54 & Counting

One more birthday before retiring. Working is interfering with my quilting - there ought to be a law. Time is running out to finish Global Girls. I have a feeling that I'll be busy Sunday stitching & pressing. A few folks are coming over for my Minus -1 Anniversary of Retirment party. That means that cleaning and straightening take precedence.

Just Back from Baltimore

Quilting got put on hold so I could take a trip to Baltimore. It was a productive and enjoyable trip although there is no place like home. It was great to be greeted by my adorable husband at the airport. I sure am glad that I don't have to travel often.

I plan to get back to piecing my Global Girls quilt tomorrow night. Of the 10 seams between rows, I have finished 3. The pressing is challenging since I'm feathering the seams.

I'll include some more pictures soon.

Piecing Continues

Yesterday's work ended when I realized that I skipped the first two rows when I was attaching the last set of pieces. Ugh! That's what happens when you work longer than you should.

Tonight I fixed that and started on stitching the rows together. The sewing was easy except for a couple of folded seams. I pulled a few stitches and fixed them. Then it was on to the ironing board. Ugh again. Fanning the narrow seams takes a lot of patience. I got two seams done but at least now you can see what I'm making.

Some of the red border of the 'girls' shows. My fault when I cut them out. I didn't pay enough attention to the edges. I paid attention to getting the 'girls' oriented. I know it deters from the quality but since this is my first quilt, I'm more concerned with the quality of the workmanship in the stitching and pressing than in the cutting. I know what I did wrong and it's been my motto for as long as I remember to not make the same mistake twice. So I'll go on from here with an extremely important lesson learned.

The Global Girls was not a good choice for this quilt top without adjusting the size of the squares. Overall I'm well pleased though. I find it hard to believe that only a few short weeks ago I wouldn't have believed that I would have gotten this far so quickly.

I think I'm going to love this quilt because of its flaws as much as anything. Hopefully, I'll have more to report tomorrow.

251 Working Days Left

I don't want you to think that I'm obsessed with retirement but I do wish I were in New Hampshire now. Florida is much too hot and way too full of people. I'm really looking forward to the quiet and the chance to observe nature. It will be a joy to be so much more connected to the world. I promise not to label all of my posts with the number of days I have left to work.

Tonight I am working on piecing the Global Girl quilt. I have 4 of the nine sets of pieces chain stitched together. It's all rather intense to sit there and carefully set the next piece on and watch the fabric feed through. Then comes the joy of pressing. Definitely not my favorite part. It gets better once I've pressed the seams over and can use the spray starch.

No pictures tonight. I'll post some more after I have all of the piecing finished - might be tonight but probably tomorrow.

252 Working Days Left

I'm planning to retire next year. To prepare, I started going through my hoard of craft kits and supplies. I'll be moving to a house that is only a third the size of my current one. Some stuff was easy to thin. Other items I am emotionally attached to - so I decided to use eBay to simplify things and make sure my items found good homes. The problem was that I got attracted to all of the beautiful fabric available online.

The right thing I did was to get Harriet & Carrie Hargrave's Freshmen Year of Quilter's Academy. I've also gotten Harriet's 'Heirloom Machine Quilting', 'From Fiber to Fabric' and 'Mastering Machine Applique'. I've read the first of these so I'd know how to do the quilting for the projects in the Academy.

Now that you've got a little perspective on where I'm coming from, let me tell you about my progress so far. I've read through the entire Freshman curriculum. I've working on two quilt tops so far and have been building my fabric stash. I've also gotten some new feet for my sewing machine and other assorted tools. I'll talk about some of them in later posts.

I've started the Sampler that gets finished in Sophomore Year. I'm not a fan of blue so I changed the color scheme. Blue became green and white became cream. Here is what I have so far.

The solids are Bella Solids Moda Cactus and Fig Tree Cream. The print is Little Darlings Little Quilts Cream Floral. I am extremely impressed with how easy this was and how great it came out so far. My seams matched up perfectly and all of the measures were spot on. I use a piece of colored tape as my guide to stitch the 1/4" for the strip sets until I got a new 1/4" foot with a built-in guide. 

The new foot is much easier to keep my eyes on than the tape. I'll remove the tape eventually although I can almost hear Harriet saying that I should remove it now so I don't lose focus when I'm feeding fabric.

The biggest lesson I've learned so far is to take my time and not to be afraid of using spray starch. I've never used it before and I'm really loving how it crisps everything up so that the pressing stays the way you want it. It also makes it so much easy to feed the fabric.

The picture below is of part of a quilt top I pieces. It's from 3's company with Thimbleberries fabric. It is a cheater in that the appliqued designs are printed on the fabric. I got this kit before I got Freshman Year. It will be a pretty lap quilt or wall hanging when it is complete.

This is the picture on the instruction sheet. The colors are very light and don't do the fabric justice. I'll update with more pictures as this one progresses.

For full disclosure I also bought Summer's Basket of Flowers that uses cheater fabrics too. I haven't done anything with it yet.

My other project I have started for the Freshman Year is my version of Cowboy's Corral. I had purchased a piece of Michael Miller's Global Girls. I just love the pictures but the red background I found really ugly. The girls are about 5" square so I decided to fuzzy cut them. Unfortunately, the fabric only had 49 girls so I am swapping the strip sets and girls and using 50 pieced blocks and 49 girls rather than the 49 pieced and 50 pictures in the original.

In the picture you can see my 11 stacks of 9 pieces pinned at the top and ready for piecing. I'm so excited to work on this one because a friend and co-worker recently got a job in Europe working for our home office for 2 years. I plan on giving her this quilt as a going away gift. Below you see the two fabrics I'm going to use for the borders. The red is deeper than the red on the Global Girls fabric and the black has a fine vine pattern.

For completeness, the three solids for the strip set are Bella Solids Moda Turquoise, Cheddar and Modern Leaf. The red is Full Circle Fabric Garden Barn Red and the black is Kansas Troubles Favorites Black.

The color is really awful in the border fabric picture. I'm sure I'll get a better for you later.