Sew I See!

Making progress on the "Use It Up" quilt (a.k.a. the crumbs and words quilt)!   This week I've pieced a backing for the quilt.  Originally, I was just going to use a single large piece (or two) of flannel for the backing, but as I dug through the stash, I found that I'd marked some of the remnants with notes to indicate that they'd been pre-washed.  That reminded me that I've been prewashing the flannel before using it as backing.   I don't usually bother with pre-washing, but since (as I understand it) flannel can shrink more significantly and differently than quilting cotton, it seemed like a good idea to prewash in this case.  I was itching to get something done and didn't want to deal with the delay of prewashing, so I thought I'd follow the mantra of the quilt and use up those scrap strips and pieces of pre-washed flannel.  It's good to get those scraps out of the stash, but piecing it all together was definitely not a time-saving decision...

Did I write about this one already?  I probably mentioned that I had finally bound this quilt, but I don't know if I posted photos or not.   To be honest, photos are almost pointless, because this quilt is so similar to the other version as to be nearly interchangeable.  Some of the "book covers" are different, and they're arranged differently, but to the casual observer, they look the same.   To briefly recap this quilt, it started when I began making a "Tall Tales" foundation paper pieced quilt for my niece.  I enjoyed making the sample "book" block so much that I thought I'd make a second quilt for myself.  All the books were pieced at the same time, but while I finished Clarabel's in time to give it for Christmas 2020 (it's been a while!), mine took longer to complete.  ...Because I stopped wanting to work on it. 😆 Anyway, this quilt is very similar to the first one in just about every way.  Many of the book covers are the same....

I've spent some time this weekend putting together the cream/beige-background leaf blocks... This is a tentative layout, minus the sashing and border.   The border will probably take a while to pull together.  I believe I have enough HSTs ready, but I need to arrange them pleasingly and join them.  We've been having unpleasantly warm and humid weather lately, but this afternoon a cool front blew through.  We took a walk, and the air was so cool and fresh!  Okay, the temperature is still 70℉, but with lower humidity, that passes for "cool" here, in late March.  Perfect weather for putting together this quilt.  I can pretend it's the beginning of our cool season instead of the tail end!  😭😂  (I know a lot of people are looking forward to summer.  I'm not one of those people.) - - - - - - - I'm still using the red/neutral bonus HSTs as my leaders and enders, and the stacks are growing ever taller.  There are enough to see me thr...

Since my last blog post, I've assembled the book blocks into two quilt tops.  For the first quilt top, I joined them in the plain old regular way, and for the second, I used the webbing method.  (This wasn't intentional.  I simply didn't remember to web them when I joined the first group.)   I webbed the blocks for the "Hunter's String Stars" quilt, and that seemed to work well, from what I remember, but with these blocks, I think I found the old-fashioned method easier.  Webbing does have the benefit of allowing you to not worry so much about which piece goes where, once you've joined the blocks in one direction, but it felt more difficult to get blocks properly lined up for perpendicular seams, even though they were webbed into place.  Anyway, webbing might not be best for everyone or every quilt.  When joining the rows the "old-fashioned" way, I marked each completed strip to help me keep them in the correct order.  You can do this with pi...

I've mentioned before that I was playing around with quilting on some flannel and then turning it into crate pads for Frodo.  Well, I've done some more of that.  I had a lot of fun practicing my FMQ (free-motion quilting), and I do think I'm getting better at controlling the machine.  (Better than I was, at least!) I thought I'd stick a few photos here to document that improvement.