Quilting Activities During My Oklahoma Visit

I just returned home a few hours ago from visiting my daughter and her family in Oklahoma City. Even though a bit tired from travel I am sitting down to write this blog to keep myself distracted from her weather there. She is currently under a tornado watch, waiting up to see if they need to duck into the tornado shelter they have in their garage. See the green dot below the "h" of Oklahoma? That is about where her house is. And this map is the rain, and thunderstorm activity there about 8:30 pm Oklahoma time. In fact, I just heard on the TV that the people in the OKC airport were just directed to evacuate into the tunnels to the parking structure there. To think we just took off from there this morning with sunny skies!

We had beautiful weather the week we were there. My daughter and I visited two quilt shops and here are my fabric purchases. We spent were fabric shopping for about four hours, divided between two shops - The Savage Quilter and Oklahoma Quiltworks - and that is a great test of endurance and fabric love since my daughter is 6½ months pregnant!

Here is what I bought - short and simple - picture style. This fabric has six colors of striping across its width. I have shown it flipped up to show what shows on the inside and the outside when wrapped on the bolt. The fold is toward the left, the selvages toward the right. I bought it in three colorways to stash for borders and framing of blocks.

I bought these two fabrics because I thought they were so unusual. The left one seems like a cross between the Cat and the Hat and birch trees but in modern colors. The one on the left has swooping lines in black and white. As an experiment, I thought it might make an interesting background, combined with strong primary solids for the blocks. The background might look cool cut up into random pieces.

Here is a pattern, a hera tool I have been meaning to try and a cute fat quarter.

Here are three half-hard cuts of flannel destined for burp cloths... but not necessarily with each other!

I heard on the TV that Oklahoma City has just issued an unprecedented flash flood emergency. I am finishing this post with a quick link up to this week's Freshly Pieced and heading to the TV to watch. I will read what others have been up to later this week! Quilting has only so much power to distract me. Maybe my daughter will read this post on her cell phone from beside her tornado shelter and be a little calmed herself.

UPDATE:
All is well. My daughter and her family never did need to take cover in their tornado shelter. The tornado watch was lifted and they went to bed. Sleep did not come easily until after the tornado warning sirens ceased going off periodically.  Life is back to normal for them. I can breathe easier, also.

A Checkered Past and Present

I'd just returned Wednesday from traveling to Southern California for my granddaughter's 1st and my son's 32nd birthday celebration. I blogged about craftwork I'd seen during my time away touring the battle ship USS Iowa. Please check it out in my previous post.

Earlier this month I'd joined a second quilt guild, the Diablo Valley Quilters, and attended their April meeting. Friday, I joined in to help at one of their monthly outreach workshops. They are a very friendly and welcoming, not to mention an extremely productive and talented, group of women. I was surprised to find we were able to get 42 sandwiches layered, pinned, folded, and ready to be distributed among the members for quilting, all the while chatting away cheerfully. These quilts will go locally to children with health issues and/or struggling mothers. 

It takes me a while after I return from traveling to get back in the sewing groove so my personal sewing this week was quite scattered and unfocused. I made a few more checkerboards for the quilt I am revealing just bit by bit. Here are the checkerboard blocks in four colorways. Hmm, is this how they will be assembled? Nope. The assembly plan is yet to be revealed. They tickle my fancy though, nondescript mini-prints that they are.

There are four of each checkerboard color so that gives a bit of clue. But they are rectangles... not squares!

Here are leftovers from the cut strips prior to slicing into squares. I may checkerboard them for adding interest on the back or save them something coordinating. They also qualify to be just scraps - but useful ones.

I cut and joined the binding for the two strip quilts I'd assembled a couple weeks ago (April 15th post). I cut it my normal 2¼" wide. I am going to attach the binding to the quilt edge French binding style, doubled over as I usually do, but this time I will not press or crease along the soft fold before attaching.

I read somewhere that if the binding is not pre-creased along its length, the hand sewing portion goes more easily and smoothly. The binding fabric is supposedly more accommodating if there is a soft curve rather than a crease. That way the outer binding fabric can be a bit wider than the inner binding fabric since it needs to wrap a further distance around the edge. There is freedom for this adjustment if the crease point has not been pre-determined. I am a tiny bit nervous that the two edges will shift along the stitching line relative to each other while being attached but I guess they won't if I'm using my Pfaff with the built-in dual feed feature. Besides, even when I have applied my bindings hard pre-creased, the two edges could have shifted relatively to each other anyway; but in my experience, that has not been the case. Skipping ironing in a center crease may also save me a few steamed fingertips. These strip quilts are not yet sandwiched and quilted so the binding step is still a bit in the future. Once I try this new technique I will report back if I find this approach to be better in practice.

I dutifully picked out my mess-up on the Simple Gifts FMQ (April 22 post) and continue to echo quilt just one or two gifts each day that I sew. Twenty gifts from the green and red columns are complete and one column of five aqua blocks is complete. I only have five gifts to echo around twice more to finish. Let's see... 25/30... I am at 83%! That is a grade of B for completeness. My quality is getting better but needs work. My outer two echoes are straighter than the inner stitch in the ditch and the first echo. As an example, that first echo below the left bow loop in the aqua fabric is really wobbly and drifted wide. I think that area may be a do-over, but not until all are finished at least once! Then I may re-evaluate that decision depending on how difficult it is to find those stray lines. The green thread does kind of blend into the aqua fabric...

This past Sunday I went with my husband and younger son to an Antique Fair in Petaluma CA. Look at the great desk I bought, made from an awesome Vintage Singer treadle base. It has been extracted from the back seat of the car where I rode 90 minutes with it plastered to my left hip. So far it has made it only as far as the inside of the garage. But I have plans for it! More in a future post.

For now, I am hooking up to today's Freshly Pieced post for WIP Wednesday.