Quilt 110: Moda "Frolic" - and keeping blocks organized during top assembly

When I was in Florida last year, I visited my favorite quilt shop - "The Quilt Place", and stocked up on charm squares.  But I messed up - I don't know what I was thinking.  I should always buy at least 2 packs of any charm squares, as I so love making simple block quilts, and 1 pack of 42 squares just doesn't go very far.

So when I got this one:


I only bought one!   Well... I guess I was thinking "baby quilt".  But even so - going to a small baby quilt.

Here are some of the prints - very bright, cheery colours!
 
I decided I'd frame all the squares in a snow-white 1.5"lattice.  But before putting the lattice together, it's important to know how I want the squares arranged.  So here's the grouping I decided on.

In order to keep everything straight - I always pin the blocks together in strips (as you'll see above if you doubleclick the photo and get the larger version of that picture).  Pinning the blocks just makes the most sense to me.  As I sew them together, I remove the pin holding 2 blocks and sew them.  Then I pick up another strip of blocks and sew 2 blocks from that strip together.  A kind of "chain piecing".  I do get japped once in a while with the pins, but this is the fastest and easiest way I've seen of doing it.

To keep the rows straight, I put pins on the top blocks.  One pin for the first row, two in the second, 3 ind the third (as you see in the photo below) and so on.

Doing it this way, I can power through the top pretty quickly and never lose track of where the rows go, etc.

I'm kinda proud of my technique.  Nobody showed me this, I just came up with it on my own.

Quilt 109 - "Old Fashioned Charm" Baby Quilt - Done!

I love Moda's charm square collections.  They are just so lovely and easy to work with. Like this one: "Old Fashioned Charm":

Here's a photo of some of the prints in the pack:

I had scraps left over from previous projects that worked extremely well for the borders.  A soft powder blue (solid) and a peachy flower print which, although the fabric isn't a Moda print, it marries well.  There isn't actually any peach coloured flowers in the Moda pack, but with the blue border to seperate the squares from the peach border, it more-or-less fools your eye.

48" x 56" - quilted on the longarm ("Butterflies" groovy boards) - cotton batting

I used a new groovy board set on this one: "Butterflies".  This was the easiest and fastest groovy board I've worked with.  Easy because there just no measuring or adjusting to advance the quilt - just line up along the bottom of the board and go.  And fast because the quilting on this is nowhere near as dense as any other machine quilting designs I've used, so it whipped up in no time!

The backing is plain peach solid - looks great and you can really see the stylized
butterflies and swirls from the groovy boards.

This one goes to "Inspirational Quilts".

Bernie's Back In Business!

Many thanks to Brad and Shelly (of Shepparton Sewing Centre - the dealer I bought my Bernina longarm from). I contacted Shelly right away and she was just an angel, arranging for Brad to come here this past week and fix up "Bernie" for me.

As it turned out, the problem was caused by my not pulling through the bottom thread before stitching.  Now, I've done that many times when just playing around and experimenting, never had a problem.  Brad assured me it's rare, but sometimes the bottom thread can get jammed up in the bobbin mechanism and cause a timing issue.  And that's what happened to me.

Well - you can bet I'll never make THAT mistake again.

It turned out for the best, because Bernie was due for periodic maintenance anyway, so Brad went ahead and did that while he was here (it only took 10 minutes to clear the thread jam).

So the thread jam is cleared, I've learned an important (if somewhat expensive) lesson, and Bernie got herself a lube job.

All good!

Quilt 108: "Flight of Fancy" - DONE!

This one is a kit quilt from Patchwork With Gail B.  I bought it in April, at t he Australasian Quilt Convention.  It's a little larger than some of the other projects I've been doing lately.  Hubby Stephen is holding it for me, and the corner on the upper right is flopping back in this photo because it's so wide.  (doubleclick the photo below to see a larger image)

72" x 69" - quilted on the longarm (free motion nested C's) - cotton batting

It's made up of two panels (the dragonfly/butterfly print) and rectangular blocks made up of coordinating prints.  Here's a closeup:

I love the rich teals and turquoises - and the fabric has little flecks of metallic gold as well.  I used a soft dove grey thread for the quilting, and am very pleased at how well the stitches fade into the prints.

Here's a closeup of the back:

I'm getting quite comfortable with the "nested C's" freemotion quilting pattern.  It's easy to do and is the fastest stitch pattern I've used so far.