A Christmas Deadline: The Western Kringle Quilt -- Pt 1: Choosing the Pattern

So in addition to working on not one but two Bonnie Hunter mysteries, I'll also be trying to finish up another big project that I had started sewing up in early November.  

Every year my husband's family does a gift Kringle and a name is drawn for each person so that everyone only has to buy a gift for one family member.  This year I was told early on that my giftee would be my Mother-In-Law's husband.  When my DH visited them a few years back (they live in NC), he found out that her husband was a big fan of Westerns -- both movies and TV shows.  When he watched TV, if he wasn't watching a sports game, he was watching a Western!  From that point on, I said if I ever needed to make a quilt for him, it would definitely be with a Western theme.

Normally, I don't get the giftee information until a few weeks before Christmas but since they told me early in the year this time, I had enough time to plan to make a quilt for him.  Over the years, whenever I was shopping (or just browsing sales) for fabrics, I would see if there were any Western themed fabrics that interested me or that immediately inspired a quilt design.  I always say that the Quilt Muses look out for me because back in June, AQS had a big clearance sale and lo and behold, they had a few Western theme prints among their offerings!  I liked what they had and appreciated that the fabrics were already coordinated.  So in order to decide how much to buy, I had to go looking for a pattern.

Keeping the fabric colors, values and print scales in mind, I skimmed through some of my quilt books and I came across this quilt:

It was a Mystery Sampler (the theme of the year for me it seems!) from M'Liss Rae Hawley's book "Fat Quarter Quilts".  I've owned this book since I started quilting but have never had the opportunity to make a quilt from it.  This one particularly caught my eye for three reasons:  the color and scale of the fabrics used in it were similar to the ones I was considering (saves me a lot of design decision time), it already had a Western theme ("Jed the Lone Star Roper" made by Vicki DeGraaf, 1998) and it featured fussy cuts of cowboy heads which dovetailed with another idea I had:  to include photo transfer pictures of Western movie and TV characters/stars in whatever design I did.  The fact that this design already slotted the perfect locations for that was a plus!  

However, I quickly realized that I liked more of the fabrics being offered than could reasonably work together in this design.  So I went looking around for something that could better accommodate all the fabrics AQS had and I found this:

from here:

This is Deanne Moore's book "Fabric Play" and it is another book that I've long wanted to make a quilt from.  Deanne is also the designer behind the pattern line "Creative Sewlutions" and I have a kit for her "BoxTrot" pattern that's currently a "Hussy" (HSY - Haven't Started Yet).  The book's premise is all in the title: "Change the Fabric, Change the Quilt".  For example, here's how this quilt is made up in two different colorways in the book :

For more on the book, see this Martingale blog post about it.

For me, I could immediately see using all of the AQS fabrics in this by substituting the similarly colored fabrics where the design used a constant fabric.  I could also see adding the pictures I wanted to the bottom of some of the fabric strips.  Sold!  Well, not yet, now that I had a useable design, I needed to order the fabric.  More on that in the next post.

Oh Wait! I Forgot One Finish!

Before I get to the other big project (in addition to the mystery quilts) that I have to (continue to) work on (hint: Christmas related), I wanted to take a moment to show the only quilty thing I got done in October.  One of the reasons I haven't blogged in so long was that the last two months have been busy months.  October started off with some non-quilty things like:

DH was on vacation for two weeks during which we had scheduled to build a protective structure for the community garden bed we share with another member:

....and a trip to see the Chihuly exhibit at the New York (Bronx) Botanical Gardens just before it ended:

Later on, I managed to squeeze in a little quilting.

This is the neck roll cover I made.  Ever since I began regularly using quilts on our bed, I've had a neck roll pillow form that I made from a pattern in a book.

I made mine a little longer.

As I've accumulated bed quilts, I try to see to it that I have a coordinating cover for the neck roll.  The first time I decided to make the neck roll, it was to coordinate with a patchwork and applique quilt that I didn't make:  before I was confident enough to make a bed sized quilt, I bought one and made this simple, one fabric cover for the neck roll.

Then I made my first bed sized quilt in 2008 (Bits 'N Pieces, on the left) and made another cover to go with it.  Fortunately for me it also coordinated with the Vintage Treasures quilt I made a few years later.

When I finished my Brrr! quilt in 2013 (on the right in the picture below) I made a coordinating neck roll cover for it and then realized that it also worked well with the flannel Triangle Trips quilt I had finished back in 2010.

However, when Fall rolled around this year, the quilt I put on my bed was one I got from my mother's house after she passed away in 2004. 

She had bought the quilt in 2002 not too long after I started quilting.  When I saw it, I immediately recognized it as a patchwork quilt.  When I asked her why she had chosen that particular design, she just said that she "liked the colors".  I never knew her to own or use a patchwork quilt prior to that.  When she passed, it was among the things I made sure to take from her apartment.  So when I put it on the bed this year and realized that none of my other neck roll covers worked with it, I immediately decided that a "quickie" project was in order.

Of course "quickie projects" are never as quick as you think they will be!  My first thought was that I really liked the colors in a fabric I had used on the ends of a set of Fall pillow cases I had made to go with the Triangle Trips quilt (and I have also used these cases with my Mom's quilt in the past).

The fabric is Marcus Brothers "American Plains Large Floral" and was leftover from the backing of my "Red Harvest" One-Fabric (lap) Quilt.

I actually don't have that quilt any more --- I gifted it to my husband's Aunt when she visited us last summer along with my Mother-In-Law.  I lucked up when I searched through my stuff and found I still had an 11" WOF strip of it left!  However, the print is directional along the lengthwise grain so what I had was not quite enough to go around the neck roll.  So then I decided I might insert a section of pieced blocks to fill it out.  It just so happens that right then I was looking at a back issue (October 2009) of Fons & Porter's Love of Quilting magazine and saw this ad:

 

BINGO!  Some Maple Leaf blocks would work well to fill in the shape.  I figured out they needed to be three inches (finished) and then pulled fall colored fabrics for them and pieced them up.  Then it was a debate about what fabric to use to surround the ends of the blocks and the roll.  I auditioned two fabrics and had to choose if I should do this with the same fabric:

 

...or this?

I definitely liked the contrast offered by the second fabric.  Next was how to finish the inside of the ends.  That first neck roll I made was all one fabric so the ends were just the same fabric folded to the inside.  However for each subsequent roll, I've used a contrasting fabric lining in the ends and this one was no exception but it took a bit to decide what fabric to use.  I finally went with a gold fabric in a color similar to the "Plains Floral" but in a smaller scale print. 

There is also the matter of the other embellishment for the roll ends:  the ties.   For the very first roll I made, I just used some ribbon secured to the roll to tie the ends shut.  All the later rolls have either fabric turned-tube ties or ties made by folding the fabrics edges in twice and stitched along the edge as above. 

Since my other roll covers were made from one piece of fabric, I didn't need to line the inside center of the roll.   This time, since there were pieced blocks, I lined the center with muslin to protect the seams of the blocks when I'd pull the neck roll form through.

And that was that!

BTW, the set of accent pillowcases I'm using this time around are made from the leftover backing fabric from the Bits 'N Pieces quilt.  Now as for what I did for all of November (before Bonnie's mystery started), tune in for the next post!

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!