Man Quilt

Another man quilt.

The request is black and red...again.  This time I felt like that meant and no other color.  But I get to choose the backings.

I thought I would just use the “sticks” design.  They were inspired by a photo on Pinterest https://pin.it/4kbQMYB

I wanted them on a larger scale.

But just the sticks was too blah.  I decided some economy blocks thrown into the mix gave it more interest.

When the top was all together I took notice of the backside and the variety of the red fabric wrongsides.  I find all those light colored backings on the red fabrics rather fascinating.

Once again, no froofroo for these men of mine.



I thought while making it that I wasn’t liking it too much.  Man stuff can be boring.

But I do like it very much in the end.

It looks kind of like it could be a game board.

Just need some large game pieces and a set of rules.



 It’s quite different from any quilt design I’ve made so far.

It measures 75” X 63”

Off it goes to the man.

 

Black and Red Quilt

A black and red quilt with white thrown in for good measure.  For a man, so no froofroo stuff.

The no froofroo is not quite as easy as it might seem.  For me that meant no flowery prints.

The design is an easy one to cut and sew.

    

I sewed long strips then cut them into 10” squares.

Arranging the squares with the red strips in alternating positions.

It felt as though it was missing something that would give it some pizzaz.

My favorite black and white stripe to the rescue!  I just trimmed a strip off the edge of random blocks to add the stripe and still keep the block the same 10” size.

Just what it needed.



So on to the quilting.

I pulled the red fabrics back out to cut and sew a scrappy binding.  

(I have a small, silly collection of dog ears)

It looks good and was a great way to use up the small pieces of yardage that were left after cutting the block strips.

And it’s a quilt!

Measuring 57” X 76”

The backing is a red grunge fabric (forgot to get that photo).

It’s fun when the breeze sneaks up to give a quilt a little flight.



I have some squares leftover.

They are not going into the scrap bin, they will become the next project...

Treasure Hunt Quilt

Grab a cuppa...this is

The story of the Treasure Hunt Quilt

This is the fabric that stole my heart that I could only find on Etsy (at the time) and I HAD TO HAVE IT.

It was sold as a 27” panel.  I originally intended to make another small quilt with it.  Possibly give it borders to enlarge the panel.  I loved it even more when it arrived!  So I thought to get another piece, sew them together and not add a border.  I went back to Etsy shopping (it was still not available anywhere else that I could find). I found another piece.  The price went up?!  Not fair!  But I HAD TO HAVE IT.  I added a 2 yard piece to my cart that I would use for backing and a striped piece I would use for binding.  And a bunch of other pieces I thought I would like to have in my stash as well.  After all, there was not going to be an in person quilt show this year where I could re-stock up.  Any excuse is a good one, right?

So the second panel arrived and I could finally get started on this quilt.  I am SO excited!  I opened the envelope and the happy dance screeched to a stop.  

The piece I now have is NOT quilting cotton.  It’s more like a canvas fabric.  Very coarse.  Now I knew why the cost was higher.  This has come after my Etsy purchase experience with the Curiosity fabric  with the 2” squares.

Oh yes I did...I went back to Etsy to get yet ANOTHER piece of this Treasure Hunt fabric.  Although I preferred quilting cotton, I decided I would make a quilt out of whichever fabric I would end up with 2 pieces of.  I did try hard to read everything and get quilting cotton.  And again it was yet another price.  Didn’t care anymore.  I crossed my fingers and the quilting gods must have felt sorry for me as I received another quilting cotton piece.  Big sigh of relief here.  This time it was a measured 1 yard piece.  36”. That explains the new price.  I’m scratching my head at Etsy now and hoping not to need to go back again.  At least not for this quilt.

I began to get the two pieces sewn together.  What do you mean they aren’t the same width???  1/4” difference.  This fabric has nice flat selvedges. I had planned to keep them in as part of the quilt.  There went that idea.  Don’t care anymore.  I moved on.  

Now I laid out the quilt top and batting.  All smoothed out and trimmed to size.  I flip it over to lay the backing down.  Guess what!  Same designer, 3” narrower than the top fabric!  Yep.  Figures.  Why would I think they would be the same width.  

Oh yes I did...I went back to Etsy (still the only availability of these Marcia Derse fabrics) to get more.  You guessed it, no more of the Birch available.  I had to choose something else to extend the backing.  I chose The Opposite.  No further surprises.  The fabric gods obviously knew there would be another incident and bestowed favor on me.

If I couldn’t use the selvedge on the front, there was nothing in my way for using it on the back.

But now that there would only be 3” of the new fabric, I had to try to get it straight on the back.  I don’t know any easy secrets to accomplishing that.  I put the time into it and I was successful in this regard.  Small happy dance.  

Finally time to start quilting.  I decided for a grunge fabric that I would do grunge quilting.  It’s probably really called improv quilting or something like that.  I just followed shapes and lines and not precisely.  That was the hard part.  Giving up control.  

After doing a width of that, I knew this was going to take awhile.  I did a block section at a time each day for a few days.  It got to where it wasn’t fun.  Make a few stitches, stop, turn the fabric, stuff it through the machine opening, make a few stitches and that was how it went over and over.  I had to force myself to stay at it until it was done or this quilt would never get done.  Ever.  After 3 days of quilting whenever possible, the quilting was finally finished.  

Now the binding.  I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to like it.  I had nothing better and still didn’t want this piece to end up in my stash.  So I forced myself to use it anyway.  Didn’t care anymore.

When I went to trim the quilt, I couldn’t bring myself to cut off the selvedges.  Even though on one side they didn’t line up.  (that 1/4” width difference). And I thought the other side would maybe be too narrow.  Guess what...yep, didn’t care anymore.  As I was sewing on the binding I really didn’t like it and the blank white sections of the selvedge were going to look really odd.  As I continued I started thinking what I could fill the white space with later on...fancy stitches?, ribbon?, cording?  Either way I could worry about that later.

This quilt is one and done!  63” x 42.5”

As I was hand stitching the binding, I decided the ugly stripe worked well afterall.  And the blank white spaces along with the text of the selvedges is now my favorite part of the quilt.  Who could have guessed!

I absolutely unconditionally LOVE this quilt!

I’m quite pleased that I powered through all the “I don’t care anymore”s and ended up with great features in this quilt that might never have been.  This is my favorite quilt ever.  It will never see the inside of a storage tote.

Sometimes there’s something bigger at the end of a lot of frustration and incidents that we think aren’t happy moments.  Everything that happened in the making of this quilt is now well worth it.  Had they not happened I wouldn’t have  this quilt exactly the way it is now.  All those incidents added fantastic features and character to this quilt.  It truly has been a Treasure Hunt and I found the Treasure!

Art History and Curiosity Quilt

What a struggle to make this small quilt.

It began when I saw a fabric on Pinterest that I just loved and really wanted.  It is called Treasure Hunt.  Finding it was the problem.  It only showed up available in Etsy.  My problem with Etsy is that I’ve never used it much and was not well versed in using and buying from it.

Treasure Hunt is a grunge fabric.  I do have a love for grunge.  Not real life grunge so much but definitely in art.  Marcia Derse has wonderful grunge fabric designs.

Treasure Hunt is being quilted and will take me awhile to finish it.  So this post is about a little Art History and Curiosity quilt.  (Those are the fabric names)

After making this little whimsical quilt , I wanted to make another.  The size is so perfect for a single person to just grab and go sit on it in the park or the yard or at any event where seating is the ground.

Marcia Derse fabrics are obviously extremely popular and are out of stock everywhere.  I could only find them available on Etsy.  Even there most are sold out.  I bought half yards of each of these pieces to put them together.

The ruler shown with the Curiosity piece on Etsy showed the color squares measuring less than 1” in size.  In reality when the fabric arrived, the color squares measure about 2” each!  That was a shock.  I didn’t know there was a link to click on to get the sellers description of the fabrics...where the seller states the blocks are 2”.  Etsy has been an expensive experience for me.  

Now I needed to make them work.  I was NOT going to buy another piece of fabric from Etsy with the shipping costs.  Plus, the seller does not cut the fabric between panels or following a graph design.  Add to that, the end of a bolt is where fabric is usually wound wonky anyway.  So I lost more of the Curiosity fabric than I was happy about just to straighten it.  

I won’t even go into the struggles I had with a simple grid quilting that was not simple in any measure of the term.  I used a piece of grunge fabric from my stash for the binding (because I did not want to add fuel to the fire with buying another piece on Etsy). This quilt measures 40” x 41”

But I won the fight and it’s done!  It is not fabric stashed in a drawer.

He’s called Chillingsworth

I’ve had a tiny scrap of Chillingsworth on my small design board since finishing my last Halloween quilt last year.  Suddenly while sewing I felt I needed a handy tiny pin cushion.

His severed head was perfect for that!

The next waiting project I pulled from the stash drawers were two Chillingsworth panels.  They’ve been languishing for a couple of years while I collected more Halloween fabrics in anticipation of a clear idea of how to use this panel.

I knew I did not want a throw quilt.  But all plans kept leading to a quite large wall hanging also.  I spent 4 days looking through Pinterest for inspiration.  I finally came across 1” Scrappy Strips by Leila Gardunia.  They are paper piecing strips.  Now, I could have sat and drawn them myself, but for $10 I could just photocopy what I needed and get started sewing right now.

Anyone familiar with these Chillingsworth panels might notice that I cut down the sides of the panel.  I worried about doing that not being sure those top and bottom corner designs would look too odd.  It just had too much blank space around him for me.  So I cut anyway.  The corners don’t look odd to me.  OR if they do, they just add to the already oddity of Chillingsworth wearing only a top hat.

I started with this strip design but it looked too ... something.  I didn’t like it for a border for him.  So I chose the straight piecing design strip.

Here is where that awesome little plastic steam(less) roller became my best ever buddy.  It made pressing those hundreds of strips quick and easy.

The paper is so quick to pull off of these simple strips.

The trash is proof of the fun I had making these strips.

While I was making the borders I wondered how to quilt him without having to freemotion quilt around him and without having straight rows of quilting going through him.  So I drew my quilting lines.  (Forgot to take a photo).

I finish the back of my hanging quilts with strips to run a flat stick through.

Each of my kids will get one of these Chillingsworth guys.  I think the cream color one can be left out all year for creep-loving people...like my kids.

Stash busting!  It’s so awesome to get some of these older purchases made into “things”. 

An early-ish Happy Halloween!

A Whimsical Small Quilt

My fabric stash is bulging.  I need to stop buying fabrics just because I like them.

But this little quilt came about from a gift of three Candy Bar (I think is what they are called) precut packs from Rachel...(years ago!)

They just haven’t spoken to me no matter how many times I handle them.  There were four packs, I made a pillow cover with one of them a long time ago.  I pulled them out and challenged myself to use them.

I decided I wanted a whimsical look.  I divided the pieces for rows of 42 or so inches in length, arranged them and stitched them end to end.

Next came my favorite fabric that turns anything into whimsical.  The stripe is cut into 1” wide strips the length of the fabric and stitched between the rows.  I didn’t want to have to piece the stripe which is why I chose the length of 42” for piecing.

Next came the quilting...

...and then the binding.  It is so fun to look at.

The quilt is a little small for a baby quilt (and I don’t know any babies anyway).  It measures 41”x33”.

So, a yoga mat maybe?  I don’t yoga.  

A child’s play mat maybe?  No small children around.

I do know that I would have liked to have it when my daughter was in high school on the track team and I had to sit on the ground to watch and to wait.  She didn’t like running...they had bleachers over there to sit on.  No, she liked to throw heavy things like the Discus and the Shot Puts.

I’ll find a use.  Until then it’s so stinkin’ cute that it makes me smile and I’ll just enjoying seeing it everyday.