Tag Archives: United Concensus

United Concensus – Finished Quilt for Project Quilting

July 11, 2010 7:08 pm by Ebony in Challenges, Finished Quilts

With the quilt sandwiched and ready for the finishing touches, I am ready to unveil it! Remember that this quilt is named “United Concensus”, and is intentionally misspelled because I intend to update this quilt with 2010 census data as soon as it is released. The finished quilt measures 43″ square from the tips of the largest prairie points. The back of the quilt was made with leftover blocks. I ended up making extra blocks because I replaced some of the blocks on the front with blue centers instead. You can see in some places the free motion stars that I added after the quilting was finished and the backing had been added. I may get the urge to add more over time, but for now, it’s fine. The large open space in the lower right corner is for the legend I’ll be adding once the 2010 Census results are published. After I finished quilting the words to the Star Spangled Banner, I had a little bit of extra room to play with. So I added the date and signed my name in quilting! I love this shot because you can see the prairie points really well, but I also hate it because of the stray thread hanging from it. Oops! Here’s another nice photo of the quilting: And one more: I’m really happy with how this turned out, although I haven’t quite gotten the hang of photography to get the lighting correct outside of a light box. But still – I’m happy with it & proud of my quilting! Now I need a serious nap. I feel like I’ve been awake for 4 days straight finishing this. Happy quilting!

United Concensus – Quilting

July 11, 2010 6:49 pm by Ebony in Challenges

Project Quilting United Concensus

The whole time I was making this quilt, I kept singing the Star Spangled Banner – our national anthem. It’s a hilarious song to sing because it’s really easy to mix up the lines, and also if you start the song in the wrong key, you won’t be able to sing the refrain because it will be too high to hit the note. My original idea for the quilting was to do some free motion stars. Then I thought I would stitch in the ditch. Finally, somewhere just after the halfway mark, I decided that I was going to actually quilt the words to the Star Spangled Banner. Literally. The whole thing. Until I found out that SSB actually has four verses. So I settled on the one everyone knows best – the first verse. Next I had to work out how exactly to write it so that the lines were straight and fit on the quilt. I decided that I would just run the lines together – not pausing for punctuation or sentences or paying attention to the actual structure of the verse. To do this, I used Golden Threads paper that I cut to the size of my quilt top, then using my cutting table as a grid for straight lines and a white chalk pencil, I wrote out the words in cursive. I had to erase in some spots and start over, but I managed to get it all written without too much trouble. I then pinned sections of the paper to the quilt & batting only, and free-motion quilted one line at a time so that all the words on that line connect together. After the quilting was done, I just ripped out the paper. I’ll likely be finding those little bits all over the house for weeks to come. I’m really sorry to not have pictures of this part of the process – the camera was dead and I didn’t have time to wait to charge it. If you’re interested in seeing how this is done, just leave a comment and I’ll make a video or something if there’s enough interest. Now, the biggest fear I had was in misspelling a word. After a bit of handling, the chalk rubs off the paper and you can’t see the lines very well. Well, my fear came true when I came to “rampats”. Ummm… isn’t there another “r” in there? So I had to unstitch a couple of letters and squeeze in the “r”. I’m willing to bet though that you wouldn’t have known this if I hadn’t pointed it out (again – sorry about the “before” – no time to wait to charge the camera!) The only tell-tale sign if you look closely is that there’s an extra start/stop between the “p” and the “t” where I restitched the “a” and added the “r”. Phew! I went back later to cross the t’s and dot the i’s (which I did with little stars.) I added a couple of free motion stars before realizing that those would actually be the perfect way to attach the backing in certain spots, so I stopped adding stars for the time being. With the quilting out of the way, I was in the home stretch! I used some of the leftover yellow & leftover blocks to piece the backing, and then I cut squares for the prairie points. Prairie points are easy if you know the finished size you want. You just double the finished size + 1/2″ for seams. So for a 2″ finished point, cut a 4-1/2″ square. Easy peasy! Then, you just fold across the diagonal, press, then fold back across the second diagonal and press. Squares in the center, half finished prairie point on the right, completed prairie points on the left. You can make so many of these so fast. I varied the sizes for mine so my edge could be a little bit wonky like my blocks. It made it impossible to estimate how many prairie points I would need, so I just made a ton of them and figured I could always make more. Prairie points are so addictive! I should use them more often in my quilts. Originally I’d intended to use mostly blue and throw a few plaid ones in there for a little pop of color, but once I started positioning the prairie points, I decided they looked a lot better alternated. Positioning them on the quilt was pretty straightforward; the only thing to really watch is at the corners, you don’t want to overlap the prairie points – you want to butt them up next to each other so they look like a mitered corner. I nested them across the quilt & then basted them close to the edge. Once the basting was done, I squared up the top, laid the backing on top, and pinned it together leaving an opening for turning. In this picture, you can still see remnants of the Golden Threads paper – to make sure I got all the paper out, I had to sit down with the quilt and go line by line with a pair of tweezers. Home stretch for this one! This is the point where I needed to stop and get ready for my friend’s wedding. I wore a sari! Happy quilting!

More About United "Concensus" for Project Quilting – When In Progress

July 11, 2010 6:16 pm by Ebony in Challenges

Project Quilting United Concensus

My pattern for this quilt called for six different sizes of blocks, ranging from 2″ finished to 12″ finished. I designed this quilt layout in EQ6 (yes, I have EQ7 but haven’t installed it yet! I know!!) first by drawing the squares as a block, saving that block as a quilt layout, then starting a new quilt using that layout, and inserting my wonky stars block (that I also drew in EQ6.) I took my pattern to the local quilt shop (Quilt Play in Grayslake, IL) along with a couple of samples of the red & blue centers I intended to use. The ladies there helped me audition about 10 different bright yellows before settling on the one which looked best. I didn’t mind the block centers being scrappy, but I really wanted to control the palette on the yellow stars. They also helped me audition a couple of fabrics for the binding, but I held off on buying anything because I thought having the top finished would lead to a better selection. I sized the quilt primarily based on what could be easily cut using my AccuQuilt strip cutter. So if the pattern called for me to cut squares at 4-3/8″, I just went ahead and cut at 4-1/2″. I figured I could square them up later. [[Now, this caused me problems later on as you'll see when the quilt develops, because I was not consistent in the direction of rounding, nor did I remember later that "finished" was not "finished" until it was squared up to the size called for in the pattern!]] The wonky stars are imperfect triangles, so the size of these did not really matter – they just needed to be at least as large as half of the square they were being attached to. So I only cut two sizes of triangles – 3″ and 2″. This was really an advantage for me because I cut 320 triangles in three passes of my 3″ strip cutter. First pass, cut the strips. Second pass, rotate strips 90 degrees to cut squares, Third pass, rotate 45 degrees to cut half square triangles: It took about 5 or 6 minutes to do this, cutting 8 layers at a time. You really don’t realize what an advantage this die cutter has over rotary until you have a project like this to work on.When I have a project like this to chain piece, I like to lay the project in a cookie sheet so it can sit next to my sewing machine. It makes it easier to move if I need the table for something else. So here’s a shot of me in the assembly process: All the pieces fit on the tray and I can just chain piece the entire quilt, one after another. First stitching one triangle in a wonky way, pressing, and then adding the other in a wonky way After the triangles are stitched to the background square, they have to get squared up to the right size again: That’s a job for my Shape Cut ruler which is perfect for this task. I stack them 4 at a time (the seams make them really bulky so that’s the most that can be reliably cut) and square up the sides first, then I rotate and square up the other side. The first block I finished was Texas: How do I know it’s Texas? Well, this is the second largest block at 10″ finished, and according to 2009 population statistics, it’s the second most populous state in the union – separated from California by about 12 million residents. See, you’re learning something today! As I finished blocks, I stuck them up on my design wall: You can see my printed “key” on the right to help me lay out the blocks. Some of them would stick to the wall on their own, but as I added more blocks, they didn’t all want to stay up there, so I started pinning them to the wall. At this point, I’d finished piecing everything but the 2″ finished stars: I had to work myself up to finish those. They were so tiny and so numerous – I had to make 14 of them! I had a couple of VERY late nights (or should I say early mornings) to finish them. Once those were done, I could start assembling the top. The way this quilt is laid out, some seams are shared so it’s easy to piece sections, but at the end of the day, there were still a LOT of set-in seams. I’m glad I wrote a tutorial recently on doing set-in seams, or I might not have remembered that I know how to do this. When I started assembly, I recognized right away that my 2″ finished blocks needed to be squared up. They were cut at 1-1/4″ wide, but should have been 1-1/8″ before I rounded. I knew those needed to be squared because I had some plain 2-1/2″ squares to stitch them to. So I had no problem squaring these up. The problem started when I needed to stitch these pairs to the next size block – they weren’t long enough. So instead of checking the measurements on the rest of the blocks, I just started adding squaring strips to make them big enough. I figured a couple of these would be needed anyway because I wasn’t insane enough to try to piece or cut a block that was 8-7/16″ finished… but I didn’t check. I’d pieced quite a lot of these blocks together before I realized that I needed all the squaring strips because my blocks were the wrong size in the first place: Also, for one of the block sizes ,I rounded the size down so it could be cut easily, so that one had to be squared with a new strip anyway. A fleeting thought did cross my mind about taking all the seams out, squaring them, and doing it right, but I decided that I would only allow one level of insanity per project. It’s a good thing there wasn’t a size restriction on this one though, because after all was said & done, it was nearly 3″ bigger than I’d planned. Phew! I finished piecing the top on Friday evening at 6PM, which was perfect, because I needed to run back to the quilt shop for binding and they close at 7. When I got to the store, I went looking around for red, white and blue, and located a blue Swiss dot that one of the ladies had shown me on Wednesday, and I also found a lucky red plaid with all my colors in it! I took about 4 or 5 fabrics to the front to audition, and settled on the blue dot and the plaid. Originally, I had thought of doing a regular straight binding, but after looking at the quilt a plain binding just wouldn’t do. Also because of the time constraint, straight binding takes me longer because I like to hand stitch to the back. I knew I’d only be able to finish this if I pillowcased it, and that seemed to plain. The perfect solution came from inspiration at the quilt shop – a quilt they had hanging with prairie points. That seemed ideal, and I could get a wonky look by varying the sizes of the prairie points. Next up… my inspiration for the quilting!! Happy quilting!

Behind the Scenes: United "Concensus" for Project Quilting

July 11, 2010 5:41 am by Ebony in Challenges

Project Quilting United Concensus

Yes, I know that “consensus” is spelled with three esses, and not two cees. But my quilt is named United “Concensus” for a particular reason, and I’ll try to explain why. The challenge for the most recent “Project Quilting” assignment was entitled “Stars Over America” and had very few restrictions. If you used red, white, and blue, you had to use at least one other color, but you weren’t required to use those three colors. That’s it.I actually refused to look at the challenge for a couple of days, because I had so many things on my plate last week that I was worried that looking at it would stress me out and I wouldn’t get to the things in front of it on my list. So it wasn’t until Tuesday that I actually looked at it, and really late that night when I came up with my concept & knew what I was going to do.When I read the theme, I knew I wanted to make stars, and the first technique that came to mind was Gwen Marston’s “liberated” star block. This is actually an AWESOME block to make when you’re in a hurry, because your points don’t have to match, and in actuality, the more wonky they are, the better they look.I also knew that I wanted to have a star represent every state, like it does in our flag. That meant piecing 50 blocks. You might think that only someone insane would think to do something like that when they have to completely finish a quilt in 4 days, attend a wedding, and cut 100 pillowcase cuffs in that same timeframe too. But you would have been wrong. It’s not the insane person who thinks to do something like that; the insanity is in COMMITTING to doing such a thing, and then actively making the attempt.What made it worse is that I chose an accent color (yellow) for which I actually did not have a suitable fabric choice in my stash – which meant a trip to the fabric store. But once I drew out the block, I knew only yellow would do. Here’s a pretty rough sketch: In reality, the wonky blocks won’t be nearly as uniform, but it does give an idea. I first sketched this block plainly so I knew for sure that there would be 50 units (actually there are 60 because I thought I’d include the US territories too) before adding the star blocks. The largest block is 12″ finished; the smallest is 2″ finished. Yup… you read that right. I designed a quilt that required pieced wonky star blocks (no paper was involved) that started with 1-1/8″ squares. Are you convinced yet that I am certifiable?After I drew this, I thought that it would be cool to add information about each state, and actually write this in the blocks, so I went hunting for the day of statehood, the state capital, and population. That’s when it hit me: this is 2010, and we just completed the census. Wouldn’t it be cool if each block were named based on the population size? Therefore the largest block would be the state with the largest population, and vice versa. Well, based on 2009 population statistics, the 12″ block would be California – so I decided that I needed a focal point, which made me change the center block to blue. I also changed the “extra” blocks from magenta to a mix of red & blue. Now the second biggest state by population is Texas, and that block has a red center. Now, from that, you might start to infer that there’s some sort of political meaning behind all of this – red states, blue states, with red being dominant to show how right wing conservatism is sweeping through the nation, swallowing up the free-thinking, liberal tree-huggers, blah blah blah. Well, don’t get your undies in a bunch. The color of each block was dictated purely by aesthetics and my willingness to make extra blocks when I decided that a particular section didn’t have enough contrast. The sketch is nice, but things are different when you have things on your design wall and they don’t quite look right, and you have to do something else to fix it.Although I’ve abandoned my idea of writing the state names & information directly on the blocks (I was too scared to either make a mistake or worried that I would HATE the way it looked & ruin the blocks permanently), I did decide to do two things. One, I named the quilt, purposely spelling “consensus” incorrectly because I DO intend to tie it to the census. Two, once the census numbers are released, I will print a large “legend” for the quilt to give the information I had originally planned to hand write.Wait until you see how this turned out! Happy quilting!