A Prairie Home Quilts

So, where have you been, I hear you all asking?  [Imagining to myself there’s at least one someone out there still listening after all this time… ] Welp, doing some house sitting, of course, and on a spiritual journey of sorts.  Yes, again.  Involving dragons again, too.  But, you know, I came away with a deeper understanding of the Hymn of the Soul and the meaning of the pearl.  Oh and the great Hydra was involved.  It was worth every minute of the journey.  Hehehe.  I will spare you the details of my spiritual epiphanies, though.  Really.  I’m sure you are more interested in the quilting I’ve been doing.  Wait, how could I forget?  There was a magical wedding and children visiting from far away lands happening in the middle of all this, too!

And I should probably fess up that I’ve been doing some writing also.  November is National Novel Writing Month, did you know that?  According to the Office of Light and Letters it is.  [Love their slogan:  We believe in ambitious acts of the imagination.]  The challenge is to write 50K words in 30 days.  I spent part of October preparing to write and I’ve written every day in November [obviously nothing for the blog!].  I’m at just under 39K as of this morning and hoping to hit 40K by tonight.  No one but me will ever read the thing, but it’s been another fun part of the journey to slay the great Hydra and let my imagination soar.

Okay, okay, on with the quilting…

I’ve been working on my .75″ hexagon project, Field of Flowers.  It was stalled.  I didn’t have all the flowers prepped.  I decided to go ahead and do that with Inklingo.  I can’t remember now how many flowers I needed but I printed and cut enough sets of flowers and centers to have 512 flowers when they’re all stitched. [I need 502.]  Then I went ahead and printed the corners and edges in the green fabric I’d purchased eons ago.

I started this project working from the middle out and then decided it would be so much easier to start from a corner as I was always getting the middle portion twisted around.  I have more than half the flowers done.  I feel like I’m making a huge dent in this project.

New starting point — bottom, left corner

Some finished flowers.

The box with the remaining flower sets.

And more of the wedding, just because…

Oldest daughter, Jessica with groom’s younger brother

Youngest daughter, Rachelle with groom’s older brother

Michelle and Jared McCarty

Daughters again…

Oldest son, Nathan and his lovely wife, Koren.

When I ordered Christmas fabric online to make a tree skirt, I had to order 1/2 yard of each of the fabrics I planned to use.  I had about 1/4 yard of each left after I cut out the tree skirt. The stripe caught my eye as a great fabric to fussy cut using the Lucy Boston Patchwork of the Crosses [POTC] collection. The main shape in the collection is an elongated hexagon. When you fussy cut using a striped fabric, it’s easier to get a kaleidoscopic effect. Here are the 3 blocks I was able to create with the leftover fabric.

Instead of printing onto the back of the fabric like you would normally do with Inklingo, I printed the hexagon and square shapes onto freezer paper and cut them out.  Then I ironed the freezer paper to the front of the fabric to make it easier to fussy cut each shape exactly the same.

I needed 2 sets of 4 and 1 set of 8 matching hexagons for each block.  Also some squares were needed for the corners and connectors.  I wasn’t as excited about the kaleidoscope effect the squares made and some of the hexagons that I cut.  I discovered the in order to get the best effect, the hexagons should be cut perpendicular to the stripe and the squares need to be cut on the diagonal.  [But I didn't discover that until I started sewing the shapes together and by then I was out of fabric.]

Pretend that the stripe runs horizontally all the way across the fabric here…  This is how to orient the hexagons — at least for the center and next row of the block.  You can see in the second and third blocks that the last row of 8 hexagons also looks okay with the stripe running through the length of the hexagon.  In that instance, iron on the freezer paper with the hexagon points going horizontally instead of vertically.

The squares look best when you iron the freezer paper on to fussy cut them this way…  Once again, imagine that the stripe runs horizontally all the way across the fabric.  [This was the only fabric I could lay my hands on this afternoon that had any sort of stripe to show what I'm trying to explain.]

After the blocks were done, the design dilemma monster reared its head.  What to use for the border around each block?? The red and green in the Christmas fabric was hard to match.  For the tree skirt I ended up with some Fairy Frost Glitz fabric.

Uhm, no. This is just way more sparkle and glitz than I want to use here.  I did like the gold border framing the block though.

Much better.  I purchased some regular Fairy Frost in a gold and black when I was first trying to match the green and red so I used them.  It’ll be a table runner.  It measures approximately 11″ x 31″.

Not totally jazzed with the square sections all being different and wondering how this might look as a table topper, I played around in Paint Shop Pro.  I’m thinking I need to order a bit more of this fabric. The fabric is Holiday Flourish III Elegant Stripe Crimson by Peggy Toole.

The edges might look better in black only although I do like the design effect in 3 of the corners.  The center squares might be nicer surrounded by black much the way the original POTC looks.  More playing with Paint Shop Pro ensued.  Oh, and imagine that each block looks different here… [teehee]

A project for next year maybe…

I didn’t do this week’s Inklingo Sampler block and chose instead to do the bonus block that is posted twice a month.  I have Inklingo Collection #3 which is what is needed for the 6 pointed Star Hexagon.

Because I wanted this block to play nice with my others, I added the bits around the Star Hexagon so the block would measure 6″ square when finished.

I fell behind on my goal of 10 hexagon flowers a week for Field of Flowers but am now caught up to where I should be.  I’ll have to make another goal for sewing so many flowers together every week or resign myself to the fact that this top will take more than a year to complete. I have 150 flowers done although only about 25 are sewn together.

Don’t they look fun?  Ludo thought so too!

I’m Not Martha is a quilt that I challenged myself to put together for as little money as possible.  I managed to pull together enough fabrics for the 42 full hexagon diamonds and 8 half diamonds from my meager stash & swap & purchase the rest on sale for about $37.  I’ll make the backing from some of the larger pieces I have in my stash.

Originally I wanted to coordinate the sets so that I could have 7 of each of 6 different colors, but when you’re “making do with what you’ve got,” things don’t always work out like you hoped.  There wasn’t any way to put the fabrics together without mixing & matching colors.  So some diamonds are made with 2 colors — blue & yellow, purple & pink, etc.  And some of the fabrics aren’t as perfectly coordinated as I’d like either, but that’s also part of the “making do” thing.  You actually find yourself being more creative.  I needed 50 sets of fabrics so I mixed & matched as best I could.  (I keep telling myself that it will be part of its charm.)

I fell behind in February in my goal of making one diamond a week but got caught up in March to where I should be.  I managed to stay current in April.  I now have 15 of the 42 full size diamonds done.  That’s 375- 1.25″ hexagons!

This is a photo of my contribution to the Inklingo Projects Blog Giveaway called Welcome Spring! Naturally my sample isn’t finished yet — I need to quilt & bind it.  I hand pieced mine, but this can easily be sewn by machine.  I’ve sewn some of the Inklingo Drunkard’s Path curves by machine for another DP project I’m working on & I can say with confidence that they sew up very nicely by machine.

The winner of my giveaway will receive fabrics printed with the Drunkard’s Path pieces to  cut & sew to complete this 18″ x 18″ block.  It can then be used as a wall hanging or table topper.  I’m including the binding & complete instructions.  My LQS was out of the purple batik, however, so I purchased some pink for the giveaway.  Head on over to the Inklingo Projects Blog to sign up for the giveaways!  There are some other great projects being given away also.

I decided on this quilt [and on I'm Not Martha] to challenge myself to complete so many sets of flowers per week in hopes of having this quilt top together a year from now.  Hand piecing 10 flowers a week seems reasonable.  *smile*

The first ten flowers sewn together.

This is the reverse side showing the pressed seams. (My apologies for the blurry photos!)

These are pieced using a running stitch so the seams need to be pressed to lay flat.  I’m pressing as I go so that I don’t end up with an overwhelming ironing job at the end.

I’m house sitting for a week starting next weekend and I plan to do a bit of sewing while I’m there.  I won’t have computer access so I’m just going to enjoy my time working on quilting projects — sort of like a quilting retreat only I’ll be the only one there.  LOL   I’ve got the next 2 sets of 10 flowers for this quilt ready to be pieced.  I need to get a few more hexagons cut and marked for “my retreat.”