Next Up: Sewcialites

It took me a while to choose but for my April One Monthly Goal, I decided to start on the Sewcialites Quilt Along at the Fat Quarter website. It seems like it will be fun and there are still three months left before it is finished.

My plan is to make a lap-sized quilt out of purple, green and blue scraps, primarily leftover from my Queen's Jewel quilt, but I'll use whatever is in my scrap bin that works with the color scheme. I may have to cut into yardage for the light color background fabric and probably the sashing and outer border, but I think I should be able to get most of the blocks from scraps.

Since we have so many house projects currently going, I am not sure I'll be able to catch up to block #29 this month, but I will try.

Garrick Finished

Well, almost. It still needs buttons and a little bit of handwork but the hard part has been finished. I think it needs buttons that are larger than an inch and I don't have any in my stash, so I'll need to go shopping. At this point, I think I'll wait until after I've been vaccinated.

This completes my March One Monthly Goal, for the most part. I got really distracted earlier in the month and didn't think I would make it, so I'm pretty relieved.

This also is on my 2021 WOOFA list, so it's nice to be able to cross it off.

Linking up with TuesdayToDo. For next week, I'm hoping to get started cutting out my next quilt. I'm not really sure which one is next; I want to make everything at once. LOL

Tuesday ToDo #5

I finished my list, though it wasn't exactly ambitious. My goal was to finish cutting out Jeff's Garrick coat and re-read the directions, which I did. I have spent a couple hours on assembly, but it's going slowly. I'm currently in the process of pad-stitching the collar. There is nothing good to take a photo of yet.

Yesterday, I was able to get help from the Electric Quilt technical assistance and now my program is working perfectly! I also bought BlockBase+ this past week while it was on sale, so soon I'll be in designing nirvana.

This coming week I would like to continue to work on Jeff's coat when I have spare time, but I have found someone to help me with a long-wanted closet finishing project, so that will be my priority this week.

I can't wait to have all this extra space to stash my craft room overflow. LOL

Visit ChrisKnits to see what everyone has been working on.

Finger Lakes Log Cabin

One last quilt design I've been playing with, and then I'm definitely going to go work on Jeff's greatcoat. LOL

Judy Martin has three log cabin quilts I'd really like to make in her book, Judy Martin's Log Cabin Quilt Book.  (I don't know why she used such weird names for these fantastic designs.)

1. Snake River Log Cabin
2. Finger Lakes Log Cabin and
3. Timberline Log Cabin

I finished the Snake River Log Cabin flimsy in January.

I have some old set fabrics that I've been a bit obsessed about using this year. This set I bought in around 1999/2000, to match a master bedroom I haven't had since 2006. They've moved at least four times and I don't want to move them again unless they're in a finished quilt. 

I've made at least five different quilt designs for these fabrics recently, but none of them have stuck. Now, I think I've decided to carve them up to make the Finger Lakes Log Cabin. The print on the set is so busy, I think it definitely needs some solids to pull it together so I poked around on my fabric shelves and pulled some more fabrics to supplement these. (I probably won't use all these fabrics, but I haven't decided yet which ones to pull out of the pile.)

Likely I'll still have a ton of this set fabric left when I finish this quilt so the problem won't go away, but at least I won't feel guilty anymore for hauling these fabrics around for years. And maybe I'll just sell what's left.

Anyway, the design will look something like this.

There is a non-trivial chance this will be the next one I start cutting out after I finish Jeff's coat. I won't let myself start a new quilt until I finish this March goal. The sooner I get it done, the sooner I can play so I am definitely going to go finish cutting out the coat this evening.

Sewcialites Rearranged

I obviously need to do more sewing and less designing. LOL

I've been thinking about joining the Sewcialites Quilt Along for a while now. I've been going to their website every weekend and downloading the blocks, but I haven't sewn any of them yet. To be honest, I didn't like the finished project, but it is fun to sew along with others and share your progress.

Learning how to use Electric Quilt better gave me the perfect excuse to come up with my own block arrangement. I think sampler quilts look better with sashing and I thought it would be fun to do a design with different size blocks.  

The large blocks are 9" and the small blocks are 6".
The center block area (not including the borders) is 51"x51".

I haven't figured out how to add sashing in the custom layouts yet. There is a 1" gap between all the blocks which is the sashing. I'll need to make a few extra copies of blocks to fill in the space so I'll just make some additional blocks using different fabrics so it will be less noticeable that they're repeats.

Except for the stained glass fabric and the light blue background fabric, I'm hoping to do most of this with scraps/fabric leftover from my Queen's Jewel quilt.

Update a couple hours later: Got it figured out. Now I'm gonna have to spend a while trying to figure out what color to use. =)

Tuesday ToDo #4

This week I finished everything on my list from last Tuesday. I finished Task #11 of the Basic Crazy Quilt Class. This was the next to last step. The last step is to sew on beads, buttons, charms and any other embellishments. Since I don't plan to do anything with the block, I don't think I'll waste the beads. I've had years of beading experience playing with a medieval group so I think I'm going to call this class done. 

I enjoyed this class and would recommend it to others. It was free and the "handouts" are excellent, but the format does not really work for me. The way the class is structured is the teacher emails you a handout with instructions and you do the task, take a photo and then post it to a private blog. Then after the teacher has a chance to review your photos and leave comments (usually a day or two) she sends the next handout. Usually, I got distracted while I was waiting. I have Allie Aller's Crazy Quilting book which has some nice projects in it, so I think I will look to that for inspiration for my next Crazy Quilt project.

I finished the Aged Elegance quilt flimsy last Friday during Friday Night With Friends. Then, when I finished early, I finally made the green Xmas pillowcases. Those border prints were leftover from the quilt and I rather like how they turned out.

1. Crazy Quilt Class Task #11  ✓
2. Finish the outer border on the Aged Elegance quilt. (Inner border is finished..)  ✓
3. Make a green pillowcase to coordinate with our Xmas quilt.  ✓

I also started cutting out Jeff's Greatcoat—my one monthly goal. I cut out all of the wool, but I still have to cut out all the lining pieces. If I hadn't upgraded Electric Quilt, I probably would have finished by now.

For this next week, I would like to finish cutting out this coat and re-read the directions before I start sewing. (And start on the taxes and get to work painting the wood for the back stairs, but those tasks don't count here.)

Linking up with Tuesday ToDo over at ChrisKnits.

Electric Quilt Obsessing

I think I bought Electric Quilt in Dec 2011, but I never really learned how to use it well. I learned the bare minimum to put in blocks and import fabrics. I never tried to make designs that had different size blocks nor anything with appliqué. But now that I have it on my laptop, it's hard to resist playing with Electric Quilt all the time.

The company offers a whole bunch of free patterns on their website, and I've been poking through them to see if anything appeals. Last night I opened up their Beautiful Blooms lap quilt design and I guess I was inspired to play with it. I don't need more lap quilts, we have so many already, so I tend to always size up designs to queen-size beds. (Eventually, we'll have way too many of those too then I don't know what I'll do. I might have to stop quilting.)

Their original quilt design

After a couple hours, I came up with a few different designs I think I would enjoy having.

This was one of the original designs that I thought was finished.

Then it occurred to me that some appliqué would look really lovely on this quilt. And it gave me an excuse to play with the appliqué tools.

That center block is a paper-pieced Clematis block
I swiped it from Joen Wolfrom's A Garden Party of Quilts.

If I appliqué the quilt, I would likely use a different flower shape; that shape was just easy to make with the tool. I might use tulips since so many of the blocks are tulips. But this is roughly the layout I was considering.  If I could get past the horrible cutting out part, I suspect I would enjoy appliqué. I really do want to try it. This might inspire me.

Linking up with Design Wall Monday. 

Pansies in Paradise Redo

I don't normally make the same quilt design more than once, but I think I can do it better. LOL

The name of the pattern is Pansies in Paradise by Debbie Beaves. I actually have the Pansy Paradise set made by Timeless Treasures (not the set the pattern was originally designed for) and I think I'm going to try this pattern again with that fabric but I'm going to reduce the block size to 9 inches. It just works better for the queen-size quilt layout.

I had a different design for this fabric (a variation of this), but I think I'll like this better. But because I want to fussy cut some border for the four-pointed star blocks, I had to look around and find more of the border fabric.

(I'm still having challenges with Electric Quilt, but now I'm triple saving and even copying files onto thumb drives. I'm still hopeful they will help me resolve my issues.)

Aged Elegance Flimsy

This month's Friday Night With Friends seemed like a good excuse to finish up the Aged Elegance quilt I started last month. It took me a couple hours to fussy cut the border and then I got it sewn on with mitered corners. And it's finished! 

This pattern was a free pattern called Pansies in Paradise by Debbie Beaves.

This quilt flimsy was made from Aged Elegance fabric by Wilmington Prints I purchased in 2009. I'm glad to finally get this stack off my fabric shelves but I will admit I don't like this quilt enough to spring nearly $200 to have it machine quilted. Instead, I'm going to put it in my Hope (I get a longarm) Chest. It will eventually get turned into a quilt, but it will be a while.

Linking up with Brag About Your Beauties, Finished (or Not) Friday, Peacock Party. TGIFF, and Whoop Whoop. I hope you all have a good weekend.

Electric Quilt Frustrations

I discovered Electric Quilt 8 works on Macs so I bought the upgrade because I wanted to be able to use it on my Mac laptop. I've had EQ7 for a very long time, but I can only use it on my gaming computer down in the basement dungeon. 

I've downloaded EQ8 and installed it and I keep getting warnings, but then it seems like it's working. I've uninstalled and reinstalled it at least three times. I submitted a support ticket and I'm hoping the issues can get figured out.

This morning, however, I was so excited about the new software that I did something stupid. I spent a couple hours putting in a fairly complicated quilt design and it looked like it was working okay. I was wrong.

I am hoping to make another of Judy Martin's log cabin quilts. This one is called Finger Lakes. (I finished her Snake River design in January.)

This quilt design is from Judy Martin's Log Cabin Quilt Book.

Overall I was pretty happy with the design but there are some mistakes I was hoping to correct. But sadly when I logged in a couple hours later to play with it some more, there were no quilts in the saved file.

I suppose I'm lucky I managed to export the image before I logged out. So disappointing.

Tuesday ToDo #3

I guess I didn't do a great job getting my list done. We are replacing the handrailing on our backyard stairs so I ended up spending a bunch of time on that project and the sewing projects moved to the back burner this week.

I managed to assemble the blocks and add the first border before I got distracted.

1. Finish assembling the blocks for this quilt. ✓
2. Assemble the blocks to make the quilt. ✓
3. Crazy Quilt Class Task #11
4. Add the outer border. (Inner border is finished..)
5. Make a green Xmas pillowcase to coordinate with our Xmas quilt.

Since we're still working on the handrail, I'll go ahead and rollover these tasks to next week.

Linking up with Tuesday ToDo.

March One Monthly Goal

More than a year ago, Jeff asked me to make him this Georgian-style overcoat. I'm not sure why, but this project really intimidates me. It's been such a long time since I made any kind of period clothing (but I used to make medieval clothing all the time, without patterns). I just need to make myself do it, thus I am choosing it as my March One Monthly Goal. Hopefully, I will do it.

Check out everyone else's plans at Elm Street Quilts' One Monthly Goal and good luck to all participating.