The Bottom of the Ocean

 

I'm doing the facings a little differently for Ocean Effect, the bottom one is going to be a "self"facing, I'm using the excess of the whole cloth front of the quilt that extends below the green upholstery fabric and blue sheer and pulling it around to the back and hand-stitching it down. But first, I decided to take the time to stitch out a quilt label using the digitized alphabet options on my machine.

I had to test drive it for the tension, and I forgot which way the letters stitch out! It's been a while since I'd used the alphabet feature, so I made a little sample and wrote myself notes. Then I had to pin it on and make sure the words of the label would be right-side up as they're at the bottom of the quilt. This will be a handy thing to have for next time, so I'm storing it with my iron-on embroidery stabilizer.

How Many X's

 

Doing a lot of blue on blue free motion quilting. Still deciding on whether to add more X's or not. As there are already three orange ones, that likely means adding two more. On re-reading, my notes are a little unclear, so I'm going with what I see in front of me right now.

I've gotten all of the smaller pieces sewn down in their centers, so the majority of straight pins are now gone. I'm using safety pins to hold down most of the rest. That makes the quilt sandwich so much nicer to handle while free motion quilting.

Time for a thread color change.

Eleven days to go until the UFO Challenge deadline at Sew Day. Will I make it? 

Stitching the Words

 

The UFO challenge deadline approach-eth, (in 13 days). so I'm working on finishing this quilt. There are a lot of words written in pen on the pieces that still need to be appliquéd. So I'm just stitching over the writing in a zig-zag before I'll be attaching them to the quilt.

I really like the look of this after being zig-zag stitched. This was two passes of stitching. It takes a lot of extra time, but I think it is worth to do it separately from the quilting. Was it a bit weird stitching out the word, "Me"? Honestly, yes, a little strange, but I reminded myself that it's just part of the song lyric that I'm working with. And this quilt is my reaction to both the music and those words in the lyric.

A lot of actual quilting has gotten done now. 

Using some decorative stitches on the not-so-skinny-strips.

Still a long way to go to finish, but I have a plan that will hopefully work out. At the very least, I'm feeling this quilt again, now that I've been working with it. And that's a Good Thing™👸

Returning to UFO-ing

Starting in on trying to get May You Ever Return completed before the next Sew Day for the BAMQG UFO Challenge.

I did some more digging and found my notes (yay!) and have more of a plan. First up is working with the words that I've already written in pen. I found some colors of rayon thread that would work, zig-zagging some of them.

Turns out that this was the first thing that's been stitched down to the entire quilt sandwich. It was all holding together so well that I thought a lot of the stitching was all the way through. Whoops! A lot of the top is pieced together, or just top-stitched, but it wasn't anchored (except by straight pins) to the batting/backing. That meant I spent time pinning it down through all the layers with safety pins. Much better, I don't think it's going to fall apart all the time.

Some of the words are quite small, but I made my zig-zag teeny tiny and sewed very slowly.

There's a lot of layers and a lot of colors. I'm remembering why I really like this project.

I trimmed off the excess backing fabric and pinned it back up on the design wall after all that. Onwards!

Returning to May You Ever Return

 

The BAMQ UFO challenge has started in January, and the number chosen for us to work on this month was #12 on our lists. For my list, this was my very hardest one, which is finishing this quilt, May You Ever Return. This was started in the excellent class/workshop, Word for Word, that I took with Rosalie Dace along with friend Jaye when we made the pilgrimage up to Sisters, Oregon for Quilter's Affair in 2018. 

It took me a while to even get my hands on the box it was stashed in, and I have as yet been able to find the class notes. (shoot!) So...as you can see this "almost a quilt" is in quite the state at the moment, a little smashed up and un-ironed. It's in an in-between place, I know I was making moves, there were decisions being made about it, placement of pieces, additions and subtractions, etc. That's what I need the notes for.  Seeing it pinned up on the design wall is definitely helping it come back into focus.

Or maybe I just need to listen to the song that it's based on a bunch of times to get me back in the headspace to access my ideas about it all. This quilt has the lyrics to a verse of a Neko Case song, Pitch or Honey, sprinkled around the piece, in an unexpected order. Not at all intended to be easily legible. Just like the song I guess.

Word Mini Quilt

 

Time for me to make another small quilt for the SBAMQG MiniQuilt Challenge. 

The challenge this time is "Words" so of course I thought of my favorite word fabric that I was using in the Ring blocks I was making a couple years ago. I had bought enough extra to spare a bit for this project.

I unearthed a baggie with the green leftover pieced triangles from making the Jawbreaker pillow and thought it would go together very well with the green word fabric.

I couldn't help but notice the perfectly highlighted word definitions on the seam allowances.

It really was cracking me up, how perfectly it worked out on so many of the seams.

I had to document it as it was soon going to disappear once this got quilted.

Definition of a needle.

There were a few near duplicates of the pieced triangles but I like the repetition in the overall design.

These really go together easily using the Hex-n-More ruler.

As I was cutting the triangles out, I made sure that the words were rightside up on either long edge of this so that the people on one side of the table can read the triangle's worth of words that is closest to them.

Here's how it looks all pieced together. Yes, another table runner has magically appeared...

Definitely needed a border, so it was back to the Tula Pink bin.

I got this quilted very very  quickly, just straight-line, nothing exciting.

 I think that it looks good and all the stitching will hold it together through many machine washes.

Now to got sew on the green binding to finish it before the meeting tonight!

The Word for the Year

Every year, I choose a word. Usually from a long list that I've manually cut out and placed in a bowl. This year though, I went to oneword365 and picked one of their suggestions. Drumroll...the word my cursor landed on was

EMBRACE

And yeah, that seems like a really good one, that can apply to a whole lot of things I need to work on. Embrace the possibility of success (or failure)
Embrace the now (ooh how 70's, so sue me)
Embrace the impossible (why not?)
Embrace the inevitable (spend your energy on what you can change)
Embrace the change (at some level that's what you want, right?)
etc. etc. etc.

So I made myself this small quiltlet as a reminder to look at all year.

A Work In Progress

 A couple detail pictures of a quilt I'm working on, almost all done with the quilting.  No title for the quilt yet, which tells me it isn't done quite yet, usually those come right away...
 The two images are from stamps that I carved and printed on fabric.  The top one was printed on a cotton-polyester fabric and you can see how the ink pooled up and is splotchy compared to the bottom one printed on a 100% cotton fabric where it soaked right in more evenly.  It is fun to work on these things and figure out how to repeat these effects.
 This is the first time I've used zippers on the surface of a quilt and I really like how it looks, more texture, the addition of more design lines, a different weight to these lines added, and a mysterious possible functional purpose.  Do they unzip for a reason?

I decided to use zipppers so that I can incorporate something underneath that can be revealed when unzipped.  So I'm thinking up some cryptic words or messages having to do with eyes or being watchful or something.   I'm thinking that I might machine embroider them on a ribbon and then sew that in.