Progress on The Ornamental Kale Block

I have been stitching in the evenings and making good progress on my Ornamental Kale block. I did have to re-arrange my pieces more times than I liked to get the balance just right on both sides-there are a LOT of pieces to fit on this block! This is definitely the hardest block on this quilt! 

If I keep up this pace I will have this block done before Christmas and just may be able to start another.

Last week my friend Pam came to visit. Since she is also making the When The Cold Wind Blows quilt, she brought her blocks and we spread both of ours out in the guest bedroom. She put hers on the bed and I spread mine on the floor. The pics are not good because it was night, I used my cell phone, and I had to stand in a chair to get the whole quilt in the picture-but I wanted to show you what we have gotten done. 

Pam's background fabric is much darker than mine and really makes her applique "pop". Each block's fabric is different and they are all sampler pattern fabrics by MInnick and Simpson. I love the way it looks--so old fashioned and yummy!!! As you can tell-Pam is on the very last block-she is very driven and gets more done in a day than I do in an entire week.

These are my blocks. I still have two more to go when I finish this one. But I am really excited about getting this quilt done. As I work on each block I think about how I want to quilt it. I'm coming up with fun ideas and hope that I'm able to pull it off when the time comes!

The Holly Leaf block

I have FINALLY finished the sixth block of my When The Cold Wind Blows (Love Letters) quilt. This one took me seven months-but not because it was all that hard or time consuming, but because I put it down for about five months and didn't work on it at all! That is not the way to get a quilt block done in a timely manner. 

This block didn't offer a lot a challenge-it was pretty much the same shape over and over again. But that's okay because by the time you have appliqued that many holly leaves down, you have pretty much perfected the shape. There are 73 pieces of fabric to applique in this block-the most of any block in the quilt. And that is a LOT of applique to go into a 28" square. 

The circles were a lot of fun to make.  I used Karen Kay Buckley's Perfect Circles to make them. They were the easiest circles I have ever done-at 7/8" each they were small, but not tiny. And Perfect Circles makes them so easy to do. I not only made the 34 I needed for my block, I made another 34 circles and mailed them to a friend that was working on the same block! If you haven't tried Perfect Circles, I highly recommend them. You can see tutorials and instructions for them online-just give them a Google. 

Here is a close up of some of the circles that I made for this block. They are about as perfectly round as I can get an applique circle. 

The next block I am making is called the Ornamental Kale. It has 71 pieces to it, which seems like it would be a snap after the 73 on the Holly Leaf, but these are layered flowers, which is always a bit more work. Here is a picture of the finished block from the book.

And here is a picture of the placement diagram. It gives you a better idea of exactly how many pieces are in each of those flowers! 

I have all of my pieces cut out and I'm ready to place them on my background today. I hope to start working on it tonight while I'm watching Grey's Anatomy. I have set a goal to have this block finished by the end of the year. We have Thanksgiving at my sister-in-law's house, so that frees up some time for me since I'm not hosting here. So, I just have Christmas gifts to make, shopping, decorating, wrapping, cooking.........

Yeah, maybe I need to rethink that self-imposed goal.

Love Letters Quilt-Block #5

I have been a bad blogger lately-but I have been sewing quite a bit. I don't seem to be able to find a balance between the two activities.

Two weeks ago I finished The Rose Hip-it's the fifth block of my Love Letters quilt. Now that it's completed, I am officially more than half way through! Each block I finish is a milestone for me. I am loving needleturn applique-I am more than willing to forego other activities (like cooking and cleaning) in order to have more time to stitch on my block.

These are the five blocks I have completed so far-in the position they will be on the finished quilt. I think it's crazy that they aren't in order in the book-but I'm sure there is a reason for it. So, I am stitching them the way they are presented. 

Here is the Rose Hip block. There were two pieces to all the flowers and buds-a total of 52 applique pieces to this block. 

Detail of a flower and bud.

These leaves are the easiest to stitch.

I tucked the contrasting tip of the bud underneath. It was a challenge to get it in the right place!

This was my favorite flower on this block. The shape was simple to stitch. 

I have been stitching away on the sixth block and should have it finished by the end of the week. The more blocks I finish, the more I want to stitch on them. I hope that I have this quilt finished (including quilted!) by the end of the year. There! I said it! So, that's my goal. Now everyone will know if I meet it! 

Happy Quilting!!

Love Letters Block #4

I am still busy with my applique. But, I have not been in my quilt room to sit at my sewing machine at all because of it! That's changing. Now that I have finished block #4 it's time to put this project aside while I sew some gifts for Christmas. I am going to be making something for each of my 6 granddaughters. None of my projects are quilts-they are all sewing/craft ideas-but I will be blogging about them anyway. 

But, I digress. This post is about my Love Letters quilt. Each of these blocks is getting a little more challenging. There are more pieces to applique and the shapes are more difficult. But, I am enjoying them so much. 

I am now finished with The Coxcomb. It took me six weeks to complete this block, but with Fall holiday activities and Christmas around the corner, that's not too bad. I have four blocks down and five to go. 

I love all the flowers with two parts to them. They are twice the work, but they are also twice as nice. 

Here are my four blocks together. This is not their positions on the finished quilt, I just have them this way for the photo. 

Here are a few detail shots from previous blocks. My work is getting better as I progress, so don't be too harsh in your judgement of my applique!

My next block is The Rose Hip. It has 45 pieces (plus stems). I have already copied all of the applique pieces onto freezer paper. I need to get them all cut out and get started. Maybe I will work on that in the evenings as I watch those great Christmas movies on the Hallmark channel. I am a sucker for a sappy, holiday flick.

Happy quilting and happy holidays. 

Love Letters Quilt-Block 3

I am already finished with block #3-The Winter Rose! Less than a month! I appliqued on the plane, in the car, in the hotel room, while watching TV, as soon as I got up in the morning and before I went to bed at night. Are you seeing how much time I spent every day on it?

I have all the pieces cut out for block #4, but house cleaning, a quilt show, my youngest daughter's birthday, some babysitting, a soccer game, etc are going to make this block slower going. But, I am loving this quilt, so I think I will still be working on it as often as possible. 

Love Letters Quilt-Block #2

This quilt is definitely slow-going! I first blogged about it here. I am finally finished with block number two. Block one took me one year-block two took me only nine months! I have started on block three and am hoping to have it finished in the next six weeks to two months. I am really loving needle-turn applique and want to work on this all the time. 

Right now my quilt room is a hot mess. My husband is making and installing a wall of cabinets for me to store my stash out of the sunlight. I will post pictures when he is finished-I think it's going to be gorgeous! In the meantime, I am doing handwork because I can't get to my sewing machine, cutting table or fabric. So maybe I stand a chance of getting this block done in record time.

Block 2  The oak leaf 

Deer in my yard yesterday morning. I would

love them even more if they didn't eat my plants!

Happy Quilting.

A Portable Grid

In my last post I talked about how I use my white cutting mat with black lines to help lay out my applique block. If the mat you have is too dark to use this way and you don't want to buy a white one (mine is quite large), I have an alternative solution for you. It is inexpensive AND quite portable. A friend of mine who lives in England looked everywhere for a white mat and this was what we came up with.

I went to Jo-Ann's and purchased an interfacing with a 1" grid printed on it. If you order it online you have to buy a whole bolt, but in the store it is sold by the yard. The blue grid lines printed on it were not quite dark enough for the purpose I needed, so I drew over them with a fine black Pigma Micron pen. Just be sure to put some type of paper under the interfacing to absorb what bleeds through.

Here is what it looked like after I had drawn over several rows. It will give you an idea what the finished product looked like. 

Love Letters Quilt

I love applique. I really, really love the look of it. I have always been envious of anyone who made applique quilts. Through the years I have taken classes and tried many methods of applique. None of them gave me the look that I wanted-which was needle-turn. So, finally I bit the bullet and decided that I was not getting any younger and if needle-turn was the look I wanted, then I needed to learn to do it. And lots and lots of practice would make me better at it. 

I have a quilting friend named Anne (I call her Annie) who's needle-turn applique is so gorgeous that it almost makes me cry to look at it. Her points and curves are as near to perfection as it gets. So, I went to her to learn to needle-turn. She is a wonderful teacher and I am loving it!! I am not nearly as good as Annie-but she has given me the love of needle-turn. I am enjoying the relaxing feel of fabric and needle in hand. 

For my first ever needle-turn project, I decided to go BIG! I have heard that the smaller the applique piece, the more challenging it can be to handle. So, I figured the reverse must be true. I found this beautiful book by Blackbird Designs and knew that this had to be my first applique quilt. 

The quilt that I am making is called Love Letters. I liked the color palette immediately  because it matches the colors in one of my guest bedrooms, so I decided to just go with it. This quilt appealed to me because each of the blocks is a 28" square, so the quilt finishes at 84" X 84" and the individual pieces are not tiny.

Love Letters

The first thing I did was start collecting fabrics. When working on a project that requires lots of fabrics I like to carry samples with me as I go to local quilt shops or quilt shows. Anne taught me this trick of cutting small pieces and attaching them to a note card or paper. Here was my working sample page.

I wanted to make sure that my background fabrics did not clash and that I got a good variety of fabrics-I like to have large and small scale prints and maybe a check or plaid thrown in. Eventually I had gathered a nice variety of fabrics and was ready to begin.

There were several things that I did before I ever began my cutting and stitching. The first was a trip to Staples. I had the spine cut off of my book and had it spiral bound. It is so much easier to trace applique patterns when the pages of the book lay flat. Second, I made reverse copies of the pages that had patterns for leaves and flowers that needed to be reversed.

My first task for this quilt was to make bias tape. Each of the blocks uses it for the stems and the center block uses it for the wreath. I needed 6 1/2 yards of 3/8" bias tape and 11 yards of 1/2" bias tape. I make my bias strips using the "tube method" (you can find videos and instructions on the internet, if you don't know how) and Clover bias tape makers. I then wrapped my bias tape onto cardboard squares for future use.

The first block that I made for the quilt was my "learning curve" block. There were some things that I decided to do differently on subsequent blocks. I learned that I cannot pin all of my applique pieces into place at once and stitch on a block this large and not get poked and scratched by all the pins. But because all of the pieces need to be placed ahead of time to know they are going to fit and be symmetrical I came up with my own way of doing my blocks. 

I traced each applique pattern onto freezer paper (if I needed four of a particular leaf, I traced four freezer paper leaves), cut it out on the stitching line, ironed it onto the FRONT of my fabric, traced the pattern onto the fabric, cut each piece out leaving a scant 1/4" seam allowance and then removed the freezer paper. I numbered each pattern piece and it's corresponding fabric piece with the same number. 

There is a placement diagram of each block in the book with each square representing 1"-this is SO helpful. I took my background fabric and placed it on my white cutting mat. I can see the 1" grid lines through my background fabric enough to make it easier to place my applique pieces. Next I use my freezer paper pieces and place them onto my background fabric where I want the applique pieces to be. This allows me to move them slightly and fit all the pieces on. I pin each piece in the center when I have them all placed and then I take it to the ironing board and I iron all the freezer paper pieces to my background fabric.

You can see the grid lines through the background fabric.

I then trace all of my freezer paper pieces onto my background fabric using a Pilot Frixion pen. (I know that there is some controversy in the quilting world about whether or not to use these pens on your quilts, but I have not had any trouble with it and will continue to use them.) After I have traced all of the pieces, I number each piece on the background fabric as I remove the freezer paper. 

Lastly, I baste my bias stems down so that the pins don't poke me and come out as I am stitching other pieces. After all of this, I am ready to begin my applique!

I started this quilt in December, 2010. I took the book, freezer paper and fabrics with me to the mountains on a post-Christmas vacation. I traced and cut out all the freezer paper pieces that I needed for the first block-the Hedgeapple. I worked on it some off and on through the next few months, making my way slowly through it (it's my first needle-turn and I was a little apprehensive about it.) In December, 2011 I took it back to the mountains with me again and finished the first block! At this rate, the quilt will take me more than 9 years to complete! I started the second block while I was there and stitched on it a little bit every day the first few weeks of January. Other things got in the way and it slowly made it's way to the background, so I am still working on it. 

The Hedge Apple Block

After I am finished stitching the block I press it lightly with my iron and the heat will remove all traces of the Frixion pen.

The Bur Oak Leaf (so far)

A Quilt Guild Meeting and a Trunk Show

Last Thursday I went with my friend, Judy, to a quilt guild meeting. We have both been looking for a guild that "meets our needs" and so we decided to attend a meeting with a guild that is half way between our homes. I think we have found it! We both had a great time and the ladies seemed very genuine and welcoming.

The program for the meeting was a trunk show by Jane Gorder, who is a prolific Baltimore Album quilter. Her knowledge of antique Baltimore Album quilts was vast. She shared with us about her visits to museums and shows to see antique ones. She has also studied and taken classes with some of the great appliquers in the quilt world. Now she is an authority in applique and Baltimore Album quilts. I loved her show! Thanks, Jane-you are a talented lady.

And then the quilts came out! They were exquisite! She does all needle-turn applique and then hand quilts them all.  I was in awe.  I have been working on my first needle-turn applique project ever and after almost a year and half, I am still on my second block (more about that in a later post)

I apologize for the quality of the pictures. I need to either learn to take better pictures with my phone or remember to take my camera with me. And I was standing in the back of the room, so you get to see the backs of heads too. 

Jane is the lady standing at the far left, in the green shirt.

This quilt is one of the small ones she showed us-yet no detail

is missing-it was exquisite!

Jane told us that traditional Baltimore Album 

quilts do not have sashing between the blocks. This 

quilt, with it's large center block, took my breath away.

This quilt also has blocks of different sizes. My 

pictures do not do justice to her talent.

Here is the traditional 5X5 setting (you can't see 

the bottom row in my pic) of Baltimore Album quilts.

I have never seen one done in blue and white 

before. I think this is a stunning quilt!!

Look how tiny these pieces are!!

This is my favorite one of them all. I am such

a sucker for red and green quilts. I also love 

the border on this one.

Thanks, Jane, for a great show. You have inspired me to get my needle and applique work  out of hiding and work on it again.