Scrap Addicts project #2

For my second Scrap Addicts project, I used the Pinwheel Fancy block from the January/February 2015 issue of Quiltmaker Magazine.     

                                                       Pinwheel Fancy blocks

You can find this block, and all the other blocks from the Addicted to Scraps column at this link:  http://www.quiltmaker.com/addicted_to_scraps/index.html

One bonus feature that I like on the Quiltmaker Magazine website is the suggested settings for the Addicted to Scraps blocks.  Clicking the block pictures will take you to a quilt pattern made using that block. The pattern for the block itself is in the magazine issue indicated, but on the blog, they give you a possible setting, including the instructions and yardage needed to make the pictured quilt.  Another bonus is that any of the same-size blocks can be interchanged into the different layouts.  For example, Pinwheel Fancy and Twirl Around from the March/April 2015 issue both finish at 6 inches. 

                              Twirl Around blocks

So, if you prefer the Twirl Around  setting better than the other, you can use it for the Pinwheel Fancy blocks, and vice versa.  Or, you can use any of the other 6 inch blocks!  

OK, that was a long detour around what I intended to write about today...  

Today, I want to give instructions for doubling the size of a block, and the fabric requirements and instructions for making the center block of my second Scrap Addicts project (which will appear on the Quilty Pleasures blog any day now...)

I decided to use the Pinwheel Fancy blocks as a border around a center medallion.  And the center part of the center medallion is a ginormous modified Pinwheel Fancy block.  OK, well, maybe it's not THAT big, but it is much bigger than the original block.  I  wanted a large center block, but just the pinwheel by itself did not make a good center block.  So I modified it by adding flying geese on the four sides and turned it into a star.   The finished size of the whole center medallion is 24 inches square and the center pinwheel is 12 inches square. 

This is a closeup picture of the center medallion.  You can see where I added the flying geese on the right and the left of this picture, but the top and bottom ones are cut off.  Use your imagination or wait until the whole quilt is posted on Quilty Pleasures ;->

The original Pinwheel Fancy block finishes at 6 inches. So I needed to make the block twice as big.  That sounds simple, but there are some things to take into account.  For example, the large half-square triangles (HST) in the original block finish at 3 inches, so you use typical quilt math and start with a 3 7/8 inch square.  You cut that in half diagonally and stitch it to another diagonally cut 3 7/8 inch triangle to get a 3 inch finished HST. But you can't double the cut size and start off with a 7 3/4 inch square because the resulting finished triangle would be 6 7/8 inches.  

The trick is to double the finished size of the HST piece and THEN add the 7/8 inch.  To get a finished 6 inch HST, start with 6 7/8 inch squares.   

Instructions for the center medallion:

Please note these instructions are ONLY for the center 24 inch block.  They do NOT include the fabric or instructions for the borders or the coping strips used to make the quilt shown on the Quilty Pleasures blog. 

From the Orange fabric

Cut 2 - 6 7/8 inch squares, then cut them in half once diagonally to yield 4 triangles

Cut 8 - 6 1/2 inch squares

From the White fabric

Cut 4 - 6 1/2 x 12 1/2 inch rectangles

Cut 6 - 3 7/8 inch squares, then cut them in half once diagonally to yield 12 triangles

Cut 4 - 6 1/2 inch squares

From the Black fabric 

Cut 2 - 3 7/8 inch squares, then cut them in half once diagonally to yield 4 triangles

Make flying geese from the white rectangles and the orange squares:

Draw a diagonal line from corner to corner on the 8 orange squares. Lay one of the orange squares on the right side of one of the white rectangles and stitch the diagonal from top left to bottom right.  In other words, start in the center of the rectangle and stitch along the drawn line to the bottom right corner.  Press the triangle in half along the stitching, making sure that the orange fabric is even with the white fabric along the sides.  Trim away the white fabric and the inside layer of orange fabric, leaving a 1/4 inch seam allowance.  

Lay another orange square on the left side of the white rectangle and stitch from the center to the bottom left corner.  Press the orange square in half along the stitching and trim away the white fabric and the inner layer of orange fabric, leaving a 1/4 seam allowance.

For the pinwheel center:

Sew the black triangles to a white triangle to make 4 HST.  Sew a white triangle to each side of the black/white triangle (on the black sides).  The resulting piece will be a triangle with a black center piece. Sew this triangle to a large orange triangle.  Trim as needed to make a 6 1/2 inch square.  Arrange the four squares so that the orange triangles form a pinwheel as shown in the picture. Sew together as a four-patch block.  

Final Assembly:

Stitch a flying geese block to the right the pinwheel block, lining up the center line of the pinwheel with the center of the goose block.  Repeat for the left side. Press the seams toward the center.  Stitch a white square to each side of the remaining flying geese blocks and press the seams toward the white squares. Stitch these to the top and bottom of the pinwheel/geese unit and press the seams to the outside.  

If any of these directions are not clear, please leave me a comment and I will try to clarify them.  

My next project with the blog is to learn how to insert diagrams!  

6 weeks. Really?

Good grief!  I just looked at the date of my last post.  I knew that I needed to get back to posting, but life has been so busy that I just haven't taken the time to do it.  So I am going to try to do a little bit each day, and will hopefully be up-to-date by the time I need to travel again at the end of the month (spoiler alert - it involves the Pope!)

Since my last post, I have taken four trips and was only home a total of 9 days in the month of August!  

The first trip was to Philadelphia, for the Knights of Columbus international convention.  That's where my quilt was raffled off. I am very excited to announce that my quilt raised $1,500 for the Knights of Columbus charities.  I was sooooo thrilled.  And I have to admit that my head got a little big with all the compliments. ;->

I thought that it was amusing that some people liked the back better than the front.  I guess that it is kinda unique, because I used a panel in the center, then added border strips and corners.  But I didn't really plan it that way, it was a consequence of how I assembled the sections of the quilt. 

Here is a photo of the back.  I'm not sure you can see the hands, but I had my son and my daughter hold it up so I could take the picture.  The center is the panel, and it is surrounded by a small print with red and blue stars.  Then the corner sections are a bigger red and blue star print.
  

I did plan to use the panel on the back, mostly because I wasn't sure where else I would use it, and it fit right into the red, white and blue theme.   The center section of the front and back of the quilt were actually made with a straight set, then turned on the diagonal and the corners were added last.  Because it was getting so big (see the previous posts about how I had to keep re-designing it!), I didn't think that I would be able to quilt it all on my home machine, so I quilted it in pieces, then assembled it and added a binding.  

To assemble it, I sewed the sections of the top together with my sewing machine.  After that, the batting in each section had to be sewn together, then the backing had to be sewn.  I did the batting and the backing by hand, using a simple whip stitch.  

Here is the final product:

Some people asked me if I was sorry that I wasn't keeping it for myself.  I thought about that for a long time and decided that making a raffle quilt is kind of like raising a guide dog.  You love it, you care for it, but ultimately, you know that it is meant for someone else.  So even though I really like the quilt,  I am glad that it has a good home.  A nice lady from Northern California won it, and she told me that it will go into her spare bedroom, which coincidentally has a red, white and blue theme!  It was meant to be!

Next up - August trip #2 and  thoughts on "She who dies with the most fabric, wins"

It's Done!

It was almost a year in the making, it had two major and a couple minor last-minute design revisions, but the Knights of Columbus quilt is finally done! And with 10 days to spare!  :->  

I hung it out on my porch to take a picture... drum roll, please..

HERE IT IS!!!

All in all, I am pretty happy with it.  I posted this picture on Facebook so that that the ladies in charge of the raffle could see that it is done and quit worrying.

Oh, my goodness!  Sixty two 'likes' and 42 comments so far, and I just posted it yesterday.  That may not seem like much, but I was (and am) overwhelmed with gratitude that everyone likes it! 

Now the only thing I have to do is put a label on it.  I tried using the freezer paper method of printing a label, but my printer ate the fabric off the freezer paper and ended up with major heartburn.  After I got it working again, I trotted off to Joann Fabrics to pick up some of the fabric sheets that are INTENDED to be put through the printer. Then, of course, my printer ran out of red ink. <sigh> I grabbed some colored pencils and colored in the part that is supposed to be red, and it looks pretty good.  I ironed it to set the dye into the fabric, and I think it will be OK.  But the problem I have now is that I feel that the label feels like cardboard, and I'm not sure I want to use it.  I bought the June Tailor brand because it said that it is color fast.  If you have any recommendations for other brands or other ways to print a label, please let me know!

Busy, Busy, Busy!

Things have been really crazy here!  Between trips with my hubby for Knights of Columbus, trying to keep up with the weeds in garden, and trying to get to the raspberries and blueberries before the birds do, I've been going nuts.

The last time I posted, I think I mentioned that there are now 74 blocks for the raffle quilt, and a diagonal setting is in order.  However, I had originally planned to put borders on it.  To put it bluntly, that ain't happenin'!  

Stepping back a few steps for the newbies - I am making a quilt to be raffled off at this year's Knights of Columbus international convention (a.k.a. "Supreme Convention"), which is being held in Philadelphia at the beginning of August. It is red, white and blue, and is made from modified Sawtooth Star blocks; one block for each jurisdiction where the Knights are active.  The original design was a simple 8x9 setting because there were 72 jurisdictions.  Sometime in May, the powers-that-be decided that one of the jurisdictions in Mexico was too big, so they split it in two.  Without checking with me - can you believe it?  ;->  So after some sleepless nights dreaming about blocks and layouts, I finally come up with a layout for 73 blocks.   All was well until the beginning of June at the annual meeting when they split one of the jurisdictions in the Philippines into 2. AAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHHHH! 

More sleepless nights ensued until I came up with the current layout.  If they do any more dividing, I'm going to give up and put the new blocks on the back!  

So I finally finished all the blocks, laid them out on my 'design wall' (living room floor ;->) and realized that I was going to have to quilt it in pieces because it is so big.  So I joined the blocks for the center section together and quilted it using a simple curved design.  Then I sewed the four corner sections together and quilted them using the same design.  To join the sections, I sewed the top portion of each piece in its place by machine, and trimmed and stitched the batting and the backing together by hand.  I then had to quilt over the seamed areas.  That is where I ran into trouble again.

The quilt was getting so big that it would not feed through my sewing machine smoothly.  Sometimes, near the edges, it was fine, but when I had to turn it, it would either jerk and make a jig-jog in the stitching line, or it wouldn't move and I'd have teeny tiny little stitches that didn't match the rest.  

So I decided that, if I want it to look decent, I won't be able to put borders on it. Adding borders that need to be quilted would just exacerbate the problem with wonky stitching.  So I am going to finish the quilting as best I can, then just bind it.  It will still end up about 80 inches square, so it will be a nice queen bed topper.  If I want to make anything bigger than a toddler size quilt from now on,  I am going to take it to my local quilt shop and learn to use their longarm! 

You've GOT TO be kidding me!

In my last post (which I wrote at the end of May, but forgot to publish until today - oops, my bad!) I mentioned the fact that my husband and I drove up to Connecticut for a week at the beginning of June. We needed to be in New Haven at the home office of the Knights of Columbus because he works for them, and there were meetings all week.  While we were there, I mentioned to some people that I was making a raffle quilt for the  International Convention, which is going to be in Philadelphia this August. I plan to have one block for each jurisdiction, and each block will be the same size and overall outline, but each one will be unique.  This is to represent the fact that each jurisdiction is equal to the others, but each is also unique.  Since the convention will be in Philadelphia, I'm making a scrappy red, white and blue quilt, with eight inch modified Sawtooth Star blocks.


I also told the story of how they added a new jurisdiction last month, which caused me no end of sleepless nights while I figured out how to set 73 blocks, as opposed to 72.  72 is so nice and even - 8 by 9, straight set, no problems! <sigh>.

Anyway, I did finally figure out how to set the 73 blocks.  I was planning to set them 9 by 9, and have a blank white block on the end of every other row.  So there would be 9 star blocks in the top row, 7 in the next row (with two blanks on either end), 9 in row 3, 7 in row 4, etc. until the last row, which would have 9 blocks again.  Here is a picture of that layout:

It's kind of hard to see in this picture, but the blank blocks would go on the sides, where my design wall (a.k.a. living room carpet) is showing through. 

Did you notice that I said 'WAS planning', and 'would go'? <Big, BIG, sigh>.  On Sunday morning, there was a breakfast meeting, and the speaker mentioned that there were 74 jurisdictions. WHAT??? Did I hear him correctly?  Did he make a mistake?  Surely, he meant 73, right?  

I followed up with him after the meeting. He didn't make a mistake.  They decided to split one jurisdiction in half because it was so big.  So for the fraternal year 2015-2016, there are 74 jurisdictions.  Which means I need to come up with a setting for 74 blocks.  AAAARRRRGH! 

The only good thing about an 8 hour drive back home from New Haven is that it gave me LOTS of time to come up with a new setting.  So by the time I got home, I had a couple of options and was able to sleep that night! Here is the one I decided to use:  

The center and the two missing blocks on each side will be blue 'blank' squares, for which I''ll probably use some of the border fabric for consistency.  Then I'll fill the diagonals with white side square triangles.  So this is IT!!!  If they add another jurisdiction, too bad, so sad!  I absolutely have to get this done by the end of the month, because July will be busy with traveling and the convention is the first week of August!!

Rolling right along

It has really been a busy spring so far!  I'm really glad I retired when I did.  I don't know how I would have been able to do everything this spring if I was still working full time.  After my last post, I finished the Pinwheel Fancy quilt (more about that later) that was an add-on Scrap Addicts project, then started cutting blocks for the raffle quilt.  I knew that I would be away from home for a couple weeks and I wanted to be able to work on it while I was away. I hit upon a way to keep all the pieces for each block organized so that I could work on them without getting them mixed up - little zipper sandwich bags!

My hubby and I were away at the Knights State Convention from Thursday thru Sunday.  On that Saturday, I got up and drove 2 1/2 hours to my niece's baby shower, then turned around and drove back to the convention.  When I got home on Sunday, I threw some things in the washer and packed.
Then I drove about 5 hours to my sister's house.  She needed to have a hip replaced, and so I went down to help her.  (Tangent alert!)  Am I the only one who considers North to be 'up' and South to be 'down'?  As in 'We drove up to New York for the weekend' or "We drove down to Florida and saw the Everglades'?  Anyway, back to the topic at hand!

I got back this past Thursday, unpacked the suitcase and started packing again.  We're heading (up ;->) to New Haven for the week for my husband's job.   The day after we get back, I need to be in Pittsburgh at 11 a.m for rehearsal.  The Concert Chorale that I sing with is going to be performing at the Three Rivers Arts Festival at noon that day!  They even have us on the website!

http://www.3riversartsfest.org/fest_event/pittsburgh-concert-chorale-2/


I was in a quandary about my Pinwheel Fancy quilt because another Scrap Addict was using a similar color scheme as my original idea.  After much agonizing, I decided to go in a completely different direction.  I still used black as my accent triangles, but I used various brights in the large triangles.  Then I made a variation on the block and expanded it to make a center medallion.  The small pinwheel blocks became a pieced border around the center medallion, set off with two narrow black borders.  Some little kid is going to absolutely adore this one!  I sent a picture to my Quiltmaker contact, and she says that in addition to the video shoot in August, she is planning to feature it in a blog post!  Yay!  I'm seriously thinking about writing up the pattern and publishing it. I'll probably make one change to the piecing; other than that, I'm very happy with the way it turned out. I can't post the picture until after it has appeared on the blog, but once the blog post is up, I will link it here and on Facebook.

Curve Ball #2

Don't you just hate it when life throws you curve balls?  I received TWO in two days.  I mentioned the other one in a previous post, but haven't gotten back to tell you of the second one yet. The second curve ball was with my second Scrap Addicts project. 

Each Scrap Addict was assigned two blocks, and we can use them however we want, as long as the finished quilt is lap sized or larger. I decided to use brights, with black on white scrappy backgrounds and black accents. I think it will make a really cute toddler quilt. I liked the way that the first couple blocks turned out, so I dug out some bright scraps from my bin and starting to make blocks. There wasn't quite enough variety, so I cut into some fat quarters, too.  And the leftovers from fat quarters get cut into strips to make more scraps! Bonus! 

After playing with layouts for a few days, and not getting any sewing done, I realized that I really need to get going if I am going to finish my Scrap Addicts projects AND the raffle quilt on time.  So I decided to stick to a simple straight setting with plain sashing and black cornerstones.   

The curve ball arrived the next day.  Since there are 12 Scrap Addicts and 6 blocks, there will obviously be duplicate assignments. One of the other Scrap Addicts posted pictures of the project she had made using the block.  It was amazingly similar to what I had decided on.   She used blues with black accents and plain sashing with black cornerstones.  Hers was set on point, but still, I thought that mine was way too similar.  DARN IT! Back to square one, at least for the setting <sigh>. 

I emailed the editor, and she said that she thought it would be fine if the quilts were similar, but I felt compelled to come up with something different. Stay tuned, and you will see what I came up with.  I'm very happy with it, and happy that it won't be similar at all to the other one!