Holiday Card Class

Yesterday, I took a class at the Cotton Patch in Lafayette. It was taught by my friend Tekoa. What fun; and to make it even better Cotton Patch set up a loaner Bernina 335 for my use. I did not have to lug my sewing machine there. I also tried very hard not to bring too much fabric either.

I made two cards during class: a pumpkin and a house. They both came out cute and, with Tekoa's paper piecing technique, there was no need to tear out the foundation. We used a type of non-woven Pellon-type  interfacing, the non-fusible type, and left it in.

The first card I made was a pumpkin.  It was made in two sections, so probably not the easiest choice for my first card, but I succeeded. I even fussy cut a little chicken in the lower corner, since he (she?) was one of my orange print scraps. Yes, I did have all that many different oranges in my stash. Per Tekoa's advice, I made sure there was enough contrast among them to make the effort of the piecing show up.

My next card was all one section, but this time I picked a variety of colors rather than monotonic. I fussy cut the fabric around the door. This scallop scrap was from the "throwaway" border of a Stacy Hsu Coral Queen of the Sea mermaid doll panel I sewed  back in 2017 for my granddaughter(s). I still have well over a yard of it left.

Tekoa hand draws these templates to custom fit the size of the photo cards she likes best. She had a large selection of these sheets free for the class attendees to pick from and take home. She was quite generous with her time in drafting them in advance and printing them out for our choosing. I picked this particular pattern to try next because of the steep angles that challenge my brain more and because it was a portrait format and the pumpkin and house were landscape format. Also, this time at home, I tried to piece onto a more slippery paper rather that the vellum-type feel of the foundation I used in class.

To be sure I did not forget what I learned in class, I made up this flower when I got home. I did goof on one of the sections of white dotted background by attaching it wrong side up; but I got to practice picking it off and trying again, successfully. I did have to pick off one of the darker leaves and do it again also because I trimmed it along the wrong line when I flipped it. I am proud at least that I got the dark leaves to face the way I wanted them to. The flower is my least favorite of the three, but it really made me think and learn — which is the purpose of a class. One additional plus to sewing at home was that I got to use my trusty Pfaff. Muscle memory is a strong thing to buck, especial when established over decades on the same machine.  All during class, I kept reaching for where the pressure foot lift was positioned on my Pfaff; its orientation is different on the loaned Bernina.

This is the sum total of the scraps I brought — a very, very, very small percentage of those I left home. Over to the left side of the shoe box are some leftover bindings from quilts I have made. When the center fold is ironed out, they work as well as jelly rolls for small scraps. I added a few fat quarters in the center mainly for pale or dark background options. The quart-size zip lock bag has some more square-ish and less narrow scraps. "Not bad. I done good." 

I learned something new, improved on my tendency to drag too much to a class, tried out a different brand of sewing machine, enjoyed time with a friend, and have three cards I can send to someone. I was hooked enough that when I got home I ordered more photo cards and more of the vellum-like foundation paper. Also of non-negligible enjoyment was the absolutely delicious home-baked pumpkin bread somebody brought to class to share. There was chocolate, too!  Taking this class was indeed a wise decision.

Jacqueline de Jonge Class

While I was visiting in Oklahoma, my daughter and I took a three-day class from Jacqueline de Jonge on Monday July 21st through Wednesday, July 23rd. It was held at the retreat center of Prairie Quilts in the town of Hennessey, 1 hr 22 minutes and 72.5 miles north of my daughter's home in Oklahoma City.

The Prairie Quilts store is on the main street of Hennessey and behind it is a brick building called The Hive, devoted to holding quilting retreats. The classroom is spacious and a delicious lunch with dessert was served daily. Robin and I stayed overnight three nights at the Sleep Inn & Suites, 0.5 miles north of Prairie Quilts on Main Street.

 

Robin has a second sewing machine so she loaded it in the car for my use. We set up across from each other near a bright sunny window. 

Here are the orange toned colors in my autumn table runner kit. The dark chocolate background, shown in an image from the instructions, is a deep luscious contrast that ties in well with the other lighter toned batiks.

The paper piecing is very labor intensive and time consuming. The smaller interior circle shown had 32 pieces. An outer ring that wraps around it had over 100 pieces. I was too absorbed and busy stitching away to take any in-progress photos of that section. This paper piecing technique contrasts sharply with a method like chain piecing. Even the removal of all the paper takes a good amount of time and effort. I guess, as with any process, once I get better at it, it will go more quickly.

The class did not have a formal agenda; students each had their own project they chose to work on. Jacqueline continuously circled the classroom, stopping at each person and assisting them with where they were at in their specific creation, many quite large and intricate. I chose a moderately sized table runner in an autumn colorway, which finishes at 20" by 60", as a small kit to learn the techniques. Although I have been sewing for over 60 years and quilting for over 50 years, I found myself the slowest student in the class of maybe a dozen or so folks. 

Here is a closeup of a portion of the outer ring. The tiniest orange piece is directly under the one inch mark on the ruler. I looked at that teensy piece and said "Jacqueline. Really?" She replied, "Yes. Really. If you do not do that I will haunt you!"

At the end of the third day both my daughter and I took photos with Jacqueline showing our progress. I am holding the sum total of my efforts — one circle with a tail — and, that center yellow sun still needs to be stitched down via appliqué. I asked Jacqueline how long it would take her to sew this table runner. She estimated about four hours. The saying attributed to Theadore Roosevelt, "Comparison is the thief of joy," can be so true if you let it. I am impressed with her answer, but I am not going to let it discourage me. I will continue to work on this table runner a bit at at time between other projects.

In the following photo, on the left, Robin has two additional stars similar to the one she is holding to show for her accomplishments. By the third star, her points were absolutely perfect!

The final photo is my goal. In the three day class I completed only one full circle. I still have two more full circles to go and four quarter-circles at the corners. Then the set in process for all these components will prove to be challenging I am sure. Perhaps by next autumn I will be finished...?

Halloween Mini-Mystery Quilt

Normally I avoid mystery quilts. I have so many projects I want to do, some large scale, why introduce an unknown distraction? Plus, I like to plan how my quilts are going to look in advance. That being said, I still joined on online group to make a mini-mystery quilt for Halloween because it had several features that appealed and countermanded my pre-conceived objections.

• unique technique
• definite goal / specific theme  – not a total mystery
• guidance on colors in term of light/medium/dark – again, not a total mystery
• small (¾ yard background piece, 6 fat quarters, 1 piece less than fat quarter)
• short duration – clues came out every Tuesday and Friday for 4 weeks

This mystery quilt was sponsored Annette Ornelas of Southwind Designs. Her signature style, as illustrated in her book Peeled-Back Patchwork: Curves without Piecing, has hooked me with it uniqueness so my curiosity was aroused. Annette gave suggestions for color choices for this mini-mystery –  Background, Black, Grey, White/light grey, Dark, Purple, Orange, and Green – alleviating my concern about utter randomness. Most of the required fabric quantities were fat quarters that could easily be gathered from my stash.  My picks are shown in the next photo. I specifically avoided halloween print fabrics and I decided to hold off for a while to pick the setting fabric between the blocks. Maybe that will be a print. Am I cheating to wait, or merely reluctant to give up total control?

There are four mystery blocks delivered at two clues per week in my in box. I can only guess at what they might be.

BAT: Clues #1 (9/21/21) and #2 (9/24/21)

That mottled background makes me think my bat is flying back home in the rosy/gray dawn twilight through a cloud cover. Those peeled back curves really are a nice added detail. They are the technique that coaxed me to join. The unfinished block measures 9½" square. I anxiously waited for the following week's two clues. Would it be a cat, a pumpkin, a witch...?

WITCH HAT: Clues #3 (9/28/21) and #4 (10/1/21)

One of our instructed fabric choices was medium and I picked the textured medium grey. That choice worked out well. The seams are barely visible and it picks up the grey in the mottled background. I initially did the peeled back curves in the same neutral cream thread that I'd used for piecing. I am glad I made the effort to pick them out on the medium grey fabric and dark blue fabric to resew each of them with a matching thread. I definitely like the contoured feeling the curves add and the contrasting thread was distracting.

JACK O' LANTERN: Clues #5 (10/5/21) and #6 (10/8/21)

I knew orange had to come up sooner or later! I usually make my quilts with prints but often thought quilts with solids look crisper. I decided to use textured solids in this mystery as an experiment. My purple and orange fabric choices, have no texture at all, as a non-print extreme. Frankly, the solid orange looks a bit flat to my taste, but I am glad I at least gave it a shot on something small. I do love his curvy, quirky grin, though. This block did not take long so I can always do another with a braver fabric. And I am glad I picked a textured blue for my dark option instead of a black print. I still need to use my purple and my white/light gray. I wonder what the fourth block will be? Hmm..maybe I will sub out the dark blue stem for bright green like in the witch hat...?

CAT: Clues #7 (10/12/21) and #8 (10/15/21)

I knew purple had to come up sooner or later! I used it as the contrast color for a black cat on one ear, the paw and the tail. There is not as much contrast as I would like but that is one of the drawbacks of a mystery selection of colors. My colors all do blend, but as a whole they are rather subtle. 

Here are all four blocks so far. I can spice it all up by picking a bright sashing fabric but then I am concerned that it will detract from the blocks. I know. I am overthinking it. There is a bonus block yet to be released and my guess it that it will use gray... also a subtle hue. Maybe I should start thinking in terms of a misty, foggy, spooky, Halloween night.

GHOST: Clues #9 (10/19/21) and #10 (10/22/21)... a bonus block!

Aha! Finally a use for the gray! It does show up with my selected background even though the contrast is not extreme.

LAYOUT:
I could have made a square wall hanging with four blocks only; but then what would I do with the fifth bonus block? Using five blocks I could add four blocks of a Halloween themed fabric in a checkerboard arrangement for an even larger square wall hanging. That would have meant more area for a backing and more area to FMQ. I wanted to keep this project, small, compact, complete and mainly function for a technique and pattern expansion. I chose to string all five in a row horizontally to be used as a table runner or a banner over a doorway. To spice up the subtleness of the background, I separated the blocks with ½" wide sashing, wide enough to add a splash of color but narrow enough not to steal the attention away from the pieced blocks but rather showcase them. To satisfy my yen for brightness, I added two orange/purple, and purple/orange polka dots borders in 1" and 2" widths respectively.

BACKING:

My selected fabric does not have a Halloween theme but the saturated colors matched the block images so well with the deep blue, purple, orange, and lime green that I used it. It is one yard of a horse fabric by Laurel Birch that I was saving because I love it so much.

QUILTING AND BINDING

After spray basting, I quilted parallel horizontal lines in the blocks in a neutral cream thread, breaking the stitch lines so as not to cross the lime green dividers. I also kept a neutral cream thread for the bobbin thread even though the backing was dark. I did not want to risk some random dots of dark popping up to the front if the my thread tension wavered a bit. Surprisingly, the light cream did make for an interesting pattern on the back; I can see this being used as a table runner on the horse side, also. After considering wishbones or a piano border pattern in the polka dots, I chose to stop at stitch in the ditch only so that the border quilting was not a distraction. 

For the binding I merely trimmed, then wrapped, the backing fabric around to the front, folding it over, and stitching it down so it was only ¼" wide. After all it did have all those colors. Being finished was more important to me at this point than being fancy. Last night, when I finished it, was, after all, the day after Halloween. The completed banner measures 53"x16". It was a very fun, focused, mystery challenge and I succeeded in NOT creating another UFO!

Barn Quilts

At my quilt guild's meeting this past Saturday, February 8th, the speaker was Suzi Parron, and her topic was barn quilts. She was a lively, engaging speaker and I became fascinated with her subject. She told of the history of painting quilt blocks on barns and their associated meaning and symbolism. In her talk she showed photos and informed our guild members that many counties all throughout the country have trails allowing travelers to take driving tours featuring collections of these huge painted images, usually 8' x 8'. Suzi Parron is the author of two books, both of which I bought at the AVQ (Amador Valley Quilters) meeting.

I also signed up for the Sunday workshop where participants would paint a 2' x 2' quilt block of their own. I must confess, I rarely sign up for workshops because I do not want to create another UFO. But this workshop promised we would finish within the class time and have a hang-ready product to bring home. It is painted with exterior paint and suitable for outdoor hanging. In my 2020 quilting resolutions (post for 1/24/2020) I vowed to try new crafts and this fit the bill perfectly. Plus it decorates outdoors so I would not be adding to my indoor clutter, which I am working assiduously to reduce. I also recently tried painting mandala rocks as a new craft (post for 1/26/2020) and found I enjoyed the painting medium.

We were given a selection of block patterns from which to choose. Although it is not typical of a quilt block, I chose the Folded Flag in the upper right corner. It never hurts to show a bit of patriotism on the front of your house. Plus this design freed me from the burden of making snap color decisions during the allotted workshop time.

We were taught how to draft our design on a board Suzi had pre-primed. Then we taped off along the lines outside the areas we were going to paint and and colored one area at a time. For the flag, red was the first color to be applied. Those random snippets of green tape designated those spaces not to be painted with the current color.

We used disposable foam brushes, one per color. The red stripes needed three coats! Since I did them first I felt I was falling behind in the class; but I wasn't – not really. Unlike my other blog posts, I have no other in-process photos. I was too busy concentrating on painting away to take them. The star was made with a template but still needed painstaking taping of both the exterior of the star to paint it white, two coats, and equally painstaking re-taping of the interior of the star to paint the surrounding space navy blue, two coats. 

Here I am proudly holding my finished block.

As folks were cleaning up and getting ready to leave I took a few photos at random of some of my workshop buddies. We were pretty varied in our choices for the block pattern and presented a representative sampling. I thought the dashed lines in the basket part of the first photo was creative and added a nice detail. The second photo shows a cardinal. Suzi said that this was the first class she taught that someone had chosen to do the cardinal. She revealed that she has taught this class 399 times! 

After class when I got home I checked Amazon to see if Suzi's books were there. They were but so was some Barn Quilt fabric from Elizabeth's Studio. I love the artistry and quality print from this mill and find my self buying other fabrics from Elizabeth's studio. It is an English company and the artists it employs are marvelous. Other fabrics from Elizabeth's Studio are also in my post from 3/27/2019. This barn quilt fabric is by artist Billy Jacobs from the fabric line Heading' Home. Of course I bought some, 2 yards. I also bought the coordinating panel which measures approximately 24" x 42" with fifteen 7" square blocks. At the February AVQ meeting I had donated a shopping bag full of panels for our upcoming sale extravaganza. Guess I can't resist re-stocking.

Here are two enlargements of the block pictures. I think they are lovely.

Amazon has its clutches in me. When I go for something I go whole hog. I also bought this 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle of – what else– Barn  Quilts!