flimsy finishes

i got so close to completing this top the weekend before, but i did not cross the finish line. all week the pairs of rows were draped on the chair next to the blue sewing room doors and i just let them be, working on other sunnier projects instead.

when this weekend rolled around, and i finally had time to quilt rather than design kitchen drawers, i had completed the last of my "sunny yellow crossroads" blocks and was excited to put them together. but i looked at these rows, so close to being a flimsy, and decided to do the quick work first.

voila! some pinning and two long seams later i had my first quilt top - flimsy - of the day finished.

once laid out, i could see i'd turned some blocks. in fact, half of one center row is turned the wrong way. oopsy. but it's not obvious and it's not the kind of thing that needs to be fixed. this top has a topsy-turvy, jumbled look anyway, so the pattern guidelines i used weren't brazenly apparent. i only noticed because i was looking to see if i got all the blocks in the correct positions and noticed some were turned. but no unpicking today. this flimsy is finished.

i got right on to putting these blocks into flimsy form. i timed myself: 10:15am start to 2:05pm finish. i had a few minor interruptions and took periodic water breaks, but i worked pretty steadily the whole time. i don't know if 4 hours was fast, average, or slow?  however that measures out, this is my 2nd flimsy finish of the day.

what a good saturday!

summer fields in a quilt

back in june, i had this idea brewing in my head about a summery version of the collins quilt. i think it was the navy blue strawberry print from cotton + steel that set me off. in the collins quilt, i'd used the gold version of that print and when i was looking at the navy colorway one day, i began to imagine a different color palette for the same layout. i have a soft spot for strawberry prints, which compels me to collect them, but i rarely use them. so i wanted to pair some of my strawberry prints with coordinating blenders in the "coins and cash" layout, using a green for the background color/cash sections. I chose kona's grass green; it's a nice fresh green color that also has a certain bit of muted softness to it which prevents it from being too loud or bright (although it tends to photograph on the bright side).

I sorted my fabric pulls into 4 color groupings that made putting the coin stacks together in a pattern easy: dark blue, red/strawberry print, low volume, lighter blue.

for some of the prints, I didn't have quite enough pieces to be in each of the 13 coin blocks required for the pattern. in these instances, I substituted another print from the same pile. I like this because it makes the quilt follow a pattern, but also have some surprises in it so it's not completely uniform.

in the end, I had a total of 4 combinations of coins in this pattern, which made placing them in the quilt layout very easy. each row in the quilt has either 6 or 7 coin blocks, so I simply rotated through the piles of the 4 sets, picking up in the next row with where I left off in the rotation from the previous row. when I don't follow a pattern for assembling blocks in a scrappy quilt like this, I end up playing a lot of fabric sudoku when trying to lay the quilt out as I try to spread the prints out somewhat evenly. not having that be an issue this time made putting the quilt together very fast.

except that I chain pieced all the coins with a green cash block before assembling the rows.

this was a problem because I wanted to alternate the dark blue being on top every other coin block and I had pieced them all with the light blue being on top every time. ugh. I had to unpick half the blocks in order to assemble everything the way I wanted.

I did have one other little "home ec moment" - on this one block I accidentally picked up two of the red pieces, which were stuck together back-to-back, when sewing them together, so I had a right side facing out on both sides of this block. nothing a little unpicking and resewing couldn't correct. but it was a first for me doing this particular trick.

 this one is now backed, basted, and sandwiched, waiting for quilting.

it's such a fast, easy make. I did the cutting in short spurts of time throughout the week, pieced all the blocks on Friday evening, and had the full top pieced together by lunch on Saturday. if I hadn't needed to unpick and resew half the pairings, I would have had it done sooner and possibly quilted by Saturday night. this next weekend I should be able to get some modern loops quilted so this one is ready to bind.

i'd like to use this layout again and explore some color play in it a little more.

i'd also like to share the pattern formula at some point. 

it's such a simple, basic layout that i'm sure it's been done before. I can't imagine it's an original idea, although I don't remember seeing it anywhere myself. because it consists of 4 stacked "coins" (4 - 2.5"x4.5" cut coins making a 4.5"x8.5" cut block) paired with a solid block (4.5"x8.5") that reminds me of a paper bill, which i'm dubbing the "cash" block, i'm referring to the layout as "coins and cash." I had thought of something like "fields and pastures" or something that referred to it looking like cultivated rows offset by open pastures, but as the "coins" are actually a thing in quilting, i'm going with "coins and cash."

spare pennies

i hardly know what to think of myself - i got this quilt top fully assembled in a few days! so unusually speedy for me. it felt like my first penny patches took for.ev.er and a day. probably because i was much more concerned about fabric placement with those.

penny patches can turn into a huge game of fabric sudoku if you care about spreading the fabrics out and get really caught up in the balance of everything. but since this was a quilt of leftovers, that happened a lot less. it was kind of like, "well, let's just get these pieces used and this top made."

i did end up with two of those large blue squares caddy-corner to each other, but it's not that big a deal. in reality, i kind of wish i hadn't used them in this project at all. without them, this would have a much lighter, low-volume feel. but that's ok.

what is a little sad to me is that i thought all the pieces of the fabrics i used for this quilt were in the same box and had to pull some other fabrics to fill in the squares i needed to make the full top. and i had to purchase/order backing fabrics, which i got enough of for two more quilts. then, when i was cleaning out my sewing room yesterday, i found a whole stack of these fabrics piled away in a place i didn't at all expect! ugh. i could have made the quilt a little more cohesive and saved some money, too. that's the problem with owning too much fabric - it can get lost in the masses. i am trying to remedy that.

beyond the surprise of getting the top for this quilt finished so quickly, i got the backing made and the quilt sandwich basted in one evening and began quilting it today! can you even believe i got two-thirds of it done in one night?

i can't.
who am i?

the muscle memory on the orange-peel/dogwood petal quilting came right back and i zipped through it. this might be done and ready to bind this week!

something curious i noticed while quilting that i never have before: the initial pinwheel design i do, which is half the shape of the orange peel, looks like apple core on the back where there are no grid lines to draw attention to the pinwheel shape.

maybe you can see what i'm talking about in the two photos above? secondary designs like that are so interesting.

i make the pinwheel/apple core design because i work my way down a row, curving back and forth in this fashion, forming half of the peel/petal design, and then make my way back up the row to finish it out. this is my preferred way to move through this particular design.

you can actually go quite a ways like this, doing several rows or blocks in one direction before turning back around. you just need to pay attention to not cutting yourself off on accident and follow the path you can down.

growing pile

 it's not all gypsy wife mania around here. there is some construction mania going on, too! we are finally enclosing the dining room-turned-sewing room with a wall and some barn doors. i sewed my little heart out over the weekend in preparation for several days off.

 i was trying to get a few projects off the floor and wall before the construction began. of course, everything took a whole lot longer than i anticipated. i did manage to get all my triangles sewn together, and was going to take a photo of the flimsy but it's too tall to hold. apparently daughter #3 took some action shots of me trying to get it up above my head while the dog came over to inspect. (actually, doggie was waiting for me to lay it on the ground. she thinks anything spread on the ground is an open invitation for her to lay on it.) with the dog photo bombing and daughter's finger on the top, it was too good not to share. #reallife

 i figure everyone is tired of seeing it "in progress" anyway so i'd better save the full frontal photo until it's a finish for real. for now, it's laid out on the piano room floor.

goodness, this was some work! i thought it was simply a matter of getting the rows all sewn together. then i realized some of the rows were a few inches too short. this required unpicking and adding on to rows that were already in place. there were several partial seams required (good practice for that "hope of hartford" block i've been avoiding for gw) and maybe even one legitimate Y seam, when i discovered one of the triangles had been attached in it's row with poor tension. deciding to widen, and consequently lengthen, this quilt complicated what was a very straight forward bit of sewing. i'm ready to put this one away for a while. when i finished it i had two thoughts: "that's a lot of triangles!" and "yay! it's done."

and this guy is on top of it, still in two pieces. i was this close to getting the final middle section sewn in. but i didn't. looks like i have a quilt pile gathering on the piano room floor again! (holy cow - this post from almost exactly two years ago is like de ja vu! quilt pile on the floor and gypsy wife on the design wall. funny.) if i were to pull out the penny patch 2.0, there would be three (nearly) completed tops ready and waiting for sandwiching and quilting. that's pretty exciting. and i think having three to quilt in a row will be good for my quilting skills, what with all that practice. so whichever one i want to look the best should probably be last in the queue.

linking up with lee's wip wednesday at freshly pieced.

"cinched" pattern - part three

 so i'm jumping all over the sewing spectrum around here. yes, i started messing with triangles but now i'm ready to get my three big wips out of the way, to finish them up while enjoying the process. today that meant completeling the flimsy for my new edition of my "cinched" pattern, which i am calling "bloom where you are planted" because of all the blossoms and because it's for a friend who has been uprooted and replanted elsewhere.

i sewed the strips together by first sewing adjoining pairs, then sewing the pairs into groups of four, and sewing those into groups of eight, and so on until the whole top was together. each time, i sewed the seam in the opposite direction i had previously sewn, first sewing from the top edge to the bottom and the next time sewing the grouping from the bottom to the top. to have one consistently straight edge for matching up, i trimmed the bottom edge of the quilt even. since i had modified some of the strips, they weren't all the same length, which is why i needed to trim.

i was nearly done with the top when i left for summer roadtrip. this morning, i put the last three sections of the lower panel together, and this afternoon i joined the lower panel with the top panel and accent strip. it has come together quite quickly.

before i did that last seam, i squared up that lower panel. when sewing with jelly strips, its easy to get distortion where your strips start to lean in one direction or just aren't completely square. (well, for me it seems easy to have that occur.) sewing the seams in alternating directions helps with the leaning. i kept trimming the bottom edge of the sections each time i sewed more strips and sections together, but the top was uneven. by the time it was done, i was 3/4" short at one end. (see top photo)

folded in half and pinned together

 squaring the strips can be confusing because the seams are not always perfectly straight and neither are the edges. i was fairly certain the bottom edge that i kept trimmed the whole time was straight, so next i folded the panel in half across the width (so the strips are still full length), lining up that straight bottom edge and pinning it into place every few strips. i also lined up the two end strips with each other and pinned them. from there i could smooth out the panel and then trim the top edge, opposite the pins, straight and square.

 i did the same with the upper panel and accent strip before attaching because i figured it was easier to work with the small piece rather than try to square that edge when the whole top was put together. and that is true. but i also messed up the trim twice, because it's me, you know. when trying to correct a 1/4" slant, i slanted it further the wrong way and had to trim 1/2". this flimsy is rapidly loosing height.

then i laid the upper section out on my lower section to pin for that final seam . . . and discovered the upper panel was one strip longer than the lower! i think i added that one strip with the intention of taking the other end off so i could shift the accent block over, but it's been so long i can't be sure anymore! i did the easy thing, which was probably wrong, and removed the piece hanging out on the edge.

then, finally, i did my pinning.

and fyi - tip alert - pinning large pieces together while on the design wall rather than on the floor is a lot easier! pin the first piece (at every few strips) to your design board. lay out the second piece on top of it, removing the pins holding the bottom piece in place as you go and replacing them into both pieces so you have both pinned into the board together. then just go back and pin only the fabric together before removing from the board. easy peasy!

sew that last seam in and you have . . .

a completed flimsy!!!
(which still needs a piece of the accent strip trimmed off.)

i have to admit these fabrics were givign me a headache every time i looked at them hanging on the design wall the last few months. they are so darn bright and loud! but now that they are neatly sewn together, they are playing much more nicely and i kind of like it again. except looking at this photo i'm rather wishing i made that accent strip in white instead of green. too late!

my goal is to get the back pieced and the whole shebang basted as a sandwich before the piano teacher comes next wednesday because this flimsy is living on the piano room floor and that means trouble.

the detailed steps for this tutorial are spread over 5 posts i wrote as i made the "bloom" quilt and worked on the pattern. find the others here:

cinched part one - fabric requirements and strip preparation
cinched part two - the accent strip and block, modifications from the first quilt, joining blocks for the long strips
the three-strip accent stripe pieced backing - how to make the backing
loops and crinkles - quilting choices for "bloom where you are planted"
cinched part four - quilting, binding, and gifting
cinched full tutorial

how not to shoot a flimsy

 along side of working with my youngest scholars, i got the top for "bandwidth" completed. the top being done, the flimsy needed to be documented and shared. but all i had to help me photograph it was two short children and a porch swing. this is apparently a very long top because even with the aid of the two short children (they are actually tall for their ages), and the porch swing, they couldn't get it fully off the ground.

also willing to help was one toddler . . .

 . . . and three curious dogs.

we used to have just one completely obnoxious pharaoh hound, but whilst away at disneyland with teenagers over the weekend, the babysitter let two stray chihuahua adolescents in the house. we've been unable to locate the owners yet and aren't heartless enough to boot them back out in the cold, as much as we'd like to . still hoping for a Christmas miracle for them and us.

even with the unwanted helpers out of the way, this was as close as i got to a shot of the new flimsy. the colors are washed out on the top (but the citrus tree looks great!). i'll aim for a more technically accurate photo once i have the quilt completed.

as anticipated, the addition of the large solid panels really calmed down the high energy of all those print strip sections. for the record, i chose the slightly deeper, less-flat blue. i'm liking the results just fine.

now i need to make three backing and baste some sandwiches!