working with curves

here is that first single gal wheel complete. i unpicked and fixed the section joint on the right side up there. it looks much better now. my second two blocks went together much better than the first two did. i almost seemed to get the hang of this curve thing. curves are still completely mysterious and so not intuitive for me, but somehow i'm making some anyway. i don't have my head wrapped around how/why they work at all, but that hasn't stopped me from producing some! my intuition for how squares, rectangles, and triangles work seems to be off all the time anyway, so maybe i'm better off for not knowing how it works.

i mentioned that i downsized the block a little to fit on my available background fabric. i took a photo to remind myself what i'm doing. 

this is the piece that was giving me the trouble. i started my reductions by taking off the seam allowance on the two tip ends for this piece. then i cut the seam allowance off the end of the pieced arc and (top photo) cut it off the two straight sides of the inner curve. it seems to have worked! my pieces are fitting together and i'm getting wheels, so something went right. lucky guess!

*on my second cutting, i realized if i flipped the templates for the second set cut from the same large strip, it solved my fit issues. oh, well. next time! there's no switching sizes now.

pinning curves together is wild, so upside-down, inside-out, and backwards! 

my tana lawns are playing more slippery than usual. i tend to get slight gathering across a seam no matter what i do. but i'm able to smooth them out before i press the seams open and so seem to have avoided the problems i could have. i should probably be using a small needle or something, but since i don't know what else to try - i'm moving forward. it seems too much work to problem solve when i'm able to fix it well enough with the smoothing.

 by the time i made the first quarter section block, my cutting table was a wreck. it already has stacks of wensleydale fabrics waiting for future blocks. with the three template pieces and various other rulers and cutting tools i need for each stage of construction, it's a regular circus on here! i'll see what i can do to tidy it up a little.

day two, two wheels comlete.

first (wobbly) curves

 i seriously don't know what i got myself into with this "single girl" sewalong thing! yikes. piecing the patchwork strip itself isn't so bad, but attaching it to the background is so outside my experience and comfort zone. this is where i need my mom! i think garment sewing would be a good background to come from for this project. all the cutting of odd shapes rather than rectangles or squares and the subsequent fabric waste is very new to me other than it harks back to my mother's garment sewing of years gone by.

i'm tight on background fabric and so i've had to adjust the size of my blocks slightly, which is quite reckless (or maybe brave?) considering i don't have any experience with this type of piecing to begin with. unlike the garment patterns my mother used to use that i'd help her lay out sometimes, this pattern didn't come with any placement instructions for how to best fit the pieces on the background fabric so as to waste as little fabric as possible. i'm having to make my best guess but since it seems i'm short on fabric and i really shouldn't be, i think i've not done it as well as i could have. 

my blocks are definitely wobbly and a little wonky. there's been stretching to try to make things right and there are puckers in a few spots. 

but ... all in all, it's been a tentative success. it is okay! i'm trying something new and learning as i go. that is something in and of itself to be happy about. if the resulting quilt isn't my best work, that's alright. trying is what's important. 

progress

wensleydale blocks 1-9

i got a little off on my counting of blocks. this was actually block 7, which i realized i'd skipped over when i decided to photograph my first 9 blocks together.

i incorporated more purple in this one. i've decided my ratio of the secondary colors of terra cotta, purple, and teal will need to make a showing every 3 blocks. i purposefully cut the purple so the directional flowers would be in correct alignment for the block to stand vertically, forgetting til after it was done that the blocks lie horizontally in the quilt. ah, well, it won't matter much in the end, as i've said before.

i've also started reusing my gingham and check fabrics because i don't have many of them and want to incorporate one per block. i got my grey check lined up much better this time than i did in block 2 when i first used it. yay! that's a win, for sure.
 

this is block 10 and i am in love. i got a bit of the selvage in the block again because i didn't cut far enough above it. i've been cutting the outer rectangle piece at 5" x 7" and i think i'm going back to slightly larger because i falls a little short of the seam allowance unless i'm really exact and careful with placement. other than that, the block was a success.

i'd have more blocks done by now if i wasn't stopping to snuggle this guy and play with his sibling so often. quilts keep and babies don't, so it's the right choice.

free-wheeling single girl

 

flimsy geese

this is probably my favorite block combo of all the geese in "grellow garden geese." there's a very old (from my earliest days of quilting) print - the background "hope valley" print. the geese are actually hummingbirds in this set; that deep chartruese RSS print is impossible to find now. it's such a perfect color and cute print i'd love to have more, but alas, i'll have to move on.

i remember when i decided to add the warmer, spice-toned browns to this quilt that i was unsure about them. now they are probably my favorite bits (previous grellow set excluded).

these are the full-size or larger of the two size blocks i mysteriously ended up with. they all behaved very well. somehow my smaller size blocks did not work out mathematically as i expected when trimming and joining them up. no real surprise there, i suppose. but they all went together well enough and look where we are:

i was tempted to leave off joining all these rows a time or two and pursue more fabric pairing for wensleydale blocks, but i kept at it and completed the top! i'm glad i did. it looks cozy in the late afternoon light, doesn't it?

 this one is off the floor and set aside with the others waiting to be sandwiched and basted. i have three tops now so i might be having a basting party very soon. or i might wait a little longer to get wensleydale ready too. we'll see where the mood takes me and if the opportunity arises. i did realize that because i have the very wide roll of batting that generally allows me to put two quilts side-by-side across it, that it makes more sense to baste even numbers of quilts at once. so maybe i'll wait. i have a few ideas who else could be done soon, if the stars align. (hint: on the floor and a new sewalong start coming.)

never surrender

wensleydale 7 was perfectly behaved until the dreaded outer rectangle. but like all the others, and more so than some of them, it looks so pretty in the end that i've already forgotten and forgiven.

the first corner went on without a hitch. then i had to resew the next corner no less than 5 times! you can see some of the previously unpicked threads still in it to the left of the seam. i was so glad when it was done i took a photo.

then promptly sliced it off because it folded under when i turned the paper over to trim the seam allowance. i was flabbergasted! seriously, how do i manage to do these things? i'm not normally such an incompetent human being as my quilting misadventures would lead one to believe.

i guess the good thing about me is i get back up and move forward, never surrendering. 

on block 8, i had an entirely new situation occur. for the first time in this project one of the pieces wrinkled up after i flipped it over to sew and got runched up in the seam allowance. i was surprised, but not ruffled. i unpicked and went at it again, more careful to hold the piece in place this time. only to have it happen again! it's a nice soft ruby star fabric and i think the drape contributed to the temporary glitch.

and despite my renewed vigilance against this new problem, it happened once in the outer rectangle, again, with a woven fabric. 

but just look how pretty she is in the end.

there are two small tweeks i'd make: the center gingham is a thread or two off center and i got some of the seam allowance in the upper right corner piece, which is a different color and shows. i'm hoping it ends up being a playful quirk in the finished quilt because i'm not fixing it.

i suppose i do surrender to the little quirks, but i never, never, never give up on the whole project.

little bits of progress

i've steadily worked away at "wensleydale," keeping the pace of a block a day (with a few skipped days), and i've also made the last of the geese i need for "grellow garden geese," but i took a small break to get some yellow hst pieces literally off the floor and made into blocks so i could put them away.

the extra hst pieces i made several weeks ago when i was playing around with a new block idea have been laying together with the block on a piece of batting, which has been laying on the floor just inside my sewing room doors. often when i'm actively working on a project, i'll have a batting scrap laid on the floor just outside my sewing room doors, which will be open when i'm working in there. the piece of batting serves as a mini design wall, albeit on the floor, and as a place to keep everything together. i don't usually let things stay in this state for long. but this project (and edna) got quickly pulled into the room and the door shut on them a few weeks ago when i was in a hurry to clean up and get them out of the way of general foot traffic in the house. so i've been stepping over them any time i enter the room for weeks now. not tidy or desirable at all!

thus, i decided to do some cleanup work to get those pieces out of the way and off the floor as a mini break from the projects i'm most focused on at the moment.

as i was putting the first block together, i realized the hsts weren't trimmed. yikes. i did not want to do all that trimming - 16 units per block - so i decided to skip the trim and see what happened. the block (left above) turned out fine enough, but when i compared it to the original block, it was a full 1/4" larger on all sides. when you cut units sized with the intention of trimming them, you can't get lazy later and decide not to trim. not unless you skipping trimming all of them from the beginning. 

so i broke down and trimmed the pieces for the 3rd block. it really wasn't too bad.

looking at these blocks together i can see how slight shifts in the value of the yellows in the star pieces vs. the corner pieces make a big difference in how the pattern appears in the blocks. how interesting. the lowest block has a clear star pattern to it whereas the other two blocks look different. using softer yellows in the innermost diamond and for the corners while using bolder yellows for the points really brings the star shape forward. note to self for future blocks!

now these blocks are safely put away in the project box recently vacated by the flying geese project and i can think about them in the spring when i feel like sewing with sunshine again.

photo of me taking a break on the piano room couch, surveying my geese and also contemplating the upcoming remodel of this room's trim. 

i called d1 to chat about some things and showed her some feature of the geese on video call. she said, "mom! that's not the quilt you've been posting about." shows how much she's been paying attention. for one, i have recently posted about this quilt on insta and she's been in the house since i put it out on the floor a few days ago. her three kiddos 3 and under must be taking all her attention. "how many quilts are you working on right now?," she says, as if she doesn't know me and my quilting adhd habits at all.  

"actively - two," was my response. and that's true despite the few side trips i took this weekend that are featured in this post.

saturday night, long after i'd shut the sewing room doors for the day, d5 came to me and asked to have a little sewing and listening session for about 30 minutes before she went out for the evening. i was thrilled. since school started up last month she hasn't had any time for sewing with me and i'm itching for her to finish those 16 patch blocks. she got 6 done while we worked together and took a short trip to PEI to visit jane.

i was mentally done with both "wensleydale" and the geese for the day, so i picked up my sweet little mini crossroads blocks for some mindless piecing. i do love these so much and look forward to getting them completed. they'll need to take center stage again when i have a few projects pushed to the flimsy & basting stage. those quirky stripes and dotted o's aren't my favorite fabric of this grouping, but they'll add character to the quilt. if only they were printed straighter! 

that's it for the side projects for now. i'll be back to work on wensleydale and geese come the work week.

wensleydale 6

i keep photographing these blocks vertically when in reality they sit horizontally in the quilt. i suppose they'll be viewed either way and every which other once in the quilt and it's in use.

i was really happy with block 6 all the way up to the last outer rectangle. i had trouble picking the last fabric because i liked the inside fabrics so much i didn't want to spoil the look. i really wanted to find a suitable blue for the last layer, but settled in this bold burnt orange andover print. i think i like it!

i introduced a new color that i've been planning to use in the palette - the dusty light purple color. it feels fall and adds to the contrast in the palette overall.

these are the first six blocks all together. still lots more to make! i think i've decided to reduce the size by one row and one column. the original quilt is a hearty 66" x 72", a little larger than my prefered lapsized quilt. that's a decision to make later on, but 45 blocks sounds nicer than 60.

there are going to be lots of fabrics in this quilt! i haven't repeated one yet, but i plan to repeat most of them.

geese are calling

the calendar says it's officially fall in the northern hemisphere, the september equinox has been breached. sure, we're still in 100f+ temperatures in this desert we call home, but we'll take the name and spirit of the season even if it's still like summer on the weather report.

fall means geese and i've been hearing mine call as i work my way around wensleydale in the sewing room. i opened up the project box for "grellow garden geese" once again to see what's in there and what's going on with my geese. i found a few cut but unassembled, so i've worked those up between diamonds and rectangles in wensleydale fall colors.  

this morning i was looking over the blocks and feeling like this whole thing -an attempt to use stash and unloved fabrics rashly, unreasonable purchased - was the typical hot mess. some geese i really like; others are just plain flat and boring. what was i thinking pairing those fabrics?

in light of my enui, i was considering packing everything back up and hiding it away again. then d5 walked into the room and saw the blocks strewn around the floor and exclaimed, "oh, i love these colors!" huh. maybe it's not a completely unlovable project after all? as long as someone loves it, it's worth proceeding with. 

something needs to happen either way because my sewing space is more than normally crowded with the piles of fabrics pulled for wensleydale teetering all over the place and now the geese spread all over the place. decisions need to be made because this isn't a workable space as is.

i moved all the sets of blocks onto the piano room floor to layout in a possible setting for the quilt top, to see how they're looking together and how many i have/might yet need.

i have enough for a 56'' x 64'' quilt, minus four blocks. there are two sets of blocks, 12 each, that are slightly smaller than all the other blocks. what i did a few years ago to cause this discrepancy is a mystery. i decided to line up all the smaller blocks in the same row. it won't matter that it's less wide than the other rows. i'll add a small fabric strip to make up any difference in length. that will give the top a fun "make do" sort of vibe that i think will add some charm. i could have trimmed aaaallll the other blocks down to match the smaller ones, but why would i do that to myself?

i really don't know how i feel about all this now that it's laid out. that doesn't make me like it any better. but my girls are saying they like it even though "there's so much yellow!" yes there is. it just is what it is now and it needs to be done. i don't want to make it bigger by adding more colors/fabrics to change the look. so i think we're gonna go with what we've got and be done.
 

more wensleydale learning

wensleydale #3

 

these wensleydale blocks are becoming addictive! i made this number 3 block with no problems at all, including getting my directional prints to line up correctly. that was a mini triumph. 

i'm deriving a lot of pleasure from selecting the various prints for each block. i've realized that i really enjoy quilts that have blocks where each fabric pairing chance is like a little project all its own. that's one of the reasons i enjoy the crossroads quilt so much and why these blocks are so fun for me. quilts composed this way are like a series of mini projects that add up to one big project. 

i was a little hesitant to add that teal and orange DS floral fabric that's in the inner diamond. it felt a little bright for the direction this quilt is moving. but after considering how well the brights and moodier fabrics in the original wensleydale quilt from the book play together, i thought it would be a nice touch to use this brighter fabric, especially if i kept it to one of the smaller pieces where it would accent rather than stand out too much. i'm quite happy with it.

the way the center rectangle plaid turned out slightly wavy i'm less pleased with. wovens can be difficult and a little stretchy. i plan to use this particular one several times in the quilt, so i am going to have to be more careful with it in future. the woven stripe i used for the outer rectangle worked much better.

wensleydale #4

i've decided i want to use either a floral or a plaid in the center of each block. i've also decided that it will make my life a lot easier if i try to keep the directional prints to the diamond sections and not use them in the rectangle pieces. by the time i made this block a few days after i'd figured out the directional trick, i forgot what i'd done. at least i have all those stripes radiating in a similar manner this time. 

after using that teal DS floral in block 3, i knew i'd need to use some more teals in the quilt. unfortunately, i don't have many at all in my stash! i did find this joel dewberry daisy block print that i ordered from hawthorne earlier this year. 

i was really excited when i found hawthorne supply company had a lot of designers that you can order fabrics from on a print-to-order basis. i found some amazing colorways of some old favorite JD prints, like this daisy woodcut print. unfortunately, when they arrived, i was disappointed in the substrate it's printed on. it's stiff, which is good for cutting, but also feels coarse and doesn't have a very nice hand. i hope it washes up better.  anyway, it was a good color for this block and i'm at least pleased with how it looks.

*note - apparently there are two quilting cotton options and the website says the quality was upgraded in april 2024. i'm not sure which substrate i got, but i did notice you can order samples of any digitally printed fabric line, which would be a good idea before ordering lots like i did.

wensleydale #5

maybe you noticed something else i started doing with block #3 - making a "victory lap" around each block's perimeter. since i'm not trimming the blocks or removing the papers until they're all completed, i thought it prudent to make a stabilizing stitch on the edges to keep the pieces in shape and from fraying.

this block 5 is a little brighter and more color dense than the other blocks. i didn't use a low-volume print except in the center piece, and calling the orange plaid print low-volume is pushing it. i also should have used at least one print that wasn't so saturated in color, one that was a little subdued or faded. i didn't balance the bright and subdued fabrics as well in this one as the previous blocks. i thought the outer grey was going to be less color dense because it's a neutral color, but it is also quite high-volume in tone. this was no deal breaker for the block, but just another lesson learned as i hone my fabric selection and matching skills. i'm banking on the block blending in with the others and playing nicely with the quilt as a whole. 

i'd also forgotten about my directional print trick, as seen in the middle navy stripe rectangle. this was getting frustrating. then i remembered something else i'd forgotten about - compensating for cutting changes. i was originally using the cutting sizes recommended by "the quilted chicken" in their cutting video, but i found them unnecessarily large and tweaked them a little. this required changing my cuts a little so the angles would stay the same, which i hadn't done, therefore producing the wrongly-angled triangles i was having difficulty making behave. once i figured this out, i got much better results in the outer grey rectangle. 

i'm looking forward to my next blocks but i'm also feeling like i may need to do some fabric shopping. i don't have enough of the woven fabrics or teal in my stash. i may make a trip to the more traditional shop in a neighboring town at some point to see what they've got. until then, i'll keep trying to get a block a day done when i can.

learning to wensleydale

once i'd made the first wensleydale block i wasn't sure if i'd gotten it out of my system for the moment or not. i calculated that if i did a block a day for two months i'd have a completed top before thanksgiving, but i wasn't committing to that. the first one took so long i couldn't see being able to spend that much time each day. i was definitely thinking i would not be doing much wensleydale-ing right away.

but the next day i found myself pulling out another template sheet and making my next block. i told myself i wanted to see how long a single block took when i wasn't having to teach myself to fpp in the process.

block two turned out pretty well, but it wasn't a quick make either because i had several home ec/learning moments along the way! 

the first round i forgot to fold back the pieces before i trimmed the seam allowance and chopped off two side triangles before looking at the front to see why i had such large trimmings. oh no! one of the leftover pieces was big enough to reuse, but i had to cut a whole new rectanlge cut into triangles to get the one piece i still needed because i didn't know how to just cut the one odd triangle. that was frustrating.

but i got if fixed and moved on, deciding that in the future i would trim each seam allowance after sewing the piece and then press the piece open.

if you've never done fpp before, you might be confused about the process and what i'm saying. here's the basics:

1. place the first piece down, right side up, on the back of the paper/opposite side of the printed template. you hold it up to a light or use a lightbox to make sure you have the piece in place.

2. lay the next piece right side down on top, flip the paper over, and sew down the line between the two pieces on the template, backstitching at the beginning and end.

3. flip over so the fabric is facing down, fold back the paper along the seam line, and trim a 1/4" seam allowance for that seam. unfold the paper.

4. turn back over so the fabric is facing up; press the piece open. lay the next piece on, right side down, and repeat.

so where i went wrong here was i forgot to move the sewn piece, which i had already pressed open, out of the way when i trimmed the seam allowance; hence the chopping off.

this is what it looks like when you do the seam allowance trimming correctly. i folded the paper back along the seam and measured the seam allowance 1/4" away from that.

i was playing with how to get my directional prints to line up better inside their shapes.  if you look at the grey plaid piece in the middle rectangle (either in the first photo or below) you'll see that after i put two triangles in place and they fan out from the triangle rather than look aligned as a rectangle, i tried to get the other two pieces straighter and succeeded. i was glad to get them straighter, but feel it would have been better to have them all angled consistently.

and this brings up one disadvantage of the fpp method over the alternate template construction method for this quilt: template pieces can be cut how they will appear in the quilt but fpp is more risky and requires a lot more thought and care if you want a certain orientation and outcome in your prints, especially the directional ones.

one idea i tried was marking the seam allowance on the back of the piece before i sewed it in place. this helped a little, but since i was putting the piece roughly in place then flipping everything over, there is often slight shifting or i didn't guess well where the piece should go.

(you get a good view of my radiating vs. straight plaid pieces in this photo above.)

the next idea i hit on for better fabric placement was to trim down the finished shape before moving on to the next round of pieces. in this case, that meant trimming the golden floral piece to the seam allowance size it would eventually be before adding the brown checkered print. the way i was doing it, the outer edges of a piece didn't get trimmed down until the next piece was added and then the seam allowance was cut. 

i hadn't seen this extra trimming step suggested in any of my fpp research, but i decided to try it. i folded the paper back along the seam i was about to sew, measured out 1/4", and trimmed. then i could line up the new piece with the seam allowance and everything would be much straighter. 

it worked great!

but then when i flipped over the piece to trim for the seam allowance on the third corner (above), i forgot to measure out 1/4" for the seam allowance and cut right along the seam instead. this was a big ouch. it required me unpicking not only that corner but i had to replace the golden triangle, first unpicking the other brown corner triangle already sewn on its other side, as well. i wasn't sure i would be able to salvage the block at this point.

getting that golden triangle out was no small project. seam ripping with fpp is the worst because the seam size is so small. i finally resorted to hacking the piece out and then removing the little leftover bits.

i did do one good thing here. i realized i didn't have to cut the whole rectangle again to replace the botched corner. i made a rectangle half the starting size and then cut the piece i needed from that so i didn't have 3 larger leftover pieces, but rather just two. i managed to save myself a little fabric there.

that was smart of me, but my next move wasn't. like i say, i can't make this stuff up. i seriously don't know how i manage to bungle things so badly. can you see what i did when adding the triangle? i flipped it completely the wrong way. i put it on the wrong side of the seam allowance. oh, me oh, my.

somehow i still make quilts.

there we go - the golden triangle is all fixed up and i put the adjacent brown corner back in place over it. then i trimmed it correctly, ready for the final corner piece to be added.

now i could place the corner triangle on, lined up with the seam allowance i pretrimmed.

in case you forgot - this is how it all ended. 

yes, half of the grey plaid is straight(ish) and there is still a small hole in the seam of one brown corner triangle where it's supposed to be seam to the golden part (no idea how/why that is, but i'm dealing with it later). all in all, though, i really like the look of this block and am grateful for the lessons it taught me.

i also decided with this block to wait to trim the outside edges until all blocks are done so i don't dull my blade prematurely by trimming through the paper each time. that will all be done in one go before i join the blocks into a top. whenever i do more blocks and get them all done, that is. obviously, i still don't know how long it takes to do a block because this one took way longer than should be necessary due to all my mistakes.