Let me see if I can get back in the groove with my blog - still dealing with lingering Lupus flare issues after the fire stress, but I've almost got my days back to normal operating mode. :)
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.
My planned NewFO for June was to do something with one of the fabrics my daughter gave me for Mother's Day. I developed this design on my EQ6, and have made decent progress on it.
The center is finished. Everything other than the fun Owls Devon gave me comes out of stash for this project. It's fun to meet the challenge this year of only working with what I already have.
And I have the plumes appliqued on one border strip. I just hate this method - ha!! I wanted turned-under edges, but have too much hand-stitching lined up right now, so I wanted to run these through the machine. So I'm doing the freezer-paper thing where you starch and iron under the seam allowance. Gahhhh!!!! It's so slow and cumbersome. I know many folks love this method, and that's super cool - I'm just a dyed-in-the-wool true-blue back-baster, and all this fussy prep drives me nuts. ;D I like the end result, though, so I'll push through the muck until I have this finished to flimsy stage.
Heather and I had - what - - 5 days of sitting at Flee Status, anticipating evacuation orders and holding our breath while we watched the daily winds blow at us from the fire. That was far too stressful a time to do any of the intense FMQ work that was my priority job for the month, and my hands were way too micro-jittery to hand stitch. So I pulled two more NewFO's out of deep storage, washed and dried their fabrics, and once we were out of real danger but still too stressed to do close work, I cut them all out and kitted them up for later attention.
Chubby Chicks wasn't blue (sick of working with it so much lately), wasn't hard to do, and Heather and I fused the bodies to the blocks. This is as far as it went, and it'll be many months, I'm sure, before I pull this back out.
Another one intended to long-term marinate: Tuscany Terrace, so we'll have a second quilt large enough for our bed. Whenever I get to it for actual sewing, it'll feel like it's flying through the piecing - despite being king size - since it's already all cut out. :)
It's been a good 7 weeks since I've had time to do a WIP post, and everything's rotated at my stations since then.
FMQ Station:
Putting in some great time on "Run, Kitty, Run!" This one's going to be a real fun mix of classic and whimsy. I finished all the feathers a few days ago and have been working on the shoe prints. One day I'll write a finish post and you'll understand how it all comes together.
I have 14 prints to stitch in, and they're pretty darned intricate. It takes way too long to trace out for marking them by pen. I considered making a stencil and chalking them on, but there's so much handling that I was sure the chalk would be rubbed off by the time I was halfway through the various treads. So I decided to go with the Golden Threads technique.
After printing out the scan of the shoe bottom, I traced the outlines with a sharpie. . .
. . . so that I could flip it over and retrace them on the clean side. After cutting the shoe out, I sadly noted that it was just a bit too big at life size to fit aesthetically in my white bands. So I reduced it to 90%.
I cut out 14 pieces of Golden Threads paper, layered them and stapled them carefully at the corners, and then lightly glue-sticked the prepped shoe print on top.
I stitched through the entire layer with a threadless machine (no problem at all with that many in the stack - the paper is somewhere between the consistency of gift tissue and waxed paper).
And then I had 14 stencils ready to be pinned onto the quilt. . .
. . . and stitched over.
Sometimes little details get very important to me - like not having tons of travel-lines from stitching these out continuously. The prints are already so busy, I didn't want travel lines messing with the clarity of the image. Sooooo. . . I stop and start with each element of the print. And I also have never been able to do any machine-knotting, back-stitching, or tiny-stitching that has been neat enough and durable enough for my satisfaction, which means. . .
. . . with each shoe print, I have 58 pairs of thread tails to knot and tuck. Times 14. That's 812 pairs altogether. Maybe I didn't want to know that~!
I have 5 prints finished.
Hand Stitching Station:
Wow! Now that we're back to our normal schedule and actually watching a show after dinner each evening, I'm really making good headway on the binding for the second Dragonfly Party quilt! This is the one quilted by Judi of Green Fairy, and I only have 1/8th left to go!! Photo Op coming soon - woohoo~!!!
Piecing Station:
This station has like zero priority right now, but quilting in those shoe prints gets super intense, so every now and then I just need a break. I worked up a plan for the owl fabric Devon gave me after totally destroying my stash room (still haven't fixed it), and have been slowly making bits of headway on that flimsy.
I wanted those rounded corners, but they're too small to fuss with by piecing, so I just do these by machine applique. I press under the edges, glue it down on the next layer with a washable school glue stick, and stitch it with a tiny button-hole stitch. Then I trim out the back to keep a nice drape. Now I'm gluing the blocks onto the center field. It's a fun project in a completely new colorway, and that's quite refreshing!
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