So finally it was time to square up the quilt.  Oh dear.  The standing woman was not standing up straight!!!!!!  And if I didn’t get her straight and centered, then she would look like she was listing sideways when I squared up the edges, where I REALLY needed there to be EXACTLY even background on either side of the woman with her leg up.  So I carefully pried apart the figure (from the waist up) and repositioned her and did some insertion of yellow to fill in the gaps.  Problem solved!  Next, time to fuse the entire top to the batting, baste all of that to the backing and quilt!

At the machine.... Rubeus Hagrid (aka Janome Horizon 7700!). Decided I needed to use up some of my print fabrics that I no longer use, and had enough of this beautifully colored Fossil Fern for the back.

Here is the entire quilt:

Finished!

A close-up of the two figures at the top in “mermaid” poses:

Notice the pale pink and pale peach women at the top, with arms reaching towards each other

A view of the bottom:

Two figures at the bottom..."warrior" on the left and "pretzel stretch" on the right

And a bit more of the middle:

center--close up. Interestingly I used some No. 100 (same as size 60-wt) silk for the background quilting. The part on the yellow is a variegated yellow, and sure enough Bob Purcell of Superior is right... the variegation doesn't show. I ran out of my 220-yard spool of variegated, and had only a section the size of my hand left to quilt, so used a medium-yellow 60-wt silk from Superior to finish...and even up close I can't find where I switched threads! So I guess I can skip the variegated silk (even tho it is so beautiful on the spool) for the way I use thread.

I hadn’t used silk for background quilting before, but I very much like the way it handles and looks, so when I want the thread to be fine and disappear into the quilt, I think I’ll use the silk.

When I was done, I had intended to put a facing on the quilt, as most of my art quilts are faced.  But I missed that darker edge.  See I quilt so much, I have to make things that are to finish at a specific size at least 2-3 inches larger because I don’t know how much “take-up” or shrinkage there will be from the dense quilting.  And I ended up needing to trim off some of the darker edges, and I missed them.  So I used a traditional bias double-fold binding in a deep purple batik.  Just right!

Now, here’s to hoping it makes it into the exhibit this year!

When we moved into our house last year we wanted to use the area under the benches in the entry as our recycling zone.  However, the space was too small for small laundry baskets, and too shallow for tall garbage cans, and everything else was really kinda too small.  So I decided I needed to MAKE some totes to take recycled glass,  metal, plastic and paper to the dump.  I really like the overall shape and style of the re-usable bags Hannaford grocers sell, so I used that as my basic idea.  Then I used my two empty birdseed bags and threw myself upon my friends for more; Kathy was in the process of moving and building a new house, so she gave me her entire stash of empty bags and I used them ALL!

The bench, with the left side up and various stuff on the floor and the right side of the bench making a mess.

Here is what the inside looked like using large drawstring garbage bags on the hooks I installed:

The bags shlumped and were an utter nuisance, hard to get stuff in without entirely clearning off the bench, etc.

So I sketched out dimensions and plans for bags that would work:

My working sketch...very rudimentary! The IKEA bag is that big blue one they sell for a dollar...use that on the right side of the bench for the voluminous redemption stuff and for the paper, which seems to clone itself at night. In Maine we pay a deposit on soda, Gatorade, wine etc. bottles, and get the nickels back at a redemption center, not the dump so having an extra large bag means we don't have to go as often.

Then, time to sew.  My corners weren’t the neatest.  But I made each large bag from about 1 1/2 birdseed bags, then used recycled tyvek envelopes cut into strips to “bind” the seams:

"taped" seams with strips cut from recycled Tyvek mailing envelopes

The leftovers...aren't you proud of me? I didn't KEEP all that clutter! It's in the garbage bin in my studio!

DRUM ROLL please:

Done and in place! Each bag has blue handles (which in this photo are tucked between the bags), and at the four corners there are small black loops that slide over the hooks so the bags stay upright, open and in place. Left to right: glass, metal, plastic, paper (more or less alphabetical so I can remember what goes where and don't have to open the lid all the way to toss stuff in)

The bags are PERFECT!  The only snag is that they do get rather full, and that overhang on the back of the bench kinda makes it a pain to get the bags out.  So I just remove the least-full bag first and turn the others sideways after removing them from the hooks.  The hooks work well… I bought single hooks from Walmart to be thrifty . Shoulda bought sturdy double hooks from the hardware store, as one of the cheapo hooks has already broken.  Having two-hooks per unit would make it easier to remove just the full  bag, but it still works.

We’ve used these for over half a year now.  They are holding up quite well, and rinse out easily if someone (AHEM, guys!) doesn’t quite rinse out a container before chucking them into the bags.

Hope this might inspire you to make your own recycling center!

Fairly early in the fusing process for Strength and Calm

We left off with Strength and Calm at the stage above.  Then I added more, a lot more, of the background.  I was on such a roll that in fact I forgot to take photos until I got to here:

Background almost all fused up, and not yet trimmed--you can see to the left some of the sketches pinned to the wall. You can also see a sliver of light blue added to the standing leg of the smaller figure to help that leg not visually merge into the figure behind.

Next step was to decide what to do with the other four figures.  By this point I was certain I did not want to get complicated.  It would be an outline shape of some sort.  I thought solid fabric, like a batik or hand-dyed, would mooosh into the background too much, and simply outline quilting might not stand out enough, and I didn’t want to paint.  So I took out some of my sheer fabrics.  These are the cheap-o prom dress synthetic sheers you can find at places like JoAnn Fabrics, which go on sale right after prom season (making it a good time to stock up).

Test-driving various sheers to see how they would look on the background. I ended up selecting two blues and two peach/pink tones.

A while back I developed a way to work with pre-fused sheer fabrics using my stencil cutting hot-tool and an old storm window.

First, I place the inked-outline drawing on the table, with the storm window on top. Then I place the pre-fused sheer fabric on top of the window. On this one, I have begun "cutting" with the heat tool by drawing the top along the right side of her legs.

The exact length of time depends on the heat of the stencil cutting tool and the fabric.  If you go too slow, you get a blobby, black nubby icky edge with pock marks.  If you go too fast, you don’t cut-and-sear/seal the edges and have to go back over it, risking the icky edge with pock marks.  And it takes a bit of breath holding and lip-biting and twisting of the mouth to get the cuts done just right.  And wine after.

More cutting done. As you cut/melt the synthetic fabric, the MistyFuse on the back sticks slightly to the glass, making it easier to cut the remaining edges. And notice that red circle at the top of the photo...that's my bolt of MistyFuseUV. Thank you to Iris Karp of MistyFuse.... LOVE it!

Done...with a scrap overlapping at her heel.

Next, I fused these sheer figures to the quilt and stitched them in place with 40-wt polyester thread.  Really liked the simplicity and not my usual quilt-every-inch style.

After I got it partly quilted, I decided I wanted to fuse the sheer down a bit better and melt the MistyFuse to invisibility.  However, I had just entered the studio and turned on the iron and forgot to turn it DOWN to synthetic instead of cotton.  Ooooops. Melting happened.

See where I melted the sheer by just grazing a set-to-cotton iron over it? Grumble.

And a bit of swearing at my own stupidity happened—see I know I need to turn the heat down and go slowly carefully when fusing sheer synthetics.  I wondered if the mess-up was too visible or if I could leave it and asked some friends.  Some said not visible really, leave it.  But I knew I needed to fix it.  So I carefully (with a HUGE holding of breath) took the heat-tool to the quilt (!!!!!) and “cut” the section of lower-body/hip out, cut a new piece of synthetic–thank heavens I had enough!–fused that onto the excised section and re-stitched.  Fortunately, I did well enough it doesn’t show.

Fixed. And if I kept my mouth shut you wouldn't know. I hope!

Thereby proving my saying that the difference between a beginner and an expert is that the expert either doesn’t make the mistakes because they’ve  made them in the past OR they’ve learned how to FIX the mistake so that you can’t see it.  Unless you blog about it for the whole world to see.  Ahem.   Last post in this series will (finally) show the finished quilt!

I was going to title this Pass on Your Passion as Interweave did, but figured that would bring in about a zillion spam comments, so hope the title worked!

Fabulous news from Cate Coulacos Prato, editor of Quilting Daily and Cloth, Paper, Scissors Today:

Interweave’s Pass On Your Passion campaign celebrates National Craft Month. They’re sharing a link to all of our free beginner downloads and also, each Interweave community (Quilting Daily, Cloth Paper Scissors, Jewelry Making Daily, etc.) is hosting at least one blog giveaway.   I just went to the link (at the end of this post) and WOW… I knew about the free ebooks from Cloth Paper Scissors and Quilting Arts, but there are lots more there, including drawing ones that I TOTALLY can’t wait to download and absorb.

You can get all the details here:

http://www.clothpaperscissors.com/blogs/clothpaperscissorstoday/archive/2012/03/08/march-is-national-craft-month-pass-it-on.aspx

http://www.quiltingdaily.com/blogs/vivika/archive/2012/03/08/pass-on-your-passion-for-quilting-giveaway.aspx

Here is the link for the free downloads:
http://www.interweave.com/free-eBooks-videos/default.asp

Pass it on!

Thanks so much Cate for letting us know…. now I’m off to do some downloading, NOW!

Got some great news this week, made official with the arrival yesterday of semi-finalist information from AQS (American Quilters Society):  my 20 1/2 by 20 1/2 inch quilt that I made for the Coastal Quilters Grocery Challenge, From the Schooner Coast, has been accepted in the miniatures category at Paducah! The smallest squares  finish at (shoot me!  WHY? did I do this…and believe it or not I could actualy see doing this again) 1 1/8″.  Yes, scarcely larger than an inch.  For those of you not in the U.S.  that is about 2.6 or 2.7 cm.  Small.

From the Schooner Coast (click to see a bit larger)

This quilt is a hybrid of a 9″ square art quilt depicting Camden Harbor and miniature storm at sea blocks.  I talked about the Grocery Challenge here (part 1) and here (part 2), but in a nutshell (this was something I thought up…imagine…an original challenge idea!) take a food or beverage from the grocery store as your inspiration.  You had to use at least 4 colors from the package (adding black and white was allowed), but so that folks just didn’t troll the aisles looking for a package with colors they liked, you had to add at least one motif or element inspired by the packaging.  For example, if you picked corkscrew noodles, you could quilt with a corkscrew design; or, if you picked Tabasco sauce, you could use a chili-pepper fabric.

I chose Shipyard Export Ale because I love woodblock prints and I love that the image is so “Maine.”  However, I thought the picture on the label looked like Wiscasset, not Camden, so I changed it a bit to look like OUR town and feature one of the local schooners (with permission of the captain). Here’s the bottle and carrier:

Shipyard Export ale, my "grocery" inspiration for the 2011 CQ Challenge

SO…. if you are lucky enough to be headed to the big show in Paducah, hope you get to see my little quilt.  I harbor NO hopes that it will win any awards…the piecing isn’t quite perfect and this is the quilt where I learned that I should have used the hopping foot to free-motion quilt, not the one that skims the surface.  Why?  The “skimming” foot got hung up on the thick intersections for those blocks.  And when I pulled/tugged/etc. to get the quilt under the foot, the stitch length became inconsistent.  But I love this little quilt of “home” anyway!   And I learned something new that I can share with my students and all of you!