UFO Diving

 Some days, it seems as though the blog has a mind of its own. At least that's what's happening with the pictures today! I hope that they'll kind of tell a cohesive story--but no guarantees!

 I had been noticing that there was a box in the garage with a broken lid. I'd moved it a couple of times so it wouldn't fall over and dump the contents all over the floor, but I hadn't paid too much attention to what was in it.

I could see a few squares pieced together and some plastic bags, but that was about all. So this morning, while waiting for Anne to arrive, I brought it and a couple of other boxes inside.

One was a box of bindings, mostly left over from other projects, and since I had some other pieces of binding hanging around in the sewing room, I wanted to get them all together.

Did that. Also pulled out the red floral binding for the Tumbler quilt, which is going to have a little surgery to separate it into two quilts. Long story and pictures when it happens.

 Anne came over to sew today, and had some help and supervision. No one is immune from this treatment!

I cleared off the top of my desk--which just happens to have my big cutting mat on it--so she could cut some squares and then it seemed like a good place to set up her sewing machine.

HiHi thought it was great fun having a visitor today, and spent his time supervising us both.

He really thinks he's a great asset to my sewing. Well, maybe not completely an asset...

Tat tail is very expressive. Here it's saying, oh no you don't. Cutting? Trimming? Pressing.

Please, woman, you have one job.

Pet the cat.

Disapproving cat disapproves of being relegated to a side table.

Okay, so back to the box. It had a most eclectic collection of random "stuff" in it.

One thing was the quilt top up at the top of this page. That picture was taken "after"-- after I'd pressed and cut the piece of fabric that was folded with it, and put it on as a border.

I know I made this top. I kind of remember doing it, and I'm also kind of thinking I did it in a workshop with Blanche Young. It's definitely one of her patterns. Anyway, it's now ready to quilt, so I guess I need to add another UFO to the sidebar.

Oh good. I needed that...

 This was also in the box. I am pretty sure this was from a workshop with Marsha McCloskey at the Glendale show many years ago.

I can remember that much. Whether I did this in class, or worked on it later, I haven't got a clue. I do still like the fabrics, and I might be tempted to put this star together.

Might. Lots of little pieces here! But I do like the way the fabrics work together.

 Paper-pieced star. Same background fabric as above, and probably from the same time frame. Also a different colorway of Hoffman Celestials.

I loved those fabrics and had some chunks of them in all the colors--black, blue, purple, and red.

This was probably just a test piece to see how to put the star together. It's peiced onto tissue paper.

More of my feline helper.

Really, it's a good thing he's cute and cuddly, because he's also pretty annoying when I want to focus on doing something.

Oh well. C'est la vie!

More of what was in the oddments box. A whole lot of srips, cut into different widths, and neatly tied with fabric strips. 

No clue at all what this was meant to be. I'm thinking perhaps a bargello design would work with these.

The colors are much more vivid in person.  The shading is pretty true, too. The prints on the right are all different colors and many of them are 30s prints.

Like I said, no clue. They are all back in their little bag, waiting for inspiration to strike.

Or something.

 Lastly, in reverse order, the pieced top and the fabric trying out for a border.

That fabric is in the quilt, though it's a little hard to isolate it. Parts of it are very pink, other parts are very lime green, there's some yellow, and a whole lot of turquoise, including some blotchy spots.

I called it psychedlic. However, this quilt top really works in terms of the shading and the interplay of colors. It pops.

And as soon as I find my box of quilts that are waiting to be quilted, it's going to go in with them. I'll probably quilt it myself--it's only about 47"square.

Back to my Jumping Jax stars, and if I get a chance, I'm going to try to hunt out the rest of the pinwheel blocks. I really feel he need to finish something.

Fat Tuesday, Really?

 To begin with, I didn't get any quilting done today. I did look longingly at my pieces all laid out on the sewing machine, but never got a chance to sit down and actually sew.

My fuzzy friend, worn out from all that bird watching, napped on the floor in the sunbeams instead of curled up on the bed.

Though he did make it to the bed in time to be closed up in the bedroom long enough for me to get groceries in.

 This was one of those days when I had a long list of things to do, and actually got them all done. I had a dentist appointment this morning, in Temple City, and one of the requirements (now that I have metal parts) is to take antibiotics an hour before. I was actually able to find the pills this morning, amazingly enough--at least my meds are organized! Not only that, I phoned in a renewal so I could pick it up while I was in TC.

Once I got all that done, I came home for a bite of lunch, then off to Target and Trader Joe's, with a stop off at the bank and gas station. Go me!

I even managed to get all the groceries and stuff in, and put away. Then it was time to head back to Pasadena for quilt class.

Tonight was fun. Anne brought her blocks from a retreat she went to last year, and laid them out so we could play with them and critique the design.

She finally decided that it would look best with a sashing between the blocks--a cream to coordinate with the background, and cornerstones in colors to harmonize. The pattern is just too busy otherwise.

Interestingly enough, when Ethel made the same blocks last year, hers went together without sashing--but she had a different, broader color palette. It's a nice design and I could see it working out in several ways for a 3D effect.

Both Anne and Ethel have been making selvage quilts. Tonight Ethel got the top of hers done, and even found a fabric for the backing that is a print that looks like strips of selvages!

I took pictures from a distance, closer up, and then really close up so you can see the fabrics and how well it all goes together.

The black bubble print is in the center of each block as well as the inner border. It will also be the binding. 

 Please note that these are the quilters who make fun of me for doing all that paper piecing with the little bitty pieces.

I have a feeling that if we did a piece count (which I have no intention of doing!!) this quilt would probably come in pretty close to my star quilt!

Anyway, it's a good way to use up those selvages, which are getting more and more creative. Some  companies are really making an effort to make the selvage complement the design of the fabric.

Instead of just the little dots along the selvage to register the colors, some are using motifs from the design itself. Some of my 30s prints have had little flowers or bubbles or fruits.

Which means that now I cut my selvages off first, and leave a half inch or even an inch of the print with it. Then I pass them along to these "string quilters" who put them togeher in really cute and creative ways!

Rounding out tonight's accomplishments, Louise put a hanging sleeve and binding on her quilt. This was a "mystery" quilt done in a group at last year's Glendale Quilt Show, and she's entered it in this year's show.  I love the vibrant colors!

Now it's time to put this post, and myself, to bed! Another busy day tomorrow, and I'm hoping it will be one that gives me a chance to do some sewing!

A Glimpse of Stars

1.  

Laid out the pieces I've been working on just to see how they will look once they're sewn together. Too bad I don't have a design wall to pin them up on--I think this is going to look really good when it's done!

Here are four of the Bag #2 pieces set together to test the shading on the stars.

Because I used fabrics from Deep Stash I didn't have a lot of choices. Well, not as many as if I'd been at the store with a full array of shades in front of me!

Still, there were a lot of good orangey-yellowy-brownish colors, and quite a lot of that reddish brown. So all the "dark" on one of the sections is that color.


This is what the sections looked like when they were done. On the left are the trimmed pieces, and on the right is a messier, untrimmed one.

Ninety-six of these guys.

If you look at the picture at the top of this column, you can see that they will be sewn to the stars I made last week. The dark spikes fill out the background of the stars, and then the yellow/orange pieces will create new stars where the corners meet.

 More process photos.

Testing out color combinations. Because of the aforementioned situation with a limited choice of fabrics, you can see that these two wouldn't give much of a definition to a star. Too close in value.

Guess there will be some laying out once the blocks are sewn together.

Started on the next bag's worth of piecing. There are 32 of these pieces, all in the dark blue/light blue fabrics.

 Fold. Trim. Sew. Press.

Repeat.

I've acquired a new assistant along the way. Shyla is renouncing her Closet Cat ways, big time. She likes to see what I'm doing and "help" me do it.

 Of course, my former assistant is not about to give up his status as Chief Cat.

You may have noticed that she perches daintily on the pressing part of the mat, staying well away from the action going on with the rotary cutter.

He feels as if he can just flop right on top of what I'm trying to do.  Even if I don't especially want his "help."

 When he's not sitting on the work, he's blocking the light. I have 3 Ott lights set around the machine and the cutting/pressing table, one of which is quite elderly and flops closed at the slightest provocation.

A certain boy cat is always ready to provoke it. He's also prone to causing avalanches of various sorts.

This sewing room was going to be organized for optimal efficiency, and that may very well happen. In the meantime, if I want to sew, I need to make a little space and try to locate my tools so they're accessible and not too precariously balanced.

Admire the lovely boycat draped across my cutting table. No, go ahead.I can't do anything else anyway.

Thisr-- is the face of a great little Mother's Helper. Not.

As I type this, he's sitting at the right of the computer, eyeing my plate of buttered raisin toast  over on the left. I'm not sharing. If I was a "good" cat mother--and I am definitely NOT his mother!--you just know I'd let him lick all the butter off and nibble on the toast before I finished off whatever he didn't want. You'd think after being my cat all these years he'd have learned that I'm selfish that way.

Hope springs eternal, and all that good stuff.

Back to the sewing and cutting and pressing and trimming and and and. I'm getting anxious to see how this is all going to look when it's done!

Recapping a bit

You can't ever get the full effect of a roaring fire with a regular camera, sadly. If the room is dark and you don't use flash, then you just get a yellowish blob. (Ask me how I know!) But using flash wipes out the ambience.

Oh well, you get the idea. This is the fireplace in our room at Asilomar. The elves come in every day to lay a new fire so all we have to do is strike a match and light the papers under the bag. Presto, heat and light and warmth.

 After a long day of toiling over the sewing machine, a fire and a glass of wine in the room is the perfect unwinder. We took full advantage of it!

Just a few samples of what  was going on in our classroom. Both the Feathered Star and the Feathered Geese quilts are completed tops!

No, they weren't just started in this class, but they are proof that it really is possible to do one of these quilts!

The Feathered Star is the pattern Louise has been working on, except that she's making the queen size version which has an undulating border to make it larger.

 Colleen was sitting at our foursquare of tables so we got to spend lots of time watching the pink and grey one come together. Such a pretty combo! She said she never works in red or pink, so this was a way of using up some of her collection of sad neglected red and pink fabrics. The reds and pinks are all batiks, but the greys are prints. Some Stonehenge, but all soft tone on tones.

The patterns, by the way, are all available at www.quiltworx.com if you're interested!

 This one is called Stepping Stones and was the fourth "corner" of our table set. It's all Kaffe Fassett fabrics--prints mixed with soft tones of shot cottons.

This one is done with strips, so not nearly as complicated to make as it appears at first glance. The white strips are the backboard showing through, by the way, not a part of the quilt.

I love the explosion of exuberant colors on the next quilt. Perfect for using those bright batiks that we love to collect!

I did take pictures of most of the quilts that were on display in our room. They're on my Flickr pages if you'd like to see them!

One of the things they do at Empty Spools is have a tour of the classrooms on Thursday afternoon. It's a great opportunity to see what everyone else has been doing and maybe pick out your next class.

Our room was an explosion of color and pattern. Most of the people had completed enough blocks to be able to put something up for show n' tell at open house.

 And then there was me... still plugging away at my second set of pieces!

This is from the bag that had me making 96 pieces, each with 9 fabtics.

Well, I did get 7 of the fabrics on the pieces. I guess I have some honework, and without Judy there to cheer me on.

 Sew. Sew. Sew.

 On Sunday I had a couple of visitors. My daughter and her family were on their way to Costco but stopped by for a visit since it's pretty close to me.

Also, the big field in the corner of the complex is a perfect place for a couple of active boys to work off some energy playing with their spinners. Such fun to watch them. G sent his flying and ran to catch it, while N8 was much more interested in figuring out how to make it go and how it worked.

At least I have a place where they can run and play!

 While they were over, I was able to give G his new hat. My lonely FO for the month, apparently (I don't think I'll get anything else much done in the next day!)

So that's Hat #2 of the group that I'm making to match their sweaters.

(Apologies for hitting publish instead of save-as-draft. I was in a hurry to leave for a doctor appt. and decided to let it stand till I got home!)


On Monday, a long-time friend, Amy of Have Projects, Will Travel, was in town briefly and wanted to go to The Hnntington. I'm always up for a visit to this beautiful place, so off we went.

Yes, I took more than two pictures--my total for the day was 95! Again, you can see them on Flickr here.

It was a really bright day, so bright that the sunlight tended to wash out all the color in most of my pictures.

Well, that and it's winter, so there isn't a whole lot of color, unless you get into the camellia garden. Which I did, and there are lots of camellia pictures in that set.

Speaking of pictures, and Flickr, because I uploaded all of my Asilomar pictures via the iPad, I wasn't able to put them into sets the way I normally do. I'm going to have to go back and put each picture in individually, and you can imagine what the chances are of that happening when I have quilts to make and knitting to do. They are all on my photostream, though, and if you click on one of the pcitures above, it will take you to the section where they all are and you can move around there to your heart's delight.

One more quilt picture, this from Tuesday night's class. Anne finished the quilting on her latest Magic Tiles quilt. This one features cat fabrics so if you like cats, be sure to click on the picture to make it bigger so you can see all the fabrics!

Anne says I blog her quilts, so she doesn't have to. I really think, as productive as she is, that she should keep a record of everything she's making.

Rain is due here tonight or tomorrow, although it's very bright warm sunshine right now, so I'm a little skeptical about how much we'll get. I will say that the authorities here are not taking any chances up in the burn area, and it's now at a red alert meaning mandatory evacuations are imminent.
Better safe than sorry! I will meanwhile sit here in my snug little house and work on my quilts and my knitting. I have some DVR'd stuff to catch up on, too. Maybe I'll be able to get a few pictures if I accomplish anything!

Empty Spools

A few snapshots from Asilomar. There are some interesting flowering plants, even in the dead of winter.


I love this little ferny one. I'd love to see this as part of a quilt. Suddenly I understand the urge to print one's own fabric!


This is our classroom building. It's one of the newer ones and located across the street from the main Asilomar campus. This means a hike to and from the dining hall. Possibly a good thing, since otherwise I'd be sitting at the machine all day.


It would be a shame to do that when there's so much natural beauty to enjoy here. The sea has been a little choppy, it's been cool and windy, but really pleasant. I'll take high 40s--low 50s any time!


Some process photos. These aren't in any particular order because I'm still getting used to how Blogpress handles photos. Besides, it's late, I'm tired, I have a glass of wine and did I mention our bedroom has a fireplace and the elves build us a new fire each day?


My particular project involves lots and lots of shortish seams. Each one gets pressed and trimmed before the next piece is added. The unit you see above (light and dark blues) has 8 pieces per unit, and I'm making 96 of them.


The one here (oranges and dark blues) has only 6 pieces and there are only 48 of these.


...which get pieced into 12 stars. This is just a layout, as there are other pieces attached before they get sewn together, but I wanted to see how it would look.


And, back to more sewing.


Meals are served in the dining hall, and the chef is really excellent. They use as much local produce and locally-sourced ingredients as they can, there are usually at least three choices per meal, and the desserts are wonderful. Baked on site.

And then it's back to work. The enjoyable kind of work!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Preparation Is The Key...

 Well, at least for the class I'm taking at Asilomar! I actually managed to finish cutting all the pieces today, so I now have 8 bags filled with foundation papers and the fabrics to go with them.

I even found the directions for cutting the pieces for Bag #6 and Bag #7. Luckily (since I've cut up all of my background fabric, that turquoise over there) I was able to cut the pieces I'll need out of scraps.

Guess there is a reason I'm a scrap saver! Well, other than being a general packrat.

At least I'm an organized one...

My housekeeper got her first look at my garage today. "Oh my... you have a lot of boxes... a lot of fabric... it's like a store!"

Didn't have the heart to tell her there's lots more in storage. Some things just can't be faced all at once!

Since today was Cleaning Day--and I never, ever thought there would come a time when I would actually be able to pay someone to clean my house, but I'm very grateful that I can, what with my dodgy back and all--that meant clearing myself out of their way so they could do their thing. I had an invitation of sorts from Youngest Daughter, who works from home, to bring my cutting over and work at her place. We're quite comfortable with this arrangement--I used to babysit at her house while she worked in the other room.

At this point, I have one project all prepped, and a second one ready  to go--that's what those two little tubs up there are full of. Next comes packing up the machine, the tools, the car...oh yeah, maybe a few clothes too.

Since I got all my errands done this morning/early afternoon, and my house is clean and tidy (that famous picking up the place so the cleaners can clean), I decided to sew a few more sashings and cornerstones while the machine is still in place.

I now have something like 150 sashings with cornerstones attached to them. I think I need to do a lot more, though, because it seems that I cut the sashing strips in groups.

One of the fabrics has 49 pieces cut out of it.

 That will wind up with a very monotonous look if they all go on only 3 quilts, but if they are spread out on 6 it will allow for more variety.

I did think it would be fun to see if I could put a different fabric on each one. I'm sure you're not at all surprised that I had no trouble finding 49 different fabrics--actually there are a lot more. I realized that one of the things that's so appealing about these quilts is that the fabrics are colorful and cheery. I guess they needed all the cheer they could get back in the 30s!

 This pink fabric is the one that has 49 strips. At least it's cute and colorful!

I had to try a quick mockup to see how these are going to look.  Don't worry, I won't put a red sash that close to a big red point!

Well, at least not until/unless I run out of options. Which isn't going to happen.

I'm prepared. There are a LOT of extra sashings. I even know what I'm going to do with them once these 6 quilts are done.

Did I happen to mention that there's a small bin out in the garage that appears to be full of 30s fabrics?

I'm going to be sewing for a long time to use up all this fabric. It's really too bad I don't live in snow country--I could be snowed in quite happily. Also, my house would be very well insulated with all this fabric and yarn.