WIP Inventory

Having finished a couple of small quilts, I decided to take inventory of my current works in progress and their current status.  I am hoping that this will help me see that progress is being made during the spring and summer slowdown. These are just the quilts I have been working on in the last few months, and not the other unfinished projects that are stored away.

Some people might be overwhelmed by the number of projects listed here, but I really enjoy getting to choose which project I want to work on. Since they are not standing in a straight line, being worked on one at a time, in order, when progress is made on one quilt, the whole group is making progress.

Here they are in no particular order.

 

Drunkard's Path

Ethnic Drunkard's Path was started in August 2003 and it is the closest to completion. It is already basted and a lot of the dark purple and blue spaces have been quilted.  I need to finish quilting it and bind it.  It is a fairly big quilt -  a big lap quilt. 

 

Colonial Bricks

 

Colonial Bricks was started September 2018. It has been pieced and the backing and binding fabric has been chosen and cut. The backing needs to be wider, so I am piecing the leftovers to insert to make the backing wider.

 

Sunlight in Winter

 

Sunlight in Winter was started December 2018. I am making the blocks one half yard of yellow fabric at a time. I used up half a yard of the butterfly fabric, and half a yard of the grunge fabric. I had a whole yard of the grunge fabric and since it is the darkest yellow, I decided to use that half yard to make the squares because I think the squares will show the pattern and it is my darkest yellow.  All of the yellow fabrics are very similar. I like that look but will consider adding more patterned yellows when I am closer to completion. I will not make the whole blocks until all of these subblocks are done.

 

Uncommon and Unexpected

 

Uncommon and Unexpected was started February 2019 as a part of a quilt along.  One of the things I really liked about the original quilt is how the cornerstones made the sashing look like circle dancing around the squares, and my eye moved from one overlapping circle to another.  My quilt does that, but the diagonally placed squares, and the striped fabric, and the small number of blocks stop the eye from bouncing too easily at the circles.  I want to add more blocks to help show more of that movement. Some of the border has been pieced but I am still thinking about how I want to accomplish that.

 

ATC Holder

 

ATC Holder was started November 2018. It doesn't look like a lot of progress has been made on this, but there has been.  All of those photo corners have been cut and pressed. I think that was the hardest part.  I need to strip piece the cornerstones and once I do that, I think I will be able to piece this pretty quickly. There isn't any decision making left on this quilt until the center has been pieced. It is deliberately plain to let the ATCs stand out.

 

Circles 365

 

Circle 365 was started November 2015, and I have been sporadically working on this quilt since then. I am putting the circles together into the quilt top when I have enough, and it is 2/3rd done. The quilt is getting pretty big now so I have decided not to take it out since my blog readers have seen this quilt grow from time to time.

 

Fourth Rail

 

Fourth Rail was started January 2019 as a leader / ender to use up scraps.  The layout has not been decided but this one looks pretty interesting to me. I have a lot of pieces already cut so it is just a matter of sewing them together.

 

Stitchery 

You probably forgot about this stitchery, but it is pretty close to completion. It's been a while since I worked on it. The first time I mentioned it on my blog was August 2018, so it was started about then, but I  bought the kit from the thrift store a long time before that. It is made with yarn.

 

Seiring Genealogy Book

 

I don't think I have shown you this genealogy book, but I started it shortly after I finished the Priest Genealogy Book in December 2017. I have the pages all ready and all the genealogy information has been printed. I need to make the cover, add the genealogy printouts to the pages and embellish the pages a bit more. The cookie box is going to be used in the quilted cover to give it more stability.

 

Cultural Fusion Rail Fence

I showed the Cultural Fusion Rail Fence as part of the Dust Off a Quilt Book Blog Hop. It was started November 2015.  The quilt top is done and the backing and binding fabric has been chosen.

 

Be a Diamond

I will be taking a part of this blog hop. My day is April 25. I want to keep it simple so this will be my April mini of the month.

 Bunny Parade

I am giving you a sneak preview of this quilt which I finished yesterday. This is a free pattern from Moda Bakeshop called Bunny Quartet. The designer of the pattern also provided a tutorial for a carrot on her blog, which I used as you can tell from the photo.  So my bunnies are a trio and not a quartet. She changed the name to Easter Parade, but since I have Elephant Parade quilt in the works, I am going to call it Bunny Parade.

Since it is a bunny quilt, I will show the whole thing to you on Easter. Since the diamond quilt will be my April mini of the month, Bunny Parade is my May mini of the month, so I will also show it to you again in May as a reminder. I don't want you to get tired of it so I am only giving you a preview now.  I know from personal experience that if you buy a Christmas present in July, it still counts as a Christmas present, even if you can't wait and give it to the recipient in July.

 

Quilt Statistics

 Since I pulled up my spreadsheet to record the finish of the bunny quilt and give you the start date for all these quilts, let's talk about the stats, shall we?  I have started 127 quilts and have finished 99 quilts, which is a 78% completion rate.

It takes me an average of 242 days to complete a quilt. This number has gone down, mostly because of all the mini quilts I have been making lately.  A lot of my quilts get done much quicker than 242 days, but I also tend to pick up projects that needed an incubation period. When I get an old UFO completed, that average number of days to completion goes up, but that won't stop me from working on my UFOs. The stats are there to record my progress, not to tell me what to do.

 

15 Minutes to Stitch: Week 11

I spent this week making the Bunny Parade quilt. I also took inventory of all of my works in process.

15 Minute sessions of stitching this week: 7 out of 7
15 Minute sessions of stitching this year: 76 out of 76 sessions
Success Rate: 100%

I checked my results from last year, and I was at 100% on March 18th, so I am on track for this year.  The following week, the 25th, I sewed 2 out of 7 days. I'll see if I can beat that this year. It doesn't sound like a high bar to reach.

Linked to:
15 Minutes to Stitch
What I Made on Monday Yes I did make all of these today, why do you ask?
Peacock Party

Time to Quilt

When I showed you my progress on Uncommon and Unexpected, I thought I was done with the quilt top and just needed to quilt it.  There are a lot of quilts in the queue to be quilted and that is where I need to be making progress. I decided to clean up the space since I wouldn't be needing any fabric, cutting supplies, etc.to quilt.

Before we go any further, can we just stop and admire those stars in the quarter triangles used as cornerstones? So many of them turned out to be whole stars. I don't think I could have centered them like that if I had tried to do it.

We now resume regular programming. When I was putting things away, I saw how many quarter square triangles I had left over. Normally leftover blocks get saved for the back of the quilt, but I decided that I would use them for the front as a border. 

I wonder if my quilt tops are getting bigger because I am procrastinating quilting them. Anyway, so now, I am auditioning layouts and fabric for a border.

15 Minutes to Stitch: Week 9 

My time this week has been spent going through the master bedroom and deciding whether each thing that is in there is worthy of staying in the house. I am keeping most of everything, because the bedroom was the first room I ever did this process on, but this time, I am mostly finding homes outside of the bedroom for a lot of the things. I really want to minimize what is in this room to eliminate allergens and make it truly a space for respite.

There were even a couple of days where I forgot to stop and sew!  I was able to more than make up the time at other days of the week and have the quilt top (minus the border) done for Uncommon and Unexpected. 

 15 Minute sessions of stitching this week: 7 out of 7
15 Minute sessions of stitching this year: 62 out of 62 sessions
Success Rate: 100%

Linked to:
15 Minutes to Stitch, Week 9

Do you have any opinions on the border? Anything you particular liked or didn't like?

The Imposter

When I saw the quilt Sujata showed in her Uncommon and Unexpected post, I was very excited about making this quilt. Here's an improv quilt I can make just by looking at it closely.

For some reason though, some of it was just TOO improv for me.  I didn't study it to see what parts were bothering me, but maybe because the black pieces don't seem properly balanced in the quilt.  Maybe it was because I had been watching Lynne carefully choosing the layout of her Parade of Zebras quilt.

Sujata had shown a layout of how to make this quilt, and I decided to make it with properly trimmed blocks like the Cultural Fusion quilt. See the sashing on the top left side, to the right of the brown square?  See how the brown is part of the cornerstone but also part of the sashing?  I liked how same fabric is used for the cornerstone and the sashing. Sujata is doing that by making lozenge shapes instead of quarter triangles.

I could mimic that by using the same fabric in the cornerstone as the sashing. It would look like it was the same piece but it wouldn't really be, and wouldn't require any inset seams.

I made a few of those, but then I realized that instead of trimming away the excess and sewing it back on, I could just combine the cornerstone and sashing, then trim the combined piece to 6 and a half inches so it would fit properly. I had made the cornerstones improv and big enough that this was easy to do. I only did that for a few blocks because I wanted it to look like a mistake instead of a deliberate design choice.

If you had told me oh so many years ago that I was trying to deliberately add mistakes in a quilt, I would have laughed at you.

I decided to balance out the colors of the big squares and then let the sashing and cornerstones fall where they may to keep the improv, but not too improv look.

That picture is on the design couch. Do you see how it is rudely pushed aside the drunkard path I am supposed to be quilting?

But as I was sewing, I kept moving around the pieces, and wound up with a very planned looking layout for the big squares. This is why I can't spend a lot of time on the layout - I change too much as I sew. I did well in making sure the pieces were being sewn as they were laid out, but as I sewed, I kept changing my mind about the layout.

I pressed the blocks and even picked up the seam ripper and took off piece in the middle so I could make it the right size before even thinking about it.  This is very unusual for me, because I usually think through the necessity of pressing or ripping before I do it, and this time it just happened.  I had to force myself not to press the blocks and nest seams. I don't need good points for this quilt. It is a quilt that just refused to be improv.

Uncommon and Unexpected

When I had looked at the book Uncommon and Unexpected several years ago, I said to myself  "Self, you can make that" after looking at several of them.  I say that to myself a lot.  It is genetically programmed.  Then I said "self, how about you finish something first?"

Fast forward to this year, Sujata Shah offered a quilt challenge to make something from this book.  I said to myself "Self, you can make that, and look, there are even directions so you don't have to figure out which quilt to make or how to make it." Then I said "goodness, how many quilts do you want to start this year?"

Fast forward to this weekend, I made some space on my table so I could help my mother with her taxes.  When she left, I looked at that empty space on the table and realized it was the perfect opportunity to start this quilt. Otherwise, it would be a waste of perfectly good space.

I knew I wanted to use the red, white and blue colorway of the original quilt and that the fabric is already in one spot. It is in the Sweet Land of Liberty quilt box, but I'm sure it is willing to share. I decided to make a mini quilt for March.

Then I started cutting and making the blocks before I changed my mind.  The big squares are the "blocks" and the quarter square triangles are the cornerstones. I will have to trim the cornerstones, but am trying to decide whether to cut it to proper size or to add them in a more improv fashion.  I just have to do the scrappy sashing and I will be able to put it together.

Winner for Old Quilt Book Blog Hop

On Tuesday, when I posted my blog hop post, I offered a drawing for some old books I had.  Today, I announce that the winner is Anita from Domestic Felicity. I have contacted her and will be sending her package off this week.