Back To The Village

On to another thing on my monthly to-do list, the Japanese Houses quilt. This was a project I started last year, prompted by the Sewtopia sew-a-long using the Village pattern from Moda.

Confession: the super cute logo got me.

Cats don't like playing violins apparently.

Don't forget your Susi Roll. 

Possibly my favorite house so far. That word/phrase fabric is so bonkers.

I just made 8 more blocks and sewed them together into the fifth row there on the bottom. There is one block made with the blue background, the rest made with the grey. Unfortunately I can't find the three fabrics I'd chosen for the background because of course I put all my fabric away, sigh. But I have a lot of pieces already cut out of the grey so I'm working with those until I can put my hands on the fabrics. 

 

A House Full

 

Here's the aforementioned charm pack from Sewtopia I mentioned, all laid out to see the wonderful variety of colors and fabric types that were included.

There are some very charming prints in this selection.

It's very hard to choose my favorite (s).

Oh these owls. And those lovely oval dots.

Sewtopia suggested using this cute house pattern from Moda, but it requires 297 5" charms. They're hosting a sew-a-long which sounds fun and starts later this month. I really like the cute house pattern, so I started cutting more 5" charms out of my box of Japanese fabrics. I'm only partway through, but this only added 22 for a total of 86. That's a long way to go to 297. 

I may just make a smaller version of the quilt or do some repeats or solids. I love all the versions of this on this blog post from Moda and also in the Instagram hashtag #ModaVillage.  My first thought on this one is to have an ombre of background solids go from darker to lighter and back to darker. 

1,710

 I finished the Tumbler finally! It's a charm quilt, and hopefully there are no repeats in the 1,710 tumbler shapes.

This thing was started way-back-when with the purchase of a Come Quilt With Me plexiglass template that I bought at PIQF at the same time my friend Jaye bought her hexagon template. She made an awesome Eye Spy quilt.

We decided to do a casual sort of joint project, so I also bought a hexagon and she bought a tumbler. Our plan was to cut shapes for each other out of our fabric stashes or new fabric purchases. It worked out pretty well, there's a huge variety in this quilt.

 This is for our California King bed, and it is quite frankly, the biggest thing I've ever made. I was really surprised at how BIG it is. It's a lot of work just handling the thing, ironing, moving it through the machine while I added on the last row.

These leftovers from when I evened-up the length of the rows ended up as part of the pieced back. It was kind of sad to see this project come to an end. I've been working on it for a very long time! I bought the template in October 2004. So much has happened in those years...
And yes, I realize it's not really done, once it's back from the quilter I'll have to sew down the binding, and add a label, but compared to the rest of the time I've spent on this project, it's pretty much done in my mind.

Working On Windmills

Working on Windmills again, (be nice, I could certainly be Tilting at Windmills here, in fact that will be my title the next time I talk about this project.).
I've been laying all these out, trying different combinations of dark/light, prints/colors, etc. Not sure the pattern interplay between the blocks comes out very well using all prints together like this, so I might have to end up cutting hand-dyed solids to go with all the prints.  I think the blocks that have prints with close-to-solids read much better.  But I probably need to lay out even more to see what the overall effect is with a bigger selection.
So hmmmm.
More thinking about this one is in order.  I don't want to go to all the work of piecing this thing and not even be able to see the pattern you know?  So it might be a matter of laying this out very carefully instead of sewing it all randomly together (which is of course my first and admittedly lazy instinct).  What do you think?

Maximum Tumbler Overload

I started this Tumbler Charm Quilt a long time ago (five years!) and I'm nearing the end of getting all those tumblers together into one big quilt top. I had to chose a edge fabric to put at the beginning and end of each strip and found a nice black/grey spiral. Here are the first five rows sewn together.

A sewing action shot, I'm only pinning the very beginning together, the rest fall into line pretty easily.
And two more added, up to seven rows.

Here's what the edge looks like with the black spiral fabric. I think it will make a nice framing border.Keep on sewing, strips over shoulder to avoid rolling over with chair.

All the variety, I love it! And no, I didn't manage to keep to the dark/light pattern that I'd originally started out with. But I truly like the randomness of dark and light sections.

This is the 1/4" foot that I'm using, it helps to get these long strips together more accurately. Accurately being a relative term in my quilting room of course.

Wall o' Tumblers!

Oh no! What are the chances?! The first rule of a Charm Quilt is NO Duplicates. And certainly not adjacent to each other, sheesh. And this was after the long strips were sewn together. sigh.

There that's much better.

Faces, there are a lot of faces. I've been fussy-cutting them, just because it feels funny to cut or sew right through a face.

And a few more faces. And that's how far I got, 13 rows, before I got bored of sewing the strips together. I'd say this is about 1/4 of the quilt top assembled. All the other strips sewn together, pressed and ready to go, I just have to get back into the mood to do it.

Tumbler Plans

Even more charms for my tumbler charm quilt that I'm ever so slowly assembling. These are from my generous and industrious friend Jaye. Thanks Jaye, guess I better get sewing these together.
I think once I do that I'll be pretty darned close to having enough for the king-sized tumbler quilt I'm planning on. But I won't know that until I'm done sewing all those rows together and do some measuring. There are still quite a few of my fabric boxes that I haven't gone through a cut a shape out of each fabric. Luckily as I've been going along with this project I've been noting which boxes have been mined for tumblers.

Also, I have to figure out how I'm going to deal with the irregular edges along two of the four sides of the quilt top. Some sort of long triangle will work, I guess. Because I most certainly am *not* going to be doing an irregular binding, not me, no way, no how. Not on something this big, and that will be intended for being washable many times. Also, what color or colors will I chose for this evening-up triangle, hmmm, scrappy? a single color?

These long-term projects are fun to come back to over the years. Good thing I'm not in any hurry.

Matchy Matchy Is Ok After All

Just noticed how matchy matchy my design wall looks right now! :-)

Not usually my thing, but I kinda like it!

Tumbled Over

What a nice surprise!
Friend Jaye recently sent me a small mysterious Rechiutti box. Nope, no chocolate, even better...more Tumblers! Well, wait, I know that Rechiutti is Jaye's favorite chocolate, so it is entirely conceivable that the chocolate *in this case* would possibly be better than pre-cut fabulous fabric pieces for my Tumbler quilt project.
But I'm pleased beyond measure at these happy fabrics up on my wall cheering me up every time I pass by them. Thanks Jaye!

And who knows I may get the Tumbler cutting bug once again and add to the 18.25 completed strips for my eventual bed sized quilt. I haven't done a danged thing on it since January when I last posted about it. This is one of those slow-cooked quilt projects, not a race-to-the-finish deal.
But hopefully well-worth it in the end.