Stars and Squares, or Quiltfilia

For the last couple of days I've been suffering a severe attack of quiltfilia, a strong, unreasonable desire to quilt something.  One possible reason could be a visit Lynn and I paid to a little art gallery in Peninsula.  There were a few little quilts there, no more than about 2 by 3 feet, which were quite charming.  Their appeal was not at all reduced by the fact that none of the seams were straight.  So, I can probably do at least that well. 

I wanted something easy, but with a strong geometrical appeal.  I've thought about making a major quilt with a Star of David motif (no, I'm not Jewish, I just think it would be fun).  But this will be a minor quilt, so I can use easy stars.  I came up with a design I call "Stars and Squares":

Becky, my oldest daughter, is expecting her first baby in July.  Do you think this can be ready by then?  Stay tuned!



The Baby Quilt Finished

I spent almost all my free time for a couple of months working on the baby quilt, and I finished it!  My sister Barb came up with the idea of quilting letters and numbers in the blank squares of the bottom half.  Here are a couple of photographs:

The First Seam

I have actually started sewing this quilt! I sewed one seam!

It was tricky figuring out where I had left off. I had a set of pieces I cut out, but I didn't remember what square they were for! I looked through the design files until I found the correct one. Then I had the challenge of figuring out what square went where. I added numbers to the squares in the design, and then wrote the numbers on surgical tape and stuck the tape to the pieces.

Finally, I sewed my first seam. It joined a couple of the smaller pieces just above the center line of the square and a bit to the right. The pieces were the right size, and I carefully sewed right on the quarter-inch line. But the combined pieces were too short! By about 1/8 inch. So I took the seam out and tried again. Finally, on the 4th try, I got the pieces to end up the correct length.

The Baby Quilt

It's been a long time. My last post was in May of last year, and here it is March.

I went to the Lake FarmPark quilt show again, and bought more fabric. Some nice solid reds, and a pack of nice reddish fat quarters. When Lynn saw them, she put her foot down. "You are stalling long enough! You are going to sew this quilt! And to practice, you are going to finish Joshua's quilt."

Joshua, my grandson, is about a year and a half old. A year ago, we visited him and his mother in Yuma, AZ. (We live in Cleveland, OH.) While we were there, we went geocaching. I entered the coordinates into our GPS. Incorrectly. The coordinates I entered led us to a large flea market -- with a quilt store! Lynn and I both bought fabric. She bought a package meant to be made into a cloth book, with an accompanying wall hanging. Her plan was to make it into a quilt, with the wall hanging making the top half and the pages sewn together to make the bottom half. She bought some pale green fabric that went well with the pastel blues and other colors in the cloth book. She spent an afternoon at Liz's house beginning the quilt, but hadn't touched it since. She told me to figure out a way to finish it and finish it.

So, I've arranged the ten pages of the book, along with ten rectangles cut from the green fabric, into a 4-row, 5-column grid that is about the same size as the wall hanging picture. They're all sewn together. Lynn bought some more fabric, including pale blue with polka dots and pale green with polka dots. I'm going to use the green polka dots as an inner border around this grid, and then sew it to the top half and put a full border around it in the original pale green.

Square 14: Work begins

It's been a while since I've done anything on the quilt. I practiced a bit, as I talked about in previous posts. But I want to actually do something that might be used on the quilt itself. So, I have begun work on the first square that will actually get sewn. According to my original design, this is Square 14. It will be just under a foot on a side. It will be located just above and to the left of the center of the quilt.

As you can see from the picture above, this square is made up of five smaller rectangles. There is one line that crosses the entire square from left to right, dividing it into two rectangles. The top rectangle can be subdivided into two, with the left piece by itself being one and the other pieces making the other subrectangle. The bottom main rectangle can be divided into three subrectangles. So, I will assemble the five subrectangles (well, four, since one consists of a single piece), and then assemble the final square.

This will make this square easy to sew, but I think it sort of violates the spirit of the quilt. Therefore, this is the only square that is set up like this. None of the other squares (typing pauses while the blogger listens to a barred owl!) have lines that completely cross from one side of the square to the other.

So, now the pieces are cut out, and all I have to is put them together!

Gathering problem solved!

This morning, before I left for work, I glanced at my dining room table, where my sewing machine and cloth have been sitting for a couple of days. I noticed a couple of pieces of cloth I had sewn together a few days ago. The seam did not show the gathering problem I've been wrestling with recently. So, it's not something wrong with the machine. It's something that changed recently. I took a closer look at how the machine was threaded. I noticed that the piece the thread is supposed to go around to change directions from the spool to go down to the needle had a fairly fancy shape. And I noticed that the thread wasn't going around any of the fancily shaped parts of that device. I looked closer and saw that the thread was going through a couple of pieces on that device that squeezed the thread a bit, causing the overtension problem. I read the directions, put the thread where it was supposed to be, and sewed another seam. No gathering!

The gathering continues

I tried again last night with the little practice piece. First, I put a piece of masking tape on the sewing machine to mark 1/4-inch seam width. Then, I sewed together the two 3 1/2-inch squares. Marking the width helped; the seam was nice and straight. However, the width of the piece along the seam changed to 3 1/4 inches. The machine's tension setting is set to "auto". I'll try playing with that. If it can't be resolved, I may have to have the machine examined by a professional repair person.