Celtic Solstice - Let's Begin

30 November 2013, 6:00 a.m. EST

Well, I believe it is time to start writing in the blog again.  I have a new project and the new year is just about upon us.  (Actually, I have 17,922 new projects, but I won’t write about all of them!)  It will take me a little while to ease back into blogging.  

Bonnie Hunter at Quiltville just released the first clue to her new mystery quilt yesterday and several thousand of us have started this new journey together.  There are a couple of Facebook groups for the mystery so folks can join in together. The one I'm is has been closed because we have over 1,000 people in it (I think.) But if you are interested in doing the quilt, there are several other groups out there. Jump in. It’s going to be fun and we will have a beautiful quilt at the end of it.  Bonnie has entitled this quilt Celtic Solstice and you can read all about it at her site.  

I don’t usually do Bonnie’s mystery quilts.  They are generally “busier” to the eye than I like my quilts to be.  Yet, with my love of Ireland and all things Irish, I could not pass this one up.  In addition, since family health issues are making it necessary to stick closer to home, I’m challenging myself in new ways at the sewing machines.  (Perhaps I’ll post about my Dear Jane and Farmer’s Wife journeys in a different post.)  So this quilt will be a challenge for me.  I’m make the small size to fit a twin bed. 

For some reason, I’m naming this project Iania’s Celtic Solstice.  I have no idea where that name came from.  I just awakened with it in my head this morning along with the memory of walking near the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland two years ago.  Who knows?  Maybe an ancient ancestor or maybe a mischievous sprite invaded my dreams.

Putting all of that aside, I’m ready to jump into this mystery quilt.  As I mentioned the first clue was released yesterday and I spent an hour and a half just cutting out bitty pieces using my new Tri Rec rulers. (I don't want to push a specific retail website. Just search Tri Rec rulers if you want to see what they are like. They make this project so much easier.) 

Then I spent close to forty-five minutes just organizing them in the correct piles, turning them the correct way, and teaching them to play nice with one another so that the sewing goes easier. Today it is on to sewing.

I’m going to follow Bonnie’s advice about getting up for a stretch from the machine every so often and I’m going to continue the Irish theme.YouTube has a number of great Irish Walking Videos that range from four minutes to fifteen minutes.  Here’s my plan.  I’m going to sew for the period of time it takes to listen to ONE SIDE of a Harry Potter cassette (Yes, I still have a cassette tape player.) Then I’m going to get up, go to the Wii and walk one Irish trail before returning to the sewing machine. Actually, I’ll probably check on my husband and the dogs before returning to the sewing machine.  We will have to wait and see about that.

I hope all my Solstice friends are busy with the projects as well.  See you soon on Facebook and the blogosphere.

Serger Project 1

E-Reader
Click for free Bernina pattern by Kellie Rushing 

Okay, I admit it.  I REALLY don’t like sergers.  I use them as little as possible in my sewing classes, but I know I need to use them more.  So I signed up for serger club at Studio Stitch.  They MIGHT change my mind, but the jury is still out.


I would much rather do clothing construction start to finish BY HAND as opposed to using a serger for any of the steps.  I think this stems back to my early childhood.  Mother made my clothes and did a fantastic job.  Sergers were not so readily available  for the home sewist fifty years ago, so if a classmate had something on with a serged finished, it was obviously store bought and made with far less love than what my mother made for me.  I used to feel sorry for the girls who had to wear store bought clothes, and a serged seam was a dead give away.

Flea Market Serger Find

However, home sewing has come a long way and many of us now have sergers.  I have two...they just stay in the closet.  (How did you like that explanation about why I don’t use a serger very often?  I’m sure you would never think that the real reason is that I don’t have the patience to put four or five different threads through 5,699 different holes, thread guides, and tension discs! In my high school class, if a student unthreads a serger, they have to put a dollar in the serger jar.  Anyone who threads a serger gets a dollar!  Ninth graders will do anything for a dollar around lunch time!)  

Let’s go back to today’s story.  A friend was able to stay with my husband so I could run out for a quick class at Studio Stitch.  It was so good to get a couple of hours away after the hub's recent ER visit.  In class we were making a cover for our e-Readers from a Bernina pattern by Kellie Rushing.   It took me awhile to get the threading right on my “borrowed” serger.  (We are buying a Bernina serger for my school classroom so Studio Stitch let me use one today to get accustomed to it!)  Justiann finally convinced me to do EXACTLY the same thing with the serger that I tell my students to do with the conventional machine  when there’s a problem. I needed to unthread it totally and rethread it from scratch.  It’s just a little more complicated to do that with a serger, so I tried to avoid doing it.  However, a couple of re-threadings later it was working great.

(It turns out that my left-handed nature gets me even when threading sergers.  I try to thread left to right through thread guides when they want right to left, and vice versa.)  

After all the time threading and re-threading, the actual e-Reader case only took about 20 minutes to finish.  It was super-easy, after I sorted through my left-handed spatial challenges (Definitions for the words “width” and “length” were a little challenging today!)   I’m now on the search for any of my friends who have e-Readers!  Guess what they are going to get for Christmas!  My sample leaves a lot to be desired, but now that I’ve conquered the basic concept I’m thinking of doing some embroidery on them and turning them out one weekend for gifts.  It will be a good way to use from my fabric stash, practice serging skills, and give a gift all at once. If I become familiar enough with the pattern, it can go into the supplemental projects that my first year students are allowed to do if they finish assigned projects in class.
Here’s the funny thing.  After the class I came home and got the old Elna serger out of the cupboard and actually threaded it and began serging a bit. It took two hours to get it up and running, using a manual that I had located on the Internet. (This serger was a $5.00 flea market find, no manual included.)  You might notice in the picture that each cone has a different color thread, just like the manual said to do to check the tensions on the stitch. That Justiann at Studio Stitch may just make me move out of my comfort zone.    I guess I just needed a push.  I’m looking forward to next month’s serger club!

Random Projects

Bold Hearts and Stars B.O.

It seems like I’m always updating this blog sitting at the hospital with my husband!  We are in the ER right now waiting for xrays from a fall.  

During the last two weeks life has been so full of school related responsibilities  (i.e. conferences) that there hasn’t been room for serious quilting.  But never fear -- I was able to work a few things in.

One evening after a rough day I was nearly brain dead but I absolutely needed a fabric fix.  So I pulled out my box of “Blocks - Cut but not sewn” and put to “hearts and stars” together.  One is in a bright child oriented colorway and one is in feminine pinks.   Here’s a pic of the bold one.  

Sometimes I’m in a cutting mood and I’ll cut five or six blocks and put them in the “Blocks - Cut but no sewn” box.  That makes it easy to feel quickly productive when I only have an hour to spare.  I can put together a block that has forty or fifty pieces in it in a short period of time without too much thought, as long as I did my cutting when I was more alert!

Another evening I was still not up to tackling anything new so I walked to mom’s to see what she was working on.  She had gotten stalled on a scrappy block baby quilt.  The corners of the blocks didn’t quite match so she was ready to just stop work on it.  She let me take it to play with.  I applied a french binding and hand stitched it in place.  Who cares that the blocks don’t match exactly?  My mom is 74 -- I think the work is pretty awesome.  We will just ask the baby to throw up on the corners of any blocks that don’t match and no one will notice the blocks are slightly off!

Yesterday I took off with a quilting friend to a gigantic “cloth shop” a couple of hours away from us.  It took us much longer to get there than anticipated.  But I told my friend that it may have been the Lord’s way of keeping us out of an accident that could have been happening had we arrived earlier.  But now on second thought, I think I’ve figured out what Jesus was doing!  Because we took longer to get there, we didn’t have as long to shop in the store.  That was his way of making sure I had money to eat on the rest of this month.  We just got paid and I blew my allotment of play money for the month in less than an hour.  However, I did get quilt backs for six quilts.  My goal is to get these six quilted before Christmas (plus the one I have on the frame right now.)  AND,   I only bought one new piece of fabric that doesn’t yet fit into a quilt!  I was the model of restraint.  (It helped that my friend had already GIVEN me three fat quarters and a 1/2 yard of fabric from her stash before we left home!)

I intended to spend this evening working on Block Lotto’s block of the month.  However, the best laid plans of mice and men go astray.  So I’ll do some applique work while sitting here in the hospital.  

Hey, great news.  Hubs is going home with me from hospital.  It’s only a broken collar bone this time!  Yeah!  I might get to do those blocks this evening after all (and look for the cell phone that I lost during the rush to the hospital!)

Project S-02 Girlie Onesies and Project Q-96 Studio Stitch Block of the Month

"Onesie" Dress for new baby

Wednesday morning waiting at Wake Forest Baptist Medical University Center for my husband to finish a CT scan.  I hope the news is good.  There hasn’t been a lot of time for serious quilting this last week because I’ve been working on several small projects.  

Denim Re-Do

I love wearing comfortable denim dresses because they last forever, but the length “dates” them.  In previous decades we wore them a bit longer.  So I spent a little time cutting six inches off the bottom of several of them and hemming them up.  (Not too short now....I am fifty years old.  Don’t want to try to look like my students!!!)

Onesie Dress

I was also excited to take a “onesie” class at Studio Stitch in Greensboro, NC this last Saturday.    Our instructor, Gail, showed us how to  deconstruct part of the onesie and add a ruffle to it to turn it into a onesie dress.  Since I have two very good friends and a niece expecting little girls within the next couple of months, this was a good time to take up this project.  I wish I had purchased a slightly better quality onesie to take to class to work on because it turned out better than I thought it would.  I gave it as a gift to my niece the day after I finished it.  She’s only four months pregnant, but I wanted to give her her first baby gift.  I also gave her two of the burp clothes I talked about last week.  

Since this niece has an older sister who has a six month old boy, there are going to be lots of “boy onesies” that we can turn into “girl onesies” by adding a  pretty ruffle.  It actually takes less than thirty minutes to turn a onesie into a “dressie”

July BOM from Studio Stitch, Greensboro, N

 Studio Stitch Block of the Month- July 

I attended the block of the month class at Studio Stitch in Greensboro last night and picked up my July block. Justiann at Studio Stitch is in charge of this and is doing a great job introducing us to simple patterns.  This pattern has a lot of potential.  I can see myself using it for the “cross motif” that is expressed if I choose my colors to emphasize the cross. (As a matter of fact, I have a quilt in my head with this right now using Freedom Fabric manufactured in the U.K.  I was wondering how I was going to use that fabric!!!!  It has Celtic crosses that can be fussy cut for the middle of this block.  )   I can also see this block used as a friendship signature block.  It could also work to feature specific fussy cut motifs in the middle of the block for a baby quilt.   

Oh, no, here’s another idea for this block!  One of my closest friends is a Mexican and her baby will be born an American.  One set of the three color blocks in the main block could be the three colors of the Mexican flag.  One set could be the three colors of the American flag.  I could alternate the main section of the block with a mini Mexican rose pattern.  Hum..... I need to think on that one.  

I’m using a quilt-as-you go method for these blocks.  Doing it this way means I’m not left with 12 blocks that I have to incorporate into a quilt at the beginning of the year when I’m ready to start on another BOM project!  I do so hate to have tons of blocks stacked up waiting to be joined into quilt tops.  (For some reason I don’t mind have twenty quilt tops waiting to be quilted.  I just don’t like having stacks of blocks.  Go figure what the difference is there.  I’m sure it gives some deep psychological insight into my personality.)

I’m doing both color ways for the BOM  and I finished one last night and then finished the cutting for the other one last night as well.  I started the piecing on the second one this morning before heading out to the hospital.  This “cancer journey” with my husband means that my quilting has to be done in fits and starts.  But it’s all good.  It does get done and if it’s not as precise as I would like I remind myself that  I do it for the love of it, not for any desire for perfection.  

Project 01-S - Baby Burp Cloths

Burp Cloths in progress.
(Blue one on the right is finished.,
and properly folded!

Wednesday evening after a day of computer work at school, I had just finished straightening in the sewing room and it was late.  But I needed to satisfy my sewing addiction and I didn’t want to stay up too late.  I needed something that would allow me to see some immediate progress.  Baby burp cloths to the rescue.

I had already done the preliminary work, so it was just going to be a quick sewing job.    

Yet let’s talk a minute about choosing a pattern for a baby burp cloth.  Should be very simple, right?  I had researched patterns for the cloths.  Did you know there is one website where a sewist has gathered 38 different burp cloth patterns?  My stars, how many ways can you sew fabric onto a cloth nappy so that a baby can spit on it?

After going through all 38 of the website links this sewist collected, I had already picked out my pattern and was planning to use my embroidery machine to put cute phrases on the cloths before sewing them together.    I had previously asked my friend how many she wanted.  She said a few.  I asked her to be more specific and she said five.  So I thought I would make five very cute embrodiered clothes.  No problem, right?

A couple of days earlier, I had gone to FIVE different stores before I found cloth nappies.  I had boiled them to make sure they were really pre-shrunk and that any residual chemicals used in their manufacture were gone.  I dried them.  I ironed them. (I REALLY ironed them.  Do you know how easy it is to stretch cloth nappies off grain if you are not careful?)  I cut the flannel and I pinned it in place.  I then set them aside for sewing on another day.

The next day I spent a couple of hours with my five month old great nephew.  It was an epiphany moment.  My friend did not mean five burp cloths.  She meant five HUNDRED.  You can only use those things one time before you have to get another one.  How much can a baby spit up?  And on top of that, why was I going to do beautiful embroidery for a baby to SPIT STINKY STUFF ON?  This was a nasty experience (Although my great nephew is perfect, his spit up leaves a lot to be desired!)

So this evening after straightening my sewing room, I went into production model.  My friend is getting a bunch of simple, simple burp cloths and they don’t have embroidery on them. (And my sister-in-law in Argentina is getting some to give her friends too!)  It may not be such a beautiful gift without embroidery, ribbons and bows, but at least it will keep that clabbered sticky stinky stuff off of her neck!  And that's what friends are for, isn't it? -- to protect other friends from clabbered sticky stinky stuff! (PS - The finished blue one in the picture is not my friends. It was for practice. She's having a girl!)

Project 98 - Chocolate Table Mats

Another new project!!!!    However, this one doesn’t count either since I merely helped my mother with it and didn’t do it all myself.  (Did you know that if someone else buys the fabric, the project doesn’t count as a real UFO - unfinished project?  It’s an SEP - someone else’s project!).  

My niece saw some table mats that mom and I had made for her mother and decided she wanted a set.  We asked her what color and she said it “didn’t matter.”  Obviously she is an alien inhabiting the body of my niece.  No one related to me EVER says that color “doesn’t matter.”  

My mom has always done very traditional quilting but we wanted this project to go quickly so we could get back to real UFO’s.  So  I taught her to do this using a quilt-as-you-go method.  I cut the strips and the backing and placed the center strip on the wadding and backing for her.  She added the strips and I finished it all with a French fold binding.  (It’s so much fun working on projects with my mom.  I feel like that by helping her  I’m paying her back for all the fingerpaint, glitter, glue, threads, etc that she let me trail through the house when I was little.)

Now if you look closely (don’t!), you will see that somehow mom didn’t keep the additional strips precisely “squared.”  However, we decided that since they were table mats and were probably going to be covered by round plates, who was going to notice?  In addition, my niece has a 3 year old and a 6 month old so they were going to be covered with food before it was over anyway!!

If you hang out very much around this blog, you will find that I don’t do work “for show.”  I come from a rural farming family and both of my parents were used to making every scrap count for something useful.  So, crooked stripes on a table mat are perfectly fine if the table mats are useful.

Now, I do promise I am going to work on some projects  already in process next.  The weather has cooled down, so I’m mounting  a ladybug quilt  (project 91) on the frame in the cabin and getting started on  quilting it this weekend.  

New Project - Crazy Pinks

Project 97


Okay, I admit it.  I had to start a new project, even though I have many in various stages of completion.  But it’s not as bad as it sounds.  I’m using only scraps of previously purchased fabric.  I’m not buying a single piece of new fabric for this project.  I’m calling it “Crazy Pinks” because it’s a crazy quilt design using up my pink scraps.  

I saw a Crazy Quilt top that a friend posted on Facebook in red, white, and blues.  I have wanted to do a Crazy Quilt for a long time and this friend’s project was the encouragement I needed.  I had a tiny box of scraps left over from a pink and cranberry BOM twin quilt I completed last year for my mom (Project 37).  The scraps were so beautiful that I couldn’t dispose of them even though they were tiny.  This looked like the perfect project for these scraps.

I did a quick Internet search on foundation block patterns for Crazy Quilts.  After doing a bit of reading and reconsidering, I decided to skip the foundation block patterns and just wing it.  


I don’t think early crazy quilters used patterns.  Many of them used the Sears Roebuck Catalog as the foundation paper for their blocks.  I used embroidery stabilizer to support the blocks (instead of catalog pages) and just started by placing a small “pretty” piece of fabric in the middle of a 9 ½ inch square of stabilizer.  Then I just picked through my scraps and continued to grow the block by adding scraps around the outer edges of the center pieces.  It took about four hours on Sunday evening to complete six blocks but I was pleased with the results.  

I returned home from work today (Monday) and decided to continue the project.  I did two more blocks and then connected them with a deep beige sashing that I had in my scrap collection.  I tried the piece out on the bottom of my mom’s twin bed and it looks great as a bed runner to keep your feet warm on a cool evening.

I’m going to go through my fabric stash tomorrow evening to look for a burgundy or wine piece to make a two inch border and then back and bind it with the same deep cream I used for the sashings.  

And wonder of wonders, I actually threw the teeny tiny scraps left from this project into the rubbish bin!  I NEVER put fabric in a rubbish bin.  It was a truly freeing experience (but they were very, very, very tiny pieces!) However, guess where mom and I are going tomorrow!! - To the FABRIC STORE! I figure I've emptied a couple of yards out of my stash, so I deserve to refill it. We do that with our gasoline tanks don't we?