It's A Girl!

I've been sitting on a secret that I have been very eager to share for months now. My daughter, Miranda, has three sons, making me the grandmother of three grandsons, Matthew, Benjamin and Andrew. Aren't they adorable?

My daughter-in-law, Kylee is due to deliver my first granddaughter on May 26. What does a quilting grandmother do while she waits? Make a quilt, of course. 

TIP: Click on an image to view it in an enlarged format

When selecting the perfect quilt for the nursery I like to think about the parent's interests and what they will be sharing with their child as she grows up. Both my son and daughter-in-law love to go snorkeling amidst the tropical fish. 

They met on swim team when they were eleven and twelve years old. The mascot of the team was a fish. My son was on the local town team called the Snappers with a logo of a turtle. 

Hence the tropical reef motif featuring a turtle. Imagine my delight, when I learned half way through making this quilt that the theme for the nursery is sand dollars and starfish! Note the starfish nestled in amongst the coral.

Leah Day has heavily influenced the quilting patterns I used. Whenever I am stuck for a filler design I go to Leah's site and browse through her 365 options. I will also just let my imagination guide me, sometimes following hints in the fabric, other times, the shape of the piece or a doodle that makes sense for item being quilted, such as a spiral on the back of a turtle's shell or the sense of a current in the ocean.

Why the big secret? I was waiting to surprise Kylee with the quilt at her baby shower. The shower and the quilt were a huge success!

The pattern, heavily tweaked by me, is called Fantasy Fish and is available from LAM Designs.

Machine Quilting with Leah Day - Week 8

Am I the only quilter without a stash of UFO's to draw upon? When I was a novice quilter I collected UFOs almost as quickly as I piled up completed projects, maybe even faster. Why? For two reasons. Either I reached a point in the quilt where I became stuck because I didn't have the design skills or technical know how to proceed or something new distracted me and I was off working in a new direction. Two years ago we moved from Massachusetts to Wisconsin and it became the perfect time to elminate several decades worth of UFOs. The result was that only a few tops needing quilting made the move with me and I have subsequently quilted them as practice pieces to master my George.

Stippling a Pieced Quilt

Week 8 required practicing on a full quilt with seams. Once again I found myself starting from scratch. Without a UFO quilt I had to make one. I did. I purposefully designed a quilt with a variety of values, solids, patterns and colors just for the challenge of selecting a thread that could work in all areas. I am partial to Superior's King Tut series when it comes threads. This particular variegated one features primary colors. I thought about using a yellow thread, but didn't have a vibrant enough yellow to blend with the bright yellow squares and of course it would stand out in the blue border.

It took me a full day of quilting to stipple this 43" x 54" quilt. I didn't time myself, but a good guess would be six hours at the machine, including a bobbin change. I always clean and oil my George between bobbins. It is a good practice and a good excuse to get up and move around the machine for 10 minutes. Leah took three hours, but I used 1/2" stipple which is mid sized versus large. I really liked Leah's tip to go around seam junctures. It helped avoid hopping when you hit a seam at full speed.

Navigating Around Seam Junctures

Now that I remember before I begin, that it is best start in the middle of an over all project and that I can stipple in quadrants and rows within each quadrant I no longer quilt myself into corners. With each passing week I find myself gaining confidence and problem solving skills on planning out my continouous line quilting. Although it took 6 hours quilt this, it is the fastest I have ever breezed through something of this magnitude.

Machine Quilting with Leah Day - Week 6

This week was much easier, since we have been stippling for six weeks now, stippling has become second nature. Well, almost. There is still the occasional glitch, but that has less to do with stippling and more to do with equipment/technical difficulties.

The assignment this week was to finish the prior week's quilt with stippling in the background that surrounded the stars, as well as in the sashing and borders. The key to successfully completing the assignment was to devise a route to follow. I started at the tip of the star point in the center block that points to the right and headed down the sashing, filling in the star backgrounds that adjoined the sashing. When I reached the border I pivoted the quilt 90 degrees and filled in the lower background triangle of the center block. Once that was done I pivoted the quilt 90 degrees to fill in the other sashing and adjacent backgrounds.  At the top of the sashing I pivoted again completed the border by going around counter clockwise. I never boxed myself into a corner!

Micro, Mid-sized and Maxi Stippling

The image above showcases the three sizes of stippling used to make this table runner. I selected a Marathon polyester variegated thread to quilt the star and an unknown brand polyester thread from my stash for the background and sashing.

The rich plum  polyester thread I selected stands out nicely in the lilac background pieces and completely disappears in the sashing fabric. An issue I ran into with this thread was that it required a thread stand to glide smoothly off the spool. I struggle with the best place to locate the spool next to machine. If I place it behind the machine the quilt bumps into and can result in problems. I placed it to the right of the machine. Sometime in the process of unspooling the thread puddled, then snagged. I sensed something was up, but just a nano second before I snapped the needle. I moved the spool from the horizontal feeder to the vertical feeder and added a band of netting. That solved the problem this time.

Machine Quilting with Leah Day - Week 4

This week Leah Day has us following a line with our quilting. We were to follow straight lines, quilt in the ditch, quilt around a pieced element and ultimately mark a quilting pattern and follow that.

My first step was to design a quilt top that would give everything I needed to do the assignment. I began with the striped fabric in the center of the block. I selected a simple eight point star design, similar to Leah's choice of cheater cloth. I made sure to include a solid fabric where a marked pattern could be shown off. I also selected a border fabric that would provide lots of pattern to follow with contour lines.

The Full Design

When possible it is best to start machine quilting in the middle of a quilt, so that is what I did. I quilted in the ditch around the striped square and then around the pieced star. By starting in a corner I never had to go over a line of quilting, however, once I started going up and down the stripes with my quilting line I did travel stitch along the tops and bottoms of the bars in order to avoid ending and restarting my thread.

Close-up of Border, Man in the Moon and Stitch in the Ditch

The close-up image above shows my almost in the ditch but slightly off stitching as I free motioned my way around the star and up and down the bar of the stripes. It also allows you to see the contour stitching around the  flower elements in the border. I had selected a sage green thread for my quilting. In hindsight I might have opted to change threads for the border and use black in order to better blend in with the background fabric.

Close-up of Stars

The last step was to mark the open areas with a design and follow the marked lines. I chose a man in the moon pattern designed by Hari Walner. I tried tracing the image onto the fabric using a graphite tracing paper. The resulting line wasn't clear enough for me to see. I opted to draw the pattern free hand directly on the quilt with a #2 pencil. The 3 stars were also hand drawn, but I just looped them together free hand with the machine.

From a distance of two feet or so my quilting appears to the follow the lines. It is only nose to quilt where the wobbles become evident. Where my biggest struggle comes and has always come is marking the quilt. I need high contrast, strong marks to follow a line. I don't immerse my quilts, so drawing on a water soluble tear away product won't work. I've tried tracing paper, but picking out the bits of paper that invariably get left behind is a bear. Does anyone have a marking solution?

The lesson I learned from this assignment is that my stitches tend to be small as I follow a line. I worked hard at slowing my pedal speed in order to get some length to the stitches, but I just couldn't seem to go slow enough.

Machine Quilting with Leah Day - Week 2

This week's assignment was to practice stippling. Leah Day recommended several ways to approach stippling that were new to me. First was to stipple in quadrants. In other words think of the space to be stippled in as a square subdivided equally into four squares. Next she recommended that we practice stippling randomly and in rows.

I am not new to machine quilting and so stippling is part of my lexicon. However, I have never stippled in rows nor had I ever thought to divide a square into quadrants. Although Leah found rows allowed her to stipple more quickly because "she knew where she was going,"I found that rows were more constricting. I worried that the rows could be detected. However, although I could distinguish the rows in Leah's work, I honestly couldn't find them in my own.

I started stippling randomly at the center of the block at the giraffe's head on the right. I filled in the lower right quadrant working my way back to the same giraffe's head. Next I stippled in up and down rows, completing the lower left quadrant. I made sure my final row lead into the upper left quadrant where I practiced random stippling and the upper right was finished in rows again.