We All Got 'Em; My Very First Quilt

In the great scheme of things, I'm a pretty new quilter. Sure, I've been around quilts, quilters and quilting my entire life, but it wasn't until about 4 years ago (when I was 21) that I really got into quilting at all. Logic says that it was around that time that I made my very first quilt...but that's not the truth. I still have my first blocks that I paper pieced with my mom from when I was 6. Let's just say that while my seams were all right, my color choices were enough to gag a maggot.

But I started my very first quilt about 9 years ago when I was 16. It was a yellow brick road style pattern, super simple and Mom had picked some cute Halloween prints from her stash to entice me into actually wanting to sew. It lasted for a few days until I realized that, hey, sewing isn't as easy as it looks! I got all my blocks sewn, but good lord was I terrible at it! My seam allowance was all over the place, my pressing left something to be desired and I managed to stretch those pieces into oblivion. I quit. A few years later I laid the quilt out and sewed the blocks into rows, and attempted to put the rows together only to find I was still terrible and nothing matched! I stuffed everything into a bag and didn't look at it again until 3 years ago. it was then that I took apart the rows and some of the blocks and fixed some pretty glaring errors that just weren't "workable." I got sick of looking at it and moved on to other things. About a year and a half ago I picked and put on an inner border, and away the quilt went. Well, after 9 years, 2 months ago I selected and put on the outer border and gave it to Frances to quilt.

Nine years later...my very first quilt is done. We chose a star pattern and a variegated thread to pop in the borders. As far as I was concerned, the quilt could only look better with quilting since it was so wavy and wonky from my lack of skill and patience. But now it's done and all it needs is binding!

Guatemalan Flora Row Quilt

I know, I know, I promised a long time ago to update more, and well, after getting let go from my job (not at the shop)...let's just say that just because you're technically unemployed it doesn't mean you aren't crazy busy! I wish I could say I had more time now than ever to sew, but sadly, that's simply not the truth. I've gotten a few projects done (or mostly done) and this is one of them.

Guatemalan Flora is a line of fabric from Robert Kaufman, and yeah, it's about a year and a half old...about as old as this sample is. It got pushed, as many do, to the back, back, back, waaaaaaaaay back burner as more urgent projects took the lead and this one sat and figuratively molded on my UFO shelf. Okay, who am I kidding? I have a complete set of shelves dedicated to UFOs. I wish I were kidding....I'm not.

But back to the quilt! This fabric came with a lot of great, large scale graphic florals and stripes, but the fabric I chose was a large border stripe with lots of littler rows with the larger ones. A lot of times we see these big stripes and think, "Well, this is only good for a border really," and we get stuck in a borders rut. But these large border stripes can be fussy cut into blocks, or a length of yardage to make into a row quilt, which I chose to do. Row quilts get scoffed at quite a bit simply because of their simplicity, and I don't think that's quite right. Even though they're about as simple as you can get, they can have a real impact and they don't have to just stay in long rows either! I cut mine apart and put large strips in between to break it up. But it made a large quilt very quickly and after it sitting on that shelf for months and months, it was totally pieced and ready for the quilter in an afternoon.

 I interuppted the stripe pieces with coordinating fabrics from my stash to get it to the size I wanted, since using only the rearranged stripe pieces it fell a little short.

 Here you can see the scale. In the upper left corner is my wastepaper basket and the right, my dresser. It's pretty large!

Now it's quilted and I thought I took a picture of the quilting, but I apparently didn't, so I'll have to update with a picture of the new quilting. Frances used a fantastic floral pattern and a really gorgeous variegated thread. All it needs now is the binding!

John's Quilt(s) are Finally Complete

[UPDATE 4/11/12: Wow, I like how the Blogger app completely rearrages the order in which I put pictures. Good grief.]

I got John's quilts finished finally. He is going to flip. Well, one he insists is "ours" even though I made it for him :-) So "our" quilt and "his" quilt are done. Mostly. His needs to go off the the quilter now, but the top is done! 

I've posted on "our" quilt before, but here is it all done, with borders. It was too big for me tro hold up and get a good picture of, so this will have to do:

This is his Quilt, from the Spoonflower Coast Guard fabric I posted about a while back: 

Projects, projects everywhere!

Picked up another new project...man I need more hours in the day! But this one is going to be cool...okay, fine I think they're all cool. But this has an outer space theme which if course appeals to my not so secret (or small) nerdy side :)

Spring Cleaning...Organize ALL THE THINGS!

It always sounds so much more exciting as a meme.

The last few weeks have been spent, well, doing exactly that. My house somehow managed to transform into a disaster zone right under my nose, so that needed to be tackled in thee worst way. As I got things straightened out, more than once I'd pick up a piece of yardage, a scrap, a black or two, a book, a pattern, some fusible pieces and wonder to myself "JHC...how did that get there?" I guess that's just the way of living as a quilter...quilting stuff managed to get everywhere. I'm still in the process of going through stuff and moving it from my sewing dungeon into my proper sewing room, which has turned out to be a far greater undertaking than I figured it would be at the onset. Apparently, I have a LOT of quilting and craft crap. So I'm just going through things and trying to emancipate myself from the heaps of things I don't need and don't use...not just quyilt stuff either, I mean I started going all out so everything has been getting gutted. Interestingly, I have managed to squeeze in a little sewing time in between. John's quilt came back from Frances and I just got the binding sewn on it yesterday. T-Minus 4 days to get that beast bound and ready for him to see on Friday!

But I'm not the only one...Mom even caught the bug and has been gutting her sewing room and side rooms as well, and enlisted my help. So I've been going over there on days off we have in common (you know, Sundays) and some evenings to help her get things gone through and organized. To be completely honest, I hadn't ven thought about it because I was more like "....I don't even know how to approach this..." when it came to getting things organized, but it turns out that helping her organize her sewing room translates to her giving me a TON of quilting stuff. We're only halfways done and I went home with 4 bags and a box of fabric and books, plus over 150 magazines to root through. Crazy! So we were going through and it was funny because it because apparent just how much she loves certain pieces...Once we thought we had all of the cut goods squared away, we kept finding the odd jelly roll or charm pack stuffed away with other fabric. I'd laugh and she'd say "What?! I like fabric!" I'm glad I've got the spare time to help because like my undertaking at my house, hers is quite the chore as well and I know she wants to get it done ASAP and with running the shop there's no way she could get it all square by herself. It is just the icing on the cake that I ended up with a chunk of her unwanted stash too, and I'm happy now that we have that kind of thing to share with each other (quilting and fabric appreciation, I mean). I don't have a huge stash like hers, but I did tell her that I have tons of Halloween fabric she can use for her next Bones Boys quilt. It's not much compared to what she gave me but hey, it's the best I got.

But as far as projects go, I have a ton going and I'm gonna have to just take the time to get some pictures taken and uploaded, but I did get some older ones done...they just need to get bound. Ugh...binding. Almost there!

What kind of trouble have I got myself into?

With all the other not-so-positive stuff going on in life right now (don't worry, family's fine, relationship is fine, shop is fine, no one's dying) in my personal life, I've decided to take a nice, head-long running leap back into quilting. Heck, if you can't manage to make lemonade, bury yourself in projects and make quilts instead. An hour with my sewing machine and it seems like most of the things on my mind melt away. Some people choose exercise, some people choose spending sprees, some people choose booze...I choose quilting. Quilting is the best therapy out there! Well, if you're a quilter anyway :-)

Here's one of the projects I've been doing. It's a pattern from Metropolitan Quilts, a local (well, up in West Linn, but close enough!) pattern company. I LOVE their stuff! Seriously, go and have a click on the link there and take a lookie at those patterns. How cool are those? Mom picked up this owl one for me at Schenck's when she was there last week: [A Note about Photo Quality: Now that my roomate moved out, I have a sewing room again. The downside to that thought is the lighting is atrocious. C'est la vie!]

Wow. Dark! I promise it's a bright and lively quilt. Verrrry cute. And verrrrry big.

I chose to do mine on a grey background instead of white. Because hey, this is Oregon, no matter what the season, there's greyness and raininess here. But I was happy with how it turned out. The only complaint I have is there there was no notation that on the non-symetrical pieces, it didn't say that they needed to be reversed to look like the cover pattern. I learned that with the swirls (about half of them should have been reversed to go different ways) and the lines on the large tree (the angles don't work if you don't reverse the applique, so I just cut mine to fit and make them shorter on the tree, whatever). But it still looks great and the pattern was really concise.  Once I get the timing on my Bernina fixed, I'll applique it. I'd use my Simplicity, but it bit the dust (RIP!). I'm using a colorful stripe for the binding...should turn out great!

I finished another quilt, but apparently I didn'ttake pictures even though I remember having taken them...I'll post those later.

I know I keep saying this...

Well I apologize for my lack of updates lately...Sometimes life throws you lemons and you find yourself buried in them before you get get to making the gallons of lemonade you're supposed to in these situations, you know? So I've been taking time to try and get my priorities and such straightened out so I can get back to being my loudmouthed self. I've been working on a few things, but it's been slow going...actually I haven't finished much lately just because of everything else going on. But things are looking up and I promise I'll be back on here bugging everyone about the weird and the quilty. Until then... :)