Basting away: WIP Wednesday

I finally pieced the backing and basted the baby quilt, and I'm eager to start quilting. Here's how it looks at the moment, front and back:

I'm particularly excited about the curved piecing on the backside. For the quilting, I'll probably use grey thread, but as I mentioned earlier, I'd love a variegated grey, pink, and red thread, if one exists. If anyone knows where to find such a thread, please let me know! For the actual quilting pattern, I'm thinking in terms of Angela Walters' jagged tile technique, with either swirls or an allover leaf pattern inside the tiles. Alternatively, I could use a range of patterns to vary the individual tiles, but I think I prefer the simplicity of sticking to a single pattern.

Let the quilting begin!

APB: Is my dream thread out there?

I basted the baby quilt today, and I'm starting to contemplate quilting thread. I'll probably just use grey, either plain or variegated, but I'm wondering whether there's a variegated quilting thread that blends grey, pink, and red? I surfed around the web and didn't find anything, but if anyone out there has a favorite machine quilting thread that comes in the right colors, I'd love to hear from you.

A perfect Canadian Thanksgiving

DH was away on business this past weekend, so I joined friends for a trip to Tofino for Thanksgiving. The weather was gorgeous, sunny, and warm, which is an amazing treat in the Pacific Northwest at this time of year, and we enjoyed long walks on the beach in between lavish meals, including a grand Thanksgiving dinner on Sunday.

From the ferry, approaching Nanaimo:

Saturday's sunset on Cox Bay Beach:

Self-portrait:

An anemone (say that ten times fast) at Mackenzie Beach on Sunday:

We also sighted a few bald eagles at Mackenzie Beach, including this one:

The eagle might not look like much in the original photo, but after zooming in and cropping, it turns out that there's actually an incredible amount of detail recorded by the camera:

A treasure in the sand on Long Beach, Monday morning:

The view at Long Beach:

Curves!

When I first started quilting, I tried machine-piecing a drunkard's path quilt. It was an absolute failure--I just couldn't get the curves to line up properly or avoid unwanted pleats--and I stayed away from curved piecing for the next 20+ years. Recently, however, I've been admiring the improvisational curves in other people's quilts, and VMQG's current Halloween block challenge seemed to provide the perfect opportunity to try again:

I can't believe how easily these two blocks came together! I don't know whether it was a matter of long years of experience with manipulating layers of fabric at the sewing machine, or if the gentle curves in these blocks are just a lot easier to piece than the quarter-circles in drunkard's path, but the curves didn't require too much more effort than regular straight-line sewing.

Janet A.'s tutorial also provided help and encouragement. Unlike Janet, I still pinned strategically--not too surprising, since I pin even when sewing plain old straight lines. I love the results, and I'm looking forward to a lot more curved piecing in the future!

Slow and maybe not so steady: WIP Wednesday

I didn't find as much sewing time as I had hoped over the weekend, but at least I've almost got the borders onto the baby quilt that I've been working on:

I still have to miter the bottom two corners, and then I need to piece the back before basting the layers together. At least the quilt top is almost done!

I also completed the first 35 rows of the vest with the shawl collar that I started knitting last week. Only 52 more rows before the armhole shaping begins...

Finally, I finished the fifth in a set of ID holder wristlets and have started listing them in my Etsy shop. There were supposed to be six, but I damaged the vinyl on one of them when ironing (grrr!), so I'm down to five. Four of them are made out of cotton from vintage yukata; the fifth (second from the left) is rayon and comes from a hitoe (unlined) vintage kimono.

Between the day job and travel, I won't have much time for quilting over the next few weeks. With any luck, I'll have photos of the basted baby quilt sometime in the second half of October, and I'll get it quilted in time for the November meeting of the Vancouver Modern Quilt Guild. I might be out of commission for a couple of weeks as far as WIP Wednesday is concerned, but hopefully I'll be back in the swing of things before too long.

Whaddya mean it's already Wednesday?

I can't believe it's already Wednesday! I was away in Seattle on the weekend, so I don't have a lot of progress to report. I did buy border fabric while I was across the border, so here's a sneak peek of how the baby quilt will look:

Last night I bought a backing fabric as well:

At least I managed to finish a few ID holder wristlets for my Etsy shop:

Finally, I just started knitting a vest for myself. I tried going shopping this weekend, since I'm in desperate need of some new winter clothing, but this year's styles just don't appeal to me. If you want a wool vest, best to DIY! I never make complete gauge swatches--usually I just do a swatch for an inch or two, and then decide whether or not it's going to work. This time, though, I actually made and blocked the swatch for what I'm pretty sure is the first time in my life:

It looked tiny when I finished it, but happily, after blocking, it was 4" x 4", 16 stitches across and 22 rows high--just what the pattern called for. I also finally taught myself a proper long tail cast-on last night. Since I started sock-knitting last winter, I've learned a lot of new techniques. I'm still a quilter at heart, but maybe I'll also consider myself to be a knitter as well, with a little more practice and experience. We'll see--it depends on whether I actually manage to finish this vest in time to wear it this winter!

My second quilt ever: Japanese quilt, 1990

When I started quilting back in the fall of 1990, I immediately fell in love with Japanese quilts, thanks to Jill Liddell and Yuko Watanabe's beautiful book on the subject, as well as some RJR and Hoffman fabrics based on traditional Japanese patterns. Not long after I started quilting (and made my first quilt, a tied "Trip Around the World bed quilt), I happened to be visiting my sister in Seattle, and I made my way to In the Beginning Fabrics, then a great quilt shop (sadly closed, after the owners decided to concentrate on wholesale and fabric design).

At that time, the finished products from a Japanese quilting class taught by Lorraine Torrence happened to be hanging in the shop. The quilts used Japanese fabrics in half-square triangles arranged asymmetrically to create a send of flow and movement, and I immediately thought I could do the same on my own. When I got home, I immediately made my second quilt ever:

For the sake of variation, I used one square block, in addition to all of the half-square triangles. I planned all of the blocks in advance on graph paper with colored pencils.* In the end, I liked the result a lot, although I'm still a little ambivalent about what I think of as "the big black bat" in the lower right quadrant of the quilt.

When it came to quilting techniques, I knew absolutely nothing. I used stab stitches because I didn't understand how to make a running stitch, and since I had no concept of bindings, I finished the quilt by folding excess fabric from the front around to the back. I think I made at least four quilts before I learned how to make a binding. No mitered corners in the border either, which helped ensure that the borders stretched more than they ought to have.

Even so, I'm still fond of this quilt, flaws and all.


*For my third quilt (alas, no longer in my possession), I did another "Japanese-style" quilt with half-square triangles, but I tried for spontaneity and initially laid out all of the triangles completely randomly. The result was a complete mess--an important lesson in design and how improvisation and randomness aren't anywhere near the same thing. A coherent design with a simultaneous sense of movement and order required a lot of rearranging, planning, and experimentation.