I didn't do any sewing yesterday but I did play with fabric. I have been cutting quilt kits for a friend this summer and this is the next one. Luckily all of these squares and strips were cut a long time ago and just needed to be co-ordinated to work together. Now I need to cut the strips to the right lengths. I cut this same kit for her last year and she enjoyed making it so much she wanted to do another. Here is the block instructions.
I got a wonderful surprise in the mail yesterday, a fabric postcard made of hand dyed fabrics from my friend Vicki W.
It was nestled between bills. I wonder if my mailman read it. I'm sure it is a novelty at my small town post office.
I sewed this top together while I watched Scorpion last night. It is 48" x 60". I think it needs a yellow back and a yellow binding. Part of the back will be the fabric with the white background and squares of yellow in the print. The yellow with white dot will probably be a strip to make it wide enough. If you go back to this post you can see the one in the book that inspired me.
Yesterday morning I found the backing for this quilt and chose the thread to quilt it. The piece to the left is all that is left of the backing yardage but there will be a long piece to cut off the side of the backing after quilting. You can go here to see the full shot of this top. Did you notice the date on that post? This one has been waiting a long time to get quilted.
My friend Martha brought me a pack of Cherrywood fabrics when she visited me Thursday. I love the beautiful intense colors. You can check out her blog here. She used to live in my town and took classes from me starting way back in the late 1970s or early 1980s.
I think I purchased the Cherrywood fabrics on the left the last time I went to the Paducah show and I think that was in 2005. They are going to go great with the new pack.
I added 11 more fabrics to the Kaffe Fassett fabric catalog "page" on my right sidebar.
My granddaughter and great-grandson were in town for a visit yesterday. We spent the morning at my house and then we went to lunch (with my other granddaughter who had a birthday yesterday and my son) at my favorite restaurant. Then we walked around the corner to the second favorite place and I got a chocolate soda to go. I was surprised how many people I talk to who don't know what an ice cream soda is. I come from the time period of soda fountains in the drugstores and this was always my favorite. Now very few places around here make sodas.
I was the winner of the last day drawing last week at Vicki Welsh's blog. The prize was 4 yards of beautiful hand dyed fabric (these are 2 yards each, 1 yard of each showing in the photo) and 10 yards of Mistyfuse. You might want to follow her blog and maybe you will win some fabric sometime. She has lots of great links to tutorials and has a shop where she sells the hand dyed fabric as well as hand made soap and glass items. She has just created a new website that includes all of it.
I have been looking at this Viburnum bloom from my kitchen window and finally went out to take a photo of it. There is always just one branch that has the blooms on it.
This quilt has been in progress since October 2010. There is a PDF download on the internet here for the original Kaffe pattern. It was too narrow for me so I added more pieces as borders in April this year. I added in a few star blocks too.
Just so I have a record of the backing too I took this photo. The flowers don't look like they run in rows when you are looking at it close up so I was surprised when I saw this photo.
I'm on the home stretch on the hand dyed fabric quilt. This is the back before I was done stitching lines. (Backing dyed by Melody Johnson about 15-20 years ago).
I finished the quilting late in the afternoon and sewed on the binding. It is from a gradation piece that went from turquoise to blue to purple, a Vicki Welsh hand dye like the other fabrics that are in the quilt top. The quilt isn't quite this vivid. The lights in my main floor studio aren't perfect.
I should be able to finish the binding today early enough to get a full shot of this one and to do my end of year recap to post tomorrow morning.
The hand stitching on the binding is done. I'll hang it on the design walls today and get a full shot of it.
I did lots more rows of quilting and now I need to make a decision how many more are needed so I can call it done. I want it to stay soft so probably 2 more rows in both directions in every row, 26 lines of quilting.
I took the photo on the right first and the colors looked washed out. I put the blue/gray fabric in the second photo and the yellows and pinks are truer colors. This quilt is quite bright but you wouldn't know it by the photo on the right. What I was taking the photo for was to show how pretty the backing fabric looks with the front. This one is quilted and trimmed now so I need to look for binding.
Next I chose the Superior King Tut colors for the hand dyed quilt. I wound bobbins of the dark pink.
I put in a few rows of stitching. Notice the colors difference in the 2 photos of this one? In the top photo I laid a gray plastic on the edge of the quilt to focus on. Those colors are true. The second photo is dull in comparison.
I chose a fabric for the top and bottom borders of this quilt, cut them and sewed them on and also cut the binding strips from the same fabric. I chose the backing, a 60" wide fabric hand dyed by Melody Johnson about 15-20 years ago. Since my only Christmas party is on the 21st I hope to do some finishing of quilts in the last 10 days of the year. I think this will be one of them.
No borders yesterday. It was the twice monthly sewing day and I made 22 more blocks to go with the 20 I showed on Nov. 23rd. The blocks are 8.5" and each insert being a 1" cut strip does not change the size of the block when it is sewn in with an accurate 1/4" seam. It would end up 48" x 56" if I don't make any more blocks. I'm thinking about stopping here with blocks and adding a 4" wide strip of hand dyed fabric on the top and bottom so it will be 64" long.
Almost all of the hand dyed fabric in this quilt was purchased from Vicki Welsh and a lot of it is from her stash packs. I also cut one of the gradient half yards into the 8.5" squares.
