Quilt #0002 Update

Yay, I finished all the machine work on Quilt #0002!  I just finished attaching the binding strip all the way around, and I'm here to tell you, figuring out how to measure and lay out the beginning and ending of the strip to seam them on the bias is not so entertaining at 1am.  It's much easier (and more fun) when one is a bit more rested.

Also, just for archival purposes and to satiate my obsessive side, I want to note here that I just started the second spool of Yli Machine Quilting Thread (500 yards).  I also got into the second spool of thread for Karen's quilt and bag, but I didn't break into the second until the bag.  I'm a bit chagrined that I didn't keep track of how many bobbins I wound on Karen's quilt, but on #0002 (for Grant), I started out winding 2, somehow thinking that would be plenty.  I ended up using 6 bobbins (although I haven't checked to see how much of the sixth bobbin is remaining.

I also want to keep a record of a stunningly helpful tidbit I picked up browsing a book today.  To keep the bobbin thread for getting tangled under the quilt when starting in the middle (where you can just pull it to the back), one simply needs to work a single stitch and then pull on the top thread to raise the bobbin thread through the quilt to the top where it can be dragged out of the way.  Awesome tip, but I wish I could remember which book I was perusing so I could give credit where credit is due.

I'm dead tired, so it's off to bed with me.

Well, that was stoopid

It's been two hours, and I still haven't stopped swearing at myself.  Grant's quilt has been coming along nicely; I was really in a groove filling in the short lines within each block of the split-rail fence pattern, stitching in the ditch like nobody's business.  I took a short break for dinner, but not without first folding up the blessed quilt.  Have you guessed it yet?  After dinner, I drew in my initials and the year for the beginning of my free-hand work, quilted the 2010 digits, and then paused before starting my initials to readjust the quilt in my lap and the work table.  And that's when the sweater began as I realized I had not quite unfolded the quilt all the way and had stitched "2010" through the bottom border AND the top border!  Fluff me sideways!  Just for the record, really nice, tight, even free-hand stitches are a nasty bitch to rip out, and I was sorely tempted to just keep going with the fold-over and turn it into a sleeping bag.  Sigh...

The good news is that the stippling in the border went extremely well, and once I again I must pause to allow myself the proper interval of time in which to be consumed with my own fabulousness.  I know stippling and meandering are some of the easiest free-hand techniques, but damn it's fun to do.  Okay, one last sprint to make binding strips and sew them on.  But rather than start the blind-stitch hem on the reverse right away, I may save that up to work on while Grant is in the hospital because it will be portable at that point.  This strategy would let me get started on a knitting bag, which has been consuming my imagination for several days now... but first the binding strips.

And a fine morning it is

My ankle was a little sore this morning as we were walking the doggies at 5:30am, which would normally not be such a good thing.  This morning, though, that sore ankle became a reason to skip the treadmill (or at least postpone it to later on), which gave me a nice solid block of time for some machine quilting on Quilt #0002, the one for Grant that matches the one for Karen.  I have the 10" blocks outlined, the inner border perimeter, and the outer border perimeter all done.  At this point, given how sticky my 50/50 cotton/bamboo batting is, I'm ready to pull the basting threads, and I am certainly happier quilting when I don't have them getting under foot.  Oh, that expression doesn't work here, because we want the basting threads to go under the presser foot; the problem is when they get snagged and go over the foot.

So after I pull the basting threads, I'll be ready to work the short quilt lines within each block, and then I'm going to do a free-hand meander for the outer border, and I'm glad I'm writing this, because I want to start the meander with my initials and the year, meandering all the way around, and then hooking up at the beginning of my initials again.

I also have to admit that I have quilted bags on the brain (oooh, I just re-read that and realized how deliciously ambiguous it is:  Am I thinking about quilted bags alot, or did I take some bags and quilt them to a brain?).  I sat staring this morning at Grant's quilt, folding edges over to imagine small knitting project bags or sock knitting bags.

And finally, I just checked on Karen's quilt, and it is on the truck and will be delivered before noon (local time), so within the next 90 minutes, Karen should get her chemo quilt, matching bag, and the chemo hats (courtesy of Kara's never idle hands).

One final addendum:  I started adding some doo-dahs to the blog, including a list of pictures of projects, both finished and in progress, and I decided the Quilt #00000001 silliness just wasn't so funny when it created link text that line breaks.  Thus, aesthetics win out over silliness (at least this time).

Pictures, yes, I know

I got all excited about taking pictures of the quilt, and I accidentally had my phone in "video" mode, so after a weird "why won't this take pictures video" was shot, I shot a video intentionally so I could pan across and zoom in.



And here are a few pictures of the bag and the quilt:

From Karen's Chemo Quilt

From Karen's Chemo Quilt

From Karen's Chemo Quilt

Some details on Quilt #0001

The quilt design is a rail fence pattern; there are four color groups, each with five fabrics. The strips of five fabrics in a color group are sewn together, and then square blocks are cut.  The squares alternate color and horizontal/vertical orientation across each row and down each column.  We chose all batik fabrics from Sew Sassy in Urbana, Illinois. Our four color groups were blues, greens, purples (but warm, red-hued purples), and reds (but cool, orange-reds).  Our inner border is a gold-orange batik with sweeping, distinct swirls, and the outer border is yet another batik, this one with a blue field with small, abstract flowers in golds, purples, and greens.  Some of the flowers have filled-in petals with interesting centers, but others are just outlines.

The batting we selected proved to be an interesting choice.  Kara's kids all love the exceptional drape and softness of a lightweight polyfil batting, but I had a quilt with less drape and a little more oomph in mind, although I didn't want it to be heavy.  A wool batting would have been a good middle ground, except Karen is allergic to wool.  We actually found an interesting compromise:  a 50/50 blend of organic cotton and bamboo.  This batting has a very interesting property that we cursed at first but have grown to love:  It's really, really sticky.  Before we knew just how sticky it was, we went on our merry way, smoothing out the backing on my (huge) dining room table, smoothing the batting over it, and then laying on the pieced top.  It sure felt all smooth from the top, so we pinned it with safety pins & then decided the machine quilting would go much better with basting threads to avoid rather than safety pins to avoid.  When we were well over half way done basting, we felt a wrinkle; and when picked up a corner to peek, we saw the backing was just riddled with wrinkles!  That's when the cursing started in earnest.  So out came the basting threads, out came the safety pins, up came the top & batting, and out came those blasted wrinkles.  As we pondered the wisdom of our $50 organic cotton / bamboo renewable resource batting, Kara realized the much maligned stickiness could also be our friend.  After de-wrinkling the backing and re-layering the batting, Kara realized we could grab the corners and just flip only those two layers to see the right-side of the backing and smooth out the wrinkles before flipping it back to add the top.  It worked great!  We also realized after the success of our second attempt that we could streamline the process by starting with the batting, laying the backing on it right-side up, then flipping it just once before laying on the top.

For the sake of expedience and sanity (important, ultimately, given my obssessive-compulsive nature and love of precision), we decided to machine quilt using the "stitch in the ditch" approach.  As Kara says, "If you can drive a car, you can stitch in the ditch."  The batting has an 8" quilting distance, so we didn't need to do anything for the 2" inner border and shouldn't have needed to do anything for the 4" outer border, but given Kara's love of hand-quilting, I wanted to give that a try, especially after she had the brilliant idea to outline one or two flowers in the border all the way around.  So, after a quick hand-quilting lesson, and after realizing what a pain-in-the-butt the tiny, tight curves were, and after stitching around just a handful of flowers, I abandoned that idea.  Also, there was just enough bearding to annoy my aesthetic, especially on the deep, midnight blue batik backing fabric.  So, after consultation with my favorite machine quilting book, I borrowed Kara's free-hand foot to machine-outline a flower or two every four to six inches.  I have three words for how it worked:  "FAB - U - LOUS" as my people would say.  It worked so well and was so much fun, I decided to free-hand machine quilt around each of the solid flowers, although I also decided to take some small liberties with the petals and omitted the notches in most petals because the detail was just too small.  And free-handing was so much fun, I decided to free-hand my initials and the year in the lower-right hand corner.

We decided to bind the quilt using the outer-border fabric, but shortly after that last lesson to get me blind-stitching the binding on the back, I got distracted with the bag (to be discussed in a future post), and then I had the reality check moment when a text from the brother-in-law mention that his wife's second chemo treatment would be on Friday (yikes, already!!), I had to call on Kara's generosity with her time yet again for helping getting that binding sew down.  Of course, I was quite silly in having her start in the opposite corner from me:  She should have started one side ahead of me, as she's three times as fast.  So, we had to worked sections out of order rather than each of us making a smooth trip around the perimeter, but it gave Kara opportunities to check that her six children hadn't gotten into too much mischief, and then toward the end it gave her an excuse to go make daiquiris.  Between the daiquiri and finishing my first quilt, I was giddy with excitement.  I was, as I wrote in a previous post, consumed with my own fabulousness.  

Quilt #0001 made a trip through the washer and dryer last night, and it's on its third trip this morning, and I think the four total cycles have achieved the desired breaking in, and I'm skeptical that a five trip is really necessary at this point.  The quilted flowers in the border puffed up nicely, and my cursive initials & year in the border pop out quite nicely, and I am uniformly thrilled to have learned how to do this and managed a 62" by 72" quilt for my sister-in-law in such short order.

More about the backstory

I'm not quite ready to jump on the treadmill this morning, but instead I'm going to write a bit about what has shaped up to be one of my least favorite summers, despite delving into an amazing new craft.  For what it's worth, this is my summer so far...

May was its usual glorious self for me this year:  School let out after the first week; I went to the Men's Spring Knitting Retreat at Easton Mountain in upstate New York; I accepted a knitting commission to knit an Orenburg Gossamer Palatine for a dear friend to replace a family heirloom (the lace shawl that had been worn by nine generations of women was either misplaced or stolen at the dry cleaners), and I rarely accept commission work; and I went with my LYS (local yarn shop owner) to a knitting and needlepoint trade show to help pick products for her shop for the coming year.  Up to early June, summer was going great.

On June 18th, though, all hell broke loose.  Within two weeks, the following things happened:

1. We found out my partner, Grant, has a tumor in his kidney.  His liver enzymes were elevated, we assumed from medications like lipitor with known potential liver involvement, but the ultrasound and C/T scans revealed the tumor in his kidney.  He has surgery on August 10th, a robotic assisted laparascopic partial nephrectomy.
2. We found out Grant's youngest brother's wife, Karen, has lymphoma.  She has her second chemo session on Friday.
3. We found out the mass removed from our dear doggie, Edwina's sweet little face (right between her right eye and snout) was a mastocytoma (mast cell tumor).  Since then, we have found out that all treatment options have a 40-50% chance of her still being with us in a year, we have to pack in ten years of loving and petting and walking and ball throwing in the next year.
4. A good friend's life fell apart when his relationship of nine years ended abruptly (and I was only too happy to talk with him at length about it because I got to talk about something other than cancer).
5. Another good friend dropped dead at his desk at work on July 5th when trying to get things caught up at the office.

But back to Quilt #0001, as this blog is about quilting.  When the brown stuff started hitting the fan back in late June, Kara very generously offered to make Karen a chemo-quilt with a matching bag to carry it in, as she did for another dear friend undergoing chemo last year, as long as I would help pick colors.  On July 5th, we met at Sew Sassy in Urbana to pick fabrics.  Kara  suggested that a really easy piecing pattern and machine quilting might let us get it done in a week, assuming I could help with ironing and such.  It very quickly morphed, however, into me helping her with all steps and getting two cutting mats going and two machines going on the piecing, but then a math error happened and everything changed.  First, the math error was mine.  The quilt pattern required 1/4 yard each of 20 fabrics (plus borders, backing, and binding), and the bag pattern required 1/8 of yard of 12 fabrics (plus lining & handle fabrics); we decided to get the extra bag yardage in all 20 fabrics so we could pick and choose which 12 to use after the quilt was pieced, so I added 1/4 + 1/8 and somehow got 5/8 as the answer.  So, we had 5/8 yards cut in 20 batiks.  After washing and ironing our fabrics, it was only when we started cutting two 2.5" strips crossgrain from selvedge to selvedge that we realized 5/8 of a yard was way too much; some quick research revealed that I cannot (accurately) add fractions, but that was a happy moment when I realized we have enough fabric to make a second quilt.  So, we immediately seized on the idea of making the second quilt for Grant to snuggle with while recovering from his surgery.  And honestly, I think I could easily cut a third quilt from what's left, but I'm not making a cancer quilt for Edwina:  She's famous for the vigor and relish with which she destroys dog beds, and I don't fancy quilting with ballistic grade nylon, even for a doggie as precious as Edwina.

So with fabric for two quilts, me helping Kara and learning about quilting became Kara teaching me on the first quilt & me making the second, but that idea lasted only a short while.  Once we started cutting strips, that was it.  I was hooked!  I don't think I would have made it through the crap-storm with knitting:  I can think too much when knitting because it's just too automatic.  Something new, though, that's a different story altogether. So now I have quilts on the brain 24/7 instead of cancer.  And I make a daily trip to the LQS (local quilt store), which in my case is the utter fabulous Sew Sassy in Urbana.  There are worse ways to cope.

Quilt #0001 is in the bag

Okay, so technically Quilt #0001 is not really in the bag because it is really in "Mr. Washie" as Kara would refer to the washing machine.  Momentarily, I'll be able to pop it into the dryer (Kara, would you like to weigh in here with a cute name for the dryer?).  I'm excited and thrilled.  I'm beyond thrilled:  I am consumed with my own fabulousness.

Back to the post title, though.  Quilt #0001 will soon be in the bag, literally, because I quilted a matching bag using 2.5" strips, the same size as the quilt.  Originally, we picked a bag pattern, which at first had me completely perplexed, but seeing my quizzical and totally bumfuzzled look gave Kara multiple occasions to quip, "Surely we can figure this out.  We have five degrees between us.  How hard could it be?"  The bag pattern was a lovely starting point for construction, but ultimately, I grabbed a quilted knitting back and just copied their construction, using the original pattern as a mere starting off point.  If I had the bag to do over again, I'd make it wider and shorter, because now I'm worried that Karen will be dragging the bag on the ground by the time Chemo is over for the day.

Well, it's time to go move things to the dryer, and then maybe I'll crash for the evening.  Tomorrow is a day I expect to be replete with machine quilting as Grant, my dear husband, started querying whether his quilt would be done in time for his convalescence and recovery from the robotic assisted laparascopic partial nephrectomy scheduled for August 10th.  Perhaps tomorrow should also include some photographs of Quilt #0001, along with it's matching bag, and perhaps Kara will remember to download the pictures of Quilt #0001 in progress and upload them for viewing here as well as sending them to me to print & include with Quilt #0001.

And I said I would never blog

I said I would never write a blog, but I will spare us all the platitudes about "never say never" and all that crap.  Maybe Kara wants to jump on the "never say never" bandwagon (but think about it, if the speaker followed his or her own advice, that expression couldn't be uttered).  So, I'm poised on the brink of finishing my first quilt and my first quilted bag, with a second quilt that has been pieced, layered, & basted so it's all set to be completed soon.  I guess it's time I start calling myself a quilter.  


This post is going to have to be short because I need to finished binding the seams on both the bag and quilt so they can be shipped overnight to Columbus, Ohio so that my sister-in-law will have the bag to carry the quilt to her second chemo treatment on Friday.