Final Fabric

 

I very much enjoyed my slightly postponed birthday lunch with friends Jaye and Tim last week. I still can't believe that I'm sixty now, but that's a whole 'nother blog post. After lunch we had a look around at the nearby Granary quilt store. I was very restrained and didn't buy the FIGO space dyes fat quarter pack that I was drooling over. Instead I opted for just one single FQ of this really interesting purple (that they had in lots of other colors) and 1/2 yard of the teal tracks fabric. 

I also got another bottle of unscented Best Press as mine is finally running out. I think I go through a bottle a year. Tim told me about using a vodka and water mixture to press out wrinkles in fabric and I am very intrigued to try this. Sometimes even Best Press won't work on some wrinkles. He also mentioned to only use very cheap vodka like the stuff for sale in plastic bottles, don't waste the good stuff, got it.

I also picked up a little mini windsock pattern. It has the metal rings included, it looked like a fun thing to make. They had some of them made up as examples in the shop and I thought they were pretty cute.

Will this be the final fabric purchase of the year? Most likely yes. Unless you count the pre-order I made of the beautiful Kona color of the year, Nocturne.

New Hobby

 

Reporting in today on my DH's new hobby. After many years of threatening to get one, he finally got a personal recommendation for a 3-D printer from a friend at work. He's very very excited about it which is all kinds of cute. It's a little bit smelly but not too terrible even with the heated up plastic.

The first thing he made was a scraper for the platten (the base that gets printed upon).  The second thing was this very cute bookmark.

Here it is at work holding my place in my latest read, the novel that the great TV series was based on, The Old Man.

It does a pretty great job, very flexible but strong.

His second effort was a holiday decoration of baby Yoda (aka Grogru) holding an ornament (an orb?). This is a character that I really really love, so it was nice that he picked that out for his second make. The stuff in the forefront is little bits of excess plastic that are left on the piece when it's done. Looks a bit like dry rice noodles. Unfortunately Lee-loo tried to eat it, so we'll have to be careful to keep it cleaned up.

There's all kinds of things he can make now, it's kind of endless. Let me know if you think of anything quilt-related he can make that would be useful. Hooray for new hobbies!

Old Town Geese

 

I've been plugging away at the Clue #1 on the Old Town Mystery quilt, a whole lot of sets of matching flying geese in neutral and aqua/turquoise. Quite a few left to make though. It'll be a whole flock of geese once I'm finally done with making them.

I'm finding I like working with the aqua and turquoise colors. The white on white printed neutrals not so much, but they look pretty nice.

I feel like I'm getting enough variation in these, but who knows as it is a mystery quilt design...

Free And Giving

 

There were a lot of choices on the free table at Sew Day. Friend Cindy had bought an estate sale lot of fabrics, and she brought in a literal table full for us to choose from. I was happy to snag a bunch of neutrals to use for the Old Town mystery quilt. The reds and oranges are also for that quilt. That black and white print was just cool.

There was also a bag of big cones of purple rayon embroidery threads. I snagged these two beauties. Not sure who contributed those, but I'll be happy to get my purple on with these. It's so nice to be in a quilt guild with such giving people.

And then over at the Community Giving table, I turned in the quilt that I had just finished the binding on and picked up another quilt to do the binding for. There were also some quilt block packets that will be good to use as leaders and enders

Old Town at Sew Day

More sewing of blocks for the Old Town mystery quilt happened at the BAMQ Sew Day. I got some more sets of flying geese done.

I also cut out and sewed together red and neutral strips for the second clue which is making a whole bunch of four-patches. I made quite a few of them, but then I got too busy socializing and made a mistake of sewing together two pairs of the two-strip pairs the long way instead of cutting segments and sewing. Whoops!

After some un-sewing and then cutting and sewing together into four patches a whole lot of them got finished at home. I really have to remember to bring more boring projects to Sew Day. Not that this is super intricate piecing of course, but I was trying to read the pattern directions on my phone and then I'd get interrupted between steps and...mistakes were made. No worries, it was well worth the time getting to talk to people.

And when I actually followed the great directions in the pattern, there's this very cool thing that happens at the four-patch intersection. I look forward to seeing how that helps when I sew all these blocks together further on into the quilt.
 

Color(s) of the Year

I always enjoy when the Color of the Year is announced for the upcoming year. There's a whole lot that goes into choosing the Pantone one, and it's used in all sorts of industries, from fashion to furnishings and beyond.  They're supposedly "capturing the zeitgeist" with this color choice. Not sure how true or useful that is, but it's still a fun exercise. The choice this year is a really lovely one to my eye (especially compared to last year's).

Pantone: Mocha Mousse is a warm mid to light brown. Spoonflower has a great selection of fabric and wallflower prints using this color. I'm not sure which solid color fabric that's out there is closest, I'm going to go through my solid stash and see. And also look through the Pantone Project postcards to see if there's a close one, there were a lot of browns represented. Some would say too many!

I think that Mocha Mousse will go quite well with the Kona cotton solid color of the year choice of:

Kona: Nocturne  which is a fairly dark purple. I think it would be fun to use this color as a neutral in some modern quilts. It reminds me of darker purple I used for the Trinket quilt.

Another Old Town Set

 

The next set of flying geese for the Old Town mystery were made with the Simple Folded Corners ruler. I like the stripe-y aqua batik that I found in my stash. How do you like that cream on cream (as opposed to white on white) space-y print?

I actually liked using this ruler quite a lot, the markings really show up well. And the illustrated instructions really were clear and made a lot of sense to me. Unfortunately my accuracy was the worst on this set, I think all of the Flying Geese points will be lost when sewn together. I'm going to try another set and go slower on the sewing.

Old Town the First

 

Starting out with sewing the first up block for the Old Town mystery quilt. I'm going to try all the different ways presented to make the required Flying Geese and compare and contrast my accuracy with each method. This is the simple rotary cut version. The neutral is a square that is cross-cut and the aqua is a smaller square that is cut once on the diagonal.

Note to self, the different way of pressing these in the directions means that your Bloc-Loc flying geese ruler really really does NOT work well. It depends on both of the seams being pressed towards the corner triangles. The reason given for pressing the two seams differently is distributing the bulk better when the quilt is assemble.

The weird background is not fabric but is the new wall calendar I bought for myself for next year. This is from a collage artist I really enjoy a whole lot, Ravi Zupa.  We came across his work on matchboxes that really cracked us up and then I looked him up online and found his other work. And yes that is an old iPod in the foreground, complete with vertical lines in the screen, but it still works! In my efforts to cool it on too much podcast listening I'm switching back to music for a little aural vacation. ahhhh.

This set was made with the normal to me technique of a flip and sew (and kind of wasteful), a square on either end of the rectangle sewn on the diagonal line that you draw. Very accurate, but that's probably because that's my usual technique.

This set was made using the Essential Triangle ruler, first time I've tried it, you cut the triangles from a strip of fabric. Pretty easy. No lines being drawn which is nice. Not quite as accurate, but for a first time not bad. And no extra waste.

A few more techniques to try out, and many more Flying Geese to make, but hey, at least I've started!

December To-Do

 

The design wall is once again crowded with many projects at the beginning of December. The Community Giving green quilt that I pinned up to photograph after finishing adding the binding. It is pinned over the Metro Twist backing that I finished last month. And there's the Running Out of Rain Cloud which just needs facing added to be done. To the right are the Stamp Quilt blocks that I've completed, In front in the piles is the finished City Sampler quilt top, the Bohemian Wife quilt top and mostly finished backing and to the right a pile of finished quilts. Guess I should put tidying up on the to-do list this month!

It's kind of ridiculous to have a to-do list in December, I know that of course. But here's one anyway to help guide my free time during this month.

Begin Something New

Make a Cotton Candy pouch for the BAMQ swap.

Oxbow Tote - cut out and begin the assembly.

Toned-Down Circle Sampler - arrange and appliqué the circles, start embroidering.

AG Stamp Quilt - continue to make more blocks using cut out the cut out stamp block centers from Tula Pink fabrics.

Design a quilt for the Sister Artists 3 embroideries. 

Old Town Mystery Quilt - keep up with weekly clues.

Continue Assembly

Trim to size and then sew the 12 columns of the Temperature Quilt together.

Bohemian Wife -finish assembling the quilt back, sandwich and make the binding

Pantone Project - work on a overall design, either in EQ8 or up on the design wall.

Y.E.S. Coat - continue making pieces/blocks. assemble on foundation, cut out lining pieces from the fabric that I dyed.

Snake In The Garden - Finish hand stitching

Kawandii - Finish hand stitching/assembly

Quilting

Trinket

Metro Twist 

Slopes

City Sampler put together a backing, make binding, take to long-armer.

Final Steps

Running Out of Raincloud -  add facing, sleeve and label.

Definitely December

Now that November is done, we are Definitely Doing December now. That means I'm a year older as of today, 60 whole years if you can believe it! I'm ready for lots of indoor time for me to sew.

The Most Perfect Pomegranate ever grown on my tree, on a napkin on my mom's counter at Thanksgiving.

Edited in Percolator app and in Snapseed. I really liked how Percolator dealt with the printed napkin.

 Here's the 30 second long video from my one second everyday for November.

The monthly I-Did List for November is as follows:

1. I pieced a great back for the Metro Twist quilt.
2. I reviewed a new ruler.
3. I learned a new technique for adding text to quilts in an online class.
4. I inked the backgrounds of the embroidered Sister Artists pieces.
5. I quilted circles and circles on Running Out of Raincloud.
6. I pieced part of a backing with leftovers from Friendship Stars.
7. I made binding and applied it to a Community Giving quilt.
8. I chose fabric for the Old Town mystery quilt, and started work on it.
9. I made a barely festive bow for Meg to wear to Thanksgiving.

I posted here 19/30 days, I posted on Instagram 6 times, on Threads 4 times, and on BlueSky 30 times. 

Still a lot of posting from me online this month, mostly due to after the election (sigh). 

I went to Sew Day for BAMQ, as well as for another project and I took an online class.