There must be something in the water...

This coming fall, I have two nieces and the wife of one of my nephews who are expecting babies.  One in October and two the first week of November.  So I figured I better get started on baby quilts.  The good news all three of these nieces/nephews and their spouses are really into my quilting and have treated previous quilting gifts like gems.  My nephews first born, has not gone a day in 8 years without her quilt by her side.  It goes to school, play dates...  everywhere :-).  Her mom treats it like gold, washing it with fine washables, etc... (that is when she can get it away from her).  One of my nieces husbands is always drooling over the quilts I design myself and has asked for a quilt with a drum based theme, as they know they are having a boy.  So needless to say, I am thrilled to be making them quilts, there will be no 'cheater' panels on these!

Last night I finished drafting the 'drum' quilt.  I choose the fabrics and even created the pattern for the drum applique.  I had thought that was all I was going to do for the night, but when I stopped it was 1 a.m. in the morning and believe it or not, I had 3 drum appliques all fused down, ready for their satin stitching.  No quilting tonight, but after looking over my applique work with my 20 yr old son, he came up with a great idea.  They were going to need to be texturized....  soooo I decided to trapunto them.  Make those drums pop right out off of the quilt top.  The drums are basically 10 inches in size, on a 12 inch square, so they will give the baby plenty of area to touch and feel, especially with the 'flags' on the side, plenty of places for stitching....  I am sure a picture is worth a thousand of my words, so as soon as I do the satin stitch on one and get the trapunto behind it, I will post a pic.

As you can tell I have gotten back into my quilting mood...  after an endless summer running around in the sweltering heat.

Hope to see you guys here in blog-land more once we take my son back to college tomorrow.

Enjoy and sweet dreams :-)

Quilting for charity...

I have 3 baby quilts to make for nieces and nephews, but before I could start, I had to finished 2 charity quilts I committed to do this summer.  One was for my guild to donate to a local nursing home and the other was for a guild member who is traveling to Africa with a quilt tour group this fall.  They are bringing quilts for the babies, so I promised I would donate one for the trip.

Well, I am sure I am like most quilters on 2 accounts.  One, I usually work in similar colors and two, I save all the odd left over pieces from quilts I make.  So I was fortunate enough to look in my scrap basket and find some treasure.  Earlier this year I made two quilts for nieces, both with purple as the main color.  Since both also used turquoise, I was able to pull enough scraps with coordinating colors from the basket to make both tops....  talk about pay-day.

The first was real easy, as I had quite a few left over squares from one of the quilts, where I just didn't like some of the colors or fabrics for the look I was trying to acheive....  but since I took them all out whole, they came together to make the quilt for the African orphanage....

Nice bright colors, where strip sets and squares made a nice 46"x42" baby blanket.  It has almost a scrappy feel but still cohesive :-).  For the quilting, I just did a continuous line design, joining swirls and leaves.  It has been such a long time since I quilted large graceful work, I had a hard time getting into the groove.  My rhythm kept wantingto take me back to my small intricate quilting of late.  But, I managed and am happy I was able to finally free motion quilt with my Superior Rainbows thread.  I just lowered the top tension to .5 and the stitch length to 1.0 and off I went!  No snagging, breaking or spit up on the back, like I had been experiencing with the Rainbow thread.  I guess practice and learning your machine, really does pay off :-).

I then took the left over purple and turquoise strips and half square triangle blocks and put them together with Kona Black for the second top. 

This piece measures 42" square and they mustn't be any larger. as this is safe size for use with a wheelchair.  Otherwise, it can get caught up in the wheels of the wheel chair...

The top came together really quickly.  I did some free motion feathers in the black sashing and 6 other designs in the 'blocks'.   I decided to practice doing quite a bit of my filler patterns on this piece, except making them about 10 times larger. I decided to practice doing quite a bit of my filler patterns on this piece, just making them about 10 times larger. It was interesting seeing which filler worked or was easy to do on a bigger scale, and which ones didn't.  I will let you be the judge, but here is the one I like the best....

I realy enjoy what I call 'leaves on leaves'.  I love the way you can change directions and they look as if they were layered one on top of each other.

I used the same Superior Rainbow thread in this piece.  Again using Bottom Line in the bottom, with a 90/14 Sharp needle. 

All ran smooth as can be.  Just have to do the piping, which I do by hand, usually as I travel up and down the road.  Now I can get started on the 3 baby quilts that are joining the clan this fall :-).

The first will be drum themed.  I just have to design it first :-)...

Nite....

Progress against to do list...

So I finished the top and back of the quilt for the Pelham Quilter's outgoing President....  Thanks to the 19 other members who contributed squares.  It is funny that the yellow and blues were all so similar in value, that it made it pretty easy to create a cohesive piece.  The greens were different, but since greens remind us all of nature and leafs and such come in so many different shades of green and live together so wonderfully in nature, they still worked well.  I ended up using a very simple setting method, with a basic inner/outer boarder as not to take away from the beautiful blocks.

I was heading out of town, and ran out of time, so my DH delivered it to Mary Anne who will quilt it for us.  Our meeting is the 13th of September, so I wanted to make sure she had enough time to quilt it on her George.

Lorriane has been president for almost 20 years...  yes we are bit unconventional as a guild :-).  I hope this quilt will be a fitting tribute to her years of service.  I will post pics once we present it to Lorraine in September.

I also spent some time quilting a small piece for a friend, Donna Chambers, to take with her on her trip to Africa this September.  She is going with a quilting group and they will stop by a children's orphanage.  She has asked members of the guild to make baby quilts for her take with her.  I should finish this next weekend.  Will post pics of this as well, once finished.

I have broken a golden rule...

When I first decided to blog, I new that I would not do so daily, but felt that if I was going to be a blogger, than I had to do so at least once every 10 days.  Well, it has been almost a month!  Not good.  Seems as the stretches have gotten longer and longer.  Maybe it is because it is the summertime and we have so much going on as a family...  jazz concerts, trips to the local parks and pools, a great family vacation in Cancun, hosting a family re-union for my husband's family.  Yes, I have been busy this month.

I have done some quilting as time and the weather permits...  (It has been one hot July in southern NY.  We had 17+ days over 93, without the heat index and quite a few over 100!)  But back to quilting...  I made two charity quilt tops that will need to be quilted (pics once quilted, promise).  Had a wonderful quilty day with my girlfriend Ashley in my studio.  I have made some progress on the African dancer I started at retreat this spring, adding detail and embellishments on his neck, arms and legs.  He is now ready to be quilted, so I played with different quilting stitches and threads to determine what combination I like best...  right now a flame stitch with matching cotton 50wt thread, so that the quilting doesn't detract from the dancer....  at least that is the thought for now.  And this week, I will be pulling together squares made by members of the Pelham Quilters into a top for a quilt to be presented to our out-going President.

Now the real reason I wanted to post today is I am thinking about making a small wall hanging to Thank the pediatrician that has taken care of my children for the last 23 years.  At the end of the month, my 20 year old son will be going for his last yearly physical before he turns 21 (and is no longer able to see a pediatrician :-)).  My oldest was this doctors first newborn, so on her last visit they sat and chatted and cried for over an hour.  She has seen my kids through Juvenile Arthritis, a screaming, streaking kid who would run at the first sight of a needle, Asthma, ASD (or a hole in my then 16 yr old daughters heart that required surgery), and a  totally broken - not torn - meniscus that will have to be replaced in a yr or so with a transplant from a corpse.  She has done all this with a smile, patience and heart of a saint.  For some things, calling just to check in on them to see if they or I, needed to talk.  So....  any ideas on patterns or shapes I should use would be welcome.  I thought of a Heart, but it seems so literal and I wanted something with more meaning, to show just how special she really is.

All suggestions are welcome....  now back to work :-)

830 Update

So I had thought I would get some quilting in today.  And although I did sit down at the machine, I didn't work on my dancer as I had hoped.  No, instead I loaded the latest software update on my Bernina 830.  Almost had a heart attack, as it seemed to take way too long, after the 'successfully installed' with restart, to the 'update complete' message.  But it went on without a hitch, so I was able to play.

One of the things the update was supposed to address was tension problems with a wide range of threads. So I am hoping that it solved some of my problems with all my different threads.  I played with my Superior Metallics, Sew Fine, Tinsel and Rainbows today. 

Guess what?  I tried both free motion quilting and free motion with the BSR.  NO problems...  no faulty 'thread breakage' messages, no thread spit up on the back, no pebbles on top or bottom because the thread is being pulled to the other side..........  ahhhh, NICE!

So I played with a couple of metallics trying to decide on the color to use on my dancer.  I think I am going to go with the gold, although the cooper will allow the dancer to take center stage vs the quilting.  Hmmmm....  maybe the cooper.  The cooper Sew Fine just fades into the background, so maybe the copper mettallic will add just a tad bit of sparkle when the light hits it just right, adding a glowing effect to the dancer.  Maybe the copper mettalic is better.  Decisions, decisions.....  guess I am going to have to sleep on it.

The good thing is I am on vacation this week and don't head out of town for a couple of days, so I still have time to play.

Play-time: Superior Rainbows and BSR

For those of you who are also my friend on Facebook, you can skip this post :-).  I just want to share my latest experiment with my friends in blog-land.

Last week, while my head was spinning on what to work on next, I decided to see if my new found friendship with the BSR on my 830, would wash away all my troubles using one of my favorite threads, Superior Rainbows, on the 830.  And since I was playing I decided to try my hand at actually working on something else I want to try one day, a whole cloth quilt.  So out came a piece of Kona White, my pencil, a compass, a protracter (no this isn't math class, but I can't draw a smooth curve let alone create multiple curves, all lined up around a star...  so I needed just a tad bit of help :-)).  I loosely drew what seemed like a pleasing outline to start with and quickly grabbed a piece of scrap wool batting and one of my many Rainbow cones. 

So...  I was set.  Ready to begin....  I attached the BSR assembly, loaded my thread and off I went.  The center shapes came out okay...  I missed my marks a bit, so things don't line up all the way, but the stitching was smooth.  No skipped stitches, no spit up on the back and NO thread breakage!  I was beginning to think that I got the hang of this thing.  I was even able to do the next round, quilting using my 'leaf on leaf' motif, that I created for my last piece.  Again...  no issues....  I was on a roll!!!

I came back the next night and decided that my shape was to be enclosed in a circle and I would use a close stipple to make my archs pop from the wool batting.  Well wrong I was!  Snags, skipped stitches, spit up...  yes it all came back.  Then I remembered, oh wait, I was supposed to lower my stitch length.  That is what I learned from the Bernina BSR Webinar about a month or so ago...  so I lowered my stitch length to 1.0 and away I went.  Smooth as a baby's bottom.  Half-way through, I decided to call it a night.

I came back the next day, used the same settings as the night before and WHAM, same 'ole, same 'ole.  Well no skipped stitches or thread breakage, but I did have tons of spit up on the back.  I could even feel it happening...  I don't know what changed in the 24 hours I was away from the machine.  My tension and stitch length was the same... I was smart enough to save the settings as a favorite.  So what happened?

Well I don't know.  But later that night, I remembered that the latest software update for the 830 includes a fix for tension issues on a wide variety of threads.  Maybe, just maybe, it will help with my Rainbows issues.  I have tons of this thread, love the color changes, love the sheen, love the look in my quilts, but HATE the way it behaves when mixed with the 830...  BSR or un-aided free motion quilting. 

Since I am in Florida right now on business, I will have to wait to see if the update actually fixed my problems.  But I thought I would at least share the results of my play time... 

So here it is:

Once I get home I will once again try to fix the issue with the Rainbow thread and then try this on one of my Radiance silk/cotton blends, with silk thread.  Yummm, isn't playtime, just wonderful!

Odds and Ends...

Still no name for my UFO, but it will come to me.

While in Atlanta last week, before heading to the airport I made a stop by Intown Quilters.  This is one shop whose website does not do it justice.  Actually, I really debated if I was going to go or not from looking at their site.  Boy, was I presently surprised!  This place was huge, had quite a bit of diversity in fabric, patterns and quite a wide range of tools/notions.  They had an entire section devoted to children"s fabric, quilts and clothes.  Another section of Kaffe Fasset fabrics, another section for orientals, another for batiks, another for african fabrics, etc...   The shop was bright and cheery.  Of course, I did my usual damage...  some black and whites, some african and some thread.  A good end to a good business day!

On Saturday, I had a great time with Ashley.  She drove down and we spent the day quilting and chatting.  What a great day...  good friends and quilting.  Life just doesn't get any better!