Quilted In A Day!

Much as I love the show Quilt in a Day, I've always felt the title to be slightly misleading.  More like, Quilt Top in a Day.  Though to be fair, Eleanor Burns was working on the premise of bag lining the quilt, turning it, and tying it.  (Which leads to one of those fine quibble points of this hobby: is it a quilt if it isn't quilted?)

Yesterday after I hauled my sewing table into quilting position (in front of Grandma's sewing desk, for greater flat area to support the weight of the quilt) and cleaning and oiling it, I started quilting the Disney Star quilt:

I used six different threads.  Two purples, for the different purple diamonds on the front, as well as one of them for the bobbin for the backing.  A pink for the two pink diamonds, and a variegated blue for the two blue diamonds.  White for the setting squares and triangles, and a very pale pink for the bobbin thread under the white, because I didn't want the dark purple I'd used for the rest of the back to shadow through to the front.

I free-motion quilted meandering flowers into the diamonds, though I switched that to snowflakes for the two blue Frozen fabrics.  (One of the Frozen fabrics had snowflakes in it, so I cheated and just thread-traced those.)  The setting squares and triangles, I just used my walking foot to echo-stitch squares and triangles two inches apart.  The quilt's a bit big for a three-year-old, but Niecelet is already sleeping in a big girl bed.

And a shot of the fabulous Disney Villains backing fabric.  The quilt is trimmed, but I still need to add binding and a label.

Still, not bad work for one day!

A bit of thrifting, and Costume College panic!

I'm mostly recovered, hooray!  In demi-celebration, demi-cabin fever, I took Jazzy thrifting yesterday.  While Goodwill in Port Orchard was a bust, I did find a few things at St. Vinnie's.

A fitted and flat sheet set for Squiddle's bed, with cute cartoon sharks on them: $4.50.  Five pillowcases, four vintage and one Disney Princess to go with the quilt I need to quilt for Niecelet: $.94.  Two butterfly faux stained glass pieces ($2 each), a mirror to start the wall of mirrors I want to build in our walk-in closet ($3), and a yard and a half of vintage navy (the color, not the military) fabric: $1.50.  A Green Toys tugboat: free toy.  And three more sets of jigsaw puzzle tracks to go with the mini train set we brought back from England: $.50.

The state has for several months now been working on a new bridge over the creek closest to our home.  The work started very shortly after we bought this house.  When the new one is finished and the old one demolished, it will free up something like 25 miles of creek for salmon spawning grounds, which is a big thing in Washington.  (Seriously, it is!  The boys' school has a special tank near the entrance for salmon eggs, surrounded by posters about the salmon life cycle, and there's a state hatchery less than two miles from us.)  Today the new bridge was finally finished and I got to drive across it!  And between when I left and when I came back, the workers had de-asphalted the old bridge.  I'll be interested to watch it being deconstructed.

AND!  Spurred on by the announcement that room reservations are opening tomorrow, I finally talked it over with Wonderful Husband and signed up for this year's Costume College.  Next I get to panic and flail, panic and flail!

I need to dig out my storage bins of costumes (fortunately I know where they are), figure out what I have, what I need, what I want... and then comes going through the boxes of patterns (know where those are) and boxes of non-quilting fabrics (know where those are, too) and addressing the discrepancy between where I am and where I want to be by July.  So... just under six months.  Can I do it?  Theoretically yes.  Practically, I know I won't get everything done.

I've never gone to the Saturday night Gala.  I don't want to take time away from classes to go to the Sunday afternoon Tea.  And the one time I went to the Friday night Social, I was miserable.  That leaves possibly the Thursday night pool party (theme: Swimwear Through the Ages) and Sunday Brunch (theme: Gibson Girl Breakfast Party).  Aaaaand... I don't really care about either of those themes.  (I miss when the brunch was Sunday Undies.)

So, had I my druthers, I'd have a nice, pretty costume for each of the three days.  For one, I'd like a new t-tunic.  I already have the chemise for it, and I know I have some fairly lightweight wool in one of my boxes.  I just have to get over my sewing-with-wool phobia.  For two, I'd love to do a Regency dress: the hot pink silk for a bodiced petticoat, and the acid-burned butterfly fustian for the gown.  I think I have a chemise for that period also.  For three.... I don't really know for three.  Something comfortable, cool, and capable of being made solo.  I must think on this.  Maybe something 1920s?  (Maybe I'll luck out and get inspired by rediscovering my stash...)

Meantime, my sewing machine oil has arrived, so time to give my Singer 15 a good lubricating.

Sick!

Ugh.  I spent yesterday sick, with congestion, a sore throat, and a generalized all over ache.  I did not get a single blessed thing done except repairing one of our umbrellas, hand-stitching the canopy back on where it had come away from three of the spokes.  Fortunately Wonderful Husband was able to deal with meeting the boys' buses.

Better today. I hope.

Guild!

Yesterday, around 2:30 in the afternoon, I was sitting at my desk and heard a CRACK.  I looked out the window in time to see half of a tree fall on the other side of the road:

You can see the remaining half of the tree on the right, with the break point in the upper right corner of the picture.  This happened directly opposite our driveway.  I'm guessing the tree had been dead a while; there were no green branches on the part that toppled.  There was no wind and no rain at the time, so I've no idea what made the tree decide it was just too much and time to give up now.  I went out a bit later with the push broom and cleared it all off the road.

And!  I finally got to go to a quilt guild meeting again!  So I'm now a member of the Quilters by the Bay as well as the West Sound Quilters, the Orange County Quilters Guild, and the Orange Grove Quilters Guild. ^_^

The meeting last night was a "Four Corners" meeting, which turns out to be four mini workshops, one in each corner of the meeting room.  So I got a refresher on spinning four-patch seams, as well as a quick tutorial on how to machine piece Y-seams; an introduction to designing pictoral quilt blocks; a refresher on Danish fabric stars; and a lesson on how to make an origami bag.  If I teach at Costume College next year, that last one may just be a class I can offer.  (I still need to work out if I can go this year.)

The guild members liked my rag quilts (I got a couple questions on them) and they definitely liked the minis I made from the scraps I took from the November meeting.  Next month will be making more string-pieced blocks for charity quilts, and in April there's going to be a field trip to Warm And Natural that I'd rather like to go on....

Busy Day!

Wednesdays are my busy days.  The boys' school starts an hour late on Wednesdays, which they like because it means they get to sleep in (and Jazzy did NOT kick up a fuss about getting on the bus this morning, hooray!), but which means I have to hustle and bustle and run about to get laundry-dishes-grocery shopping done and be back at the stop in time to meet Jazzy's bus!

So, a slightly late post today.

Tonight is the Quilters by the Bay meeting over in University Place.  I have my money and I'm ready to join!  I have two minis and two rag quilts for sew'n'tell.

I had hoped to be quilting by now, but before I switch over to that task, I want to oil my machine as well giving it a good cleaning, and instead of sewing machine oil, Amazon sent me nebulizer tubing.  Sigh.  So back that went and theoretically my sewing machine oil is arriving on Friday.

Meantime, I pulled out the other two Christmas pillowcases to show you!

This one is Wonderful Husband's.  He sometimes makes hand-spiders and creeps his fingers up the boys' legs to tickle them.  A few months ago, Squiddle told him he wasn't allowed to do any more spiders until Christmas.  So he got "Christmas Spiders"!  The orange is a left over bit from Squiddle's pumpkin costume for Halloween a couple years ago.

Jazzy, meantime... well, I found the blue pirate fabric at Savers, down in Fountain Valley, California, months ago, and knew it had to be a little boy pillowcase.  The striped fabric was in my plastic shoebox of bright fabrics.

A Quick(?) Quilt

I needed another project like I needed a hole in my head.

Nonetheless, while digging through a box of strips the other day, I found twelve 8.5" Disappearing Four-Patch blocks done in muslin and two different greens.  They're definitely blocks I made, but I can't remember what for.  Block Lotto (RIP)?  Guild Block of the Month?  And why didn't I turn them in, if so?  So, call them probably four or five years old at this point.

As I was tidying things up to put away, my eye kept resting on them.  And the stack of green fabrics I'd pulled out to audition for Evergreen blocks.  And the stack of fabrics from the thrift store.  Finally I caved and did a quick layout to see what I thought:

Sometimes your creativity is limited by what you have on hand.  I knew I didn't have any more greens available without extensive digging.  And while my first thought was a one inch border of the lighter green, I didn't have enough of that either.

Next came cutting alternate squares and setting triangles:

My go-to tutorial for figuring out setting triangles, BTW, is Bonnie Hunter's On Point Quilts.  Always round up just a smidge if you end up with numbers with an eighth measurement in them.  Better safe than sorry!

Since there wasn't quite enough of the lighter green for a border stripe, I cut it narrower (1" instead of 1.5"), pressed it in half, and used it as a flange for just a pop of color:

The finished quilt top is 40" x 51".  A little large for a true baby quilt, but I like to give toddler sized quilts as baby gifts anyway.  Babies grow.  And this is a size that my six-year-old (who is like 90th percentile, size-wise) would still use.  So there will be much more use gotten out of something like this than something merely crib sized.

I was kind of tempted to name this one something like Emerald City, but I think I'll go with Cloverleaf.  Not quite what the Rainbow Scrap Challenge is intended for, but given that it used up a fair bit of green fabric, I'll count it for the month?

Monday, Monday

Ugh.  Wonderful Husband stayed up a little late last night playing Minecraft, so getting the boys up and dressed and fed and to the bus this morning lay entirely on me.  Which actually went mostly okay!  Except for the part where, when his bus arrived, Jazzy threw an absolute fit and didn't want to go on it.  Which is a first.  Ah well.  Between the bus driver and myself, we got him boarded and buckled.

Happier things!  Yesterday we went to Sehmel Homestead Park for a bit, and left when it started raining.  But not before we got a rainbow out of it!

And I've got all the bits and bobs I need cut, so fabric goes back into the garage now.  But since I found some 3.5" muslin strips, I wrote out labels for both the boys' flannel rag quilts, which I need to sew on.  Here's the one I haven't posted here yet, Squiddle's, which I made back in November: