructions on how to use it. I acquired the ruler and it really made the cutting zip along like lightning. I liked it much better than the Marti Michell templates used in the BOM program I have been involved with.

It looks complicated, but it's really very easy to use

The clue for Week One seemed daunting. We had to make an awful lot of these half square triangles. It actually turned out to be easy, thanks to the Easy Angle Ruler, and it went very quickly, thanks to doing only 1/4 of the number specified in the clue.

Here are some of my squares:

Clue 1

Note that the gray is constant, but not the neutrals.

I kind of knew this already, but as I was sewing I became acutely conscious of the low quality of the Jo-Ann fabric. I really thought they would have better fabric in their quilting section. The fat quarters weren't any cheaper than those at a better quilt shop (before the coupons). The gray was fine, but the thread count on the neutrals is very low. I would have preferred something with a tighter weave. I'm not too worried about it because this project is unlikely to be subjected to a lot wear. But still.

Here is the link to the Allietare Link-Up page for Week 1, where you can see what others are doing: Allietare Week 1 Link-Up

 

Sea Grass

 In August I took a class with Rayna Gilman. On the second day our challenge was to make something with a limited color palette: two neutrals and a color. Read my blog about the class here: Kiwi, Anyone?

 I selected some fabrics - whites, grays, and greens. (The color is a little off in this photo.)

I sewed the strips together and flipped the piece around.


I squared up the piece. It was a little longer on one edge than the other so it did not lie flat.

After sitting in my sewing area for a suitable length of time, my project demanded to be finished. I tweaked it by narrowing a few of the pieces that were too wide at one end, and managed to beat it into a more one-dimensional piece. I decided to use the print from the focus pieces for the backing. (I have also been using this print for the focus pieces in the 2015 BOMs.)

Then I spent some time thinking about how to quilt it. At first I thought I would quilt only on the light colored stripes, or only on alternating strips. In the end, the focus print also supplied my inspiration for the actual quilting of the project. 

The fabric also gave me the idea to use a variegated thread for the quilting.

Initially I did not plan to have so many lines of quilting, but I just kept filling in blank areas, and in the end, I liked the densely quilted result.

Voila! (Did you notice that it got flipped around again?)

After completing the quilting, I made a facing using the same old focus fabric. (I made the label before sewing on the facing this time :)). It turned out much better than last time, and I only had to do the monogramming once, but it is still a little uneven. The variegated thread looked awful on my test label, so I went with a solid green. I wish I had used the solid green to hem the facing down, but I was too lazy to rip it out and redo it. Besides, it's only on the back, right?

I really like how this turned out. I like it a lot better than "Slice and Dice." I am going to have to try the "two neutrals and a color" idea again.

One last observation . . . As I walked through the living room holding my finished project, it suddenly dawned on me that it looked a lot like our Steve Gordon painting . . . which is my favorite piece in our house! Could I have been influenced subliminally to echo the "look and feel" of the Steve Gordon?

Lessons learned:

• After squaring off and adding facings, the project will be smaller than expected - in this case, about 10" x 17 1/2". Keep this in mind when you start the project.
• Plan ahead with regard to when to use variegated thread and when not to.
• Don't use fusible web to add focus pieces, if you can avoid it. If you are adding the focus pieces at the end, would appliqué look better?

Kiwi, Anyone?

Today was Day 2 of the workshop with Rayna Gillman. We were challenged to make something using a limited color palette: 2 neutrals and one color. This was intended to allow us to focus on design without being distracted by colors.

I have to confess that I am not sure what "design" is, or what makes a design "good." I guess the idea is to play around with it until you like it, then get some feedback from others and then play around with it some more.

I decided to use grey, white and green. I started out with strips, the same as yesterday, because I was not yet in touch with my inner designer.

On the design wall

I added a kiwi green focal point to one of the strips and sewed everything together. For no particular  reason, I flipped the piece around, in case you were wondering.

Here is my focal point. Ta da!

When it was my turn to get feedback I was encouraged to add a few more partial strips to complement the focal point. I did so (and I broke one of the rules by adding strips made of a print containing blue and purple).

I'm not sure whether I like it better with or without these additional focal points

I used fusible web to add the strips because I had already sewn everything and it seemed like too much work to rip out stitches and cut and sew partial strips together and then re-sew. It felt like cheating, but I reminded myself there are no rules.

Although I didn't feel that I was focusing overmuch on color for this one, I also didn't feel that I had much of a focus on design. If design is what order the strips are in and how wide they are, I did focus on that. If design is making different shapes and patterns, I didn't really do that. I stayed with what I knew from yesterday.

I like what I ended up with. It feels "artsy" to me. I plan to finish it and hang it up somewhere. Maybe.

After two days, I really feel that I have moved up to the next level of quilting. I have created two projects without using a pattern or instructions. This is SO not me. This is SO far outside my comfort zone. Rayna is so encouraging.