One Monthly Goal May finish

I had a lot of inquiries about the fabric I used for the Panama Pyramid alternate triangles.This is the last of the fabric piece and luckily most of the info part of the selvage is intact. 

I really struggled deciding how to quilt Panama Pyramids. A lot of time was spent perusing my machine quilting books. This is a page from a book by Amanda Murphy and I liked some of these triangle designs. 

I  simplified a design so the quilting wouldn't be so tight and used an arc ruler to quilt the center shape and the echoing, then added a little bump-back feathering to fill the space.     

 It went pretty fast and I could work across the quilt without breaking my thread. Even better, after the first couple rows, I realized I could quilt an upper and lower triangle together--less rolling--yay!

Willow agreed to help with the photo shoot, but not to modeling a mask. 

This is her "stink-eye" glare. She's mad at me now.

We tried a few pictures outdoors before our mid-morning walk but the chippie that lives under the porch was extremely distracting! 

I guess this is the best one we are going to get!

May One Monthly Goal: Panama Pyramids
Linking with Elm Street Quilts HERE

All New--part 2

When Di Ford passed away recently, it reminded me of all the quilts I've been wanting to make from her first book Primarily Quilts. I have a small stash of her fabrics that I've been collecting to make Miss Porter's Quilt and since I was in the mood to do some machine piecing, off the rails I go again...

 

The central feathered star was a challenge--not perfect, but passable. I translated the hand piecing instructions and templates into rotary cutting and machine piecing  and finally got it to work out (after a lot of reverse sewing--lol!) The dog tooth border was supposed to be made with tiny individual English Paper Pieced triangles (3/4" high) . I used a strip of fabric and turned the edges as I appliqued it in place--much easier to my mind. 

The rest of the stars went together pretty quickly. There was a bit of a fabric crisis though.  I ran out of the older Jo Morton brown print I was using for the star background. I'm not averse to making do with another fabric but... I happened to notice a small piece of the JM fabric in a scrap bag I had recently dug out of a bin and had tossed onto my cutting table. It was right in the front of the bag! A miracle. Really! I had purchased the scrap bag many years ago from Country Threads. What are the chances that I happened to come across it just before I needed a bit more of that fabric for a future project? I'm still amazed at how that all worked out. 

I had quite a few Di Ford background prints but added a few favorites from my stash as well.

This was a first for me--broderie perse applique. 

Only four of the stars get the appliques. I was tempted to put broderie perse on all of them, but decided I should probably just follow the pattern.

Those four stars surround the central feathered star. 

So, this is where I am now--lots more dog tooth border to accomplish and then a pretty large applique border. It's going to have to wait for a bit while I get back to my May Goal quilt. Hopefully I can stay on the track the rest of the month and not go off the rails again!

All New!

In the last two weeks I have started a couple of new projects. 

One of them is this Wild Goose Chase kit that came from the stash of a quilt camp friend, Kitty.
In the pattern, there were pages upon pages for the paper pieced flying geese--not my favorite method. I decided to use my Quilt in A Day ruler to make the geese units. I needed to add a few extra fabrics to be able to do that, also making it a little bit scrappy--a good thing, in my book. 

Piecing the geese using Eleanor Burns' technique went pretty quickly--lots of geese happening! 

I changed out the very bright orange fabric that was in the kit and used two deeper cheddar colored fabrics from my stash for the rest of the quilt.

These blocks go together pretty quickly when the geese are all ready to go! 

This is all nine blocks set together as shown in the pattern. Very striking, I think. 
It's difficult to see in this photo, but there are two different blues used in the  backgrounds.
I was a little unhappy with this setting though, because the top seems very dark--and it's only 36 inches square.  

I re-set the blocks on my design wall and grabbed some cheddar squares from my 2.5" scrap box.  I liked that the sashing added some lightness and also made it a bit larger, but, hmmm......still not sure.  

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Then I remembered that I had a good sized chunk of this fabric in my stash. It's from one of the same lines of fabric included in the kit. There had been a small piece of it in the kit labeled for use in the dark parts of the geese. (I had used it as a light when I made my geese units.)

I cut it to finish at the same width as the geese units. This isn't sewn together yet. It's a little crazy looking but I kind of like it. Or maybe I am just mesmerized by those wavy stripes?
There will be a narrow cheddar inner border and a small border from the same floral in the darkest blocks. 

It has an hypnotic effect, no? 

May One Monthly Goal

I originally wrote this post at the end of March before the final clues to Cheddarback were released, so this quilt was set aside. It's been waiting all month for me to put it on the HQ16 and get it finished.
Panama Pyramids is now my One Monthly Goal for May.

I had been moving the stack of Panama Pyramid blocks from place to place--they always seemed to be in the way. I decided it was time to put the blocks up on the design wall and start arranging them. 

After spending an enormous amount of time arranging (and rearranging) the blocks, I blew half of them off the wall with the back end of my vacuum cleaner (not intentionally!). 

So....enough with the arranging--just sew them together Karen!
Half way through sewing the blocks together though, I realized that the top was going to look much better with a couple more rows.
 I needed more blocks. 

Fortunately, I did have a few extra blocks sewn, as well as lots of extra triangles cut out. I made 19 more blocks and was lucky to find a piece of the blue alternate block fabric in my Cheddarback bin. Whew!
My goal for April is to get Panama Pyramids sewn together and quilted.  There are scads of Panama Pyramid quilts on Pinterest and many of them are quilted with fans. Maybe that will be how mine with be quilted too. Or maybe not.... 
Linking with One Monthly Goal HERE

April One Monthly Goal Finish

I finished my April One Monthly Goal: Cheddarback last night. It was a fun block of the month/sew along. Part of the fun was how challenging some of the blocks were to accomplish. I rearranged the lower corner blocks so the darkest blocks would be at the bottom--just looked a little better to me. 

I used my Easy Fans pantograph to do the quilting. 

I think this is one of my favorite blocks (not just because it's blue and white). I would love to make a whole quilt from this one. 

Another favorite, but I probably would never make an entire quilt from this one because of that square in a square (my nemesis).

And lastly--the Cheddar Back!
Linking with One Monthly Goal HERE

Sweet William Progress

If things were normal right now, I would be busy getting ready for quilt camp. But they aren't, so instead I'm leisurely binding my One Monthly Goal quilt (Cheddarback) and slowly working my way through my Sweet William applique blocks. And, (it goes with out saying) making masks. Sigh. 

Here's a few of the most recently finished baskets. All of my baskets have been set up with the applique so it's just a matter of stitching them down. I've been doing that in the evenings and can get at least one block done depending on how many pieces there are in the block. You can see that some blocks are much more simplistic than others. The good thing is that now I can put away the fabric bin for Sweet William (and Cheddarback if I'm feeling ambitious) to make room for something new!
I hope you are all finding things to do in your happy places!  

A Little Afternoon Delight

The Quilt Show released part six of the BOM mid-March in addition to part three  at the beginning of March. The idea is to give us some busy work since we are spending a lot of time at home.
And what is the busy work, you ask?

We now have the measurements to make the double nine patch blocks.
There are 64 blocks needed for the quilt. The block finishes at 6.75". My plan was to work on them at my spring retreat, but that has been cancelled. My new plan is to make the small nine patch blocks as leader/enders since I have all year to get them done. 

 Before I started cutting strips, I re-finagled my leftover four patches (from the shoo fly blocks I made in month one of the BOM) and pieced them into nine patches. Both the four patches and the nine patches require 1.25" squares, so  just needed to add more squares.

I was really itching to have more piecing to do and was so tempted to join Bonnie Hunter's Unity quilt along--I love me a medallion quilt!  But really--I just needed  something to work on at my sewing machine. I opted to stay focused (for now), and have been spending a little time each afternoon working on the little nine patches. I have 82 made and need a total of 320.

 These are all the applique blocks I have finished as of last week on the design wall. I'm glad I finally put them up there because I can see now that I need to add more pink and green. And yellow.

 I've made a template to help trim the blocks. The blocks need to be trimmed to 7.25" and this makes it pretty easy to situate on the block, mark around with a pencil and then trim up using a ruler and rotary cutter. 

Only one more April block left to stitch down!  

Amazingly, I have not purchased anything quilt related since our "lock-down" began. I admit to having spent a bit lot of time browsing online and filling carts, but have resisted pushing that tempting Buy Now button.  Soooo, this was a fun little package to get in the mail: a nifty shirting from sweet Janet.  
Thanks again, Janet! 

No progress to report on my April goal--I haven't been able to motivate myself to start quilting Cheddarback. I thought I was waiting for a sunny day to add better light to my sewing room, but today is beautiful and I'm still not feeling the urge--lol!