Go Go Godey!

Nancy Zieman's video for half square triangles was the inspiration for this quilt. I really liked the Godey block she illustrated at the 13.53 minute mark of her instructional video entitled "No-Hassle Half Square Triangles", which aired October 2014. 

Squares of fabric were leftover from my patriotic mosaic quilt. Many of those fabrics had been garnered from a share pile at quilting class, and the share pile was intended for the veteran's care facility quilting project. So, I decided to see if I had enough extra fabric to get a secondary smaller lap quilt put together in time for the donation. 

Rummaging through my own stash I found some 1980's fabric featuring patriotic sections that gave a faux pieced look. Fussy-cut and sashed to size, they made a great filler for the Godey blocks. From that point getting the rest of the borders was just a question of color and width. I went for a stripe and came up with the Homeland Stars and Bars lap quilt pictured below.

Label on quilt back. 

Pick a Pic

Found a cute picture of a teapot and decided it needed to be put on the front of a stacked hotpad. 

Foto to Fabric

     Our quilt group wanted to do a project together this year, so we were offered the opportunity to make patriotic lap quilts for a local veterans' hospital. I never could find any fabric that seemed to inspire. I have so many projects underway, I needed something fairly straightforward and quick, but nothing caught my imagination. Finally, though, I saw this beautiful photo online and decided to reduce it to the largest pixels possible to still produce a recognizable image from a reasonable distance. 
       Printout in hand, I began cutting 3.5 inch squares primarily from varied red, white, and blue fabrics. Next, I identified areas in the now pixelized photo that would need to have two-toned squares, and made half-square-triangles as needed. 
      To test the effectiveness of my fabric choices, I laid them out in columns and rows before committing them to stitching. Once satisfied with the layout, I picked up each column in order and clamped with a clothespin on which the appropriate column number had been written with a Sharpie pen.
      Next I will sew the squares together a column at a time, then join the columns. My plan is to somehow attach this to a piece of federal blue fleece for a really toasty warm lap quilt.
     Oh! And best of all, with this quilt, my local 14 month-old grand-boy joined me in playing with the fabric. (Fuzzily portrayed below...)

Fun! Fun! Fun!

Meanwhile, Happy Veteran's Day!

----------------to be continued. --------------------

Points Turned

Found a tutorial on the Quilting Board called "Ten Minute Block Variation (on point)", and it seemed just the thing for another block for my Roman Road quilt in progress. 

My plan was to come up with a block that would look like this:

However, for that to happen, I had to get the math right and manage to end up with a nine inch unfinished block. And... well, I have to say, my math just wasn't up to it this time around.

So, I could continue calculations, OR...I could kick these pretties off point and put them together a bit differently. I opted for the easier path. (Hanging my head in shame.)

Ideally, I would list here the steps in making the little ten-minute block variations, but honestly, it would be better for anyone interested to go to The Quilting Board tutorial section and find the post I followed there. The title of the tutorial was "Ten Minute Block Variation (on point)". Joining the board is free.

My plan is to put sashing between the four small blocks for a cross-like effect. Once completed, I'll post a picture here:

Borders Meeting ... Miter Known

   Before our summer break, quilting instructor Sandy presented a lesson on mitering borders. Her method was from Patti Carey. Subsequently I found this video link illustrating essentially the same method: Mitered border tutorial

Although it is not quite as easy as "1.2.3.", if one applies the steps shown, it actually does work well. I especially like the effect when joining striped borders.

So, the steps Sandy presented (with the first being her own addition) were:

• STARCH your border fabric! (Yes, this is step one...starch & press the borders to be mitered.)
• Sew the border strips together, if adding more than one border. (You will need to allow more than the  combined width of the quilt for each border length. See measurement instructions below.)
• Measure the quilt top through the center and at the ends to find the shortest measurement.
• After ascertaining the width and length of the top, subtract 1/4 inch from these measurements and save for reference. Example: Quilt measures 30 1/2 x 45 1/2, record as 30 1/4 x 45 1/4.)
• Lay the border out straight and trim one end at a 45 degree angle out away from you. Measure from the initial cut point to the recorded measure (for instance 30 1/4 inch in the example given) and trim at the opposite end 45 degrees...again away from you.
• Repeat for each border strip, marking the 1/4 inch from each corner to find the sewing point. It is also helpful to mark the quarter inch seam crosspoints on the quilt top. Then using a pin you can find the exact point to join by piercing center points of allowances of both the quilt top and the border being joined. Attach the borders starting and ending at the 1/4 inch marks you made; DO NOT PRESS anything, yet.
• Now sew the mitered seams from OUTER CORNER TO SEAM-LINE matching all the strips of the borders as you come to them. BACKSTITCH at the end. (Glue stick may come in handy for this step.)
• FINALLY press the mitered seams open and the quilt seams toward the border. [Sandy says she presses all the seams to the outside.]  Happy dance may begin now.

Below are a couple of the projects I've used this on since receiving the hands on tutorial from Sandy. Note the flip side of the teaching sample, showing the seams pressed:

You can see that the mitering does not make much difference on the brown dot fabric in the bottom right photo. However the stripes both of the bamboo-look and the red/pink fabrics  (bottom left and bottom right photos) run into each other and line up for a very nice effect, don't you think?

As with any new technique, the more frequently you use it, the more intuitive it becomes. One of the biggest challenges the class members experienced was getting the ruler edges lined up to make the 45 degree angle cut in the proper direction. It was a little gratifying to see that this was a challenge for the illustrators in the video tutorial, as well. Just keep twirling that ruler like a baton till you find the sweet spot for that first cut...then prepare to wrestle with it once more at the other end of the strip. By the 8th cut you'll be a pro...till the next quilt comes along. ;o) 

Hmmm. Maybe it would be best to do all four of your "first 45 degree" cuts at one time before going on to make the other-end, other-direction cuts on the final four.  

"Miter" known, there'll always be more than one way to border a quilt.

No More Monkeys Quilt (back)

The 5 minute blocks were made up with no plan in mind, so I had extras after having pieced most of them into a quilt top: No More Monkeys, [see previous post]. I took four of them and began trying various orientations until I came up with a nice pinwheel of sorts. That's when I decided to use them for the start point of a quilt back for the completed No More Monkeys Quilt top. 

Note use of camouflage pink for
one of the five minute squares 
sections. Ran out of fabric!

I had some dark brown scraps from my Elephant Walk quilt...just enough to make a mitered border for the central pinwheel. Also, there was a narrow strip of red & pink striped fabric just long enough to do a miter border out from that. 

For a few days I was not sure what I might use for a border beyond that border. Then I remembered some old wine & beige ticking fabric I had bought on sale around 1995. Really drab stuff for which I had never found use. On a hunch I held it against the pinks and browns, and it worked! Finally, a use for it! 

   Bordered, though, the pinwheel seemed to be missing something. That's when I decided a fabric yo-yo with a button center might be the element needed. Brown won out as the color and my button jar and fabric scraps complied and supplied. Sometimes you just need a dot of something else.

Next came the two-fabric binding. "Somehow" (!) it was cut wrong at first and had to be cut and pieced a second time. In the ultimate version, it had three strips of fabric instead of two, and one of the strips was completely hidden in the final fold. Pretty sure I need to revisit the how-to basics of two-fabric binding.

My quilt top top-stitching of the shapes (square, rectangle, circle, triangle) did not show up on the quilt back as well as I had hoped, so I wound up hand-stitching (Gasp!) some rick rack to better

define the shapes for quilt back viewing pleasure. Who would have guessed there would be something else to do after the binding was completed? 

For me...for a while, at least...there'll be: "No More Monkeys"!!!!

No More Monkeys Quilt (front)

Click here to see August 4, 2013 post, Monkeying A Round, for the source info on the central block.

Last year about this time I had finished the Mariner's Compass paper pieced center block, but had not a clue what would come next. As I considered various things to try, I decided I wanted to paper piece the design below based on a hexagon, so I cut monkeys to fit in the center and tried my luck. As it turned out, however, I never quite found how to order my piecing and had to finish the final seam of each round as best I could. I think there is a method that would work, but I have not quite mastered it. To hide my less than perfect final seams, I used a decorative stitch over each seam and ended up with the four corner blocks seen in the completed quilt above.

So, I had a center block, and four corner blocks, but nothing more. This seemed like a good time to try out a five minute block I had seen on YouTube. First, though, I wanted to know if I could fussy cut some monkeys to fit into the triangle of the 5 minute block. First run on some scraps proved it was possible, and so it was onward! 

Practice Five Minute Block with monkey on the flap

These were not actually quilt as you go,
picture of block was isolated from finished quilt and photo-edited
to look like a stack of blocks. It's hard to remember to snap pictures in the heat of
stitching!

Stacks, now, of five minute monkey blocks awaited a plan for where and how they would be oriented into the still evolving project.

My last quilting class before summer break had instructor Sandy teaching us how to do mitered corners for border pieces. Some of the samples she had brought to class used striped fabric, which really looked pretty nifty with the mitered approach. I had some remnant bin fabric in my stash already being considered for this quilt, and because it looked like bamboo, it also had a stripe effect. The plan was coming together!

As I finished the mitered inner border and added the outlying blocks, I heard an interview of a woman who was working with very young children and emphasizing how they love to learn shapes. She said she therefore used simple shapes in her baby quilts for the baby to continue to enjoy the quilt into the toddler stage.
Bingo! There was the plan both for jazzing up the plain bamboo plane, and for the free motion quilting that would be used thereon.

I machine stitched over the edges of the applique, then echo-stitched out from the edges with brown top thread and white bobbin, for the shapes to carry over to the back of the quilt in what I hoped would be an appropriate color. Quilted free motion triangles, squares, circles and rectangles in the four different shape sections of the border

So (sew?), after a year of monkeying around, a quilt finally did emerge. See below the top of my "No More Monkeys" quilt.

My next post will show the back of this quilt.