Romancing the Rose - A mile-marker finish :D

The Rose is without an explanation; She blooms, because She blooms.      

 - Angelus Silesius

I love this little quilt. Well, it's not particularly small - it's a perfect sofa cuddler.  :)

Everything about it makes me smile. Named after the Northcott charm pack that I had to buy when I only went into the shop for thread, I pieced the top back in 2009, mixing it with fabrics from my stash. I was really pleased with how it turned out.

Not wanting to ruin it with my then-nonexistent machine quilting skills, it hung on the rack for TWO WHOLE YEARS.  sheesh, already!!   ;D

So, when I needed a quilt to take to my appointment for practice time on the long arm machine last month, but had no time to piece a top, I decided to sacrifice my precious friend. 

My brain spun non-stop all through the night on how I wanted to do the quilting. Spent a fair bit of time the next day doodling on piles of printer paper until I knew exactly what type of design I wanted to go with. 

Figured Patty would get a chuckle out of my intent to do a custom job with separate borders rather than starting easy with an edge-to-edge, and she didn’t let me down. She laughed at me.   :)  Hey – if I’m always bringing complicated jobs for her to do for me, why should I go easy on myself?!  I ended up getting to learn how to turn the quilt after it was mostly quilted so I could keep the long border work intact.

The inner free-motion design that I developed turned out to be the BEST motif for a beginner!! It’s so forgiving! Seriously! The mistakes actually make it look even better, because roses are all different from each other, and petals do all kinds of things in real life  Now, this is my kind of thing!!  woohoo!  Why didn’t I try this AGES ago?  ;D

I found the heart-shaped ivy leaves in the dark green border to be easy and relaxing.

In the red rose border, the little chalk dots I had marked every however-many inches were the perfect aiming spots for the line of free-motion roses I wanted to do there. It did throw me for a bit of a loop to figure out how to run that pattern upside down when I got to the bottom, but orienting the doodle paper on the quilt next to my sewing area helped a lot. I managed. It came out just fine. 

Started out like these. . .

Ended up like these!

The one thing that did NOT come out just fine was the intended figure-8 scrolling in the double skinny border, next to the trellis pattern.  ummmmm.   yeah.   oh, my, that one was funny.  I just couldn’t get those to work! They got wider and wider and wider apart, 

and when I got to the bottom, I couldn’t remember how far apart they’d spread, so I made them EVEN WIDER from each other!  lolol  It was pitiful.  Got even funnier after I rotated the quilt to do the sides of the borders.  :D   I’ll have to chalk some spacer lines next time I try that motif.

Well, I did know up front that there was no way I was ready to try straight lines on the

longarm, let alone diagonal ones – and REALLY let alone a 1-inch crosshatching – 

So Patty let me take her cone of thread home to do that part with my walking foot on the tabletop machine. 

She even loaned me her handy-dandy crosshatch stencil to use with my Pouncer. Worked perfectly – it centered just right with minimal fudging. I thought it was really fun the way you just go around and around and around the quilt in a big zig-zag and the grid fills itself in as you keep going. . .   

(so easily entertained sometimes)

The back looks really fun. Well, until I looked at those seriously goofy loops again. . .    I was actually going to frog them out and redo that border set on the tabletop, but Scott said “No way” did he want to hear me whining about it the whole long time it would take.  (hehe) 

So I compromised and did some free-motion first aid:  I sewed more loopdy-loops on the yellow border to at least fill in all the crazy spaces. They’re fairly messy, but I do like it better than it was before. Patty laughed at me when I took the thread back and showed her my “fix.”   :D   Well, yeah – can’t let go of ALL the perfection over-obsession at once!  Maybe on Learning Piece #3. . .

So, finally – after two whole years – Romancing the Rose is quilted! Put the label on yesterday morning just in time for Show and Tell at guild, and this makes finish #14 of 2011~! I am excited.   :D

Check out the many incredibly creative quilts people are featuring at Amy's Quilt Festival, Spring 2011.  :D

My WIP Wednesday #7

Life continues to fly along in a blur!  My Heather is home again after a successful college freshman year. Drove 1700 miles in 48 hours to pick her up in St. Louis and scurry back down to Florida for her sister's high school graduation week. Current "Active Progress" is minimalized for anticipated Real-Life business.  :D


At the sofa sewing station (where hand work happens in the evenings while I watch a show with Scott), Romancing the Rose will finally get its label and become 2011 finish #14. 

At the piecing station (where my cheap-o Singer reigns supreme at that task), my Flying Needles and Swap Adventure BOMs will materialize.

At Saphira's station (the expensiver Husqvarna machine used for quilting and fancy stitching), Katie Loves Chris will *finally* get finished.


This quilt was made for my youngest sister's wedding since Grandma could not make one for them, having passed away not long before. I purposefully chose a traditional style that was typical of quilts created during Grandma's heyday of quilting. Got it pieced in a timely fashion, as well as the straight-line quilting on the patchwork areas, but the free-motion quilting I wanted to do in the Sunbonnet Sue blocks INTIMIDATED me!!! I'm feeling confident enough and have let go of the demand for pure perfection, so now it's up for immediate attention. We won't mention how long ago the wedding was. . .!


This week's stats:
New Projects - 0 
        (Soo very good, and believe me I've been TEMPTED this week with awesome sales! Plus, according to my UFO-buster plan, I am allowed to start a new project as a reward for finishing 6 from the list. I'm saving this allowance for a quilt for my cousin's wedding - he's getting married in THREE days!!! Got a great design idea, modern style, gelling in my mind.)
Completed Projects This Week - 6 
        (Poor Forgotten Orphan from 15 years ago #2 became 3 quilts for Bama Bound Quilts tornado relief, and 3 totes for the quilts.)
In Active Progress - 3 
        (Charming Love, Devon's Owls, Katie Loves Chris)
UFO Firing Range - 32.667 (-1)
Finishes for 2011 - 13  

Completed tops awaiting quilting:
Two charity wheelchair quilts
Katie Loves Chris
Dreamy Unicorns
Trip Around the World with Mr. Hernandez (Mr. Hernandez's)
Trip Around the World with Mr. Hernandez (Heather's)
Be Attitudes
We Love Kelly
Sailing with the Flying Needles
Wagon Wheels West #2
Devon's Silk Spinners
Marissa's Minky Squares
Kelly's Thirties Hand Quilter
Kelly's Calico
Leap Frog Lily Pond
Poor Forgotten Orphan from 15 Years Ago #1

Bama Bound 1, 2, and 3 are Ready to Go!

Yay!  6 finishes to add to 2011 - all unexpected projects, but everything came out of my stash (except the little stuffed friends) and one item came off my insane UFO list that would have undoubtedly been there until 2012. 

I sure wish I hadn't had occasion to drop my other projects and do this one, but too many families due north of us lost their homes to the Alabama tornadoes. I was more than happy to help Bama Bound Quilts.  (Please check them out, and pass the word along if you can.)

You know, the trouble with getting the camera to read colors correctly just drives me nuts. I have to admit, it's rather interesting, because it's different in different lightings, as well as from fabric to fabric. For example, this may be the only photo in which the purple fleece on the back of that center quilt actually looks the way it does. The purple in the flannel, though - in reality, it's the same as the darker purple in the floral pocket accents, which look pretty close to true life in this picture. Weird.

The totes turned out so cute, I'm going to have to make one for our house, too. The outer shell is flannel, lined completely with a black twill. Pretty sure there's enough of both fabrics left to do one up.

 

These 3 quilts all came from a UFO that was at least 15 years old. I'd found it - lost and forgotten - in a plastic bag in an obscure closet corner when I made my Clean Sweep Round-Up in January. 

Two are baby/toddler size, and while the last one is too small as far as a bed cover or play mat go, it's the perfect size for a toddler/preschooler to carry around and snuggle with. So I'm sending it as well. They all have either fleece or flannel backs, for maximum coziness and tactile delight. 

I'm pretty certain that the UFO happily underwent the pains of the seam ripper, now that it gets to go snuggle with not just one person, but three little girls who will hopefully get a little comfort out of an unknown friend's efforts. 

Oh - and I love labels so much - found this free label graphic somewhere online and thought it worked PERFECTLY with these quilts. Thank you to everyone who shares such files - they make the world a better place.  :)