Time 4 Tea (T4T)

I've spent some time over the last few weeks working on the design for a new quilt and it's coming together well. As mentioned in my introductory post (http://bertcollections.blogspot.com/2009/01/introductions.html), I'm working on a quilt inspired by a teapot I've inherited from my paternal grandparents, (although I've decided to change its working title to time for tea). So far what I'm working with is:
*a collection of blue and white print fabrics I collected on a trip to the USA in 2005
*a collection of photographs of teapots that I'm gradually turning into applique patterns on my computer.
I'd like to take the opportunity to thank my friends and family and casual acquaintences for the pictures of teapots that I have so far - each one has a story that goes withit, so maybe I should write a set of short stories to accompany the quilt.

Anyway, what I wanted to write about today is the creative process of getting started on a quilt. Time for Tea, has started with a blend of ideas and has become for me a collage of the story of 'time for a cuppa'. In my family, you're always offered a cup of tea when you visit someone, it's an easy way of asking "what's happening", a form of comfort from life's troubles (especially if someone else makes it), and a way of just getting "five minutes peace" from the bustle of daily life. I have many happy memories of sitting at the dining table with members of my family just spending good times together . I should also mention that tea is particularly part of 'the girls'' traditions in the family, and reminds me of my grand mothers so I'm making the quilt particularly with them in mind, but almost as a tribute to the women of my family. What I'm trying to do in the quilt is somehow combine all these ideas.

In addition to the ideas I want to convey, the broad style of the quilt (traditional, modern, square, rectangular, big, small etc.) is an important thing for me to clarify early, and then I develop some 'rules of thumb' that I use when deciding what to do next for the quilt to make sure the overall tone or theme of the quilt is consistent. In this case, I'm working with traditional style fabrics, on a symettrical design based on a clock in the centre with borders and features round the the outside (I'll post a picture of my scribbles to show what I mean). I want the fabrics and symmetry of the quilt to make it look traditional, but to use the applique and quilting to make the quilt more informal, to reflect homely origins of the ideas.

That's about where the ideas for T4T are at. For now I need to create some more applique patterns from photos I collected while on holidays and refne the design a bit further - oh, and finish the Life's Rich Tapestry quilt which I was going to start quilting 10 minutes ago, but decided I type a blog entry while I had my cup of tea first, so the tradition continues :-)

Happy holidays to one and all on Christmas day,
Bert

LRT7 – Structural/Stabilising Quilting and Wine?

This weekend I’ve done some structural or stabilizing quilting on Life’s Rich Tapestry. What’s amused me is the amount of concentration it takes to do long lines of ‘stitching in the ditch’. Most of the ‘ditch stitching’ that I’ve done before has been lots of short lines, so the fact that every time I day dreamed I caught the wrong piece of fabric was interesting. What’s more, I had a glass or two of wine at lunch time today, which seemed to make the first couple of rows easier, and the last couple harder (sleepiness setting in :-). On the whole, I’m quite pleased with the results anyway.

I’m trying to keep the pieces square with this stabilizing quilting, by starting with two horizontal lines on either side of the leaf border at the top of the quilt, then doing the vertical lines in the centre, which I’ll follow with stitching along the horizontal leaf border at the bottom (refer to the photo of the whole quilt below). While this appraoch has kept the squares and vertical lines of the centre section nice and straight, the horizontal border at the bottom seems to have stretched or moved, as had the outer border in the top right hand corner. The lead to the fabric puckering and the edge I was going to ditch stitch on the leaf border looking more like a scalloped one than a straight one (as shown in the photo above). So… I’ve repinned the bottom border and top right corner this afternoon and, as the photo to the leftshows, this seems to have smoothed out the issue enough and straightened the lines again.

Despite the slipping of the lower border of the quilt, last weekend’s approach to pins (refer LRT6 post) seemed to work – I had enough pins to keep the work stable, without getting in the way too much. I’m happy that the final result is both nice and even and straight. So any errors were from my trying to think about something else while I was quilting, not the pins :-D . And...here's the result.
Happy crafting until next time,
Bert

LRT 6 – Quilt Sandwich and Basting.

While the title here may suggest I’ve spent the day baking, this couldn’t be further from the truth. I’ve spent today pin-basting the quilt sandwich (backing, batting and quilt-top) of my ‘Life’s Rich Tapestry’ creation. This is a slow, careful process that gave me some time for reflection and appreciation for the art of quilting. I’ll cover the sandwiching process in the techniques section of my website soon, I thought it would be more constructive to discuss the basting here today, as good information on this seems to be hard to find.

I’ve made nearly 20 quilts now, and while each one has taught me something different, and I’m always keen to experiment and learn something new. From previous projects I knew that sewing basting (by machine or hand) is more difficult than it looks with a large quilt, so the decision is not really whether to pin baste. Pin-basting is absolutely necessary for the end product to reflect the hard work you’ve put into it. Rather, the decision is whether to sew or tack as well as pin. For this project I’m going to try just pins, combined with a two-step process for quilting – structural quilting, then decorative quilting (which I’ll cover in next week’s post). The results of my pin-ing efforts today can be seen in the photo below.

You may notice from the photograph that I’ve flouted the ‘baste every 2inches’ principle and I’ve done this on purpose. In my experience, pin basting can work but only if the pins are in the right place. So I’ve adopted the approach of pin-around-the-quilting-line to see how that works. For the structural quilting, I’m aiming to just follow the vertical and horizontal lines in the piecing, so I’ve pinned through the centre of each piece leaving enough room for the foot of the sewing machine to fit around the pins. The reason I haven’t placed the pins in a 2inch grid is that I find it very frustrating to be constantly stopping to remove pins - it makes my sewing wonky and breaks my concentration. Who knew sewing could be that aggravating ? J

I'd Rather Be Flying (IRBF) - Inspriation

While travelling on holiday last year, I picked up a printed panel of an airport in a shop near Harden NSW. The panel has now inspired a collection of aviation fabrics and notions. I’ve got some initial ideas on how to combine these, but am busy with other projects and deciding on the style I want for this aviation theme quilt “I’d Rather Be Flying”.

You’ll notice in the photos that I have the fabrics pinned to a ‘design wall’. While this sounds fancy, all it is, is some heavy duty cardboard (about 1m x 1.2m) with thin wadding staple-gunned onto it. I’ve added a rod on the back that’s hanging on a couple of picture hooks. It’s a pretty simple, hide-able arrangement. At the moment mine stays on the wall because I have space but it’s previously lived behind desks and only been pulled out when I needed it. I find this a very useful addition to my collection – it’s saved me lots of sewing things together that wouldn’t have ended up looking right. So when you read in a book or magazine or elsewhere on the web about the virtues of a design wall, you’ll know it needn’t be as fancy as it sounds, but that it’s a handy bit of kit to have/make.

I’ll continue musing, but in the meantime you can help me and others who may have purchased these panels by providing us with some inspiration… post a comment or email your ideas on what the quilt could be like or a story you’d like to share. You never know, it might just be the missing link!

BERT

PS: The cockpit instrument panel is a separate printed panel I picked up somewhere else - it just aligns nicely with the runway on the airport panel.

FG2 – Appliqué Do-s and Don’ts

Mum’s been madly sewing flowers onto the background this week so I’ve got a pile of emails from her I thought I’d summarise here for you. Although Mum’s sewing machine has been “chinese water torture” to work with a lot of the week, it looks like she’s prevailed in the end. The photos below show you the progress on the ‘Fantasy Garden’ quilt and I’ve added some dos and don’ts from what we’ve learned/relearned about appliqué in the process.

Do’s
Do a practice piece first – this makes sure problems are identified early and happen (mostly) on the practice piece rather than your best work. This is especially handy for: *getting corners and tight curves right as these can be tricky this allow you to get the idea of how to do these before you do the final ones; *testing threads and decorative stitches; *trying and refining new techniques; and*getting the stitch widths, lengths and combinations right.

If threads are being a problem (catching, not moving through the machine, just not producing nice stitches etc.) try:

• rethreading the machine,
• adjusting the tension,
• different brands or types of threads,
• adding some interfacing or stabilizer (e.g. freezer paper) to reinforce the fabric or make it easier to slide across the machine.

Don’ts
Don't use the cheap fabric for the background – fabric with a low thread count is too thin, pulls through, doesn’t sit flat and generally doesn’t look nice. If you have to use this type of fabric, add some iron-on interfacing (med-heavy weight) to the back of the panel to reinforce it – freezer paper just isn’t sturdy enough for this.

Don't place the sewing lines for the appliqué pieces where seams cross on the background (as occurs in the purple B flowers on this design shown in the photo).

Other Ideas
If working with a large background piece (this one is about 1.2m x 1.5m), try making the background in two (or multiple) sections, applique-ing all the pieces on (except those that cross the centre seam), then add the final seam and remaining appliqués. This should make the movement of the pieces easier “so your not drowning in fabric as you try & navigate the curves”.

That's it from me for today - I've got some experimenting with cutting curves and bias tape to do ;-)

BERT

LRT5 - Trimming and Borders

I find cutting a large pieced section a bit of a nerve racking experience, but I’ve braved it today and it worked, so I thought I’d share with you how to make trimming and borders more successful. As I learned a when I made a large log cabin block a few years ago, the key thing is to trim the panel to be square regularly, because if you leave the trimming to the end, the compound error is large and it’s hard to make it look nice and square. For LRT, I also have the challenge of the squares not really being square (refer to LRT4 post).


To get the panel so it both looks square and is square, I first folded the panel in half vertically and pinned the first and last seams together so the strips would align, and then aligned that fold with the grid on my cutting board, and cut through the layers so the left and right sides of the panel were parallel. I then folded the panel in half again, aligning the top and bottom edges of the earlier fold, as well as the cut edges on the cutting grid, and trimmed the remaining layers so both the corners were square, and the top and bottom edges parallel.


So next was to add the top and bottom strips to create a leafy border all the way around the pieced strips…I’d made the 6 1/2'’ strips of leafy fabric last weekend, so before cutting these to size I had a helper help me measure the vertical height, the horizontal width, and the diagonals of the panel in a few places to confirm it was square, trimmed the top and bottom strips to the same size the selected size of the horizontal strips and sewed them on to the panel. Note, whenever you add a border to a block or panel, measure it as I’ve described above and cut the border strips to the average size of the length or width of the panel. This allows you to fudge it by slightly stretching or condensing the panel to match the strip size. This may sound like a strange thing to do, but this way you make the panel a consistent size and shape rather than adding more layers of errors to sort out when you get to squaring up the completed quilt top.


To do that fudging when adding strips to a square or rectangle, pin both corners of the strip to the panel it’s joined to (as shown in the photo). Do this at both ends of the strip (plus a few pins in between if it’s a long seam) and then loosen or tighten the pieced panel to fit the strip as you sew the seam to make the length match the strip. Presuming both pieces were cut square, this gives you a near-perfect corner when you open the seam out. Then you can just check how square and straight the corners and edges are, trim a little if necessary and carry on with the next section of your quilt. What you end up with might be something like my panel with the border added shown here.

Another fudging tip while I think of it…WARNING!: if you’re a card carrying member of the quilting police then skip on to the next paragraph as this fix may cause you mental harm, otherwise read on…one piece in a joined set that’s very close to the sewing line of seam can be a problem, in a finished quilt it may become exposed with washing, wear and tear etc. Most of my quilts so far has had one of these pesky sections so the best ways I’ve found to deal with it are to: 1) shorten the section so that it’s not an issue, or 2) if the first option will spoil the effect, then sew the seam close to the edge, but then secure that section with a couple more rows of stitching as shown in the photos below. This makes it more difficult for the edges to escape and should stop any fuzziness appearing on the outside of the quilt.

I’ve also done some experimenting for the next border on ‘Life’s Rich Tapestry” this afternoon – I’ll write another post about that shortly ‘cause it was lots of fun.


BERT

Fantasy Garden (FG1) - An experiment

Quilting seems to have been a sociable craft from it’s early days, and although I learned to quilt from friends, I’d never worked on a project with other people before. That’s all over now….Recently, inspired by an article in a magazine, some funky fabric in my stash, the desire to get my Mum back into sewing, and learn more about appliqué, Mum and I embarked on a project together.

The quilt is called ‘Fantasy Garden’ and has a pieced background, with the remainder of the design appliquéd on using the ‘stick it on’ and the freezer paper method. We’ve chosen bright fabrics because that’s what we like and it will brighten up a dark corner in the house.

I’ve told the first chapter of the story in pictures for you (below) and we’ll share the fun with you as we go. From piles of fabric to having the flowers stuck on the background took a support crew, a lot of tea, and about 3 days work. I suspect we’ll get better at this as we go along, but it’s fun to share the creative challenge with someone else.

Have you done a project like this? You could tell us about it with a comment by clicking on the link below. We’d love to hear your stories!

BERT

LRT4 Squares ain’t Squares – A lesson in fudging it

I spent Sunday converting my strips of pieces, to a nice rectangle. Sounds easy doesn’t it? Hmmm. My plan with this quilt was to keep the patchwork design simple so that it would be easy to put together and I could make a feature of the quilting. The problem with achieving this first arose when I noticed that the charm squares I had bought (to save me some cutting), were parallelograms, not squares. So, when I strip pieced the squares and rectangles together (refer to my LRT3 post) I lined up all the pieces on the left hand side so I could just trim the right hand edge and would have a nice neat strip. Problem with this was that the pieced strips ended up being wobbly anyway, so I’ve spent a couple of hours figuring out what to do about it.


My first attempt at straightening the pieced strips I tried as planned, only it ended up a banana shape instead of a neat long rectangle and bent the straight leaf strip I joined it too as well (as shown in the photo).

Doh!!

I unpicked the join and started again. Next, I tried just laying the strip out on my cutting board, aligning the left edge of the pieced strip (the straighter one) with one of the grid lines, and just made sure the whole thing was 5 ½ inches all the way along by aligning and cutting about 10” of the length at a time. This meant the whole strip was not square, but each section was only a little bit out. I joined this to a leaf strip, had some lunch, stared at it for a while and decided I could live with that even though it wasn’t as neat as I originally wanted. I finished joining the strips into set of one pieced and one leaf strip, and decided to try and tidy up the ‘squareness’ of it in how I joined each of these sets together.

After a cup of tea and some more thought, I decided that just aligning the top edge of each strip set was not going to work. Visually, it’s more important for the seams joining the blue rectangles with the charm squares to be aligned than whether the top or bottom of the fabric aligned. So I started fudging it again. Back on the cutting board, I aligned one strip set with the gridlines, and marked the leaf fabric to continue the seamline from the pieced strip (stay with me now, it will all make sense soon…). Then I placed the next strip set, with right sides together on top of the leaf strip, and aligned the right hand edges of the fabric, and shifted the top piece up and down, until the seamline on the pieced section of the upper set, aligned with the line I’d marked on the lower set. Finally, I put a few pins across the top to hold the two sets together to get keep the alignment while I sewed the seam.

Finally, by keeping all the pieces flat and aligned with how I’d pinned it, I managed to sew all the strip sets together plus the additional leaf strip (so the leaf pattern is on both outside edges) and ended up with the panel shown in the photo below.

So it was a bit of a fussy and frustrating day, but I think it was worth it. If all the joins had turned out like the first one I did this morning, I would have thrown it away and started again because it would have been impossible to quilt…

Now I have something I can work with and I'll start thinking about what to do with the borders.

BERT

LRT3 - Chain Piecing

I had to laugh this afternoon...as I was chain piecing some sections together I was also thinking about how to explain the process, and promptly made a mistake 3 times in the same strip. Ah well, these things happen. So here's what should happen with chain piecing.

Chain piecing seems to be all about preparation, preparation, preparation. Get that right and all should go well…So how to do the preparation. First of all, carefully cut all the shapes evenly to size. While that works in theory, I discovered that the charm squares that I’d bought weren’t square at all, so when I matched the edge of the rectangles with the edge of one charm square consistently to align each square-rectangle set. This means I have one neat side and one ugly side which I’ll then trim later. As my squares are 5” I found that a dinner plate was a good size for holding the squares, and placing them alternately on the plate made them easier to pick up (ie one as a square, one as a diamond, as shown in the photo).

I put the plate of pieces somewhere handy. For me, that's on the left side of me with the side of the fabric to be sewn closest to the sewing machine . Then to start sewing, just pick up the first set, align it with the edge of a ¼” seam foot on your sewing machine and start sewing. Sewing at a moderate pace, allows you to control the set you are sewing, sew about ¾ along the seam, then pick up the next set and position it while you finish the seam on the first one. Don’t stop sewing at the end of the first set, just keep going, do a few stitches, then feed in the next set. What you’ll end up with is a string of sets joined together that looks like washing on a washing line as shown in the photo. Once you’ve finished the seam on all your sets, just snip the stitches in between each set and..Bob’s your uncle, you’ve got 126 sets all ready to be ironed.

You’ll find you’ll get into a rhythm of sewing and adding a set and finding the next one etc. I was so into the rhythm I ended up with a piecing song, - opposite pieces, straight sides together, sew the seam, next set. It’s a bit like the shopping list in ‘Teddy Bears Go Shopping’ – if you recite it to yourself as you go it makes sure your pieces are correctly matched and the sequence is comfortable and efficient.

For Life’s Rich Tapestry, I’ve done two lots of chain piecing – joining the square-rectangle units, then joining 2 sets of these into unit. As I have sets of six squares/triangles in the strips in my quilt, the strips were pieced the usual way rather than chain piecing so I could complete one strip at a time and avoid ending up with pieces upside down.

Happy Sewing,

Bert

LRT2 - Design by Camera

The next stage was to figure out how to combine the colours and fabrics in the quilt. I’ve taken to using what I’ve come to call ‘quilting with my camera’ to solve these sorts of challenges. I find after staring at a combination for a while my brain gets tired thinking about it, so I rearrange all the fabrics/pieces, take photos of them then ignore them for a couple of days and then look at the pictures on my computer. For some unknown reason, I can make a better judgment about balancing prints, colours, values and shapes looking at the digital version of the design rather than the real thing – strange but true. Try it next time you’re not sure what to do with your project next.

The design by camera falls into a number of sections. First I looked at how to join the squares…
Then how to join the square-rectangle units (which are a charm square chain pieced with a blue rectangle – see the chain piecing post)…
Then how to join the strips of squares and rectangles… And some possibilities for borders around the central strips…
The important thing to note here is also that although I’ve presented the pictures above as a set of sequential steps, what I was really doing was a mixture of all of the above at different times. It’s just a process of put, look, photograph and think some more, until you figure out what works the best.

Try the design by camera technique on your project and share your experience with some comments on this post.

BERT

Life's Rich Tapestry (LRT) - Getting Started

I purchased 8 sets of 5" charm squares in African prints quite a while ago. These have been sitting in one of my collecting baskets while I thought about what to do with them. My original plan was to make a map out of the print fabrics as the basis for the quilt. While that was a noble idea, I’d like to learn some of the basic piecing methods like ‘chain piecing’ as I’ve missed out learning this in my projects so far, and hopefully that will make the project easier and faster to finish.
So, I took my charm squares to a sale a the local quilt shop, bought myself a few metres of fabric in coordinating colours and this is what I ended up with.

Introductions

In the beginning, there was fabric. I thought I’d start a blog of my quilting projects to share what I learn with fellow and potential quilters, and to learn from your experience as well. I completed a few long-term projects in late 2008, and decided that starting some new ones I early 2009 was the ideal opportunity to try out this blogging thing and see what I could discover.

I have three new projects that I’m working on in parallel at present, these are:
* ‘I’d rather be flying’ - an aviation themed quilt with pre-printed panels as the central pieces.
* ‘Herstory in Teapots’ - inspired by a teapot I’ve inherited, my family tradition of gathering for a cup of tea, and a set of blue and white fabrics I purchased on tour in the USA a couple of years ago.
* ‘Life’s Rich Tapestry’ – this is an experiment with a set of African print fabrics and a variety of other things from my fabric stash and is evolving on my lounge-room floor as I write.

Each of these quilts is a different style, made with different people in mind and a different technical challenge. If you’d like to join in the journey of making these quilts I’ll be adding the initial pictures and story of each in the coming weeks, and updating the story of each as the project develops. If you’ve got ideas on what to do next, questions or just comments then I’d love to read your posts.

Bert

PS: The two quilts pictured are 'Heart of Aotearoa' and 'Home Sweet Home' from my 2008 Bert Collection.