Y2K10... aka my Watercolor Quilt... aka my Insane Quilt Project

Thanks so much to Amy for hosting the Blogger's Quilt Festival!

Finally, I finished my Insane Quilt Project! Its official name is Y2K10. It is about 62" square.


I started this quilt in early 2002, late to the Y2K charm square swapping party. Back then, there weren't really any quilt blogs but quilters were hanging out on quilt message boards on sites like quilting.about.com. Lots of quilters were swapping 2 1/2" or 3" charm squares in order to make a Y2K quilt with 2000 different charms. There were even magazine articles about how to join these swaps. Mostly people would send out sets of 25 different fabrics, plus a signature square. It was a fun, and really inexpensive way to get a hold of a large variety of fabrics (this was important because we had a tight budget during those grad school years). Each swap was set up individually via email (there would be lists of people willing to swap on various websites), and a lot of people sent a little typed up biography of themselves with their squares.

I found the pattern in the May 1999 issue of Quilter's Newsletter Magazine--it is called Colourwash Checkerboard and was designed by Deirdre Amsden. (I modified the pattern slightly for my quilt.) This back issue is no longer available on the QNM website, but you might be able to find it elsewhere. The designer wrote a book titled Colourwash Quilts: A Personal Approach to Design & Technique which is available used on Amazon, if you're interested.

It was a really time consuming quilt to make--I cut every single piece individually--the triangles and the square-minus-triangle-chunk shape were each cut with templates, and the squares were 2 1/4" before sewing, so I had to cut each square piece down to size too. If you look closely you'll see the quilt is made of 9 sub-units, and each one is made of several different blocks of colors. I pieced each color block together first, then made the large sub-units, then pieced the whole thing together.

Here's the back. I just made the back a couple months ago. I used leftovers and scraps to make the rainbow strips. This photo shows the quilting better than the front, too. I didn't want the quilting to take away from the fabric and color so I chose to do a simple grid design. I quilted it with tan/blue/brown variegated King Tut thread that was recommended by Debbie at my local quilt shop. I had thought I would use a gray, or a gray variegated thread, but I'm glad I went with this one.

I quilted it with my old Viking 100 machine, using the walking foot with the presser foot pressure slightly loosened (having it slightly loosened made a big difference and I didn't have any problems with the layers shifting as I quilted). I used painters' tape to mark my lines, and quilted diagonally through the squares on the front of the quilt (every other diagonal row). This didn't necessarily translate to perfectly straight lines, but you can't tell that from the front.

The main backing fabric is a brown quilter's only solid from JoAnn. I used this same brown on my figgy pudding Christmas quilt that was finished at the end of 2009.

Here's the signature block. I received a total of 71 signatures from 37 US states and 7 other countries.

Aren't they great? I love the variety--handwriting, transfer/printing, stamps, embroidery, fabric paint.

This is the center section of the quilt, it's the first section I made. I made the navy blue color block in the middle first. You can see the small template shapes a bit better in this photo. If you're interested in getting a closer look at the whole quilt, I've posted photos like this of the 9 quilt sections on my flickr account.

The process of making this quilt was a real education in color and value. I first sorted my fabrics by color, and then value (lightness to darkness of the color). The fabrics in this quilt were divided by their value into lights, medium-lights, medium-darks, and darks. I kept the sorted fabrics on quarter sheets of posterboard that were stacked on top of each other and stored in a cardboard box that fit the posterboard just right. This was really helpful for keeping the project all together and made it easy to take it with me too. I started the project in Utah, took it with me when we went to Oregon in the summer of 2003 for my husband's graduate school internship, continued in Utah for another year, and then brought it out here to Kansas.

Sometimes I wonder what it would look like if I hadn't sorted by color, and just done it by value. I think that if the fabrics hadn't been sorted by color first, some of the fabrics would have ended up in different value categories--I'm thinking about the yellows here. I do love how it ended up of course, but I think it would be interesting, someday, to make a "values" quilt where the values were focused on more than the colors.

Now that I'm done... for a long time I've said I would start a Dear Jane quilt as soon as I finished this one. I don't think I'm ready for that yet--maybe after I finish a few more projects!

Just in case you want to read even more about this, here are my previous blog posts about this project:
8 out of 9

and we're back
rainbow
watercolor quilt back

If you have any questions about this project I'll answer in the comments! Thanks so much for stopping by my blog today, and enjoy looking at all the Quilt Festival quilts!

Giveaway Winner and UFO #4!

It's #241. (I still don't know how to take a screenshot, sorry.)

I'll be back after I've triple checked the results.

Robyn! I'll email you just as soon as I get this posted.
Thanks so much to everyone for all the comments! Lots of people are very nostalgic for Rainbow Brite! And thanks to everyone who said nice things about my quilt top, too.

I also wanted to share finished project #4. Sadly this sat for a week with about 7 inches of binding left to do. I finished it up this afternoon and washed and dried it.

This is my Quilts For Kids quilt, finally finished and ready to go. If you don't already know about this, you can go to quiltsforkids.org, sign up, and they will send you a free kit to make a quilt. You have to provide your own batting and binding, then wash and dry the quilt after it's done and send it back. The quilts are given to children who have life threatening illnesses or are victims of abuse.

I'm pretty sure this is my first ever quilt made from non-prewashed fabrics, and it seemed to crinkle up a lot more than quilts made from prewashed fabric. I love how it turned out. I'm working on a second non-prewashed quilt now, can't wait to see how it looks all quilted and washed up. Here's a picture of the back, you can see the texture of the quilting a bit better here:

If you look close you can see a couple of the hearts in the quilting stitches. I stitched a heart after about every 4th-5th loop that I quilted.

This was fun and pretty easy to make, but even so it still took me a long time to finish. I'd like to make another one, but I have so many other projects going on that I'd like to finish up first. I will definitely commit to making one next year, if I don't get to it sooner.

Tomorrow's the Blogger's Quilt Festival! Are you participating? I'm excited to see all the quilts. I think this time I might ration my quilt viewing time and look at some quilts every day for a couple of weeks. Hmm....

It's May Giveaway Day!

Happy Giveaway Day!

Thanks so much for visiting my blog! I have a few vintage sheet goodies that I hope one lucky winner will really enjoy!

My giveaway includes the following:
*one half of a fitted Rainbow Brite sheet (I couldn't bear to give the whole thing away, really I still might use it someday, right?)
*two vintage sheet fat quarters
*one charm pack of 40, 5-inch vintage sheet squares

Here's another photo of the sheet:

I tucked under the edges in this photo to make it look a little more neat--so you'll be getting a bit more than what you see here.
The charm pack includes almost all of the fabrics I used in this quilt top (plus a few that weren't):

There are about 5 duplicate prints in the charm pack.

I am willing to ship internationally, and you can enter until May 20. If you'd like to enter, please just leave a comment below! Please make sure your email address is available in your blogger profile or include it in your comment, please.

toddler peasant top

Sorry I haven't posted for a while! I wanted to post this a few days ago but I haven't been feeling the greatest. I'm glad to be feeling mostly better now though.

This is one of my finished projects I didn't get around to showing yet.

She cracks me up. The shirt is the project, by the way--it's modified from Simplicity 5695. I made another one of these for a friend and am going to make one more for another friend and swap for some hairbows.

Check back tomorrow morning for my giveaway post! And don't forget to visit sewmamasew.com for links to lots of giveaways starting tomorrow! 

Left Handed Rotary Cutting Tutorial

I decided to make a tutorial for rotary cutting for left-handers--hope this helps some of you out. If anyone has any questions or needs more help on this, please let me know--I'm glad to help!

Some safety tips first:
When rotary cutting, always cut away from your body.
Close the protective cover on the rotary cutter every time you put it down. Every. Time. Thank you.
If you have kids in your house, put the rotary cutter up high when you are stopping working with it, even for a short time.

I started out with a fairly long piece of fabric that was also the complete original width. I needed to straighten my edge so I could get straight strips that went across the whole width of the fabric. First I held up the fabric, with selvedge edges together, and adjusted the two top corners until the selvedges were parallel and there were no ripples in the fabric. Amy has a tutorial just for squaring up fabric here, if you want to read more about it.

The photo above shows how to line up the ruler along the fold of the fabric, making sure that the cut edge will be a 90 degree angle to the fold. (The fold is lined up with the 1/2" marks near the bottom of the ruler.)

For left-handed rotary cutting, you will always cut on the left side of the ruler, while holding the ruler firmly in place with your right hand. (This action shot courtesy of my 5-year-old.) For long cuts, after you have cut up to where your fingertips are on the ruler, pause for a second and carefully (don't move the ruler!) move your hand higher up on the ruler.

After I make the straightening cut, I like to unfold my fabric and lay the ruler along the center of the fabric to make sure it is straight. If it's not, sometimes I will try the folded technique again, or sometimes I will cut the edge straight while the fabric is unfolded. This requires carefully shifting the fabric as the whole width of it doesn't fit on my cutting mat.

Now I am ready to cut strips. I move the bulk of the fabric over to the left of the ruler, so I can use the ruler to measure the width of the strip I am cutting (2 1/4 inches, here). It doesn't have to be perfectly lined up with the lines on the mat for this. If you are going to be cutting several strips, it might be a good idea to unfold your fabric and check that it is still straight after 4 or 5 cuts.

If I need to cut a strip that is wider than my ruler, then I use my mat to help measure. I make sure the edge of the fabric is lined up with a line on the mat, and then line up my ruler using the measurements on the edges of the mat. The above photo shows the set up to cut a 6 1/2" strip. The left edges of the ruler are lined up with the 11 1/2" mark on both the top and bottom mat edges (see photo below). 

I also wanted to show how to use the 45 degree line on the ruler to cut the edges for binding strips. Line up several layers of fabric on top of each other.

Place the 45 degree line along the long side of the strip, and cut.

For the other end of my binding strips, I place the 45 degree line along the long edge of the strip, but in the portion that will be cut off. This is so the strips will sew together correctly into one long binding strip. (More about quilt binding here, if you're interested. )

I hope this is helpful! I'd love it if anyone has feedback about this. Does everything make sense? Have I left anything out? Please let me know in the comments.

another new project

Let's see how well cell phone pictures look here on the blog.

I've been arranging the pieces for a circle quilt. My sister-in-law Amy C. (I have a SIL named Amy T. too) is having a baby girl this summer. This is going to be her quilt! This was the very quick I-finally-got-all-96-pieces-cut-out layout.

Here it is after I changed it up a bit.

Amy said she liked the first one better. What I'm going to do is sew together all the quarter-circle and background square units so I have 48 pieces to deal with and then work on arranging them from that point.

Something I thought about while I was cutting these was doing a little tutorial for how to make your own template to make this quilt block. And maybe my technique for cutting them, too. Is anyone interested in seeing something like that here?

May blogging events

There are a couple of quilt-bloggy things coming up in May that I wanted to make sure everyone knows about!

Sew, Mama, Sew is hosting another giveaway day! Click on the graphic above to get all the details. If you don't already know about this, here's what it is: hundreds of bloggers will be hosting giveaways of handmade items or supplies for making things. It is a great way to find out about blogs you might not have known about before and I love entering lots of giveaways. The giveaways will be open until May 20 so you have a few days to browse all the crafty giveaway goodness. I don't have any idea what I should give away, does anyone have any suggestions for me?

And, we've all been waiting for it... on May 21st, Amy will be hosting the third Blogger's Quilt Festival. I just finished something today that I'm saving up to share that day. Again, hundreds of bloggers will be participating, and there will be prizes. I can't wait to see everyone's quilts!

placemat quilt swap 3

My partner received the little quilt I made for placemat quilt swap 3 today. Here's the big reveal:

The photo is a little washed out from too-bright sunlight. I am learning.... and hey you get a good view of the quilting in this shot, right? If you want to see it in better light, click here. Much better, huh?

My partner asked for "romantic pinks and greens" and I really like how this turned out. The star block was improvised, meaning I did not do any math before starting it (or while making it, really). I just started out with a 5 inch square and went from there.  I tried to make the pink triangles just fit the rectangles they are a part of, and because of this they don't have the "proper" angle that is usually found in this type of block.

This quilt was made completely from fabrics in my stash. I think if I did it again I might go get a couple of new greens because a couple of them don't blend really well. But overall, I do like it and think it turned out ok even if some of the greens were a little off. 

Here's the back:

This is my second UFO finish for the spring to finish challenge. I am working on finishing the binding for a 3rd and have the binding ready to attach to a 4th project. It feels good to get things done!

My ugly quilt

Natalia from Piece N Quilt is hosting an ugly quilt contest. I think it's a great idea! I've blogged about my ugly quilt before, it's also my first quilt.

I decided to take a new picture of it.

I had clothes made from at least two of these fabrics; maybe my mom can chime in if she remembers making clothes out of these fabrics for us. Or did Grandma make them? I had an outfit (pants and a vest maybe?) made from the turquoise print in the top left corner when I was 5, and lovely pants made from the fuschia/purple color that I remember from 3rd grade. In fact, that's when my mom chopped them off below the knee and made them into super-cute knickers. Come on, I know I'm not the only one that had knickers. These ones had a gold snap at each knee.

Anyway. Back to the contest. You can enter any time between now and May 11. Prizes will be gift certificates to Piece N Quilt. Go here to find out more about entering!

the winner!

Oops, I didn't get to this yesterday, sorry about that. Thanks everyone for entering, and for telling me more about yourselves. I actually have quite a few more pairs of novelty squares that I am thinking of giving away also, so watch for another giveaway in the next few weeks.

The winner is number 30, Mom on the Move! I'll be emailing you shortly to get your address!

I hope everyone's having a good weekend! I got a bunch of quilting and cutting done for a couple different projects yesterday. 

This is how the world went. (and some sewing, of course)

My middle child is almost 6. Here's what he told me the other day:
"Mom, I know how the world went. First there were dinosaurs, then Jesus. Then pyramids, then Indians, and finally electronics."

I tried to tell this to my friend, but I couldn't remember the whole thing. I did remember "first dinosaurs and then Jesus" (how could I forget that?); anyway I asked him to tell it to me again today, and this time he said "I'm going to leave out the pyramids, because they were at the same time as the Indians." So this time, it went: dinosaurs, Jesus, Indians, and then electronics.

This is the same boy who asked, a few weeks ago, "What is this At-um word I keep seeing everywhere?!" We had to explain what an ATM was. I love him so much.

Ok, moving right along... here are a couple of things I've been doing this week. Finally mailed out my April bee blocks, and I also made up some blocks for this project:

Yes I waited until rather close to the deadline. Maybe when I do my project like this (in the fall) I will have a fake deadline and then a real deadline for all the procrastinators.

I am also just about ready to send out my swap quilt for PQS3. Here's a picture of part of the back. I'm almost done sewing the binding down:

The sort of homespun woven green fabric there is from my very first quilt shop fabric purchase, oh so long ago. I'll be able to show the front of the quilt sometime next week, after it makes the trip to my swap partner's house.

I am quilting my Downy quilt now, and thinking about my UFO list and what to do next.

Don't forget to scroll down to the next post for my giveaway, if you're interested! I'll close comments and pick a random winner on Saturday night. Hope you're having a great Thursday!

Oh yeah, I have to share one more thing. This is hilarious--someone linked to it on facebook. You have to go read this, especially if you are a fan of the Mom jeans SNL commercial: Mom jeans and the dreaded long butt. I don't want to ruin it for you, but the section on grandma jeans KILLED ME. So funny.

spring giveaway

A long time ago, I made this quilt:

And I was new to quilting and had the crazy idea that I might make two of them. Because I kind of went to some trouble to find all those different novelty prints, I guess. So I cut out parts for two quilts.

But I never made the second one, and I don't want to. I still have everything for that second quilt top though, except the rainbow border fabric. I've thought about giving it away for a while, and today I went to my bin of ancient projects and got it out.

There are 24 pairs of novelty prints, a stack of purple rectangles for separating the novelty fabrics, some green strips, 1 1/4 (or so--I didn't measure) yards of the green, and some red/white heart print for binding. I'm sorry about the lack of rainbow border fabric, but glad I used it all up in some other projects. :)

If you want this sort-of quilt top kit, please just leave a comment on this post. I'd love it if you want to tell me your name and where you live and something fun you've made lately. I'll pick a winner sometime on Saturday, May 1.

**Comments are closed now, thanks for entering!**

something to look forward to

Sometimes for fun, I like to visit the "coming soon" section at fatquartershop.com. I'm always interested in what the next Basic Grey line will look like. Over the weekend, I saw a few new things to get a little excited about:

New, fall-ish basic grey line. I am not in a fall colors mood right now, but I think this collection will grow on me.
There is also a new line by Lila Tueller coming out, Spirit:

It's kind of hard to get the feel of how these fabrics look from this small image, so I was glad to see more pictures of these fabrics (some made into various clothing items) on Lila Tueller's blog. I love the rust and deep turquoise colors together. And the brown. And, there's going to be twill.

Oh yeah, there's also a new American Jane line, punctuation: 

I love those tickets!

PQS3. And more.

I had so much fun making my little quilt for DQS8 that I decided to join in the placemat quilt swap put on by Sarah of house of krom. This one is a one-to-one swap, and my partner is on. the. ball. I got my little quilt from her today:

Isn't it cute! I love the prairie points, I've got to try those one of these times. It was made by Ruth, aka ruthiequilts (link goes to her flickr stream).

So I have been imagining her quilt in my head. I finally pulled fabric for it the other day:

She said she likes romantic pinks and greens, I think I can make something cute with these. (It doesn't have to be mailed until the beginning of May, I still have time!)

In other news, most of my sewing time this week was spent doing this:

The trick to quilting with the walking foot and not having shifting problems, at least for this quilt, was to loosen up my presser foot pressure a bit. There are a few places in this quilt where parts were eased to fit and could have been a problem to quilt, but the quilting went really well and I didn't have the shifting I had on my last quilt. I need to pull out the user manual for my Janome (I used the Viking to quilt this one) and figure out how to adjust the presser foot pressure on it for the next time I do straight line quilting.


I did find time to switch out my walking foot for the quarter inch foot and make my blocks for The Block Swap 2.

I had to add the blue outer strips on the left block because I mis-measured and it came out just a smidge too small. I kind of like it though, and think this might make a cool block even if done on purpose. These blocks will go to Jennie of Sunflower Quilts.

Spring to Finish

Yep, Jacquie is at it again. She's heading up another UFO challenge with some prizes to inspire but is also encouraging everyone to plan rewards for themselves.

I am in the middle of finishing the mother of all UFOs at the moment (it needs 27 more lines quilted), I have some other old projects I'd like to get done, some newer things that need to get done, and I'm feeling like I'm making progress.

My reward. Make that multiple, rewards. In my comment on Jacquie's post, I said I would start my 5 year old's monkey quilt. But then I remembered yesterday that I have been telling myself for months that as soon as I finish my watercolor quilt I'm going to start a Dear Jane quilt. And finally, I would really like to make the skirt from Alabama Stitch Book too. So, more projects that will most likely take a while to finish. Oh well, that's part of the fun.

So--I have 8 UFOs. I wonder how many of them I can finish before May 15?

Do you have any unfinished projects? Head on over to Jacquie's and join in the challenge!

p.s. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JAN!!
p.p.s. Happy Birthday to my Grandpa Taylor, too! He's 94 years old now and probably won't read this. :D

squeaking in a wordless Wednesday post.

:)

sew and tell Friday--quilt top!

I just finished up this quilt top. I really, really like it. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it yet... it isn't for anyone in particular. I could donate it, there are a couple different options that I'm aware of right now for that. Or maybe I'll just keep it. I don't feel like I made much of a dent in my stack of vintage sheet fat quarters, so I think I'm going to try some other ideas with these fabrics soon.

I'm almost ready to start quilting my watercolor quilt--just need to go buy thread. I ended up going with pin basting, what can I say, I was afraid to try something new (spray basting or fusing) with this particular project. I'm going to quilt it with my trusty old Viking, with the presser foot pressure loosened, and hope that I can avoid any obvious shifting.

I'm linking up over at sew -n- tell Friday, go see what everyone's been working on this week! Hope you have a great weekend!

4 blocks

I made these blocks from my vintage sheet fat quarters this afternoon. I didn't even know I had that bird fabric... there were only 2 good repeats of it on the piece I had so I had to make a bird block. The next batch will start with my "darker" fabrics in the center and outside. They are going to end up at 12.5" square, I haven't trimmed them yet though.

My deep thoughts about log cabin blocks--every time I make them, especially improvised ones, I think the inner fabric choices are so important and then it turns out that the outer strips really make up so much more of the block than the inner parts. Maybe I need to plan from the outside in one of these times.

Saturday catch-up

I've been on a bit of a computer fast this week; as soon as I decided I was going to really cut down my computer time on Wednesday, my computer stopped working. So. There you go. It has been a good thing but made it harder to post on the blog.

I have been working on a few small things--a friend from church bought the supplies to make a bunch of blankets for Heart to Heart International and asked me to sew them up. I made 3 of them, and gave 3 more to another friend who said she'd help.

This is the first time I've used the satin blanket binding, and it's not too hard, but it takes some time. What I did was trim the two fabric layers, pin the binding on one side, then go sew it. Then I went back and smoothed it out on the living room floor again and pinned the next side. Repeat until done. I did one each day for 3 days.

I also made these blocks for Audrie who is the April gal in the bee beautiful group. These seemed pretty easy at first, but when I put the last seam in the first block, it was a little unfortunate. I had to redo it this morning and it turned out better. The secret is to make sure the pieced sections really are exactly the size of the template before sewing. Anyway, they are done and they didn't take a lot of deep thinking which is good some of the time, you know?

Speaking of online quilting bees... I saw this site on one of the blogs in my reader this afternoon. Quiltingbeeblocks.com is a site explaining virtual quilting bees--it has a directory of many of the bees that are going on, explanations of just what a virtual quilting bee is and how to start one, links to block tutorials and more. They also have a flickr group and they are having a big giveaway right now too! I'm looking forward to browsing the quilt blocks in the flickr group and seeing what so many quilters have been up to in their bees.

And finally, just wanted to share a little sneak peek of something I made for someone.

Going to get it in the mail really soon, I hope. I'll show the whole thing soon.

what to buy in April

Look what I came across the other day... April is supposedly a good month to find deals on fabric. Who knew?

I finished up a new charm pack dress for Lauren today. The fabric is Eden by Lila Tueller.

My charm pack dress tutorial is here, if you're interested. If you do make one of these dresses, I'd love to see a picture!

finally... finished baby quilt!

I finally got the last few inches of binding sewn down on this quilt tonight:

I'm going to wash and dry it, get a label on it, and mail it to its owner right away!

The quilting was done in sort of straight lines, some of them doubled up, in a grid. I thought I (pin) basted pretty well and I used my walking foot, but there were still some issues with the layers shifting as I quilted. I am looking for any suggestions or advice about improving my straight line quilting, because I am hoping to quilt my watercolor quilt next, and I was thinking (hoping) diagonal straight lines would be a good choice.

Here's a better view of the block I put in the back.

I also got some other things done in the last couple days:

Blocks for a charity quilt that the bee beautiful group is collaborating on.

And, jam. I made it with the quick set freezer method. My first time. Strawberries were on sale! I'm going to make another batch, probably in the morning.

Things are working out a bit better here this week and I'm actually going to post my link over at sew -n- tell Friday. Go see what else people are sharing!