Modern Borders = Placemats

First - thanks for all the support with the bag story!  Yes, the stains mostly came out. It was pointed out to me that I kinda skipped that part. Oops!  Also, I've had quite a few no-reply commenters lately so if you didn't get a response from me directly, that is why.  I WANTED to reply to you....  Why won't all these blogging platforms play nicely together? Sheesh.

In the busy-ness of my life, I am finding time to keep up with challenges. It's become a point of pride with me to not have missed a single challenge at SaskatoonMQG.  The one due at the end of July?  Make a modern border.

How do you do that?  And who came up with this cockamamie challenge anyway? (Me. It was me.)

Fine.  I'm making a piece that is ALL borders.  That's right just one border after another.  And then I'm going to cut it up so the borders don't even go all the way around. Yeah.  Take that, challenge-comer-upper-with! (Again, me.)

I started with some shots and chambray.  Feels so luxurious in the hand. If only the shimmer of both showed up in photos...Threw in some Tsuru for good measure.

Once I had it pieced, I used the leftover shots on the back, and then grid quilted the thing to death.  That took some time.  I echoed the borders a bit with the thread colours.

Then I got out the rotary cutter. At this point, my great idea seemed a little nuts. I held my breath,  began my meditation (It's only fabric, only fabric, only fabric....ohmmmmm...) and cut away.

Now onto the binding!  It was important to me that the borders not be broken even though I'd mercilessly cut them to shreds moments before.  So, I pieced together the bindings from the leftover border pieces.  I made a separate strip for each side of each piece (what???)  I'm not so good at calculating the exact amount of fabric taken up in a binding corner so I sewed the long strips and used Linda's binding method with the mitred corners.  It's probably the best way to do a matched binding. Linda rocks.

How did I keep it matched all the way down? Good question! Three things.
1) I moved my needle one more notch to the right to account for "quilt shrinkage" - think exact 1/4" instead of scant.  On a larger piece, you'd have to measure the finished width of each chunk but this was small enough I could fudge it with my non-scant seam allowance.

2) After piecing and pressing my bindings, I ran a basting stitch 1/8"(ish) from the edge down each to secure the top and bottom together.

3) Glue. Lots and lots of glue. Wonderclips. Hot iron to set.

Once the corners were mitred, I knew there was no way I was going to be able to hand-finish these bindings with the uber-dense quilting.  Machine-binding and I have not gotten along in the past; I've always thought it turned out messy and ugly, and way less satisfying.

Solution?  More glue!  I burned through about half a Sew-line glue pen on this project but it was so worth it.  Altogether, the bindings took less time than the quilting, even if you allow for re-reading the mitre tutorial twice to remember what I did the last time. They look like more work than they were.

And there you go - placemats!  Challenge conquered.  Next challenge?  Trying to photograph the clothing-making rampage I've gone on this summer... :-)

Colour Challenge Pillow

First off - thank you to everyone who's stopped by during the Blogger's Quilt Festival, left comments, nominated my quilt, or voted for it!  It's very kind of you and I'm flattered beyond words. You've put me in some pretty amazing company. Thanks!  It took me 10 days to get around to see everyone's quilts so I do appreciate the time it takes to look, read and leave a message.. <3 p="">
****

The Saskatoon Modern Quilt Guild had a recent colour challenge. We had to make something using a colour scheme that had been discussed at our meeting in August.

In a move that surprised absolutely no one, I chose blue and orange.  Blue + Orange = Complimentary Colour Scheme!  After playing around with some scraps, I had some little boxes.

I played around a little more and framed them into boxes using a FQ of shot cotton I'd been hoarding.

Then I tried to counteract all that square corner-ness with some circle quilting.

Et voila! A cushion!  I tend to give away a lot of my challenge pieces since Mum and Seester usually call dibs.

Totally keeping this one.   It's my colours. :-)

I've got more to post - a month or more of not blogging equals lots of little things that need showing and telling... but it'll have to wait until next time! Have a great Tuesday!

Finished Quilt: Inspired by Star Trek: The Doomed Lieutenant"

Broken record here. Haven't posted, yada yada. Busy, catching up, yada yada. Where does the time go, yada yada. And how do you (completely crazy - in a nice way) people who post once (or more) a day find the time? Yada yada.

***

We had a long-running challenge over at the Saskatoon Modern Quilt Guild for the summer.  The idea was to make a quilt "Inspired by" something that had meaning for us and to tell the story at the meeting at the end of September.

I racked my brain.  And then, after watching Star Trek (the new one but not the new, new one - Pine but no Cumberbatch) for the umpteenth time, it hit me:  I'm a nerd. And that's my inspiration.

Quilting and sci-fi have a little in common.

1) Those who aren't a fan, don't necessarily understand the draw.  We've all had a conversation with someone who doesn't get why we take perfectly good fabric and cut it apart only to sew it back together again. Or why we HAVE to HAVE the entire line of fabric from Designer X and hoard it until the end of time!  Sci-fi nerds often get odd looks when folks don't recognize a reference or understand the Twitterverse exploding over a new movie, graphic novel or tv show coming out.

2) A language used by 'insiders' - think fat quarters, tumblers, scant 1/4", HSTs, FMQ for quilting...  Lightsabers, phasers, Daleks for sci-fi. Or in the case of this quilt, Red Shirt.

red shirt: the throwaway character on a science fiction episode, (namely Star Trek), who will be dead by the end of the episode, identifiable by his red uniform

I present to you my latest quilt.  Inspired by Star Trek: The Doomed Lieutenant.

This quilt relies on the idea of the Red Shirt - a no-name officer who'll be toast before long so we don't lose a main character.  Poor Red Shirt, whatever his name is. Was.

It ended badly for him.

Colours for this quilt were chosen based on what I've observed from Star Trek over the years.  Tumblers represent officers, the navy background is the 'final frontier', and the teal thread sort of makes it sparkly but in a throwback, retro-space way.  I'm really happy with how the quilting turned out.

The back was put together using the leftover tumbler halves and yardage.  Approx. 71" wide.

As a bonus nerd Easter egg, there are 42 little uniformed officers on the front of this quilt. Yep, I'm a nerd... :-)  And a proud one.

***

Ok - Gotta go catch up. Again!  Trying to finish before the Blogger's Quilt Festival this weekend...!

Oops!: Now with Finishes.

I had considered calling it Oops!: The Musical, but I couldn't get song rights. :-P

Seems like I forgot to check the internet for a month.  Oops.  Maybe it's a failure to really dig into the new routine or just a need to spend less time with my computer but I've definitely tried to prioritize other things this summer than blogging and blog-reading.  You do NOT want to know how many unread posts are in my Feedly....

I have been busy with the following:  meeting blog peeps in person!, sewing, knitting, teaching Nephew a bunch of stuff his mother doesn't approve of, hiding in dark basements away from sunlight, teaching English as an Additional Language, offering my shoulder, cooking while listening to loud music and kitchen-dancing, watching just about every CFL game (something has to fill the void between hockey seasons....), and reading actual, physical books.  Books, people! Remember those? I love real books, but man, I have a hard time sitting still long enough to get "gripped".

Anyhoo.  I'll ease back into the (ir)regular blogging routine with some finishes I meant to post ages ago.  A couple of months ago, I was giving a little presentation on QAYG at the Saskatoon MQG as part of our meeting.  I had done up a few slapdash sample pieces using scraps and 12" batting squares just to illustrate some things that I'd learned for the prez.  And then, of course, I'm left with these little thingies and no plan.  Blergh.  So I just started throwing them together.

I ended up with two mug rugs from my piles of scrap,

a mini table topper,

and a coffee table runner.

The white on white chunks are leftovers from my brother's Punisher quilt.  The muslin that backed most of these was from yardage, but that too was leftover from another project so I call it a win.  Even the binding was from the leftover basket.  The batting was scrap that had been cut into 12" squares just for practicing free-motion.

Is this my best quilting/sewing? Heck, no, but I used up some scraps , I learned some techniques, and if I spill something on them, I won't cry for days. So there you go.  Not every piece has to be show-worthy.  I think these are like the quilt version of sweat pants. I wouldn't show them off to fancy company, but to protect a table from Hot Wheels or the carpet from living room picnics, they're just fine. :-)

And now I have a month's worth of blogs to catch up on. Again.

Technical Tantrums and Other Fun Ways to Spend Your Week

The following section contains an explanation for my week+ absence based on a petty first-world problem.  Feel free to skip down to craftiness after the asterisks.

I am a little naive at times.  When my RSS reader (Reeder) told me that it would continue to work after the demise of Google Reader, I believed it. I didn't confirm that it would indeed work closer to the planned date.  Nope.  Imagine my surprise and dismay on July 2nd when it didn't. Blerg! Apparently, they're working on it but it wasn't going to be ready in time. ( I find it important to add here that I am not a total Luddite; I have embraced new technology faster than the average bear, but I'm rarely a first-adopter and I am cautious regarding change.  I still don't like the new Flickr....)

I went looking for a replacement, hopefully temporary, as I love Reeder - I had it all set up the way I like, I was happy with the interface, and it synced across all my devices.  I wasn't crazy about Bloglovin' but the Feedly app wouldn't let me login on my phone.

So then I spent a day and a half importing all my carefully curated feeds manually into Bloglovin'. I was then too tired and annoyed to read any of them for a few days.  And when I sat down to delve in, I hated it. I would even say I loathed it. It changed my settings randomly, wouldn't adapt to needs and ways of doing things, and it wouldn't import some of my feeds for seemingly arbitrary reasons.  I threw my hands up, closed the computer, and stewed.  I tried the mobile app.  Hated it, too.  Had that existential blogger moment where I questioned why I even bother to blog or read blogs, and in the grand scheme of things, what does it all mean???  I moped, offline, for a few more days.

Then, missing the interaction and inspiration (and my damn hockey news!), and blindly hoping that they'd already found a solution to Reeder, I returned to the desktop. Alas, no. But I spend another day manually importing my precious feeds, (and adding several more that I don't really have time for...)  into Feedly.  While it's not Reeder, it is more adaptable to what I'm looking for and how I use RSS.  I could breathe. It'll do.  Faced with an overwhelming total of posts in the 4-digits, I spend another afternoon going through each feed to clear out posts prior to when I'd checked out of the interwebs last week.  That brought it back to a manageable level. That's where I left it last.  Manageable.  Though I still worried about how to read on the go, which is how I do most of my non-comment/lurker reading.

Imagine my delight when the phone app for Reeder has been updated to work with Feedly. And all is right  moderately okay again in my blogging universe, though I still have some catching up to do. Phew.  Sometimes, technology is not worth the paper it's printed on....

******* (These are the asterisks I meant...)

During my impromptu blogging hiatus, I threw myself into sewing.

A July bee block for SimplySolids is done. It was very fun to do, though she'd warned us to be conservative with the fabric.  I didn't want to end up short so I made a little template for each row, save the last one, and used it to cut a triangle from each fabric ahead of time, and religiously trimmed each seam so that it would be easier to line up the pieces.  One pink triangle got a little cheeky but I didn't notice it until I'd already packed up the block for sending. I can see it in the photo but I'm hoping it's not a disappointment to my bee mate...

On my own bee quilt, I have almost all of the blocks (just two to come in) and I've started working on the sashing and border strips.  The sashing strips are 4.5x16.5" and are made from the scraps left over from the blocks. It's much farther along than this photo but I still have the top and bottom "border" strips to do. I've even made the binding!  I'm really enjoying this whole process.

I also finished up the charity quilt made by our guild but I'll save that for another post!

There were rumours this week of looking for a summer job but visiting family and a nasty chest cold that's left me worse than sotto voce (in fact, zero voce!) has quelled that idea.  I'm spending a lot of time watching movies, knitting socks, and glaring at people who ask me questions they know I am unable to vocalize an answer for and then make fun of my hoarseness. (That's right, Dad - I'm writing at you! Now, quit giggling.  It was funny when Seester was the voiceless one, sure, but you've gone too far... "What? What was that? Heeheehee."  Too far, sir.  :-P )

Opportunity to Help: Slabs for Calgary

Hi all!

I'm headed south for the day - spending time with family.  Some of whom are moving to Calgary.

Speaking of Calgary....

If you live in Canada, you'll no doubt have seen the devastation in Alberta on the news. (Or in person - our prayers are with you!)

The Saskatoon Modern Quilt Guild is throwing their support behind Just One Slab - Quilts Recover - Southern Alberta. We're making slab blocks!

It's a fantastic way to use up some pesky scraps and do some good will sewing.

To learn more, (especially if you're in Saskatoon):  Check out our post on Saskatoon Modern Quilt Guild

OR

Cheryl's Just One Slab post at Dining Room Empire.

Have a safe (and dry!!) Canada Day long weekend!

Every block - made with love!

Finished: Pod Bay Cabin Doors

Okay, so two months ago, our guild issued a "make it modern" challenge: Take a traditional block and put a modern spin on it.

Due date was this past Sunday.  As of Friday at midnight, I had bupkis. Blargh!!! (I almost sent a strongly worded email to the demon-seed whose cockamamie idea this was before I remembered it was me and Jaclyn. Oops!)  I had been tossed around the idea of a snail's trail, only curved, and no amount of sketching or logic could make that happen for me.  But I do love me a log cabin so Saturday morning, I started to play.

So I cut out some rounded squares using the Quick Curve ruler, and then went to town, log cabin style, demolishing some leftover charm squares.  I tried for a little while (okay, just twice) to do evenly measured, precise curves but ultimately just improv'd them using the ruler as a guide, not centring or measuring.  It was more fun that way.

And then I had pods.  Oooo-oooh!  What to do with those?  Join them together or isolate them?**

One lightning fast trip to the quilt shop for a yard of shot cotton later (seriously, I didn't even put on makeup...), and I was back to the machine, trimming out the blocks.

Hmmm. Nope, not done yet. Not modern enough.

There.

Back, baste, echo, bind.  One finished wall-hanging. Finished in time for the challenge deadline.

About 24" square.  Or two feet. Heehee.

I love it when a not-a-plan comes together!  I had a "yeah, I'm awesome" moment before I scorched a piece of fabric and remembered I'm human. :-)  I'm really happy with how it turned out - totally surprised myself and may be permanently over my fear of curves.  Also, starch is the bomb.

So, if you get lost on your way to a project, change where it is you want to go. :-)


**The name of the piece occurred to me at this moment which also made me isolate them instead of joining. I heard my nerd voice say, "Open the pod bay doors, HAL." Of course, Dave... Hey, I've never claimed to be normal. :-)

Still kickin'

Well, it's been real... lol.  I find that in the spring, I need a little more downtime than the rest of the year due to the season-shift and the migraine-related consequences that come with it.  This year, with its whack-tastic weather has proved to be a little more difficult than usual and results in the frequent disappearing act.  It's not that I don't miss reading blogs and keeping up on the haps but this last little while, I kinda skipped the glare of the internet - my laptop sat abandoned - and my sewing machine gathered more dust from disuse than lint from overuse.  It's Easter break so I've had the week off but while I had big plans, I crashed hard instead. My productivity was more of the passive kind - I cleared tons off the PVR and watched almost the entirety of Game of Thrones. (I was also holding my breath approaching the NHL trade deadline... Phew! Dodged an unneeded goalie-sized bullet there!)

This was the first day of Spring 'round these parts.... Chest height snow. After the first two melts.  Yeah.

So, I'm a week behind on everyone's blogs if you've been missing my comments or hits on your site. Sorry, I'll get there. :-) (Oh, so very Canadian....)

I am working on a tutorial for the random piecing demo I did at the Saskatoon Modern Quilt Guild at our last meeting and I'm hoping to get it up before the end of the weekend.

The guild has a couple of challenges going at all times.  The one we just finished was the Ugly Fat Quarter Challenge.  We all brought an ugly FQ, dropped it into a pillowcase and took turns pulling one out. What did I get? A green/brown floral monstrosity.  I went pouch because I was mentally blocked and after experimenting unsuccessfully with some FMQ and mock-trapunto, I was running out of fabric.  I did manage to quickly design my own gnome-y accent for it though and it makes me happy.  My sister thought the pouch was cute and it now lives with her.

'Scuze the shaky photos - took them months ago.

Our current challenge is a Two-Colour Crayon Challenge.  You pull two crayons from a magical toque and those are the colours you're stuck with.  You can use only those colours, and neutrals if you really feel you need them.  I pulled yellow and white.  And as much as I'm happy with how it's going, it will also be living at Seester's.

I managed to get my Simply Solids Bee block finished.  Karen @ BungalowBayQuilts asked for Scrap Jar Stars and I was thrilled that I had tons of scraps so I could make it really colourful for her. Hopefully, colour was what she wanted because, boy, there's a ton in there!

The major project I had planned for the break was the quilting on a quilt that's sat waiting, basted and ready, since the middle of January. Well, folks, it's already the end of Thursday and this is how far I got.

10 minutes in...

But when HotWheels interrupt your projects, it's really hard to be annoyed at a lack of progress.  Nephew's learning about why we don't keep pushing the button with the scissors on it...

And since you may have noticed this, I'm not on Crackbook, I don't pin anything, I don't use Twitter or Instagram, and am kinda lame and inept at using Flickr.  Therefore, please understand how very difficult it was for me to do the following.   I am resentfully claiming my blog on Bloglovin'. (I am a curmudgeon, yes, I get that.)

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

Yeah.  I have no plans to use it - I'm happy with Reeder - but I know that I keep a pretty low profile and thought it might make it easier to find me, if you're looking.

Now - I'm going to send some overdue emails and get back to reading.... Have a lovely one!

Busy. Compulsive.

Ha! We all knew that "three posts a week" thing wasn't going to hold up for long. :-)

In all fairness, I had other things taking up my time.  Like teaching, and spring, and play rehearsals, and vehicular accidents (no injuries!), and general life stuff.  Priorities.  We all have them, so no apologies, no obligations.  However, other than keeping up with the hockey news, I haven't been reading anyone this past week.  So you know what I'm doing tomorrow. :-)

I have been sewing, amazingly enough.  A paper-piecing workshop at last month's Modern Guild meeting led to a scrap-busting explosion of hexagons in my living room. This is what 400 of them looks like.

All from scraps. Randomly pieced.

Yeah.  Since I ran out of my purchased hex papers about a week into this, I ended up making a crap-ton (yes, a crap-ton!) of my own.  You can read more about how on the guild blog here.

I still have some edges to fill in and a border to do but I'm pleased so far.  It's going to be a table topper.  You'd think after all of this hand-sewing, I would have mad skills when it comes to the whipstitch. I should have a wicked whipstitch. But nay, good folks, nay.  It still looks a little like I did it with a chicken bone for a needle and with my eyes closed.  Oh well, maybe some day...

I was working on this piece at my other guild meeting (there are two different guilds in town - I belong to both) and a fellow member, whom I'd never met, snarked me, "Well, that's just compulsive!"  Fair enough - there is a nugget of truth in that, my mother would certainly agree with her, but handwork helps me focus and keeps my hands busy during stretches of time where my attention would otherwise wander, like the occasional guild meeting, and I'm therefore less likely to run around like a four-year-old dragged to a tupperware party for lack of a babysitter. To my credit, I did not snark back, because I don't know her and wouldn't want to inadvertently offend her while trying to crack a joke to prove I have a sense of humour. (However, blogging about it might have devalued that credit somewhat... Oops!) I couldn't help but feel though, while not offended, that there was a different way to offer that opinion that didn't make it a personal attack.  "I personally don't have the patience for something like that" or "I can't be bothered to do hand-sewing or something that small" or even "that kind of thing is not for me" would all have come across as more supportive or polite than the undertone of "there's something wrong with you!" implied with the word compulsive. 

Of COURSE it's compulsive.  Look at this.

I had a pretty good laugh about it.  I'm fairly sure she didn't mean any harm. I'm not generally bothered by criticism. In fact, I think constructive criticism is key to growth and development, and our tendency to over-nice each other, particularly in the quilting community, detracts from our ability to deliver or accept such criticism without taking something personally.  What made me laugh was that the comment wasn't even about the work (too  many colours, poor whipstitching, inaccurately cut or sewn hexagons, or not to someone's personal taste), but that the statement was a value judgment on ME, and not the work. Now, I get called crazy all the time, (there probably IS something wrong with me - lol) but usually by people whose first names I know, and who I have an established rapport with.  I have called fellow bloggers crazy in a loving way, particularly when they are exceedingly prolific or unjustly hard on their own work. I guess I've become more aware as a teacher that what we put out there can have a impact on people.  Imagine if I'd told another artist, a potter, that pottery was a useless art, or a child whose room is covered in pink, purple and sparkles that only losers like unicorns (or apply it to weightier subjects that I won't get into here). It might roll off them like nothing, or it could stop them from enjoying something that had previously.  For the record, I think pottery is amazing and the skill level some people have achieved is staggering. I also have no problem with unicorns, though I don't embrace them as strongly as would your average person on the street.  And I LOVE constructive criticism. It helps me get better at the things I do.  I could not survive as a teacher without giving and getting constructive feedback. But this has been a reminder for me not be conscious of applying value judgments in that criticism. 

I guess you can say I DID learn something from the comment after all. 

I've got other things I've been working on but that's what's tickling my mind today.  Hope you didn't mind the musing.  Maybe it gave you something to chew on.  

Have a wonderful Wednesday!

The QAYG Guild Bag: Tutorial

Our guild participated in the Madrona Road Challenge.

The rules were we could add more of the same line or solids.  And we preferred that whatever it was be quilted.

I needed a bag to take all my guild stuff to and from meetings in so the idea of using Madrona Road for it made sense to me. To make sure I kept it within the "rules", I made it quilt-as-you-go-style, which actually lent a lot of support to the sides and bottom.  Works for me!  The pocket design was inspired by that fabulous herringbone print.

It's got two exterior pockets, an inside zippered pocket, a large notebook or tablet pocket, and a divided pocket for little things and pens. There's plenty of room for my binder, clipboard and various supplies.  It's been working really well so far and keeps my all my guild stuff in one place. Handy!

I didn't follow a pattern - just a sketch I did quickly before I started. I've posted a tutorial  for the bag on the Saskatoon Modern Quilt Guild page, if you'd like to check it out!

TUTORIAL LINK: Click Here

Up and Running (Stitch)

Well, I'm excited.

We have the website for the Saskatoon Modern Quilt Guild up and running, we have a Flickr group, internet buttons, a mailing list, real live members, and, let's face it, a lot of fun!

My lovely co-chair, Jaclyn of JaclynQuilts, (the Statler to my Waldorf, the macaroni to my cheese) and I are hoping to blog regularly to keep members and potential members informed about what we're up to and have some general quilty goodness, so from time to time, I'll be over there. We're also hoping to get our membership involved in blogging on the site as well.

Basically, we're official and that feels really good.

Like 'bite of cheesecake', good.

Visit Your LQS Day: Periwinkle Quilting

(I know.  Three posts in the same week - I'm as stunned as you are!  But today is important...) 

I can't go to my local quilt shop today.

So I went yesterday. :-)

It's no secret that I love it there. They know me by name and I get a chorus of "Hi, Carly"s when I walk in; it feels a little like my Cheers.

When Periwinkle Quilting opened, years ago, I was drawn like a moth to wool, or a quilter to cotton.  I hadn't even made many quilts in my life.  I didn't know yet that I was a quilter.  But I was driving down the street, saw the sign and made a bee-line for the store. (Moths, bees, I'm mixing my insect metaphors here...)  A shop just for quilting?  Here?  It was exactly what I never knew I'd always dreamed about...

Once through the doors, I was exposed to a whole new world.  It was the first time I'd seen non-traditional patterns, and fabrics specifically made for quilting.  And en masse, in beautiful colour-sorted sections and entire fabric lines designed to work together.  Overwhelmed? Indeed! But pleasantly so.  I think it's fair to say that without Periwinkle, I might not have discovered the wealth of the quilting community.  (Not to mention that it was Michelle at Periwinkle who started the ball rolling on the Saskatoon Modern Quilt Guild...!)

The staff is incredible there - always ready to help you pick a project or find the right fabric.  They love Show&Tell and have smiled through my many chatty ramblings as I meander.  Everyone is so friendly and it's fun to exchange tips and ideas; I consider the shop a place to recharge my creative batteries and my positive energy.

However, I don't think I've ever gotten out of there with less than a fat quarter...


Periwinkle Quilting
105-2105 8th Street
Saskatoon, SK
(306) 933-3072