And any other craftiness I can come up with!
I haven’t been doing a lot of sewing the in last month, haven’t been feeling all that well. The baby hasn’t been treating momma very well 🙂 I know it’s now April, but I finally got the blocks completed now that I’m starting to feel better during the day. Once I get some ink for my printer I can work on the April blocks – hopefully I’ll be feeling well enough to get them done in the correct month!
I finished another one of my table runners! It’s the patriotic one that was charm squares my husband got me on one of his trips. I miss his trips, I don’t get fabric gifts anymore 🙂 But at least now I have 2 items finished from my PhD list.
Well, I’ve been an idiot for the last year or so when it comes to my quilting frame. I had bought a Mini-Pinni frame and bought the stitch regulator that works for my sewing machine. I was having lots of problems getting it to work properly and I just gave up working on it since I was so frustrated. Now that I have so many tops finished I’d like to get quilted, I decided to try again. Again, it wasn’t working right and I got frustrated. But I started looking at the manual for the stitch regulator. Everything looked setup right, but when I asked the hubby if he remembered changing the jumpers for my machine, he couldn’t remember. Sure enough that was the problem! Once he fixed the jumpers it started working right! The tension is looking good and I’ve been practicing on some muslin. Yesterday we went and bought a laser pen at Staples so I can try doing pantographs from the back of the machine. If my test works out well, I’ll start quilting one of my tops that needs done!
Since my machine is upstairs on the frame, I can’t work on the Quilt Show BOM yet. I printed out the instructions today, I have to pull the fabrics that I’m going to use with it.
It’s been snowing a lot lately, so much that we now have 20 inches on our deck! Some of that is from drifting, but not all of it! Please Spring, come soon!!!!!!
I finally finished something! I joined the guild’s PhD challenge and decided to work on something from the list last week. I finished the tumbler table runner that has been a finished top for well over a year. I’m not very good with free motion quilting so I decided to practice and meandered the table runner. It’s not too bad, but I had some tension issues at the beginning. It doesn’t look too bad actually 🙂
Well it only took me a couple of hours in front of the tv last night to cut out all the tumbler pieces. It was pretty easy! I just lined up the 5″ mark with the edge of the strip and it cut it to 2.5″ across the bottom of the piece. When it’s all put together it will be a finished 2″ tumbler. I found that EQ doesn’t calculate the way I thought it did. When I originally designed it, I was basing it on the yardage. Well, that wasn’t quite correct. I got a lot more blocks out of the strips that I thought I would since every time I cut it was the side of the next block. I had almost NO waste! I just redesigned it to match the number of blocks I have and the center layout is now 39″ x 52″. Now that I’ve finished lunch, I can start working on putting the blocks together!!!!!
I finally got all 4 blocks finished for the Quilt Show BOM. I really like the Irish Chain blocks, they look really cool with the scrappy colors. I’m not happy with the way the stars went together, but I think that’s because I screwed up one of them and had to rip out 4 seams to fix the issue! This is farther than I got with last years BOM, I’m hoping I’ll have the fortitude to finish this year, I think I will though! Now to wait until next month for the next set of blocks!
Ok, I know I don’t need to be starting ANOTHER project, but I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with this jelly roll I bought a while ago. I’ve looked at many, many books and just haven’t found a pattern that I liked. I was thinking about it while I was out today, because I was listening to a podcast and she was talking about heart themed projects for Valentine’s Day. I’ve FINALLY decided on the project! I’m going to cut these strips into tumbler shapes and put it all together randomly. The blocks will use the full 2.5″ height so I should be able to use just about everything in the jelly roll. I have a template, but it’s for 2″ tumblers which was just too small. Below is the EQ drawing – no, it’s not colored correctly!
So anyway, now that I decided what I was going to do, I needed to figure out how big this was going to end up being and figure out the layout – how many rows and how many in each row? Off to EQ to try and figure it out! But I needed to know how much yardage there was in the jelly roll to make sure I was making it a realistic size. I could not find the yardage ANYWHERE on the web! So I finally decided to calculate it out myself! I know there is 36″ in a yard and these are 2.5″ strips. You can fit 14.4 strips in a yard of fabric. Most jelly rolls are 40 strips of fabric, so I can figure that there’s about 2.75 yards in my jelly roll. This made it easy for me to determine the right layout in EQ since it tells me how many yards of the fabric I need! The center of the quilt is 42 x 32 and I need 528 tumblers to make this quilt. Now to cut them all out!!!
The good news is that I also have a tub FULL of 2.5″ strips cut from old projects that I can make a totally scrappy one too! But first to use the jelly roll!!!!
I know, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted. But I’ve been busy! I did manage to get some applique Dear Jane blocks finished though. And today I completed a couple more blocks. I have more in the works, hopefully I’ll get them done soon, as I’m almost at 50 blocks completed!
I don’t have any pictures yet, but I recently aquired a treadle sewing machine! I won’t go into the relationships as to who I got it from, but I have found out that it was manufactured somewhere between 1913 and 1920. It needs a lot of cleaning up and I need to replace a few parts before it will work. I’ll have to see if I can take some pictures in the next week or so to post.
I am on a roll this week! I’ve finished 5 new DJ blocks this week! I am really very happy with the way the applique blocks are starting to turn out, I think I’ve finally gotten the hang of it! Hope to get even more blocks done soon!
The biggest news this week is that I’ve been teaching! The Amherst Library has a mobile computer lab from the state for a couple of weeks and when the request went out to the guild, I said I’d be interested in teaching it. Today is my last class, 2 beginner and 2 advanced. Everyone is loving the class, and even ladies that have used it before said they’ve learned something new! I even think there are a few that will be upgrading to EQ6 soon! There is also a possibility that I may be teaching the same classes at another library in our area when they get the mobile lab, but I don’t know any details yet!
I joined a group of ladies over at Star Crazy Log to make the 2010 Quilt Show BOM. If you’d like to join us, email nedras@mstar.net with the following information:
•Do you currently belong to The Quilt Show? (necessary to download the patterns)
•Where do you live?
•Do you have a personal blog? (not necessary). Send your link address.
We now have 17 participating – come and join us!
*sigh* I wasn’t planning on adding any more block of the months (BOMs) to my open projects. At least not right away. But of course, one blog links me to another blog and they are doing The Quilt Show 2010 BOM – Star Crazy. So I started thinking about what fabric I had in my stash that I could use. So, I decided to use my Moda Marbles collection that I started last year. I might not have enough to do the entire quilt, in fact I might need to get background fabric, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to use as much stash as possible! I have the first months blocks completed – I just don’t understand how you can be so careful cutting, sewing, pressing, etc and still not have the blocks come out the right size! My blocks almost NEVER come out the right size, but I always fix it later!
I also completed another block in my Dear Jane quilt. I just keep chugging along! I’m not sure I like how this one turned out, I think I picked the wrong fabric for it. I might redo it later, we’ll see.
