Monday is Fun Day - Mouse House

Another cute bird house, too cute to put outside...

Two porches - nice!

Eating a piece of cheese.

Fabric Challenge Quilt Number Two - The Start

Our quilt guild is having a fabric challenge. I already made one quilt, which I called Juggling Snowballs.

I have about half of the fabric left, so I decided to make a second quilt.  The challenge fabric is on the right, and the focal point of the new quilt is on the left.

It's due next Tuesday, so I only have five days to work on it.  I haven't started, other than to have a design in my head.  I also have two big flea markets this weekend, so I better head on out.

Millie Met Her Deadline

I finished my Modern Millie, aka Wild Millie, quilt one day before my deadline of June 2.

This was pretty much the state of it as of last Wednesday.  To finish a 4' x 5' quilt in less than a week took a lot of time, so I impressed myself by meeting my deadline.

I wanted to experiment with this pattern (Modern Millie from Thornberry Quilts) by doing different colored blocks.  I made some of the blocks in March, but before making the rest last week, I arranged the background squares the way I wanted them.  Then I went ahead with the insert strips.  That way I could control the composition better.  

If I had used just one background fabric like the pattern did, then I would have made all the blocks before arranging them.  But with my design, I had two variables to deal with: background fabric and number of insert strips.  A totally random approach wouldn't have worked out as well.

This is the finished front. 

I needed a quick way to quilt this and I didn't have any good ideas.  I called the class teacher who made three of these quilts, each quilted a different way.  

I picked her simplest way:  First, stitch around the edge of each block, just inside the seam line.  I used the edge of my walking foot which was around 1/3".   

Then do parallel lines of stitching within one block at a time, skipping over the insert strips.  Instead of having all the lines start at the top, she said to stitch down, then over, then flip the quilt 180 degrees, then stitch back in the other direction, etc.  This prevents one giant pucker from happening at the bottom of each block.  It worked great, but it did take extra effort with all the twisting and pushing of the quilt through the machine arm.  

You can sort of see in this picture that the direction of the stitching varies by 90 degrees from one block to the next:  one is horizontal, the next is vertical, etc.

Of the 20 blocks, there were 10 distinct background fabrics.  I used a different colored thread for each one, so it would blend in as much as possible.  

Some of the thread colors were obvious when matching to the fabric, but for others I had to make little labels.  Notice how the label in the upper right is for a lavender fabric but the thread is silver.  And the one in the lower left is for dark grey fabric but the thread is purple.  Surprising, but true.

Each 12"  block took 30 - 45 minutes to quilt, depending on its location and how much fabric I had to squish around.  Like I said, I had two blocks of each background fabric.  To get around the tedium of so much quilting in a short time, I did one set of two blocks at a time, then switched to the next thread color and did another set of two.

Like pushing wooden beads on an abacus, I pushed each thread apart from the group as I finished with it.  This small measure of visual progress was rather appealing.

Plus, it was sort of like bingo as I waited to see when I would complete one entire row or column.

I like the back better than the front.  I didn't plan on this design ahead of time, I just pulled out lots and lots of fabric to audition until I settled on just these three prints.  

I started with the dahlia center block - it's the size it is because that's the size of the fabric I had once I trimmed off a little scrap that was sticking out from my rectangle.  Then I added that pink/purple paisley to each side.   

I didn't have enough of the paisley to completely fill out the top and bottom row, so I used the dahlia scrap.  I was going to put a dahlia in two corners, and the grey/chartreuse in the other two corners.  But I think the design I came up with is more interesting.

For my label, I made a teeny slice-and-insert block.  Sometimes my labels get ridiculously large, but I was in a time crunch so it's very small.  Besides, since I like the back so much, I wanted the label to be discrete.

By not sewing on a sleeve, it truly is a two-sided quilt.  One could put it on a chair...

... but it also works lovely on a dog bed.

On the whole, I'm happy with the quilt.  It's nice and cheerful and modern.

Monday is Fun Day - Hen and Chicks Salt and Pepper

There are lots of fledgling birds around lately.  Just this past week we've had baby Chickadee and House Finches in our yard.

This would be a good time to look at my hen and chicks salt and pepper shakers.  I bought them in February at a flea market.

Cute quilt in the buggy.

Back to Millie

In March, I took a quilting class using a  pattern called Modern Millie, from Thornberry Quilts.  I'm just now getting back to it, trying to meet a June 2 deadline.


These are my fabric choices.

The block is a slice-and-insert technique.  Usually you use the same background fabric so the strips really stand out. 

I wondered what it would look like if the background fabrics were different and they became the focus, instead of the strips.   It's a little wild, so I'm going to name my version "Wild Millie".

These blocks hung on my design wall for so long that I had to put a pin in each one so they wouldn't fall down and get mixed up.  I eventually had to carefully remove them so I could use the design wall for my curtain.   Since I finished that earlier this week, I'm back to Millie.

I Finished My Curtain

Curtains are fun to make.  It's just like making a quilt top, and it feels like cheating because you can stop right there without making the sandwich, doing the quilting, the binding, the sleeve, and the label.

This was my starting point.  Aside from the focus fabric, I planned on using these nine fabrics along with white.

 I wound up dropping three of them and adding six others.
 

The fabric you see at the top and bottom is kind of unusual.  I thought it was regular old cotton when I bought it, but it had a lot of stretch in it (which I didn't notice at the time).  It's not a knit, so I'm not sure what it's problem is.  The strips were originally twice as wide; I decided to fold them in half to make them stronger before adding more blocks to them.

I picked fabrics that read mostly as a solid.  After I sewed each seam, I top stitched it to keep it a little neater once it's laundered, and also to give it a more finished look.

Orange was one of the new colors I added.  I love the Marimekko-style of that orange floral.  It fits perfectly with the vibe of the focus fabric.

I didn't make it very wide, because I wanted that center panel to be very visible.  If it was much wider, it would get lost in the folds.

I found some nice white rings that complement the modern retro style of the curtain.

Monday is Fun Day - Cow in a Bird Cage

I went to an antique mall earlier this month, looking for things to put on my deck for the summer.

I came home with this bird cage on a stand.  I originally had a bright pink geranium inside.  That looked really pretty until the wind blew everything over.

 

I still wanted something in there, so I added a cow ornament.  This makes much more sense than a plant, or a bird, for that matter.