Oh Finally...

I have been so very busy the last month or so. Work, teaching, taking classes, etc. Recently I just gave a presentation to my freshmen class about time management and "how to eat an elephant -- one bite at a time." Well, I feel like I am eating my elephant on a buffet line with chopsticks (and I am pretty good with chopsticks). For every twenty bites, I was actually only getting 5 bites of food in my mouth and feeling like there was a line of people waiting to get at what I was trying to eat. So, I have decided to step off the buffet line this weekend and take some time from "eating". Since I have a numerous amount of W.I.P. projects to chose from, I decided to take my winter version single girl off the staircase railing and attack it with some river rock motif. Now, I have to say, that while I have been practicing on some quilting sandwiches, I was so nervous to get this started.

Here is my first attempt at free motion river rocks. For me, it is not an option for someone else to quilt my work, as I want to be able to look back or give it as a gift knowing that I have created the whole thing. Granted I am not designing my own patterns (yet!), but at least I know that every stitch was done by me. However, there is a higher level of frustration by quilting your own projects..which is why I am blogging after a shot of tequila instead of still working on my river rocks.

Here is another view.

I am really hoping to get some more quilting done in between my other responsibilities. There are two baby quilts waiting for me too...ugh. It will be so nice when all I have is "work" and my quilting. I say "work" because I know once I am doing full-time therapy it won't be work for me, but where I belong. Back to my single girl.

Single Girl continues...

I have started to sew all the blocks (well, into actual blocks) and have begun sewing the blocks together. It is coming along fairly well, until my Janome had to go to the sewing machine hospital. Seems as though you cannot leave the spool you winding bobbins with on the spool holder as the end will sucked up into the side vent and wrap itself around the gears and the belts. It was so ugly when they pulled the side of the machine apart, but a few snips and pulls (no damage) left me smiling on the way back home with my baby.

So here is one block of the Single Girl quilt, yet as I am sewing the blocks together I can't say that the circles are 'butting' up against each other as they are supposed to. Later I read on a blog that it is easier to sew them together with a zipper foot, as the side of the regular foot gets in the way and pushes the fabric to the side. Oh well, it is what it is; it's not perfect, but I did it all on my own.

The circle edges and the seams are lining up fairly well, and overall, I am very pleased with the way it looks. SO much so, that I am starting to cut out the fabric for the South Pacific themed Single Girl. As soon as this is sewn together, I will start sewing the other one together. Once I get to the hand quilting for the grey Single Girl, then I can take it to work and do it over lunch (hopefully keeping my hands busy will also stop from the eating so much). Here are the fabrics for the other quilt waiting to be traced and cut.

I wake up every morning and go to bed every night seeing these little slices of heaven waiting for me to turn them into their soul's purpose--motivation!!

Single Girl Part Tres...

Well, here we are again with curves and curves and more curves. this quilt has more curves than I do! So I finished the first two of many blocks and they came out pretty alright! I had a few tiny puckers but nothing major and for my first quilt with curved pieces, I am really not going to make a fuss about it. Thankfully my sewing of clothing came in handy and I tried to remember all the tricks for sewing curved pieces of fabric together, but there is ALOT of pinning and massaging going on. It take a long time to prepare the piece(s) for sewing but once they are together the sewing takes a mere seconds to do. Kind of like Disneyland; you wait in line for hours and the ride is only a few minutes long. Here is a pic of the first block:

I am bound and determined to work on this more today, but between schoolwork, work-work, and my grading papers, not sure how much I will get done. I will keep posting as I go though; for those that are following along.

South Pacific Single Girl

Well I haven't even finished the first one, and I am already planning the next one. I have decided on my next Single Girl to be themed South Pacific, sort of tropical, vintage, and colorful. Here are my fabrics that I have been collecting...not sure if I will add more or not.

I am planning on an off-white background to match the background of some of the fabrics. Since I am quilting my first quilt in a dark gray Perle 8 cotton, this one will be in a salmon color Perle 8. I can't wait to get started on it. This is nuts, since I haven't even finished the first one. Oh well, I could have worse addictions.

Single Girl Part Deux...

Well, I am making progress. Slowly, but making progress. I have all my A-H quarters sewn and only saw a few pieces not lined up so well. I have to say that the posts I have read are very helpful, but have also made me very nervous to make this quilt. Once person even said that you have to measure just perfectly or the whole thing will be off. Great. I have decided that it will be what it will be.

I bought some pieces of dark gray poster board from JoAnn's to see how the circle would look against my not yet purchase Kona Charcoal fabric. So far so good. Now, I did cut two of the pieces upside down, so I had to re-cut them, but otherwise, it went pretty well. After once again consulting all posts for the Single Girl Quilt Along on Ginger Monkey's blog, I cut, and cut, and cut out all my templates. I have already started planning another single girl with what I am calling some South Pacific themed fabric and an off white background. This time I will actually trace the templates as shown on the blog, and also make copies of the templates rather than transferring them to plastic sheets. I feel that I made some errors in transferring them over. We will see.

Oh so many templates. Each one has twelve pieces to make twelve rings. In the meantime I ordered my Kona fabric for the front, back and binding. However, they only had 5.8 yards so now I am short for the back. With the suggestion of my stepdaughter, I may make the back from a fabric that is soft and/or fuzzy. We will see what I can find.

Here is my yummy charcoal fabric. It is even richer than I thought it would be (as you can see by the faded gray color of my background paper that I thought would match perfectly). The only pieces that I am not too sure about are the gray with ferns fabric, but I'm not changing it now!
So one of the posts explained that you cannot line up the pieces like at the top and the bottom like you would normally, but rather where they intersect. What? After much deliberation with myself, I decided to go old school and draw a 1/4" seam allowance on the back of the pieces (which later reduced itself to x's in each corner) and then put two pins through each corner where they intersect like you would for hand piecing. Granted I am sure there is an easier and/or fastest way to do this, but this is all I came up with.

After lining them up, I pinned a couple more in for good measure and sewed away.

After all 12 of these quarters were done, I will move onto the next quarter. I might get his done by summer if I'm lucky. Like I said, so far they are coming out alright, but I am concerned about matching them up with their charcoal cousins later on and it still coming out in the shape of a square. I might call on you experts that I know to help me "make it work" if needed. I will say that I have learned not only what worked, but what I will not do the next time on my South Pacific quilt. For the quilting, Denyse Schmidt includes a pattern to follow, which I will, but I have decided to do it with size 8 perle cotton. I can't wait! Keep posted to view the progress. I think I might also count how many cups of coffee it takes to make this quilt as well.

Single Girl...

Well I just couldn't wait to start on my Single Girl Quilt so I started to rack my brain on how I would lay out the pieces without cutting pieces out of the fabric. When I first purchased the patter at Sew Modern in LA, I thought I would just find some fabric here and there to eventually get around to it. However, after last night's meeting, I was all inspired to get started now! Here is the pattern...

I read through most of the blogs and looked at the pictures of others doing the quilt along. There was a great idea from one quilter, wish I could remember her name, who suggested using plastic three ring binder dividers for cutting out the templates, so that is exactly what I did!

I used a fine point Sharpie and had no problems with smearing or anything. Once I cut out all the templates, I wanted to keep them divided by the four quadrants of the pattern, so I found this great little pouch at Office Max that had three separate pockets inside and one big one; perfect!

I decided to do the background of the quilt in Kona charcoal and the circles (rings) in various shades and patterns of yellow, but having purchased some of the fabric already at Sew Modern, when I got home, I wasn't feeling it all like I was before. So, while at Quiltique last night for the meeting, I decided to bring the pieces I still liked and find some complimentary colors. This is what I came up with...

Unfortunately the colors don't show up as well in this photo, but trust me, they look nice together. Originally I had bought a large piece of dark grey cardstock from Joann's to lay the fabric against for organizing which ones would go where, however, I quickly realized that the only way to get the full perspective of how it would look would require to cut a swatch or two from the material to place in the ring pattern. I didn't really feel comfortable doing this, since some of my pieces for fat quarters and I really didn't know how much I would have to play with. So, I got creative. I took a picture of each piece of fabric, and after fixing the color and cropping made tiny little pics of all my fabric. Then, I set up a Power Point slide with a dark grey background and started to arrange the tiny pics where I wanted them. Then I labeled them with the matching template letters, so I know which template went with which fabric. I am sure there was an easier way, but being new at this, I have to find some way to make this work.

Again, the colors are really off in the photo, so I laid the actual fabric next to each other to make sure it would look good. the brownish colored darker pieces are actually a dark grey background and most of the yellows are much more pale then the picture indicates. The teal fabric is not quite as "teal" as it shows here either, but it will do the job. It will be my sewing project for the next meeting.