Daily progress

I have so many projects in the works, I feel like a circus juggler! Yesterday, I took a few hours off from the studio and defied death again by going to Cleveland, GA with a friend. We went to a quilt shop where they are not Covid concerned, and I was very uncomfortable with the lack of distancing and masks there. I won't go there again until the Covid thing settles down. We wore masks and I stayed to myself despite the workers who kept coming around and asking if I needed help. People just don't seem to care about acquiring a deadly disease. I do. 

In the studio, I finished the pantograph on the big quilt, and it turned out beautifully. This is a stunning quilt for the quilter's bed. I love it!

Blogger put the pictures in reverse order, but I don't want to mess with it right now. This is a picture of the back, where the quilting shows quite well.

The panto is Adore. I think it fills the open areas nicely.

Lovely quilt, well made.

Next, I quilted this Tee shirt quilt, finishing at a tardy 6:30! That's what I get for going out during working hours...

Okay, if I import pics one at a time, they will be in order. Sheesh...what a pain. This is the Tee shirt quilt. It's the first one the quilter has ever attempted and has a few boo-boos, but looks fine.

Panto: Rounded squares

The backing hides any quilting wobbles.

I used the fabric I got on my outing to quickly make a set of blocks for a 2-3-2-6 charity quilt. My friend is learning the longarm, and this will be a good practice piece.

The cows were too darn cute to leave in the shop.

My Grandson got his sticker-face game yesterday. I sent it along with their new quilt. Isn't  he just too adorable?! I'm a bit biased, but aren't all Grandmas? Time to go to work!!

The new Blogger SUCKS!!

As far as I am concerned, the new version of Blogger really is horrible. You either have to have this tiny print, or this giant print. The first size is called 'normal'. For whom is this normal? Some of us are trying to read these posts on phones, and it is like looking at gnats on a screen. It also doesn't work on my Safari browser. I am bummed.

On with the post. Yesterday, I sewed the sari project together and added the first border. I will be doing the mitering and adding the final border today.

There was no way to turn the blocks to change the sheen color of the silk. It still looks fine to me.

No photos of what I did with the rest of my time. I emptied and cleaned the drawers in the cutting table. What a mess! I tossed a bunch of useless stuff and can now locate the rest of the useless stuff more easily. Sigh...I admit it, I am a packrat!

My daughter sent a photo of the mask I made for Army duty. They had troops doing Covid testing last weekend. Now I have two daughters swabbing noses. Not good. We are up to 68 cases in our rural county. That boggles my mind. I will blame it on the tourists who come from infested areas and spread it to the unsuspecting locals. Wear your masks, people!!

I'm pretty sure she is smiling under there. Taking no chances in Arizona is important. 3000 new cases there just yesterday!

I am one row short of finished with the big quilt on the Millie. I will have it off and photographed this morning, and will be on to the next one.

So much to do...not enough hours in a day to do it all. Stay safe and carry on.

Slow going, but doing okay

There have been some down days here at Wazoo while I regroup from the recent breakdown of the Millie. Mr Wazoo got her up and running with the new carriage and I quilted my son's quilt and a customer quilt with only minor hiccups.

The finished quilt for my son and daughter in law.

Panto: African Samba

Marbled backing

Customer Star Wars quilt

Panto: Meander stars

Star Wars on the back, too!

We sent the quilt off to Wisconsin, and hopefully it will arrive today. The Star Wars quilt had the thickest batting I have ever worked on (except for the alpaca batting...that's another story) but went along without incident. I have the next quilt loaded and in the works. It is really big (does that surprise you? I didn't think so) and each row takes 25 minutes to chug across. I should have it done today. 

I cut up the last silk sari and have the blocks backed with stabilizer, constructed and trimmed up. At the end of the day yesterday, I arranged them on the design wall. There will be some tweaking, because of the difference in color when the silk is turned and the purple weft is more prominent.

The border of the sari wil become the inner border of the quilt.

I got a few batiks that are very similar in color to the weft in the silk for the accents in the quilt. The entire thing is half square triangles, so it was easily constructed.

Lots of sliver trimming done to square up the blocks.

Here are the blocks on the design wall. See the difference in color in the backgrounds? The pinwheels have the embroidered fabric from one end of the sari. The other background is the main part of the sari that has small diamond shaped embroidery scattered on it.

All the stitch in the ditch is done on the big circles quilt. Now, I have the backgrounds to do before moving it to the Millie for the motifs in the circles. Unfortunately, there is only one of me and I can't sew the silk project and quilt on the circle quilt background at the same time.  I'll get the wall hanging top finished, then begin on the circle quilt while doing the other quilt on the Millie. 

This quilt is so beautiful! I am itching to get going on the actual quilting.

In the middle of all this, I need to be on a Zoom call with the board of the quilt guild to discuss what's next in this up-ended world of Covid restrictions. We haven't met since March. I just cancelled the July speaker and class, and am looking ahead at the schedule to see who will be disappointed in August.

It looks like our trip to Texas won't happen in July since they are having a major up-tick in the number of virus cases there. My Dad is there, and my brother is, too, staying at my sister's house while she and her hubby take care of family business in Wisconsin. I thought it would be a good time to go there because I would get to visit with my brother for a few days. As with everything else, it's a wait and see thing.

On Saturday, we defied death and travelled to Chattanooga to get a couple of feet for the Bernina. I wanted to speak to them about the Handi Quilter longarms, too. If I can sell Millie, I would be able to replace her with a simpler machine  with in-person customer support offered. I have been thinking about it since the first breakdown in March. We'll see how that goes.

My friend, Birdie, has been sticking close to his wife while she sits on the nest. When I try to take his picture, he flies over to another part of the garden, so it was quite a coup to get this one blurry shot of him on the bird feeder crook. The nest is on top of our floodlights  for the back yard. This is the third time they have had it there, and I expect babies to be chirping soon! Tiki man continues to mock me...tongue out and eyes squeezed shut. He is such a prankster...

Slow days with machine breakdown

Millie stands idle while we wait for tyet another part from APQS. I unloaded the quilt I was working on and Mr Wazoo will be available to help me with the part installatyion if it comes today.
Meanwhile, I kept busy with the sari quilt sewing, and even took a speed trip to the fabric shop for fabrics to go with the bronze and red-purple silk sari fabric. I hope to make some progress on that today.
The blue and light gray one is ready for quilting.

I cut the pieces of fused silk into blocks, and arranged them in a medallion. The center Dresden Plate block uses two solid support fabrics along with bits of the sari for the blades. I hand appliqued this plate into position on a light gray background.

Here, I was experimenting with the printed border of the sari for the quilt border. I knew I wanted to miter the corners, so I just folded it to see how it would look.

Here is a close view with the pieces sewn together. Because the sari is printed a bit wonky, the lines don't look perfectly straight, but they are!

All sewn and with the mitered border!

A sari is a huge piece of fabric, so I was able to piece a backing from this one to match fabric with the front. It will be new territory for me to quilt something silk with a silk back.

I didn't take a photo of the backing after sewing, but the stripes are repeated on either side of the center motifs. Should be interesting.

More rain expected today. Mr W is not happy...hopefully, he will get busy with the Millie if her parts arrive.

Sewing with saris

Because I can't quilt until the machine is fixed, I decided to work on one of my customer commissions. A woman brought me three saris from her mother-in-law who had recently passed away. She wants five quilted projects made from these saris. I had never seen one before, and it will be a new experience for me to do these quilts. Each one of the saris is 43" x 110" of fabric.
Two of the three saris are silk, and one is cotton. One is a beautiful, and obviously dressy silk, with two colors for the warp and weft. This makes the fabric have a shimmer when it moves from the light maroon to gold. One end is heavily embroidered with gold thread, and there is a border of wide gold ribbon along three sides of the fabric. This one will have to be stabilized with interfacing to keep it from raveling. The quilt from this will be the most difficult to make, so I'm leaving it to last!
The second piece will be made into a wall hanging for the granddaughter. It is dark blue patterns on a white background of voile fabric. Extremely lightweight and drapey. I will also be adding stabilizer to this.
The last one is a lightweight silk with purple stylized elephants on a yellow-orange background. I need to make two baby quilts from this for a new set of twin grandbabies. I decided to start here.
I cut a strip from the center of the fabric for experimentation. I pressed it, but it was still to fluid to cut with any precision or sew easily. Spray starch to the back of the fabric made it like thin paper. Worked great! I want these quilts to be soft in the end, so didn't want to use the fusible interfacing if I didn't need to.

This is the stabilized with starch fabric, ready for cutting and sewing.

I used the printed border from the sides of the fabric to make end borders, and left the fabric in a whole piece, rather than doing a lot of piecing. With the drawing expertise  of Mr Wazoo, I made an elephant template and cut two from purple fabric with fusible web on the back. I added the saddle cloth like in the original fabric, and sewed all of this down with Glide thread in a light orange color. Simple but effective!

Both quilts look the same, but the printed cloth on the elephant's back is slightly different so each twin has a unique quilt. I used a tear-away stabilizer for the eye, and it stayed nice and flat. Buttonhole stitch set at 2.6  worked great for the outline.

This is the finished flimsy, still soft (as you can see! It was a challenge to get it to stay on the design wall...) and ready to quilt. I'll get ther second one done today. It ended up 43" x 53".

The weather has been beautiful, so Mr W and I ventured out to our favorite nursery in Hayesville, NC and picked up two new shrubs and a new plant for the planter outside my studio.  He spent the afternoon digging and planting. A nice Father's Day gift!

Funky Friday

Not a good day here at Wazoo. My Millie is ill again. This time, I'm done. I texted the tech person and said just that, and requested a new computer system. They are sending the carriage, the only piece I haven't replaced yet. I'm not optomistic.
I spent the day tidying up ther studio, planning the quilts to be made from the saris, and making a June newsletter for the evening guild.
On the lighter side, I finished the wall hanging and sent ot off to Houston! Hurrah!

It turned out quite nice!

More pebbles and some petals, too. The border is close matchstick quilting.

Solid blue binding. The backing is a wild rainbow print by request of the family.

Nothing else of note here. Tomorrow, I'll start on the sari quilt project.

Good day with big finishes!!

I am so happy! Today I finished two big projects and it feels good. The repair job is done, and so is the custom quilt. The repair went smoothly because I was binging on The Office. In fact, I am on the final season. Hmmm...Parks and Recreation sounds good.
On with the show!

The quilt, all repaired, but filthy.

Loads of these bits are new.

I washed it, and here is how it should look!

Of course, after washing and drying, I had to repair six more bits that  disintegrated during the process. I hope it goes home tomorrow!

Flip the coin, and here is the custom quilt.

This customer had the quilt languishing for years before she decided to finish it. I am so glad she did! It is lovely.

I kept the quilting very simple. There are feathers, background stylized pebbling and piano keys. That's it. Nothing that takes away from the star; the appliqued flowers, vines and bugs. Oh yes...one frog and one snail, too! (See the snail crawling across the bottom of the picture?)

The frog is in the lower left with the white flowers.

Simple border treatment.

The whole quilting experience was unplanned, free motion.

There are also lots of tiny red berries peppered over the quilt.

Perfectly chosen backing, too.

I took a couple of hours to sew the columns of the quilt for my son together. Tomorrow, I will get the top done and figure out the backing. He asked for colorful, so colorful it is!

Ready  to sew the columns joined tomorrow.

While I was sewing the quilt, I also quilted this customer bulldog quilt.

Panto: Diamond Plaid

Complimentary fabric for the backing.

After work, I took my walk around the yard and shot a couple of pictures of what's blooming today. It was a beautiful, sunny, productive day!

The Stokes Aster are blooming in the back rock garden

These are  tickseed coreopsis. I like the color combination, don't you?

Our old birdbath looks nice nestled in the butterfly bush.

This planter came from Wisconsin, and I filled it with a trailing clover plant. Get your hair out of your eyes, girl!!