Use It Up Challenge…..FINALLY….

When we last left this challenge, it looked like this…..

I quickly finished the 2-1/2 inch square border but there it sat while we traveled and I caught up with my accounting work.

This week I have had some time to work on the project again with the first step being piecing the piano key border. The first problem was that I didn’t have enough keys cut to finish the border, so I had to do some fancy piecing…..

….and some of the seams got REALLY small…..

Even after all of my fancy piecing, I was still a few inches short but added a little bit of two new fabrics to allow enough for the border. Having said that, there was not enough to make a full border so I ended up having to add corner squares….

At this point,the piano key border was 3.5 inches wide.

Now is where the rub comes in….. I still had some tiny slivers of fabric left so decided that I would put them together to make a new fabric to be used somewhere in the quilt.

I took a base fabric, covered it will fusible web and started laying out strips of the left over fabrics…..

After ironing it down, I pulled out some fun threads…..

….and attached the fabrics….

My thinking is that I would make circles that could sit in the cornerstone squares and they turned out looking great…..

Then came the new design opportunity (ie…mistake). As I was attaching the first piano key border, I decided that it would look better if it was smaller….a LOT smaller. So, I grabbed the rotary cutter and whacked off almost half of the border. It looked a lot better, but then I realized that I had now made the border so small that the perfectly formed circles would not fit anymore…..ARGH!!!!

Since there wasn’t much that I could do to fix it, I decided to go ahead and attach the final border and then figure out what the quilt needed. At this point, I had these leftover strips from the wrongly-cut border….

I was really wanting to have circles somewhere in the outer borders to continue the theme from the center of the quilt. As I looked at these pieces, I realized that some of them were big enough to cut a 1 inch circle out of…….

Then came the agonizing decision of exactly what I was going to do with these perfect circles. I started out thinking that I would put the circles all along the outer border…..

I also considered a tiny, tiny strip of mini keys in the middle of the border (see the bottom one) but quickly canned that idea.

By now, I was tired of trying to come up with ideas so I called down to Michael and asked him to come up and have a look. He really liked the circles in the borders but commented that it should be asymmetrical and not have circles all around the piece.

BINGO….that was exactly what I was thinking in the back of my mind, but it hadn’t made it to the front of my mind yet!!!

Thus, with help from the Hubby, the top was finished…..

The house of interesting chandeliers…..

On our return trip from Texas, we stopped by Hattiesburg, Mississippi to visit our friends, David and Lyn. They have recently purchased a new home with a gorgeous wrap around porch…..

……complete with some very interesting light fixtures.

This one was my favorite and was over the dining room table……

This one hung in a very small guest bathroom…..

….and this beauty was in the Master Bedroom…..

I have never seen chandeliers painted black, but it was quite effective!!!

We had a wonderful, if very short, visit with these dear friends!!!

Goodbye to an old friend….

Back in 1993 our guild decided to put together small quilting groups of four people each and that each group would work on a mystery quilt….one clue each month.

At that point, Michael and I barely had enough money to live on, much less to go out and purchase fabrics for a quilt that I had no particular use for AND no idea exactly what it would look out.

So, I decided to use the fabrics that I had on hand and to make it scrappy rather than a planned format. I had a wonderful time with my three bee mates and was thrilled with the final product….

This quilt became our family “comfort” quilt. We used it for our kids to sit on when we ate dinner in the living room, we snuggled under it when we were cold, we were comforted by it when we were sick or recovering. Basically it was our “go-to” quilt.

Now, after all of these years, it looks like this…..

Many of the fabrics have rotted and shredded, probably because I didn’t use the best of fabrics……

This hole was the final straw…..

When my feet went thru the quilt I decided that it was time to put this old friend out to pasture.

Now the question is what to do with it. I am not sure that I can throw it away but not sure that I want to store it for the long haul!!!

I guess that I really need to finish up the quilting on the piece that I started to take the place of “comfort quilt”!!

It’s a “Piece-o-cake”

Last week I had the joy of spending some time under the teaching of Becky Goldsmith from “Piece o’ Cake” designs.

At our guild meeting, she gave a magnificent power point presentation about Machine quilting. She encouraged us to think (from the very beginning of a project) about how we are going to quilt it.

She had some great ideas about where to get quilting designs from, including….

– Catalogues for rubber stamps,

– Zentangles (check out this blog….)

– Art, Nature or Architecture

– Shapes found in the quilt or designs in the fabric

She also suggested that you stop before you have quilted too much to make sure that you really like the design that you have chosen. She said to never quilt more than what you are willing to rip out!!

Becky showed us that she keeps a notebook with her quilting ideas. She said that she always draws each design by hand even if she takes a photo because the act of drawing helps her to remember it better.

She told us to never stretch the batting when layering a quilt, but instead to pat out any bubbles. She thread bastes her quilt sandwich and trims the batting and backing so that she can fold over the backing to cover the batting along the edge of the quilt…..great idea!!

Her meticulous attention to detail shows in the magnificence of her work….

She also showed several of her famous quilts…..

More to come…..

A post about quilts…..really!!

I am reminded that the name of this blog is “Quilts and Other Stuff” and lately it seems that I have been posting almost entirely about OTHER STUFF. So, it is with great enjoyment that I am finally getting to write about quilts!!

Sometime back I posted about making a “Disappearing Nine Patch” quilt (post is here) for one of our guild charity projects. I wasn’t completely happy with the quilt top and decided to try it again but this time to plan my fabrics a bit more.

SO, instead of making it completely scrappy, I used the same fabric for each of the centers of the Nine-Patch and also used the same fabrics for the four surrounding squares so that the blocks looked like this…..

They were then sliced into quarters and formed into blocks that look like this….

The final top looked like this, although the photo doesn’t do the colors justice ….

The really fun thing about this top is that it only took 1 hour and 20 minutes to put it together, including the borders!!

It is now in the hands of the long-arm quilter and will soon be handed to a deserving individual. I hope it brings them much joy!!!