Hand Piecing

Two bloggers started a Hand Pieced Quilt Along together--Patty of  Elm Street Quilts, and Kristin of Simple, Homemade, Everyday. Each of them used different colorways and each has posted a different setting. There's a facebook page, too--Hand Pieced Quilt Along.  Every week (on Monday) a different block is posted, beginning with the basics and building on those skills. Each block finishes at 6", so those are some small pieces there.

This is not my first time hand piecing, but it has been fun to get back to it. The first quilting class I ever took was a sampler quilt of 12" blocks, all by hand. I made a throw for my daughter after graduating high school (late 90s) and hand quilted it as well. It's still in use, though very worn and ragged, which is why I am making her the string quilt.

I'm running a little behind, but I did finish up blocks 1 and 2 this week. (Block 5 will be posted on Monday, so I'm trying to catch up!)  There are sponsors with prizes every week, so this will be my first week to link up and be eligible for a prize. I decided to use batik scraps for my blocks, and I think I will set them on point, something I've never done before. Here are my first 2 blocks:

 It has been such a dreary, rainy fall and winter, that I felt the need for something more cheerful, now that the lights and colors of Christmas are just a memory. I'm thinking this little quiltlet should be called "Confetti".  It reminds me of the birthday cake Dawn made for my granddaughter's 4th birthday last week.

Revving it up again

I'm finally getting back into sewing and quilting again. It's been too long coming, but you know, life....! I've really missed it, and just decided I needed to get my daughter's quilt finished, no matter what. I started this before she finished law school--and she graduated in 2007!. She deserves to have it.

It's a string quilt, and for the longest time, I couldn't figure out how to do the batting. I sewed the strings to muslin strips, then decided to add a border, then another couple of borders, to make it a generously sized sofa quilt. But the borders weren't backed by muslin, so I just couldn't figure out how to make it all a consistent thickness with the batting. I asked at a couple of quilt shops, but no one seemed to know what to do. It was so frustrating, I put the flimsy aside for years.

I pulled it out again the end of last summer, and thought I could just use batting on the borders, to make it more even, but that didn't seem to play out well once I started trying to put it into practice. So the latest plan was to just use a thin batting for all of it, and get this thing finished!

Sandwiching a quilt has been such a challenge, with a bad knee. Getting up off the floor is next to impossible. I had managed to get the quilt sandwiched using spray adhesive, but still came out with lots of wrinkles on the back. So for Christmas, Jack bought me a 6 ft long folding table. Having the table made it so much easier to smooth it all out and repin, and now I have my machine set up on the table and am finally quilting it. It's a domestic machine, and I am so rusty, but it's coming along. The table is really too high for sewing on, and I can only do it for about an hour before my shoulders get fatigued, but my goal is to finish it this month.

I'm quilting it from the back, because the myriad of patterns and sizes of the strings makes me a little cross-eyed when trying to free-motion quilt it from the front. I keep mentally chanting "finished is better than perfect" when I get frustrated.

There's a quilt-along on Facebook that I'm participating in, too. I'll post more about it later. It's hand-piecing, and perfect for winter nights!