A long-time quilting friend, who leads one of my donation groups, recently bought a longarm quilting machine. She has offered to quilt our donations for Flying Horse Farm! So in future I’ll have pictures of the tops but not of the finished quilts, because she is willing to bind and deliver the quilts as well! What a deal!

Our group recently had a retreat, and that’s an additional story. I had cut out one project for each day of the retreat, thinking I could sew without having to get in the way of others trying to use the cutting area. That part worked out fine. However, I ran out of projects before I ran out of retreat time!!!

Luckily we all bring shoeboxes of fabric we no longer want and everyone takes something for a future project. I went to those boxes and found that a friend had donated a set of coordinating fat quarters she’d changed her mind about! This quilt is the result.

I had to wait until I got home to add the border because the retreat was 40 minutes from the nearest quilt store, in a lovely rural area. This isn’t the house where we stayed, just the neighborhood.

And here’s the quilt top I made from batiks I cut ahead of the retreat. I was able to finish that top and send it home with the friend who will quilt and donate it!

And that’s all we’ll see of these two tops, because after they’re quilted they’ll be donated directly!

Of course I’ve heard of 3-yard quilt patterns, but one of my friends especially enjoys them so I recently tried one. They are smaller than I usually make, but that means they are faster, too!

That background is actually green rather than icky-gold, but I couldn’t seem to get it to show up that way!

This quilt was made from a pattern called Favorite Things in the book Make It Christmas With 3-Yard Quilts, available here. I appreciated that it was a very efficient use of fabric! I did modify the pattern a little because I had plenty of the background fabric.

This picture is the top only; my sewing machine that has a walking foot is still not at home!

Now I’m off to look for more 3-yard quilt patterns! Do you use them? Any that you particularly recommend?

When sorting quilts recently I came across this one and had no memory of it–ha!

Communique quilt from a pattern by Andrea Turner

It was obviously made some time in the 2020s, based on the fabrics included, but I don’t know when, or even who quilted it. Remember, this time period includes the pandemic. For me it also includes a major household move with consequent use of several different long arm quilters. So I just have no idea.

However, I was able to look back through my file of patterns and find the original, available for free here.

And now that I’ve found both the quilt and the pattern I may just make it again. It was a great use of scraps of various sizes!

I’ve been making some smaller quilts–call them art quilts if you like–just for fun. I love the process of designing, and sometimes I just want to make a bunch of smaller things for the practice.

I’ve had these African wax fabrics for quite a while, intending to use them–you know the story!

So when a friend was over to play recently, we cut some BIG circles (using Daisy Aschehoug’s templates) and I decided to use some of these special fabrics.

There were a LOT of experiments!

The eventual conclusion was that the 4 circles I had made would need to be 4 separate quilts! Here are the first two tops.

Circle 1

Circle 2

They’re only about 45″ square, so I may try hand quilting them.

My favorite sewing machine is in for repair, so I was looking around for a project that doesn’t require any special stitching/feet/fooling around. I found this foundation paper pieced pattern I had cut from a magazine long ago.

This is enlarged 150% from the original, and I used David Sirota’s method of making just one foundation and then using glue rather than sewing through the paper. If you need instruction, go to his website.

The blocks finished about 12 x 16 inches, so I added 3″ borders when I had made all the blocks I cared to make. And incidentally, all the plants and pots were made from scraps. The background was yardage, but left over from another project.

Then I searched the stash and consulted the oracle (oops, I mean husband) and selected red fabric for the sashing and border.

These little quilts I’ve been fooling with are small enough that I may quilt them myself. However, I remain less ambitious in that area than some of my friends, so the bigger ones will still go OUT to be quilted!

What do YOU do when your favorite machine is not available?

Ha! You opened this because of the chocolate, didn’t you?

A few months ago I posted about some minor modifications I use to make hanging sleeves more easily. Most of my quilts are bed or throw size, so I don’t include the sleeve in the top binding as would be done for a wall hanging.  I attach a hanging sleeve only if a quilt is going to a show or if I’m taking pictures of it.

This baby quilt, 50″ x 50″, is about as small as my usual quilts get

I make up hanging sleeves from leftover backing fabric and have the finished tubes ready to be cut to the needed length so there’s no time crunch when I want to hang a quilt. If the quilt is going to a show I sew the sleeve on, often with rather large stitches because it’s temporary.

However, if the sleeve is going to be on the quilt only long enough for me to take photos, I’ve found that straight pins work just fine to attach the sleeve! I put the pins fairly close together along the top of the sleeve and space them out a bit more along the bottom edge. On both edges I bury the tips of the pins–you know why!

This seems to be working, so I’ll probably pin the sleeve on for future photos.

This bar is from Tony’s Chocolonely, a Dutch brand of fair trade chocolate

And now, I discovered a quilt block design in a chocolate bar last week. Obviously this company understands that chocolate and quilting go hand-in-hand!

As mentioned previously, I’ve been participating in Tara Faughnan’s Block Studies class. The blocks were mostly nothing special, though her video instruction was excellent for people who might not know how to make them. And seeing what others made with the combination of Tara’s blocks and her color palettes has been wonderful!

So I combined blocks made from several studies that were part of the class, plus a few I just made up for fun, and made a quilt top.

I’ll square it up and then we’ll see. To be continued. And if you’re thinking of taking a class with Tara, I do recommend her.

 Of course there’s a never-ending debate regarding whether to prewash fabric and I’ve been back and forth several times over the years. I usually resume prewashing when something fades and runs in a finished quilt, but I mostly don’t prewash. My theory is that most (not all!) modern fabrics are colorfast. Of course cotton fabric shrinks, but most people expect quilts to be crinkly due to cotton batting, so it doesn’t really matter if the fabric shrinks, too.

Here’s a quilt in which cotton batting produced even crinkles

Enter my class with Tara Faughnan, which I’ve found very useful. Tara advised prewashing because different colors of fabric shrink different amounts! She also noted that prewashing then starching makes the different weaves on the market (think Kona solids vs Cotton Couture solids) behave similarly when you get around to sewing them.

I just said ho-hum and went on my way. Then this happened:

Yikes!

Well! Those are 2″ squares, so the amount of shrinking in that middle one is kind of alarming. Furthermore, it appears that warp and weft shrink differently, which is not actually a surprise. The cause of the shrinkage in this case was just ironing with water spray.

So I got out all my solids to pre-wash. I washed in color-coordinated loads, with color catchers. There was a little bit of fading with the reds, but otherwise nothing faded. I didn’t try to evaluate shrinkage.

So I’m back in the pre-wash camp. Where are you this week?