Sewing Party

I know this post is a little late, but I figure it's better late than never.

At the beginning of December we had taken some time off hoping to go see my grampa for his 85th birthday. Unfortunately, because of covid, we weren't able to do that. Since we already head the time off, we decided to make the most of it.

My mother came over for a couple days of sewing and errands. 

She had a quilt top she was prepping to get into the frames. She finished up the hand appliquing, with a few consults on placement. 

This design is a free pattern called Paisley Splash. Once the applique was done, she added a border. I didn't get a picture of that until it was in the frames at Christmas time. 

We both had aprons to make as Christmas gifts for almost 3 year olds as well. We used Sew Simple Home as inspiration, but drew up our own pattern. I chose to use 2 cottons and make a double-sided apron to make it a little sturdier.

I was told my recipient likes yellow, so that was my inspiration as I dug through my stash. I chose to use a plain fabric on one side in order to add a pocket and an initial.

I got a great smiling picture of the recipient on Christmas morning. I hope it gets used to make many delicious things, but more importantly to have great family time together.

I also made a couple of snakes for a couple of big brothers to celebrate the birth of their sister. This is a pattern I have printed out, but I can't find it online again. I chose to make one longer for three older brother and one shorter for the younger brother. These are fun and pretty quick to make. 

In addition to sewing, we went out for a ski/snowshoe. The weather was beautiful and we had just enough snow, so we headed to the local golf course to frolic for a bit. It was a lovely break from the sewing machine. 

 

We also had a lovely trip to Shakespeare to get some quilt batting from the local quilt store. While we were in town we hit up the local pie store for butter tarts. We had to wait outside in line in the cold, but it was worth it! A visit to the British shop rounded out our trip. 

In the evening we went to the park to enjoy the Christmas lights. There was a new display this year of timbits playing hockey. They looked like glowing bowling balls 😀.

We had a great time together, and got lots accomplished. It was just what I needed. 

Bobbin Work! Covid Quilt Challenge #11

We did our next challenge this past weekend. Apparently I started writing this post and forgot about it, so it's actually been almost 2 months since our last challenge. The topic we drew was bobbin work. This was an interesting one because neither of us really had an idea of what it was or what was involved.

As usual, Friday night started out with googling and Saturday started with testing. I did less planning on Friday night, because until I did the testing, I really didn't have an idea of what would happen or what kind of ideas might make sense.

This is what my testing looked like. See how helpful it looks :P?

It actually gave me a good sense of which materials would work and which ones wouldn't. It also gave me a sense of how to work with each material. Some did better going through the bobbin tension and some didn't. Some benefited from a top tension change, some didn't. Little experiments helped with this. Especially taking care to go slow at the beginning - I did snarl up my machine a couple times.

My key feature was my ribbon yarn. I had a spool left from when it was popular and I had made my mother a scarf out of it. I really liked what it did when run through the machine - it bunched up in a ruffle/rouched kind of way and looked really cool. Plus it was gradated, and so looked very interesting. That led me to deciding that I wanted it to be the main part of my design.

I started by quilting the entire background. I wasn't fully thinking when I picked the backing fabric. I know I had a reason, but I don't remember what it was, and because I had a dark background fabric and light backing fabric, it meant I had a dark top thread and light bobbin thread, and my machine quilting skills aren't good enough that that was a good idea.

 

After that, I traced the outline of what I wanted on the back fabric, so that I could do the bobbin work upside-down and know where I was going. I had decided to make a butterfly. I started with the main outline with the ribbon yarn that I loved so much. 

From there, I added a yellow outline with a thick jeans thread, and a blue ribbon accent created with a zig-zag stitch. The body of the butterfly was created using a zig-zag stitch that I varied in width to create the shape I wanted.

Next I added buttons as accents as well.

To finish it off, I faced the project, and then zig-zagged the ribbon yarn around the edges as well.

Overall, I was very happy with how it turned out - especially given at the start of the weekend, I didn't even know what bobbin work meant.

Okay, onto my friend's project. At the best of times I am just piecing together (haha - no pun intended) what I think she did. An now it's been 2 months since she would have told me anything, so this will mostly be a series of pictures of the progress of her project.

pic

Again, I think the thing that really drove our design decisions was the types of threads we had, and how they interacted with the machine.

This is the design she chose to do.

She used 3 different threads to complete the design.

Her big things were working through what order to sew which lines in, and also doing the filament in the lightbulb as a free motion design (but going over it 3 times to get a thicker line - I think she did an incredible job of following the same line every time). 

Except for the small black square of fabric, everything else was done with bobbin work.

She also chose to do her bobbin work through all 3 layers, so counted that as her quilting as well.

Broccoli!

At the beginning of October, my friend turned the big 3-0. Usually I get her a vegetable or two for her birthday (cuz that's the kind of person she is :) ). However, she's been on a reduced diet recently, and I wasn't sure what she was and wasn't eating. Plus $1.99 broccoli didn't feel like enough for a 30th birthday.

So I got to work thinking and googling and decided a collage broccoli was the way to go. And I even found some ideas online - I'm not the first one to quilt a broccoli :). I ended up using ideas and resources from Collage Quilter, who has done some great work. She has some lovely pieces including a harvest quilt, which includes some youtube video tutorials on fabric selection, technique, etc.

I pulled my fabrics out and got to work, sorting, cutting, placing and sticking.

I did the outer edge of the broccoli separately from the inner floret - this made it easier to get the shape I wanted without too much work. I cut out rounder shapes for the florets and strips for the stalks.

Both pieces were made on a separate scrap of fabric, and then cut out and placed on the background.

After that it was just a matter of quilting: pebbles/bubbles for the florets (smaller in the darker parts and larger for the lighter middle bit - made it stand out a bit more) and jagged lines for the stalks.

I had a lot of fun creating this project. I would definitely try something like this again.

She hung it in a place of honour (and picked out the perfect ribbon for it) :)

Covid Quilt Challenge #10: Non-Rectangular

This past weekend was another covid quilt challenge (I got a little behind on my posting). The "technique" we drew this week was "non-rectangular". We decided that this was a little too vague of a challenge, especially since I had a few other things going on on the weekend. We added the theme of fall to our non-rectangular challenge.

This was an interesting one, especially before we added the theme, because it's not really one that you could google, the way we often start our challenge. Even with the added theme, it wasn't super googleable. We found you had to just look for ideas that might then lend themselves to being "non-rectangular". The other interesting thing was how does one define "non-rectangular". Where did a diamond fall? Was a rectangular shape that just had wavy edges enough? What about three straight edges and one with something that poked out? If so, how much of the edge would need to not be straight to count. We decided that it just couldn't be something with four straight lines and four 90 degree angles. In the end, I tried to go farther than that, just so there wasn't any question about whether it was too close or not.

I struggled with the idea of "non-rectangular" mostly because every time I went to sketch something I would start with drawing a rectangle. I was thinking about doing a tree with confetti leaves, but decided I didn't have time for that in the weekend, and I wasn't convinced I could nicely make something that wasn't rectangular. Instead I started thinking about doing a large, single leaf, and added on more to the rectangle I had started sketching, and ended up being excited about the idea of an L-shaped piece with a couple bits sticking out the edges as well. I sketched out a leaf I liked, and after some googling, I settled on adding an acorn that hung off as well. I tried to think of a third thing for my third square, but decided to leave it blank.

I knew I wanted my two covered squares to have an outer fabric and an inner fabric, but I struggled with what to do with the blank square because it felt like that wouldn't be enough (I didn't want it to be too plain) but the initial things I thought of were going to make it too busy and draw the eye away from the other bits. I the end I decided to do a split half-square triangle with a few different fabrics. This was really because of how I decided I wanted to quilt it and I knew having a strong diagonal line would be good. That also meant that I wanted to mitre the corners in the other blocks, to keep with the diagonal lines.

There were a few extra challenging things about this project. One was the size. In order to have an abnormal shape and stay within the perimeter range (20-30 inches), the blocks were quite small (3" finished). This meant the mitred bits were also quite small. The other challenge was figuring out how to finish a quilt that wasn't a "normal" shape. I toyed around with a few ideas (including adding binding that went behind the sticking out bits, but in the end I scraped that and did a bit of a raw-edge finish. I'm still curious about what other quilters do — it wasn't something I seemed to have the right words to google.

I decided to reverse appliqué the leaf — both because I thought it would look better and to try something new. It was an odd enough shape that I chose to iron freezer paper on the back, cut a line in the middle, and then glue down the fabric that I turned under. Technically I have used this technique on a previous project and I used rubber cement for it, but it had been long enough since I did that that my rubber cement had gone rubbery, so instead I used a glue stick and it was messier and not as precise as I would have preferred, but it got the job done.

I chose to do straight line quilting that rotated at the dividing diagonal. I purposefully spaced the lines different distances, but on a piece this small it was hard to get enough quilting to look good, while still having things look randomly spaced and not part of a pattern (since some of the different distances aren't that distinguishable). I did not account for how much the acorn would stick out the side, so I should have carried some of the quilting further along — it ends early on the backside.

I laid the leaf and the acorn out where I thought I wanted them, which wasn't quite where I had sketched them, but they looked better this way than when I laid them out to match the sketch. Next, I stitched them down on top of the background. I ended up turning under the background on the top (I had originally cut it to have binding added to it), but I left the backing cut as a raw edge. Once I had cut out the shape, I overcast around the entire edge of the quilt to finish it. I still think I might have liked a different finishing method, but I still haven't figured out what that is.

My friend ended up going a completely different route. She made her the shape of her object. She also did A LOT of handwork on this one. She decided to do a pickup truck that was hauling pumpkins. She made a paper outline model of what she wanted, and auditioned her fabric for it.

Next, she started making her pumpkins. At first she pieced them.

But she wasn't happy with how they came together, so she ended up rethinking things and realizing she was going to have to do things by hand to get the look she wanted. Pumpkins got made and attached.

And more of the truck got made.

She created her finished look through lots more hand stitching.

And added side mirrors.

She added more details, some hand embroidery, and some quilting to finish things up. It was lots of time, but overall a lovely product.

Another One Bites the Dust: Covid Quilt Challenge #9

Another week, another challenge. We have some plans (crazy, I know) for the next few weekends, so we decided we needed to do another challenge because it will be a month before we can do the next one. However, I also wasn't sure I was up for another full weekend, full brain power challenge. So this time, instead of randomly picking our challenge we decided to do some freehand machine embroidery (since we felt it would take a little less time/energy to do). It still took a good chunk of my day, but I was able to putter a little bit more.

We started by doing some googling, which was harder than it should have been because we didn't know the right words to use. We found eventually that the words "freehand machine embroidery" got us most of the way there, and then similar image searching narrowed it down for us. We were definitely looking for something a little more basic and we liked the more fun/whimsical ones with black thread outlines. We picked a cake that we liked the look of and decide to both do a version of it for our test piece. Since it was only 3 rectangles of fabric and a cake plate just done of stitching, we decided we could do it fairly quickly.

Mine

My friend's

What I learned was that I can't just freehand things without anything to go off of (as evidenced by my cake plate). I also started with a slight advantage as my friend had never even broken out her quilting foot. But she's a very talented individual and caught on very quickly (plus it helps that it's small pieces that aren't meant to be done perfectly).

This was all accomplished on Friday night. We knew that these projects were a bit less of a time commitment, so we decided we would do a bit of a series that we could possibly revisit another time as well. Because of this, we decided we wanted our things to be the same size and we picked 5" finished (which is the bottom end of our perimeter). For our series we picked a theme of fruit. We decided we would each make 3 fruit pieces.

We each ended up picking a smaller theme for our 3 fruits. I chose "July" as my theme, picking my favourite local fruits that I can get in July — strawberries, cherries, and yellow plums. I decided to do a different number for each piece — 1 strawberry, 2 cherries, and 3 plums — and I also decided that I wanted to incorporate a little bit green into each one (for some consistency).

After sketching each one, I cut out paper templates and then fabric pieces, which I laid out how I thought I wanted. Then I attached a little bit of fusible webbing to the pieces just to help them stick in place when I went to stitch them. I was a little worried when I cut the paper out, because there wasn't much of a difference between my plums and my cherries, but getting them in the right colours really made a difference.

After that it was just a matter of stitching things in place with black thread.

Then came the tricky part. We hadn't really decided how we were going to finish them; we just knew we didn't really want to bind them. I had a lot of extra when I worked, so I decided to trim the back and the batting down to size and then fold the front under and around to finish it on the back. I then used my machine stitches to sew around the outside to hold the border in place. I worked from the back to make sure I was stitching where I wanted. The machine work was a little less controllable than I wanted. It made for a very rustic feel, which on this project was fine, but wouldn't be good for things I wanted to look more  polished. If I had been feeling a little more ambitious I could have free-handed something, but I had enough trouble making sure that the edge staged in place and my stitching didn't get too far out of place with the pre-existing stitch that I don't know how successful I would have been.

My friend chose her theme to be "a study in yellow". We did not tell each other our themes or chosen fruit as we worked — we decided it would be more fun that way (and we wouldn't influence one another).  She ended up picking a banana, a pineapple, and a lemon.

She mostly used the same method I did of pre cutting the shapes she wanted and tacking them down with fusible web before stitching them.

However, for her pineapple top, she instead went with another method we had seen which was to use a bigger piece of fabric, stitch what you wanted and then trim down to just outside the stitching lines. She said it was a little difficult because you're basically in no man's land in terms of knowing where to go (instead of having an outline to follow). She used a paper template to help with that.

She also struggled with what to do to finish them. In the end, she decided to face them, but before she did that, she free motion stitched an outer border on them and then attached the facing. She did a very good job getting the outer border lined up before she turned everything under.

I think they look really cute framed from the back too.