White Oak Basket and Birch Basket

I'm becoming quite adept with the baskets! These two didn't have so many little patchwork pieces, so they were pretty easy.

White Oak Basket

The White Oak Basket had tall loopy handle that was made out of bias tape. I had enough from the other basket to use for this one, so I was happy not to have to make more of that. It pays to save all your scraps! I cut the blue strip wrong so that there are little marking that show at the top, but flowers will eventually be appliqued over it all, so I think that will be hidden. I'm hoping!

Birch Basket

Birch Basket had another paper-pieced handle, and that was about it. Pretty uneventful! SO...my next challenge is to start the applique. Five of these blocks are getting appliqued with flowers, and let me tell you...it's not going to be easy.

Applique pattern

I did some experimenting last night with freezer paper applique and quickly determined after 20 minutes of fiddling with one little piece, that that was not a viable option. The pieces are too small for the innerface method I'm doing on the Bloom Sew-Along quilt, and I don't think I'm good enough yet for Needle Turn to work either. So more research and experimentation is needed.

Nope, the freezer paper method will not work!

Make it Simpler Monkey Wrench

I signed up for Anita Grossman Solomon's new Craftsy class called "Quick Techniques for Classic Blocks". I've taken previous classes with her, and I like her unique out-of-the box way of looking at things and her clever short-cuts. She does lots of relatively simple things, but with innovative techniques.

Anita's new class is all about these patterns she's developed called "Cutting Lines Patterns". You print off a pattern sheet, slap it over two fabric squares, sew on the marked sewing lines, then cut it apart on the marked cutting lines, and you have a block! The big plus of this is that you don't have to pre-cut any fabric pieces before you sew them together and your sewing is extremely accurate - no worrying about varying quarter-inch seams.

I was excited to try all this, so I printed off a bunch of Anita's Monkey Wrench patterns and went to town over the weekend. It was weird at first, because it felt like I was missing some major steps in the quilting process. I went right from picking out fabrics to sewing them - no cutting in between. It almost felt like I was getting away with something, and it was fun!

I sewed 42 blocks in the span of a few hours over the weekend, and now I just need to cut them all apart and play with the layout a little bit.

If you want to give this a try, Anita has made the Monkey Wrench pattern available on her blog for free. One sheet is instructions, and the other is the pattern. This way of sewing is absolutely foolproof!

Craftsy Block of the Month: Pine Needle Basket & Cherry Basket

Pine Needle Basket

I continue to plug along with the baskets. Pine Needle Basket was relatively easy - the handle was paper-pieced, so that's a good way to achieve nice crisp angles and points without any piddly templates, thank goodness!

The rest of the basket was similarly constructed as the other ones, without any weird angles. And a bonus? It turned out square!

The Cherry Basket was a tiny bit trickier, only because it had more little triangles to piece together, and also because the handle is made out of bias tape. Jinny had a surprisingly easy way of making the bias tape, and I decided to machine sew it onto the block vs. hand sewing, so it all came pretty together quickly.

Cherry Basket

I have two more of these basket-type blocks to make, and THEN we start appliqueing little flowers to all the baskets. And THEN I make five intricate paper-pieced blocks. So I'm a long way from finished, but I'm enjoying the process. For the most part.

Friday Finish: Pink Lemonade

It's been a few months since I've had a Friday Finish, so I'm glad to finally share one, even if it's for a little mini-quilt!

I definitely feel a sense of accomplishment with this quilt because I was able to master - well, not quite master - more like begin to become sort of proficient with a new technique. This is the fun thing about quilting - there are always new things to learn, and that keeps it interesting.

I quilted this with some straight line quilting, which took me all of 20 minutes - another plus with the mini quilt making! The backing is a cute print of lemons, and the binding is a yellow and white gingham. I finished the binding by hand, because why not - it's only about three feet of hand sewing, and it was a good chance to try out my teeny tiny binding clips. Those things are great!

I'm excited to start my mini quilt wall now, and I can't wait for my next kit to come in the mail. BTW, that homemade caramel was pretty damn good. There'd better be more of those!

Pink Lemonade

So, I don't know if I've completely mastered Y-seams...but I'm getting much better at them, that's for sure!

This little mini quilt is made from 8 pieced hexagons. The 1st one took me 45 minutes, but the 8th one took me 10, so you can tell I got pretty speedy at them.

Some of them have issues with puckers and folds, like this one below, but nothing a good pressing and lots of quilting won't cure!

Others, like the one below are just about perfect. I think this was my 6th one - I had things down pretty well by then.

The rows need to get sewn together now, and then little triangles added to the gaps on the sides - so that will involve more y-seams. I'm not so scared of them now though!

Y-Seams...I just can't escape them!

I had to chuckle when I opened up the pattern for my Mini Quilt Club that I wrote about a couple days ago. This pattern is made up of hexagon shapes, sewn from diamonds. I realize that sounds confusing, and it is a little, but the thing that made me laugh is that these blocks call for Y-Seams - oodles of Y-Seams!

I wrote about Y-seams giving me trouble on my Ash Tree block, and then  I realized that maybe some of you don't realize what these Y-Seams are and why they're tricky. So a quick explanation:

Most of the time in quilting, we sew straight seams. That's it. We sew pieces of fabric that are cut with straight edges together with straight seams. Everything is straight, which is nice and easy.

Sometimes we use techniques to help us sew curves, or piece improvisational blocks with wonky or wavy seams: 

Curved piecing

Improv piecing

This curvy piecing can be slightly more tricky, and lots of quilters would just prefer to stick with straight seams. I'm generally one of them.

Every now and then some pattern writer will decide to get clever and design a pattern with pieces that need to be sewn together, but can't using a continuous straight seam. This is called an inset seam, or a Y-seam. Take a look:

http://madebychrissied.blogspot.com/2016/03/Beginners-Guide-To-Sewing-Y-Seams.html

You can see how the corners for instance, would require that you sew down one side, stop and then sew the other. It should be easy in theory, but it requires lots of marking, and complete finicky precision, which are not my strong suits. There are lots of tutorials on line wherein people try to convince me that y-seams are really not that difficult! But they're all liars.

I've managed to cut out the pieces for the mini quilt...but I have to gear up for tackling the 12 - yes 12 y-seams that each block will have. I guess that's the universe telling me it's time to quit being such a baby and master this technique already!

All my diamond pieces, ready to go.

Mini Quilt Club

Lots of quilters enjoy making mini quilts. I haven't jumped on that bandwagon, because mini quilts just seemed kind of dumb to me - what can you use them for? They don't have any purpose! But then I saw this:

http://camilleroskelley.typepad.com/

And all of a sudden, I wanted a mini-quilt wall! This also coincided with me getting an e-mail from Westwood Acres, an online fabric store, telling about their mini quilt club - once a month they ship their members a mini quilt kit, complete with pattern, backing, batting, everything needed to complete a mini project once a month.

I signed up and got my first kit yesterday! As promised, all materials are present and accounted for, and they also threw in some mini binding clips and a homemade caramel! I think I'm gonna like this club...

2015 Block of the Month: Basket of Fruit & Ash Basket

So, I soldiered on with these tricky blocks over the weekend. Basket of Fruit was similar to the last one, only the basket was patchwork squares. I did pretty well with that one.

Basket of Fruit - Block #2

But Ash Basket? Stupid Ash Basket? That thing gave me trouble! All went well with the first part, the blue half square triangles. But then it was time to put the basket together with all the weird angles - I had to cut the material twice because I didn't realize two of the templates were supposed to be cut in reverse - no WONDER it wasn't all fitting together!

So many weird pieces to sew together!

Then, the bottom part of the basket had to be sewn together with a Y-Seam, which I've never done before. First attempt was bad - see all that fabric bunched  and puckered up?

First Y-Seam attempt

My second and third attempts were not much better, and by that time the fabric was getting shredded from being seam-ripped so many times I had to go cut another piece and start fresh. Finally, my fourth time - yes FOURTH finally was successful. Hooray!

Finally, some Y-seam success!

So, Ash Basket took me a total of two hours to make, and the funny thing is that it's not square! It came out some sort of random quadrilateral shape. Jinny says we'll be adding sashing strips to all the blocks at the end, so any shape irregularities will be rectified then, but jeez. Two hours, and it's not even square!

Ash Basket - Block #3

Bloom Sew-Along, Blocks 10 & 11

I'm all caught up on the Bloom Sew-Along now, which means I have to wait for the tutorials to come out on Monday's now to complete the rest of the blocks.

Blocks 10 & 11 were easy - not a lot of pieces or complicated placement.

There will be nine more to make, and then I sew a border around each block and put the whole thing together.

2015 Craftsy Block of the Month: May Basket

When Craftsy released their 2015 Block of the Month way back when, I got all excited, bought the kit right away, watched the video lessons each month...but actually sewed nothing.  The designer and instructor, Jinny Beyer, is famous in the quilt world for her masterful use of color and her intricate designs. I think this quilt is absolutely stunning, but it's put together in a ways that I'm not really used to and that seemed overly complicated or fiddly.

For one thing, all the fabric is cut out using templates - so you cut out your little shapes and trace them onto template plastic, then you cut out those shapes, trace around them on the fabric, then cut the fabric out with your scissors. To someone who's used to slicing everything with a rotary cutter in about 10 minutes, all that tracing and scissors work seemed silly.

Templates...grrr

Then, on the video tutorials, Jinny sews everything by hand! BY HAND! I like a little bit of hand work now and then, but there's no way in hell I'm sewing a whole quilt together by hand. There are also things like Y-seams and applique blocks with over 40 bits of tiny applique pieces, and intricate paper piecing.

All of those factors made the idea of starting the project not so appealing, so it's been sitting in a drawer...until last night, when I finally decided to bite the bullet and make the first block, called May Basket.

I think May Basket is also the easiest block, but even so with all the template tracing and fiddling around fussy-cutting the border fabrics, it took me over an hour to get the thing put together - and that's with machine piecing, NOT by hand!

First block complete!

There's a lot of focus these days on quilting things that are fast, and I generally don't have an issue with that, as simple projects yield instant gratification, and it's fun to accomplish easy things. But sometimes I think with all that speed comes a dumbing down of technique, and boring designs. This project will be different - it's old school quilting, and it won't happen fast, but I think I'll actually learn something.