Coming into Home Stretch

Lots of progress on the lake quilt this week. Tomorrow it comes to a halt as I head out of town again, this time to TN to visit my mom. After that it's off to the Bourbon Festival in Bardstown, KY, and then hopefully I'll be back in the studio to finish this up. In the meantime, here's what got done:

1. Quilted the geese. Mostly just outlined their major areas in a free-motion satin-stitch so that their bodies would puff out a bit and look more dimensional.

2. Quilted the turtles. Gotta admit I wasn't looking forward to this, but they turned out to be more fun than challenging, although there was definitely a 'learning curve.' For them, I used a combination of free-motion satin-stitch and free-motion straight-stitch. With the first turtle, I had to break thread roughly 8 times as I kept working myself into areas I couldn't easily get out of. With the second turtle, it was one continuous thread, start to finish, no breaks. At that point I was pumped enough to do a third one! Alas, there are but two...

3. Quilted this frog.

Just kidding. We found this little guy yesterday on the porcelain-berry vine in the back yard. He was only 1-1/4 inches long, and turned green as soon as my husband picked him up. He's called a grey tree frog. I love frogs. Ok, back to quilting:

4. Time to steam-block the quilt. Tools: carpeted floor, flannel-back vinyl table cloth (flannel side up), old cotton sheet, quilt face-down, lots of T-pins, press cloth, spray bottle of water, and iron. This photo was taken just after the quilt was blocked (took about an hour after pinning). After that, it lay untouched overnight, until there was no question it was dry. And what a difference. I always forget just how much smoother and better these wall quilts look after they're steamed and dried. Blocking 'marries' the quilt layers without flattening them (hold the iron just grazing the backing; do not set its full weight down on the quilt!!), shrinks out any warping, and makes it far less likely that those buried knots will ever work their way out. 

5. Time to square. Pinned the blocked, dry quilt back up on the design wall. And suddenly it hit me that I could use a plumb bob to get a true vertical line. I'm sure people do this all the time, but I never had a design wall until this quilt, so the idea had never occurred to me. Wow, what a timesaver!

See the string hanging from the flower pin? That's just a paper clip (not the old wire kind) clamped onto the bottom end of the string. This (the string plus the clip) is a makeshift plumb bob. The paper clip is heavy enough to pull the string into a straight (plumb) line. When the paper clip stops swinging around in the air currents caused by your window air conditioner, your pedestal fan and your ceiling fan, you can get your true vertical line and mark it on the quilt! (And yes, I had to turn off the window unit, pedestal fan and ceiling fan--one by one. That darned paper clip didn't stop moving until all three were off and the air was perfectly still. Hey--ding ding ding--here's an idea: Maybe I should have used a bigger paper clip. Duh.

Oh well, next time. :)

Anyway, the quilt is now squared and trimmed, and binding strips have been cut. I'll save that photo for next time.

Now it's time to sign off and do the fifth load of laundry. Why do I always think I can save all the chores until the last day before a trip? Hooking up with Leah Day's FMQ Friday post--she's teaching her husband to stitch free-motion--is this cool, or what??? (Wait, do we really want our spouses in our spaces? I might have to think twice about that... ;) Anyway, his first free-motion attempt is pretty impressive. Also hooking up with Sarah Craig's Whoop Whoop Fridays post, where she has got a clean house this week (I'm SO jealous, but yes, now and then it just has to be done) and is generously sharing other folks' work instead of her own.

Have a good weekend, everyone, and if you're having 75 degree weather like we are today, take a break from quilting and get outdoors!

Linda

Back to the Lake

It's summertime, and what better time to head for the lake?

Yes, after leaving Lida behind last week, it was time to get out a lake scene quilt top that had been sitting since last November. This one is larger than any landscape I've made, and the old studio had become so cramped that the quilt top had to be designed in the living room. I'd progressed as far as possible on it and then stashed it in the closet. With the new studio up and running, there's room to work on it now.

This is by no means the entire quilt top; it's only a section of the lower left quadrant. The turtles (pinned on in the first photo and fused on in the second one) were designed with just two fabrics and needed embellishment to look more real. Tsukineko inks are somewhat transparent, so I left those in the drawer and chose some Jacquard textile colors instead. Turns out they're only semi-opaque. Two other bottles of fabric paint caught my eye, some Scribbles 3D left over from painting T-shirts a long time ago. One of them was just about the right color for the sides and stripes on my turtles. I used a tiny paintbrush to spread the paint just enough to keep it from gobbing anywhere while leaving it thick enough to cover well. I'm not entirely thrilled with the results (lots of guesswork due to my shadowy photos), but they could have been worse.

The turtle shells will be free-motion quilted, following the spiral lines in the fabric. In fact everything on this quilt--rocks, water, geese, grass, dogwood branches and blossoms, and water lilies--will be quilted in free motion.

Leaving that on the cutting table to dry, I reluctantly turned to a task I've been putting off for months--altering the hem of this dress to wear to my niece's wedding next week. It's made of no-fuss crinkle cotton and should pack beautifully for the trip to Maine (where I'm also hoping to get some great coastline/island photos for quilt inspiration).

 

After running a single row of straight-stitch 3 inches away from the old hem edge, I pressed the new hem up on that stitch line (all freakin' 5 yards of it) and used an overedge serger-type stitch on the fold, similar to the original hem. (There is no blue area in this. That's just a trick of the light.)



All that remained was to trim, extremely slowly and carefully, the old hem away from the underside--the challenge being of course not to cut into the dress itself. Mission accomplished (with an iced coffee close at hand to keep my mind from going into Zen mode like it usually does during anything monotonous). Whew! And now I have some nice, long, 3-inch wide turquoise strips for my scrap drawer.

By Tuesday the paint was dry on the turtles and the whole quilt top was ready to be sandwiched. Realizing there was nothing in my fabric stash large enough to serve as a back for this quilt, I turned my thoughts to designing a new landscape. I have to say, happiness is having a design wall and space large enough to audition 6 half-yard panels of Vicki Welsh hand-dyes at once. What a mood-booster this was!

The lake quilt top is still on the cutting table. (I'm not quite ready to show a closeup shot of it.) Yesterday I found an interesting green print at JoAnn Fabrics for the quilt back, with enough leftover yardage to use as foliage in a future landscape quilt.

 

Signing off here to go shoe shopping...ugh! The only shopping I like is fabric shopping, so it takes an upcoming event like a wedding to get me into any shoe or clothing store.

 

Hmm...wonder if there's a shoe store near JoAnn Fabrics....

 

Hooking up with FMQ Friday over at Leah Day's site. Her post about finding a balance between intensity and sanity certainly strikes a chord with me. Click on some of her reader hookups to see what they're up to. Also getting my whoop whoop on (for having finished my turtles) by hooking up to Whoop Whoop Fridays. Look what Sarah has managed to piece in just a few days! (And check out the multitude of reader hookups at the bottom of her post!)

 

Everyone have a great week next week. I probably won't be posting then but will look forward to catching up with everybody after we return from Maine.

 

Speaking of posting, if anyone is having trouble posting comments on this blog, you are not alone; I know of at least two people who've commented on my blog in the past but haven't been able to do so for the last two or three weeks. None of my settings had changed, so I contacted Blogger (Google). Hopefully they'll figure out what's going on and fix it. So please keep trying, I love to hear from you. Yesterday I did enable comment moderation (the only setting I've ever changed), after learning that apparently spammers can post vulgar language or ads on your blog and cause your blog to be deleted. Not taking any chances on that! Again, very sorry if you are having difficulty. Please keep trying. Thanks,

 

Linda