Six In Process

 

Yesterday I laid out six more Old Town blocks and did the first bit of stitching the units together. I used my new chain-stitching thread cutter from Feral Notions to separate the stitched together units so I could stack them up like this. It worked so well, very easy to use and quite stable which is a big improvement over my previous thread cutter. Also it looks pretty and cute which is always welcomed around the studio.

They're now all waiting on the ironing board for those first seams to be pressed in the correct directions for easy block assembly. That's one of the things I'm most appreciating about Bonnie K. Hunter's excellent instructions for Old Town, the emphasis on seam pressing direction.

And just for fun, I laid out just one more, but it hasn't been stitched together at all yet. I'm finding that the mixture of white and neutrals in the blocks is okay to my eye after all, that was one of the main things I was worried about as I made the units for this quilt.

Chain Pressing

 

It's likely that we've all done chain piecing at some point, but have you ever tried chain pressing? Maybe I'm the only one, but I finally tried it. This was a tip in the directions for the Old Town Mystery quilt that I've been working on. If you're chain piecing, cutting each pieced pair apart, and then pressing takes a lot of extra time when you're doing 100's of HSTs, etc. And especially when you're working in matching sets like I am here.

I think I'd heard of this concept at some point in the past, but to me it sounded fussy and fiddly. I figured I would get it all tangled up or just take more time to arrange on the ironing board. But I finally took a chance and just tried it, solely because it was explained so well by Bonnie K. Hunter in the Old Town directions. And what do you know...it really is quite easy and works very well. I think you have to definitely have at least a stitch in-between each piece so there's enough maneuvering room.  Now, I haven't tried this out for other sorts of units to see if it would have the same sort of easiness, but I will definitely try it again. 

Here's a short video that shows you how to do it.

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.

Appointments to Shopping

I had some time to kill between appointments yesterday so I ended up at Golden State Quilting. It is located dangerously close to my doctor's office. Was that a subconscious reason I chose that particular doctor? Perhaps. Here's a group shot of what I bought on steering wheel. How do you like that kinda wild-eyed cartoon/caricature of Eleanor Burns? 

And here's a more spread-out version of my haul at home in better lighting. Five FQ's,  three of which will end up in the Bohemian Wife quilt as they are Kaffe Fassett Collective prints, a new quilt marking pen from Quilters Select, A smaller wool pressing mat to use at Sew Day and retreats. I bought a Jaybird Quilts pattern, Northern Lights to use with the mini Hex-n-More ruler, mostly based on the fact that they have one made up and displayed and I really want to make one with my own hand-dyes.

Getting Stitchy

 

More and more is getting done on the Stitch Happens quilt, it's really coming together and starting to look like a sewing machine shape. I'm still really excited about how good that multi-colored polka dot fabric looks as the spool 

I'm using my Steady Betty pressing mat to stage the block's pieces and walk them over to the iron and back. It helps to keep everything organized in a way that works for me. Also, it's not floppy so it acts more like a grippy tray.

I almost didn't include more pieces of that yellow/dark yellow ruler print but I think it looks good carrying across from the block to the right of it. And it's a good contrast to the Tula Pink yellows that I have.

I like the right part of this block quite a bit.

It's fitting right in.

Here are two pictures that show the quilt growing.

Maybe I'll put the series of pictures all together in a little video, so you can see all the blocks growing up into a quilt.

This is the last piece of the quilt that I need to piece, it's the needle section of the sewing machine, as illustrated by a series of sharply pointing-down flying geese. Then it'll be the job of piecing the pieces together. Before doing any of that I'll have to decide whether or not the result of following the pattern's four-at-a-time method of piecing FG units ends up higgledy-piggledy directions of the background fabric is worth re-piecing them or not.

Random Pairs

 

The stack of half rectangle triangles for the Color Collective month two quilt was ready to sew together after my initial trial sewing experiment.

I devised a way of randomizing the pairing of colors and quickly sewed them up. 

Carefully pressed them open, and Tara Faughnan was right, it did save time to have pre-starched the whole    yardage of fabric instead of the individual pieces as you go.

It's a big stack that I've got to trim down to size, that's the next step, and then I'll play around with some arrangements up on the design wall.

Product Review: Steady Betty Pressing Pad

Way back in July I mentioned that I was using the Steady Betty Pressing Surface. It's one of my favorite new tools.

 I have the original 16x16" version, for me it's not too heavy, I find it easy to move around. Apparently they have a new version that is half the weight of my original one, so if the weight would be an issue for you, that might be another reason to give this a try. I could see bringing this to a retreat.

I keep it on the little rack that is part of the legs of my ironing board. Whenever I'm pressing and *not ironing* I use it. That's what this thing really helps me with. As you probably already know, when you're piecing, you have to get those seams opened up and the allowances going in one way or the other without distortion. Moving the iron is necessary, but I'm only moving the seam allowances, and the pressing surface holds the rest of the fabric.

I've been using it with Best Press as I'm piecing all those blocks for the City Sampler, but that's because the additional stiffness helps me with more accurate sewing with the smaller sized blocks.
For final pressing the Best Press usually isn't necessary.

The surface is a soft but grippy foam material, there is some plush or give to it, but not too much. It does help with dissipating the heat from the iron quickly.

Only a few drawbacks I can think of, you can't leave anything on top of the pressing surface or the impression tends to stay for quite a while. I left my iron on it overnight and the dents took a couple days to go away. I don't know if one of those dents could become permanent or not. I'm not sure how durable this surface will be, I can imagine it would tear or be cut pretty easily and that wouldn't be something you could repair. So I'm making sure to not have any scissors around the thing when I'm using it.

Two thumbs up from me on this one!