When A Quilt Wants to Dance ~Flimsy Alert!~

Whoop! Whoop!  

My "Set Sail" quilt top is Aliiiive!

If you were a quilt center that had been hanging sadly in your maker's Flimsy Closet for just one week shy of four years (even though you were one of her very favorites). . .

Aug 7, 2013, before this closet came
to hold 37 flimsies by the time that I bought
my longarm machine 2 months ago!

. . . you would dance around, too, when she got down to business and added all your borders! 

152 flying geese and several long border pieces later, it's a finished king size flimsy! 

We hurried to catch a photo before today's thunderstorm moved in. Light was fading fast and I felt a drop when this baby finally said, "Whew. I'm finished now."  (dancing, that is)

The pattern is in the Fall/Winter 2008 "Quilt Sampler" magazine, and the designer is Sandy Perdue. I purchased a personalized kit from Quilting By the Bay back in 2010 with enough extra yardage to convert it to the king size. (The original pattern doesn't have the geese along the sides.)

I'll be doing some custom quilting on this, and while I'd love nothing more than to load it onto my still-new longarm and get right to work on that, I need to practice my skill level up just a bit more to be entirely happy with the result. So I have two other tops that will go through first. But I am determined to have this on my bed before August ends!

P.S. This kind of work has gone on solidly for the last several months without any recording, so hopefully I have my act back together enough to put more than BOM work on my blog again. It's been a bit isolating to not share things regularly, but it's been all I could do to recover from that super pernicious Lupus flare that hit all through Jan/Feb/Mar and then not only get back up to my normal speed in Taekwondo, but to start ramping things up several notches as Marissa and I enter the final approach to earning our blackbelts. Exciting times!

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Linking up at 

Sarah's Whoop Whoop Fridays 

WIPs - Sail, Jane, 1930s, Monkeys

Changes at my stations:

Piecing:

Finished the entire inside of "Set Sail" and got the first border attached to protect all those seam ends:

And now it's safely hanging with the other flimsies until I pull it back out to make all those flying geese for the next border.

So the undercarriage is thoroughly cleaned, thread changed, and "Rainbow Jane" is well on her way to being assembled:

Hand Work:

Kelly only had about 18 inches left to hand quilt on her 1930s project. She'd had it on a big frame, which I don't have. I needed to problem-solve how to keep it at the same "tightness" she'd had and be able to use a lap hoop during evening TV times. 

So I secured the backing to the floor and pin basted the remaining looseness. 

I'm thinking I'll remove the ones that get in the way of the hoop rim when I put it in. Hopefully this will let me finish the quilt for her without a huge show of style/set-up difference. The busy print in the border will be hugely forgiving, I know.  :)

FMQ:

And now that Heather's into the free-motion portion of her Dragons and the Sapphire is set up the same way I need it, I can get back to finishing up Devon's Earth Monkeys when Heather's not at the machine. Have to settle on the plan to do that, though.  I pulled out some of my acrylic boards and played with sashiko motifs. Dev and I still don't know which we like best, so it's all sitting out on the pool table for a couple days while we get different looks at it all and make up our minds.  

Check out the difference in appearance when you make the guide grid just 1/4" smaller!

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Linking up at

Lee's WIP

Esther's WOW

July NewFO - "Set Sail"

Love Barbara's NewFO parties each month, and they're really helping me get these kits pulled out of stone-cold status and on their way to becoming quilts before my youngest is out of high school.  ;D  Lots of other fun projects emerging, so take a fun breakfast stroll through the other links.

July's NewFO plan was to pull Quilting By the Bay's "Set Sail" kit out of the NETY storage and get it going. And although I've been inundated with blue/white projects this year, this one still floated my boat for a summer UFO focus, so I stuck with the plan. I'm super happy with how far I managed to push this one.

The center row is finished! That's 72 inches so far. It'll be 102" square when it's complete. Even though it'll bleed into August, I want to finish the center field and encase it in the yellow stop-borders to protect all the seam ends from ravelling before I put it away to start on August's NewFO. Besides, being my birthday month, this is the one time this year I get to go SHOPPING!!!!  woohoo! So I don't yet have a projection for August's slot.  


I have 14 more base blocks to assemble, then I can put together the two side panels for the center. 





When it's finished, it'll look like this, except that there was enough fabric for me to add the flying geese on the other sides so that this will be a good size for our king bed:

I had to make 448 HSTs for this sucker.

Fastest way around to do that many with perfect accuracy is to pin the paper pattern to right-sides-together pieces of fabric and sew through all the layers. I cut the fabric pieces with only 3/16 inch leeway around the edges, and it really conserves fabric for you.

Bump your stitch length one notch smaller and tighten the tension a smidge, and you're good to go ZOOMING along the dotted lines.

After you've done that, lay a few out on your cutting mat and slice them all apart on the solid lines. Then watch a fun show while you pop the papers off (which takes far less time on a collection like this than it would take you to size the HSTs after pressing).  

You can get various Triangles-on-a-Roll papers (a nice variety available as you can see at their site - ooo! and a product like Golden Threads paper, too - I have to check that out!) or you can print out HST patterns at Block Central or Quilting and Whatnot (just be CERTAIN your printer is not set to "fit-to-paper"!!)

Not sure when I'll pull this out again and tackle the geese. I should have planned on doing those in the paper-piecing style for less intense work, but I was so focused on cutting the whole quilt out to kit it up for marination after this month's work that I just cut them all out for the 4-in-1 method.  Well, it's probably best that I did that, because although I'm super comfortable now with the paper-piecing method, and am pretty darn good at cutting pieces with minimal fabric waste, there's still a larger margin needed than the 4-in-1, and that wouldn't have let me eke out enough to add the extra sides of geese. So I guess it's all good.  :D

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You should browse through the link-up party at Barbara's - folks have got some super cool NewFO projects going!

And there's more fun at Lee's WIP Wednesday link-up!