I made this little Trapper Keeper / Portfolio for one of my friends for our Secret Santa exchange. I wanted something that could hold a notebook or tablet, pens, some papers, and business cards.
I based my design on Choly Knight’s free portfolio pattern, including using the hardcovers off an old textbook for the reinforced covers. And I used Choly Knight’s free journal pattern to do the pleats for the pens on the left panel, which was my first time doing pleats! I made the side panels separately, then sewed them to the inner fabric. Then I put the outer fabric and inner fabric together, right sides together, sewed around and flipped it right side out. All I had to do then was sew the opening together and it was done!
My second quilt! I loved making this quilt. It’s a kit from Bluprint that came with everything I needed to make the quilt top (and I bought yardage of one of the fabrics for the backing, and some 80% cotton/20% polyester batting). A bargello is a type of quilt that’s made using strip sets. This bargello needed 3 jelly rolls (6 strips of each of the 20 colors) and that made the entire 76″x92″ (technically a twin but fits on my queen bed) quilt top and I had some left over for a pillow.
The pattern tells you the order of the strip set, and in this bargello there’s only one set that you make 5 times (the 6th strip was cut up into baby rectangles to make a small portion of the quilt). Other bargellos can be made with more than one strip set to make ribbons that play together. So you sew all those strips together for five big striped rectangles. Then you cut your rectangles into strips of varying widths, each with all 20 colors in order.
It would be prudent to explain now that some people sew their rectangles into tubes, so the 1st color and 20th color are sewn together. While efficient (see next paragraph), this method didn’t work for me because my strip sets didn’t turn into perfect rectangles and were, in fact, wonky. Very wonky. Like not even close to parallel sides wonky. But! It still worked, I just didn’t sew my rectangles into tubes.
Also, this video about putting bargellos together may be easier to understand than the paragraph you’re about to read. 😉
Okay, so now you have your long strips and the colors are all in the same order. And you know that the 3″ strip goes first, then a 2″ strip, etc. etc. So let’s say the order of the strips is A, B, C, D (to you know, the width of your quilt or section) and the order of the colors is 1, 2, 3 (to 20). Strip A stays with the top color as 1 and the last color as 20. For Strip B, you cut the seam between fabrics 1 and 2, remove fabric 1, and add fabric 1 to the bottom – so your strip goes 2 to 20 and then 1. For Strip C, you seam rip between 2 and 3, and add the top to the bottom – and your strip goes 3 to 20, then 1, then 2. On an on until you get to Strip T (the 20th strip) that goes 20, then 1 to 19.
Strips in order per the pattern – 1 is at the bottom, 20 is the dark gray at the top
Partially constructed block – excuse the furry helper
Then you sew your strips together, and it makes the wonderful bargello effect. The key to making it look wavy is to have the strips be different widths – otherwise it would just be diagonal lines like a checkerboard. I really want to design my own bargello (perhaps on a smaller scale) to look like a river or something, with overlapping waves and stuff.
The two blocks at the bottom were made out of individual baby rectangles, the rest is strip sets
All pinned up in my family/dining room!
Approximately 400 safety pins later…. (a Kwik Klip helps close all the pins)
Then I basted and quilted it with my little “toothpaste” designs! Doesn’t it look like little squeezes of toothpaste? 🙂 I wanted a design that was flowy like the bargello itself, but possible to do in an all-over fashion. After doing the “custom” quilting on the Green Diamond Quilt, I wanted to see what would happen if I did the same thing on the entire quilt – and save myself some brain energy. I couldn’t decide what color thread to use, so I opted for variegated rainbow pastel thread that blends in pretty well to both the quilt top and the backing. Plus it’s another level of colorfulness that is fun.
Some free motion in real-time! Remember that the fabric is moving, not the needle 🙂
The toothpaste design is done in columns, so I started in the true middle, and worked up and down as I moved to the right (which gradually decreases how much sandwich is in the throat of your machine – between the needle and the case), then flipped it around and did the exact same thing to the other side. Since I’d practiced a lot on pen and paper and with scraps – more practice than last time! – the quilting came together pretty easily. Plus, each intersection is only 4 pieces of fabric coming together instead of 8, so it was significantly less bumpy than the Green Diamond Quilt.
But still, this quilt was a beast to wrangle with my machine. It has decent throat space but a bunch of cotton is heavy, and the quilt would fall into my lap as I moved up, which made it harder to control since I was working against gravity. I was only able to drape so much on myself before it would fall down, but I have a big enough table that the quilt could sit on the table in the other directions. I understood immediately why those set-in sewing machine tables are super popular, and why a longarm would change the game completely. But I’m not there yet – I still have many smaller scale projects I’m excited to work on, and twin-ish/queen-ish size quilts are still possible for me.
Glamour shot outside before washing – look at the cool shadows!
On my bed after washing
That said, I got the quilting done in three nights and am super pleased with the results. After washing my Green Diamond Quilt, I knew it would only look better after washing, and it does. 🙂 It’s crinkly and soft and puffy in all the right ways. Plus because it’s cotton, it feels cool to the touch. I have it on my bed right now, but because it’s primarily thin cotton batting, there isn’t as much warmth as I’d like – I’m naturally a 3 blanket person. So I bought this “dream puff” polyester batting for my next bed quilt that claims it’s twice as warm as down, so we’ll see 🙂
I made this for a friend who loves this saying 🙂 There’s a trend of doing embroidery and cross stitch type crafts with pretty designs and swearing, so I absolutely jumped on the train. This is done on a canvas, which was a bit tricky because the canvas doesn’t seal up the hole made by the needle in the same way that fabric does. But I did fishbone leaves with some lazy daisy embellishments and wagon wheel flowers based off Namaste Embroidery’s “Woven Rose Border” pattern.
So the Green Diamonds was meant to be a trial “mess up” quilt before I attempted to quilt the rainbow bargello (see next week). I got a cheap 5-fabric fat quarter (18″x21″ piece) bundle from Joann, and cut each fabric into squares. I made half square triangles (HSTs) of each pair of fabrics – so each fabric had a set of HSTs with each other fabric. I decided to lay them out in a fake “on point” design, so that each fabric was represented by a row of diamonds. This created a secondary block, or pattern, between the rows of diamonds that’s diamonds of alternating fabric. I sewed these together in rows, then sewed the rows together. I used some excess fabric for the border.
Let’s take a second to talk about quilting. A quilt, by definition, is a piece of fabric (quilt top), a piece of batting, and another piece of fabric (backing), and at some point those three layers are held together by thread. For the most part, quilters these days use 100% cotton fabric for the quilt top and backing, and there are many different kinds of batting: cotton, polyester, cotton/poly blend, wool, etc. These three layers together are called the quilt sandwich, and the act of putting the thread through all the layers is called quilting. 🙂 Quilting can be done by hand or by machine.
Hand Quilting
Design: hand sewing a running stitch to make lines or a design across the quilt top.
Tying: using a needle to draw thread through all three layers and tying the thread on either side of the sandwich. Can be used with buttons or other baubles.
Machine Quilting
Walking Foot: usually used for straight line or simple designs, a walking foot is an alternative presser foot (thing that holds the fabric down against the machine as you’re sewing) that helps feed the top of the sandwich through the machine at the same rate as the feed dogs that are moving bottom of the sandwich. Normal presser feet do not bring the top through as effectively, and stitching can become uneven and fabric can get stretched or distorted.
Feed dogs are the little strips that come up and down and move the fabric through the machine as the needle moves up and down. In mechanical machines, the needle and feed dogs are moved by the same crankshaft.
Free Motion: a free motion foot is used instead of the presser foot, and the feed dogs are lowered so they do not move the fabric. The quilter moves the fabric around the sewing machine space so that the needle travels across the fabric. Can make lines and patterns like hand quilting.
Longarm: a special sewing machine where the fabric is held stationary on a large frame, and the quilter moves the machine with the needle around the quilt. Machines like these are very expensive but incredibly effective. Much easier than moving the fabric in free motion.
So I knew I wanted to do free motion with this quilt. I did a lot of practice with pen and paper (surprisingly useful) and on scraps. In a fit of ambition, I decided that each fabric would have its own design. There is “dot-to-dot”, NZNZ, swirl with petals, wavy lines, and wishbone. Let me say this now: I didn’t practice enough on all of the designs. I’d done wishbone before on a pillow, so that one turned out pretty nice. And I surprised myself by having some very nice wavy lines, too. Dot-to-dot was the hardest – creating a straight line mid-fabric without any guides (I decided to forego drawing in water soluble marker on my fabric) is really hard.
Before you quilt the sandwich, you have to baste it so that all the layers stay aligned and don’t move around while you’re quilting. You can hand baste with stitches, spray baste with adhesive, or safety pin (my chosen method). You lay your sandwich on a flat surface (preferably not carpet), and I like to tape down the edges of my backing so it doesn’t slide about. Then you start pinning in the center and move outwards, smoothing wrinkles as you go. This also makes sure that you don’t end up with weird wrinkles, pleats, or bunches in your finished product (but more on that later).
So anyway after pinning the living daylights out of my sandwich, I sat down to do some free motion. You always start in the middle and work your way out, just like basting. I decided to work down the rows so that I could keep doing the same design and keep it in my muscle memory. One of my issues with this quilt was moving from diamond to diamond – some of my designs didn’t bring me back to my starting point, or guide me into the next diamond. Also, since this was an HST design, there can be up to 8 layers of fabric at the intersections, which made it bumpy and hard to quilt near the centers and points of each diamond.
It took a bit, but I quilted this in a couple nights and put the binding on (strip of fabric wrapped around the edges of the fabric).
Now – about the wrinkles and bunches. I loved my finished product, but there’s one last step in quiltmaking. Washing and drying. No one likes something they can’t throw in the washer and dryer. I was extremely worried about threads coming loose, or the binding just spontaneously falling off (extremely unlikely), but I threw it in the washer anyway. And when I put it in the dryer, I didn’t even look at it.
But then it turned out wonderfully crinkly and soft, and nothing bad happened 🙂 Washing your quilt helps the batting fluff up a bit, and the quilting sinks down, making a nice texture that hides mistakes (of which I made many) and bumps (of which there are many) and pretty much everything else. Plus it makes the whole thing soft and cuddly, which is what quilts are (for me) meant to be. I don’t think you’d wash an art quilt, or something with super detailed free motion, but for my purposes, I learned to stop worrying about the tiny things because I can’t even find them anymore when I look at the quilt. And as Angela Walters says, “better finished than perfect”.
I finally got around to adding the borders and finishing up the back. The hardest part has been preparing and planning how to quilt this bad boy. I’ve had the top done for some weeks now, but agonizing over what to quilt. I want to honor the kaleidoscope effect while doing something simple that won’t detract from the coolness nor add to the chaos. I think I’ve finally got it and hopefully my next post about this quilt will be the completed version.
The backing! I’m using a full panel and some leftover hexagons that didn’t make it into the top.
Now you can see the full beauty of the original panel. I wanted to put the full panel on the back so I could (a) easily show people the original fabric and (b) display it with the panel side showing. The layout on the front kind of mimics the colors of the panel too, with blues on the top and greens on the bottom. And you can see why I, a lifelong whale lover, chose this fabric 🙂
Go Wildcats! I went to Villanova for a time, and made this for a fellow Villanovan in celebration of their win in the NCAA March Madness tournament. I used a canvas from Joann and some acrylic paints to do a paint pour with the Villanova colors. Paint pours are super simple and usually turn out awesome (if you stop while you’re ahead instead of messing with it too much). You just mix paint with some water or flow acrylic (a special product to make paint move easier), and pour it on the canvas. Then you tilt the canvas around to make the paints move and mix together.
After the canvas dried, I traced my pattern onto the back of the canvas so I would know where to stitch. The pattern is mainly backstitches and satin stitch, with 6-strand thread for maximum fluffiness and volume. Canvasses are a bit tricky to stitch in since the holes don’t close up as easily as with fabric, but I was dedicated to the paint pour background so I stuck through it.
Yesterday my mom and I went to the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum (check out their search feature, they have tons of pictures of quilts). It was so cool. The main exhibition they had was called Evolution, so all the quilts were art quilts meant to reflect that theme. These were truly works of art with mixed media (lots of painting), and machine and hand quilting together. It showed me the more artistic limit of what quilting can be – meanwhile I’m hanging out on the more “function over form” side. We saw some really intricate strip piecing (some strips were 1/10th of an inch wide, which is crazy thin) and some cool improv/random piecing. Some people included different types of threads, types of fabric – like cotton with silk and organza, and lots of fun applique. There was an incredible mandala type quilt with buttons, a piece that looked like an abstract painting, and improv/cut up strip piecing to recreate geologic formations.
Oh gosh the sign said this was made of 5,000 little pieces. It’s 47″x47″. Roman Music Tapestry – Sue Sherman
What my mom and I noticed, apart from the art, was that a lot of the quilters hailed from scientific fields – the quilt that won the exhibition was a former molecular bioscientist, she carved a wood block depicting mitosis, printed it on her fabric, and then quilted it (below).
CELL-ebration – Kathy Suprenant
The one that struck me the most was this koi fish quilt called Ritsurin in the Rain by Martha Wolfe. It has a pieced background with appliqued fish, covered with organza, then quilted with “rain” lines and “ripples”. I’ve been thinking about using organza over a landscape applique to mimic a sunbeam, and seeing it in person confirmed that it could work. And the fish! They’re made with layered applique, so each of the patches on the fish is a different piece of fabric, all (I assume) fused together and then placed on the background.
The sign indicated the techniques included: raw-edge applique, machine piecing, machine quilting, hand quiltingLook at the layers of fabric – they’re raw edge, she cut those out and layered them to make it look like a fish
Needless to say, I will definitely be going back when they rotate exhibitions. The talent – and vision – of these artists is insane.
These pillows were my first foray into quilting! I got the High Seas 5″ squares on sale and paired them with a light gray background fabric.
I did a simple loopy free motion design on the 5″ square layout, and some coral-like wavy shapes on the half square triangle layout. This was me figuring out how to do free motion quilting effectively, including wrangling the excess fabric, what speed to move at, and how to control the whole situation. More about free motion quilting next week! 🙂
The backs for both the pillows are this adorable whale fabric, and I’m planning on making a shirt out of the leftovers. 🙂
This is from the wonderful Namaste Embroidery’s pattern “Flowers in Her Hair”. It’s mainly fishbone leaves and lots of wagon wheels! It was a joy to do for one of my friends from college, even all the single-strand satin stitch that was very difficult to get parallel. I loved choosing all the different green shades for the leaves, and I figured I’d offset it with some nice bright flower colors.
My current project! This is a “One Block Wonder” (OBW), as described by Maxine Rosenthal. I’ll leave the full explanation for the final post, but you can see the layout up on the wall and the fabric it came from in my lap under the furry helper. There’s some stray hexagons on the floor, so maybe that’s a hint 🙂
Finch's Creative Endeavors 