A finish: #2.22 Weeds

I don't know if you remember this top from July 2022.  I spent a long time considering whether my applique skills were up to translating the teasel in my photograph into fabric, but in the end didn't think I would be able to produce something I was happy with.  However, along the way the idea of weeds inveigled itself into my brain and wouldn't go away.  In the end, I gave in and printed the names of lots of the weeds I have in my garden onto the quilt top.  Here's a view of what that looked like.

and here's a view of the finished quilt in its entirety.

In a departure from my habitual, straightforward quilting I had a bit of a play and tried a different version of something floral in every strip set.  In one or two I just followed what was already on the fabric, in others I added stylised leaves or flowers.  It was a lot of fun but has been surprisingly difficult to photograph.  This is the best shot I have managed.

It has ended up a biggish quilt - around 75" x 65" and is pleasingly weighty (that's the denim and old trousers).  

I started this on April 9th and finished piecing on  July 15th 2022.  I've been quilting it for a while, can't really remember when I started.  Nonetheless it is finished within 2 years (just) of completing the top, which is pretty quick for me.  I bound it using fabric from stash, quilted in perle no 8, mostly odds and ends, also from stash.  The wadding is organic cotton.  

My favourite things about this are the green that came from my best-ever trousers (that's the strip with Chickweed printed on it in the photo) and the inclusion of the  Monaluna print which I used to make the dress my then-4-year old daughter wore to my wedding (and she's nearly 14 now, so that tells you how long those scraps have been sitting in a box).  Also, the colours of this please me inordinately - greens, blues and browns just float my boat.

In other news, I am pushing on with my blue hexagons but more of that in my next post (which may even happen before the end of the summer!)

Hexagons and crosses

The plan is this: to use the crosses that I liked from the piece I've just finished and find a way to combine them with some more of my octagon blocks.  I don't want to make more octagons, but there has to be a way to use up the ones I've got that feels satisfactory. I'm adding a couple of extra shirts to the ones I had originally pulled and also added some of the scraps from the last top, mostly orange bits and pieces.

Maybe something like this?

or this?

I don't know how these will fit together, but I like them well enough, so I'll keep going and see what happens.

Done for now

It's hard to believe that it is May and this is the first quilt top I have completed this year.  Never mind.  Things can only get better!

Here is a progress picture of my central chunk of piecing with a couple of rounds of strips.  The right-hand side was sewn on at this point but the bottom, top and left were still being tinkered with.  I found I didn't much like it when two pieced sections sat next to each other.  A small overlap was okay, but after that everything got rather busy and, because there are lots of mid-tones, tended to run to mush.  So my strips are a mixture of small sections of piecing and bigger bits of single fabrics.  

That's fine in principle but of course I was running out of big bits, so figuring this out using what I had took ages.  The bit that caused me the most problems was the final strip I wanted to add at the top.  I tried all sorts of variations, including the strip that is sitting at the bottom now and every random length of shirt I had left.  I had a denim and the floral print, joined by a little cross and everything I tried to go above them worked with one half of that combination, or the other, but never both.  I was starting to think I was going to be tinkering with this forever.  Then serendipitously I was tidying up the bags with the octagons that I rejected a couple of months back and had an 'ah-ha' moment.  They did just the job.

It has ended up being quite a big top, so it wasn't easy to photograph and you will see that the right-hand side is flapping a bit and I haven't got it flat, but that is about my hanging system rather than the quilt.  Nevertheless,  I think this is still a fair picture and I am definitely happy with it as a finish (for now).

Now that I have sneaked a few of the octagons into this top, I am motivated to get them out and have another play.  Maybe this time I'll find a way forward that I like. Fingers crossed.

Strips and chunks - it's all progress

I'm still going with this.  The hourglasses went on down the left-hand side and are looking just right to me.   I also added to the right-hand side, cutting the strip I was adding so that I could keep that curve in the denim.

It feels to me right now as though the area with all the dark blue stripes and grey bits is a self-contained thing, so I'm not planning to add any more blue verticals, just that one piece horizontally across the bottom (or what is currently the bottom ). I'm also going to stop adding in the grey floral, except in hourglasses, so no more big bits.  Practically, I think the next step is going to entail just adding strips top, bottom, sides, rather as if this were a medallion with a very big middle. Since  I don't want it to feel like a medallion particularly, I will be trying to pay careful attention to how the strips and hourglasses fit together so it's not too obvious.

Here are the next two strips going onto the left and right-hand sides and also some of the random bits I am trying out around the edges.  

When I started, the floral bottom left felt a big loud and shouty and like it should only be used in smaller pieces, but somehow, now that the quilt is bigger, I feel much more comfortable considering using great big chunks of it.  Of course, given that it was a shirt, I only have enough fabric for a couple of those chunks, but that's definitely enough to have an impact. 

As this stands, I am not far of a length I would be happy with but am some way short of a satisfactory width.  Never mind.  

Chugging along

This is chugging along alright at the moment.   I joined a couple of my chunks together (that's the bit at the top in the photo), and kept making other bits at the same time.

Joining bits to make bigger bits is the easy part.  Some of my fabrics here (mostly the pale oranges)  I am treating as interchangeable.  Others, principally the dark, dark blue, which has tiny, fine orange stripes running through it, and the darkest floral, I am using more carefully.

Since I liked how the pieces looked lying on the floor together, I thought I'd have a go at finding a simple way of joining them together.  I wondered about using a horizontal line of hourglasses, but it felt a bit too crowded.  Interestingly, I don't hate them in this photo, but in real life it didn't work for me.

So I took them away, but left the denim strip.  I am happier with the hourglasses running vertically down the left side. As things are right now, all of this is sewn together, except those hourglasses. 

I am thinking that I might stop with the deep blue verticals at this point.  I am running out of big pieces of the shirt and what is left would probably work better in hourglasses, given that I have a collection of odd shaped bits and bobs.  The question is, then, what I do next.  Your guess is currently as good as mine.

Using up the rejects

While I was trying to figure out how to make something I liked out of the octagons, I made various other bits and pieces too.  I tried combining them with little crosses and also made a handful of hourglass blocks.  Neither of these worked, but now I am looking those rejects and wondering if they might belong together in something else.  The crosses were mostly in reds and dark blues, whilst the hourglasses came in red and orange-y fabrics.  So I have pulled some extra shirts and a pile of denim scraps and am giving it a go to see what happens.  

I didn't hate this first piece, so have kept going and now have three chunks. As you can see, they are pretty simple so this didn't take long.  Now I have to decide whether to make a few more, or start to think about how they might talk to each other.

Quilting when stale

I am aware that my quilting muscles are rusty.  Decisions take longer, I do more unpicking, get further through a project and then change my mind over big choices.  That's okay.  I have decided to start with simple things.  My first pass, though, was a complete non-starter.  I had seen a lot of very pretty octagon quilts and thought I would pull some scraps and fiddle about with something similar.  

What I learned, pretty quickly,  is that either I needed to bite the bullet and cut these in a proper, regular fashion, using a template, or to become wilder, push the shape away from its natural geometry.  I can see that a half-hearted improv octagon is not a good thing. Sewing them together in groups didn't so much look like improv - more like poor sewing.  I tried adding strips in to break them up, which I didn't mind too much, but it wasn't exciting me and I couldn't find a way forward. Shame - there are some nice fabrics here, but stuck is stuck.

It doesn't feel like I have time to waste wrestling with this at the moment, so I'm sticking it in a bag.  Maybe I'll revisit it, though that feels unlikely right now.  Instead, I'm just going to start again with something new. 

A finish: #1.22

As mentioned, I have a couple of finishes saved up to share.  Here is the first one. 

I seem to be getting much better at moving things through the system, since this is barely two years from start to finish.  This is, admittedly, because there are a couple of tops I seem to have pretty much decided never to quilt, but if I don't feel it when I sort through the piles, I don't see the point in giving months of my time over to working on something.

This is a simple little quilt really, but for some reason it is really ticking the boxes for me right now and has gone onto my bed as a result.  I think the orange has something to do with it, plus those strips of my once-favourite green trousers and the lovely blue plaid shirt with the deep, deep blue stripes. The Indonesian batik fabric that is in the checkerboard bits posed some problems when I was piecing. It was so busy and unusual that I couldn't find a way to balance it with other fabrics for a while, but I am happy with how it worked out in the end. It sits well, I think, with the dark blues and the other orange/red areas help too.

I started this on the 20th January 2022 and finished piecing on 31st March, so that's as close to exactly two years as makes no difference.  It is pieced with shirts, plus the green trousers scraps (most of this went into this top) and some orange Oakshott fabric that I have had for years.  I looked hard for a shirting that would do the job for me, but nothing worked and this lovely orange seemed right at home.

The backing is some of the duvet cover that you can see in this quilt top and I used a different part of said cover for the binding as well.  

The wadding is organic cotton and it is quilted with perle cotton. As usual I used what I had rather than buying in specially, though this will be the last time I can do that without at least one or two new purchases.  I echoed the flying geese in the centre in some areas of the quilting, just to make a change from straight lines. and am quite pleased with how it worked out.  

The finished piece is around 65 inches in all directions, give or take.

 

A quick gallop through the last 4 months

It's been an age, I know.  Cricket finished, winter cricket started, I have been working much more than previously and other caring responsibilities in the family have eaten into my sewing time.  That's life.  I have been sewing still, even more slowly than usual. 

I turned this pile of shirts, a skirt and a duvet cover

into this quilt top.  Using a duvet cover offers a much bigger piece of a single fabric than I am used to having.  I had used one side for a quilt back, so was only using the front, but even so there seemed to be loads of it.  You would think this would be a good thing but in fact it rather stumped me for a while.  I felt like everything I tried still looked more like a duvet than anything else. Hopefully I have managed, in the end, to produce something more than one step away from someone else's used bedding! 

Next up, a lovely pile of mostly green shirts.  I've had the one on the top left for ages (since some time during lockdown) and finally had enough other greens to give it a go.

This came together quite easily really.  I made a pile of one sort of block then, when I got bored, I started making log cabins instead and before I knew it, I had a finished top.

I also have a couple of fully quilted finishes, but will save those for the next post, in an attempt to build a tiny bit of blogging momentum.  

Another finish

Some time ago I gave up trying to think of clever names for my quilts and just started numbering them, so this finish doesn't have a proper name; it is just #4.22, which is to say the fourth quilt I pieced in 2022.   At least the numbering lets me place it easily but if anyone wants to suggest a title, do feel free.

You will see that this is not a top that had to languish for long before it was quilted (unlike the one in the previous post).  I used to work steadily through in a chronological order, but now I am mixing the older quilts and more recent ones.  Some tops I am just keener to see finished than others. 

This is the second in what turned out to be a run of four quilts playing around with quarter-circles. The spikes were an addition to stop me getting bored with the piecing and represent the "why do something nice and easy if you can make it fiddly and complicated?" school of quilting.  At least I felt quite Christmassy as I was making it, both because of the colours and because the spiky circle-shapes reminded me a bit of baubles.  And also because it was actually Christmas! 

There's a lovely mix of patterns in these shirts, including the Indonesian-style one, which adds to the festive feeling for me, a slightly subdued Hawaiian one, with blue and red flowers, and that red tartan, which I had pretty much concluded I was never going to use.  Just goes to show every shirt has its home, in the end. I often fall out of love with something as I work on it, but that never happened with this top: I liked it then and I like it now.

I quilted the horizontal bars with straight lines and the photo below shows how I approached the baubles.

The backing is one big piece.  This is unusual for me but I found a few good duvet covers second-hand recently and there are so many seams in the top that it felt like a good idea not to add more on the back.  Binding is from stash.  I think it is a Charley Harper fabric from years ago. That's how the bindings go now - it's mostly a question of what's still in the boxes.  Not much left now, then I'll be making binding from shirts, I guess.

This was started right at the end of last year, round about 22nd or 23rd of December.  and piecing was finished on 15th February this year.  I have lost track of when I started quilting - some time early summer - but it was finished on 5th September.  

The wadding is organic cotton, the thread was from stash.  Next time I start a quilt I will be buying thread as I am almost out, but it's been years since I've had to do that, so it's probably about time.  

It's not the biggest quilt ever- about 60" wide by 70"long, but it's big enough to wrap up in, which is what matters most.

 

Time Slips Away: Done and Dusted

The first of my two recent finishes. This is Time Slips Away, the last quilt I started before covid struck and the last quilt I finished in my old house. Also, thanks to covid, this is my least blogged quilt ever.  I just about managed to sew and was thankful for it, but blogging was mostly beyond me. As a result, it is a piece of work that I have generally overlooked.  When I pulled it out of the drawer to sandwich, I realised I didn't have a strong sense of it at all, but fortunately, looking at it after all this time, I rather like it.

I think this represents part of a transition phase for me - there are a few shirts (3 I think) in this, but there are also a number of pieces of proper yardage whereas now it's almost entirely shirt/recycled clothing.

The fabric that kicked this all off was a little shirt, probably from around the 1970s, with a swirly floral print (you can get a proper look at it here). When I got to the quilting, I tried to echo this by sewing overlapping circles so that I got a sort of petal effect.  This seemed like a good idea and I covered the whole quilt in next to no time. Only then I had the bright notion that I would do a second round of stitching, just inside the first.

Undoubtedly this has given me a much more flower-like feel in the end, but about halfway through I started wondering what on earth had possessed me. Who in their right mind quilts a whole top and then does it again?  On a practical note, while I like how it looks, it definitely makes the finished item ever so slightly stiffer than I am used to.  Not enough to bother me, but I wouldn't want to go any further in this direction - I prefer my quilts to feel drape-y and inviting and ready to use.  

I started piecing on 11th March 2020 and, despite lockdown and consequent home schooling, finished piecing 25th June 2020. It was the last quilt I pieced in my old house and the last thing I sewed at all until the December. I have to admit I don't know when this went into a hoop. I have been working on another one and this has taken the longer of the two, so probably since around the beginning of the year, on and off.

The wadding is organic cotton and as usual I used whatever perle cottons I had that were a close enough fit.  This is a habit I will have to reassess soon as my store of half-used threads is growing smaller and smaller.  The binding is a grey print from stash - again, I will have to reassess eventually, but for now there's still plenty of fabric in the boxes.  In fact, given how long it is since I bought yardage it's a bit scary how long my boxes are lasting.  I am given maybe three or four half yards most years, but given that I use them for both bindings and in quilt backs, I had expected to run out ages ago.  

My favourite parts of this are the lines created by the black triangles, the pinwheels, which happened accidentally at first and then accidentally-on-purpose, and the way I had to use teeny-tiny pieces to get to the end.  I have done this lots since but this was one of the first times it got so close to the wire and I was both relieved and a bit pleased with myself when I got to my finish.

Catching up

Not sure where the last month went.  Well, that's not true; I have a pretty clear idea of what I've been doing with my time but it's not interesting enough to go blogging about it.  Apologies to everyone whose last comments I failed to get to, I won't make a habit of it, honest.  

I have been quilting a lot, rather than piecing, for practical reasons, and have two quilts finished but am having issues with photos, again for reasons I won't bore you with.  However, before I put my machine into hibernation, I did manage to get Wild Things across the line.

I thought, way back when I last posted, that I was happy with the length of this, but when I looked again I felt it needed just a smidge more, so I added plain chunks top and bottom.  You can tell this is reaching the end, since instead of saving these few final pieces in case I want to chop them up, I am happily using them as they are. 

I figured that I could use up my last curved blocks too and laid out the long columns of stripe roughly where I thought I wanted the edges of the quilt to end up.  You can see my problem - I had a gap to fill. There were still some crosses floating about.  Enough, in fact, to get me about three-quarters of the way there, but I still had gaps.  Bother.  

So back I went to my bags and boxes and tried to find something that would do.  In the end, this black and brown check seemed to fit the bill, so in it went.

And just like that, I was done. The finished top looks like this.

I'm still a couple of weeks off being able to piece again and am feeling distinctly fidgety about it, but am trying to give some thought to what I might try next.  This is the fourth circle quilt in a row, so maybe it's time for a change. 

Repeating myself

 Here I am, still short of time but plugging away when I can.

I have spent a while trying to figure out how to extend the chunk I finished last time.  Is this the middle of something?  The bottom?  The top? I have been moving and shuffling and quite a lot of just sitting and staring.  It is still the case that I like some permutations of these blocks a lot and others not at all.  This makes things simpler in some ways, but I also don't have enough fabric to make more than one or two extra now, so I need to be very sure of my decisions before I sew things together.  

After a lot of general fiddling, I decided I would extend the central line of crosses and make another piece very similar to the first chunk.  

That sounds easy, but there were many, many versions before I found one I was entirely happy with.  In particular I was trying to watch the placement of the dark blue and dark red fabrics and, more generally, to keep an eye on the spread of light and dark across the whole thing.  

This is what the two finished chunks look like together.  I'm pretty happy with this, but its not there yet as it is a good-ish length (maybe 55-60") but skinny.  Time to go wide.

A bit of progress, I think

 So, the stripes came out and the crosses went in.

And I started to play with what might happen around the edges of this first chunk.  More crosses?  More claws?

Maybe more of both. Or maybe that, plus some stripes.

WIP

This stripe is an interesting thing. I liked that it worked as a counterbalance to the checks and little fussy prints and I thought the darkest of the blues would help echo the darkest blue shirt and stop all the mid-tones predominating. Sadly, I didn't like it as much as I thought I would once it was in the quilt, so I went ahead and took it out.  But I can see that it looks much better in the photos I shared than it does in real life and the arguments for its inclusion are still valid, so I fully intend to keep it in the pile and start adding it back in, though possibly in smaller bits.  It's not in these photos, but I reckon next time I post, it will be in there again.

I still like the notion of separating my curvy claws with something, so I have had a go with the crosses.

This seemed to be worth persisting with, so I kept going.

Of course nothing is carved in stone, but right now I think the six blocks on the left will be staying as they are.  The right hand bits are more by way of an experiment.  I am playing around trying to work out how symmetrical or asymmetrical I want to be, taking into account that in some versions I like how the blocks interact a lot, and in others I do not like them one tiny little bit.  I don't feel like I'm stuck, just playing still, but it does also feel like these blocks might turn out to be a bit contrary.

 

Trying stuff out

I am moving slowly. After a few false starts, I decided that one of the issues I was having with my group of fabrics was that there was something rather similar about them - a preponderance of small, busy prints - that was making them hard to work with.  I dug out a much paler shirt and a nice stripe, to see if they would help.

I haven't found anywhere yet that the pale one looks at home, but I had a go with the stripe. Here are a couple of versions.

This definitely reminds me of claws, now that Yvonne has pointed it out, and I am now thinking of it as "Wild Things" but it is also reminiscent of the spiky teasles in my garden. Using the strip between the curves accentuated this and I quite liked it, so I kept going.

You will see that I got bored of just making curves and started making crosses as well.  I like the crosses still, but as of today, I have started taking the stripes out, in the places where I had done actual sewing.  I have been trying to put my finger on why I decided to do this and the closest I can come to an explanation is that they pull my eye too much toward them, so I see the stripes but the curves are fenced off from each other.  I'm not sure I want strips of old pyjama to be the star of this particular show, so out they go.  Of course I may revisit, but for now the crosses are staying, the stripes are going.

Off we go again

This is the next bundle of shirts. All bought one day in late March from an Age UK shop in an upmarket suburb of Nottingham. 

You can't tell from this photo, but the gingham-type check at the back is a pale purple.  the rest are pretty much as they look.

A first pass through my drawers resulted in a few options to bulk this out: a nice navy with a tiny white dot, a mid-blue with a Hawaiian vibe and some scraps of dark red.  They really are scraps, though, so while I'm not putting them away just yet, I won't be counting on them for much either.

My calculation is that I am a couple of shirts short, but that's fine. I'm going to make a start and worry about what else a bit further down the line.  

Not wishing to hang about, since sewing time is hard to come by, I ignored my original thought, which involved pinwheels and/or hourglasses and decided instead to go for something fiddly and time-consuming.  There's just no accounting for the way my mind works. 

Hmm. I'm not loving these right now.  I am okay with the general idea, but someone, in passing, said they look like dinosaur eggs and I just can't get that image out of my head.  I'm not going to give up though.  I am hoping that a little rejig of the proportions, otherwise known as a sneaky trim on one side, will sort things out. Let's see how that goes.

And done...for now

 All finished and heading off for the pile of tops still waiting to be quilted.

This is how it went. Lots of bits were not sewn at this point, because I was  trying to figure out that top left corner and the right hand side simultaneously.  When I laid out the bits on the right, I thought I was right down to the wire, in terms of remaining fabric.  I was hoping to be have enough squares and pinwheels to fill in all my spaces, but was still trying to keep an eye on how things balanced across the whole top. Lucky for me, I  found one last, biggish piece of shirt big enough to cut several chunks from and that presented me with a much quicker solution in that top left corner. It is a note to self - sometimes I only use a small amount of a fabric, because it seems to me to be having an oversized effect on the quilt as a whole.  That's fine, but I should really keep better track of where I put the left-overs! I would have been pretty fed up if I had only found that fabric after I'd finished piecing.

I also dug out one last curved piece which fitted in over on the right.  These two finds between them gave me just enough to stretch to a finish.

In the end I am very pleased with how this has turned out and that it ended up being what feels like a respectable size to me (roughly 60"x70", I think)