#52 Happy New Year

#52: Happy New Year
Finished: 12/30/12
Techniques: strip piecing, couching, appliqué, raw edge appliqué, ribbons, 3-D, free-motion quilting, satin stitching.
Size: 14 x 15 1/2"

Description: The last mini-quilt of the year! And since we're heading for 2013, I created a simple festive design to ring in the new year. This one was just for fun.

The party hat and party horn were strip pieced, cut out and appliquéd onto the background with a satin stitch. The numbers for 2013 were satin stitched on using tapered ends. The confetti was made by adhering fusible web to the fabrics, cutting them into random sizes shapes and ironing them onto the background. They added a nice touch. I then couched some silver bead strings around the party hat leaving a length fairly free for the chin strap part. More beads were couched on top of the hat and by the end of the party horn. For added whimsy, I curled some silver ribbon and attached pieces to the top of the hat and end of the party horn for a 3-D effect.

Quilting was done with a loopy free motion stitch meant to simulate the path of the confetti.

Here's wishing all my good friends and family a joyous new year!  Watch for my next post for a wrap up of this year's mini-quilt project and for what I plan to do next.

#51 Poinsettia

#51: Poinsettia
Finished: 12/22/12
Techniques: Paper-piecing, free-motion quilting, machine stitches
Size: 19x19"

Description: The inspiration for this mini-quilt was the poinsettia fabric used in the border. I created the central poinsettia design and paper-pieced it together. I could have used the same red print fabric for the entire poinsettia, but chose instead to include a second lighter red print to add a little spice to it. I like the effect. The yellow dots in the center are made from a circular machine stitch.

The flower was quilted with a straight stitch that I ran forward and backward along the leaves. Surrounding the poinsettia and in the border I used a free-motion loopy stitch.

I'm afraid I haven't taken good pictures lately. The last few mini-quilts look much better in person than in the pictures.

I apologize for the brevity of this posting, but there isn't really much else to say about this mini-quilt, and I'm busy getting ready for Christmas.

Have a wonderful holiday everyone!

Merry Christmas!

#50: Snowmen Tucked In

#50 Snowmen Tucked In
Finished: 12/15/12
Techniques: Tucks, Scalloped Binding, Fussy Cutting, 3-D
Size: 11 x 16 1/2"

Description: I got this idea from a quilt hanging up in Nana's Quilt Cottage in Old Colorado City. They had a quilt with little tucks revealing a scene and I wanted to try my hand at that. I still had some of the snowman scene that one of my quilt buddies had given me. (Those fabrics were handed to me in a pile so I'm not sure which friend gave this particular fabric to me, but thanks so much!)

I fussy cut the scene into 2 3/4" strips including seam allowances. Because of the seam allowances I couldn't cut the strips side by side, but I had several repeats I could work with so that the scene would display as a whole. I wanted to use the snowy sky part for the tucks but didn't have enough of it, so I chose a dark blue print from my stash that blended well. It's difficult to see in the picture, but there are tucks on the upper part as well, except for the column containing the house which I wanted to keep whole.

Sewing was easy once the fabric was cut; I alternated the snowman scene with the tucks. I then folded and pressed at the seams and sewed up the middle of the strips creating the tucks. I strategically bar-tacked the tucks.

Then there was an unexpected problem. Because I chose to do wide tucks, the edges of the tucks did not lay flat with the edge of the mini-quilt. I could have solved that by trimming off the edges straight, which would have worked OK with the bottom of the piece, but would have cut off the top of the house. To avoid that, I found that I could cut scallops for the columns and be able to catch all the edges.  So when I cut the binding, I cut it on the bias and bound those scalloped edges. I did the top first, which  is not as pretty. By the time I got to the bottom scallops, I'd had a little practice so they look better. I still need some practice with binding scalloped edges, but at least I added another technique for this project which is soon coming to an end.

The backing was another fabric gift from one in my quilting group. Sweet little angels.

#49 Star of Bethlehem

#49: Star of Bethlehem

Finished: 12/9/12

Techniques: Paper-piecing, free-motion quilting

Size: 32 1/2" x 22"

Description: This is a practical piece that I wanted to do as a backdrop to my snow village that I put up every year around the holidays. I have an entertainment center that my Dad built for me. Originally, I put a TV in the space, but I don't use it for that since moving to my new house. The space has a large cut-out section in back that I wanted to cover up. It's nice for cords and wires, but not very aesthetic otherwise. 

So I designed a mountain scene and put a bright shining star in the upper corner. The foreground mountain was pieced with various prints. It looks a little funky but it's ok. I designed the scene in columns for easier piecing, but I think in the future I won't do that because it doesn't look very natural to me.

It does make a nice backdrop I think, but after piecing and quilting, it needed squaring up. I originally figured the size I needed for the space, but after squaring, it came out a little narrow. (You can see the curtain rod sticking out of either end, which is unfortunate.

Quilting was done entirely free-motion, so I got some practice. Each element (snow, mountains, star, sky, rocks) was quilted with a different pattern.

The snow covered peaks are better seen in the lower picture; the camera washed out the white in the upper one.

I had fun doing this. I think I will design other backdrops for the space in the entertainment center for other holidays and seasons.

#48 Advent Calendar

#48: Advent Calendar
Finished: 11/30/12
Techniques: Pockets, Fussy Cutting, Machine Stitches
Size: 23 x27"

Description:  A couple of months ago, my friends in the CC Quilters group surprised and delighted me with gifts of several Christmas fabrics from their stashes. Adding those to my own Christmas fabrics, it didn't take me too long to come up with the idea of creating an Advent Calendar with pockets for goodies. I just had to wait for the beginning of December.

I researched Advent Calendars and found that the numbers vary: 24, 25, 26, 31 or 32, depending on what you are counting down to. The most common number is 24, so that's what I went with. I sketched out several ways to lay out 24 squares and I liked this pattern the best. I fussy-cut the 22 different pocket fabrics in rectangles and folded them over for smooth tops of the pockets. (There were 22 pocket fabrics instead of 24 because I was able to fussy-cut one fabric three different ways. Can you tell which one?) The next step was to stitch on the numbers, which I did with a satin stitch with tapered ends. I then sewed borders around each pocket and sewed them together in rows, with a white print to carry out to the edges. Binding was done with the cute candy cane fabric one of the ladies provided. Quilting was done in white thread with  a fancy machine stitch.

This was an easy one to sew, and I love it because it is so festive and because my friends thought to do something so nice for me. Thanks, ladies! And the best part is, I still have fabric leftover.

#47 Geometrics

#47: Geometrics
Finished: 11/25/12
Techniques: Partial Seams, Circular Quilting
Size: 28 x21"

Description: My stash of fabrics is sorted by types: florals, nature, solids, batiks and mottled, novelty, and geometrics, to name a few. What I call 'geometrics' are those fabrics containing stripes, plaids, ginghams, polka dots, diamonds and anything else with repeated geometric patterns.

At times during this year when I've been stuck for an idea, I've often just started looking at my stash hoping for some inspiration from the fabrics themselves. That's what I did in this case. My eye landed on my geometrics and I knew I wanted to do something with them. I plotted out a design of interwoven strips and added a few squares of others to round things out. Although it may look like some of the fabrics weave in and out, this mini-quilt was entirely pieced. To avoid breaking up the strips and to avoid sewing Y-seams, most of the piecing was done with partial seams. Considering the intricacy of all the design, I feared I might become confused as to what seam to sew next. And when I tried to plan it out in advance, it was confusing. But when I actually started sewing, I didn't get confused at all. It went very smoothly, much to my own amazement. The only difficult parts were the couple of places where there were very small pieces to piece.

Although there are some fabrics with tiny dots, there aren't any fabrics I would consider to be polka dots. None of my polka dot fabrics fit in with the color scheme. So when it came time to quilt, I decided to quilt with circles. I used different thread colors for each circle, but in hindsight it might have been better to have used only one color, green. Oh well. I drew out externally tangent circles with a pen that disappears when ironed. I used plates, glasses, lids, and other round kitchen objects to draw the circles. Then I quilted using a triple straight stitch. The circles drawn from plates left too much area un-quilted, so I added internally tangent circles to fill in. I think the quilting looks like bubbles.

#46 Bountiful Basket

#46: Bountiful Basket
Finished: 11/18/12
Technique: Tiled Piecing, Mosaic, Free-motion quilting
Size: 13" x 18 1/2"

Description: This mini-quilt combines the theme of Thanksgiving and trying to make the design look like a tiled mosaic. I am thankful for many things this year, but right now I am thankful that this mini-quilt is finished! This has proven to be the most time-consuming project to date, and one of the most difficult. I vastly underestimated the time it would take to finish this project, and in an effort to get it done in time, the work is sloppy at best and not up to my usual standards. Having said that, however, I am still very much intrigued with this technique and think it holds great potential for spectacular designs. I'll need to experiment with how to deal with the myriad of problems I encountered during the process.

My original thought was to portray a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables, a typical Thanksgiving composition.  I picked out the fabrics to represent the corn, cabbage, apples, cucumber, squash, grapes, basket, sky, and grout. That was the fun and easy part. I then sketched a basic design and overlaid a grid, hoping to follow it for placement of individual pieces.

The pieces of fabric had to be small by necessity. I cut the "tile" pieces 1" square (for a finished 1/2") and I cut the "grout" lines 5/8" ( for roughly 1/8" finished width). I didn't worry too much about the evenness of the sewing, figuring the slight variances in widths would make it appear more like an actual mosaic. I sewed the pieces in columns then used long strips of the grout fabric to connect the columns.

One of the first problems I encountered was that my sketch was too small. The fruits and vegetables were just colored blobs; they needed to be bigger in order for the observer to recognized them as fruits and vegetables. At this point I should have re-done the sketch, but I thought I could get by without doing so. That was a mistake.

Another problem was that my round fruits were coming out square. I thought about replacing certain pieces with half-square triangles to round off the corners, but that would have involved a great deal more time. I decided to "fix" it in the end with circular free-motion quilting.

Because the pieces are small, there is quite a lot of bulk in the seam. As I was sewing the columns together, the mini-quilt kept rolling in on itself, making it difficult to work with. This also led to an "accordion" effect, making the piece very stretchy (and it had a great deal of rebound). This later gave me grief when I was quilting. You will notice that parts of the sky are far too wavy.

I soon realized I wasn't going to be able to finish the cornucopia design; it was going to take far too long. So I lopped off the tail and made it into a basket lying on its side.

There are parts of this design that I particularly like. The yellow squash, the grapes, and the one vertical ear of corn turned out nicely. (The other ear of corn is rather wonky.) I also like the sky, which was cut from a large scale blue gingham.

As frustrating as this project was, I want to try this technique again. I've learned quite a lot, and have a lot of ideas of what to change for the next time.