The Beast Conquered

This quilt was started in the summer of 2015 as my youngest son's college graduation quilt. It has appeared here on the blog many times, but progress was halted on more than one occasion due to shoulder problems, then surgery, and finally a long, slow recovery.

It feels so good to have finally taken the last stitches on this king-sized quilt, and completed the label. It may have been meant to be a graduation gift years ago, but this is going under the Christmas tree this year! 

Below is the glamor shot--at least as glamorous as a t-shirt quilt can get.

The twin to this quilt can be seen HERE. I made that one 9 years ago for my oldest son's graduation.

I have another near finish that I should be able to share at the end of the month, when I also hope to have a monthly mini ready, but here is a sneak peak.

This was Thursday when I was working very hard to get the quilting finished on my HQ Sweet 16. Friday afternoon I attached the binding and got half of it sewn down by hand on the back. Hope to get the other half finished today. To finish two quilts in one month that are large enough to keep someone warm is a very rare occurrence for me. I want to bask in the feeling for a minute. :)

I had a request from someone who wanted to see my tree that only has handcrafted ornaments this year. I have wanted to do this for several years, but I always hate to leave off the ones we have collected on family vacations, or the ceramic ones I painted, or the Matreshka doll ornaments that echo my doll collection. But since we won't be hosting any family gatherings, I figured no one would care if I left those ornaments off this year. You should be able to enlarge the photos to see the ornaments more clearly.

These photos get the tree from most angles. You can enlarge them to see the ornaments. The crocheted chain, large felt ornaments, and most of the counted cross-stitch were all made around 40 years ago, early in our marriage when buying ornaments wasn't an option. Many of them haven't been on the tree in decades. There are ornaments made by my mother and mother-in-law, my daughters, granddaughter, myself, neighbors, and some of you.

You may have noticed a little guy sitting on the window ledge. That is our "Gnome in a Dome." Many of you have an elf on a shelf, and some have a Nisse or two (or more). When hubby and I recently visited a Christmas display at a local garden center we couldn't help but notice that gnomes seemed to be the predominant theme. We decided we could use a gnome for our dome. He is a cute little guy.

We will be having Mom join us for a few days next week. It will be a privilege to have her with us for Christmas this year. There will be precious memories made. She wasn't supposed to live to see last Christmas, so it is a miracle she has made it this long. Though frail and struggling with short-term memory issues, she is still spunky and her dry wit keeps us laughing.

If you are celebrating Christmas, or Chanukah, or any other special traditions in your family, I hope you will cherish those with whom you are able to gather, virtually or physically. Make memories that will be remembered fondly. Choose to set aside differences, forgive past hurts, reach out to those who may be a bit harder to love. See if you can help someone feel valued. Choose to be part of the change the world can use right now.

Until next time,

Janet O.

 

Earlier this week I was walking to my car in a parking lot and was captivated by the view of this sun dog. It is brighter than any I have seen before (does this prove that I am a weather geek?). ;)

Monthly Mini and the Beast!

This is my Fairy Garden Party, based on Bonnie Hunter's Garden Party pattern. You can go here to read how this quilt shrunk when I was making it at a workshop with Bonnie, if you are not already familiar with the story. And here you can see how the top came together back in 2017.

I am linking with Wendy for our monthly minis. She keeps us going with her encouragement and example. Follow the link and check out the wonderful autumn mini she made, and enjoy the links to the other mini makers there.

The quilting of this has had me stumped. It is small--as you can see here, with my hand in the photo. Sometimes I feel like things this small can look clumsy if you put too much quilting in them, especially if you don't use a really fine thread. Hand quilting was not an option, because the back side is wall-to-wall seam allowances.

I finally decided to stitch down either side of the green chains, and around the flower centers, with a little more quilting in the borders. (You can see that I forgot to get rid of the marked lines in the border before taking these photos.) 

When I started trying to stitch straight lines from point to point down the sides of the green chains, I had to keep weaving from point to point--there were no straight lines involved. Oh, well, I am so done with the quilting on this. I had the outer border almost completely quilted when I discovered the tension on the back was off (even though I had tested it before I started), and I had to unpick it all. But it is finished now and I am glad to cross this off the UFO list.

Also in the UFO department, I have made major progress on The Beast, my youngest son's king-sized college graduation quilt. It is all quilted!!

Maybe I will actually have it trimmed and bound in time for Christmas, since I didn't make it for his birthday (2 days ago).

The random number generator chose comment number 26, so my lovely friend Kris (who blogs at Lavender Quilts) will be getting a package of my herbal soap when it finishes curing in a couple of weeks.

Hope you are finding beauty in the world around you.

Until next time, 

Janet O.

The Beast Revisited

It has been a long time since I felt my shoulder could handle pushing this heavy, king-size T-shirt quilt around under Gidget's needle. It feels good to be seeing real progress now, and without shoulder pain.

This is my youngest son's college graduation quilt. He graduated 5 years ago. Do you think it is about time I completed it? When I started the quilting on this a few years ago my shoulder problems eventually brought it to a halt. After finally having surgery 2 years ago I thought I would get back to this quickly. But healing was slow and then other projects had gotten in the way. Now this is my machine quilting priority, and over the past couple of weeks I have quilted 16 blocks. I have four to go, and then I get to start on the sashing.

I am doing some pretty dense quilting, and I am trying to make each block different from any others.

Some turn out well--others, not so well. The block to the left is one of my favorites. The one below is in the "not so much" category.

I have never loved quilting pebbles, hence I don't do it much, so I can't do it well. But by the time I decided I wasn't thrilled with this block, I had gone too far to unpick (I just wasn't willing to do it at that point). Of course, this is the brightest, most fluorescent of all the blocks, which makes it  obvious. So be it.

These photos show a few of the other designs I used in the quilting.

         





















This T-shirt quilt has a twin brother. My oldest son graduated from the local university in 2011, and only 4 months later his T-shirt graduation quilt was quilted and bound. Of course, I didn't do the quilting myself. Here is the twin--and they were only born 4 years apart. How is that for a trick?

Between the two of them, these are the quilts that compelled me to learn machine quilting. When I picked up this quilt from my machine quilter, she told me about all of the problems she'd  had with breaking thread and wacky tension as she quilted it. Then she said that she wouldn't be sad if she never had to do another t-shirt quilt. My youngest son was already in college by then and already had the t-shirts stacking up (my sons were joiners). At that moment I figured I just needed to learn to do it myself, and that very month I was attending my first machine quilting classes (where I was, in all honesty, the class dunce).

One other near completion, my "Mom's Flower Garden" quilt finally got the border attached. Here it is on the guest room bed, making sure it is the size I want before I send it off to be quilted. Yes, there are too many quilts in the queue, so I am quilting this one by check.

Every couple of years I hire a friend that does excellent work and let her finish one of for me, and this is one of those times. I am excited to have her work her magic and get this 22 year old UFO into the "finished" pile!

And lest you think you are on the wrong blog, I do have a couple of small quilts that are in the works. One of them should end up being my mini of the month and will make an appearance here soon.

Our little valley has had an explosion of Covid cases in the past couple of weeks. We went from under 100 to over 700--heavily related to employees at a meat packing plant. Hope you are all able to stay safe, wash your hands, social distance, and wear a mask when you can't.

Until next time,

Janet O.

A whole bunch of randomness!

I did it! I updated my Tuffets Tute to show how I have had the greatest success making a smooth closure on the Tuffets. You can find it in the tabs under my header photo, or just click here.
In order to get photos of the process I made another boxy pincushion--the little purple and cheddar one. This tiny thing finishes at 2" square.

If you look closely you can see a pin head on the bottom edge of the dark pincushion. I hadn't stitched it closed yet. : )

And, as you can see, I couldn't resist taking the little Dresden to the dark side. I love the way a black background makes colors pop!

If you recall the block Lisa Bongean designed for The Splendid Sampler, you may recognize the center of this. Lisa called her block "Dedication Rose", and it was designed for needle turned applique, but I did it in wool.

And then I gave it a few borders to make a little medallion quilt out of it.

 My red/white mini Burgoyne Surrounded was intended to be entered in our State Quilt Guild Jubilee show of red/white quilts, but life happened--and my entry did not. It would have been the first time I entered a show. I finally got another block made. I am making this square, so I only have 5 more blocks to go.
I think it is fun to see how much the 97 pieces in each block shrink as you assemble them.

 


Since everything is already cut for the whole quilt, and some of the little units are assembled, you may wonder why I haven't whipped this up faster. I'll tell you--because it takes so much concentration!! More often than not I am sewing at night and I am too tired to think this hard. But I will say that the red/white version is easier than the black/tan/cheddar version that I did a couple of years ago.

The beast has been set aside for a while now, but I have completed all of the quilting in black thread and white thread. I'll probably do the gold, light blue, and bright green blocks next, but I am struggling to match those greens with a thread. I'll do the grey and navy blue blocks last. There are a lot of those.



If you have followed me for any length of time you know how much I love red/white/blue projects. Take a look at these two free patterns by Stacy West (Buttermilk Basin) available from Henry Glass.
On the left is an 11" x 17" wool applique pattern and on the right is a little pieced quilt about 22" x 28". Oh, I want to make them both. You can find the pattern links here.




I debated whether or not to share this. You have seen a lot of my Mom's quilts lately. But here we go. On Mother's Day the women's auxiliary organization of my Mom's congregation held a little reception with a fruit/veggie buffet after their meeting. 

They featured as many of my Mom's quilts as she could gather. I had to go get photos, but I will just share one I took when I slipped in early, before the women arrived. There are 15 of Mom's quilts displayed here, all hand quilted in her tiny stitches. The quilt in the corner won sweepstakes at our county and state fairs many years ago. It went to the Houston show, too. It is a simple Irish Chain--the thing that made it win is Mom's quilting.

One more random thing, after sifting through the comments on my giveaway and weeding out the No-reply comments that didn't include an email address, the random number generator chose a winner for my drawing. Gayle (middlesister blog) is our winner. Gayle already had the book, and she graciously offered that it be gifted to another winner. So back to the random generator and this time it selected Kristie (cowgirlquilter blog). Congrats to you both. Your winnings will be on their way soon!

Until then,
Janet O.

p.s. Thanks to everyone that left a comment on the giveaway. I enjoyed hearing from so many that usually don't say much. I had 21 "no-reply" comments this time--more than ever. I appreciate the six that left contact info in their comment. If you are "no-reply" and you don't leave your email address in your comment, you are not entered. Sorry, it is just too complicated to deal with winners that can't be contacted. This is supposed to be fun. : )



 

Forging Ahead

I did get a "little" sidetracked as I was forging (sounds like I have clandestine operations going on in my basement, or something). Realizing I only had 3 mini quilts to display with a St. Patrick's Day color scheme, I had to do something to put in my standing clip.
So this happened. Maybe I'll call it "Patrick's Pinwheels".

Shouldn't take long to quilt. It will finish about 7" x 10". 
The pinwheels were made from a couple of strips of the fabric Randy had wrapped around a pincushion she sent me last year. You may  recall the little Valentine quilt I whipped up from the two strips on the right in this photo.
You can see the strips I used in the quilt above--and this took every last bit of them. I just added the black from Moda's "Essential Dots" line. 
The strip to the far left was partially used in my Quilters Madder, so now all of the strips have been put into little quilts.

Okay, here is where I start forging ahead. I decided that rather than spending months agonizing over finding just the right setting, and/or sashing for these 64-patch blocks made from Mom's watercolor quilt leftovers, I needed to just use Mom's scraps to finish this off. This quilt is all about sentimental value, not design perfection. 

I tried greens for the sashing, but the green in the blocks just does not stand out enough to make the green sashing feel unifying. There were a few strips of light purple leftovers from Mom's watercolor quilt, but not enough to sash the blocks. So I dug deeper and came across some strips of purple in a bag of scraps from the last quilt Mom made. I had to give them a try. They were a variety of shades, and when combined with the first purple strips I found, there were barely enough. I decided to put the lightest shades around the darkest blocks, and vice versa.

The setting triangles stumped me. Mom's scraps were not big enough, and there was nothing in my stash that clicked. I'm really trying to meld warm yellows and cool purples and pinks in the quilt, and that isn't easy. That is where my buddy Kris, from Lavender Quilts blog, saved the day. She had this warm yellow batik with a soft purple print. I took a sample home and it did the job for me, pulling the yellows from the inner blocks, through all of the purples, to the edge of the quilt. So this is my final answer. Probably no one would put this all together by choice, but I look at this as a "make do" quilt--making do with Mom's leftovers, and I am okay with the purchase of the setting triangle fabric.

The really big forge ahead was that I finally pin basted "the beast"!

And last night I actually began the quilting!
 
If you have ever made a t-shirt quilt before, you know they are heavy. Quilting a king sized one on a sit down machine really gives the shoulders a workout. After only 1 1/2 blocks quilted, my left shoulder is talking to me. I was supposed to have it scoped the end of December, but it was scheduled for the very day my Dad passed, so I canceled. My shoulder was actually feeling pretty good by that time, too, after having been a problem for over a year. So I didn't reschedule. But after shoveling a few driveways following one of our many snowstorms, it is troubling me again. 
I'll have to take baby steps quilting this, or I might not be in shape to sew when Bonnie Hunter comes to Utah this July to teach classes. Two of the classes are only 30 minutes from home, so I will be there to meet the first quilt blogger I started following, over 6 years ago.

Until next time, 
Janet O.

Two January Goals

I'm not real big on goal setting for my quilting. It is truly my therapy and deadlines just create more of the stress I am trying to alleviate.

But with recent events in life I have really been on hold in the quilting department and I needed a push. So I gave myself a couple of targets to aim for in January.  I wanted to stitch-in-the-ditch on my "Quilters Madder", but when I tried to get started my machine wasn't functioning. It was WAY overdue for a spa treatment, so I sent it away for a few days. I actually picked it up a week ago, but didn't have a chance to sit down and work with it until today. That baby just purred. Hasn't sounded like that in....well, I am too embarrassed to admit.
But this is what got quilted.


 I decided to do the whole thing with SITD and diagonal lines.

 

I made my units for this quilt half the size in Lori's directions, and I added one more row, and a border of HSTs all around. It finishes at 14 1/2" x 18".

My other target was to get "the beast" off of my design wall. I thought about just pulling it off the wall and calling it good, but that would be cheating. So while my Pfaff was away at the spa, I sat down to Nellie (my featherweight), and that little workhorse assembled the whole beast!

This is a king size quilt, so it was no small task. (This is my second quilt like this. The first one is here.)
I know some of you thought I was crazy for fussy-cutting each of the 71 sashing strips from the plaid fabric, but when I laid it out on the living room floor and stood in the loft to take this photo, I was glad I went to the extra effort. I think the blocks are so busy to start with that keeping the plaid uniform in the sashing prevents it from being a hot mess!


Here is Nellie (who is pretty proud of herself) posing with the magnetic pinbowl I won in Lisa Bongean's 12 Needful Things giveaway at Christmas time. Thanks, Lisa. :)

And more happy mail came in the form of this bundle from Sandi. What a fun early Valentine! Thank you, Sandi! If you know me you know I love useful things made from rulers and yardsticks!

This year I will be putting more effort into getting some larger UFO quilts completed, but that doesn't mean I won't slip in a mini whenever I can. In fact, I think I have earned a treat. I am going to whip up Temecula's little Box of Chocolates Valentine mini. How about you?

One last thing--Rebecca in AK won the snowman pattern from my last post. Please send me your snail mail address and I will send it your way.

Until next time,
Janet O.

From my sewing room window last evening.

What a hodge-podge!

What started out as a simple leader/ender project quickly became my main focus.

Wanted to get these little log cabin blocks made and sewn together. I've only ever made small log cabin blocks using foundation paper piecing, and that's not how I did these.
So I was a bit nervous when I began squaring up the blocks, afraid I would have very wonky ones that wouldn't look good once they were trimmed. I was pleasantly surprised. To the right is all that came off as I trimmed thirty  3 1/2" finished log cabin blocks. Just a fuzz pile! Whew! That means all of my piecing of minis has paid off in more accurate sewing.

I am certainly my own worst enemy when it comes to finishing up the pile of little flimsies. I keep adding to it! The leftover 1" log cabin strips were sliced into 1" squares and now these little blocks are taking shape.




I did complete the smallest two little quilts from my last basting binge. The one on the left was a block gifted to me by Vic. Quilting on it was pretty basic--SITD and a scallop in the border.

The batik quiltlet was one of my test pieces when I reviewed Lisa Bongean's Itty Bitty Eighth rulers. I used her Pinwheel Garden pattern.

I ditch-stitched this as well, and then added some swags in the white and the border.

All of the HSTs in this were from a swap I did quite a while back with Sandi. I have made a baby quilt, ornaments, a pincushion and now this little quilt, all from those HSTs. There are still a handful left. I think I definitely got the better end of the swap!







Have finally chosen a spot for my Lori Smith Fit to Frame piece, which is still nameless. It now radiates its charm in the dining room--at least for a while, until I change my mind and move it somewhere else.

And through it all, I continue to plod along on the mammoth T-shirt quilt, which has now spilled onto the floor. My design wall accommodates a queen size quilt, but this beast exceeds the limits.

All of the blocks have been bordered to bring them to a uniform size and the fussy-cutting of the plaid sashing has begun. The shirts are not in their final layout yet. My OCD-ness will not allow the colors to have such random placement. I've just been too lazy to bring in the step stool I need in order to reach the top blocks and rearrange everything.

It is this time of year again on the farm. Twins and triplets will soon be frisking about the pasture and I will have full view from my sewing room window. I can't wait!


Until next time,
Janet O.

Sundry Things

Just dabbling in this and that when I have a minute. Seems I can't focus lately.
This is something I have been wanting to make for a long time. Prepped the wool one evening and have been stitching in spare moments. Just have to finish going around the trees and then stitch it to the backing.

Designed by Lisa Bongean, this little mat is cut from a 12" square of wool. This blue wool came from a pair of slacks at a local thrift store. A lucky find.
The pattern is named Snowy Gathering, and is found in the Winter 2013 issue of Primitive Quilts and Projects.
One of these days I might do a "snowman only" post. Can't believe how many of them I have stitched.

Before the holidays I had cut a bunch of purple and neutral scraps into HSTs for a long overdue project. Life got in the way and I didn't get anything finished as planned. So I stitched them together as leader/enders over the past few weeks. I toyed with different settings, but finally settled on these stars, that will finish at 3". The size of star was determined by the size of triangles I could cut from the scraps on hand.


The blocks for my youngest son's college T-shirt quilt all need coping strips in order to get them to a uniform size. Not my favorite task, so I am forcing myself to border a few blocks when I have a rare day at home. Ten down, twenty more to go!

It seems that when there is no holiday imminent, I don't have a non-seasonal runner for my hutch--at least not one I like.

So I grabbed a couple of Kansas Troubles mini charm packs, and some KT scraps, pulled out my trusty 2 1/2" tumbler template from MSQC, and went to town cutting tumblers. Kind of went overboard and cut many more than I will need. 

Fun mail from New England, lately. I won a giveaway on Vic's blog and received these wonderful FQs, and a couple of her delightful, handmade lavender sachets. And Grace sent this fun quilt block calendar that is now hanging in my sewing room. I have had the delightful opportunity to meet both of these bloggers while in NH and I consider them good friends. Thanks, ladies!


I'll finish with this shot from my sewing room window. Love it when the sunset makes it look as if there is fire on the mountains.

Until next time, when maybe I will have finished something--anything!!
Janet O.