Monday Make-Its

MONDAY MAKE-IT REPORT

So I woke up Saturday morning with a wild notion that I would start another quilt with the Windham Rocky and Bullwinkle fabric -- so I thought about it for awhile and here is what I have done so far.  Mind, this is not the other Rocky and Bullwinkle project, it is a new one.  I have a tendency to veer way off into left field when I am working on something that comes right out of my head, so I figured if documented this one, I would finish it the way I actually imagined it when I started it.  Here goes:

 Above is pictured the Daisy white and Daisy yellow fabric in the Rocky & Bullwinkle series.  If you are my age, you might remember that the Daisies were a big part at the end of the episode when Rocky and Bullwinkle popped up out of the ground.  I cut 2-2 yard lengths from each  bolt.  Then down to the washing machine.  I am a big proponent of shrinking the fabric and getting all the dye, sizing and any other sundry chemicals out of the fabric before I do anything with it.  I can avoid unpleasant surprises this way.

 Above is pre-wash, left is after wash.  I use detergent and run it through a full wash and rinse cycle.  I also use -- and this is VERY IMPORTANT -- if you don't want to wash each fabric by itself  -- go and get a dye magnet or color sheet from the grocery store, it is in the laundry department.  It will absorb fugitive dyes and pigments that come out of the fabric during the wash and will prevent it from bleeding onto other fabric.  I am happily surprised at how well they do their job.  I prefer the paper one but I don't have a reason why.  I learned this the hard way and should really have known better, having actually worked with pigments and dyes in the past.  There are two brands that I can think of but I can't remember their names.  Then into the dryer to shrink.  Now back up to the ironing board.

Use plenty of starch for accurate cutting.   I make my own starch from the concentrated stuff I buy at the grocery store. To the left is the fabric all ready for cutting and cutting.  I have also considered making starch from scratch, but I think its prolly cheaper to buy the concentrated stuff.   I also made myself a great big ironing board with OSB board, Insul Bright, a staple gun and that silver ironing board fabric from JoAnn Fabric.  Oh and duct tape and that non-slip rubber shelf liner.

I use an Accuquilt Go for cutting my strips.  To get an accurate cut and minimize waste, you have to cut the fabric the right size for the die -- here we will are using the 2 1/2 inch strip cutter so I will cut 81/2 inch wide lengths from the fabric.  The fabric is folded end to end -- and first I cut off the selvage.  

A note about the selvage.  If you are at loss when choosing your complementary or matching colors -- why take a look at the selvage.  The colors used in the fabric are right there on the selvage.  Cut if off and take it to the store with you.  This information is put there when the fabric is printed, just like magazines.  

Now for the cutting. 

Ready to go!  Very little wasted fabric.

So I got started on my quilt top.

First thing I did was sew it together incorrectly.  Yikes, I cannot begin to tell you how many times I have done that. Seam ripper!  

Below is a far as I got before I had to go to my other job.

Reminder JoAnn Fabric is having 50% of Red Tag fabric till I think July 17th -- go get it -- here is what I purchased yesterday.   Another Halloween quilt coming.   My JoAnn's store has great red tag stuff -- there is another store cross town that has a worthless red tag department. I am happy mine is close to my house.  Washed already but not ironed.

Be well.  Sherrill

Friday Afternoon Frolic

Ok so I ave attached a pillow I made from a couple of log cab in blocks I made for a quilt from my friend Mary.  I did not like them as a quilt -- as usual, too big and over the top -- so I changed the quilt concept and was left the big blocks.  Makes a great pillow don't you think?

Hi, welcome to This is Me Making Quilts and Other Stuff -- but mainly quilts right now.  A little background is probably in order.  I am a lawyer, but before I went to law school I had another life in industries that involved color.  I started right out of college doing windows and displays for good old Sears and Roebuck.  Then I quit that job and went on hiatus spending $1000.00 in the Caribbean and riding through the islands on a ship named the The Federal Maple with my friend Mo and drinking rum punch.  Mo is a veterinarian now, guess we both grew up -- we were so young then.  After the hiatus, I went on to become a color matcher making products for the shoe industry -- crayons, dyes, inks and other interesting colored stuff, including bright, bright white for soft balls made in Haiti.  Well, as we all know the shoe industry in the United States no longer exists, but I had already gotten a job making flush color for printing ink specifically because of my ability to read the undertone in the color yellow.   Just as an aside, if the undertone is opaque, the flush color is overcooked.  And then I went to law school because I wanted to get a bigger boat to run up and down the Ohio River.  But this is another story and probably another blog.

I must say I have always been fascinated by color, particularly bright colors, and have even been known to buy a toy merely because it is made from bright colored plastic.  And I collect wind-up toys, and Pez dispensers, both bright colored plastic and now, apparently, fabric.  I also collect other toys-related stuff and have 8 pinball machines at my house -- get it, the bright colors and blinking lights fascinate me.   I like to drink beer and play pinball with friends.  And I am the world's worst housekeeper.

My Mother was one heck of a sewer and used to make beautiful tailored clothes from Vogue patterns in the 50s and 60s.  She made a lot of my clothes.  My Mom tried to teach me how to sew when I was in high school.  It did not really work for either of us.   Now, however, I have come full circle and am teaching myself how to sew.  She is long gone, but if she knows what I am doing, she most likely is quite surprised and rooting for me.  My Mother was also a fabric freak and I recently found some of her stash -- about 7 yards of a charming calico.  Hey, calico never really goes out of style does it.

I have recently discovered that I am also a fabric freak- well not really recently -- because I also found some fabric that I purchased just because I liked it when I did not even have a working sewing machine.  It is very brightly colored and has fish on it.  Like Mother, like daughter, I guess.  Now I spend lots time roaming the internet looking at fabric and imagining the things I could make with the fabric I find.  I also sometimes go to JoAnns or Hancocks to just look at the fabric for future projects.

How did I get to this quilting thing anyway?  Well, let's see.  When I was in college I used to do hand embroidery and made shirts with stories embroidered on the back.  Hand made was the thing and I used to spend lots of time doing hand embroidery and we all had fantastically patched blue jeans.  The more fantastical the patches, the better,  and it was a status symbol to have lots and lots of hand done patches on our bell bottoms.   I have always liked to make stuff, and I did make a quilt when I was in college and my Mom helped me with it, but it is long gone and so is the hand embroidered stuff.

Sometime at the turn of this new century, long after my college days, I discovered that there were home sewing machines and digitizing programs that would allow a person to machine embroider whatever she could imagine and digitize for the machine to sew.  Whee, I had to get an embroidery machine, so I did.  I got an Babylock Ellegeo and a digitizing program and  I happily embroidered for 4 or 5 years.  I love embroidery and was quite content with that until I embroidered a soccer chair and bent the needle bar on my beloved machine.  That machine is at the factory waiting for the go-ahead from me to be repaired.  I never really learned how to use the sewing side of that machine and let my embroidery languish while I had no sewing machine.

Now I have an Babylock Ellisimo that does embroidery, has a drawing pad and had quite and extensive sewing side and I am learning to use it and all the little feets.  AND, I have discovered that I really like putting quilts together and long for an official studio so I can call myself, wait for it -- a quilter in my studio.  But whatever, I am using my living room and my deck and my house looks like Joann fabrics or Hancocks with the bolts of fabric laying around.  I think I got this bug when I found the Rocky and Bullwinkle fabric from Windham.  Oh that's another thing, I love cartoons, real ones not CGI.  I am not really a fan of CGI, but love the old toons and have many, many of them on little tiny SD cards.  Rocky and Bullwinkle is and was one of my favorites, the intelligence and satire in that series is unmatched today.  So I was elated when I found the Rocky and Bullwinkle fabric and immediately ordered a bolt of each from the line and started my quilting.  Incidently there is a Rocky and Bullwinkle pinball machine at my house as well. The Rocky and Bullwinkle quilt project is on hold and in the unfinished projects pile, because I did a bunch of other stuff and now am rethinking the project.

But I did discover that I like making theme quilts and have done some and I have included pictures of two of them below.  So, if you have gotten this far, congratulations and thank you, but enough is enough and here are pictures of two my finished projects.

The above is a quilt made from Hello Kitty fabric that I gathered from various places.  When I am doing the piecing, I am in another world, its like putting a puzzle together and I just keep on going and don't always pay attention to the size.  So as you can guess,  the Hello Kitty quilt got pretty big before I started paying attention.  I backed it with Hello Kitty fleece and I had to sew outriggers of pink Kona down each side to make the width.  The only batting is between the outriggers and the top and I did that to match the thickness of the fleece.  It worked out beautifully and I gave it to the daughter of one of my dear friends.  Tina I love you!  Oh and I got my courage up and really did some quilting myself on my Ellisimo.  Nothing fancy, straight lines and zigzagging stitches.  I am a long way from the quilting being the star of the quilt.  Hello Kitty is the star of this quilt.

 

Halloween is the star of this quilt.  I absolutely love Halloween and Halloween fabrics.  Woo Hoo, wonder why?  Halloween is my birthday.  So last year I went nuts and bought a bunch of Halloween fabric and made this and it was my first quilt I finished from beginning to end.  I really was unsure what to do with the top when I finished it.  Well, after roaming around the internet and reading other quilters blogs, I realized -- boink right in the head -- that I could back it with fleece and just sew it myself.  I gave it to my friend Mo and she says she loves to be under it on the couch.

See you next time!