a "For Keeps" quilt for Sarah

Sharing beautiful and useful things with the people we love is the main reason most of us sew, isn't it?  At least that's how I feel about most of the sewing that I do.  I made this simple but lovely quilt for my dear niece Sarah in April.

Sarah is a lovely person inside and out; she's a wife and mom to two beautiful sons, and probably the most kind and genuine person I know. She recently had a bit of a health scare. I wanted to sew a tangible and beautiful reminder of how much she is loved - something she could see and use every day.

The quilt was delivered to her last weekend, and then yesterday I listened to a podcast interview with Amy Gibson of Stitchery Dickery Dock and learned about her "For Keeps" pledge.  It so perfectly sums up how I feel about sewing and making things for my loved ones, and this post seems the perfect place to share it.  Don't worry - I'm also including all the details on the making of the quilt a little further down in the post :)

The For Keeps pledge states:

"I love to sew because it brings me joy, and I love to share that joy with those around me 

by making things that are used and enjoyed every day.

I don't sew because it's trendy.

I don't sew because it might make others like me more.

I don't sew because I have to.

I am taking this pledge to refocus my heart and to remind myself of why I sew, and who I sew for.

I pledge to make things I love

For the people I love

To use every day.

I will sew for keeps."

Perfect, right?!

And now back to the quilt details... Sarah's Pinterest boards gave me great insight into her home decor preferred colors, and I know that she loves simple classic designs.  I immediately thought of the "Small Change" quilt in the "Quilts Made Modern" book by Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr.

Twenty different shot cottons by Kaffe Fassett and Pepper Cory make up the palette for this quilt.  I used a half yard of the bottom grey and quarter yards of all the others cutting two (four from the grey) 3.5" x 42" strips from each.  The strips were then randomly sewn into 3 strip sets which were cross-cut into 3.5" x 9.5" sections shown below.  I advise pre-washing shot cottons especially the Pepper Cory shot cottons - the shrinkage rate of these beautiful fabrics is greater than other quilting cottons which could result in a very puckered finished quilt when it is washed and dried for the first time.

These three-square sections were arranged in an 18 x 24 square grid to determine color placement. I also used the monotone (black and white) setting on my phone's camera to check that the light and dark values were spread across the quilt.

A new quilter in the area - Isis in Huntley - quilted this all over classic fans design in a mauve thread.  She did a fantastic job!

The backing and binding is a solid from Lotta Jansdotter's line Glimma for Windham Fabrics. The color is chameleon-like; it's a dusty grey/mauve/lavender that changes depending on the lighting and what colors are next to it. Very versatile, and I really love the way the quilting texture is highlighted on this solid backing.

I've been keeping a record of most of my projects in this swatch journal. Orderly rows of fabric squares and neat handwriting push all my buttons :) And how fun to have a tactile record of the items I've made for my loved ones!

Let me know your thoughts on the For Keeps pledge. There is a free printable available for your sewing area and a blog button too on Amy's Take the Pledge webpage. I've added the button to my sidebar :)

You can get more information about the podcast interview with Amy here. Sandi Hazlewood does a fantastic job with her Crafty Planner podcasts; you'll want to subscribe and listen to all the episodes!

my signature color

Whoa - I finished a quilt almost three months ago and forgot to tell you about it!  This is my Triple Star quilt with lots of fuchsia/magenta/pink so I'm calling it "My Signature Color".

During 2014 I was a member of an online bee group - Modern Instabee Hive 15 - that used quilt patterns from the book Modern Bee: 13 Quilts to Make with Friends by Lindsay Conner.  November was my month for the 11 other members to make blocks for me, and I asked them to use a variety of low volume fabrics for the background and loads of darker pinks for the 16" Triple Star block.  Using these fabrics from my stash (minus the turquoise prints) I made a couple of example/inspiration blocks.

During the months November 2015 - February 2015 Triple Star blocks from all over the continental US and Canada arrived!

The book pattern called for finishing the quilt with plain 2" sashing between the blocks and a couple of borders around the 3x4 block grid, but I changed it to include 4" sashing with additional stars as the cornerstones and no borders. Because I'm contrary like that. And because you can never have too many stars.  A sprinkling of turquoise cornerstone stars breaks up all of the pink.

The quilting was done by Carol Linder in Hampshire, and I chose the "Cracker Jacks" pattern with fuchsia thread - naturally!  The leftover black and white floral backing from this quilt made a fun (and free!) binding.

For the backing I used Wide Back Text in white from Windham Fabrics.

ALL the color names on the back of this quilt!

Many, many thanks to the members of Modern Instabee Hive 15! This is one of my all time favorite quilts, and what a great experience it was to work with all of you!

** I've been busy with some secret Santa sewing the past few weeks that I won't be able to share until January. But Carol currently has my Red Hot Dreamy Hexagons quilt top in her queue, and I've been diligently working on my Flower Garden Quilt. So there are still projects for me to share with you in the few remaining weeks of 2015 :) **

flower garden hexagons = slow sewing

Confession: Late in 2014 I started yet another hand sewing project.  At the time I was having such fun making the English paper pieced (EPP) hexagons for my Red Hot Dreamy Hexagons quilt top (which by the way is finished and just waiting to be quilted!) that I immediately started making more when I saw this book cover...

I'm using primarily Kaffe Fassett and Anna Maria Horner fabrics to make my star and flowers and a wide variety of light-to-medium grey prints for the background hexagons. The center star of the quilt top is almost complete!

The pattern calls for 759 colored hexagons (to make the star center and surrounding flower blocks) and 532 background hexagons!  Wow - that is a LOT of hand-sewing!!  I haven't yet made a count of how many are completed because I don't want to discourage myself, but I plan to show you my (slow) progress on this throughout the year.

The great news is that this project is perfectly portable - I've worked on these hexagons while traveling in Florida, Indiana, Texas, and Ohio and in front of the TV many evenings.  You only need to bring along a small bag of precut templates, precut fabric squares, needle, thread, small scissors, and reading glasses while you're on the go :)

I use a 1" Fiskars hexagon punch to cut my EPP papers.  I am way too cheap to buy enough EPP papers for a project of this size, so I cut my papers from the subscription inserts found in magazines.  FREE EPP papers, people!  Using a hole punch tool to make a hole in the center of each paper makes them easy to remove later.

A few of my fabrics were cut using a 1.25" hexagon die and my new Sizzix Fabi Cutter, but I found that they were a little too small to easily wrap around the papers, so I've gone back to my original method of using 2.5" fabric squares for 1" hexagons. (The 1" measurement indicates the length of each side of the hexagon.)  There is a 1.5" hexagon die available for the Sizzix Fabi, but I'm too cheap to buy another die when 2.5" squares work just fine :)

As you can see, there is not a lot of seam allowance on the back side of these EPP hexagons - too fiddly for me.  The method I use for thread basting my hexagons is actually a mash-up of several methods, but this YouTube video is the closest demonstration I can find online to show you how I do it.  I don't glue baste my hexagons - I tried that method but it just didn't work for me.  Thread basting takes longer, but thread is cheaper than glue and it stays in place just fine.

Along with the star center I've completed four of the 32 flower units...

This photo shows the back of the center star unit. You can see that I've removed the papers from all of the hexagons that are surrounded by others.  The perimeter hexagons still have their papers enclosed; I don't remove the paper until a hexagon has been sewn to another on all six sides.  You can also see that the green and black hexagons do not have any thread basting.  These are the ones I tried to glue baste, but the seam allowances didn't remain glued down long enough for me to sew them all together, so I ended up re-gluing all of them.  What a waste of time!

And here are the back sides of my flower units. I'll leave all the basting stitches in even after the whole top is put together. There really is no reason to spend the time removing all those stitches - they'll just be concealed on the back side against the batting and won't interfere with the quilting process.

And one last shot of the center...

This is going to be a very lengthy project. I hesitate to even venture a guess at a completion date, so for now I'll just plan to write an update periodically and maybe at some point provide a count of how many of the 1,291 hexagons are completed.  But that would require counting.  And I'd rather just spend the time sewing :)

Red Hot Dreamy Hexagons progress

The second UFO that I want to complete this year is my Red Hot Dreamy Hexagons quilt.  Last year I wrote a post about the center medallion of this quilt, but then I put it away for a long while during the time I spent working on the SIL quilts :)

At the end of 2014 this is what the quilt looked like...

The original quilt (from the pattern book Quilt Grandeur) was made in greys and very subtle colors.  To be honest I didn't give this quilt a second thought while looking through the book because "subtle" doesn't usually draw me in.

But a few months later I saw this earth-toned version offered as a class on creativebug.com, and I couldn't stop thinking about it.  I was really intrigued by the English paper pieced (EPP) hexagons appliqued in the center, and this version was obviously brighter.

Pretty soon I started thinking about how a red version might look, and I was off hand-basting and sewing hexagons like mad!  I used the background fabric to choose these shot cotton colors for the hexagon rings, but once I sewed the rings and saw them all together on the background fabric I knew right away that that yellow had to go.

In the second iteration I added the flowers behind a few different rings.  While these colors were an improvement, that one blue ring was the odd man out.

I felt like the hexagon colors were right in this third try with the addition of a second blue and the brighter orange, but I didn't like the green flowers within the top and bottom left rings.

So I replaced the green flowers and arrived at this arrangement for the quilt center medallion  All that rework was worth the effort - I love this final version!  The first border is one of my favorite prints - Paperweight in Paprika - and the cornerstones are cut from the same floral print used in the center of each hexagon ring - Japanese Chrysanthemum in Scarlet.

Each ring was hand-appliqued to a single fussy-cut flower.  The seven hexagon rings were then hand-sewn together at the edges to make one large centerpiece which was hand-appliqued as a whole over the background fabric - Jupiter in Red.  Lots of hand sewing, which I really enjoyed :)

I put this quilt up on the design wall again today so I could finish the second border and get started on the third (there are five total borders).  Based on my goal of completing five UFO quilts before October, my ideal timeline is to complete one quilt top each month January through May to allow time for long arm quilting and binding.  It will be a stretch to finish this one by the end of January, but I'm hopeful!  After all, goals are supposed to be a bit of a stretch, right?

center block of Dreamy Hexagons

In my last post I showed you a peek of some fabrics I have pulled together for a new Kaffe quilt project. The large center block of the quilt will have eight rings of (12) 1" english paper-pieced (EPP) hexagons.

If you're not familiar with EPPing, it is a type of hand-sewing where the fabric is basted around a paper template or insert (a hexagon shape for this quilt) and then the shapes are hand-sewn together before removing the paper template. There is an excellent two-part tutorial for making EPP hexagon flowers from Lori Holt at Bee in My Bonnet here and here.

I use the same basic method (without the paper clip) to make these rings. The quilt pattern calls for using shot cottons to make the hexie rings, and I'm using a mixture of Kaffe shot cottons, Pepper Cory Peppered Cottons, and Robert Kaufman Carolina Chambray for my rings.

After all the rings are completed, each one will have a large flower appliqued under/behind it. Here is one of the fabrics I'm considering for the large flowers - Japanese Chrysanthemum in Scarlet by Philip Jacobs. It's my #1 choice so far :)

Coming in a close second is this Cactus Dahlias in Red also from Philip Jacobs. As you can see I've got four of the eight hexie rings sewn. I'll probably make a few extra and choose the eight I like best.

I'm trying to let this quilt evolve as each border is added and not have everything all planned out from the get-go (much like my border challenge quilt last year), but here are a couple of photo mosaics that show which fabric combinations I think might work well. All these photos are from the gloriouscolor.com website. They have the largest and most comprehensive online selection of Kaffe Collective fabrics. A few local brick and mortar shops have a decent selection of his fabrics, but nothing rivals the inventory at Glorious Color. I buy what I can locally and order the rest :)

Jupiter in Red

Shirt Stripes in Red

Japanese Chrysanthemum in Scarlet

Lotus Leaf in Wine

Chard in Hot

Roman Glass in Red

Jupiter in Red

Cactus Dahlias in Red

Shirt Stripes in Red

Picotte Poppies in Red

Babble in Charcoal

Oriental Tree in Red

This glorious riot of reds, pinks, and oranges is so invigorating, but I'm trying to take it slow and enjoy the process of just playing with the colors and seeing where each step takes me. The fact that there is no deadline for finishing this quilt makes that easier!

one finish, one near-finish, and one new project

You know me - jumping from project to project! The last days of March were filled with family and some auto travel as Thing 1 was home for a quick spring break week, and then just as she went back to school Thing 2's spring break began. Thing 2 is a high school junior now, so we took a road trip to visit a few colleges in the Midwest. We visited three schools and right now it looks like we have a winner (or at least a very strong front-runner). We'll probably make some more visits though since it is a long while until applications need to be filed, and it's always good to have a Plan B, right?

On our travels to a couple of Indiana schools we were lucky enough to see our nephew John and his young family. So we met baby Zachary for the first time! I finished sewing the label on to the back of his quilt as we drove - a real "just-in-time" finish. But with all the excitement of seeing everyone, I forgot to take some final photos. Hopefully John will be able to send some photos of the finished quilt in Zachary's room.

Here are the last two shots I took of the quilt at my house. First - marked and pinned and ready for quilting...

Tree of Life 2013 finish

Somehow I skipped posting these photos of my completed Tree of Life quilt last year. It's obvious from all the photos that it was actually completed in late summer/early fall - when the grass was still green and the breezes still warm. These photos are a great cheer to me today in these early days of February when it is snowing (again!) and I'm seriously contemplating running away from home until May!

everlasting pumpkins for fabric lovers

Christmas ads are already inundating us, but there are still a few weeks of fall remaining. Plenty of time for you to make a batch of these pumpkins to decorate your home for Thanksgiving.

I made these three last weekend, and it took me about one hour per pumpkin - a great way to spend a Saturday afternoon. The project will go even faster if you've got a willing crafty helper :)

You can find these carve-able pumpkins at JoAnns, Hobby Lobby, Michaels, and most chain craft stores. You'll also need fabric scraps, matte finish Mod Podge, and a foam brush.

I cut my fabric scraps into roughly 3" squares. I cut them with scissors, eye-balling the dimensions. No need for precision cutting on this project!

Beginning near them stem, brush a swipe of Mod Podge larger than your fabric square on the pumpkin. Place the fabric square on top of the Mod Podge, tamp it down, and then brush another layer of Mod Podge over the top of the fabric square.

Continue this process - layer of glue, fabric, glue over the fabric - down the side of the pumpkin, overlapping the fabric edges as you go.

Yes - this is my mostly Kaffe (and friends) pumpkin!

When you get to the bottom of the pumpkin with a "column" of fabric, start working your way back up to the stem. Continue until you have the entire pumpkin surface covered with fabric.

Check for any edges that may have lifted and re-glue them with another swipe of Mod Podge. Then you just have to wait for them to dry - usually only a couple of hours.

Now you've got some everlasting pumpkins to decorate your home. I've displayed mine on the fireplace hearth, but the outside photos are so much prettier!

You could cut your fabric scraps into any shape - rectangles, triangles, circles, diamonds - go crazy and have fun!

Next year I want to cover some white pumpkins with large dots of black and grey fabrics. What do you think?

my new favorite fall skirt

Are you tired of seeing photos of my skirt creations yet? I hope not, because after this one I've still got one more to show!

This is a tiered version from The Essential A-Line by Jona Giammalva. The book version has four different fabric tiers, but I've included just two here because I love that main fabric so much.

Fabrics shown are Kaffe's Lotus Leaf in Umber used as the main skirt fabric and his Violets in Ochre used as the bottom tier. I added the Kaffe Shot Cotton in Prune as the bias binding between the fabrics and at the hem.  This one looks fabulous with a lavender tee and jean jacket!

Once again I used a centered back zipper rather than the side invisible zipper shown in the book. These skirts are very easy to make (especially when you've worked the process six times!), but just in case I ever need to alter the sizing, the center back zipper will allow me to take in or let out the side seams to adjust the fit without ripping out the zipper. A side seam invisible zipper is less conducive to alterations.

This skirt is lined with a poly/cotton blend broadcloth and includes a waistband facing, just like many of the others I've made. You can see more of my Essential A-Line skirts and read more details about how I've constructed them by clicking here and here.

Next up for skirts - inverted pleats!

P.S. If you are a local reader, my two-session Essential A-Line basic skirt class will be held on Fridays, November 1 and 15 from 6:00-9:00pm.

these skirts aren't just for summer

These are fall skirts! I've now finished three more skirts using the book The Essential A-Line by Jona Giammalva (previously blogged about here.)

I cannot say enough good things about this book! As you probably know, I love skirts, and this book is by far the best one I've seen to help you make your own fitted pattern that can be varied in so many ways.

The first skirt here is the basic A-Line constructed as directed in the book. It has a side seam invisible zipper and traditional (slippery fabric!) lining. What do you think of that fabric? I can wear ANY color with it! It is called "Effervescence" in Jewel by Robert Kaufman. The fabric is printed with a border running along the selvage on one side, but I was able to cut around that.

Can you see that zipper? No, you cannot, because it is invisible!

Next up is a variation of the basic A-Line. You may recognize this AMH print because I already have another skirt made from it!

This time I changed the pattern from the book to utilize a center-back zipper installation. Since I'm going to be teaching some beginning sewists how to make these skirts, I think a regular centered zipper is far easier to master than an invisible one.

I also added an interfaced waistband facing to this version because I think it helps the skirt to lay better around your middle section.

The lining is a poly/cotton blend broadcloth that is layered together with the main fabric, so it does not hang freely as a traditional skirt lining would. This gives the skirt a bit of a heavier feel (perfect for cooler weather!) while still blocking out any sunshine "see-through".

The hem is encased in a bias binding - one of the hem variations shown in the book. This fabric is one of my all-time favorites: Paperweight in Gypsy by Kaffe Fassett.

And lastly, my version of the book's Patchwork skirt. The author made her patchwork skirt with all 5" squares, but I was inspired by another skirt I saw over the summer made from many different sized cuts of fabrics. I got together with a friend of mine a few weeks ago and we each made one of these skirts (similar but different due to fabric layout) utilizing a shared set of 16 fat quarters. I'll share another post soon with photos of that sewing session - so fun!

Again I added the center-back zipper and waist facing.

And the bias binding hem. This hem fabric is Oval Elements in Licorice by Art Gallery Fabrics.

These three fall beauties are now hanging in the window of my LQS advertising my upcoming November class! I've structured the beginning basic skirt class in two three-hour sessions to be held in the evenings.

Then in 2014 I'm planning to add more classes so students can make some of the book's variations of the basic A-Line skirt. Currently there are two versions on the cutting table in my sewing room - the inverted pleat skirt and the tiered skirt - with a Friday deadline! Must get busy sewing!

Enjoy the week!!