What I've Been Up To

Wow, I last posted on Sept. 8.  All good here but quilting was taking a back seat to other activities for a time.  

First, #finallyavacation!  Mr. Main Street and I were scheduled to go on a Mediterranean cruise to various Greek ports in April 2020 but of course, it was cancelled when travel shut down at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.  The cruise was rescheduled several times until finally, in late September, we were able to go.  We flew to Athens where we stayed a few days prior to joining our cruise ship.  It felt as safe as possible as all on the ship were vaccinated, we had a test just prior to embarking, then a couple of tests along the way.  We never experienced any problems and had a very good time.  My favorite parts of the trip were Athens, the port of Katakolon where we toured the site of the ancient Olympic Games, and hiking just above Amalfi, Italy.  

The Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens

Our ship, Azamara Quest, seen from Santorini

Site of the ancient Olympic Games

View of Amalfi, Italy, (and our ship), taken while hiking.

We enjoyed this cruise so much that we are already signed up for another one next fall!

Once back home, I got back to work on Flowers for Emma, a quilt project with hexie flowers I had been working on for a couple of years as my portable project.  (Pattern by Sherri McConnell of A Quilting Life.)  My flowers were finished a while back but I had more applique work to do then sewing the blocks together with the sashing.  

I enlarged the quilt to 48 blocks, which is generous throw size (quilt holder husband is stretching to hold it up).  I marked the edges for a scalloped border, just need to get it quilted.

The hexie flowers are appliqued to four-patch blocks made up of low volume, mostly white fabrics.  Fabrics for the hexies are all from various Fig Tree Quilts lines for Moda, mostly from a fat quarter bundle of Chantilly that I won as a door prize at my LQS, Pennington Quilt Works.

I'm continuing to focus on unfinished and near-UFO projects cluttering up my sewing space.  I have another near finish so I will be back here soon.

What I've Been Working On Lately

After time spent cleaning up and re-organizing in my sewing space (you can see my destash sale fabric here), I was ready to get back to a quilting project.  Flowers for Emma was starting to take on UFO status.  I began this project about two years ago as my portable project but have not had much need for portability over the past 18 months and have focused on machine sewn quilts instead.  But only the hexie flowers are sewn by hand in this project and with them completed, it morphs into a machine project.  

I made the flowers above while watching The Flight Attendant on HBO Max and The Pursuit of Love on Amazon Prime. (Both are fairly entertaining; of the two, I preferred The Pursuit of Love.)  All of the fabric for the flowers, except the yellow centers, are from various Fig Tree Designs for Moda fabric lines.  Then it's over to the sewing machine where I use a blind stitch or tiny zigzag to applique the flowers to the pieced background.  I've been trying both stitches and think they work equally well.  You have to look very closely to see the stitches and I think they will become even less visible after quilting.

The original pattern calls for 35 blocks, set in five columns of seven blocks each.  I'd like to enlarge it but not sure yet if it will be six by eight (48 blocks) or seven by nine (63 blocks).  In the meantime, I plod along.

Hexagon Handwork

Wow, it has been a while since my last post...and so much has happened.

Like me, you are probably undergoing some form of quasi-quarantine in an effort to slow or stop the progression of the COVID-19 virus.  Thank goodness for quilting, right?  The social isolation is not so bad for an introvert like me with hobbies but social butterfly types like my mom and sister are really feeling it.

Over the past two months, I've stayed true to my plan to work on UFOs and projects from my stash.  First, these English paper pieced hexie flowers, to become a Flowers For Emma quilt by Sherri McConnell.

Making the flowers is a great little portable handwork project.  But now that I'm stuck at home and have 20-something made, I started appliqueing them to the pieced background squares.

I'm using my sewing machine for the applique.  I have a Bernina Q440 and the blindstitch (#7) works great for this.

You can see the stitch in the photo below, enlarged.  In real life, the stitches are not noticeable and will disappear even more in the texture of the quilting.  I used white thread to match the background and have the #7 stitch set at a width of 0.9 and length of 0.6.  Yes, that length is tiny and I better not have to do any unstitching because I don't think my seam ripper will fit in the stitches.

So far, so good and it only takes a few minutes to sew each block.

I'll be back again (sooner!) with more updates.

Hexie Flowers and Succession

A couple of months ago, I wrote about my new portable sewing project, hexagon flowers for a Flowers for Emma quilt.  You can read about here if you need a refresher. 

Then I started watching Succession on HBO.  I somehow missed this show last year when the first season aired but saw a lot of publicity in advance of Season 2 and a few people whose taste coincides well with  mine recommended it so I decided to give it a try.  (Just an aside but I long resisted subscribing to anything that would add to our already outrageous cable bill but three years ago, Miss Main Street had to watch The Wire for a college class and the easiest way was for us to add HBO to our cable package so she would watch it at college online using HBO Go.  The class is long over but Mr. Main Street got hooked on some shows and doesn't want to give it up.) 

I thought the first episode dragged a little (heavily focused on introducing the characters, none of them likable) but stuck with it, and I was hooked by the third episode.  It is very well written, acted, and filmed.  The characters are mostly despicable, though I admit to some sympathy for Kendall.   By the way, nothing was left to chance in this show and I am certain the selection of that painting behind Brian Cox in the photo above was deliberate. 

So while the Roy family was entertaining me, I worked on my hexie flowers for Flowers for Emma. 

This is what I had to show at the end of Season 1.  More have been added to the pile during Season 2.  And I'm looking for a new show - Miss Main Street has given me a long list - Peaky Blinders?  Derry Girls?  Hanna?  Something to tide me over until The Crown Season 3 comes out. 

The hexie flowers are very scrappy in the original Flowers for Emma pattern.  I'm making mine less scrappy but using the leftovers from my Fig Tree Harvest projects and augmented with my Chantilly fat quarter stack win.   There is still plenty of the Chantilly stack for another project. 

The pattern as written calls for 35 hexie flowers.  I am considering going bigger which will mean more flowers.  Either way, I need to applique some of the flowers to the background so I can remove the papers and reuse them.  So there will definitely be more TV in my future. 

Portable Project - English Paper Piecing Flowers

I've been craving a hand sewing project to work on while I watch TV and to take with me when I travel.  I was torn between several very appealing English paper piecing designs and finally settled on Flowers for Emma, designed by Sherri McConnell of A Quilting Life.  I downloaded the pattern from her Etsy store. 

My flower centers will be this tone-on-tone yellow from my stash.  It's from a 3 Sisters collection by Moda, but one of their early collections, at least 10 years old. Once again, good to be using something from my stash.  The hexagons can be cut from 2.5" strips and having the hexagon template (1" sides finished) makes the cutting easy, though you can cut hexies by using the 60 degree lines marked on  your regular cutting ruler.  The template I'm using was $6 from Paper Pieces.  My plan is to hand stitch the flowers then applique them to the background but undecided yet whether I will do that by hand or machine. 

One of the attractions of this pattern to me was that I could see being able to finish it in a year or two, as opposed to the lifetime project that a traditional grandmother's flower garden quilt would become.  I enjoy EPP but it does take a long time to finish.  I enjoyed working on my La Passacaglia quilt (aka Rondeau) but it took me about two years and is only wall hanging size. 

When I get some of the flowers made, I can begin piecing the backgrounds and appliqueing as I go, giving me some easy machine work for times when I want that.  I'm pretty excited about this quilt!

Basting Hexies

I got the rest of my hexies basted, with help from a 4-episode Netflix show called Collateral.  It is pretty entertaining, with great performances from the actors, though the mystery relies on a few too many coincidences. 

I knew this box from last year's Christmas cards would come in handy for something.  It is perfect for holding my basted hexies in color order. 

This is not a traditional English Paper Piecing project.  Rather, I am making a wall hanging using the method that Modern Handcraft uses.  You've probably seen photos of her work on the internet; I have some on my Pinterest boards.  So my next step is to figure out what to use as the background fabric.  Modern Handcraft usually uses a solid white background, which is what I initially thought I'd use. 

But I trialed some alternatives from my stash.  I like green better than the white option, though I am thinking of going with a solid rather than tone-on-tone and maybe just a little darker. 

But I like this blue denim option too.  What do you think?

In other news, this little guy joined our household two weeks ago.  His name is Trevor and he is a Pembroke Welsh Corgi, just like Dillie (his half-sister, they have the same dad).  So we are back to being a two-Corgi family, with puppy in training.  Fortunately, Trevor is learning fast and he loves to be cuddled.   

What I Did On My Vacation

If you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen a photo or two from my trip.  Mr. Main Street and I went on a river cruise on the Danube, from Nuremberg (Germany) to Budapest (Hungary).  It was wonderful and may have spoiled us for other means of travel!  AMAWaterways was the river cruise company for our trip and I can't say enough good things about the experience. 

We flew to Munich and spent two nights there, taking in the major sites and adjusting to the time difference, then went by train to Nuremberg, where the cruise was supposed to start.  But water levels were low in the canal and river, so to avoid running aground, our boat, the AMASonata, was moored east of Nuremberg and the cruise company took us to the boat by bus. 

Nuremberg

We very slowly made our way downriver, stopping each morning in another town where we could have a leisurely tour of the sights and then spend some free time.  All of our meals were on the boat; the food and service were both excellent. 

Passau

Melk Abbey

along the Danube in Austria

Hofburg Palace in Vienna

One day in Vienna was not enough, I'd like to see more, but that gives me a reason to go back!  Budapest was more impressive than I expected, a lot of beautiful buildings along both sides of the river (one side is Buda and the other side is Pest, joined into one city in the 19th century).  It became even more impressive at night when the major buildings are lit up.  

Parliament building in Budapest at night

I took along a hand work project, about a zillion hexies I cut out that need to be basted to the paper.  I only got a few done, had too much else to occupy me, lol.  I met a woman on board who was working on her own epp project, the Lucy Boston quilt.  Pretty surprising considering I almost never encounter another quilter outside of my LQS (or the internet) and there were only 168 passengers on the cruise. 

I'm back to my regular schedule now and a whole lot more basting.  Good thing I have a long list of shows to watch on Netflix.  The weather forecast calls for rain this weekend so I may make some real progress. 

Roughly What It Will Look Like

2018 Winter Olympic Games = lots of time for hand sewing in my view.  I got a little project together.  It is called the mandolin quilt block, from Tales of Cloth.  I stumbled across the block on Instagram, where you can see this block (#mandolinquilt) in every color combination and type of fabric you can think of.  It is an English paper piecing design.

The photo below shows my fabric choices, cut and laid out to test the combination.  Actually, this is where I ended up, not where I started, but I neglected to take photos of the false starts.  

I glue-basted during the first night of coverage and have been sewing during figure skating, skiing, and snowboarding.

The design so far; two more rounds to go.  I'm making just one block and my plan is to applique it to background fabric, quilt it, and frame it using a large embroidery or quilting hoop. 

Millefiori Quilts 3

Willyne Hammerstein has a new book out, Millefiori Quilts 3.  I bought it at my LQS as soon as it come out because I've been thinking it is time for me to start another hand project.  There's lots of great eye candy and more than a little inspiration!  Willyne makes all her quilts by hand, not the English paper piecing method, but with the instructions in the book, you can use either method.  (But machine sewing is probably not an option with these tiny pieces.) 

There are 18 new designs in the book.  Here are a few of my favorites.  Please excuse the poor photography; it is difficult to hold the camera with one hand while you hold the book open with the other hand. 

This is the cover quilt, Moncarapacho.  Really fantastic, and an unusual combination of colors.  I'm deterred by the fact that the center of each motif is a 10-pointed star.  Think of all those points coming together and the bulk of the seam allowances!

Nocturne uses a similar color scheme and also has a pieced border.  It looks a little easier too, with just six points coming together in the center. 

Le Grand Desert is her take on the dresden plate block, with the addition of smaller six-pointed stars.  And all fussy cut from one fabric.  It's like a mash-up of dresden plate and one block wonder and looks so impressive.

Belle Fleur, again an unusual color combination but so effective.  I've seen this block before, called Antique Rose Star (in fact, I have a whole Pinterest board on it, here), and it is very adaptable to different fabric types, from the 19th century reproductions shown here to modern prints and everything in between.

So now I'm looking for some color inspiration in the form of a possible border fabric, then I'll decide exactly which direction to take.  But another epp project is definitely in my future.

La Passacaglia - The Beginning

A few weeks ago, I blogged about my latest obsession quilt love, the La Passacaglia quilt from Millefiore Quilts by Willyne Hammerstein.  I started my project last week and have the center of Rosette #1 finished.  

Here's the center star; those bobbins on the right give you an idea of the size.  The pieces are tiny.

I did a lot of fussy cutting for this one.  It is time consuming but I like the look it gives, especially for the central 5-pointed star.  

This project will be entirely hand pieced, using the English Paper Piecing (EPP) method.  I will probably work on a machine pieced project at the same time, because sometimes you need to finish something in less than 2 years!