Jacob's Ladder Finished

Here it is, all washed and dried.

In hanging it I notice that a) there are still some chalky markings on it, and b) there is a bit of bleeding, despite my having thrown in four dye catcher sheets with it.  It will probably have to go through again.  But all in all, I'm happy with it.  More than anything, it's nice to have a 10-year-old UFO finished.  In looking at it this way, I'm also glad I chose a solid white binding ... I had puzzled on that one for a while but wanted the sawteeth to really pop.

I also chalked up 22 days of sewing on Michele's Crafting by the Numbers challenge, out of a possible 31 in March. 

Obviously, I'm still having a bit of trouble with weekends.  Starting in April, I am going to also note on the calendar the project(s) I'm working on during a specific day/evening.

Last night I made my first test block for Quiltmaker's 100 blocks volume 6.  Although it wasn't a block I would normally choose, I enjoyed the process.  I emailed them my photo and evaluation today, and there is a new block in the dropbox today.  I will probably get to it later this week since it's a busy week, starting with quilt guild tonight.  I need to wrap up here at work and get going soon.

My latest projects

I've been remiss with blogging about what I've been working on for some time, beyond the Jacob's Ladder UFO I had prioritized for the Quilting is Murder challenge.  However, I've been hinting about this for ages ... as long ago as Christmas, when I wrote about one of them, "It occurs to me that it's one of those things that happens when you give a gift and find that you've inadvertently received one in return."  Let me explain ...

... in December, I participated in the Quilting Gallery Blog Hop Party and gave away a jelly roll of Moda's Fruitcake line.  Well, Fruitcake had pretty much been retired by that point and it wasn't easy to find images of the fabrics which I could post on the blog, so I went to Moda's website.  Which reminds me, if you have not spent a good deal of time at Moda's fabric collections website, you should.  They list EVERY one of their fabric lines and then what freebies they offer for each: 

Swatch Page Print out for an instant Shopping List to take into your favorite quilt or specialty store.

JPG Images Upload our images into your favorite quilt program.

Group Description Learn more about the collection and include in your newsletters, blog posts, and more!

Marketing Tools Print on cardstock and tag your fabrics and gifts to identify the collection.

Free Pattern Download a free pattern to use with the selected collection.

The "Free Pattern" is a goldmine since these patterns are designed to work with ONE fabric line and often using one form of precuts (from fat quarters to charm squares).    When I was looking up Fruitcake, I clicked on the "Free Pattern" link for the line and found just what I had been looking for.

I'll back up a bit.  Last summer, we took the kids tubing down the New River in Radford, and we all had a great time.  It was a gorgeous morning and there were dragonflies everywhere, landing on us and the tubes.  I wanted to try to capture that memory with a quilt, and I ordered a fat eighth bundle of Moda's line, "Dragonfly Summer." 

I didn't know what to do with it, but the free pattern for Fruitcake was a pattern which looked just like the innertubes, and called for a collection of fat eighths ... how perfect!  I cut and pieced all of the circles in one long night, and since then have been working on appliqueing them to sand-colored backgrounds.  Contrary to the instructions, I am not doing raw-edge applique but needle-turn applique.  Each evening I have some handwork to do on the sofa now.  Here are a couple of the blocks:

They actually work out to be pretty large - about 20" background squares.  But they go fast.

I have another project that I worked on a bit last night but couldn't take pictures before my phone battery died.  However, between working on all these other projects, I squeezed in one more.  I was so inspired by Pat at Color me Quilty and her Gothic Windows tutorial posted at Happy Quilting that I had to find a way to work a few of those into my quilting queue.  Coincidentally enough, I had also recently received email from the guild asking for donations of small quilts for the Virginia Quilt Museum's silent auction fundraiser.  I put two and two together and rifled through my stash of 2.5" strips for some arresting colors.  I have three of the four finished and the fourth, in the bottom right, ready to be tacked down:

The only deviation I have made from Pat's instructions is that I am sewing down the windows by hand rather than machine.  I love Cathedral windows squares - I have made three various CW projects so far, including one in silk - and I love the handwork.  I like the striking contrast of the deep purple and bright red with white accents, and luckily I don't need a border since there is a size limit of 72" perimeter on submissions.  Keep an eye on the auction - it could be yours!  But if you don't want to bid, it is easy enough to make your own from Pat's great instructions.  Go check it out!

So these are just a few of the projects I've been working on now that I've let the Jacob's Ladder rest a bit.  There is one more as well - a biggish one - that I'll blog about another time.

Jacob's Ladder - first finishing point

Tomorrow is the deadline for the Quilting is Murder UFO challenge, and I have worked on nothing else since learning of it early last month.  Well, nothing else in my sewing room - of course there was plenty to distract me, like the kind of work I get paid for doing 40+ hours/week, working out, cleaning the house, and so on.  But my spare time all went into this quilt.

Remember, I started with a box full of blocks and a quilting stencil that I had put away in 2001:

And then I decided on a double sawtooth border using some thangles:

Finally I got the top put together and basted last weekend, and tried a new marking technique with a pouncing spray:

Now the deadline arrives and my goal was to have the bulk of the quilting done on the center of the top.  I have quilted all the center blocks with the sheaf of wheat template, and the ladder sections to look like ladders.  There are some open squares still that I'm thinking about another stencil in, and I have the edge sections and borders still to do (no idea what to do in the 4.5" wide white border!) but it is finished to the point that it is being submitted to the judges for the challenge today on the Flickr group. 

First, the "completed" top:

And I have to choose one of these detail photos to submit:

It feels really strange to submit a quilt for "judging" with pins still in the borders and markings still all over the fabric.  This is not a quilt I'd ever be submitting for real judging.  The seam quality on the swap blocks made it very challenging to put them together well, and my machine quilting definitely shows signs of improvement from rocky beginning to smoother finish.  I'm not going to ask for any votes, and am not even posting this to my Facebook page, because I really only want people interested in the contest itself to participate in the voting.  I like the way they've organized it with the shop owners getting 100 votes each to balance out the ballot-box-stuffing that happens.  I trust that the judges know what they're doing with the rules they created for this challenge!

Still, I didn't participate in this to win (yet) another sewing machine.  I wanted to get this UFO finished, and I wanted some practice at building my machine-quilting skills, and I wanted to try out some new-to-me techniques, and I've accomplished all that (or am on my way to doing so).  I plan to continue with this past tomorrow's deadline to get it DONE done before I turn to working on any of my other projects. So regardless of how the contest turns out, I consider myself a winner.  ;-)

Jacob's Ladder Progress

Thanks all for your comments about guild guilt - as I commented on the post myself, I ended up agreeing to do the newsletter.  I see now that it includes publicity, which I will probably reinterpret in my own way, delegate, or else drop the ball on entirely.  Well, this is what they get with a technologically inclined, busy woman!  Print media?  What's print media??  Incidentally, if anyone uses a freeware/shareware desktop publishing program they love, please feel free to share in the comments.

Guild ended early last night and I had some time to sew.  I've tried several new (to me) techniques on this UFO.  Over the weekend I finished with my double sawtooth border (made with Thangles; new technique #1) and got the quilt pin basted.

Last night I finished running some straight lines in the ditch over the quilt using my walking foot, which I've never attempted before (new technique #2).

My third new technique is something I came across at JoAnn's while shopping for batting and backing fabric for this quilt.  I was browsing the quilt stencils area for something to do in that 4.5" wide white border area and came across a stencil marking spray.  I'd never used it before but thought it was worth a try, since pounces make a mess and don't leave enough of a mark on the quilt, and I can never use marking pens or pencils on stencils reliably.

The instructions said to cover the area around the quilt to protect from overspray, so I took the lid of a copy paper box, cut a hole in it slightly smaller than the stencil, and taped the stencil into it.

Surprisingly to me, this does not spray a blue line similar to the marking pen, but a chalky substance similar to a pounce.  It works pretty effectively.  I used it on a scrap piece and rinsed it all out much more easily than the water-soluble pen.  It leaves a little chalky dust on my free-motion quilting foot that I blow off after I take the quilt out to mark the next square, but it works very well.

The only challenge is placing it correctly on the square to quilt since you have to cover up so much around it.  I think I have a system down for peering through it enough to get it right but it's a little tricky.  I'll also have to wipe off the excess spray from the stencil before I use it again tonight - the photo above is after four uses.

Additionally, when I pin-basted this top, I did NOT use any basting spray since I'd been reading that it might have been the culprit behind a lot of my tension and broken thread issues on the Hoopla baby quilts last year.  Sure enough, I have not had any issues so far.  I also have to say that the time I've spent reading Leah Day's and Judi Madsen's blogs, between their machine quilting and top marking tips, have really been helpful to me in undertaking this project.  I might end up machine quilting myself more after this!

I'm happy with the way this is quilting and I hope that I can get a lot done before this weekend's challenge "completion" deadline.  I know it doesn't have to be finished, bound and laundered but I'd at least like to finish the quilting in the center of the quilt.

busy times

I've made a little progress on the Jacob's Ladder UFO, but we were away to see the kids this past weekend and I came back with a bit of a cold, so I went right to bed at 9:00 last night.  I hope to be feeling better to work on it some more and maybe even get it sandwiched and start quilting on it this weekend.

My Honey and I got married this morning too, so there's also that which has been keeping us busy.  It was fun - we only just decided on the day on Thursday, bought bands on Friday, told the kids on Saturday, and his relatives yesterday.  His dad came to be our witness and was even able to talk the bailiffs into being able to bring a camera into the clerk's office to take some photos, despite our courthouses not allowing any devices that record, receive or transmit broadcasts, not even a Kindle.  It took people at the office several hours to figure it out.

Honey is away tomorrow on business so that means quilting time for me if I'm not falling into bed under the influence of heavy doses of cold medicine.  I will try to take and post some photos of Jacob's Ladder and maybe even some other projects in the works which have not made it here to the blog yet.

progress on Jacob's Ladder

I've been making some slow progress on my "Save a UFO" project of the red & white Jacob's Ladder ... and thanks so much for all the kind comments!  You can read some more about the challenge here, which ends on February 11th, although I'd like to not wait until the last minute for once.  Fortunately, it doesn't need to be completed by then, just "considerable progress."

I trimmed up the blocks and had to discard about a half dozen of them because they were too small or too wonky, which left me with 42 ... enough to do six across and seven down.  So I've got them in pairs so far and will sew the pairs into rows and then a top.  Here it is all laid out in one possible setting.

I had originally stated my intention to make a flying geese border, but then I rethought that.  I had an unopened package of Thangles which I was interested in trying out.  And it turns out that they finish at 1.5" ... since each of these blocks finish at 9", I calculated that six of them per block should fit beautifully as a sawtooth border.

In fact, I may do a double border depending on how it looks.

I'd never worked with Thangles before but found them fun to work with, especially while watching TV.

This way I can get sewing work done on a weekend without completely ignoring my Honey.  :-)

I hope to do a lot of sewing tomorrow morning before the big playoff game begins at 3.  I'll post as I make progress!

Saving a UFO

As I indicated in my previous post, I'm participating in the Quilting in Murder - Save a UFO initiative.  This is the story of my UFO.

Back around the turn of the millenium, when my entire quilting e-world was in the form of AOL forums, I participated in a block swap.  We were each to make a Jacob's Ladder block in reds and whites.  At first I thought I organized it is because the Jacob's Ladder is a part of my sorority tradition, and cardinal red is our sorority's color, but as I dug through the box, I found the original instructions dated August, 2001 (due November, 2001), and I wasn't the host.  I loved the blocks I got in return and to this day they sit in a nice little box all stacked in a pile, complete with the names and email addresses of the quilters who made them still attached.  A quilting template in the form of a sheaf of wheat (another sorority symbol) is tucked in there with them.

This photo shows six of the blocks on my cutting table.  There are 54 of them in all, however, some of them are not to the 9.5" unfinished dimension specified by the swap and won't be used.  Many of them still have the labels attached with the information about the quilters who sent them ... with email address domains like earthlink and webtv!  I wonder how many of them are out there in the blogosphere now?  Also in the box, printed out in July, 2001 (a week after my now 11-year-old son had his first birthday), is a copy of the original instructions from Quilter's Cache, which you can still find here, although this finishes at 12" square, not 9".

A few times I have opened the box, laid the blocks out on the floor, moved them around ... and put them all back.  I could have put them together into a top but the dilemma of a border still remained.  Since then I've decided to do a red and white flying geese border but haven't made any headway on actually doing it.

My commitment now is to finish the top and maybe even get it sandwiched and quilted.  Let's see how far I get.  I think a decade is long enough to keep a UFO on the shelf with the intention of getting it finished someday.

Quilting is Murder - Save a UFO!

 

I'm thinking about participating in this challenge.  After all, one of my New Year's Resolutions is to finish at least one UFO.  This puts me on a deadline, but  on the bright side, I could win something fun.

I've already joined the Flickr group so I guess I'm committing. Actually, I guess since I decide when it's "finished" it might not be that hard.  I know exactly what I want to do, but the thing is that it requires putting away the lovely project that has had me obsessed this past couple of weeks.

Okay, I think I just talked myself into it.  I'll finish up the cutting stage of this project tonight and, since we're up north this weekend, I'll start focusing on my UFO next week.  While I have quite a few UFOs, there is only one that I have specifically in mind for this project.  So like a good mystery, I'll keep you hanging until we come back from our commercial (weekend) break.

If you join too, leave me a comment and let me know!