July Friday Night Sew In

It's been a while since I joined the Friday Night Sew-In because since we've been vaccinated we're usually off dancing, but a minor injury kept me home last night, and of course, I prefer to spend my time sewing with Wendy and everyone.

I actually spent the entire day, from shortly after breakfast until bedtime, working on the border strips for my Finger Lakes log cabin quilt. This one.

As I neared the end, I kept running out of pieces. Apparently, I was counting challenged while I was cutting out the project and so I had to keep cutting up more strips which made for pretty slow progress. But I am finally ready for the final push to finish this quilt.

I'm also linking up with Finished (or Not) Friday. Have a good weekend everyone.

Tuesday ToDo #16

 Thanks to Chris for hosting the weekly ToDo linkup. You can visit her blog for this week's link party. 

Our weather has been pleasant this last week and I spent quite a lot of time sewing. Certainly, more than I expected when I set my goals last week:

1.    Scan the quilt design(s) I like from my library book. ✔︎

2.    Start fussy cutting and gluing the fabrics on the papers. For non-fussy cut pieces, see if I can cut them on the Cricut. ✔︎ I posted about it here.

3.    Work on Design Wall in the sewing room. ✔︎

Not only did I finish cutting out the papers for the EPP quilt, but I've also finished gluing them all and sewing three of the blocks. By the time I had spent two days hand sewing, though, my fingertip was ready for a break. So I went up to my sewing room and worked on my Finger Lakes log cabin quilt for three days and finished sewing all of the central blocks!

For this next week, I would like to work on:

1. Assemble the central portion of the Finger Lakes log cabin quilt.
2. Start piecing the border blocks.
3. Rework the hanging hooks on the design wall.
4. Continue to sew the Meadow Flower blocks when we're out of the house.
5. Cut out the Irish Chain blocks for the Meadow flower lap quilt.

Love My New Cricut!

I got a new Cricut Maker 3 machine on Monday and spent the afternoon cutting papers for the Hatter quilt. At least enough to get started. I'm expecting to be able to reuse some of the pieces.

Yesterday morning I was hoping to get started on the Hatter quilt, but I am still waiting for fabrics to arrive. I ordered a black and white stripe as well as a light purple. They seem to be taking a long time as I ordered them over a week ago.

While I was trying to decide what to do, I was looking at my WOOFA list and realized I have yet another quilt that would work great as an EPP, and I have everything I need for it already.

Meadow Flower Lap Quilt

Luckily I was able to find this block in BlockBase+ so it was really easy to import it into the Cricut Design Space and make minor modifications.

It only took me a couple of hours to cut out all the papers and then I tried cutting out fabric for the first time.  It was like magic!

OMG, this took maybe 3 minutes to cut out.

I cut the center gold squares out of a scrap from the bin.

Cutting out all the papers and all the fabrics took maybe 6 hours and I suspect I'll get faster as I get more experienced with the design software. And the glue I ordered came today, so now it's time to get gluing.

Linking up with Midweek Makers.

Tuesday ToDo #15

 Last week I had a couple of meager goals:

1.    Finish the first set of blocks for the Finger Lakes Log Cabin quilt. ✔︎

This past Saturday we had a cool morning and I was in the mood to sew, so I actually managed to finish this task! It took me all day, but I even managed to add the two extra pieces that the pattern called for. All 24 blocks had an extra right edge piece and then 18 of those had an extra piece added on the top edge.

2.    Start cutting out the Hatter quilt. I probably won't take the time to cut out all the pieces... ✔︎

I spent several hours on Sunday starting to cut out the papers for this project. I don't particularly like cutting out quilts, but I discovered it's far worse to spend hours cutting up cardstock. I got bored with that and soon found myself looking around for a laser cutter. Then I ran across the Cricut Maker 3 as a viable option. I spent the rest of the day watching videos on how they cut fabric and using the design software. After spending several hours talking about buying a many thousand dollar laser cutter, I had no difficulty getting my husband to agree to this purchase. LOL 

I was happy to discover BlockBase+ can export SVG files so it was really easy to transfer my block into the cutter design software and play with it.

I ended up cutting out the pieces from a ream of cardstock we've had kicking around our house for decades. It is 9½" wide and too wide for most printers, but it worked fine for this project. I think the Cricut prefers 80# cardstock and this was only 65, but it worked OK. I lost quite a few pieces when the paper tore but it was certainly an acceptable success rate for my first day. I could very well have been doing something wrong with the layout or settings. I know I still have a lot to learn.

This isn't remotely enough papers for all the pieces at once, but I am hoping I'll be able to remove them as I go along and reuse them. This took quite a while to cut all these, but not nearly as long as hand-cutting would have taken and they're much more uniform.

For this next week my goals are:

1.    Scan the quilt design(s) I like from my library book.

2.    Start fussy cutting and gluing the fabrics on the papers. For non-fussy cut pieces, see if I can cut them on the Cricut.

3.    Work on Design Wall in sewing room.

Thanks to Chris for hosting the weekly ToDo linkup. You can visit her blog for this week's link party.

July One Monthly Goal

I think I will risk making another One Monthly Goal, but I will make it less ambitious than the last one. I won't expect to finish a whole complicated quilt in one month. Instead, I think I will set the goal to get started on a new EPP quilt, the Meadow Flower Lap Quilt (from my WOOFA 2021 list).

We've been vaccinated and have been getting out at least 3 times a week going square dancing so it would be nice to have a project I can work on in the car and during breaks. I've ordered templates and some diamond papers and I'm eager to get this project started and see how I like hand sewing projects.

The Hatter Quilt

 Free Spirit Fabrics released a quilt design called The Hatter Quilt.

I believe it was designed by Tula Pink for her Curiouser and Curiouser fabric line and it's free to download right now. It is actually a fairly simple quilt that uses one block, the Key West block. I believe I was attracted to the design because of her striking use of the black & white stripe.

I could probably machine piece the blocks, but I've been looking for a project I can work on by hand, so I am going to convert it into an EPP project by combining the two half-diamonds into diamonds that span the two blocks, and by combining the four corner triangles into one square piece. I'm also going to reduce the size of the blocks to 9" so I can buy some pre-cut diamond papers. Life is too short to cut out 504 little diamonds.

I poked around my fabric collection and I found the "Accent on Pansies" collection I bought during the pandemic. At the time, I happened to notice it on clearance so I bought enough for an unplanned quilt, which means way too much. LOL 

I didn't manage to get all the fabrics in the line, but I have some of the top four shown in the palette on the left. And, on the bright side, I think it will look good with a black and white stripe, so I will go ahead and use one.

This is the rough plan I put together in Electric Quilt 8. I normally plan queen-size quilts for our beds, but this one will be as big as I can manage. If I get sick of working on it too quickly, then I guess I'll be making a wall-hanging. LOL

The little squares look funny in this pattern because today I was not insane enough to input this pattern manually so I could put actual squares in there. You all get the idea. The squares will be filled with these little flower motifs, which I will fussy cut.

So, there we go, yet another project to put in my queue. I'm obviously much better at planning quilts than finishing them. 

Because it's Tuesday, I guess I'll go ahead and link up with TuesdayToDo, which will be #14 for me. And I guess I was supposed to give progress on my last list. I finished cutting out the T-shirts for a future quilt and I packed them away into my basement storage. Once I cut out the parts we wanted to save, they took up a LOT less space.

I finished the Sewcialites Quilt early, before the end of the quilt along, because I was eager to clean up the scraps and put the project away before I got too distracted.

And I still have not finished the set of Finger Lakes blocks, but I did make some forward progress. I think I could finish them in another hour.

And for the next list, which is likely to be for more than a week:

1.    Finish the first set of blocks for the Finger Lakes Log Cabin quilt.

2.    (And from out of nowhere, it's never been on any list before,) I think I will start cutting out the above Hatter quilt. I probably won't take the time to cut out all the pieces, but I would like to have some handwork project I can take with me when we leave the house. I'd like to always have something with me that I can work on for a few minutes at a time.

June Update

I didn't do a flurry of activity at this blog, only to abandon it. I just have not been working on sewing projects this month.

Last week, I did work for a few hours on my Finger Lakes Log Cabin before it got too hot, but once it got uncomfortably hot in my sewing room, I abandoned that project until it cools down again.

Now that we're vaccinated, and all my clothes are unpacked, I figured we'd better start doing square dancing again, or I would need to get rid of the clothes. Honestly, I probably will still get rid of some but since there is pretty much no demand for square dance clothes and fabric has gotten crazy expensive, I'll likely cut some up for the fabric. But, I haven't gotten to that point yet.

We danced quite a lot, but then the weather in Portland got crazy hot. It was 115℉ (46℃) yesterday and 110℉ today. Dances are canceled when it gets over 90℉. And frankly, it has been so hot we've had to spend a lot of time watering our yard to try and keep our plants alive. And, even with our AC running all day, our bedrooms are too hot to sleep in comfortably. We've spent way too much time the past week hanging out in our cold basement streaming TV.

Since I'd like a project I can work on while in front of the TV, I started exploring some options for a new EPP project to try. I've never made one before and I've wanted to make one for years. I thinking about trying Free Spirit's The Hatter Quilt (the download is free right now).  

This pattern is not actually an EPP pattern, but I am going to convert it into one. I am going to combine the two half diamonds into a diamond and the four corners into a square. I don't think I'll be buying special fabric for the project. I already have way too much fabric I bought during the pandemic so I'm going to try and use fabrics from my stash. But I will probably buy a stripe once I find one I like.

It's supposed to be cooler tomorrow, so I'm hoping to spend a couple hours pawing through my fabrics and see if I can find any that speak to me for this project. =)