UFO Challenge update

I’d really like to blame this on Erin (my friend and local librarian) but I can’t, can I? Oh yes I can! Hello, my name is Sarah and I’m a Deadliest Catch-aholic. AND ERIN ENABLES ME! Basically, all I have done this week is watch season one on DVD. Not a lick of stitching or even worrying about not doing a lick of stitchin. Season two has already been placed on hold for me.

Anyways… a long long time ago in a state far far away….I should have been packing all my worldly possessions to move from Miami back to my hometown in NY. Instead, I was still taking classes at my LQS since I loved my friends and teachers there and feared the quilting here in NY would be different. That’s why this months UFO was never finished although it was sew close. And do you know what the biggest obstacle was to finish it?? Math!

Rusty, AKA Jane Hardy Miller, was a teacher at our store and the person who forced me to learn "color." She had already published the very popular French Braid Quilts and was working on her second book: French Braid Obsession. We were testing a pattern for the book and had we finished our quilts we might have had the opportunity to have it included in the book. Guess mine won't be in the book, huh?!

WWHHAATT?? – in looking up links for Rusty’s book, I see she has a new one coming out in June this year. Better start saving my pennies!

When I pulled this UFO out of it's drawer I found I had all four braids done with their purple spacer strip attached and some notes on the math to get the panel to fit into the center. I would have done things a little different now, such as cutting the panel slightly narrower and the extra spacers I still need to add bigger, so I could save the selvage dots for my collection and I would have purchased more of that great stripe for the binding. Oh well, hindsight is 20/20 and when you stall you can’t make changes. Either way, I have checked the math three more times and it still appears to come out ok so I finally cut the panel this morning and tonight or tomorrow (before season 2 arrives) I can get the spacer strips attached.

I didn’t lay out the extra spacers in this picture but that same purple will be used to add a 1.5” finished border around the center panel. Then I add the braids, trim the edges and it’s done. What will that take? A couple hours? And then another drawer is emptied!

I have always referred to this quilt as my wine french braid because of the grape/leaf fabrics and the colors. Maybe I should get some of that wine cork fabric for the back. It would really complement the top. Not that I have the money or time to actually finish the whole thing super soon.

Mainly because I did buy this flannel backing for the t-shirt quilt finished last month for the UFO Challenge. Think 9 patch: there will be 40” squares of the green in the 4 corners, the inner side rectangles will be about 12” of the teal and the center 12x12 square will be the green again. I thought it would be the best use of yardage and would make it as interesting as the front.

January UFO Challenge Completed

January's UFO Challenge was #6, my t-shirt quilt. My goal had been to complete the top. I started this quilt in 2007 or 2008 and after I moved back to NY, I didn't work on it again until this month. I'm thrilled to say that I got the top completed and I've even picked out the greet polka dot flannel to use on the back! It should be nice and snuggly!

I had a great picture of the quilt...however...as soon as I put the camera card into the laptop I discovered that there is a "card error" and all my pictures are lost. Thankfully this was only a 512 MB card but since I also have a problem with my other card it appears that I have to go buy a new one tonight. Wahhhhh...all my pictures are gone - cat pictures including Cali when she was new to me, my birthday with videos of the boys singing to me...wahhhhh :(

Will post a pic of the quilt tomorrow, if I can get a new card tonight. There is a "historical" snow storm approaching and I have no idea how soon/quickly the weather will get bad.

February's UFO is #10, my french braid with wine fabrics. I "think" I have all the fabrics I'll need but I have little idea of where I stand on the project so I'll neecd to spend some time to figure it out.

UPDATE - I got a new camera card last night. Yikes 4GB - that's a LOT of photos. This was a quickie shot this morning so it's not laid out perfectly flat. Poppie posed as today's Quality Control Officer.

UFO progress

Hah! This is as far as I could get this morning on the t-shirt quilt because it was the point of jumping into the shower at that very second or being really late for work. You'll need to trust me that I have the green border on all 4 sides and this is the second side of the black/final border that I'm about to finish. Thankfully I can pull out that top drawer and/or slider tray to support the body of the quilt while I wrestle with the borders. Saturday I am pinch-teaching a class at the LQS so I can scope out the flannel for backing this.

And here are the centers of my RRCB blocks. When making the twosies, I used 30 different greens and 30 different neutrals. Wish I had done the pinks that way, of course, I don't like pink, so I don't have 30 pinks, so I couldn't use 30 pinks, so why am I fussing about it? I still need to complete 580 more red/neutral half square tri's to finish these but at least we are making progress.

Design Wall Monday - 1/24/11

I'm afraid I wasn't nearly as productive this weekend as last. I had a tea party at my house yesterday (look for pictures tomorrow) and spent my time cleaning and cooking. I sew wanted to sew but it didn't happen.

--I did purchase more fabric to do the borders on my t-shirt quilt and have started cutting the fabric. Hopefully after Library Board meeting tonight I can get at least one or two sidea sewn on.
--I did lay out a few blocks to sew on my RollRollCottonBoll but couldn't quite make out which way to lay out the pink/brown half square triangles given that I printed the directions in black and white. That got set aside because I was not going to frog out mistakes.
--I did start working on the red and neutral half square triangles (for RRCB) this morning...only 580 more to go!

I also started this little project. I don't like V-Day so I surprised myself by buying the kit. It's really tho. These hearts will be sewn into a red bias binding to create a little banner strip to hang across the window or door frame. I think it needs more reds and one black :)

Can't believe I almost forgot to tell you that it was -13F when I got up this morning. It dropped fast last night and there wasn't a cloud in the sky to retain any morsel of heat. My windows/frames were cracking in the cold - it was a little creepy. It's currently +13F and tomorrow is supposed to be 32F. WTF?!?!?

UFO Challenge Update - 1/20/11

As you may recall from last week, I had the middle of the top into two sections on the LR floor. When I came home from work Friday it was remarkably untouched given that there are 3 cats in the house who like to run the length of the house, ie thru the middle of the LR. Of course, as soon as I came back downstairs from feeding the cheeky monkeys and changing clothes I found that they had indeed been having fun. I walked past the scene of the crime into the quilt room and out ran the perps. You can barely make out their outlines as Pepper and Cali fled the scene.

Well, I had stopped at the LQS on the way home but "we" decided to just use the fabric I already had to do a skinny lime green inner border and black outer border. I went to bed early Friday and got up to a perfectly positioned quilt on the floor. But as soon as I walked to the kitchen I saw Cali make a run for the LR where she jumped, dived and twisted onto the quilt to end up like this. Doesn't she look proud of herself?!

Any way, I did get the two halves together and then realized there was no way I had enough of the green fabric to even do a 1" unfinished border. Harumph. The snow was blowing for the traditional birthday storm so I resigned myself to getting the needed fabric this coming weekend and made binding. I just love how the zig zag comes thru on the binding and how it will pop off the black border.

Design Wall Monday - 1/17/2011

Bronchitis knocks the wind out of you…really, it feels like you can’t breath and the hacking to get the crap out of your lungs is no fun either so once I got home Friday night and got into my comfy pjs – that’s how I stayed until dinner time on Sunday. I can’t remember the last 2-full-day-weekend that I just did what I want when I wanted: sewing and reading and sleeping in and staying up late. Be sure to check out my other post today to see why I really wanted to do “nothing” all weekend!

Friday night I hit the LQS after work and came home to dinner and time in front of the boob tube. Saturday morning the sewing marathon began. I won’t show pictures of everything so I have some fodder to talk about later this week but this is what I accomplished over the weekend:

1. Remember the pink alert? I finished 6 little treat bags for my tea party that got postponed until next weekend.

2. The center of my t-shirt quilt (UFO #6) is finished but I didn’t have enough border fabric so I’ll have to go back to the LQS. Will post more on Thursday…

3. Remember DWM last week with the experimental windmill runner? I finished the top but I think it leans towards failure. I just don’t care for it although I am sure someone else will. It was a good study to see how a row of all of the same fabric charms works - maybe that is the problem: one row might have worked but not the black and cream rows. It will be a good sample for class but I won’t do another with rows. I like 2 fabrics, but not rows. I am not sure if I will bind it in the brown or the cream color...leaning towards the cream to pull it in more (it does match the wheat fabric).

4. I finished the last 2 green and cream Turning 4-T blocks. This was supposed to be for my b-day so I’ll work on it some more tonight. I am designing this quilt myself and it’s turning into a design as you go kinda thing so I have to decide how I want to proceed. I’ve only changed it 3 or 4 times so far.

5. I also worked on 2 sections of my Roll Roll Cotton Boll blocks…will post more another day….

UFO Challenge Update - 1/14/2011

Turns out that hacking cough was bronchitis thanks to recent alleries and asthma. Doc sent me home Wednesday with lotsa good meds to rest and relax but what's a (quilter) girl to do? Sitting in an upright position is the best option when breathing is important so...I sat at my sewing machine.

All blocks are now done and squared up to 18" using a neat gadget I got for Christmas.


The Quilt Ruler Connector holds any two rulers together. Small drop down tabs and a ledge at the one end help line up the rulers and the 4 suction cups hold them in place. Works like a charm! My only improvement would be an additional pair of suction cups at the last third of a pair of long rulers that may not be the same length. When I picked up the 24" and 18" rulers I had used, the far end was a little floppy.

Back to the quilt...the rows are almost together...just need to get the two halves together. Then it's on to the borders which means I kinda need to decide what I want to use it for. It's already 74" square or bigger than my fav couch quilt. This morning I thought I wanted a small inner border of that central green marble to tie it in and then I could surround it with that zig zag fabric. I'm just not sure if there is enough zigzag to go around. I could make the quilt rectangular with zig zag on top and bottom but it will be hard to match the pattern and I'm still not sure there is enough. I could also use the green and black for borders and use the zig zag for binding. I think this might be the best because there is soooo much purple background, the black and green might ground it. I still need to decide how much bigger I want it...might be time to go measure the bed again. Maybe I should even write it down this time.

I'm also thinking that a t-shirt quilt is heavy enough, I could skip the batting and just back it with flannel. Anyone quilted a t-shirt quilt or something with flannel. Any suggestions?

UFO Challenge update - 1/6/11

In the month of January we are working on UFO #6...which is my t-shirt quilt started in a class about 3 or 4 years ago that then snuggled in this drawer ever since.

This is a big drawer but when I actually started digging, I discovered it's mostly full of extra shirts and shirt parts to fill out this quilt (like breast pocket logos) or to make another quilt. The 13 t-shirts I need for this design (yeh, I even found a diagram of my design with color layout) were already ironed to the woven interfacing and 2 of the blocks had the corner triangles sewn on. I had even cut out the rest of the triangles I would need for the corners and setting triangles. I already have the zipzag stripe for borders and binding.

What I discovered is that, unlike the original pattern which called for a different fabric on each t-shirt, I had planned to square up each shirt with the same fabric. Boring! I'll be at a few LQSs this weekend so I am going to look for a black TOT and maybe something else to go around the middle block. The black should tie in the purple fabrics that have a black stripe and a lot of the t-shirts also have black. If I don't find anything for the middle block I can either use the purple flower fabric or some of the stripe.

I've now got 8 blocks done and I don't think it will take more than a couple hours to finsh the remaining 4 when I get more fabric. And then it's on to borders.

Design Wall Monday - 1/2/1011

Welcome to 2011!!

There are a few older projects on my design wall this week. They are soooo last year (sorry but I couldn't resist). I finally finished the binding on this windmill runner. It was a Christmas gift for mom so it's about time. It just needs a good wash to get to the crinkly stage and then she can use it on her new dining room table. Like my freehand fans? They are catholic fans - we don't do baptist in our house ;^)

This little table topper is for a class I am teaching at my LQS. I bit the bullet and actually stitched feathers in the borders. I learned from Patsy's DVD series but this is the first time I have actually quilted them. I was very impressed with myself, especially since the border was so narrow and confining. Can't wait to let loose on a larger quilt with the feathers.

This is the other topper I made to time how long it would take for the class. If you remember from previous posts, the middle was very "smooshy" color-wise but I think the red flange and the blue border does actually bring the green fabric out. I need to quilt this and then I can use the new curved corner template my friend Liana sent me for Christmas. I can see it needs a good ironing before I quilt it...it's been folded for too long.

Finally, I did pull out the UFO I will be working on this month. Judy drew #6 and that is my t-shirt quilt. From a brief glance it doesn't look like it will take much to get the top together. I hope that really holds true. I am thinking that I will try to post weekly updates on Thursdays...

Oh BTW - our 5 minutes is up. Yesterday was 25 degrees and snowing and OHHHHH did it feel bitter after 2 days in the low 50s. This morning was 18 and I was outside in my pjs to start the car and get these photos. Not so bitter today.