Sew Yummy – Where everything is yummy

Churn Dash Fun

By Yummy | October 20, 2019

I found some lovely fabric in my stash, that for some reason I had not used yet; “Mugungalyi” -Circle by Nutex 100% cotton www.nutex.co.nz – great quality with a lovely feel and thickness. And black and white, what could be better to use with bright scraps?

A simple churn dash block I thought would show off the fabric nicely. I had just enough fabric to make 12 blocks with enough left over to make some narrow sashing to avoid dealing with seams butting.

But what layout?

Any thoughts appreciated, I’ve still not decided, though I’m leaning towards the second one.

Purple Galaxy

By Yummy | October 17, 2019

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Here is a picture of my Galaxy Quilt top. It’s a design by Deb Tucker.

It was started at retreat last year and had needed the outer border put on which as you can see has finally happened. As this is a bit wider than I like to handle on my home sewing machine so I’m going to find a wide back for it and then rent time on the long arm to quilt it.

Pennies in Rows

By Yummy | October 12, 2019

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One of my big goals this year is getting old projects finished.

I’ve had some new starts this year (of course!) but so far I’ve managed to complete 17 projects were started prior to 2019. I’m very pleased with that and hope to get a few more done before the end of the year!

This project was started around 20 years ago when greens and pinks were still fairly big colours in decorating.

I’d sewn strips of mostly pink and light green floral fabric together. A whole box of strips of it. All of the uneven and sometimes wonky strips were trimmed to six inches wide and were of varying lengths. There was no project note in the box but I did recall thinking I’d make a coin quilt with these strips.

I went and did some image searches for coin quilts as and found a quilt called Coins on the Sidewalk made by Kelly at My Quilt Infatuation . While I didn’t copy this quilt it did inspire the setting I ended up using for my quilt.

I cut my strips sets the size of my 6″ x 12″ ruler – seeing the strips were already 6″ wide it just seemed the easiest way to go. And I cut out 2.5″ strips for sashing. Here is my quilt top before borders.

And here is the quilt top with the slightly wider outer borders.

While not finished this quilt has made it from “kit” form to the rather large “to be quilted” pile. The leftover strips that didn’t get used aren’t enough for much and will be tossed as I don’t do strip quilting at this time and don’t have the room to store them until that time when I decide to start.

Stars in the Darkening Sky

By Yummy | October 6, 2019

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A month or two ago I started making 16 patch blocks using 2 inch squares when I should have been using 2.5″ squares of fabric. I made a lot of blocks before I realised I had made an error.

Not a world ending problem at all though some rather pithy language did occur at the time. Truth be told, I like sewing together little squares of fabric. I used some of the 16 patches to make my Big & LIttle Patch Quilt but what to do with the rest?

I, of course, started cruising the web to come up with ideas on what do to do with the rest of the blocks (I made a lot of the wrong blocks) and saw this quilt on the web. It’s described as alternating sawtooth stars and uneven 9 patch blocks.

YES, that gave me inspiration and got my creative juices going. A dark grey background, scrappy centre sawtooth stars, scrappy centre uneven 9 patch blocks and a lighter grey corner blocks for the 9 patches. Yes that would work!

Here are my first 9 blocks:

Definite possibilities but I did not want to make this a charity baby quilt and I still had scrappy 16- patch blocks. Another row and column were added.

I liked the size better but didn’t like the fact that the corners were different on each side. That really bothered me. So it grew again (Why, yes I had made that many incorrect 16 patches before realising my mistake). I added another row and column and the quilt was square:

Please excuse the craptastic picture. It’s the only one I have at this size. However, at 60″ square I had the same issue I have with all 5 foot square quilts. It’s to me, a weird, not very useful size.

So back to making 16-patch blocks (I had finally run out) and then a total of 10 more blocks, for a quilt that would finish 60″ x 84″. That would work as a large lap quilt. Great for snuggling on the couch on cold winter days.

Laid out on the bed I liked this much more:

And finally the sewn together quilt top:

I’m really happy with this. We have obligations the next few weekends that take precedence over quilting (our wedding and honeymoon) but after that we need to find a wide backing for this and then I’m scheduling Marc and I for a few quilting sessions on the long arm machines at Whirls & Swirls as I want this one on the couch sooner rather than later.

UFO LIST updated Oct 2019

By Yummy | October 5, 2019

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Here are the UFO’s on my list that are still to be completed as at the beginning of October 2019. Since July I have made not too much progress, however, I must brag that I did finish 16 UFO’s in the first half of this year. UFOs do not include any projects started in 2019 of which there are some.

2. Friendship Star baby quilt – COMPLETED August 17, 2019

3. Loose Star blocks – Top completed

4. Alletaire – A Bonnie Hunter Mystery Quilt – a few blocks need fixing and top needs to be finished

5. Halloween square pumpkin wall hanging – needs quilting

6. Cinema at 7 – top completed

7. Found charm square top – top made or donated?

8 Cross and Chains – top completed

10. Too nice to cut lap quilt – top completed

11. Black and white wall hanging, finish quilting

15 Coin Quilt – top completed

17. Galaxy Star – top completed

18. Grand Illusion Bonnie Hunter Mystery Quilt – borders need to be added

19 – The last of the ZIG ZAG Nines quilt

19b) dancing nine patch blue border – top completed
19d) dancing nine patch green border – top completed
19e) zigzag 1 – COMPLETED SEPTEMBER 2019
19f) zigzag 2 – top completed

20. Arizona Crossroads – top completed

21. Shannan’s Poly cotton Quilt – top to be finished

22. Black table runner – quilt or scrap

23. Peaky and spiky quilt – top to be finished

25. Twisted Star lap Quilt – top completed

27. Star quilt (brights on black)- quilted, needs binding made and sewn

30 Marc’s Gradient Quilt in 3 colours – needs borders

31 Irish Star Quilt – borders?

32 Quilt top (not made by me) found at VV – needs quilting

35 Whirlygig – Borders to be added?

37 Stars touching – top completed, sandwiched

38 Black & brights Livejournal swap quilt – top needs to be made

En Provence Quilted

By Yummy | October 1, 2019

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We finally quilted En Provence the Bonnie Hunter mystery quilt from 2016/2017 this May. I made the quilt in Bonnie’s colourway and am quite pleased with how it turned out. How can I not be when purple is my favourite colour? Marc helped me quilt it on the long arm quilting machines that Whirls and Swirls rent out by the hour.

Here is is on the frame:

And here he is hard at work machine quilting. I did do some of the quilting too, I just wasn’t able to take a picture of that.

And the final product off of the long arm looked like this:

I bound it in the same material as the backing as it blended perfectly with the purples on the front.

It’s finally bound and on our bed!

Next up for Quilting – Starstruck

By Yummy | September 24, 2019

22 Comments

This past weekend I cut out batting for 4 small quilts. Thanks to our purchase of 2 rolls of batting this summer, there is no shortage of batting in our house. I still haven’t touched the roll of wool batting. The batting I cut this weekend was Hobbs 80/20 batting. I’m happy to report we can now close the door to the closet containing the batting without needing to body check it first.

The first to be quilted is going to be this quilt, Starstruck by Bonnie Hunter that’s going to find a home as a wall hanging in my sewing room.

Here it is without borders:

Looking at the picture with borders below I think I have a problem with wavy borders and I may need to think about redoing the borders before I start doing any quilting.

I have a black fabric with a multi-colour print for the back and perhaps the binding. The quilting will be close grid lines in the border and I haven’t quite decided what in the centre. I want to avoid doing grid lines through the blocks. As it’s not going to get high use I’m too worried if it’s not quilted too densely.

Medallion Quilt Project

By Yummy | September 18, 2019

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One of the guild projects at my guild this year is to have members make a medallion quilt. I have to admit when I heard this at first I groaned. Medallion quilts don’t do it for me for one and for another I wasn’t sure I wanted different people working on quilt for me with different skill sets, fabric choices , colour preferences and senses of style.

But then I heard more about this medallion quilt project. We were each to make our entire quilt. We’d make a centre and then every month we’d be given some choices for our next round. We were in complete control. The control freak part of me quite liked this. And going out of my comfort zone I thought wouldn’t be a bad thing. So I’ve decided to jump in and participate.

I’ve made my centre block and I’ve used my stash of Alison Glass Fabrics and a Northcott dark grey fabric and came up with this block:

The first round will be announced shortly. I can’t wait to find out what blocks I will be asked to use. I know it will both stress me out and challenge my creative skills.

Zig Zag Quilt

By Yummy | September 12, 2019

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This is another of my quilts that came from the Zig Zag Nines quilt by Bonnie Hunter that I ended up deciding not make when it was already partially assembled. Crazy yes, but I just didn’t have a use for a king sized monstrosity of a quilt and the assembly of it was not going well by any stretch of the imagination.

So I made my own mini Zig Zag quilt that will go to charity.

I did some simple machine quilting using a wavy stitch on my Sapphire along the seams of the blocks and in a cross-hatch pattern. I wanted a few curves in the quilting to offset all the straight seams in the piecing.

I found a fun backing for this quilt that reminded me of the tetris video game with the little blocks of various colours.

This is another quilt off the UFO list. This makes 17 (or maybe 18 I need to double check my list) UFO’s completed this year. Sadly, I’m going to run out of year before I run out of UFO’s. However, unless I get new start happy between now and December I should start 2020 with less UFO’s than I started 2019 with, so at least progress is being made.

The big & little patch quilt

By Yummy | September 8, 2019

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I needed to make 44 – 16 patch blocks to make a border on a quilt. I’d made more than half of them when I pulled the quilt out and realised I’d been making the blocks with 2″ squares when quilt was based on 2.5″ squares. That was a fun moment – NOT. Out came the 2.5″ square bin and I had the opportunity to start back at square one. Some swearing ~~may have~~ occurred. The right blocks have now all finally been made and are waiting for me to finish off that quilt

However, rather than focus on that quilt I’ve been fixated on the 6 inch – 16 patch blocks that I made by accident. What to do with them?

I searched different settings for the blocks and my friend Bonnie suggested this one after I suggested a much more elaborate one what would have taken much more effort and time. So, I cut out sashing and made some four patches and came up with setting that looked like this.

I liked it!

So I started sewing and eventually this is quilt top that I ended up with:

I’m really pleased with how this turned out! I see some wavy quilting to soften the straight lines but other than that I haven’t thought to much yet about how to finish it off.