peppermint float

It has been a rather light week of quilting here this past week.  The hubby had the week off from work (planned vacation), which meant he wanted to spend time with me.  Add in a few days of weekday shifts at work and a few family things (now that folks are getting vaccinated, we can visit more easily!) and I have a week of little time in my sewing room.

Not to fear!  I DO have a finish-finish!

Last week, I quilted the stick-assigned quilt and trimmed it off the longarm, but I had used a water-erasable blue pen that took many attempts to get it all to actually disappear.  (Newer pens give you a more visible mark, but also take more effort to remove.)  Which meant it hung from the bars on my lonagarm for a while, drying between spritzes.

Finally I did sew down the (prepared ahead by months) binding and set it aside again, waiting for a chance to do the hand-sewing portion.  I wasn't worried.  I had time.  Yesterday I finally finished the hand-sewing - after two fairly long sessions where I listened to/watched some live streams saved on Instagram - and took it out for a photo.

But this is a lot of words, right?  And you want to see a quilt!

First, a little of the process.  And some in-process photos, of course.

Quite a few years ago (I just looked, it was 2016!), on a road trip to a family reunion, a friend and I found a quilt shop hop across Missouri.  We found it completely by accident when stopping at a rest stop at the edge of the state.  There was a line in the small bathroom at this cute little visitor center/rest stop, and while my friend did her business, the very friendly couple who ran the center started a conversation with me.  Turns out, they knew all about this state highway/route shop hop and gave us a map.  It altered our course only to keep us off the more major highways, but it was a peaceful, beautiful drive.  And we only got kinda lost like once.

Anyways, at one of the shops, which was one my mom would have loved for all their Civil War reproduction fabrics (and I told her to go there, make my dad take her on the way home, but she declined...silly lady!), I found a huge stash of books.  "Simply Modern Christmas" by Cindy Lammon was among them and it screamed at me to buy it.  While the shop did have a room of more modern, less dull fabrics, this book was definitely not the norm!  But I snatched it up super fast.  Along with another book and some fun applique pins.  Maybe some other stuff, but it's been a lot of years, so the fact that I remember THIS much is amazing.  (I probably forgot some other important information in the process of remembering this, but who cares?!)

The book sat on my shelf of other books, with me knowing that this quilt needed to be made.  Last year, when the world was forced to shut down due to the spreading of a nasty bug, when it seemed every other well-known quilter out there decided to host a quilt-along, I decided to go my own direction.  Nothing was screaming at me to join ANY of the group projects, but I needed SOMETHING.  I decided this project was it.

I rummaged through my stash to find reds and greens that would play well together and meet my goals of a quilt that resembled the one in the book.  I didn't need the exact fabrics, but knew the colors chosen were what drew me in, so I needed to stick fairly close to the original.  I had bought some fabrics for this late the year before (or so my previous blog posts tell me - I have no photos or memory of when I did this), but never did start it.  It was time.

At first, I sewed them one at a time.  Because each combo of center and outer star is different, I had to pay a lot of attention.  And with all the events unfolding in such a quick, scary fashion, I felt quite scattered and knew I needed to limit what I had to process at one time.

The original pattern called for just nine blocks, but that also made a small quilt.  Finishing at 53" square, that was too small for a throw.  So I kept going, making 16 stars total, to make a good-sized throw quilt!

It stalled out some here.  I needed to get a sashing fabric and that was one thing I was unable to find on my shopping trip that brought me both of the black and white dot fabrics.  Eventually, I made it into my local quilt shop, I think in a between time when she was allowed to be open and not?  It is all a blur now, but I found a perfect black and white print.  Because the stripes in the photo below were dizzying!

A few months later, a friend invited me to sew with her.  We both have limited exposure to life outside our homes and decided sewing with the windows open at her lake house was a chance worth taking.  So I headed 2 hours north and we spent the day together.  I took this project.

We had a beautiful June day and I used her deck as a design floor.  (She has a design wall, but was using it for her own project.  No worries.  This was fast and being outside wasn't terrible!)

It was a fun day of chatting and sewing (scroll down in the link for photos and such) and we both got a lot done without even realizing it.  Tedious tasks like long seams go so much faster when you're not doing them alone.

Before it was time to head home, I had a top.  No borders yet, but a TOP!  I love it so much just here, but it's kinda small yet and borders are going to spruce it up, for sure.  Also, that sashing is a bit busy and needs some taming.

Home and border auditions from the stash.  Quite a few of the fabrics in the blocks were fat quarters or less to start, so my options were limited...

I was sure of the red (mostly because it was the only one I had enough of!), but I wasn't sure about the green.  While the lime green wasn't in any of the blocks, it seemed like it might work.  But...

...I ended up choosing the darker green.  Since it was in the stars and not adding a new fabric, I decided it was best.  And I like it a lot, though the print itself makes me go "meh" when I see it as a whole.  The other border fabric loses a little of the bright punch at a distance, but that's okay.  I like it just fine.

I whipped up binding before returning all leftovers to my stash - in July of last year - and then it went to the Rack of Shame.

Late November last year, when JoAnn's had a really, really good sale on calicos, I picked up enough yardage for four quilt backs.  (And a giant roll of batting...)  This was one of them, though since I bought a red and a green and had two Christmas quilts on my list, I wasn't sure which would get what.  The cars and trees quilt I longarmed in January got the red.  So this got the green.

But did I longarm it in time for Christmas?

Of course not!

Then the sticks came to be.  And of course, this quilt needs to be on a stick!  I have too many quilts I just love hanging on the Rack of Shame, so those were the ones first onto the sticks.  This month, it was drawn, so after a fair amount of procrastinating, I pieced the back and headed to the longarm.  (I also had managed to replenish my stash of white-white thread earlier in the month, so that was another way to pretend procrastinate.)

This is the only photo I took.  Aside from one I drew on in my phone editing app to remember how I did the corners.  That I deleted.  (oops?)  But how many photos of a single quilt on a longarm are needed?  You get it, right?  Quilt an area, roll it, quilt another area, roll it, etc. until done.

My brain decided this needed ruler work.  Echoing the stars and stuff.  Which not only required the ruler (which I'm not great with), but marking (which I don't enjoy) and the ruler base, which makes my throat space significantly smaller.  Neither the ruler motifs nor the marking were complicated, it adds time.  Lots of time.  But it took less thread than something like an overall swirl - by a LOT - so I guess trade-offs?

I can't say "before I knew it, I was done" because that would be an outright LIE!  But it did go faster as I got the hang of the ruler movement and muscle memory set in.  So EVENTUALLY, about 13 years later, I had quilted the last pass, and could remove and trim and spritz.

Finally the stupid blue marks were gone, so I hauled it upstairs and attached my "walking" foot (remember, it's a very difficult walking foot and it is more like a "break your shoulder making it feed foot", though it IS better than without it), and attached the binding to all 317 sides of the quilt.

A few days later, I had a finished quilt!

Quick!  Outside for a photo!

And since the wind was blowing some, I managed to get a photo of it flapping in the wind where you can see what is on the back!

Green gingham seems right.  I mean the cornerstones are black and white gingham, so it all fits!

No up close photos of the quilting.  Sorry.  It's nothing super fancy, so you're not missing much.  (And maybe if you click on the photo and blow it up, you can see it?  I haven't tried, so no idea!)

So now for the pattern information:

Pattern: Peppermint Float

Book: "Simply Modern Christmas" by Cindy Lammon

Size: 67x67" (I think...my notes are sketchy...)

Pieced and quilted by me using all sorts of fabrics from all sorts of sources!

Today I have embarked on making a few more tiny stars.  With new fabrics coming in for a few projects in the past few months, I've been cutting squares and setting them aside for that project.  Today, with no sticks to be working on, it seemed a perfect fit to tackle that bin before it gets overwhelming.  I still need quite a few stars, but before I decide to go raid my mom's stash again (my parents are fully vaccinated and I'm getting there, so soon!), I better catch up mine!  (Speaking of which...the last few quilts I've longarmed have had backs that aren't yet represented...better go cut a few more!)

The hubby had a birthday this week, so a trip to the nearest Bass Pro Shop was in order.  He is hard to buy for, so most family give him gift cards, and since last year was so crazy, he had two years worth of "cash" to spend...

This cost us $6.99 after the cards were all emptied.  And since he has a credit card that gives points, he used those to finish paying for this.  We got out of there without spending a single penny!  (We had to pay for gas to get there, but he used the credit card to earn more points doing that!)

He MIGHT be ready to go fishing this summer?  (He has about ten times this many stashed in tackle boxes, but they do get lost and broken and he likes to try new things, too...so when he comments about my fabric stash, I just remind him about the bins of lures he owns...and the 15 poles...I think he has more fishing stuff than I have quilting stuff!)

Time to get back to the tiny stars.  I've been having trouble motivating myself to get into the sewing room this week, not only because of the odd schedule and interruptions, but because I wasn't sure what to start.  Tiny stars?  More tiny words?  Both were tempting, but neither were hollering.  Finally, this morning, I decided I could also pull sticks for April, early, and that motivated me to do tiny stars instead.  No explanation why, but whatever.

And one more note about the sticks for this month.  Some of you may remember that needle felting was also on a stick.  I wasn't able to attend the class at my local quilt shop this month to do that, but yesterday I officially signed up to take the class offered in April.  That will satisfy that stick, though a bit late.  The project is some funky mushrooms and I'm hoping mine turn out at least half as good as the sample.  I've never done it before, but have always been intrigued by it...I'll have a full report in a few weeks!

Time to go work some more on the tiny stars!

Happy quilting!

Katie

PS I think, due to yet another year with no guild quilt show, I will be doing a front porch quilt show on Memorial Day weekend again.  The hubby is on board and we're looking at better options to hold the quilts.  We worked out a number of kinks last year and with more planning ahead this year, I hope it will be a little easier!