Stitching in the Barn

 Piecing the Rock Candy Table Topper video is here . I loved this. It went together super fast. This one glows! I have to put aside Journey2Nebula to finish a Christmas quilt. I also just tried out ruler quilting on my home machine. I got the kit for my birthday. More on that later. Happy Quilting!

I cut these as I cut extra pieces for Jawbreaker from the previous post. I love the pattern Rock Candy so I couldn't wait to get started. The video for cutting Rock Candy is here .  The pieces are cut but I still need to trim the points. I have these templates so I used them to trim. I can't wait to sew these together!

School and life got intense so I had to put sewing aside 😢 I'm back in the saddle and I cut more Jawbreaker pieces and laid them out. You Tube video for Jawbreaker is here . This is not the direction in the pattern or video. This is my piece after sewing the rows.   The top sewn together.   It looked so weird with the jagged edges that I wasn't afraid to trim it. The trimmed top.  I might trim it some more because this was just making it square. I've got a couple of weird bits where I was planning on trimming it more. It might also stay unique. This came out way better than I expected! The next one is already cut out and I'm trimming the tips.

 Started the Jawbreaker quilt. I'm actually on time this week. Video on YouTube here . The strip below is the same blue and green above. Ugh, phone camera. I guess its because there was no white background but done is better than perfect. I found cutting the triangles in this orientation was easier than sideways. Ready for piecing!

 Pieced Lucky Charm. Video here: Jaybird quilts All pieced together and I even started the next one!     My intersections are amazingly good! I'm so happy with it!

 Had fun with cutting and starting the sewing on the Lucky Charm pillow. I spent about 3.5 hours on it so far. There were a lot more pieces to cut and trim. These photos were taken in early morning light so the colors aren't great. Just need to sew the rows together and take a photo in better light.

 #Journey2Nebula Seaside place mat top complete! Piecing video here. Please excuse the old pressing mat :) Took about 3 hrs total. Front:   My points came out great! Back:   Fabric inspiration from my stash that will become my backing.

  I received an extra large Stripology ruler for my birthday this year. I had received the Hex N More ruler for the previous Christmas. Both from my MIL. My husband had bought me the fat eighth stack at a craft show many years ago. It's Good Fortune by Kate Spain for Moda. They all came together for the start of an extra large hexagon quilt. Love these rulers! Lovely large stack of hexagons. I got 2 from every fat eighth. Great pile of scraps. I need to find a solid to calm down and unify these wonderful large scale prints. Happy quilting!  

Here's my completed Dresden Wreath for my MIL. My daughter got sick so she didn't get to embellish it but it still came out nicely with the different fabric textures. The solid bright red hearts are satin, the one on the lower left has texture, and the rest are cottons. I realized while finalizing this project that I don't know how to make bows and bought the wrong ribbon to make one. I ended up doing a magic bow like in the directions in this Craftster post from 2007 . (I had totally forgotten about this board and I used to be on it all the time back in the day. I can't even remember my user name but I hope I can find my old posts to see wheat I was up to back then. It looks like Craftster just went into archive only mode on Dec. 19th. and moved active participants to a new site.) The bow I made is kind of derpy looking and isn't sized right for this wreath but I'm sure my MIL will put on a nice one, she's great at making bows. I included a pai...

I'm going to change up my blog soon. I like the newer modern template choices.  Today's post is more documentation for my process on this quilt. This is probably TLDR. Worked on fitting the quilt to the Marti Michell Perfect Patchwork Templates for making Drunkard's Path blocks in 3 to 4 inches. I had these, they'll make cutting easier and I haven't used them in a while. To make them fit the quilt, I had to make my blocks 7 inches finished and use a 6 by 6 block layout. I use EQ7 for designing so changing it up is easy.  I will need 36 blocks, 18 with black pie sub-blocks and 18 with bright pie sub-blocks. I need 72 HST which divide into 8 sets of 9 different colors. I can also evenly divide the number of Drunkard's Path blocks into 9 so I trimmed my fabrics down to 9 from 15 in the last post. All of these are from my stash. Pretty good picture but the greens got lost. I'll get 8 HST from each color and 8 Drunkard's Path sub-blocks...

At some point I bought 2 charm packs of Island Hopping by Connecting Threads that were a group of 16 fabrics and decided to make a baby quilt from the squares. I put both packs on my design wall with the packs split evenly in the middle. I changed the placement for a week until I found one that was balanced and pleasing. Sewed it together and got a couple of fabrics to round it out to a decent size for a baby a long time ago. Meanwhile life happened and this quilt has been intended for 2 babies and will end up for a third being born this week. I'm really happy with it. I quilted it around the beginning of August 2019 with an orange peel motif in the blocks and swags in the first border. I couldn't figure out what to do in the last border that wouldn't be too dense. While I was sick in bed recently, I came across a way to quilt a braid design that was simple, fast and not dense. It worked great! I finished the quilting, trimmed the front and batting, then turned t...

We, my MIL, daughter and I, worked on our crazy quilt blocks all through 2015. These are our first crazy quilt blocks pieced! I used the method where you randomly cut a 5 sided polygon, place it on a piece of muslin and randomly add strips around it.

I started out the new year by sewing! I sewed this block on January 2. I have never done a square in a square type block before. I really enjoyed how it looked a bit wrong after the first two triangles were attached, with the long tails hanging off the ends, but then it worked out. It came out great for being cheap fabric. I literally bought these block kits for a dime before I knew there was a difference in quality. I had to starch the heck out of them. I pulled this one out because I wanted to sew something and came across it. I was really impressed with how my skills have improved. The next day I sewed up this one So easy but it was just so much fun! I really miss sewing blocks. they took me about an hour each. I have a lot of these already made in different blocks that I'll probably make up into a quilting practice quilt or two & use for car quilts. I can use the practice.

My daughter, MIL & I sew together. The project we chose to do in 2014 was a paper pieced quilt of a tea set. We found the patterns at Piece By Number here: http://piecebynumber.com/grandmas-tea-party-mini-quilt/ MIL was concerned some of the pieces looked small so we enlarged the pot & cup blocks by 150% and changed the setting to only four cups. My daughter is an art major so she helped us pick some coordinating fabric for me & my MIL's quilts, then picked out some others for hers.

I did get our dice bags finished last year. This is the first one I did with a pocket on the lining and the paper piecing page for my next block.

My coworker turns wood and got what he calls an eclipse bowl. There's a small bit of a ring in the bottom you can see when you hold it up to the light. I took it and made it into a big weighted pin cushion. My first idea was to make the cushion into a hexagon flower shape to fit in the bowl.

I've known about this quilt forever. I originally read about it on the Quilting Board way before I'd seen the Jelly Roll Race or the 1600 inch quilt. You can find the original post here: http://www.quiltingboard.com/tutorials-f10/super-fast-jelly-roll-quilt-t44258.html   I recommend you wade through it because there are a lot of nice examples. On page 7 is a picture tutorial and somewhere in there is a discussion of making different sizes and using different widths. She used to have a PDF printout for free but you could just print the first page.  Anyways, I used my JoAnn's, 20 strip jelly roll to try this out.  I wanted to also separate the strips by piecing squares in between them. I really like that look for this quilt so I chose a crazy scrap I had laying around and cut twenty 2 1/2 inch squares. The jelly roll had only ten different fabrics, 2 strips of each, so I pieced squares on one end of each strip. I should clarify, you need to piece strips ...

I sent out my fabric postcards last week for the swap. I made two more for a total of three so I should get three back. I used these postcards to try out a no mark method of sewing hexagons together that Jacquie over at Tallgrass Prairie Studio posted. It made sewing hexagons super simple and fast. I started with my Bits & Bobbins scraps and cut some hexagons with the small hex template from Marti Michell. I used set H template 52a which makes a 1.5 inch finished hexagon.  First I sewed a strip of them straight across. This actually already has two strips pieced together and I'm in the middle of the third but the idea is the same. The previous stitching lines make the 1/4 inch from the end marks, as long as they are accurate. You're basically stitching the seams in order starting on the side touching the previous piecing on the top or left then to the next counter-clockwise until it's attached. Above, the light blu...