Heart of the Pines

A friend and fellow-blogger gently reminded me last week that this blog has been verrrry quiet.  Just as I got started, Hurricane Sandy blew through.   So we have some catching up to do!

The Heart of the Pines Quilt Guild in Gaylord, Michigan had their 2012 quilt show just before I left the lake.  (In fact, I'd scheduled my trip to be sure to be there!).

Quilt Show!

Antique Quilts

Surprise!
The quilt police must have missed this circa 1930's quilt -- thank goodness!  This quilter must have been stash-busting -- lots of different fabrics in the "black-and-white" blocks but most of the blocks have just one main fabric and one background fabric.  But every now and then there's a happy little surprise.

Do you see the pink center strip and one gray triangle in one of the blocks above?  Just below it is  mix of black and brown.   But my favorite is way over on one edge, where two cheery gold triangles light up the block!

There's a story behind this quilt, too.  It fell in the mud at an auction and they were getting ready to throw it away.  A quilter found it, and although she couldn't see the condition or design of the quilt, they let her take it home -- for free!  :-D   It took some serious cleaning, but now it's traveling the quilt show circuit.  The red reminds me of the red fabric in many of the quilts I saw at the Drummond Island museum.


Trapunto
This yellow quilt is so pretty!  It only uses three fabrics and two blocks, so the trapunto flowers really stand out -- literally and figuratively.  The detail is wonderful.

Grandmother's Flower Garden

Many quilters find hand-stitching little hexagons to be relaxing.  Personally, making anything bigger than a coaster would drive me nuts!  Just imagine the work that went into this quilt.  The fabrics are probably from worn-out shirts and dresses.  Each hexie is less than an inch across!  (Sorry it's so blurry; I still haven't mastered my iPhone).

 Just For Fun!

I love county fairs.  This quilt is called "County Fair."  The quilter must have had fun designing and making it. 

Every "picture" block is 3-dimensional.  My friend Beth would like the eyelet on the canning jars!

The ticket booth for the Ferris wheel looks like a cupcake!

Little mini-quilts are flapping on a clothesline at the Quilt Show.  Wonder which one got the blue ribbon?

Who wants a cow bell when she can wear pearls?

Applique

West of Baltimore
Pat Deitering

The colors in this floral quilt are gorgeous.  Some of the flowers are made with folded fabric to give them a 3-dimensional look.  The four corners are identical baskets; the rest of the blocks are unique.

"Took no time at all"?!?  This woman is amazing.  I guess working on a quilt like this would help make the Michigan winter fly by.

Here's one of the corners:

Mother-of-Pearl

I don't remember the name of this quilt, but the colors of the flowers remind me of mother-of-pearl.  The applique is stitched on with the edges of the fabric exposed, like a rag quilt, but with only a very narrow edge.

Paper Piecing

Amazon Star
Terry Gravila

This stunning star quilt called to me from the far end of the room.  I love blue and brown together, and the aqua near the center makes it look as if the star were exploding -- supernova!  Have you done any paper piecing?  I haven't, but may add it to my 2013 quilting goals.  At least the quilter admits that this was the most challenging project she ever undertook!

Detail of the Amazon star, machine pieced and long-arm quilted.

Christmas Star
Sylvia Zamoyski

Another star quilt, also machine paper-pieced.  I like how she also used the background fabric in the stars, so the points look as if they were floating.

Mixed Media

Cherry-Chocolate
Janet Bonarski

Not too sure why this quilt went into the "mixed media" category, but it is different!  It took the quilter two years to make at a block a month.  She designed it herself.  It uses only two fabrics, brown and red,  with solid squares and pieced blocks in seeming random order.

Each block is quilted separately.  What is really nice is that the red squares were quilted in brown, and the brown squares in red.

Machine-Pieced

The Pieced-Tie Quilt
Terry Gravila

The pieces for this field of flying geese were meticulously cut and prepared by Joanne Harris, but she passed away in 2003 before sewing the quilt.  Terry Gravila received the "kit" and completed it in 2012.  The quilting is a Baptist Fan design.

 

I hope you're enjoying these lovely quilts!  I'm still without power 5 days after Hurricane Sandy blew threw, so my computer time is limited.  I'll be back with more photos from the quilt show in a few days.

Teeny-Tiny!

Itsy-Bistsy Teeny-Weeny Yellow Half Square Triangles!

This week has been my personal quilting retreat in Michigan (again).   I spent my last few days at home cutting the basic pieces for 6 weeks' worth of Barrister's Blocks.  The blocks are 6-1/2" unfinished, and the units are getting tinier as the Sow-Along progresses.  (I was a good girl and completed 10 blocks for the Otsego Lake quilts before I started on these).

Sorry for some of the blurry photos.  Cell phone vs. camera.  You understand.

Chained Star

I bought some seam guides at the quilt store in town.  I've tried tape, moleskin, whatever, without noticeable improvement in my seam accuracy.  But these little guys do help.  Count 'em up -- the four-patches are composed of 1" squares (finished).

I'm not thrilled with the yellow/brown squares that march up from the lower left, but the seams and points came out great.

Tic Tac Toe

The finished squares and HSTs in this block are also just 1".  The block was going great -- until I sliced the HSTs for the final corners of the Monkey Wrench unit the wrong way.  Oops!  Now I'll have to finish this one when I get home.

Gentleman's Fancy

I love this block, plus we were instructed to make the Flying Geese using a different method that I'd tried before.

I cut rectangles from the yellow, then sewed the light squares along the diagonals and trimmed them off.



This method seemed to give me better results than what I usually do (sew 2 squares on the diagonal onto a larger square).  Maybe it was just luck.









Unlike the 3-squares method, this one left me with some small triangles that just cried out be be made into HST units.  I didn't think too much about how useful they would be until after I sewed and pressed them. 














The HSTs came out well, too -- when I squared them up, the only trimmings were the dog-ears.

But tiny!  Oh, my!  1-1/4" unfinished -- that'll be 3/4" after they're sewn.  I have NO idea what to do with them.  Barbie quilt?!?  Postage-stamp quilt?  TBD.

Carrie Nation

All squares, and strip-pieced to boot.  Hallelujah!  Usually we are told to cut squares of whatever size and go from there.  This time we cut strips, sewed the strips together, and then cross-cut them.  The small finished squares are 3/4".   Hmm, that gives me an idea for those little yellow-and-white units!

These fabrics were a real find.  I got them in the little LQS in downtown Gaylord, one of those stuff-a-bag deals.  I like the different kinds of leaves, and the contrast between the warm brown/pick squares and the cool background fabric.

Mosaic

For whatever it's worth, the block that I'm using for the Otsego Lake bed quilts is also called Mosaic, and it looks nothing like this.  It would be nice to have some kind of pattern-recognition software that could identify a block pattern and tell you all the different names it goes by!

This block is OK technically, but the colors just don't work.  Everything looks just, well, medium.  Blah.  Part of it is the photograph, a bit overexposed.  But the floral does nothing and the blue should be stronger.  IMHO.  But I probably won't re-make it unless it looks totally horrible when it's time to assemble the final quilt.

Darting Bird

This was more fun to make than I'd expected -- a nice way to use several fabrics without being completely scrappy.

This coming weekend is a big quilt show right across the lake.  Guess where I'll be?!?

Sunflower Stars!

My One-Block Wonder quilt top is done -- I just had to share it with you!

The inner border is a deep gold.  The lovely Colleen from my favorite LQS found the fabric for the outer border -- on the sale rack!!  It's a slightly uneven stripe with gold, rust, green and black.  It looks like a piano key border, but no sewing required (except to attach it to the quilt, of course!).

I was stumped about where to spread it out, ended up taping it to the back fence.  Note to self:  seek a better system.  Removing the tape pulled the loose threads out of the border! 

This oblique view is washed out by the bright sun, but the stars really pop.  It's amazing how these quilts change when you look at them from different angles.

Now I have to figure out how to quilt this baby.  I've poked around on the web for ideas, but nothing really called to me.  Let me know what you think.  You don't have to sign in on Google and join the blog to comment!  If you have a quilting friend, ask her (or him) to look at this and make a suggestion!

Oooh, yes!

Irresistable!

The local Ben Franklin store in Gaylord, Michigan, is folding.  My sister-in-law told me about it two weeks ago; she said that everything in the store was 30% off.  The store carries a lot of quilting cottons, so as soon as I got here, off to town I went!  Sad to see that the window that in July was touting AccuQuilt and many area quilt shows now looks like this.

Still...

So look at the prices today!

Open the door and find that the inventory is still quite large.  These shelves are all autumn/Thanksgiving fabrics.

The rear wall is all novelty fabrics, with an emphasis on "north woods" themes -- fishing, hunting, canoes, woods, cabins with smoking chimneys.

 Lots of kids' fabrics -- cartoon characters, cars, sports, princesses.

As if all that fabric wasn't feast enough, this sign was posted in the fabric section:

If you can't read it, the little note says that you get 40% off PLUS an extra 50 cents per yard!

Many of these are good fabrics, too:  Thimbleberries!  Moda!



To think that someone at my Simple Sampler class last week noted that you don't usually see much red in Thimbleberries.  Huh!





















I've been on the lookout for something with a black background to make another One-Block Wonder [kaleidoscope] quilt.  There wasn't enough of this fabric to make a lap-size quilt, but maybe I can get a few hexagons out of it for a table runner or some pillows.










This is what I ended up buying -- end-of-bolt for all four, so the most expensive fabric (the Moda) was only $8.50 per yard. 

According to one of the employees, the store will only be open for another week or two.  Guess I'll stop in every couple of days to see if the prices drop further.  There are still 3 other shops in town, one with traditional quilting fabrics and oodles of pre-cuts, one with more modern fabrics, and a Hobby Lobby. 

Enough talk about quilting -- time to do it!  Unfortunately, it turns out that I somehow took all my bobbins and good thread home in July, so back into town I must go.  Fun this morning; now, not so much.

The Kaleidescope Adventure Continues!

The One-Block Wonder Class is so much fun!  I can't imagine doing a project like this without a few other people in a class to exchange perspectives.

So, I got all those triangles cut and spend quite some time figuring out the best placement of each group to create a hexagon.  Then I sewed them all together, 3 at a time, to create half-hexies.

First, sew 2 triangles together from each set of six.  Make sure that you keep track of where the points are going to meet in the center of the hexagon (I did have to rip out a few seams...).  Press the seams open (not to the side).

Then sew a 3rd triangle to each of the triangle pairs that you just made, again making sure that the center points meet and pressing the seams open.

 This can all be done by chain-piecing.  You just have to be careful to keep each hexagon in order!  You'll end up with two half-hexies that you pin together.

At the second class, we all arranged our hexagons on a piece of batting, then started moving them around to find a layout that we liked.  This was stressful for me, because I didn't think that my fabric pattern was working.  But everyone in the class liked it!  :-D  And everyone in the class (well, except one person) hated their fabric, too.  But guess what -- all of the quilt layouts looked WONDERFUL!  Can you see the stars and swirls starting to form? People suggested different ways to arrange the hexagons, and everything started to come together.

 
I'm so disappointed that I didn't take pictures of the other projects -- they were so nice, and every one was completely different.  I hope everyone brings their completed quilt tops back for show-and-tell, so I can share these beautiful creations.

Now to start putting everything together.  Each hexagon is arranged so that there is a continuous seam line vertically (line them up so that there is a point at the top, not a flat side).   In one row, the line is between hexagons; in the next, it's down the middle (that's why we didn't sew our hexagons together before we arranged them).  I don't know if you can see this in this photo.  I need to figure out how to add graphics to these photos -- little arrows and comments. 

 When I got all my hexies lined up again at home,  I started sewing them into vertical "rows" (AKA columns).  I ended up with 16 vertical strips and tons of leftover hexagons and half-hexies.  I'm seeing a couple of table-runners in my future!

All my columns are sewed; now it's time to press all those seams open.  Ugh!  Once that is done, I'll sew the columns together and the basic top will be done!  

I'm off to Memphis for my grandson's 6th birthday (how did that happen?!?!).  When I get back, just wait until you see the border fabric that I'll be using!