Sewing With Sharon

Sewing sessions with Sharon have resumed! Yeah! Thursday of last week and Wednesday of this week, we spent long days in the sewing room catching up with each other, and catching up on our stitching. Let's take a look at what Sharon has been making.

A week ago, she came in with the small start of a gorgeous floral quilt - not full size, but more in the wall-hanging or lap quilt range. She wanted to feature the wonderful center panel and then build other coordinating fabrics around it. These are all Laundry Basket fabrics by Edyta Sitar.

It soon became apparent that this would end up being quite a bit bigger than a lap quilt. She continued adding row upon row of varying widths until she had this. And since this picture was taken, she has added more. I will take a picture next week with it pressed and pretty on the bed. For now, these hastily-taken snapshots will have to do.

This week, Sharon said she was just playing in the Kaffe's - those bold, bright and happy fabrics of Kaffe Fassett.

These are 2-inch strips left over from previous projects, and she is turning them into 9-patch blocks.

The eventual quilt these will make is from the KF book called Quilts in America (2018); this one is called Kites. All the fabrics in this quilt have circles or dots, even the setting squares. Sharon says this is a very long-term project, but I can see this coming together faster than she might think. It will be gorgeous!

Typical for us: we make a plan to do something together. Our idea is to use our vast collections of Larkspur fabric, a pretty 3Sisters line from several years ago. She has a lot and I have a lot. We have dedicated June for making Larkspur quilts; we will use whatever patterns we want. I am thinking some sort of star for me. I put making a quilt with my Larkspur fabric on the goals list for 2020, so I will be happy to get a big item ticked off my list. I will post more on this plan in coming weeks.

Happy Quilting, Friends!

Tuesdays with Sharon

Now that Sharon and I are committed to sewing together each Tuesday, I need to come up with a clever name for the endeavor. Tuesdays with Sharon will have to do for now, and truly, it is the simplest way to reference it!

She came to my house this time, since I was working on the prom dress. Sharon brought her Aviary charm packs and continued to work on her project from last week. I need to get the book she's using and report the title here, along with the exact name of the quilt. It's a book that specifically addresses using layer cakes, charm packs and jelly rolls - precuts, I suppose you'd say.

At the beginning of the day, Sharon had this:

She was chain piecing, so all these rows are attached, and are ready for horizontal rows to be stitiched. But wait!! There's a problem!!!

This star has a twisted point. A bit of unsewing was required, and she was back on track.

We took our lunch break while this was stretched out on the floor. Guess who came to play? Gracie.

I don't know what her fascination is with quilt parts on the floor, but she had done this before. She goes nuts!

She had the quilt top tossed into quite a mess before we finally got her out of there. (Throw kitty treats down the basement steps, and watch her go! We shut her in the basement.)

At the end of the day, Sharon had the center portion of her quilt top nearly fully constructed. There are about 4 rows at the top there that still need to be sewn. Next, she has decisions to make concerning borders. I also think she intends to restitch a couple of the blocks that form the stars, as she is dissatisfied with certain points (or lack of points!).

At this point my DH came home from work; he admired it (like a good quilter's husband should!), and Sharon referred to it as a "girly quilt." Yes, it is, but it is so beautiful, and so Sharon! She has a decided preference for the cottage look, and this speaks to that preference perfectly. It makes me want to work on a floral, soft, girly quilt, too!

The prom dress work for me consisted of making a second trial bodice. I did one without lining and boning, which was way too big. Into the trash with that, and I cut out a second bodice, a full size smaller. This time I went for all of it - lining and boning, included. It took quite awhile, but it came out pretty well, and when Emma tried it on, we had a  pretty decent fit. I've got a couple of places to take in just a skosh tighter and we will be good to go.

Here's practice bodice #2, constructed using some ugly, cheap '80s cotton.

Today, the real dress goes into production.

Always Learning

The picture above features two quilts that have a romantic, floral, shabby chic look to them. The quilt on the bottom I hand-pieced about 6 years ago. To make it even more special, it was hand-quilted by my grandmother. The pattern is called "English Elegance," and was the cover of a 1999 BH&G American Patchwork and Quilting magazine. I made it entirely from my stash, with no special purchases except for the backing. The quilt folded on top is called "Tag Sale" by Carrie Nelson of Miss Rosie Quilts. I saw it on display at a nearby quilt shop, bought the pattern, and used a fat-pack I had on hand. I machine-pieced and hand-quilted it. Both quilts were long, drawn out projects, but I am so glad that I finished them. They reside in my guest room.
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It just seems natural that a retired teacher would be interested in learning. In thinking of all the the things I want to do in my retirement, learning stuff takes a major role. Learning to blog effectively is one of the items on my list of things to learn, and since my first post on Wednesday I have done quite a bit of self-directed study of the ins and outs of Blogspot. I am confident that I have the blogging part down; the daunting aspect of this is the photography. So, with the help of daughter Erin, an artist with the "eye" I lack, we have taken several dozen pictures and she has provided pointers for what she considers necessary for the most pleasing pictures. However, there are two schools of thought at play here: her desire for artistically placed quilts and my desire to see the whole quilt from a quiltmaker's standpoint. So, the pics we took today are all to Erin's liking, i.e. they are artistically pleasing. And while I like them, they do not offer the quilter a good full view of the quilts with borders. So there are still things to learn.

Here is an update on my quilting activity since the previous post. On Thursday, I did little more than dig out a project to take with me on Friday morning to my quilt group. It was fun digging through some long-forgotten UFOs, and I have a bit of renewed interest in finishing a few!

So Friday morning, off to quilt group. I took the "row-a-month" project (begun in 1998!), of which all that remains to be done is the applique row. I have decided that my method will be needle-turn applique, and in the 3 hours we worked, I got one bird done. (Note to self: take a picture of this progress to post here.)

Once back home, I pulled out the batik circle quilt. The top was finished except for the borders, for heaven's sake! So down to work! I finished up those borders and now have a lovely, cheery bright quilt top for a twin bed ready to take to my long-arm lady.

As the evening wore on, I wanted to watch a couple of shows with my daughter, so I set up the quilting frame and Ott Lite. I managed to finish 3 blocks on the baby quilt, bringing the total completed blocks to 18. My fingers are just so sore, it is hard to do more.