More Vin du Jour

I may have said this last time, but it has been a very stressful week. I really dislike giving final, high-stakes exams. I just don't think a large part of assessment should ride on one test. The rules say we have to have an exam, though, so I give exams that aren't a huge part of the grade for students. You would think this would be less stressful, but it isn't, because everything has to be completed in a very short time, especially for graduating seniors. So lots and lots of anxiety on all sides this week. Thank goodness it's Friday, and the last exam is over.

Working on my little scrap project kept me sane this week, but I did not finish the quilt completely. I did finish the center, though! Here it is:

Not bad for a bag of scraps! These blocks are really big. This measures about 37 by 37 already. One reason I didn't finish it is that I haven't got any large pieces left for a border. I kind of like it without a border at all, but I do think a border will set off the stars in the center. So I need to make a piano key border to use up the small pieces I have left. That would be a good use of the fabric and a nice finish, I think. I have just enough of the yellow to make either a small inner border or a binding. Not sure which one is the best use of the yellow. I'm thinking the small border, but I might change my mind.

As I said last time, this pattern (found HERE with tons of other free patterns) looks complicated but really isn't. Big pieces and easy shapes, even though it doesn't look like it in the finished product. One thing I found really useful is to cut a pattern for the circles out of freezer paper and iron it onto the pieced stars before trimming them into a circle. This works a lot better than trying to draw or trace the circle and then cut it out. Less chance of scissors slipping. Also, when putting the frames on the circle, stitch with the circle on top. That way the feed dogs can ease the frames just a tiny bit, just enough so that everything fits right. (If you want some more tips on the pattern, check out the earlier post. It really is a good pattern and not very difficult.)

I really do love these fabrics, and I'm really glad I saved them (for several years!) for just the right project. I also think this was the right pattern to finally use them in. But can I complain one more time about the waste? LOTS of waste in this pattern! Good thing I use white scraps all the time!

Anyway, that's where I am right now. I'll be grading (and grading. . .) this weekend, so not a lot of time to sew. I don't really sew much on the weekends, anyway, because there's a lot to do, and it's really the only time the hubster and I have together. Weird, I know. If I get a chance, though, I will be cutting my way through this:

This is a bin of small scraps just waiting to be cut into 1 1/2 and 2 inch squares. I should be able to find some time for that, right?

Everybody have a great weekend! Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there, especially the new moms. You're all doing a great job, and don't let anybody tell you different!

Linking to Sarah and Amanda again. Go check out everyone's great projects!

Vin du Jour

It's a very stressful and busy week here. Final exams, final papers, grading, more grading, meetings. . .it's a lot to pack in to one week. To keep me sane, I am working on a pattern that I thought would be easy enough and still engaging enough to let my mind rest a bit. I always stress a lot over final grades, so I need to do something to get my mind off it for a while. The pattern is Vin du Jour, a free pattern from Moda fabrics which you can find and download HERE. Even if you don't go there for this pattern, there are a ton of other free patterns there, so it's worth checking out.

I thought that making a few blocks from this pattern and then creating a small wall hanging would be great for some scraps I saved that I really love.  They are the scraps from this quilt:

The fabric is Portugal by April Cornell. I just loved this fabric so much, especially the yellow. This quilt hung in my office for a while, and I think I may hang it again this fall.  It just makes me happy to look at it. I had a good-sized pile of scraps from this one, and I saved them all together. When I saw the Vin du Jour pattern I knew this was the place to use them. It just seemed right.

This makes some really pretty giant blocks (18 inches!), but it's a weird pattern. First of all, it calls for a really expensive and limited-use ruler to make the center of the block. Since I own enough pieces of plastic, there's no way I was doing that.  I just made a kaleidoscope block, like this:

I paper-pieced mine, but there are a lot of different ways to make it. (It's a 6 inch finished block.) Just be sure to use white in the corners so that the pattern finishes out correctly in the larger block. You could even use a solid piece of fabric and just "snowball" it by adding triangles to the corners to create an angled snowball block if you didn't want to piece it. After making the center, the pattern has you make quarter square triangles and cut part of them off, like this:

Okay. A little odd, but it does work. I don't know how you'd get the final design otherwise, really. Then there are frames for the block (more waste!) and then the center is cut into a circle and the frames are joined to it. It sounds complicated, and it looks a little scary in the pattern, but it isn't really. Just takes some attention--and pinning. You end up with this really pretty block:

Isn't that a nice design? I like it. It is giant, though, so I only have enough scraps to make four blocks, which will be plenty big enough for a wall-hanging or table-topper. I may have to make a piano-key border, though, or something similar, because I don't have big pieces left after cutting everything.

One thing about this pattern--there is a LOT of waste. I cut up a whole yard of white fabric for the backgrounds, and that's just for four blocks! I ended up cutting off a lot of it to make the circles, plus what I lost in cutting for the frames and lopping off the quarter-square triangles. Good thing I was using scraps! If I had used new fabric I would have been really mad. Fabric is too expensive to waste that much of it. Pattern designers, are you listening?

Anyway, that's what I'm doing to save my sanity during the next few stressful days. I hope to finish it by Friday, just after the last exam. We're having thunderstorms today, which seems to suit everyone's mood, especially the students'. It will all be over soon.

Everyone have a good Wednesday. I am going to link up with Lee at Freshly Pieced. She gave a presentation at our local quilt shop and her Wavelength quilt is outstanding! Hop on over and have a look!

Weekend wonders

Hello everyone. Hope you all had a great weekend.

This weekend I got to go here:

Every year Nancy's has a big warehouse sale with vendors and classes and the whole nine yards. Usually it's the first weekend in May. Some of my really good friends and I used to go every year and make a big trip of it, but they have since moved out of state, so our big trip is no more. (Not to worry--many good places to fabric shop when we visit each other!)  But the weather was really good on Saturday and my husband and I were up for a short road trip (about an hour and a half), so off we went. 

We got lunch from the American Legion veterans, conveniently located right across the street from Nancy's:

Look at how that wind was blowing! But the brats and burgers were great, not to mention the bake sale, which they wisely held inside. The hubster hung out there for a while then ran some errands while I explored here:

Lots of stuff to look at! There were some really nice bargains in those bins, plus all the vendors had their own deals. Here's what I left with after I looked at everything:

It doesn't look like much, but I was really happy with it. (Not sure why it's upside down. Hmmm.)

But wait, there's more! We went driving through Beaver Dam, a nice town, in search of a walking trail, and we passed by a rummage sale. There was a sewing machine for sale out front, so how could we not stop?

I passed on the machine, and she had a lot of apparel fabric that I wasn't interested in, but I did see this:

I said, "$10 seems like a lot for an 8 year old pattern." And the woman at the sale said, "It comes with the fabric, but I don't have the batting any more, so you could have it for $8."

Wrap it up! There's more than 5 yards of fabric there!  I also got this for another $10:

She said she didn't like them. I don't know if I like them because I've never used them, but for $10 I can try! Maybe some applique? Maybe a wall quilt? Maybe some paper piecing?

So, that was my excitement for the weekend! Hope yours was good, too!

(No idea why the pictures are weird, and there doesn't seem to be a way to fix them! Any advice?)

The vintage linen project

I am happy today! I finished the vintage linen project yesterday.  Here is the finished top, about 30 by 30:

I like it so much! I took this picture this morning in between rain showers. Will we ever dry out? Or warm up?

This is not exactly how I envisioned it in the beginning. I tried several different possibilities for the center, and this is the one I liked best. I tried it first with rounded pieces for the Dresden plate, but they looked too cutesy, if you know what I mean. If you saw the earlier post on this project, you'll notice that I also had to get rid of the lighter purple that the center was originally appliqued to. The center linen piece isn't a perfect circle, and when I cut the original lavender piece into a circle it looked really bad. So I took it off and appliqued the linen piece to a white solid to give it some stability and then trimmed very close to the stitching. Then I stitched about an eighth of an inch outside that line to applique it to the center of the Dresden plate. A small tip from garment sewing if you ever find yourself needing to do this--use your zipper foot. Seriously, if you run the edge of a zipper foot along the original line of stitching you will end up with a perfectly spaced second stitching line.

The other thing I found really helpful was to block the Dresden plate "blades" before I appliqued them to the white background.

Blocking (and some Magic Sizing) made it easier to handle and made the finished product better, I think. A large part of the blades did get cut off after I appliqued the center piece, but I'm not sure what I would have done to prevent that. I used the 5-inch line on my Dresden template and ended up trimming off at least two inches. One side effect of this project is that I now want to make a whole Dresden quilt. We'll see. . .

Just two close-ups of the linen itself. My husband thinks it was stitched either by his grandmother, who died in 1963, or his Aunt Mary, who died in 1968.

Whichever woman from his family worked them, they are beautiful, and now they are out of a drawer and will be used and loved again. I'll be pondering how to quilt this, especially the center. I'm open to suggestions if anyone has any.

Looking at this piece, I'm pretty sure every "art" teacher I ever had would be appalled because I mixed blue purples with red purples willy-nilly. I think I'm happy that they would be upset about it!

Hope everyone has a great weekend! I am linking up with Sarah, Amanda, and SoScrappy again--I want to show this off!