There is a book out on skinny quilts that all my friends seemed to have. It has a quilt on the cover we all liked and kept saying we were going to make, but none of us got around to it. Along comes the guild speaker for January, the designer of the quilt, Carol Taylor. I knew this was my opportunity to play with the technique and give me the motivator to dye all of the fabric needed for the project.

Dye Cups

My hand dyed fabrics work great for gradations of value, so I was excited to get started. We needed 4 values; light, med light, med dark and dark. We needed 10-12 pieces of fabric for each value. I wanted to have 4 colors, so that worked out to a minimum of 3 different hues of each color. I decided to do 4 just to have some extra to choose from. I also decided to do 6 values of each color. Just in case I didn’t like the lights and trying to get as dark as I could.  So off to work I went. The first step was to cut up 96 pieces of fabric. We didn’t need much fabric so I died Fat 16ths of fabric. For the non-quilters a fat 16th is a piece of fabric approximately 11×9 inches. Then it was on to the dyes. Mixing fun colors and putting everything in tiny cups. I know it looks like they are all black, but really they are each a different color.

Rinsing Fabric

Purple floors

Everything was going well until the rinsing began. I did my usual quick rinse in the sink and then ran buckets of hot water to let the fabric soak. While it was soaking I called mom to chat and began cleaning up a bit. At one point I noticed one of the buckets didn’t have enough water in it. I figured I was distracted and just didn’t fill it up, so I added about 2 gallons of water to the bucket. Time passes, the room is looking better, but ….. The purple fabric bucket doesn’t have any water in it. Now this time I know I had water in there. Sure enough, one of my favorite buckets cracked and let all the water out of the bucket and on to the floor. It leaves a lovely purple circle on the carpet and takes 3 days of fans and heaters to dry out…. Not so much fun.

I am very late to post my update, but I did get my room cleaned up. Of course it has been messed up and cleaned several times since this picture was taken and could use another pickup. Especially in the often neglected closet.

Just in case there are some doubters, I took the following pictures on January 14.

December was a very busy month in the studio. I had to complete 4 photo memory Christmas trees and a baby quilt before I could start on my Christmas cards. Since December is also the month of deliveries, several needing signatures, I also needed to spend a bunch of time in the house. The result was a quilt room in chaos and a family room not much better.

Today I packed up everything that was laying about the house and carried it out to the studio. When all was said and done, this is what I was left with.

I started the cleanup today and made some real progress. I hope to have it finished by Thursday. I need to begin dyeing some fabric for a class I am taking at the end of the month. Unfortunately I can’t dye with the studio this messed up. I would end up with dye all over everything.

The really funny thing is that this happens almost every year. This year Bill asked me on Sunday evening if I would like his help straightening. As much as I would have loved the help. I don’t know if I could have even begun to tell him how he could help.

I was reminded last night how much I have been neglecting my blog.

I have been busy the last couple of months on some surprise Christmas gifts. They seem to be taking me a lot longer to finish than I had thought that they would.

Unfortunately that means that I haven’t been working on other projects like Christmas cards and a baby shower gift.

I am hopeful for a very productive next couple of days…. We will see.

I challenged myself to finish my braid quilt in time for the SCVQA quilt show. I knew that I would put off quilting this one if I didn’t have a deadline. The quilt show seemed like the perfect opportunity to give me that deadline. I thought the quilt lent itself to a fairly easy choice for a quilt pattern, even on my standard domestic machine.

I decided to follow the zig zag patter of the braid across the quilt. I started with the middle row and quilted from one side of the quilt to the other. I then worked my way to the top and bottom of the quilt by quilting every 4th row. By only quilting every forth row I got the layers sabilized more quickly and it enabled me to give up sooner, if I ran into a lot of problems. I can’t say that I was super speedy, but it really wasn’t difficult. I was able to use my walking foot, since it was straight lines, so it wasn’t stressful at all. I ended up quilting every other row. At the top and bottom border I just continued the same quilting pattern.

I’m happy to say it is complete and it looks great in the guest bedroom.

Bill’s Grandmother fell and broke her knee this week. She is going to have to spend several weeks in rehab. While Bill and I love being out here, it is really hard at times like this, to be away from family. We really wanted to do something to let her know that we were thinking of her. I thought about different things I could make for her room to brighten it up, but in the end we decided that a colorful pillow would be the best choice. Thankfully I had a stash of flannel to use but I needed a pillow. I made a quick trip to the fabric store, but would you believe that they were out. Thankfully Michaels was right down the street and they had just what I was looking for.

I sketched out my design and starting cutting fabric. I decided to put the heart on with a fringed edge so that I didn’t have to worry about fraying flannel applique. I’m not sure that I loved how that came out, but it worked for this project.

Update: Grandma is out of the hospital and doing well. Our hug from California was a huge success. If you know someone who is going into the hospital I highly recommend something like this to let them know you are thinking of them, even when you can not be there.

I am happy to say that I finally completed all of the curtains. I made minor changes after the first set, but then they went pretty smoothly once I got the process down. The most difficult part was trying to find a surface large enough to do my cutting on. I ended up using my cutting table with my ironing board at one end to make it longer. I also ended up taking several rulers together to give me one long enough to make my cuts.

The purchased curtain panels are each 40 inches wide. That means we need 3 curtain panels for each window. The new border fabric we purchased is 55 inches wide. I now have two choices, waste 15 inches of fabric on each strip of border fabric or reassemble the purchased curtains to be 55 inches wide. I hate to waste fabric so I went for the reassembly. The first step is to take one of the 3 panels and cut it into 4 pieces. Then I take 2 of the pieces and sew them to each side of a full size panel. This will give me a panel that is 55 inches wide. Repeat the process until you have 8 new panels.

Cut the new panels to length and then sew on the border fabric. Now you have new curtains with lots of seams. Not too lovely from the back, even if you do make nice finished seams.

I have decided to take the easy way out, and Bill wanted the room a little darker, so I will be lining the panels. This will allow me to hide the seams and block out more light, and give a little more insulating protection.

I had great success with some new curtains I bought for my front room, so I thought I would go the easy route and purchase curtains for the family room as well. I have 2 sliding glass doors and 2 large windows in the room so I needed a bunch of curtains.

I found some curtains that coordinated with my current wall colors and I thought I had success. I needed 8 packages of curtains to cover all the windows. No problem.

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This quilt went together very quickly. I created all the points of color by sewing full strips of each color together alternating them with black strips. Once they were all sewn together, I then cut them into the rows for all the borders.

I had to do a little bit of un-sewing to get the lengths that I needed for each border strip, but that was much easier than cutting and sewing each small square separately.

For my next version of this quilt I may do a little bit of rag edge for the large squares to introduce some texture.