Perfecting the Pillsbury Dough Boy Look - part 2

 Longtime readers know that I’ve made quilted jackets only to later cut them up and make them into zippered pouches and totes.  When will I learn my lesson?  Apparently not anytime soon… 

I made this tote years ago from a Jinny Beyer kit.  But I made it before I learned about bag interfacings and underlayers.  The bag is gorgeous but would just collapse on itself.  For over 10 years I’ve had the fabrics and paper pattern (this is paper-pieced). So I decided to make a bag that would actually stand on its own.   But as I made the new front and back for this new bag, I decided it was too pretty for another bag.  Instead, I deconstructed  the bag above and retrofitted it with Soft and Stable, thus creating the bag I wanted.  

But now what do do with the bits I just created?  10 years later these Jinny Beyer fabrics are still among my favorites.  I think there’s a depth of color in her RJR fabrics. 

I ordered a jacket pattern - Tamarack Jacket by Grainline Studio - and a bolt of Thermore, a thin batting.  And then I got busy.  

It’s almost completed.

I lined it with one of my favorite Art Gallery fabrics, Hello Bear.  And I’m still figuring out the closure.  So far toggles seems to be the answer.  To be determined…

I still have some leftover colored bits.  And a lot of odds and ends of a plan white/cream.  Thinking… but it’s what’s up next! 

47 Purses in the Mail - and My Reward

Combined with a few purses done in August, I sent 47 purses to Sew Powerful this week.  It is a great feeling of accomplishment and with such a great payoff.  There was a team from Sew Powerful in Zambia last week, and they posted pictures of young ladies receiving their purses.  Go to SewPowerful.org for these pictures. Along with those smiles were good reports from the various components of Sew Powerful - sewing, farming, soap making, etc.  This community-driven initiative supported by the Sew Powerful army makes me know that what I do, along with hundreds of other purse makers, is important.

Devoting an entire month to just purses means putting aside projects that I want to do.  And Ive been wanting to make my way through not only the fabrics I have but also the projects set aside that I've been meaning to get to.  The fabrics in the bag below were set aside for a different bag.  But suddenly I saw them on the FIKA Tote by Noodlehead.  This pattern was new to me, and it has so many different pieces.  My husband does word puzzles.  I do fabric puzzles, and this was like a monster 3-d puzzle.  But I loved how it turned out and of course want to make another. 

This bag is essentially 19" wide by 15" tall and 5' wide.  One side of the bag has two slip pockets.  The smaller pocket in darker grey (with my phone peeping out) is the last of a fabric that I have loved.  Holly and/or Sarah turned me onto it.  I tried to find more, and all I could locate was this lighter grey matching fabric.  Against the grey/brown grunge, I think both are striking. 

The reverse side of the bag has one big zippered pocket. The foundation of both sides as well as the gusset is Soft and Stable, which means this bag can stand on its own.  The handles are lightly padded with fusible fleece.

The bag has a recessed zipper and enough interior pockets to confuse the best of us.  What I think I like most about this bag and pattern is the final step.  Instead of leaving a seam in the lining open and birthing the whole bag through the lining, the interior and exterior are simply sewn together as they are meant to be and then bound.  I think the result is excellent and very polished.

Before I started on the Fika Tote, I worked on this years-old Jinny Beyer tote bag. The small panel above on the left is paper-pieced, not a way that I prefer to work.  But look at the precision!  There's another identical panel under it.  All the colorful leftovers from the paper piecing were kind of big, so I sewed them together.  There are two big sets of panels.  And wait!  There's more.  Look at the skinny colorful strips on the right.  All these bits - big and small - need to be featured.  I don't know how or what, but I'm thinking...

Next?  Hmmm.....

A Finished UFO: A Deconstruction

In trying to make room in my cabinets for piles on the floor, I found this sort of completed quilt. It's from my Jinny Beyer/batik period, probably 2012-ish. Jinny Beyer is a genius with texture, color, and light; I have learned much from her. But then I get cheap about buying kits for patterns. So this quilt is her pattern but from my stash. And I love it. But as I was quilting it, frustration set in. Let me sing this quilt's praises but also point out its issues and what I intend to do.    

I practiced my stippling technique, working with thread color that blended right in.

But since I quit stippling, this quilt still needed quilting.  So I got out my No 5 Milliner's needles and my No 8 Perle cotton

The stippling and machine quilting look great from the front.

But look at the back.  I don't mind the stippling but the tension for my straight-line quilting was obviously off.

So the stippling and hand stitched will live side by side.

Should I take out these icky stitches or just call it finished?  All I know is that its out of the cabinet and looking for an owner.

Getting busy...er

This is the body of a Spectrum quilt and is 63" by 85".  Unlike the illustration and suggestions for this quilt which uses a dark background, a Kona snow is used for the horizontal sashing and will be the background, too.  I am counting on my longarmers Frank and Terri Karls to do something terrific with all the negative outer space.  I now need to do some heavy-duty calculations to turn this into a generous king-size quilt.  So I am stopping for the day.  This kind of sewing is exacting and exhausting.  And this quilt body represents 3 days of work.  I did take a few hours out of this sewing to make a couple of Mors bags, including one made from red, white, grey, and black scraps. ***as I write this, John is answering the door for Halloween and making the kids say "Trick or Treat."  As well they should!***

Two of these have boxed bottoms.

The reverse of the above bag

International Left-Handers Day

August 13 was International Left-Handers Day.  Yes, I know it's August 18 today.  I'm only five days late acknowledging this date.  To right-handers this day may not seem significant.  But being left-handed has been a life-long adjustment to right-handers and their world.  I have to teach cutting and quilting techniques with someone across from me, not next to me, and use mirror-imaging.  Rather than continue to whine, I am celebrating with an entry in the  First Annual International LEFT-HANDED Quilters Anonymous Online Quilt Show with my best quilt.  This is Jinny Beyer's Around the World design and her fabrics.  The center and corners involved paper-piecing, a technique that baffles some left-handers.  What I love about this quilt is its luminescence.  It hangs in my studio.

I do have to enter a second piece in the category of Best Quilt. Out of Africa is an original design and it represents one of my first attempts to break out of the traditional quilting mold.  The center is woven, there's some interesting surface quilting, and the borders are read ethnic.  The piece hangs at the Salt Creek Wine Bar in Brookfield, Illinois, where John and I had our 60th-70th birthday party almost two years ago.




For more of this left-handed quilt festival, check it out here.

Deadlines

Some of my deadline are client-driven. But many of them are self-imposed. This Jinny Beyer table runner was something I wanted to have finished by Wednesday, but life intervened when my mom was hospitalized for two days. So now, thanks to the onset of a cold and skipping a workout, this table runner is now on our dining room table and I can move on to the red scrap project I started at the Chicago Modern Quilt Guild retreat. And the new purse kit that just came. And the Drunkard's Path I started at the retreat. And the pile of batiks that are just begging to be used. And - well, you get the idea. And if it's March, that means June graduations are not far behind. There are 3 t-shirt/jersey quilts in the works which have real deadlines.

The final deadline for Christopher - his quilt from Bradley's shirts - has been met, and he's coming over tomorrow to pick it up. I'll be sad to say goodbye to Chris - he's been great to work for. He's a great guy who has been instrumental in helping himself and his family grieve Bradley's death.

Mini Palette

Is this fabulous?  Or is this fabulous?  I think it's fabulous.  Look at the luminosity in this piece!  I intended this to be a vertical wall hanging for my studio - what a great lesson it is in the color wheel and values.  But when I showed this to Janet, my ortho-bionomy massage therapist, she immediately saw it as a horizontal wall hanging for above her Prairie-style headboard.  So a picture of this piece in situ will follow at some point.  It is 22" x 48".

One of the reasons I wanted to make this Jinny Beyer pattern is because my sense of color is emerging.  While I'm getting better, I truly do have to refer to the color wheel hanging in my studio.  The Jinny Beyer Studio sells these little pre-cut fabrics - there are 150 in the above wall hanging - for $12.50 each.  Each swatch is 1.25" by 3.5".  And I have just ordered three more sets of these swatches.  I'm eager to work with these fabrics again and perhaps experiment with different borders and bindings.

Decisions, decisions...

I have already confessed an on-going love affair with all things Jinny Beyer. Her designs and sense of color create beauty. While I have ordered fabric from her studio, I am also trying to develop my own sense of color, especially in a graduated palette. She has made her pattern "Night and Day" available as a free download, for which I am thankful. In the previous blog entry I worked hard at choosing 14 fabrics. After an intense weekend of preparing the 12 strip sheets of 7 fabrics each, today I did the cutting and some preliminary layouts, auditioning different backgrounds.

Can you tell that I'm actually making decisions about background for two quilts? For the Day Quilt the predominant pieces go from light to dark. It's just the opposite for the Night Quilt. Jinny Beyer intended the Day quilt to have a light background, but that's just too light for me. On the other hand, laying on the Night pieces on a green mottled background doesn't do it for me either.

Everything is on my studio floor, and I'll leave all four possibilities there until I make a decision - or get tired or walking around them. Despite my vast stash, I may even have to make a trip to quiltfabric.com in Willowbrook and look for different backgrounds.

I do like the fabric decisions I made to create the strip sheets, and being thoughtful about the background for each quilt is a good thing.

Blogging at this point really is useful - I'm able to study these pictures and decide which background appeals to me the most. Seeing things on the design wall - er, floor - is one thing. But then seeing the photo image sometimes makes things even clearer.

Amazing Technicolor Dream Tote

Jinny Beyer is a quilter who understands color and value and has an exquisite eye for design. Her website is great for eye candy and inspiration. I bought one of her quilt kits, Around the World- it's the quilt on the opening page of this blog. Recently I saw her kit for a tote bag. I love the design and love the colors but the price? Not so much. I downloaded the pattern from her website (she really is very generous with her free patterns) and began to put a palette together. And then? Some obsessive paper-piecing and sewing. The result? You be the judge. I think this is fabulous. Time-consuming but fabulous.

Question: What's the perfect sewing music for this pattern?

Answer: Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat!

Truly, when this bag is carried, it is a walking work of art.

The Long Arm of Quilting

This is the most beautiful quilt ever. Of course I say that about each quilt I make, but this one truly is spectacular. Because I was making it for the bed that I share with John, I wanted to make it wide and long. Most queen quilts at 90" wide, so I wanted this one to be 100" wide. John prefers a long quilt, so the length is 114". That is a lot of fabric. I worked very hard piecing the blocks for this quilt. Since this quilt is so large and so pretty, I deciced to splurge and have a long-arm quilter work on this quilt. Normally I do my own quilting, which is straight-line and utilitarian. My machine-quilting holds the 3 layers together and reinforces the geometric lines of the quilt. Just recently I've been experimenting with free-motion quilting, but that's a skill that has to be practiced quite a bit before tackling a full-size quilt

The quilt we currently have on our bed, a white and blue log cabin, is a quilt that I had machine-quilted with an all-over pattern. That technique would not have been good enough for this Jinny Beyer "Around the World" quilt. In February 2007 I met Downers Grove quilter Judy Teska when she and I shared a 90-minute timeslot at a quilting-themed women's retreat held by the Downders Grove Congregrational Church. What a charming woman and what a talented quilter! Judy gave me the name of a long-arm quilter, Debbie of Tinley Park. Based on Judy's recommendation, I took my fabulous quilt to Debbie in February. On March 30 I returned to pick it up.

Debbie is truly an artist. She initially asked whether I wanted my blocks/design or her quilting to be dominant. When I asked her if her if the two components could highlight one another, she smiled. She suggested a varigated thread, Nordic Fjord. She worked her magic (although I must point out that she has a heavy workload and the wait time was 4 weeks). I hate to use the word spectacular again, but really it is. The photograph doesn't even begin to hint at the textural richness created by the quilting. The quilting lines are so organic and complementary to the design and the colors. It's really a work of beauty.

I can't wait to create a new quilt top that is somehow Deb-worthy.

If you're thinking this quilt looks suspiciously like the one in the Made Possible by a Grant From... in a March post, you are sort of right. These fabrics are the same, and so is the overall design. However, the first quilt posted has a Mariner's Compass center and corners. This quilt has a simpler center and corners.

Made Possible by a Grant From....

My productivity level can be pretty high at times. It's amazing what one can do when devoting 6 to 8 hours a day on one project. But here's the real secret to my productivity: my husband John.

I don't do housework. I don't shop. I don't pay the bills. I don't do the laundry. I do cook but not often. This household pattern began when John retired in 1993 (ok, it probably even started before John retired). And it continues. Any quilt I give is as much from John as it is from me. Any workshop I do is possible because John even helps me load my car. Any commission I complete is because John carries the workload of the house.

Here's a great example: in running off copies of directions for my current workshop Blocks from the Underground Railroad at the Lawndale Christian Church, I not only ran through all of our white paper but even used all of our pastel paper as well. John needed to make copies for something he's doing for the Brookfield Jazz Society. When he saw there was no paper, he cheerfully announced he needed to stop at Office Max for paper on the way home from visiting his father in the hospital and doing the weekly shopping.

I love that John loves the studio as much as I do. I catch him going upstairs just to check things out. He painted the ceiling and all the trim, he configured and installed the closet hardware, he hung the full-length mirror. He finished the trim on the CD shelves and then painted them so that I could finally get all my CD's out of storage. I couldn't figure out what to do with some of the things I wanted to hang like my Imari needlepoint, the Seurat print, and a Baltimore Album quilt print from my sister. He not only figured out where to hang them, he then did it! Even the fabulous color of the walls (Koala Bear from Home Depot) was his idea - I would have gone much mintier if left to my own devices and that would have been so wrong) is something I must give him credit for.

John's devotion to all things jazz and NFL equals mine to quilting. My goal is to be as supportive of his interests as he is to mine. In May we are celebrating our 25th Wedding Anniversary. I love John. A lot. I'm a lucky girl.