A Finished Quilt!!!

I finished a quilt!  I actually finished it about a month ago, but you may have noticed a lack of blogging in that time. 

I've been on a little bit of a vacation - my husband and I have been traveling a little for his work, a month in Salt Lake and now a month in Seattle.  

So I've been taking the time to do all sorts of sewing.  I quilted this Crazy quilt following my brother's suggestion, where instead of diagonally sewing through the points of the squares, I sew through the centers, so it crosses between two strips diagonally.  The picture above is much clearer than my explanation.

I followed the diamond pattern I had created with the stripes.  I love it!  I haven't had the courage to throw it in the wash, though.  The top is made up of so many different fabrics, I'm a little scared.  So I plan on using it until it's filthy and then giving it a go.  What's the worst that could happen, really? I'd actually rather just not think about it! 

The back is soooo cool! So simple, but the design shows through so awesomely!  It was my first time using a walking foot, as well.  After an hour of jerky, uneven sewing I realized I didn't have it on right, so once I fixed that, it worked amazingly.  

I don't know what I'm doing wrong with my corners, but they are not a 90 degree angles.  I'll have to look over those tutorials I read again before my next quilt. (Though, I'm actually excited, my next quilt is round! No Corners! So I'll have time to research my problem).

The little crease in them isn't beautiful, but honestly, I love my quilt to death anyway, imperfections and all, so I don't care!  But I'll want to make it better for future quilts that are gifts for others.  

See you soon! 

(with pictures of another completed quilt!)

Owning Purple, and a (WiP) Quilt Almost Sandwich!

I love this picture.  Here we have the backing fabric for my WiP quilt (bottom right), my favorite pair of scrubs, gifted to me by my husband (top right), my favorite pair of tights, gifted from my mother (bottom left) and my phone case, picked out by me (top left).  I kind of like this color, no?

I never liked purple when I was younger.  My favorite colors were green and blue.  With four kids, my mother needed a way of organizing our schedules (we all had sports and music and church activities, so it got crazy sometimes).  She put a huge calendar on the wall every month, and whenever we had an event, we had to put it on in our color.  Here's where purple entered my life.  The boys naturally got first choice with green and blue, my sister had orange, my mom was yellow, dad black? and family stuff in brown (or something like that).  I was not a pink fan (I added my 3rd pink item to my wardrobe on Friday, a pale pink knitted shirt.  The other two are a pair of neon pink corduroy shorts and a neon pink and tan striped jersey skirt).  Point being, pink is not my color.  Red was too close to pink.  So my mother chose purple for me.  I believe I felt a bit of loathing at the beginning.  Seemed so unfair that the boys got green and blue because they were 'boy' colors.  But I love my brothers, so I stuck with purple.  

It started changing me.  I began to feel a sense of ownership over anything purple.  Toothbrushes, bags (woah, just realized, my favorite backpack, that I picked out for myself when I was in 2nd grade and kept using through high school - with safety pins holding the zipper closed - was purple.  Maybe I didn't 'loathe' it.  Odd).  Anything that was purple seemed to say it was mine.  When I got a kindle, my sister gave me an awesome case for it - purple.  I found out purple looks good on me (though my scrubs and tights are the only purple in my wardrobe right now).  Few games have purple tokens, but if they do, they're mine.  Purple became a really important color to me.  I still don't love most shades of it.  Most are too blue or pink.  I love the shade pictured above with a nice dose of red, but I love the idea that it's not a 'favorite' color, but it's a personal color, very close to me, one which is hard for me to not live with.  When shopping for a random household item, if I'm not drawn to any other color, I'll get purple.  It's my safety net color.  I like my purple.  Purple means me.

So to me, this back says "Tess pieced this!"  I love the colors together.  The blue really pops.  I'm glad I didn't make it any wider, it would've been too much.  

I was going to attempt to baste it by pinning/weighting corners/taping it to my carpeted floors because I had no other options, until my husband happened to mention it to his mother who was coming up for the weekend - and she had an old quilting frame!

So with all my pieces assembled, that's what tomorrow will be - sandwiching all the layers on an old wood frame, tightening and push pinning everything into place, safety pinning it like a mad woman with as many pins as I have (I'm a first time quilter, can you tell?).  I'm so excited and can't wait put it all together!

See you later!

(with a basted quilt!!!!?????)

Straight A's and a (WiP) flimsy

I can sometimes be very impatient, so when my last final ended a week ago, I was checking for my grades every day, sometimes a few times a day (maybe they'll post them after lunch?)  For the last few days I have almost not wanted to check for fear of a disappointing empty space where the grade would be.  So very half-heartedly I decided to check this morning, trying to expect nothing.  But they were there!  And I got straight A's!  That hasn't happened in a while.  I was really nervous about my Probability class, and I must have really aced the final to get an A in it.  I'm so excited!  Now I can fully appreciate that classes are over and move on with my summer!

Or really get on with this quilt.  It's officially a flimsy now!  (Look at me knowing quilting terminology!)  The top got sewed together last week.  (It's on a queen size bed, but it's meant either for a twin or for a 'cozy up on a couch' size.) My husband would go off to work, my brother (who was visiting for the week before he started the summer semester) would sleep in until 1 or 2 (yes, pm) so I had all morning and early afternoon to sew and cook.  We fattened my brother up 6 pounds the week he was here.  He needed some good, home cooked food.

He was very helpful and went with me to JoAnn and picked out these lovely shades of Kona.  The backing will be mostly berry, with a horizontal stripe of turquoise in the center to make it big enough, and the binding will be turquoise.  He picked a beautiful blue thread to quilt in and suggested a really cool way of quilting, which I'll attempt to explain (or just show) in another post.

This is an artificial view of what it looked like when I was sewing 6 blocks simultaneously.  It was usually bunched up behind the machine as the next strips were laid out in the space to the left.  But I was sewing on the last strip, so I made a pretty circle.  I don't get much natural light in this room - except early in the morning, which is not when I sew.  And there always seems to be something obstructing the light when I have it.  Working on that. 

It felt awesome to stack all the blocks up.  I hadn't ironed them yet, so it made the pile taller.  Which made me feel better, of course.  I didn't get a picture of the ironing process, which was: after I laid the squares out in an order I liked, I sat on the floor with a portable ironing board next to me and scooched (which is apparently not a word) down the rows, sitting on un-ironed rows.  It was fun.  Strangely fun.  

See you soon!

(With a pieced back and basted quilt...?)

Cheese and a (WiP) Quilt

I was looking in our cheese drawer the other day for some tastiness to add to a savory crepe sandwich when lo, I beheld that we had quite a selection.  I was curious and soon discovered that we have 12, yes 12 varieties of cheeses in our fridge (14 if you include cottage and cream).  They are: spicy cheddar, pepper jack, asiago, smoked gouda, spiced gouda, gorgonzola(crumbled), another nameless blue cheese(solid), fontina, gruyere(we actually have 2 packages of this - we love it), parmesan&romano(combined so counted as one), feta and laughing cow.

I love cheese!

Anyways.  I decided to start a quilt.  We'll see if I end up liking it.  I got inspired by, and am using Quiltville's post as a guide.  I love it because it's an all scrappy quilt, no unifying sashing or anything.  But my possible problem is that my scraps aren't from other cute quilts like good scraps are.  Mine are random fabric I've acquired from old clothing, thrift stores, clothing/whatever swaps and things found on the streets.  I don't know what material is used for most of the fabric.

Here it is: so far a bunch of strips cut and placed in 6 strip blocks.  I placed them in a rail fence pattern to separate them visually but still pack them into my enclosed sewing area.  

I needed 5 more squares, and I'm cutting entirely new fabric for the most part so they'll get rearranged.  The hard part is not knowing how it'll look in the end.  I know it'll change once it's all cut and resewn and there are few layout options as well, but the suspense is intense!  

Below is the pile of strips for the above squares (6 strips/block x 19 blocks = 114 strips measuring almost 3 inches tall).  I've gone through some MacGyver, the Voice, The Fashion Star, Project Runway and Hell's Kitchen episodes to cut them.

I'm a little nervous about the end result, but strangely getting more excited as I write this.  I got a new iron today, too, since my old one just decided it didn't like being hot anymore.  So now I can unwrinkle the rest of the fabric I need to cut and maybe tomorrow (finger's crossed) I can start sewing blocks together.

One thing I am excited about (which I know may put me in a minority) is that once they're all sewn and recut into tubes (check Quiltville's page to understand the process), I'll have work to take with me for on the go, waiting in a line, got to class a few minutes early, waiting for the red light at the bottom of my street that sometimes takes 2 minutes to recognize I want to get across.  I love having something to do when I'm not in the house.  Yay!!

So I'm working on this one.

Excitedly.

See you soon!

(with a quilt top sewn?)