Peas In A Pod

Little Forest Quilt-Along Update-I Finished!

Hi Everyone,

Well, as you know, I haven't been feeling well.  I felt a little better on Saturday and did a few things around and outside of the house.  Felt worse on Sunday.  Feel so-so today.  Hope this doesn't hang on too long.

But I did have to show you what I finished!

Ta-dah!  Sorry the lighting is so bad.  It was really cloudy on Sunday morning when I took the photos.  But I had to get it done.  I already had the quilt sandwich assembled.  I also had all the binding ready to go, as it was left over from another project.  (And I still have plenty more left!  Wow!  What was I thinking on that project?)  I had taken on my retreat to work on, but I never worked on it there.  I swear, I think I'm phobic about quilting in front of other people.  I'm very self-conscious about it.  But in the privacy of my own sewing room, I am okay.  I really had little fear when quilting this.  I knew exactly what I wanted to do, practiced for about 5 min on a practice piece, and then just went for it.

I wanted to quilt some snowflakes in it, so I used some of Leah Day's ideas.  (The motif is called Icicle Lights.)  More on that in a minute.  I also quilted some garland in each tree.  The only tricky thing about this design is there is a lot of "travel stitching" (stitching over the lines you just stitched) to do to make the snowflake pattern.  So, I had to be pretty accurate.  Sometimes I did a really fine job of that.  Other times I didn't.  But, once I washed it and it got all crinkly, it didn't really matter, because it didn't show.

While I was quilting it, when I'd go off a line, I was saying to myself, "It's okay.  Snowflakes aren't perfect."  And if my lines weren't perfectly straight, I'd say, "It's okay, the wind blows snowflakes around."  I really just relaxed into it and had fun, for once.

Here is the back.  You can see I went around each tree and then drew the garland.  I was just going to do the garland, but I thought that would look weird on the back.  I went around the trees just to frame the garland on the back.  Is that weird?

Here's a closer shot from teh back.  Again, not perfect, but I am very satisfied with it.  This served its purpose well....to give me another small piece to practice free motion quilting on!

One more shot of the front.  Just 'cause.  You can see I had a little trouble with the red bleeding when I washed it.  Too bad.  I put a color catcher in with it (I never prewash my fabrics and really don't have a problem with bleeding....probably pushed it with the red and white).  I think some of it is coming from the fabric underneath the white.

Here's the other that bled a little.  Just these two.  I bet the fabric was folded over onto the red here when I washed it.  I'll have to see if I can get it out.  I am not going to get too worked up about it.

A word about the quilting design.  I had recently picked up this book from Leah Day.  I am enjoying using her designs as inspiration for some of my quilting.

It just so happened that as I was leafing through it, I thought, "I should look for a snowflake-related design for Little Forest." And a couple seconds later, I stumbled on this--Icicle Lights.  Perfect!  It was nice and modern looking.  Perfect for this quilt.  I rotated it, however, and made it so the snowflakes were coming down.

If you want to see Leah stitching the design, you can click here.  She also did them vertical in that post. In this case, I didn't watch her video.  I just went for it after looking at this drawing.  I think it worked out pretty well.

Now, a word about thread.  I have told you all how much I love my Aurifil thread.  I quilted all the white snow with my 50 wt. Aurifil thread.  It went smooth as silk.  No problems.

Well, when I was at quilt retreat, one of my buddies told me I should be trying lots of different threads and seeing what works.  Thinking I would do the quilting on this quilt at retreat, I went to one of the quilt shops in Shipshewana and got some thread to quilt the trees with.  I didn't have the right colors of Aurifil in my stash, so I thought this was a good opportunity to try some different thread.

I picked up these:

Pretty colors from Presencia.  I think it's also 50 wt, but I could be wrong.

Well, on the first tree I stitched with the red and the green, the thread shredded.  I wound a small bobbin, because there was not much stitching to do, really.  I ran out of bobbin thread.  (The Aurifil just goes and goes, it seems.)  I was very frustrated by the shredding.

So, I made a decision yesterday.  Nothing but Aurifil thread for me from now on.  I'm going to buy a color card and just start collecting that.  I guess I should try to use up some of the other threads I have, but I may not.  I have decided that I get fantastic results with Aurifil, and that's going to be all I buy from now on.  I guess I'm even more of a dedicated Aurifil girl now than I was before.

And stay tuned, because I have a giveaway of Aurifil thread coming!  :-)

 I want to apologize to Linda (my co-hostess) and to all of you for being a slow hostess on this.  You should go check out Linda's version of Little Forest.  It really rocks.  She did hers bigger and all in green.  I love it.  Thanks to everyone for playing along and hanging in there with me.  I still wouldn't be done with this if I hadn't felt the pressure of the quilt along, so it really helped me.  I hope it helped you.

And while you're at it, go check out the Flickr group for other finished ones!  There are so many great versions of this out there! This is an awesome and fun little project.  Many thanks to the Purl Bee for letting us use the pattern they had posted on their website.

This week, I will wrap things up by doing all the drawings I'm behind on and sending out prizes!  So, stay tuned for that!

Hope you're all having a great Halloween.  I think I'll do those photos tomorrow.  I thought this should come right away.

Now, the big question.  Should I keep this for myself, or give it away?  Hmmmm....If the red hadn't bled, I would be more tempted to give it away.  I'll probably end up keeping it.  Shoot.  There goes my thought of actually having a Christmas gift done already.

Until next time,

Mama Pea

 

Quilt Retreat in Shipshewana, Part 3

Hi Everyone,

Well, it all finally caught up with me.  I'm home sick today.  I feel okay as long as I'm laying down, but I feel dizzy whenever I stand up, my throat hurts, I'm sneezing, and I feel completely wiped out.  So, I'm staying home to rest.  In between naps, I'm getting work done on the computer (thank goodness for web-based instructional support, so I can grade my exams online!).  I thought I'd use one of my breaks for blogging.

This will be my last post about our Kalamazoo Log Cabin Quilters retreat in Shipshewana about a month ago.

On Saturday, Cheryl and some of the gals asked me if I wanted to take a field trip to another town to visit a little quilt shop.  I said, "Why not?!  Let's go!"  So, off in the car we went.

Oh, yes, everyone was all smiles and excited!

We ended up in Rome City, Indiana at Caroline's Cottage Cottons.  It is a pretty neat building.  It was built in 1870.  Caroline and her family restored the home when they turned it into a quilt shop.  It is very neat.

Here we are before going in.  When we got inside, Caroline gave us a history of the house.  She told us the step I'm standing on had a particular name....Maybe a burglar's step?  I can't remember now.  But the step is built taller than the first two steps to trip a would-be burglar trying to sneak up the steps in the night.  The idea was that he'd trip on the step, fall on the porch, and make such a ruckus that the people in the home would wake up.  She shared lots of little historical details about the home with us.

This was one of the first displays inside that caught my eye.  I certainly was in paradise.  :-)  See the wallpaper on the wall?  You can tell that there was a lot of attention to detail in Caroline's restoration.

There was a shop hop going on in Indiana at the time, and this was the shop's pattern.  Even though we weren't on the shop hop, Caroline gave us all the pattern as well as the discounts that were being given to shop hoppers.  In fact, she even gave us some special discounts.  I thought that was really nice when she heard we were retreating in Shipshewana.

I loved this little display of "Tea Cakes."  They were little fat eighth bundles.  Very cute.  That's Caroline in the background.

Although it is a somewhat small shop, her selection was absolutely amazing.  I really like her taste in fabric and patterns.  Here is her selection of wool bolts.  Wow!

The little kitchen in this house was simply adorable.  When they have classes, they hold them in this room.  The classes are necessarily smally (like four to six people), due to space.  This room was filled with 1930s reproduction fabrics.

Here is a close up of that hutch against the wall.  I loved all the red and white fabrics.  Love this display and how the fat quarter bundles are tied up.  In hindsight, I wish I would have picked up one of those bundles for my red and white quilt group projects!

This is what's on the opposite wall.  More great 1930s prints.

I saw some rugs in the room with the wool and really liked how they looked.  I have been wanting  to make some sort of rag rug for my foyer, but I haven't found a technique I like the look of enough yet.  But I really liked these!  It's using a technique called locker hooking, which I've heard of but didn't know how locker hooking was done.  At that, Caroline whipped out a sample and started demonstrating it for me.  She took 1" strips of torn fabric and this hook that looks like a crochet hook on one end and has an eye on the other end.  There was a special string threaded through the eye.

She began by hooking several loops of the fabric through the mesh with the crochet hook end.

Then, she pulled the eye end through to thread the string through the loops.  This is what keeps the loops from pulling back through.  Neat!  I liked the technique, and I liked how the rugs look.  I bought some of the mesh and string.  She ordered me a hook, because she was out.  That came a couple of weeks ago.  I ordered a book on locker hooking from Amazon that she recommended, because she was out of them.  I think this will be one of my winter projects.

Here is the front room.  It was full of civil war fabrics and other very traditional fabrics.  Lots of good stuff in this room!  Love the Edyta Sitar quilt on the wall to the far right.

This sign was by the front door of the shop on the way out.  I really loved this idea.  This would motivate me to stay on my weight loss plan!  Isn't that fun?!

There were also some cute little primitive ornaments on the wall.  I liked this one a lot.

Karen found lots of goodies (you can see some of the bolts of stuff she bought behind her).  She spent enough money there (I won't say how much to protect her innocence, LOL!) to earn a crown!  I love this!  The store gives you a crown if you spend a certain amount in one trip.  How great is that?!  Good girl, Karen!

All in all, this was a really great shopping trip.  Caroline is one of the nicest shop owners I've met, and her store is just as cute as can be.  She has a wonderful selection of fabrics, and I will go back there to shop again.  I might even make a special trip to Rome City, just to go there.  Rome City was about 20 to 30 minutes away from Shipshewana, so if you're in that area, I would highly recommend you stopping at this shop.  It's great!  Please tell Caroline and her staff (who were also wonderful) hi for me if you go there.

When we got back to Shipshewana, we went to the Bread Box Bake Shop for lunch and had great sandwiches.  I snapped this photo, because I loved all the variety of bread boxes they had on display.

What a great weekend this was.  So relaxing and fun.  Like I said, I got some sewing done, but I didn't want to stress over how much I got done.  I shopped a lot, walked around some, went for runs, and did some knitting at night with knitting buddies.  It was a wonderful, wonderful weekend.  I can't wait for next year's retreat!

Hope you enjoyed the summary of my retreat.  I got a wonderful package in the mail the other day.  can't wait to share it with you!  I am so spoiled!

Until next time,

Mama Pea

Quilt Retreat in Shipshewana, Part 2

Hi Everyone,

Taking a break from my busy, busy day at work to compose a blog post.  It is 2:16 pm, and I've been going nonstop since 8:00 am.  (I have to teach tonight until 9:00 pm.)  So, I decided I deserved a little mental health break to compose a post.  Next I need to find time to get out to all your blogs and the fun I'm missing there!

Back to my recent quilt retreat.  Today, I thought I'd tell you about what I was working on, as well as others.

Let's start with what I was working on.  I already showed you this:

It's a little doll blanket for Sweet Pea for Christmas.  I'm going to blog about it more, too, with links to how to make it and my instructions for finishing.

But here is what I spent the majority of my time working on...

I did not have a single cut or stitch done on this when I arrived at the retreat, and I totally finished it!  Right before leaving on retreat, I had seen Lynn's post about this technique.  (In this post, she's further along.  And here's her post where she's a little farther along.)  Then, Caroll posted about how she was making a table topper using this method.  (Check them out.  They rock!)  And I thought, "That would be a good project to take on retreat!"  It is pretty mindless sewing, which I need, because I chatter too much at these things.  I bought one BaliPop (a package of batik strips that were 42" long and 2.5" wide; there were 40 strips in the package).  I used the technique shown in this video, by Missouri Star Quilt Company (don't you just love them?!):

 

I love this technique.  I also stayed with four strips.  I cut them as shown in the video, and I got 100 blocks out of it!  They are a little odd sized...something like 5.5" but not exactly.  Doesn't matter, they are all the same size!  I had them done in about a day's worth of sewing.

Here is an example of the 8 blocks I got out of one set of four strips sewing together. 

I had one square left from each strip set after cutting the above.  I took those leftover squares and sewed them together (so the squares were from different strip sets).

Here is an example of the four blocks I got from sewing two mismatched squares together.

I started playing with block layout ideas, by taking four of the blocks cut from matching strip sets.  I liked this one quite a bit.  A nice pinwheel effect.

This one was good, too.

This was probably my favorite.  But I realized I needed my blocks to be all identical to do this.  And I hadn't been careful when I sewed my two sets together to always turn the stripes the same way before sewing around the perimeter.  So, all my blocks wouldn't spin nicely like this one did.

Sorry, this photo is a little blurry.  I took my old camera to retreat, and this is the problem I had been having with that little camera and caused me to buy the good one!  But I didn't feel like lugging the big camera along.

I thought it would be fun to do one of these patterns for the whole quilt but I only had enough blocks to do another 1/2 of a long column.  This would have made the design weird.  I needed it to be wider than this and wanted to use more of my blocks.  So, I abandoned this idea.

I ended up going with this random layout.  Then, I went to Lolly's (which I blogged about yesterday) and bought some batiks for the borders.  I used four of my remaining blocks for cornerstones for each border.  I have one block left that I'll use for a label or something.

One tip for you if you make something like this.  Be aware that ALL of the outer edges on these blocks are bias.  So, be careful when you are sewing them together.  I wasn't as careful as I should have been, and my center is a little wonky.  The center measured about 1" less wide in than the top and bottom.  Ouch!  I squared it up with the borders and am hoping it all quilts down okay.

I made this for our guild's service project this year.  We are making quilts for the Sieta Scholars.  Seita Scholars are kids who come to Western Michigan University from the foster care community.  They are kids who have aged out of foster care and often show up on campus with the clothes on their backs and a couple of bags full of stuff.  They are not well equipped with bedding, towels, lamps, alarm clocks, and all the stuff most typical kids get for graduation.  They simply don't have that kind of family support.  So, we are making quilts for their dorm beds.  I am thinking of trying to recruit some quilts from some of you bloggers for this project, if you are interested.  I will try to post all the particulars (like size) if you are interested.  We are also collecting blocks (and I can give the pattern for those) if you'd just like to donate a block or two.  Our guild will sew them into quilts.  But anyway, that's where this quilt will be going.

I asked one of the guild members who's a longarmer if she'd be willing to quilt it for me.  She said, "Yes, but better yet, why don't you come over to my house and quilt it yourself on my longarm?"  Hello!  I jumped at that opportunity!  Thanks, Cheryl!  I can't wait to do that!

So, both of my projects for retreat were made from jelly rolls (the 42" by 2.5" strips of fabrics).  I found this was a REALLY good idea for a retreat project.  They worked up fast, were fun, and didn't require a lot of concentration.  Believe me, concentration was in short supply between the shopping, chattering, eating, looking at everyone else's work, etc.  (At least for me!)

And speaking of everyone else's work, here are some completed or in progress quilts that were happening at the retreat:

This will be another quilt for the Sieta Scholars.

Look at all these quilts being laid out in the hallway!

Here is a close up of one I particularly liked.

And who doesn't love Santa?!

I have a soft spot for simple, elegant design like this.  Especially when it involves batiks.

I just love all the designs by Crabapple Hill Designs.  Love.  Them.  All.

And some lovely Dear Jane or Farmer's Wife going on.  Not sure which one, but I'm thinking it's Dear Jane.

That's a pretty good summary of retreat.  I'll do one more post about the road trip we took to a local quilt store one morning.  It's a wonder I got any sewing done at all on this retreat!  :-)

My cousin is being buried today.  I am feeling a little blue.  I wanted to be there for my aunt, uncle, and cousins, but I coudn't make another trip for the burial.  (He's being buried in another state from where the funeral was.)  But I am thinking of them and trying to think of happier days with my cousin.

See you tomorrow!

Until next time,

Mama Pea

Quilt Retreat in Shipshewana, Part 1

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for all your condolences on the passing of my cousin.  It has been a difficult thing and has given me lots of cause to reflect.  I'll share a little more about that later.

Right now, I'd like to try to get back in the saddle a little again.  I have so much to get caught up on!  You may remember that a while back I went on retreat with my quilt guild (the Kalamazoo Log Cabin Quilters).  This was toward the end of September.  Yes, that's how far behind I am!  We went to Shipshewana, Indiana for our retreat.  That's only about an hour from my house, so that was great.  Shipshewana is a very Amish area, so it's very quaint and a wonderful place to hang out.

Here is a picture of the room we were in.  It was HUGE, and the lighting was great.  We had 100 people from our guild come to the retreat.  We stayed at the Farmstead Inn.  It is like a conference center, so they had this big room for us, and we all had hotel rooms down the hallway.  It was just great.

Here is the view from teh other end of the room.  I was sitting down near the windows, but it really didn't matter, because the light was great everywhere in the room.

When we first checked in, there were these little goodie baskets for each of us.  They were gifts from teh local fabric stores.

This was from Lolly's, a pretty awesome fabric store.  More about that in a minute.  A neat new ruler.  Always love those.

And inside, a fat eighth, some chocolates, and a coupon for the store.  Yay!

And this coupon from Yoder Department Store, another pretty good fabric store (as well as awesome shoe store and anything else you can imagine....it's a true, old-fashioned department store!)

We went shopping right off the bat.  We started at Yoder's, but for some reason, I neglected to take photos there!  We then hit Lolly's.  Oh, my.  This is a great store!

They have almost every kind of fabric you can imagine.  I made a bee line for the civil war fabrics.  (But they also had batiks out the wazoo, moderns, 1930s reproductions, you name it!)  Loved these pin cushions.  Simple, yet effective!

Loved their wool.  Loved this sample block made up from the book Pennies From Heaven.  I have been eyeing this book every time I go into a quilt shop.  I mean for months now.  I finally caved and bought it.  In part, it's because I've loved watching what Sue is making from this book.  (Sue, since you moved your blog, I can't find it again.  Something is messed up in my reader and it just goes to your old one.  Please leave me a comment with your blog address so I can find you again!)  I need to make this, but it's going ot have to wait.  LOVE IT!

EDIT:  Sue e-mailed me and here is her URL if you want to see the lovely things she is making.  Thanks, Sue!

I wanted one of every fat quarter in this display, but I was a good girl.  I only chose one.

 

Lolly's is so big, their store spills into the lower level, too.  We each got to pick a free fat quarter from this boat.  That was fun to rifle through!

I did really well in this store, until I saw this.  It's one of Edyta Sitar's patterns.  It's called Eldon.  You all know I love her.  I fell in love.  Bought the pattern.  Bought the acrylic ruler to cut the star diamond shapes.  And yes, bought the fabric to make this, too.  I'm going to make it for my bed in our bedroom.  I just love it.  I will need to add another border to make it big enough, but this is going to be awesome.  I need to finish some other things before I allow myself to start on it, though.

This is a really awesome shop.  I mean like, destination quilt shop shop.  The whole town is.  So, if you are ever in that area, it's definitely worth the stop.  Plus, there are other quilt stores, antique stores, good Amish bakeries, etc.  you should check it out sometime!

Well, that's about all I have time for now.  I'll do two more posts about retreat, I think.  Next, I'll show you what people were working on.  Then, I will show you another cute shop we visited.  It was a really great, relaxing retreat.  I'm ready to go back right now!  :-)

Hope you are all well.

Until next time,

Mama Pea

How to Make Fabric Roses « The DIY Dish

via www.thediydish.com

Just another quick note, everyone....Kim and Kris from The DIY Dish have another cute video tutorial on how to make the pretty fabric flowers you see in the vase on your left. Cute and easy! Thought you might want to check it out.

Until next time,
Mama Pea