{Post 1,766} Piecing Just Recently

Many of you are long-time readers of my blog. I am going to purpose to post at least once a week. My husband and I are empty nesters after a whirlwind of years raising our 8 children. I don’t think I have sat around and rested much, and I don’t even know what it means to be bored. Our lives are filled with vastly different activities. We have changed much in some areas of life and none at all in others.

I have been quilting for 30 years. My tastes have changed so much. I love every part of quilting. At the beginning of the year, I started following Susan Smith (Stitched by Susan on all social media, including podcasts). My love of and skill for machine quilting has forever been changed. In the past few years, I have started machine quilting for customers. I am so grateful to have sold many quilts I have pieced and quilted in the past few years as well. Not making a huge profit (because if you quilt you know the cost of materials and the number of hours of labor), but making my hobby worth it to me.

Here are a few quilts I have pieced recently. I love getting comments and questions, so fire away! If you want to know fabrics or pattern names, email me. I am also on Instagram as shelby_stitcher. Shelby, NC is my hometown.

Today I had one of our cars at the mechanic’s, and I cut another of the Twist N Shout Rectangles quilts (that’s the one above with the black border, 3 quilts up). I got the pattern at a quilt shop in WV a couple weeks ago. The one above was sold before I even had the center finished. I had mailed a finished quilt to a customer. She texted that she received it (it was the one right above this with the blue border). Then she asked if I had any new quilts in the works. So I showed her the TNSR, and she bought that one, too. I have a friend I’d like to make one for, so I will start on that soon.

Bye for now! Drop me am email and say hello!

{Post 1,765} More Kids, Cooking, and Quilting

 ***I had started this post back in July. I don’t even remember what was going on with the kids and cooking part. I finished the few paragraphs I have started. I miss blogging. I will try to post at least once a week from here on out.***

My life is not anything extraordinary or even varied much. Lately I have started doing a few new things though. I am branching out socially. I have started taking out ladies from my church one at a time for a snack or a meal to get better acquainted again. I used to do that regularly but stopped recently. I also have started sewing with two different groups of ladies…one on Monday and a different group on Wednesdays.

I made lots more grocery bags. These are lined. The pattern is by michellepatterns.com. I made some to give away. We have two birthdays for ladies in our family this month. I think I’ll mail them two bags each.

 

One of my customers brought a quilt top over yesterday. She said she cleaned up her sewing room, and did I want to look through her scraps (her words)?? I said sure. To me a scrap is a 2” square. She brought a super nice tote bag that had over 16 POUNDS of fabric in it. Not JUST fabric…a finished quilt top, 3 sets of 12” blocks already pieced. A ginger shot cotton collection, 8 charm packs (four sets of two different collections), a Bali Pops stack, two large FQ collections from FQ shop, a layer cake, over 50 six-inch squares, and a few small pieces of yardage. I could sew on just the contents of that bag for years. The above grocery bag was made from one of the blocks in the bag she gave me along with fabric my sister gave me. I gave the bag to my friend when I finished her quilt top as a thank-you for the “scraps”.

{Post 1,764} New Quilting Pattern Test Run

I have a large quilt top of my own that I want to quilt soon. As I was thinking of a pattern, I noticed one I liked that made me think of water/the ocean, which is what I think when I see the colors of my quilt-top-to-be-quilted. I decided to quickly put a border on this I Spy quilt. Had just the perfect fabric in my stash.

I don’t use a lot of bright fabrics, but I’ve always loved this stripe. Had enough, which is always a good thing. 

So I started the pattern I had in mind…Swirls and Bubbles. While I liked it a lot, I don’t prefer dense quilting. I’m wondering if I could have made it in a much larger scale. I will try that on my plexiglass sheet. 

After one pass of that pattern, I switched to looser waves. Just a gentle wave from side to side. I plan to do another section the same size of the Swirls and Bubbles at the bottom. Since this is one of my own quilt tops, there was not a lot of pressure to please the owner, LOL!

A couple other random pictures of my life recently. 

Finished this quilt top center. I will add some kind of border. Already have a plan in mind.

Some pictures of Luke’s daughter, for those who know him. She was watching a cowboy twirling his huge lasso in the second picture.

I finally made a grocery bag from a pattern I bought from michellepatterns.com. I made the large size. This are her bags, not the one I made. I like it, and I will be making more. It went together so quickly, and is made from regular quilting cotton fabric.

{Post 1,763} Vintage Pansy Quilt

 I have many friends at my daughter’s in PA. She lives over 300 miles from us. One of those dear ladies recently asked me if I would quilt an appliquéd pansy quilt top she made 40 years ago. So, on our last visit to PA (two weeks ago), I picked it up. 

Susan Smith of Stitched by Susan has a freehand masterclass that I finished earlier this year. I used so many “new” skills when I quilted this top. It had extra fabric all over the borders, which is rather common. I felt armed with better skills to tackle this and make it as beautiful and flat as I could. Here is a pic of before and after of the same corner. I used a peach-colored thread and an all-over feather pattern to pull in the fullness.

I was soooo thrilled with how flat and pucker/pleat-free it turned out.  Here are some pictures of the top in progress and some of the completely quilted quilt. The backing is white muslin.

This next top is one I’ve been working on for years. No rush as I don’t have someone in mind to give it to. I am trying to sell it. I will quilt it if the new owner wants. It is called Bear Mountain Cabin by Glad Creations Quilts. I love their patterns. 

Here is another quilt in the works. I just need 22 or so more blocks completed to reach 60” x 72” in size. This may have a border…I have not decided yet. It is made with a strip of selvage down the center and men’s upcycled shirts for the balance.

{Post 1,762} Juicy Fruit Quilt

We went to south GA this past weekend. We haven’t seen my oldest son’s family in about a year. I drove all the way down, and my husband drove all the way home. It was about 8 hours in the van one way. As usual, I gave much thought to what I should spend my time on while he drove. It was going to be daylight the whole time, which makes a difference. 

I never travel w/o my iPad. Between Kindle, email, blogs, etc., I can keep happily busy for hours. But I never pulled it out once. 

This box of shirt scraps was accumulated when I last cleaned off my cutting table. I am blessed to have a big pressing station as well as a big cutting station in my sewing room. I found bits and bobbles of shirts all over my sewing desk as well as the other two flat surfaces. I kept throwing them into a plastic tote box.

Often I get questions about how I get so much sewing done. Well, I sew every day (just about). Having pieces precut is something that I don’t do often. In this case, I was cutting down the shirt leftovers for two different quilts. They are both blocks I made up and both are pieced onto old phone book pages. That is for stability and to make sure they get up to the size I am shooting for. 

The first one is named Shirts and Selvages. I save selvages from all my fabrics. I have made many different items from them. I am using cash register tape (I got 4 rolls for $1 at a local thrift shop) to piece selvage strips, then I trim it down to 2-1/2” wide. I put that diagonally on a 6-1/2” square paper and use strips of shirts to finish the block out. I got this idea from Bonnie Hunter originally. If you’re new to upcycling shirts or string piecing, check out her blog. It’s quiltville.blogspot.com. I cut strips as small as 1” wide. Nothing over 1-3/4” on these small blocks. Here are my first ten. I use up a strip until it’s all gone. As I finish the blocks, I will spread out the heavily-repeated fabric.

 The second quilt I am calling Juicy Fruit, after the stick gum sold when I was a child. I don’t know if it is still sold. The block shape is gum-like, and the colors made me think of the multi-colored zebra in the commercials. I cut paper and muslin 3” x 6”. The paper is covered with shirt strips. The finished blocks are alternated with the muslin.

Here is where I am so far with that one as of a few minutes ago. This will measure 49.5” wide and 45.5” high when the blocks are sewn together. I have them sewn into groups of 18, 3 across and 6 down. That way I can move them around to distribute the eye-catching colors before sewing the final layout.

Each new quilt is my favorite, and when I’m sewing two at once—that’s a lotta love!

So my cutting strategy? I pulled out one piece (I figured it didn’t matter which one since I was going to try to cut up the whole box…and I did). If I could get a 3-1/4” long piece out of it that was at least 1” wide, I’d cut some rectangles for the Juicy Fruit. I stacked them all so that they weren’t in a jumble when I went to sew. If the piece was fairly large, I cut a 3-1/4” wide strip then subcut it into various widths for Juicy Fruit and cut the rest into strips for the sides of Shirts and Selvages. If the piece was too small, but big enough to matter, I matched it with a similar width piece to piece later. I laid those in my husband’s baseball hat which was beside me in the van. When we got home, after I put things to rights, I pieced and trimmed all those. I. Could. Not. Wait. You can see the pieced ones in the picture above. I also had those pieces at the very top of the shoulder seams of the yoke that have the diagonal edge. Two of those fit perfectly together. Waste not, want not! That’s pretty much my theme for everything. Here is a picture showing the difference. The top went into the very neat strings pile, and the bottom went into the trash. Even I have my limits.

So, do you like one quilt more than the other? I’d love to hear what you think about them. Using upcycled shirts makes the quilt seem loved and antique from the start. They are more lightweight than using quilting cottons well. I simply love them.

I bought an old wooden lap desk years ago at a thrift store in town. We always take it on trips because my husband usually works if it’s a weekday (while I drive). I use it if it’s a weekend. My iPad, practice sheets for machine quilting, and other items work fabulously on it. I sat behind my husband in our van on the way home.That way I could spread out my things beside me (our second row of seats fold into the floor, so we folded the other one down).

Here are a few pictures of my trip home. Not only did I get all the fabric cut, but I also cut up all the selvages I took with me. I stored those in a plastic bag so they wouldn’t get mixed up with the shirt scraps. I am messy, but neat. LOL!!

Years ago I cut up a badly-scarred cutting mat, and I take one of those to portable sewing opportunities. 

This is the box I started with…the styrofoam cup was from lunch. I used it for a trash can. Only the tiniest bits didn’t make the cut, so to speak!

This is what I ended up with…the rectangular leftover container was laden with neatly stacked strips, and I had row upon row of pieces for the Juicy Fruit quilt. The cup held just a smidgen of trash. 

Back to sewing for a bit! 

{Post 1,761} Popping In

 I am hanging out with four of my grandsons, age 6 down to 1. They live about 7.5 hours’ drive from us. Got here last night and will be driving home Sunday AM. I don’t see the boys often, so I wanted to make and bring them something a little special and specific for each one. So I thought about it long and hard and decided to make them string backpacks.

Each boy’s outer fabric is special for them. The inside lining is all Thomas the Tank Engine fabric. I used black paracord tied with double fisherman’s knots. That is the most secure knot for slippery ropes according to Google. It’s tricky to learn, but I practiced ;)

Jeremiah is 6 (left). His bag was made from dark blue with Americana words on it. He got a game of Spot It, Two new books, a sticker book, cookies, and fruit snacks. Samuel is 5 (middle). He got a paint with water book, a sticker book, cookies, fruit snacks, and a block set. Lyndon is 3. He got a Water Wow book, a squishy light-up toy (big hit with everyone), a puzzle set that makes 6 different puzzles, cookies, fruit snacks, and a number learning book. Baby got cookies, fruit snacks (of course), a ball, and several tiny books. 

Each backpack is constructed differently. I was working through 4 different tutorials on Pinterest. Oddly enough, the one I like best is the easiest to make. It’s the dinosaur print one.

I purposely brought things we could do with them. Worked like a charm with their cousins recently!

{Post 1,760} Remainders Quilt

 As I have mentioned, this quilt pattern was in a book I have, then I saw someone making it on their blog. It is so pretty in person. I finished up two large sections that are 7 x 24 blocks, giving me a total of 14 x 24 blocks. The blocks are set 24 x 30 in the quilt, so I need another section of 16 x 24. I have a 7 x 7 section pieced, so I will add to that. I am anticipating one more contribution of fabric, and will use every speck of my nearly non-existent willpower to wait for it. This has been so fun to make because you can start with any size HST and bring it up to 3” square unfinished size. The slight difference in the colors and sizes of the HSTs make it that much more attractive to me. I just found and pinned another block that is similar. Here is that one:

This one has all different background pieces. That changes the look quite a bit. In reality, I probably won’t make this soon because so many projects catch my eye. I have quite a few quilt tops of my own to machine quilt. 

Here is my quilt on the design wall. The extra 7 x 7 is just slapped on there so I don’t lose it in my “there appears to have been a struggle” sewing room. The long sections measure 60”; that will be the width of the quilt.

Enjoy the process!