Design Wall Monday - Strips

This week I'm quilting a couple of tops so they'll be finished and ready to turn in at our next Project Linus group meeting. But I couldn't resist arranging some strips I'd cut for another bargello quilt. So on my design wall are the strips for Life's Ups and Downs #2.

Look what's hiding over on the right edge of my design wall: Cobblestone blocks. There's 11 blocks now; still a long way from being enough for a quilt top, but it's a leader / ender project. I. e., something to stitch when I have to pull my current project from the machine to press, cut, arrange blocks, etc.

Head on over to Design Wall Monday at Patchwork Times to see what JudyL and many others are working on and add your own Design Wall Monday post to the Linky list.

Design Wall Monday - Making Friends

That lonely little Cobblestone block from last Monday is still on my design wall, but it's not so lonely now. It has 4 friends.

Our Project Linus meeting yesterday was my only piecing time last week, since I spent the week finishing quilts to turn in. I remembered to take my leader / ender project to the meeting and finished 4 more Cobblestone blocks.

Head on over to Design Wall Monday at Patchwork Times to see what JudyL and many others are working on and add your own Design Wall Monday post to the Linky list.

Project Linus - Third Sunday Group - February

Our Fast & Fun quilt top for February 2013 was Up & Down. Our Third Sunday group met today at JoAnns Fabrics in Independence, MO to work on Project Linus blankets.

Up & Down is a 40" by 48" quilt featuring 2 coordinating fabrics plus an accent fabric. Jodie had plenty of kits ready complete with instructions for us.

We had a small but dedicated group today. Jodie was the first to finish her quilt top featuring a Disney print. She used a striped fabric for the accent.

Look below for a close up picture of the fabrics in this quilt top.

I've noticed that Marie frequently picks kits with blue fabric. Her quilt top features another Disney print with a (different) striped accent fabric. The third fabric is the same blue/aqua tone-on-tone print that was in the Diagonal Puzzle quilt I made.

I'm sorry the picture is blurry. I don't know if it was my camera or the quilt top that was moving. Maybe both.

I've been picking kits based on my supply of potential backing fabrics I have in my stash. Today I picked one that I think I can pair with a baseball print on the back for something that will appeal to the boys. The baseball print has a light blue background, but I think it will work.

Want to know what is on the red and blue prints in my quilt top? Look at the picture below.

Can you see them? Sharks! Some boy (or girl) is going to love those sharks!

I had an uneventful drive home until I was about ¼ mile from my neighborhood entrance and came upon 3 deer crossing to the right side of the road. No problem, it was a 35 mph zone. What worried me was the 4th deer that was still on the left side of the road. Fortunately, it stayed there while I and the car behind me drove by.

I see deer around my neighborhood occasionally, but it's always a surprise. I enjoy seeing them, but I have neighbors that wish they weren't around. Seems the deer are rather fond of their garden.

Quilting Update

I finished quilting both Diagonal Puzzle and Life's Ups and Downs, so they are ready to turn in at our Project Linus meeting tomorrow.

Diagonal Puzzle Quilt

On Diagonal Puzzle, I ditch quilted the edge to edge seams between the horizontal rows of blocks. Then I quilted zig-zag lines from top to bottom, first going through the center of the black squares on one row, then zagging at a right angle across the solid block on the next row arriving at a black square corner and turning again.

Once all the zig-zags were quilted through the black squares, I used a chalk pencil to mark half way between the points of the zig-zags and quilted a set of zig-zags through those points so the stitching was close enough to hold the batting securely. You can see that better in the close up picture below.

Life's Ups and Downs Quilt

On Life's Ups and Downs, I first ditch quilted some of the vertical seams to stabilize the quilt. My goal was to have the vertical stitching about 5" to 6" apart, but I had to work with the width of the pieced strips.

With the quilt stabilized by the vertical stitching, I quilted horizontal waves across the quilt. First I stitched waves through the yellow lizard print and the 2 waves of continuous green (the only 3 fabrics forming an unbroken wave). With those lines as a rough guide, I quilted more waves to divide the area and leave no spot more than 4" from a line of quilting. A closer view is below.

I used Pellon Quilter's Touch polyester batting in these quilts. I bought a 60" wide by 20 yard long roll at JoAnns when it was a door buster special on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. It is a nice batting to work with. Definitely better than the 10 yard rolls of polyester batting that JoAnns sells.

Design Wall Monday - Lonely Block

One lonely Cobblestone block has been on my design wall for nearly 2 weeks. This is from a leader / ender project I started after finishing the Diagonal Puzzle top. I have several more blocks in progress. And yes, my design wall really is that dirty. That flannel sheet used to be white.

After stitching together the Life's Ups and Downs top, I moved into finish-em-up mode. First up, a Scooby Doo quilt top I brought home from our 3rd Sunday Project Linus group.

I don't know who stitched the top, but I'm sure it started as one of Jodie's kits. The design is a slight variation of our September 2012 pattern, In the Stream. Jodie paired it with Warm & Natural batting and a yellow flannel back. Here's a close up of a few of the Scooby Doo squares.

I'm quilting the Diagonal Puzzle top now. I plan to finish that and quilt Life's Ups and Downs so I'll have 3 quilts and probably 3 fleece blankets to turn in at our Project Linus meeting on Sunday. Yes, the 3rd Sunday of February is 6 days away. Time flies when you don't pay attention. And the 3rd Sunday comes early when the 1st is on a Friday.

What's on your design wall? Visit Design Wall Monday at Patchwork Times to see what JudyL and many others are working on and add your own Design Wall Monday post to the Linky list.

Life's Ups and Downs Stitched

I stitched my bargello strips into a quilt top.

You may recall that I used the Life's Ups and Downs pattern in Quilt It with Love: The Project Linus Story as my guide for this quilt. I made one major detour from the instructions.

The Life's Ups and Downs instructions say to sew a strip of border fabric to both the top and bottom of your strip set. You crosscut the strip set, arrange the pieced strips to create a curve you like and stitch the strips together. Then you trim the top and bottom to make them straight, creating a large amount of scraps.

I hate waste. My scrap drawer is overflowing. I knew there had to be a way to do this without deliberately creating all those scraps.

Some bargello patterns have you sew the strip set into a tube, crosscut into narrow tubes and either cut fabric or unstitch seams at predetermined intervals. Life's Ups and Downs doesn't shift the strips by predetermined intervals. You arrange them to create a design you like. So the tube doesn't work.

SusanB's Bargello Magic Trick

You may remember from my Design Wall Monday post that I had a wide strip of a pale yellow fabric on the bottom of my pieced strips. That pale yellow was for my top and bottom borders.

When I sewed my strips together, I left a couple of inches of the seams unstitched on both the top and the bottom. The picture below shows the top of some of the seams.

I did some measuring and cut that curvy section of pale yellow into 2 pieces. One piece was attached to the bottom of the quilt top. The loose piece got moved to the top of the quilt top.

I stitched the ends of all the strips together, stitched the gaps in all the vertical seams, added the side borders and it's all done. No wasted border fabric. No scraps!

Click on any of the photos to see a bigger version.