A Sunny Rag Quilt

This baby quilt is another one of my daughter's summer projects:

This is her very first quilt (although she didn't put batting inside -- it was heavy enough -- so I'm not sure if it can technically be called a quilt).  Whatever you want to call it, it is very cute.  Here is a close-up of the fabric (all of which was purchased at our local Joann Fabrics).

I love the little birdies!  Also, if you look closer, you can see the yellow embroidery thread she used to tie the front and back together.  The fabrics on the front side are all flannels, with the seams on the outside and clipped, so that they will fluff up.

This picture shows the yellow minkee fabric on the back.

It's a very cuddly blanket.  My daughter loosely used these directions.  I say "loosely" because she took those directions and then did them her way.  First, she sketched her design out on paper and decided to use 6-inch squares of flannel.  She then sewed them together in rows, then sewed the rows together.  (I was surprised at how quickly she did all this.  My daughter is not plagued by my slowness:).  Then she cut the minkee to fit the back.  She decided against using a binding and instead just sewed the minkee all the way around, leaving a hole for turning.  She then turned it all right side out and sewed up the hole. Also, because the blanket was a good weight without the batting, she left it out.  Lastly, she opted to tie the blanket instead of quilting it.

Here it is displayed on the fence, piquing the curiosity of a couple of onlookers.

Let's move in for a closer look:

Oops!  A little too close!

Ahh!  The quilt is safely back with its maker:)

My daughter didn't get to keep it for long.  She made it for a baby girl at our church who has not yet arrived.  Hopefully, she (the baby) will spend many happy hours cuddled up with it:)

Friendship Quilt

I have been working on a small quilt -- curl-up-on-the-couch size -- for one of my children's classmates, who is going through a lot of health problems.   We wanted to do something nice for him as a class, so I thought of a friendship, or autograph, quilt.  As the name implies, friends sign a block and contribute that block to the quilt.

I do know how to sew and I have made quilts, BUT I have never made a quilt on a machine.  All my quilts have been made by hand.  This was a little out of my comfort zone.

I decided to use a brick pattern:  rectangles seemed to be a good size for signatures, plus the rows didn't have to exactly match up.  I don't have a rotary cutter, so I just made a template from a manila folder (about 5"x9") and cut out the fabrics -- enough muslin for the signatures, and the greens were all either fat quarters from Joann Fabrics or scraps I already had.

I took the muslin squares and a fabric pen to class and collected the signatures (instructing the signees to leave at least an inch margin -- some listened better than others ;)  Once I had those, I arranged the blocks in rows on the floor.  I sewed the blocks in each row together, end to end.  

Then I sewed the rows together until I had the top done.  To make the brick pattern, I had to stagger the rows, so some rows had six blocks, and alternating rows had seven.  

After it was all put together, I just trimmed down the excess block that stuck out on the sides.

I put batting in between, and for the backing I used minkee fabric, which is a textured polyester, very soft and cuddly, it feels a something like a supersoft towel.  The internet information on "sewing with minkee" was a little intimidating, especially since I had never quilted anything on a machine before, but I safety-pinned everything together fairly well and jumped in.

Minkee taped to the floor:

Batting laid over the minkee and trimmed to size:

Top laid on batting:

At this point I safety-pinned it, starting in the middle and working towards the edges.  I tried to evenly distribute all the safety pins I had (probably around 30).  It wasn't as closely basted as it might have been, but it worked.

I just quilted in the ditch (along the seam lines), starting with the middle rows and moving out.  I sewed the whole thing on my Singer 301, and I have to say despite my inexperience and working with a potentially difficult fabric, everything went off without a hitch.  This is a very capable sewing machine!

I used a brown print for the binding, and the only part I did by hand was sewing the back of the binding down. I washed it and everything came out beautifully.  The minkee feels really good.

While there is nothing particularly complicated about what I did, all of it was pretty new to me.  Be encouraged to jump in and try something new :)

My hope for this quilt is that it will be an encouragement and comfort -- both physically and spiritually -- to its recipient.

Smokehouse Quilt

My dog Penny taking a rest

This quilt rested on the foot of my bed all summer.  It is a scrappy bow tie quilt -- a lot of the family quilts are bow ties, it must have been a go-to pattern.  While it is certainly nothing fancy, this worn little quilt is in relatively good condition considering the circumstances of its rescue:  the quilt had been nailed across a window in the smokehouse behind my grandmother's house, and it had been there for YEARS and YEARS and YEARS.

See the holes?

                          

A smokehouse is a little wooden shed where meat can be cured.  In my grandparents' case, it was primarily hog meat.  When I was very small, they still had cattle, and one of my uncles was a hunter, so maybe there was some venison or other game, but mostly it was hogs.  My papaw raised a few hogs every other year.  He would butcher them and cure the meat, enough for them -- and they always had people coming over to eat -- and enough to share with the five grown children's families.  I never helped them really, but I remember going down with my mom so she could help make sausage and other meats (which they canned).  The smokehouse was mostly for curing hams and sides of bacon (or what we called "streak-ed meat," which is similar to bacon).

Anyhow, the smokehouse hasn't been used for anything but storage in a very long time.  My cousin was cleaning it out and took the quilt down from the window.  He was going to throw it away -- it was so dirty -- but my mom said no, she would take it home with her.  She washed it, and it actually turned out to be a nice little quilt, the kind that feels good over you when you're sleeping.  (Side note here:  I cannot find a batting that feels as good as these old quilts which were just lined with spread cotton -- they are soft and slightly fluffy, not thin and stiff like a lot of newer quilts.)

When my family visits my mom we have to sleep all over the house, and on one of our visits Mom gave this quilt to one of my kids to sleep under.  I noticed it since it was new to her, and Mom said if I wanted it I could have it, so I brought the quilt home with me.

The quilting is pretty basic, and the scrap placement sometimes makes sense to me and sometimes doesn't.  In some ways it's a utility quilt, except I know that it took a lot of careful work.  I wonder what the scraps were from -- maybe some grandma or aunt's dresses or an uncle's shirts?  No one knows who the maker was, but I am assuming that it was someone who was somehow related to me.  That thought makes the quilt even more comforting to lie under.

I have not repaired the holes.  The binding also needs replacing.  There are lots and lots of projects on my "should do" list ahead of this one.  But I go ahead and use the quilt because I think if I had been the one to make it, I would like to know that someone -- especially someone from my own family -- is still enjoying and appreciating my work all these years after I'm gone.    

 Penny enjoying a rare moment in the quilt

Hexagon Piecing

When I first started thinking about making a Grandmother's Flower Garden quilt, I looked at hexagon quilts online.  Almost everyone used English Paper Piecing, but the idea of that really did not appeal to me.  It seemed like so much more work. (I'm not alone in my opinion, Jinny Beyer says basically the same thing in her book Quiltmaking by Hand).  So I decided how big I wanted my hexagons to be, downloaded a hexagon shape from the internet, and made a template:

On my template you can see the little holes I punched where my quarter-inch seam allowances cross.  I cut my fabric shapes out (not all at once!) and used a pencil to mark little dots on the backside of the pieces.  Then I piled the pieces in a ziploc bag and stuffed them in my purse.

All I need are my pieces, thread, needles, a few pins

and some scissors

and I'm good to go.

(You may notice that these pictures are taken inside of a car.  That's because most of my hand piecing takes place on the road.  Here I am waiting for my son to get out of basketball practice.  I thought I'd show you hand piecing in "the field", so to speak :)

The few places I found that didn't use paper piecing still sewed their hexagons together in a complicated way, going round and round, skipping every other piece.  I couldn't figure out why they did it like that. It made more sense to me to piece them in rows, then sew the rows together.  I made a prototype, saw that it worked, and that's how I've been doing it.

First of all, I set my hexagon block up the way I want it. Then I start with a row.  Take two pieces, put them right sides together, and pin them in such a way that the pins come out where the dots are:

Check the back side to make sure the dots are lined up.

Take a threaded and knotted needle (I use quilting betweens just because I like short needles, but use what you like) and insert it at the first point.

Sew across the piece in a small running stitch, making sure to stop at the other pin point.

Do a little backstitch, knot off your thread, snip and first piece is done.  Smooth the seam allowance to one side (doesn't really matter which). View from the back:

View from the front.  I take my fingernail and smooth the seam flat.  There is no ironing going on in the car :)

Repeat until the whole row is finished:

Repeat THAT until all your rows are finished, then lay them out in order.

Pick which two rows to start with and lay them out carefully.

Flip over the top row onto the bottom row and pin the two first pieces together like you did at first, making sure dots (or seams) line up.

Thread your needle with a long strand of thread and begin as before.  When you get to the end of the seam, pull the seam allowance to the side, out of the way.  In hand piecing the seam allowances are left free -- they are not sewn down.

It's a little blurry, but can you see what I'm talking about there?

Take a backstitch at the end of that seam, then pivot the piece around and pin at the edge of the next seam, like so:

Sew to the end of that seam, again keeping the seam allowance out of the way.  Don't forget a little backstitch at the end.

At the end of some seams, you pivot the piece, like we just did.  But other seams require you to go to the other side of the seam allowance, like below.  The way to do that is to simply stick the needle through.  This will leave the seam allowance free and put you where you want to be.

Here's a closeup:

And here's another view:

Keep sewing along, one seam at a time, until you get to the end of the row.

One row completed:

Now this is not that hard, but do keep checking on what you are doing.  Don't get cocky, or you will end up with THIS:

ARRRRGGGGGHHHH!  No matter that I have made over 50 of these suckers, every once in a while I get this.   After removing the stitches (the seam ripper is my friend, the seam ripper is my friend), I can see what I did wrong.  See how I started on the very END side of the top row instead of the bottom angled side?

This time I am careful and it WORKS!

TAA-DAA!  A completed hexagon block!

And my time (this took two times, thanks to my mistake)  in the car has been well-spent!

Hopefully this has been clear.  If not, you can comment or email me.  If you are really serious about hand piecing though, you should get Jinny Beyer's book.  It will walk you through every step of making a quilt.

Marking a Quilt

I'm not sure this really warrants a blog post, but hey, it might help somebody out there.  All quilts don't need marking.  If you are outlining each piece, you don't need to mark them.  However, on this particular quilt I wanted to do allover fan quilting.  There are several ways to do this. Some people completely freehand these fans, but I wasn't quite comfortable with that, so I compromised and freehanded in between each marked line.  Because I wanted all my fans to be facing the same direction, I started in the bottom righthand corner and marked one horizontal row at a time.  I quilted that row, then marked the next row.  Here's how I marked the last row.

First, I laid the quilt on the floor and put something hard underneath it (in my case it was an 18-inch square of the stuff that clipboards are made of -- that's just what I happened to have).

Then I lined up my template (which I made out of cardboard -- you can buy templates already made, but a lot of times it's just as easy to make your own).

Next I took my sharpened chalk pencil and marked my lines.  Keep your sharpener handy.  It doesn't take long to wear these chalk pencils down.  (A note on the chalk pencils:  on this quilt I usually used white, but in a few places the white didn't show up and I switched to silver.  White and silver should meet most of your needs.)

Then I took the template off and filled in any gaps.

First fan marking completed.

Next I lined my template up against the just-finished markings and repeated the process, making sure the hard surface underneath the quilt was lined up with where I was marking.

Another fan completed.

I did this across the row, then picked the quilt up and laid it back in the frame and started quilting.  Simple, no?