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Friday, January 29, 2016

Sunny's quilt

And now a flashback to November 2015 to show you a secret project...

You may remember that in 2014 I made a quilt for each of my five sisters-in-law on my husband's side of the family.  In 2015 I was on easy street because I only have one sister-in-law on my side!

Sunny (Allysun) is my youngest brother's wife, and her personality is just like her name - happy, smiling, cheerful, sunny.  Their living room is decorated in greys, black, and pops of gold and yellow, so of course her quilt had to be primarily yellow :)


Her Twisted Blossoms quilt was made using the Quick Curve ruler and Metro Twist pattern (both from Sew Kind of Wonderful) and their quilt along found here.  That ruler requires a firm "measure twice, measure again, then cut" mentality; I wasted a good chunk of fabric when I first started cutting.  But once I realized my error and re-read the directions it was all smooth sailing from then on.  The curves are so slight that sewing the convex and concave units together was quite easy - no pins! - and the blocks are trimmed to size after sewing so it's nearly foolproof.  IF you carefully measure before cutting ;-)


I made 12 blocks using different yellow and grey prints combined with Kona Cotton in Snow.  Petals of each blossom block are formed by four sections cut and trimmed with the Quick Curve ruler and four modified half square triangle blocks.  The center squares are all unique grey prints combined with the Kona Snow to form a square-within-a-square.


Then it's a basic nine-patch construction for each block finishing at 16" square.


I switched up the final assembly of the quilt adding 2" finished sashing and grey cornerstones between each block and around the outer edge - it just needed a little something more than the blocks right next to each other could provide.  So with the added sashing the quilt finished at 56" x 74" - a generous lap size.


The quilting was done by Carol Linder in Hampshire, IL using the pattern "Random Clams" by Jessica Schick in a silver grey thread.  The binding is a white dot on charcoal grey from Jen Kingwell's recent Moda line "Gardenvale".


Sunny seemed thrilled with her new quilt when I presented it to her at Thanksgiving, and she later sent me a photo if it in their living room.  Great color matching if I do say so myself!

I have so many works-in-progress right now that it's a bit embarrassing.  But I still managed to start two new projects last week!  One of them is being quilted right now, and I hope to bring you photos of it completely finished next week.  Maybe one day soon I'll count all the UFOs again and publicly confess the number...

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

major milestone

I have finished English paper piecing (EPP) and sewing all of the main components of my Grandmother's Flower Garden hexagon quilt!  There are 32 flower clusters, 6 star points, and 19 groups of background hexagons.  The empty spaces between sections will be filled with additional background hexagons as I sew the segments together.


The final seven flower clusters were completed earlier in January.


And last weekend I decided on a final layout which was transferred to a new coloring diagram.  Now all the flowers and background segments are numbered to make it clear which pieces go where as I sew them together into larger sections.


It's a bit tricky handling these larger pieces as I sew them together, so I've divided the diagram into six sections which I'll piece together before joining them all into one large quilt center.  Not exactly a portable project for much longer!  I've selected and purchased a border fabric, but I haven't yet decided on what the border design will be - maybe more hexagons!  For now I'm concentrating on keeping my momentum so this does not become another UFO ;)

More hexagon stats:

  • Center Star hexagons complete; 151/151
  • Flower hexagons complete: 608/608
  • Background hexagons complete: 532/532
  • Total hexagons complete: 1,291/1,291
  • Weeks since starting this project: 71 (wow!)
Anyone else out there working on a long-term hand sewing project?  A big challenge right now is where to store all of these pieces while they're being sewn together - ziploc bags aren't cutting it any longer!

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