WIP: "Spool Play" is finished!

Time to stop spoolin' around. You've seen the close-up:

So now it's time to see the whole quilt:

I'm still thinking of doing a quilt-along in late spring if anyone is interested. If you don't have a collection of selvages and couldn't care less about starting one, don't worry, there will be a couple of non-selvage options as well.

I'm off tomorrow morning to an annual quilting retreat in the mountains. If I don't go completely bonkers by the time I get my templates and all the gazillion little pieces cut get my act together, I hope to make some progress on the Single Girl quilt-along.  I'll be back Monday with pictures. Have a great weekend!

Miscellaneous Monday

Sneak peek at my spool quilt. As soon as the binding is completed, I'll post a picture of the whole quilt. I am so happy with how this quilt turned out, especially the loop-de-loop variegated big stitch quilting in the border. I'm also pretty thrilled with the binding, which is a coordinating print to the "challenge" fabric.It looks like the color registration dots on all the selvages. Perfect choice, if I do say so myself...

I got the complete fat quarter pack of Hope Valley, which included quite a few fabrics that I didn't already have. I'm still planning on doing at least three rings of just solids, and I'm trying not to be too matchy-matchy, but these solids by Anna Maria Horner arrived the same day. How great do they look together?!

And Mark was able to capture a "sun dog" in the sky the other day while driving. Quite common (I think...) in the Midwest. More rare here in the Central Valley of California. (I try not to think about how he is capturing these great photos while driving....

Color Therapy Thursday: The "I changed my mind" edition

It seems like just yesterday when I quite confidently said I had made my fabric selections for the Single Girl quilt-along. Oh, wait. It WAS just yesterday.

Since that time I have a new plan. As much as I love Katie Jump  Rope, I was still a bit unsettled about my decision. So I switched over to Hope Valley. Maybe because I'm in such a grey/orange mood right now? I'm not quite sure of the reason, but this is IT. Finito. Same plan: twin size, nine rings of print, three rings of solids.

(sorry for the weird line going through the picture. Blogger's image uploader has been doing this to my pictures all week!)

Here is where it got tricky. Have you ever tried to match Hope Valley against the Kona solid swatch card? Until yesterday, I thought I had a pretty good "read" on colors. Wow. Denyse Schmidt did a number on that theory. Each of those colors is just a little "off" from anything Kona (and Moda Bella solids ) has to offer. Pretty much each and every print in that line is just a little warmer, just a little cooler, a tad more brown, a tinge more grey. This is the selection I have so far. I have a couple more colors on order. And if someone could track down Moda Bella "Betty's Orange" for me, you would be my new BFF.

I'm okay with the fact that the solids aren't an exact match. I think it will add a little interest to have a slight deviation in color. And anyway, the prints and solids aren't going to be holding hands with each, they're just going to be friendly neighbors.

And just to show you that I mean it when I say "this is IT," I'm off to post my fabric selection pictures on Flickr. That's a lot of commitment for a Single Girl...

WIP Wednesday

To start off this morning with something totally off the subject, I like new yellow No. 2 pencils, freshly sharpened. They seem to collect around my keyboard. I know I could have a cute mug filled with them, but they would probably still be in various places on my desk. We have been making friends with bartenders collecting various wine and liquor bottles over the last year and Mark then slumps them into cool shapes that are great for entertaining--you know, wine and cheese parties. You can use them for crackers, olives, etc. College guys like Corona beer bottles to throw their spare change in. Anyway, someone gave us a Frexinet champagne bottle. Those bottles have a matte finish, but after Mark fired it, it came out nice and glossy. Voila! My pencils have a classy place to reside on my desk now.

Okay. Moving on to something more WIP-ish.

I joined the Single Girl quilt-along and have struggled over what fabric to use. And being so flaky, every time I see someone else's selection, I think, "That's it. That's what I want to do." The quilt on the pattern cover is made from Katie Jump Rope. So I was going to do that, because I have collected quite a bit of it over the last year. And then someone decided they would use Katie Jump Rope mixed with Flea Market Fancy. Hey, that sounds like a good idea. Then I decided maybe I would make a Christmas quilt because I have a lot of cool contemporary Christmas fabric. Then I saw that Corey was using all solids. And I loved that idea. And then I saw that several people on Flickr are not matching all their rings, making a ring or two or three of a different color. Genius.

Okay, folks. This is my final decision. I'm sticking with Katie Jump Rope.

Then I started pulling out coordinating solids (sorry for the lousy picture--the lighting was terrible in the late afternoon) and I think I'll make three rings of only solid fabric. It's my compromise of all the things that appealed to me: Katie Jump Rope, solids, and a couple of rings that were different from the others.

I'm making progress on my spool quilt. Good thing, too, because I leave for the quilting retreat a week from tomorrow! I machine quilted around all the brown spool parts, and I'm doing big stitch around the sides of each spool. I had read Kate Conklin's big stitch tutorial and liked the idea that she was trying to make the stitch on the front and the stitch on the back of the quilt relatively the same size. I tried that and it totally felt awkward for me. Do you think hand quilting is kind of like your signature, individual and unique?

Color Combos

I was in my local quilt shop the other day. You know, to pick up perle cotton and needles. and then I went home with this. But we have already talked about...so moving on.

Anyway, the person waiting on me wondered what I was doing with the orange and grey. I said I was making an orange and grey quilt for my sewing room. She looked at me with the weirdest expression.

Her: "Really? I don't think I've seen that color combination before. I just can't visualize it..."

Me: "Really???" (To myself: "You don't get much inspiration online, do you?")

Like this latest quilt block I received from my 3x6 quilt block exchange. Don't you love it?

Or this quilt for sale on etsy:

Or this awesome zigzag quilt:

and especially this:

I could go on and on about how much I love the grey/orange combination. Or a lot of other equally amazing color combos, yellow and grey; blue, green, orange and brown, etc. My local quilt shop thought I was totally nuts. But you all "get" how much I love this color combination...right??

What are your current fave color combos?

How did this happen??

I went to my local quilt shop for this

because the consensus of the color for my big stitch needle on the bottom border is grey, not brown. And I wanted to try No. 24 chenille needles as recommended by Kate Conklin in her recent tutorial.

How did I end up walking out of the store with all of this as well?

Does that ever happen to you too?

Check your local listing

What do Quilting Arts TV,

Pokey Bolton,

and my pincushions have in common?

They are all going to be spending some time together! Five of them left my house on Tuesday morning on their way to the East Coast. They will be in a segment filmed with Pokey today, airing some time in June.

Apparently Pokey, who is the founder of the Quilting Arts conglomerate, liked them when they were photographed and put on the cover of the Quilt Scene (also her magazine). Schnikeys!

Did you know Quilting Arts TV airs on PBS??? I didn't! I checked...and it doesn't air on our area. Bah...

And in the meantime, the etsy shop is now completely empty. I need to start sewing some of these into something!

Tuesday Thoughts: A little on edge

Warning: this will be a picture-heavy blog post. On a variety of completely unrelated things...

For my spool quilt, I had to pull out a lot of selvages based on color, whereas my normal "filing" system is by topic. So after all the blocks were completed, my selvages were a mess. I spent the afternoon organizing them.

There was a box of super cool selvages. These will be fun to incorporate into something special.

Oh, and I found a typo...

I had just finished, when the mail arrived, along with another box of really awesome selvages.

So this is my plan:

And I have started working on my hexies again. I had 25 hexies per compartment in this plastic container. I guess Levi had a better system in mind...

"Grandma, I'll be really careful..."

Where did our favorite hexie go? The monkey with the pirate bandana...

I went to the grocery store to stock up on food for Super  Bowl. I don't have a sister, but these were kind of fun labels:

Not sure how I feel about these next to each other though...

Basting quilts? In my opinion, the.worst.quilting.job.ever. I'm trying a new product. So far I like it. "Like" as in I didn't completely hate basting the quilt top. We'll see how they work with a combination of machine and hand quilting.

Color Therapy Thursday

This afternoon I spent an hour with  dental sadist, aka my hygienist. I'm sure she is very nice in a social situation. From my perspective, she had an evil glint in her eye and was wielding high-speed power tools.

Don't get the idea that I don't practice good oral hygiene. Quite the contrary. However, a regular toothbrush just doesn't do the job. So from now on, my Sonicare is my new BFF. Promise.

Trying to take my mind off the high-pitched drilling noise, I went to a happier place. Thinking about fabric and color. Tossing around the idea of doing a spool block quilt-along with lots of different options.

Have you ever taken covert pictures in, say, Borders or Barnes & Noble? Wouldn't these be the starting point for some great quilts? Question: are we getting our ideas from packaging, or are packagers getting their ideas from us?

My favorite:

Okay, I'm outta here. Off to floss again. Ouch...

WIP: Works in Progress Wednesday

Here is a progress report on Spoolin' Around (what do you think of the name? I'm pretty happy with it, so if you think it's too dorky, um, don't tell me...)

Anyway, use some imagination at this point and envision the white border on all four sides rather than just the top and bottom. I didn't have time last night to sew the last two borders on. Oh, and also ignore those ripples on the top and bottom borders. Not sure what is going on there. I carefully measured the  quilttop and borders. They are both the same width. Anyway, I'll work on that too.

Things changed a lot in the last week. Last Wednesday I was still pretty set on doing a small inner border and then a larger border using the challenge fabric. Then Jessica left a comment with a GREAT suggestion (thanks, Jessie!) and from there I ended up with a 1/2" inner border. And let me just make another observation here. Do you ever buy fabric for no known reason, other than "you'll know it when you need it"? Alexander Henry has a few colors called Heath, a wondeful blender fabric.

The brown colorway was the perfect solution when I was making border decisions. The challenge fabric has a lot of negative white space, and in a few places it would butt up against a tipped-over spool, and I didn't like the white against the white. So I needed something to separate it, and this was perfect. A solid would have been too jarring, but this brown and white "mesh" fabric was a great transition. So I'm saluting the decision to buying fabric just "because." Because at some point it might come in really handy.

Next came a 1 1/2" border of the challenge fabric and then a 4" white border. I had tossed around the thought of appliqueing a needle on the bottom border and big stitching some "thread." Instead, I am going to big stitch a needle, and then the thread will wander around all of the white borders. I'm thinking variegated thread?

My next dilemma is the quilting around the spools. I was thinking of quilting 1/4" inside just the brown spool part with brown perle cotton. Alternatively, stitching around each spool with white perle cotton.

Further decisions, which I won't have to make for at least two weeks: I got this companion print, which I could use for the back, or the binding.

Oh, and I kind of snuck this in on the bottom border. When I cut the selvage off, I had only cut 1 1/2" so it was a little too small to just sew it in to the border. Oh, well...

I'm linking up at Naptime Quilter for Workshop in Progress and Freshly Pieced for WIP Wednesday. Check out what everyone else is up to.

I just had a random thought. Yesterday I mentioned that Mark's fused glass plate appeared in a quilt magazine put out by Alex Anderson and Ricky Tims. Have any of you ever watched The Quilt Show? After Alex did eleven years of Simply Quilts on HGTV, she and Ricky Tims teamed up for a web-based quilt show. I renewed my membership recently, and I received a free gift certificate for a 1/2-year membership. I can give it away to a friend who is not a Star Member of The Quilt Show. And it doesn't even involve your postman trudging through the snow. I just email you the info and you go from there. If you are interested, I can give you the information. It is entirely free to you. So as a giveaway, anyone want to be my friend? Leave a comment to enter. I'll pick a winner on Friday morning and get the info to you.