Distraction and the Mundane

DISTRACTION:
I try to post weekly to DL2Q but sometimes life intervenes. Last week, I was unexpectedly away from my San Francisco Bay Area home for five days when my son in southern California needed an emergency appendectomy. His wife and daughter were visiting her family in Ohio. I was closer. My last minute airfares would be cheaper. There'd be no complications of child care for a 3½ year old and a 1½ year old. And although I would not wish the pain and unexpected surgery on him, I enjoyed the rare one-on-one time with my son. I was quite willing to be a mom again. I have no regrets whatsoever about the time lost; I rather viewed it as time gained. But, my quilting progress did take a hit. To keep my presence in the blogging world, though, I will report on the trivial tasks I did complete.

THE MUNDANE:
Not much creativity or artistic expression was happening here this week upon my return. I am entering three quilts in my guild's quilt show September 16th-17th. I judiciously chose to enter only quilts I had completed. I am so glad now I did not pressure myself to enter a fourth that still needed to be backed, quilted, and bound.  Yet "completed" is a relative term. All three needed quilt sleeves, two of the three needed labels, one needed to be bound, one needed to be washed and fluffed. I am reminded that all these mundane tasks usually take much more time than I estimate.

First up is my youngest son's Monkey Quilt, posted May 26, 2014, needed a sleeve. I like my sleeves to somewhat match or at least coordinate with the backing. This quilt was finished over three years ago but of course I still had the scraps. In the sewing equivalent of dumpster diving I was on a mission to find those scraps and see if I had enough that could be used for the sleeve. I had to go through only three plastic bins. Fortunately, I had been in the phase where I put all the scraps from a project in a zip-loc bag. I'd read a tip somewhere that doing so was useful because the colors already went together since they'd been used together in a project. Most scrap organization recommendations advise sorting by color, which I do not do.

I found strips long enough but not wide enough for a sleeve. I chose the lollipop fabric found in some of the rectangles of the border and the red dots used in the binding, each of a different width. Of course I wanted the sleeve to look like it belonged on the back of the quilt. Lengthwise piecing to the rescue. Then I had to decide how much of each fabric I wanted to show. I know this is just a sleeve folks but hey it counts. Decisions like these to take time and futzing. I came up with placing the red dotted fabric away from the matching binding. I think I would have preferred to show a narrower width of red dots, but I was limited by the my available width of the lollipop fabric. 

I found a couple arcs of the orange peel quilting lines that I had missed originally. Apparently the quilt had been without those for months, even with multiple uses. Once noticed, though, I needed to change to orange thread on my Pfaff and add them. However, a label was already on this Monkey Quilt.

  

Next up for sleeving was my Storybook Charm quilt, displayed in my July 5, 2017 post. I noted and inwardly groaned that I had not made my grosgrain labels for the corners. I dutifully made those labels. The inward groan was because I had to un-sew portions of the binding to slip the corners of the labels underneath and then re-sew. It was after doing this that I re-read my blog post. It stated that my intention had been to skip the labels and just write name and date information on the binding. Oh, well. Now it has grosgrain labels.

I did not have quite enough of the backing fabric for a full width sleeve. I pieced it in the center and sewed down the seam allowances so they would not catch when threading through the support pole for hanging. 

I used only a ¼" central seam and let the sleeve fall a ¼" short from reaching the binding on each end. I thought that was preferable to another seam for just another ½" of width.

Finally I had to label and bind my Out of the Blue quilt before adding a sleeve. Here are the corner labels, neatly tucked under the sporty striped binding.

I had a long strip of the backing leftover to use for the sleeve. It ran lengthwise though, so I could not line up the grid of flowers. In 20/20 hindsight, it is a square quilt, so had I rotated the quilt 90°, making one side the top, I could have aligned them. I was not about to remove labels and do that. Even I could acknowledge it was only a sleeve.

Here are my three quilt entries for the show: Monkey Quilt, Storybook Charm, and Out of the Blue. They are quite an eclectic mix. I am sure there will be an even greater variety at Let's Bee Social #193 so I will link up there.

Vintage Ornaments Finish

Last week was slow and steady but this week I crossed the finish line with my Vintage Ornaments quilt, even down to the label.

The quilting in the sashing came out with the effect I wanted. It looks like the path taken by little starbursts wandering among the ornament blocks. And, in the blocks where it shows up, I am pleased that I made the effort to quilt in two sizes of meandering.

I washed the quilt and it crinkled up with an old-time appearance. It fits in well with that time capsule feel of the ornaments and the backing fabric.

The weather (not enough sun and too much wind) did not make for a good photo opportunity but maybe I will get a better picture when I give it to the recipients in Southern California.

I also made a second Counting Monkey book, this one for my six-month old granddaughter. It has a built-in surprise for her, different from her cousin's book. I found an online source for the crinkly paper sometimes sewn into infant toys and her book will make noise when she turns the pages, or rather when she stuffs them in her mouth! I can't wait to read it to her and see that impish grin of hers in person.

Counting Monkey Cloth Book

I made this book last night for my granddaughter in Oklahoma. At nearly two years old, she is a getting a bit beyond the age for cloth books but she is learning to count so it is a conundrum if it is still appropriate for her. The animals in it are cute and she can still have fun with a "Find Waldo" type activity locating and counting them. It was either sew it up now or forever let it sit in my stash and, since I am about to visit soon, I can give it to her in person. 

The book is titled Monkey Mischief by Henry Glass Fabrics. Sixteen different dye colors went into this little book. Wow! No wonder it is so cheerful!

Here are the inner pages and back cover.

I also have a second one of these for my now nearly five month old granddaughter in Southern California - a bit more age appropriate I think. It is in the works and will be sent off to her shortly. It won't be a surprise :-o since I blogged about it, but it can be something to look forward to :•) . Besides she is still too young to read this post!

A Surprise Package

Last Friday I got a surprise package in the mail. It wasn't something I'd ordered from Amazon. It wasn't something I'd ordered from the Fat Quarter Shop. It wasn't my even my birthday! I opened it up and in it were two fat quarter bundles of funky, adorable, animal prints from a fabric shop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

The style of the one on the left looked vaguely familiar and I read the business card tag. The fabric was titled Ed Emberly's Happy Drawing Too Fat Pac. Aha...that's why it was familiar! When my kids were little they loved Ed Emberly's drawing books. They had this one and used to sit at the kitchen table drawing animals from thumbprints. Here it is with its 1994 cover.

And here is another book, specifically of animals. I can hardly wait to unfurl the fat quarters and see if I can pick out matching animals. Right now the bundle looks too pretty for me to disassembly just yet.

The animals on the other bundle were also too cute for words. Upon reading the selvage and poking around a bit online I learned that the other bundle was by Amy Schimler-Stafford, an illustrator of children's books who is unfamiliar to me. I certainly plan to investigate her further. I love fabric by artists and book illustrators since they seem to have a distinct air about them. I learned this about myself with my cloth books by Joy Allen (June 11, 2014 and December 27, 2012 posts) and my search for a seaside print by Faye Whittaker. 

But the mystery of who this package came from was still unsolved. Then I found a single type-written page, scrunched in the bottom of the package. It began with the phrase, "Hello Lady Di". I smiled and knew immediately who had sent it. My husband's close friend from his college days always called me that. Richard and his wife Linda had sent it. Linda is a quilter and knitter but Richard proudly pointed out that he had "picked out the fabrics" himself. Richard has been an educator for special needs kids for years. As a teacher did he know these authors prior to their venturing into fabric design or was it merely coincidence? Or was it just the happy exuberance of the animals on the fabric that steered his selections?  Either way his choices were serendipitous for me. Here I am with Richard and Linda when we visiting them in New Hampshire in August 2013.

Richard's note went on to say how happy they were for us with the birth of our second granddaughter. We now have a 3-month-old granddaughter and a 21-month-old granddaughter. He explained that the package contained the two different sets of fabric so I could "make something different for each of my girlies". What a super neat gift and surprise it was to send fabric to a quilty grandmother for her grandbabies! Having someone else pick out fabric for me has the added bonus that I am not constrained by my unacknowledged biases nor sketchy-edged comfort zones. This is stuff is wild and I am going to thoroughly enjoy working with it. 

The package also contained some yardage of monkey fabric to make a pillowcase for my special needs son who loves monkeys. You can see the monkey quilt I made for him in my post for May 26, 2014. It was thoughtful of them to remember Alex as well.

I never knew about the Portsmouth Fabric Company with its over 7000 bolts of fabric. I moved from New England to California in 1976 and it was established in 1979. I guess I know what I need to check out next time I visit Richard and Linda. Many, many thanks to them for a thoughtful, unexpected gift I will thoroughly enjoy and put to good use.

Monkey Quilt Completed

I finished the last bit of the Monkey Quilt for my son Alex this past week, just in time for his birthday today. This was one of those rare times when all four corners of the binding mitered neatly into place at precise 45 degree angles. This was in spite of the "good fortune" to have the binding seams fall at three of the four corners. Hmm...  perhaps this is why they creased so nicely? Nah! Here is the finished quilt.

Did you notice an inconsistency? My daughter called it a design choice. It was unintentional but in retrospect I think it worked out for the best. I will explain at the end of this post. Here is the obligatory photo of the back. The print is of monkeys and lollipops hanging from tree branches.

For the label I did more than just my usual initial and year. Since my son is an adult in an assisted living home, I wanted the quilt to be labeled with Alex's name. So I added a brief inscription machine embroidered on grosgrain ribbon and attached it in the lower corner of the back. This photo also gives a closer look at the backing and border fabrics and the typical mitered corner. You can see that those are monkeys with orange pants and yellow shirts hanging from tree limbs scattered about on the back. On the front border, the green and yellow squares are printed with bunches of bananas, the yellow rectangles have fish, and the aqua rectangles have lollipops. 

Alex has limited speech but he can say "Mun-kee" and he loves bananas and lollipops. We will also give him this fruit medley patterned rug to go beside his bed. It has the banana theme and the color palette goes with the quilt.

The first thing Alex noticed on the quilt was not the monkey, but the owl. "Whooo," he said and pointed.

Alex enjoyed unwrapping his rug.

And here is Alex trying his quilt on for size.

Now, about that unintentional design decision...? The bottom border is put on in the same orientation as the top border. For a directional patterns I sometimes do this intentionally but this was not one of those times. I did not notice the "non-reversed" border at all until I'd put in place the final stitch of the binding and stood back to admire the fruits of my labors. Aargh! It was too late to change this feature after its having been quilted in place and bound, even for someone stubborn enough to spend 16+ hours picking out brown squiggly quilting in the four corner blocks.  At least I will not anger the quilt gods with perfection. However, there is a serendipitous consequence arising from placing the yellow squares of the piano border up against the inner border instead of down next to the outer border at the quilt's bottom – the non-squareness of the quilt panel is not as noticeable. The yellow banding that tapers to compensate for non-squareness of the center panel scene would have stood out more had it been placed next to the contrasting green squares. So the bottom border orientation just helped me to make lemonade out of lemons. How coincidental that there are lemons on the rug, too! Hakuna matata! No worries. I think from the last picture that Alex likes his quilt and that is what counts.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ALEX! 

WIP: Monkey Quilt Home Stretch

This was the home stretch in more ways that one. I did a lot of standing up and stretching during and after 16 hours of picking out the brown quilting in the dotted centers of the corner blocks. (To see why, go to my previous WIP post dated May 14, 2014.) I have quilted the brown, orange, and white dots now, though, and it was worth the effort. Here is the quilt folded to show the four re-quilted corners. There  are no more scraggly dark brown squiggles amongst the dots.

I stitched an eighth inch away from the seam line on the inner edge of the brown frames. I decided I liked the way it looked, so I decided to repeat it on two sides of the outer edges of the brown frame. This meant taking out the orange scallops first. But I was now an expert at picking so it took me only about an hour to do two edges on four corner blocks. I left in the scallops that are on the outer edges of the quilt so that they would remain continuous adjacent to the binding.

In other parts of the quilt I just straight stitched an eighth inch away from the seam line for the framing bands of orange and yellow. This photo also shows my scallops in the border and my outlining of the leaves.

All that is left for the Monkey Quilt is to attach the binding and do the hand stitching on it. It will be ready for my son's birthday on Monday (fingers crossed). I will post a finished photo in the next WIP, perhaps with my son in it, if time and lighting permit.

For those of you who follow my blog posts, I have often expressed a fair amount of fear with my FMQ. This quilt was a breakthrough of sorts for me. It had a variety of FMQ techniques – outlining in the center panel, free hand arcs in the border, free hand circles for the dots in the corner blocks, and straight stitching with feed dogs engaged. I changed thread colors many times – orange, yellow, brown, turquoise, beige and did not resort to the more forgiving clear thread for the top. The border scallops are even in an orange color, different from the top fabric (such bravery). And, yes, I did pick out a lot. Thank goodness it was a contrasting thread so I could see what I was picking. (I suppose you could argue that had it not been contrasting thread, it may not have been so compelling for me to remove it, but let's not go there.)

In retrospect the picking out was a positive experience in many ways. I developed several methods to remove the stitching even when my stitches were exceedingly tiny. I did not rip the quilt fabric itself, not even once. I would get up first thing in the morning and have quiet time with my own thoughts while I was picking. But most important of all, it gave me the sense that FMQ is not final, it could be undone even if tedious, and I would not ruin an entire quilt. I also learned the hard way that continuing to FMQ a section in a way I think I do not like is not a good way to confirm that, yes, indeed, I do not like it!

I did deviate from my work on the Monkey Quilt this week in order to take up the shoulder seams on a dress I wanted to wear to a dance last Friday night. It was quite ironic that I had to do more picking to open up each shoulder seam before I could take it up. To add insult to injury, I sewed the first shoulder seam with the strap twisted and had to take it apart to do again. Overall I picked out three shoulder seams for one dress. Fortunately I had the dubious good fortune to have gotten more skilled at picking out from this week's marathon de-quilting. My other improvement is that the hemming of the outer chiffon-like fabric and the inner slippery lining of the dress went fairly quickly and easily. It looks like making those eight napkins (post for April 8, 2014) paid off in my getting better at using my hemmer foot than I was for the last dress I hemmed (post for May 20, 2013).

Other than the dress alterations I have been working the monkey quilt and ignored all other projects. Here are my statistics, which seem pretty static. But my early morning musings have told me that there has been growth in my quilting skills on a longer time scale and I can look back on older posts and confirm it is true.

Completed projects:

1. Took up shoulders and hemmed dress

Ongoing projects:

1. Monkey on a bike quilt - quilting completed, just needs binding and signing
2. Chicken quilt - spray basted, awaiting embellishment (April 24, 2014 post)
3. Classic Cars strip quilt (August 3, 2013 post) - need to back, quilt, and bind
4. Grinch quilt (May 22, 2013 post) - all borders added, need to back, quilt, and bind
5. Overlapping square wall hanging - awaiting FMQ
6. Mask quilt (October 19, 2011 post) - hidden away awaiting inspiration for arranging hexagons

New projects:

1. Alter and hem dress

It's time to visit Freshly Pieced's WIP Wednesday and check out what has been keeping other folks busy this week and to see all the great photos from Spring Quilt Market. 

WIP: Monkey Quilt FMQ Status

Last week I did the piano key borders on the Monkey quilt with an orange peel pattern and liked the way it came out. It can be seen in my previous WIP post dated May 7th, 2014. This week I started out by FMQ'ing the corner blocks.

I did not want to quilt the corners too heavily, following the rule of thumb that quilting density should be kept pretty equal throughout a quilt top. I circled each brown dot in brown thread. When I was done the dots did not really stand out. Perhaps if I had done the white and orange dots as well, the puffs would have shown up more. I was too lazy to change to white thread for the white dots and orange thread for the orange dots. Plus, it was tedious lifting up the pressure foot and moving from dot to dot even doing just the brown ones. So I decided to use brown thread and repeat the honeycomb type ring pattern about all the dots, using continuous quilting.

I did not like the results of the honeycomb approach. Here are the before and after pictures. The brown lines printed on the fabric (left) look like whimsical scribbling but brown stitching lines (right) look sloppy on the quilted block. And the dark brown on the turquoise was overpowering and showed every glitch. Of course I did not firm up this conclusion until I had completed the four corner blocks. I moved on to the center panel portion of the quilt, planning to re-visit the four corners at a later time.

The water section, with the fish, and the grass section, with the frog and alligator, came out much better. In the water section, I did not want to change color for each fish so I used the background blue color and went around each of them, even each little bubble, using a non-continuous quilting pattern. It was not as onerous as I thought it would be. On the grass section I was emboldened to do each tuft of grass individually. Cutting all the connecting threads was a bit pesky but well worth the results.

I like that the critters, water ripples, and tufts of grass give added dimension. Here is how flat the green section looked before the quilting.

And here is how the water and grass sections looked after the quilting. I followed the same "rule" when I quilted in green around the bicycle section in the grass.

Next up was the upper beige background section where the monkeys and giraffe and trees are. Taking my cue from the blue water and green grass sections, I did this in beige thread like the background. I outlined the leaves, bicycle, and animals. Yay! They came out great. So technically my FMQ on this quilt was finished. Here is the upper left corner of the panel.

But now I became convinced those scribbly corner blocks looked awful by comparison – way too densely quilted and unforgiving of crooked quilting. Hmmm. Perhaps I should go back and re-do those corner blocks with blue thread (camouflages goofs better) and circle just the colored dots (less quilting density).

PROS:

1. Those scattered round puffs of color would look really cute raised up.
2. I will not be reminded of my poor scribbly decision every time I see the quilt.

CONS:

1. The blocks are in the corners, not center, of the quilt and not that noticeable. 
2. I would risk tearing a hole in the quilt.
3. It would be very time consuming and tedious picking.  

I decided to try picking out the brown thread and see how it would go. I started on some of the obvious brown wobbly stitch lines, but like peeling sunburn or wallpaper, once started I was suckered in. It is an awful lot of picking out. As a novice FMQer, my stitches were tiny due to my poor coordination between the speed control with my foot and the fabric movement with my hands. Not only did I sew slowly with tiny stitches but I did each row of circles by doing the top half on the way across and completing the bottom half on the way back. This meant each circle had a region of overlapping stitches in two places, making those places in particular very, very, difficult to pick out. The tools of my torture were some curved thread snips, a sharp pointed seam ripper, and a pair of tweezers. Even so I left a few brown lines at the edges and a couple double stitched circle overlaps so as not to risk ripping a hole in the quilt itself.

Four hours later I had one corner block picked out and ready to re-quilt with puffy individual dots only. Here it is re-quilted. I tried to photograph it at an angle so you can see the puffs at the colored dots. They will puff more when the quilt is washed. They really do look happier than those angry brown scribbles did.

But now I am committed to many more hours of anti-progress, picking out the stitches in the other three corners. I got up this morning and in 1.5 hours I had picked out a little over half of another corner block.  The stitches were not quite so tiny on this one so score a few points for inconsistent stitch size in the correct direction. My revised estimate is three hours per block. The lower "with" and upper "without" scribbles version, seen side by side really do convince me that my decision to pick out was the right one, as tedious as it is.

My FMQ on the quilt was "done" until I got picky – picky in more ways than one. This week I started no new projects and worked exclusively on this monkey quilt. My project count and progress stats are unchanged from my previous WIP post.

For now I am going to take a break and re-engage my feed dogs to do some straight stitching in the frame of the center panel and to attach my binding.  Once I get to hand-sewing my binding I can always alternate between putting stitches in as I attach the binding and taking stitches out as I remove the quilting lines in the corner blocks. I will channel my inner self (and fingers) like in that 1984 movie The Karate Kid with a minor difference. Instead of "Wax on, wax off," I will be reciting "Stitch in, stitch out."

During my picking break I will also visit Freshly Pieced's WIP Wednesday for this week. Perhaps I should nickname my blog Freshly Picked.