As If One Mystery Is Not Enough, There's Still En Provence Too!

Bonnie Hunters latest mystery is "On Ringo Lake" and I've joined in on the fun.  This will be my third Bonnie project but only my second time doing one of her mysteries.  In fact, I'll be working on both of them at the same time: when I decided to jump into “Ringo Lake” (pun intended!),  I decided that it was also high time I tried to finish up “En Provence” which was last year's mystery.

I had started in on it late and had the usual ambitious plans to catch up and get it done before the end of summer.  Needless to say THAT didn't happen!  It's okay though, fortunately these projects are not a race and don't need to meet a deadline -- other than maybe having it finished before the NEXT mystery is released next year!

When I was on line waiting to get fabric cut for "Ringo Lake", I had a conversation with the woman standing behind me about this very same thing.  She saw my piles of bolts and when I said it was for an online mystery, we realized we were both big Bonnie fans!  She mentioned that she had never tried one of the mysteries thinking them hard to do because of all the pieces.  I told her that the parts themselves are usually very simple units so the only real “challenge” is keeping everything organized and setting yourself up to sew a little at a time to get them done.  Bonnie's quilts are like any other quilt project:  it may not get done fast but if you keep plugging at 'em, they'll eventually get done.   Bonnie's personal projects are a testament to that.  We both marveled at how many she gets done even while traveling!

As for “En Provence”:  I had finished up most of the block units for it back in February during a couple of the Quilt-A-Thons Judy Laquidara at Patchwork Times had held at the beginning of the year.

I left off needing to make the decision on the one “constant” fabric to be used in the Tri-Rec sashing units in that project.  It was supposed to be a mauve and I had two: a really strong tone-on-tone and a softer one with Polka Dots.

While I liked the boldness of the tone-on-tone and believed it would help it stand out among all the noise of the scrappiness, I had used a lot of polka dot prints in the block piecing so admit I was partial to using that in the sashing too.  I was also a smidge short of what was called for with the tone-on-tone (which had come from stash) and didn't want to take the chance I'd run out and knew I couldn't get more.  So I made a couple of test units with the polka dots and since I didn't hate them, I've decided to move forward with that after all.  So I've been piecing these units together leader/ender while working on “Ringo” and another project I have going:
 

 
I'm also finally starting to lay out the block and sashing units on the design wall. If I'm pleased with how it looks, I can also leader/ender those together as I continue with my other sewing. 

And believe it or not, even with all of this going on there is still more to come soon.

More "On Ringo Lake"

The color scheme for Bonnie Hunter's latest mystery quilt -- “Ringo Lake” -- is Chocolate browns, Turquoise, Corals and Neutrals.  Since a lot of my home is decorated in brown and early in my "Quilt Career" turquoise was one of my favorite quilting colors, she had me at hello!  Even better, I was able to find a few good things in stash to start me off.   Digging for turquoise led me back to some “oldies but goodies”. For instance, I still had about a fat eighth of this Jinny Beyer print:

That was used in my very first quilt project from 2002:

 

The Jinny Beyer fabric was used for both the binding and the backing and was the only fabric I purchased for that project -- the rest came from my clothing sewing stash and the floral was from a garment district dumpster dive!  I didn't want to invest a lot of money in this venture back then because I wasn't sure if I was going to want to keep doing this "quilting thing".  Guess that question has been answered!

I was also able to re-purpose parts of an old UFO that I have long debated about either going back to or abandoning.

I started this so long ago, I don't even have any notes of when I did so (a rare thing for me).  It was to have been my first mystery quilt project and was from the Fall 1999 issue of Quilt magazine. At the time I didn't have a good 1/4 inch foot and after sewing a bunch of triangle squares realized they weren't the size the pattern said they should be. Back then that was enough to discourage me and I put the project aside saying I would go back and fix them “at some point”. Yeah right!  Needless to say, since then I've done a lot of projects and more than a few mysteries but this one never moved from its position at the bottom of the “To Do” list.

However, I did remember this project when it came time to look for fabrics and in fact both the turquoise and the neutral fabric I had used in it are now part of the “Ringo Lake” story.  After taking into account what I moved over to the mystery project,  I saw that I still have a lot of the HST units that had already been attached to plain squares:

Hmmm, they look good like this.  I'm going to also keep these pieces handy and see if I can maybe incorporate them into Ringo Lake somehow --- maybe a border or for the back?

I also did a dive into the "Scrap Users" bin for strips in the project colors:

I didn't get a lot from there but at least these were already cut so ready for use.  I was also able to pull some more stuff from the big stash of fabric I won from Vicky over at the LA Quilter blog four years ago.

Even with all of that and a few other browns and corals from  stash, I still needed to do some "stash enhancement".  I guess that's another good reason for Bonnie to start these on the day after Thanksgiving -- "Black Friday" sales are a big help in the stash enhancement department!

So all the gathered stash is in the box on the right.  So what's in the bag on the left?  Why it's my (now old) "En Provence" stash!  And why is it out you ask?  You didn't?  Well I'm going to tell you anyway -- in the next post that is!

Checking In On Ringo Lake

It's been a while since I've been able to post to the blog so what better way to get back in the groove than to link up for Bonnie Hunter's latest mystery “On Ringo Lake”.

Bonnie's been offering scrappy mysteries since 2007 and they have become a gathering place for Bonnie fans world-wide!  This link-up is for the first part of the mystery which was posted here on Friday and you can read the introduction to the mystery here.

Here's my little production center with the first  “Ringo” units:

Yesterday I cut a bunch of strips in all the colors and am steadily strip piecing, sub-cutting and then sewing them back together into the nine patches.  I'm hoping to stay on track and get Part 1 completed by the time Part 2 drops this Friday.    

If you didn't already come from the Bonnie's linky, head over there and check out where everyone else's boat is moored “On Ringo Lake”!

Bloggers Quilt Fest - Fall 2017

Woohoo!  I just came across Amy Ellis' blog post that the Fall 2017 Bloggers Quilt Fest is underway!  Amy is a Martingale author and pattern designer who has been doing this online festival in conjunction with Fall Quilt Market for about ten years now.  There is also a Spring Festival but for the past few years she has run that one through Instagram.

This time around she is going back to the old format:  everyone will post the link to their blog post about their quilt to one page -- the one announcing the start of the festival.  Amy says the linky software she is using will indicate with a check mark which posts you have already visited so you can keep track of your viewing.

This is always a great way to see what people are making around the world and find new bloggers whose work you'd like to follow.  If you have something to share, be sure to post your link to Amy's site by next Monday after which a random number generator will pick the winners.  Just follow the instructions for adding your link on the festival announcement page.  There are great prizes up for grabs so it's worth a shot to enter! 

I don't have anything to put up this time around since I haven't been at the machine much lately.  That means I can spend my time taking a trip around the quilt world and see all the beautiful work others have to offer.  Always an inspiring pleasure!!

It took until the holiday weekend to get back on track...

With September now firmly in place, it's time to get my bearings.  In my last post in early August, I was all fired up and ready to get down to the nitty gritty of quilting my latest two projects and then.....NOTHING!  I had stitching plans for both but then got overwhelmed when it was time to actually sit down and stitch.  For the "Abundance" table runner (quilt design by Gudrun Erla from a Connecting Threads kit), the plan was to fuse down the leaves and since the body of the runner was already quilted (done quilt-as-you-go),  it was going to be a simple matter of choosing a thread to zig-zag around the leaves, then bind and finish it.

The problem was that after I got all the leaves fused on, I was really struck by the beauty of the design and suddenly the plans for a simple zig-zag edging didn't seem like enough.  I began to question the original plan of choosing just one color thread for them all and once I started considering doing thread changes, I began to see the possibilities for quilting more detail like veins in the leaves and maybe even doing some wood grain stitching on the "tree trunks".  However, going for more detail also meant committing to more time working on what was supposed to be a "quick-and-finished-this-week" project.  Needless to say I wound up going back and forth on this to the point that I didn't sew at all.

This puts me in a new and interesting phase in my quilting: early on I was determined to machine stitch my quilts but terrified to actually quilt them (aka "mess them up") so would often take weeks (months, years) to get up the courage to tackle them.  Now I'm more confident in my ability to stitch them but get bogged down on achieving "just the right balance" of quilting detail.  I love the end look of custom quilting but am aware of how much time (and sometimes extensive thread changes) it takes to execute.  Since my projects generally don't start out with the intention of being "show quilts", I usually want to try to default as much as possible to the use of one thread and simple continuous stitch designs.  However, once you get that "big" quilting idea in your mind's eye, it's hard to settle for less.

So I thought that instead I'd move on to quilting the other lap quilt I had also been working on but that didn't happen either.  I got bogged down again trying to decide how I wanted to quilt that quilt too!  By then two weeks had passed and every day I'd say, "I should quilt" and every day I didn't.  Instead I tried reviewing my stitch pattern books and then all the Craftsy classes I've signed up for over the years and waited (hoped?) for inspiration to strike.

Also during this time, my old iron started "peeing" every time I used it but fortunately on my last trip to the warehouse club they had an iron on sale for $20 so I got it.  Well a new iron also highlighted how bad my ironing board cover looked....


Picture from last year

....so I kept busy by making a new one: 

How lucky is it that I had purchased this blue Alexander Henry print on sale probably two years ago, and it just happens to be the perfect coordinate for my new iron! 

I also busied myself with die cutting additional applique motifs out of the scraps of all the batik bits that already had fusible attached.  Hopefully these can become or add to something one day.

Fortunately, I finally got some really good news when Craftsy sent out an email two weeks ago offering free views of one lesson from each of two of their classes:  Christa Watson's "Quilter's Path: Plan It, Stitch It" and  Helen Godden's "Escape the Ditch:  Empower Your Quilting".  Both pointed to motifs that helped me get over myself and finally jumpstart the quilting of both of the stalled projects!  For this one, Christa reminded me again about the idea of doing a "wood grain" motif which sent me back to viewing how Angela Walters did it in her "Machine Quilting Negative Space" class and that gave me the push to go back to the runner. 

So during the last two weeks of August, over the course of five (not continuous) days I pushed through to get the stitching done.  I detailed stitched the "tree trunks" and then the leaves in batches corresponding to the (bunch of) necessary thread changes.

I was using a medium dark brown bobbin thread which coordinated with the back.  It worked fine through the first two rounds but then one day it seemed like I just couldn't get the tension right -- there were a lot of "pokies" and thread breakage.  I had to walk away from the stitching for a day or two and when I regrouped I found that raising the feed dogs back up while lowering the stitch length to zero seemed to solve the problem and it was another two (again, not continuous) days to finish up the leaves.

I thought I was done and ready to move on to binding but then it still didn't seem quilted "enough".  So I decided to stitch in the background as well, completing that on Sunday and then bound it on Monday.

Before doing the background stitching I had another brainstorm to take some of the extra leaves I had cut and fuse them onto the back to use to write in my label information.  For those I used the colored threads on the back but a neutral thread on the front which created "shadow" leaves in the center front.

9/7/17 Edited To Add:  I was finally able to get a good shot of the "shadow" leaves on the front.

In the end, I'm happy to finally get the runner I now call "Autumn Leaf Dance" done.  It's not bad and while I like the background stitch motif, in hindsight I feel it's now quilted too densely.  So "Note To Self":  always sketch out your potential stitch designs!!  If I were to do it again, I'd use the same motif but execute it on a larger more open scale.  However, finished is better than perfect and every project is a practice for the next.  Moving on!

It's Been A Good Week....

So all the stabilizing ditch stitching has been finished on "Modern Twist"....

I know it's hard to tell from the picture but trust me it's done!

...courtesy of a lot of "Game of Thrones" binge watching!  I had never watched the show before now but since I don't live under a rock, I've had heard a lot about it all through its run.  When I saw the teasers for the new season (Season 7), I thought I might like to watch it since the next season will be the last.  Only the previous season (season 6) was on "On Demand" through our cable provider and everyone I asked said it was best to start from the beginning if I wanted to really understand what was going on. 

I found out that because we subscribe to HBO we also get free access to HBO-GO and ALL the seasons can be viewed there.  This worked out great because that meant I could watch it on my phone or my laptop or on the TV by accessing it through the our PS4 console.

So needless to say, I'm almost caught up and definitely sucked in!  I'll be starting on Season 6 this week.  As for the "Twist" quilt, with the ditch stitching done, I can now move on to the "modern motifs" free-motion quilting I want to do on it.

In between "ditching and Throne-ing", I also cut out and started working on this table runner:

I bought this kit from Connecting Threads awhile back and it turned out to be the perfect in-between project because it is made "Quilt-As-You-Go".

Edited To Add:

The pattern gave instructions for cutting the background wedges with either a regular ruler or the Creative Grids 15 degree Wedge Ruler which it just so happens was already in my quilting tool kit:

I used some fusible batting remnants layered onto the backing and then the background wedges and the corner "tree trunks" are stitched onto it. 

After that I'll be fusing and machine appliqueing leaves onto the background.  The pattern calls for 40 - 50 leaves for each tree.  Fortunately that will be made easy by using my GO! cutter to cut those out.

I will be using the leaf dies from the Round Flower, Flower Bunch and Rose of Sharon #1 Go! dies.  If you need to figure out which dies have the right size applique shape for a pattern, you can download a "cutting equivalents chart" from the Accuquilt site that lists the size of all the die shapes they manufacture.  I used this as a quick way to see if I already had dies that would cut the shapes I needed.  It's great that you can add fusible to your fabric (in this case Charm Squares) and cut them with the die cutter, remembering that the fusible is considered an additional half layer when planning how many you can cut at one time.  Since Go! dies can cut up to six layers at a time, that means I could set up to cut four with fusible attached at a time.

BTW, Accuquilt has a block design competition going on right now!  If you have an idea for a block using Go! dies, enter and you might win some great prizes!  But hurry, entries are due by
 August 22.

Edited 9/18/17 to add:  The block contest winners have been announced!  Read about them and see their winning blocks here.

As for me, if I can stay on track, I might be looking at some finishes by the end of the week!

Moving On....

So it's a new month and the design wall is empty...

...scraps from the last project were sorted...

.....the cutting table was cleared....

....and another quilt has been basted.

This is Modern Twist my project from the 2013 Planet Patchwork New Year's Mystery series.  It's been waiting a long time to be completed but this month is its turn.  It was the January pick from my APQ UFO Challenge list.  Over due but not to remain undone!  This is one of three Planet Patchwork mystery tops I have.  All of them are on my UFO challenge list for this year so eventually all will be picked and it would be a big feather in my UFO cap to get them all finished.

While "Twist" is on the quilting table, I'm going to try to start the cutting for a few new projects:

Also since the design wall is empty, I can start laying out the En Provence blocks as well:

As always I've got a long list of what I'd like to do for the month but will have to winnow that down to what I can actually get done as I move forward in the month.  To keep it manageable, I'll tackle it a project at a time, mapping out for each what it will take to get it done and being mindful of opportunities to work on more than one project at a time using the "leader/enders" system. 

With Summer winding down, what's on your "To Do" list for this month?