Bargello Toppers « LoveBug Studios

The Last of the 2010 Projects

January 1, 2011 3:04 am by Ebony in Uncategorized

I tried, and tried, and tried, and tried… to finish up projects or get them significantly further along before the turning of the new year. Here’s how I fared. CMQG Name Tags Back in June, my quilt guild had a sew-in project to work on pillowcases for ConKerr Cancer and a nametag project. I decided to model my name tag after our logo (which is the Chicago skyline in fabric) and a couple of people liked it and asked me to make one for them. Well I ended up with so many to do that I didn’t get to finish mine or my friend Vicki’s, so here they are:Oh Cherry Oh! Disappearing 9-PatchI went CRAZY buying Moda’s Oh Cherry Oh! line of fabric. Every time I could find a fat quarter, or a jelly roll, or a charm pack, I bought it. I found a layer cake & thought I’d died & gone to heaven. My brilliant idea was to take the layer cake and make a couple of quilts – this was before I decided to buy Mr. Darcy (my longarm) so I liked to keep quilts under 60″ so I could still finish them on my table top machine. Well, after I cut up the layer cake, I needed more yardage for the sashing, and more for the binding, and pretty soon, I had 4 quilts on my hand. Well, I pieced all the tops, pieced all the backs, squared them up, and got them ready for quilting: I also made the binding for all 4 quilts – two will be bound in green and two in red. I finished these so fast, I forgot to take progress photos! Art Quilt CoastersBack in 2009, I got a custom order for a wedding to make 100 art coasters (or sets, I can’t remember which) for a wedding, and I ended up having leftovers. I finished up some yellow and purple sets – 18 total – and I think I’m done with these for a while: Gyleen’s Pineapple QuiltWhen I went to Quilt Market, I was helping Gyleen Fitzgerald in her Pineapple Quilt Exhibit, and purchased her book and new pineapple ruler. While working on a video technique for the AccuQuilt strip cutters, I decided to make a sample block to demonstrate how to use these two tools together. Well, now I have a pineapple quilt going! I really love this block but I worry that my obsession with symmetry will make this project unsustainable. I might relegate this block to the back of the quilt & do a completely random scrappy one instead, but in the mean time, I have a new quilt project. Double Wedding RingThis is a “leaders & enders” project for me – whenever I’m piecing another project, I’m working on this one at the same time, so progress on it was expected to be pretty slow. That is, until someone requested that I do a video on it. Well, I ended up completely re-doing the technique I was using for piecing, because I found it pretty frustrating to try to demonstrate it via video, given all the swearing and ripping I was doing. The new technique gives a much better block, without set in seams, and you basically get the quilt to the point where you can sew it in curving rows. I ended up producing 4 new videos to cover it all – it was like doing a television series! Here’s how far I’ve gotten thanks to the video production:So I’m back to “leaders & enders” on this project, but I’m really glad to have gotten this far. Unfortunately it also means a little bit of seam ripping on my Cothron Wedding Quilt so I can assemble them the same way, but I’m glad to know this project will be so much easier to piece now. Bargello Table ToppersRemember my insane Bargello project that generated almost 30 table toppers? Well, that project is seemingly endless. I did decide to railroad these onto Mr. Darcy using a single piece of backing and batting: I used it as an opportunity to use up the Warm & White batting that I don’t like very much anymore, and to practice several pantograph designs. I used about 3 different designs across the 23 toppers that needed to be quilted still. Next time I decide to railroad, WIDER is BETTER. I was using up a bolt of 60″ muslin, but I would have been better off stitching them together & working with it in a 120″ wide section. Why? Well, when you’re railroading, you have to advance the quilt after every pass. Since I could only fit 3 across on a 60″ width, I had to advance 8 times. Had I used the 120″ width, I would have cut that in half, and it would have been a much better use of my 12′ machine. So, lesson learned!! I’m going to keep that in mind when I work on the Oh Cherry Oh! quilts; even though they have 4 separate backings, nothing is stopping me from stitching those together so I can railroad those 4 quilts too. It makes sense for quilts that are going to have the same pattern or thread used, to railroad them on the frame. While I worked on these, I ended up having to splice the batting while it was on the frame: I overlapped old with new by about 4″, then I cut a wavy line through both layers (being VERY careful not to cut the backing too!) Then I handstitched the two pieces together. I normally don’t like seaming batting in the middle of a project, but for something small like a table runner or wall hanging, it’s not a big deal. When they were all done, I pulled them off the frame. I think this came out to 60″ x 150″ – so the equivalent of a king sized quilt: I think they look cool railroaded like this, and it seemed a shame to cut them apart. In any event, I did, and stitched all the binding onto the front (you’ll recall I made 54 yards of binding for these) so I could practice my machine stitching binding to the back. I decided to give my Martelli Binding Foot another go; I didn’t have much success with it before, but with so many bindings to do, I wanted to give it another shot. I swear – for every 10 inches I stitched, 9 of them were missed. It was incredibly frustrating to constantly rip out and reset. So I went back to my pinning method and using my stitch in the ditch foot: This worked out pretty well; I did have a couple of misses here & there, but it was significantly less than with the Martelli foot. So many people swear by this foot but I haven’t been able to get it to work for me yet; I think because I like really full bindings, I use a 3/8″ seam allowance when attaching 2-1/2″ binding by machine, and I think that may not be enough leeway for the Martelli foot to stitch down & consistently catch the back. I’ll have to try this again, but it’s too late for this project since all the bindings have been stitched at 3/8″. In the end, I got 6 of them bound, but there are just too many of them to finish and I want to move on to something else. I don’t expect these will be UFOs for long, but I really wished I could have finished them before the end of the year. And so ends 2010! Happy quilting!

Busy Little Bee & the Running Toilet

December 22, 2010 6:26 pm by Ebony in Mr. Darcy, UFOs

Bargello Toppers

My vacation is proving to be… not much of a vacation, but at least I am managing to get some quilting done. I also had to take a conference call from work yesterday! Bah humbug! I haven’t felt like I’ve gotten much accomplished in the 5 days I’ve been off so far, so yesterday I made a list of things I wanted to accomplish yesterday. I managed to get them all finished (though admittedly some of it ran over into this morning): Fix toilet Shovel driveway Post AQ video Fold laundry Finish apple core top Borders on table toppers Make binding Load table toppers to Mr. Darcy So here’s how I fared: 1. Fix toilet. So, this is one of those humdrum things that come along with owning a home. Sooner or later, a toilet will cease working properly. In my case, the toilet would flush, but the tank would never finish filling. I traced the issue to the rubber flapper doohickey thingy, and went to Lowe’s for assistance. I picked up a replacement part along with a new mailbox. (Yes, fixing the toilet reminded me of the mailbox that will probably end up in the shovel of the next plow that comes by.) And… about 40 flushes later, I got it adjusted so the flapper lifts when you push the handle, and the chain doesn’t get caught underneath when it closes. Now I can stop running down 2 flights of stairs to the other bathroom in the middle of the night. TMI? 2. Shovel driveway. Apparently, it’s winter. And apparently, it snowed overnight yesterday. I figured if I didn’t put it on the list, I’d never go outside & do it. This was actually a job for my little electric snow thrower. It’s the BEST $200 I’ve ever spent on anything. That, and the 100′ outdoor cord that allows me to throw snow all the way down the sidewalk too. I’m also really glad I did this yesterday, because overnight last night, we got some wicked rain that basically made a sheet of ice over everything. Made taking the garbage out pretty easy, I just gave the cans a shove & they went right down to the end of the driveway! 3. Post AQ Video Oh, I’m in trouble now. I’ve just posted the last video that I have recorded. Well, technically I do have one more, but it needs serious editing and I think I’d rather re-record it with another bunch of them today. We’ll see. 4. Fold laundry I never claimed to be the world’s best housekeeper, but even this one makes me blush. I don’t have a problem washing clothes, but folding them has always been my downfall. I am proud to say that the “in basket” is empty (well, not enough for a full load of anything anyway) and the “out basket” is all folded! Putting all the clothes back in their drawers is the topic of a different to-do list. 5. Finish Apple Core Topper The subject of a new video is this apple core table topper: I think the actual “to do” was just to finish the top, but I really wanted to get it quilted & bound. I’m quite proud of my binding, by the way! It’s continuous bias binding to go around the curves, complete with perfectly mitered corners. I also finished it completely by machine, stitching from the front. I’m improving with every project I think. 6. Borders on Table Toppers One of my UFOs this year consists of about 30 table toppers in various stages of completion. Over the last couple of days, I’ve been piecing them, and yesterday was all about getting them to the point where they could be loaded onto Mr. Darcy. Yesterday’s attempt completed 15: 7. Make Binding Well, with a total of 24 table toppers that need binding, I decided that when I cut the borders I would cut the bindings too. So I had a marathon binding session, to create 54 yards of binding. That’s right folks – almost 2,000 linear inches, all in one session: With so much binding to make, I got very tired of trying to keep the binding from falling off the ironing board, so here’s my solution: I just pinned a little length of ribbon to the end of the ironing board, threaded the binding through it, and now when I pull the binding to iron it in half, this little invention of mine straightens it out with the wrong side up! 8. Load Table Toppers to Mr. Darcy I decided to railroad these onto Mr. Darcy, meaning that they will share the same backing (muslin) and be quilted in the same quilting pass: I really had a debate about these; I have 3 widths of muslin available, 45″, 60″, and 90″. If I used the 90″, I would have been able to do more at one time, but it’s my Robert Kaufman premium muslin that I wanted to have available for long arm clients. In the end, I decided to use the 60″ muslin because it’s the only size that’s on a bolt that doesn’t fit any of my cabinets or shelves (so stands in a corner.) I’m using Warm & White batting, to help use up the roll you see underneath, and again to save the best of my batting for LA clients. Also, because I’m railroading 3 of these table toppers, I needed to create “extensions” for my clamps to grip, so my machine can go all the way to the edges. I just made these out of lengths of white muslin & pinned them to the sides. I’ll have to unpin/repin with every advance of the quilt. These are going to get a nice pantograph, mainly because I want them done quickly, and I do need to get some practice in on pantos. Happy quilting!