Modern stars swap complete and mailed!

     Every once in a while, I will participate in a block swap. I have to know it is going to be run well before I commit and I have to love the blocks. I am doing the O My Stars Swap with the modern version. They are due on Jan. 11th and I am thrilled to have mailed them out Tues. 7th, because the last time I tried to do a swap with Barb, I had a heart attack and had to drop out.
     I have no idea what kind of quilt I will make. I had to make 32 for the swap and I made an extra 10 for myself, but it won't be enough to make a quilt.

All of the solid colors I used.

We were instructed to press the last seam open.
I used my Seam Stick to do this as it works fantastically when there are lots of interesecting seams.

Assembly required

     In trying to get a handle on the new year and kick the can farther down the road, I gathered the bags containing all the pieces for a comfort quilt, but were not arranged and clipped for web construction piecing. There were more than a few. Yikes. 
     My mother can sew small straight seams and is bored a lot. I try and give her pieces to sew that I can trim later or don't have to match. Making kits for her is time consuming and then I need to trim, arrange and finish- a reason the pieces get bagged and piled up. 
     Every once in a while, Missouri Star reels me in with a great deal on a layer cake. If I cut the white 10" squares myself, my mom can sew the color and white squares on all four sides so I can make HSTs and trim them. I have to glue the corners with Elmer's washable glue because she won't use pins and pushes the fabric through zoom, zoom. Glued corners or seams work for her and they make less work for me ripping in the long run.
     The first one is the Disappearing Hourglass from MSQC. The blocks were from Kaffe and white HSTs. Once arranged on the wall, I realized I royally screwed up the blocks in rotating the centers most of the time incorrectly. I have made this pattern before- I must have been brain fried. I am not ripping out as the bias would kill the blocks. So, what you see is how it is going. They are clipped by column, numbered and ready for web piecing. It will have a 3" border.

     I have about 12 blocks left, so I will use sashing and cornerstones with a big border for a second one. I like to make my adult comfort quilts about 60 x 72-80" to actually cover them. 
     Next, I had batik and cream HSTs. I chose Supernova that Sarah shared. I had made one before with all kinds of blue and white. However, when I pinned these up and asked my husband what he thought, he said it was confusing and awkward in spots where it changed direction. Because this will be a comfort quilt, I want the design to be calm and comforting, so I took it apart. Sigh.

     I looked through my pins and drew up an idea giving a star look. Trusty old graph paper.

     Put this one on the wall and I think it is a winner. Some colors maybe need rearranging, so I will let it hang for a while. It used 120 HSTs- the exact same from the quilt above. There are about 48 HSTs left, so I will have to figure out another idea for those. This one will be about 60 x 72 with no border or maybe a thin one. I have to number and clip it together because I need the wall. Another one ready to web.

FMQ quilt quickly for comfort

     A few days before Christmas, a woman in my class at church asked if I had a quilt or book or resources for her cousin's daughter, Ana, who is 4 and in the last stages of brain cancer. I ransacked my tops for one to finish quick and found a top  a friend had made for a FMQ presentation we made to our guild and I had never finished. 
     It was not my first choice for a child, but I had to have something now. I was able to finish the quilting on one of my Singer 301s with a new old foot that I bought online. The foot is a Singer darning foot that was sold for the 401s and the seller told me it would fit. Well, not exactly. I had to take off one of the thread guilds and crank down on the needle screw so it wouldn't hit. The foot itself was very stable and worked flawlessly. It cost a small fortune. I don't like the cheap ones that flop around and don't stay tightened. I have asked my husband to carefully grind down one corner so the screw holding the needle in will not have to be cranked so hard to be out of the way. Hopefully, he can do it.
     I used lots of thread colors because when I did the presentation, I tried different colors so it would show up on our projector.
     I was able to quilt, label, bind and pack it in a bag with one of my books and a couple of pocket quilts. The woman in my class was able to get it to her father when he came back to the Buffalo area to get more things because Ana was in a hospital in NYC.
     Last Sunday, the woman showed me a photo of Ana with the quilt over her in her hsopital bed. I am so grateful I persevered and was able to get it out although it was not my first choice.

 

Catching up

     I am trying to surface after the Christmas season. The week before Christmas, I got the second part of the shingles shot. I was just as sick as the first time, bedridden again. I know so many people who said, "All I got was a headache." Well, good for you. It is not like I chose to get a reaction. 
     Also, I traveled to PA to babysit my grandson the week before Christmas so everyone else could go to the Pittsburgh Steelers-Buffalo Bills game. My grandson and granddaughter gave me a respiratory virus that struck me during the whole Christmas week. So, I have been trying to get done what needs to, but little else.
     The week before I got sick, I made all the flannel pillowcases that I make as presents for the family. I had washed and zig zagged the edges previously. I cut them all out assembly style and sewed them up. Everyone loved them and I got requests from a couple of others. Great.

They are all folded up here so I could get them all in the photo. I picked fabric for each person's interest. I buy the flannel in August on vacation in the Adirondacks in Inlet at the Crazy Moose.

      The other request I had was for t-shirt pillows. I do not like sewing with t-shirt material. I will never make a t-shirt quilt. There are plenty of other people that do that well.
      My son in law had some old Mario game t-shirts and asked me to turn them into pillow gifts for his nephew, my grandson. I bought some very lightweight stabilizer, ironed it on, layered batting and put a backing on, and then free motion quilted it on my newest 301. I enjoyed that part. Then I bought 18" pillow inserts with a coupon- Joanns, and hand stitched the closure with a ladder stitch. 
     When I showed them to my son-in-law, he claimed one of the pillows.

Doing the free motion

One side quilted and cut out

All pinned, ready for quilting

All the layers- t-shirt, stabilizer, batting, backing

One of the sides

Another one quilted

The happy recipients

New Mystery Quilt done

     Alycia posted a new mystery quilt- A Winter Quilt Along, with each step supposedly taking one hour. Some of the steps were longer for me, especially since I had to do a lot of ripping as I sewed together parts wrong. Sometimes I am angle challenged, especially if the design is not symmetrical. 

     It started out with lots of HSTs. It was divided into three sections- top, bottom, middle. 

     The center section was last. When I laid it out, the center did not work for me. I thought the center should pull all the diagonals together and have some points, instead of a truncated star. 

Testing out the new design

     This meant I had to make more HSTs (half red, half blue) and leave off a few half red/white. 

Going to choose the red fabric

      I was happy with the result and choose the red fabric for a border. I won't be able to sew this on until after Christmas.

Christmas Card saga one more time

    Since I was 18, I have made Christmas cards every year. The number keeps creeping up, and every year I hold my breath to see if I can make it. This year I made 110. I don't like copies, so each one is handmade. I find people always love my cards and tell me so, but I can hardly ever sell a painting when I exhibit them. Hmm.
    This year, I experimented with Brusho, a watercolor crystal product, I saw demonstrated at a rubber stamp show in September. By the time I started this last week, I totally forgot the demos and had to reinvent the wheel. I used two Brusho blues sprinkled for the sky, a fine spray bottle, Arches cold press watercolor paper, a self carved stamp of an evergreen, brushes, kosher salt, white paint, and regular watercolor paint. The Brusho is a dye, so my fingers have been blue all week. 

Brusho skies

Skies with trees, ready for cropping

My mess, stamps, gelli plate, etc.

    I painted the skies in long strips, stamped and painted the trees, spattered paint and added shadows with a brush. Then I cut the strips into compositions for the cards. I bought A7 cards and envelopes with coupons from Joanns. 
     I printed out the poem I used for the inside (Longfellow's original "I heard the Bells on Christmas Day") on white paper, rubbed yellow/yellow orange pastel dust over it and glued it inside. Now I am writing a greeting in each one- the hardest thing for me to do. The out of town ones are mailed- I keep on writing in the rest.

Sometimes dreams take a long time

     Back in the 80s, I tried repeatedly to become a published children's book illustrator. Because there was a cheap airline, I flew twice a year to NYC to see publishers and attend the Society of Children's book writers and illustrators. Learned a lot, met a lot of great illustrators, but the endeavor went nowhere. I gave up, ran a graphic design business and went back to school at 41 to earn a teaching certification and masters in K-12 art. I taught for 13 years, retiring due to chronic migraines and middle school.
     I embraced quilting again just before I retired, having put it aside for the above. I love making all quilts, but especially comfort quilts. Almost all quilts I make are given away many, to people in need of them, mostly by referral. Included here is the most recent giveaway, an original design done as a mystery for my guild and Alycia Quilts. Some people asked me what I include in quilt package, so here is a photo of the bag, book, card, pocket quilt, and quilt.

All washed and fluffed.

Detail

All the pieces. Bags were donated, I sew a pocket on the front.

Recipient fighting brain cancer who I have not met. I don't meet most of them.

     I could not find a suitable childrens book to include for chidren referrals, and extensively searched along with my neighbor, Sandra, who is a professional writer. She wrote a suitable script and asked me to illustrate. I explained to her the above and she was not deterred. As I back out of my driveway, I pass her bedroom window. She kept taping signs in it, like "Do the Book", "You can do it", "It is waiting for you", etc. She wore me down. Using my grandson as a model, I posed him according to what I saw in the text, took tons of photos, did lots of sketches, painted all the 11 x 14" watercolors over a year.

    You guessed it, we could find no one willing to publish. We had some hard covers self published printed to try and find a publisher. Cold silence. For years. 
     Last summer, a small publisher, 50/50 press, contacted us. They had received one of our hardcovers through a convoluted trail. Almost a year later, Amazon printed it. Not thrilled with how the paintings printed, but thrilled for it to be there. Later, Barnes and Noble picked it up. Last week, our local paper, the Ken Ton Bee, interviewed us. 
     Finally, I have a book to include with the quilt package and a book for others to share.
     My grandson was five when I started. He is nine, going to be 10 in March. How is that for a long delayed dream?