Testing, Testing

Practice makes perfect right? Well, I figured at least it couldn't hurt. Before launching into the challenge of FMQ my Penny Patch quilt, I decided to do a little test project.

I was browsing around on Pinterest and came across this little cutie: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/238831586462998727/

I decided this was exactly the project I needed to tackle to practice my FMQ. Bigger than a coaster, but not to the level of making another quilt.

It always amazes me how much patchwork "shrinks" as you sew it!

I will admit that I did not buy this pattern. I know right. I feel guilty about it, but that is one of those things about quilting. You get good at looking at a pattern and being able to see what it took to put it together. Especially if it is something classic like squares or half square triangles. Also, there are a lot of free tutorials out there on quilted drawstring bags. . . so, yeah. How do you decide if you should purchase a pattern or not? I would love to hear others thoughts on this one.

Here are the tools I used to come up with my "pattern."

• Looked at the finished dimensions listed on the pattern. I decided that seemed like a good size and figured up how many finished 1.5" squares I would need to get close. It was important to me to do the quilting on the EXACT same scale that I would be doing for the Penny Patch quilt. So, even if I had purchased the pattern, I likely would have needed to adjust it anyway, but I rationalize.
• Used a free tutorial from Pink Penguin on how to create the casing on the top. I ended up needing to make the strip bigger to accommodate my larger cording, but otherwise was able to follow the directions in their entirety.
• Went to my go-to bag book: The Bag Making Bible for the instructions on installing the flush zipper. I have used these instructions quite a few times but never seem to be able to remember all the steps without looking them up.
• Followed the directions that came with my grommets.
• Looked at a similar drawstring bag I have in the house to figure out the amount of cording I needed. In the end, it as mostly a guess so I hedged my bets and over bought. Many thanks to the Husband who helped me figure out how I needed to insert the cording so the bag would actually cinch. I was nowhere on that one.

And TA DA! A cutie patootie little bag!

Now don't get me wrong, there are some downright ugly flowers on this bag. The FMQ definitely took practice and getting used to, but by end, I was pretty happy with how my little flowers were turning out.

I intended for this to double as a scrap busting project so I went to work digging through my enormous scrap bin. BUT I was so inspired by the color palette of three little scraps, that I ended up at Fabric Depot. I was able to use scraps for the lining of both the inside of the bag and the pocket, so it wasn't a complete scrap failure. I am glad that I went for it though. I absolutely love how it turned out! And to top it all off, it really was great practice before diving into my Penny Patch.

After careful consideration of the "ugly" flowers on the back of the bag, I decided this bag was just too cute to languish around my house so I have listed it for sale in my Etsy shop. Check it out!

Tackling the BEAST

The Biggest of them All

Remember this UFO?

A twin size quilt for Brother. I have been pretty intimidated by idea of quilting this at home. I toyed with the idea of renting time on a local long arm machine, but decided I am too cheap and too busy to make that work.

After a lot of the usual hymning and hawing, I decided to keep it simple just do straight line quilting.

I pin based half of the quilt and spray basted the other half. I figured that if the spray worked out well, after I quilted that half, I could take the pins and out and spray the other half. That way at least half of the beast would be fully secured at any given time.

I'm not going to lie, this is A LOT of quilt to wrangle. I moved my machine as far over and as far forward on the desk as I could to allow for maximum work space.

The first bit in the very middle was the hardest. After that, it got quite a bit easier and I hardly noticed the giantness of the quilt. I did a full 3.5 hours and finished half of the quilting!!!

The rest didn't go quite as quickly, but I was excited to get this done and managed to find time here and there to get it all finished up. All that is left now, binding the beast. I have the fabric and plan to machine stitch and finish with a zig zag as opposed to hand stitching. I know that this quilt will need to endure a lot of washing so I want it to be extra durable.

The quilty goodness.

Hopefully this will be a finish very soon, but there are a few other projects out there distracting me. . .

Fireworks: A New Project

Challenges

At this point in my quilting career, I feel like I have kept my projects pretty safe and straightforward, playing more with color than shape. The first real tricky project that I tackled was my Hopscotch quilt and we all know, that even though I won the round with the quilt top, I still have yet to do battle with the quilting :)

One project that I knew would be challenging, but caught my eye nonetheless, was another pattern by Camille Roskelley, Fireworks.

The only change I planned to make to the pattern was to make it smaller. Oddly, I have this thing against square quilts. To me, blankets should not be square, they should be rectangles. So there. I planned to make only 12 blocks so the quilt would be three blocks wide and four blocks tall.

My fabric choice also came to me right away. I wanted to use Denyse Schmidt's Chicopee collection. I had a full set of fat quarters stashed away for just the right project!

A Family Affair

I had the pleasure of traveling to Upstate New York for work. That just happens to be where my extended family is from, so I snuck in a little visit. My aunt Anna is an accomplished quilter and I knew she was just the person to help me tackle this challenge, so I made sure to pack my fat quarters and pattern in my suitcase.

My cousin and I headed over to my aunt's place and enjoyed a lovely afternoon of chit chat and sewing. At the end I had a completed quilt square! Not bad! These are by far the best flying geese I have put together and almost all the points look great. Color me pleased.

My first fireworks block.

Languish

As I shared in my Penny Patch post, I am not really a fan of the whole cutting part of quilting. At my aunt's, to keep things simple, I had only cut out what I needed to make the above block. On top of not wanting to tackle the amount of cutting involved in making 11 more quilt blocks containing 73 pieces each, I was struggling with my design choice. What were the best fabrics to put together in each block? Should I only use one of the color ways in the collection, or both as I had planned? Was the grey background going to make the quilt look dull? So I pondered and mulled and occasionally pulled the the fabrics out to see if I could come up with something that would make me happy.

At long last I decided that I wanted to continue to tackle this challenge. I thought the best way to get my mojo going was to make some progress. What feels like progress? More blocks! Here is my second block.

My second block.

Buoyed on, I finalized my fabric combinations and got all the patterned pieces cut out.

The rest of the color and pattern combinations

Now all I need to do is cut out all the background fabric. Not a small task. I don't want to let this one languish too much longer, but I do have a few other things on top of my list to finish before I continue this challenge. At least now I am excited to see it come together!

Penny Patch: Work in Progress

Following Along

When I first saw Rachel's Penny Patch quilt and that she was offering a quilt along, I was very excited. I loved the original quilt (pictured below) and the coincidentally the colors she chose for the QAL were the same ones I had in mind when I thought of making my own :)

I quickly purchased fabric, of course, the easy and fun part! This time I was even a good girl and used several prints from my stash. Then like so many other things, it sat and waited for me to have time and the desire to tackle the cutting. I have come to realize that cutting is one of my least favorite parts of the process. I do my best to power through all the cutting in one fell swoop knowing that if I don't, it could be a long while before I am willing to do it again. 

Cutting

This meant that long after the QAL was over, I set out to cut out my fabric. This was MUCH trickier than I anticipated in terms of cutting the right number of fabrics in the right colors and right sizes. I kept my laptop handy and referred often to the instructions. The process was tedious and it took me an ENTIRE Saturday. I kid you not. I wanted so badly to start sewing things together, but it was just too darn late.

Penny Patches

Next it was time to sew together the penny patches. Since you actually sew strips and then cut them down, it meant that I had to put my penny patches together BEFORE I could lay the quilt out and see what I wanted to put together. Boo erns.

Another confession, I am very OCD about my quilt layouts. I put everything out on the dining room floor and crawl around on my hands and knees swapping little pieces here and there until everything is just so. I have tried being more loosey goosey about it, but it just makes me nuts and I end up ripping things out, and going through the tedious layout process anyway.

But in this case, there wasn't much of choice, I put together fabrics I liked and got sewing.  With that done, I could finally lay out the quilt. Yay!

Layout Attempt #1

Hmm. It looked like nothing but a hot mess to me. Does anyone else agree? The first time I laid everything out, I paid no attention to what direction the darker value fabrics were going on the larger four patch squares, only the penny patches. It just made everything "frustrating" looking. Despite the cohesive color scheme, nothing really looked like it belonged together and it felt like the quilt was fighting with itself.  Defeated, I put everything back in a giant pile and went and had a glass of wine.

Layout #2

To minimize the messiness of the ba-jillion pieces, I made the un-me like decision to sew the larger four patches together before laying the quilt out again. I was nervous, but feeling cautiously optimistic. This time when I laid the pieces out, I made sure that the darkest values were all going the same direction. I also did a better job of dispersing my low volume prints throughout the quilt. This was also partly due to my pre-sewn pieces.

I'm not sure if you can tell the difference between the two, but I sure could. I was much happier with this second layout.

And then . . .

I sewed it all up! Since I was very wary of pieces getting out of place in my carefully constructed layout, I sewed the rows together straight across instead of putting the little penny patch squares together before constructing the rows. It made the process a bit slower, but I was more comfortable with it.

I was so excited that I snapped a photo a few rows in!

Voila! My penny patch quilt top!

FMQ, eek!

Yep, that's right folks, my plan is to free motion quilt this one. It will be my first. I am buoyed by the fact that the pattern is very deliberate. I don't have to try and fill in space creatively and hope it all works out. Rachel put a great tutorial together on the dogwood quilting pattern, to compliment the original one from Elizabeth.

Wish me luck.

Curio Hourglass Quilt: A Finish

The Beginning

I went out to Holly Hill Quilt Shoppe with mom for the first time quite a while ago and they had a collection from BasicGrey that I had not seen before, Curio. I loved the yellows in it and definitely wanted to add this collection to my stash.

There wasn't a lot left yardage wise, so I decided to pick up a layer cake. When I was browsing around on Pinterest, I cam across this quilt complete with video tutorial. Perfect! Over at Fabric Depot, I picked up some white from the Moda Grunge line for my neutral because I liked the way it complimented the collection.

The process didn't go as fast as I thought it would but all in all wasn't too bad.  Before long I had a completed quilt top.

The backing went together easily and I am quite pleased with the print I ended up with the main part. It has a tiny script on it but reads mostly solid without being boring. I also used up the rest of the layer cake squares to add some interest. And let's face it, what do you do with random left over pre-cuts? I mean, throw them in the scrap box for sure, but I always struggle with how to use them. Though, I am getting better at this thanks to all the scrappy inspiration out there in blogland.

Crappy photo trying to get a feel for how the back would look.

Let the Madness Begin

I knew that I wanted to keep the quilting simple and planned to just outline each of the hourglass shapes on either side. I picked out a medium colored brown Aurafil thread and set to work. This is where things got crazy and this quilt started it's journey to the long wait in the UFO pile.

As I was quilting, I felt like my stitches were bunching up strangely, but there weren't any wrinkles or puckers in the fabric, so I forged on. The quilting was going quite quickly so it was when I was OVER half done that I got the bright idea to give the stitches a little tug. I instantly heard, SNAP! POP! and thought, NoNoNoNoNo!  Yep, the thread broke, in many places. I kept tugging. It kept popping. It was painful, but I knew the quilt wasn't viable as it was. I still have no idea what caused it. The thread, the machine tension, the batting (which was a new kind for me)?

To the UFO pile it goes. I needed to pull out nearly ALL the stitches and start over. I had no idea when I would get around that unpleasant task.

One day when I was thinking I wanted to do nothing but watch TV and feeling guilty about it, I decided the pull the quilt out and rip stitches while keeping an eye on what Castle and Beckett where up to. It wasn't quite as painful as I had imagined, though it did take a good long while.

Back at It

After another good long wait in the UFO pile, I was ready to give the quilting another shot. I hadn't done any re-pinning or anything after the pulling the stitches out. I loaded the same thread into the same machine and set about my business. It all went beautifully. Before I knew it, I was done and the quilt was ready for binding!

Without procrastination, I went and cut out my binding, sewed it together, pressed it and got it sewn onto the quilt. I am on a roll!

To continue my progress, I made the gutsy decision to take the quilt with me to the agility trial that weekend. There is a fair amount of down time, but it isn't the cleanest place to take a not-yet-finished quilt. I managed to get half the binding hand sewn over the weekend without incident.

I was on a roll! It didn't take very to finish the sewing the binding and just like that, I had a finished quilt that I was darn pleased with! So far, I managed to keep it from mother's clutches and have it listed in my Etsy shop. SOLD!

Low Volume Loveliness Complete!

Let's start back where we left off shall we?  I talked about my low volume quilt here and here.  The verdict...

I love it!

I love this quilt.  It came out perfect.  I may have almost cried a few times during the process when I was pretty sure that I ruined it, but in the end, I am over the moon happy with it!

Quilting

This was decidedly harder.  I really like straight line quilting and the texture it adds to a quilt but I didn't want straight straight lines, you know what I mean?  I don't remember if I saw something that inspired me (probably) but I ended up playing with the idea of curved straight lines and a ripple effect.  I just kept drawing different things until I hit on a combination that I liked.  Check.


Now how to execute that?

I numbered the ripples in the order that I drew them and then started with the first one.  I used to plate to get a nice curve and then quilted that line first, then the ones inside of that.  Next, I quilted bigger and bigger circles until I was where I wanted that ripple to end.  Now comes the part where I ran into trouble.  My second biggest ripple was at the other end of the quilt and even though I spray basted, I didn't feel like I got a great "lock" on all the layers. So when I started quilting the second ripple, I just knew that I was going to end up with a bunching and puckering in the middle. NOOOO!!!  Not on this quilt! This quilt that I already loved, that I hard worked so hard on, that I had used precious scrap fabrics for!!!!  At this point, I am trying not to cry.  The husband looks confused, but knows enough to just tells me it will all be okay.

Okay, regroup.  Deep breath.  How was I going to fix this?

I marked where I wanted my curves to end for big ripple at the other end.  Then I went back to the side of the quilt I started with and began to fill things in based on my pattern.  I did  A LOT of smoothing and tugging, but in the end, there was only one teensy little pucker.  A huge sigh of relief.

Binding

So for once, I knew exactly what I wanted to bind my quilt with, black and white stripes.  I have seen both Rachel and Rita do this with low volume quilts and love the look.  Trouble was, I couldn't find any!  I even made a comment on one of Rachel's blog posts, to which she kindly responded, unfortunately to say, she had no idea where she had gotten it!  Hmmm.

I headed out to trusty and giant Fabric Depot to find something.  I came home with a mostly black print with white script text.  I was feeling good.  It got the binding cut and sewed on.  I was feeling less good.  It was SO black.  But since this is how my creative process tends to go:

I forged on with the hand stitching.  I think I was about halfway through when I just couldn't take it anymore.  I didn't like it, AT. ALL.  Let the ripping commence.  And the hunt for something new.  I was down in Eugene visiting my dad so I went to a local store there.  It's a tiny little place but has a decent selection of quilting cottons.  I found this checkered pattern and decided that it had the element I was really looking for: equal parts of black and white.

Round 2 of binding went smoothly and Voila!

Love!

It makes me happy every time I see it at my desk and even happier when I pull it onto my lap, over my shoulders or drag it into a meeting room! Oh like right now :)

MIA - Mired Intensely in Agility

Oh, hi there!

I have been MIA for sure.  What have I been up to you ask?

Some sewing, though not recently, which is an entire saga of its own. However, I have made some progress that I do want to share since there are a few exiting things in that mix.

But mostly, it has been me and main man Dexter tearing it up in agility.  While this isn't a blog about the sport of dog agility, it is what I have been spending most of my time on, so bear with me.

I started in the sport of dog agility a little over four years ago.  I had seen a few competitions on TV and thought it was just. so. COOL.  How can I get my dog to do that?!  I had wanted to take a class ever since I got Maddie, but was in college and really, just a complete chicken.  Plus, the internet was still taking shape and random, small groups of enthusiasts were not always easy to find.

Anywho, when Dexter was two, I decided that I needed to just give it a whirl.  Maddie was already getting older and Dexter was so shy, that I thought it would be a good confidence booster for him (I was right).  After about the second class, I was completely hooked.  Fast forward four years.  I have been teaching a Foundation class for over a year now, got talked into being the secretary of the club board (even though I am not very good at it) and Dexter and I are solidly in the Intermediate level in competition.

What does agility look like?

Well, if you are Dexter, it looks pretty darn good :)

Photo by Joe Camp

Here is a video of a standard course we ran this past January:

Standard courses contain all of the different pieces of equipment and are done in a pre-determined order.  Pretty much anything that goes wrong (dropped bar, off course, missed contact) disqualifies you.  The other question I get a lot about agility competition is if the course is always the same.  The short answer is no.  You get a course map at the beginning of the day that you can look at and then you get about seven minutes to walk through the course (without your dog) and plan how you are going to tell them where to go.

Here is a Grand Prix course we ran in April.  The fact that Dexter jumps off the dog walk before touching the yellow (missed contact) disqualifies us, but other than that, this is a pretty good run.

There are other types of games in agility.  Rather than run down a list, I will just tell you about one of my favorites, Jumpers.

Jumpers is just jumps and tunnels. It really tests the handlers skill at getting the dog around the course in the right order.  It also doesn't have pesky things like contacts :)  For a little laugh at my expense, here is our Jumpers run from the same trial as the above Grand Prix run.  These two runs occurred about ten minutes apart and only had about a minute to walk through the course.  You may notice that I completely disconnect from dog to look at the cones and read the numbers!  Oh and I almost do a full-on face plant, that was fun.

Here is a much prettier Elite run from ASCA this January:

Yes, it was VERY cold.

When do you do all of this?

On weekends of course!  And they take all weekend.  Most trials start at 8 am and you want to arrive onsite about a half hour to 45 minutes before hand.  Some venues (like the one with the blue background) require travel and hotel stay.  Others are about an hour away and we just drive each morning.  Which is to say, we get up REALLY early.  We generally get home around five or six unless we have traveled far and wide.  We like to cap of the weekend with a few beers at our favorite local watering hole, Laurelwood, and then go home and do nothing.  Between weekend competitions, the class I teach, the class I take and the practice time in the barn, agility takes most, if not all, of my free time.

Just one more run, please!

How do you manage all of this?

I would be remiss if I didn't mention in this post that I have the most awesome, incredible husband of all time. I don't know what I would do without him.  He loads the car, sets up our crating area, takes all the video, makes sure I am where I need to be and is always there to "catch" my dog if I have to sprint across the arena to try and make a walk through as in the above mentioned scenario.  He does many jobs as an agility support spouse but I think most importantly he reminds me that whether we (meaning me) fall our face or take first place, we are loved and supported and that is a wonderful thing.

Buddy excellently performing the job of "dog holder"