Doll Quilt in Progress: From Trash to Treasure

I’ve been quilting for HOW long?? And still I made an avoidable error. I recently purchased a pattern. When I read the instructions for cutting the fabric and looked at the instructions I knew that there was serious error for cutting part of the pattern. I should have drawn the block in EQ8 and checked it, which is what I did…eventually…but instead I just went head and cut out the fabric as directed.

I thought I could wing it, or change some other parts of the pattern and make it work. I re-cut a lot of the pieces, but no. The half square triangles (HSTs) were never going to work.

I could have just tossed the lot, but years ago I designed the apple fabric and had it printed at Spoonflower. No way I was tossing it!

It didn’t take me long to figure it that the orphan patches would make a sweet doll quilt. I laid the HSTs out in lots of different patterns but finally decided I liked a simplest layout. I got it all sewed together and looked at it for a few days. Nice, but it could be better.

I couldn’t be believe I was doing this for a doll quilt, but I took off the borders to added an inner red strip. I made raised flange from a 1 1/8 inch strip of red fabric. I folded the strip in half the long way and pressed. Then I sewed it to the pieced blocks using a very scant 1/4 inch seam. And finally reattached the apple border using a full 1/4 inch seam.

Doll quilt sandwiched, basted and ready to quilt

I do like version #2 better, though there was really nothing wrong with version #1! It’s all sandwiched, using up a remnant of cotton quilt batting, and is ready to quilt.

The puppy had surgery two days ago, so this will have to wait. The pup is sore, but doing well, but I’ll doing quiet tasks to be near her until she’s feeling better.

Once the it’s quilted, I’m planning on adding red binding. A doll somewhere is going to be toasty wrapped in her quilt, maybe dreaming of making an apple pie for her little person!

Purple Half Square Triangles!

I’m seeing purple! Which is odd, because I don’t really like purple! This new quilt will be comprised entirely of half square triangle (HST) blocks. You can see a sample of them in the photo above.

The HST blocks are all made and trimmed. That is as far as I’ve gotten as because I feel like August really is kick back and be lazy time! And I’m okay with that!!

Bringing a New Quilt Design to Life

If I were a teacher, and if my post last week was multiple choice test, my students would on a rant today! That post is about a quilt pattern I was designing. I showed 4 variations, and thought the 4th design was the one I was I’d chosen to make. Turns out the final design was not a, b, c, or d, but e—”none of the above”. Uh-oh!! That wasn’t even listed as an option last week—but it has to always be a possibility in the creative process.

When I started sewing the star blocks, I realized that the flowers were facing north, south, east and west. I put my blocks up on my design wall and tried several variations, taking snap shots of each.

After looking at my snap shots, I decided have the flowers in the large half square triangle blocks, face north and south. So now the design doesn’t have a designated top and bottom—it looks the same from both ends of the quilt. This might not work with a fabric design that was bolder, but I think it’s just fine with the dainty little flowers.

I still have borders to add the to quilt top. I was racing to finish sewing the main blocks in the top so I could get a photograph for this post before a snow storm arrived. So you’re seeing what I’ve sewn so far. (And yes, the snow and dusk both arrived just an hour after I took the picture).

Half Square Triangle Embroidered Mini Quilt Completed

I've completed up my Half Square Triangle Embroidered Mini Quilt. It finished at 12 1/2 x 13 inches.  I'm so happy with these embroidered flower designs which I found in Kazuko Aoki's book, The Embroidered Garden.

I really like the front of this little quilt. As I showed in my last post, some of the threads from the flower embroidery are hidden inside the the quilt. I wanted to use the flower stems as part of this little quilt's quilting. I used two stitches for the stems--the running stitch which has gaps between each stitch and the back stitch. The running stitch looks like quilting stitches on the back of the quilt. The back stitch really doesn't look good.

I'm not unhappy about the back since this is a quilt that will be used as a wall hanging.  But if I were doing it again, I'd just use a running stitch for all the flower stems.

Half Square Triangle Mini Quilt with Embroidered Flowers--WIP

I'm currently working on a Half Square Triangle (HST) mini quilt made with more left over triangles from another quilt made with the stitch and flip method of block construction.  These HSTs finish at 2 inches square.

I had a idea about embroidering flowers, peaking out in the white patches but hidden by the colored triangles. It was an interesting idea, but when I found the designs I wanted to embroider, it made more sense just to work on the surface.

I embroidered just the flowers through the top of the quilt and the batting, saving the stems to use as part of the quilting. That worked really well. The colored threads are buried in the back of the batting and so aren't visible on the front of the piece. Here's a look "behind the scenes" on the back of the batting.

I learned to embroider in school in second grade, so it's an established skill. But I decided to look around the internet to see if I could find some inspiration and new ideas. 

I discovered a beautiful book, The Embroidered Garden: Stitching Through the Seasons of a Flower Garden, by Kazuko Aoki.  This is such a lovely book. I highly recommend it if you are interested in embroidering flowers. All her embroidered pieces are together in the front half of the book, with detailed stitching instructions in the back of the book.

I drew my flowers, one at a time as I worked, with a fading marking pen, using her embroidery as a guild. I needed to redraw portions of some flowers because the pen faded faster than I could stitch! I used flowers from two of her Summer Garden pieces to make my design, but I didn't very stray far from her beautifully balanced floral compositions. My embroidery design clearly echoes hers.

I'm nearly done!  I'll show the completed mini quilt in my next post.

Pinwheel Modern Doll Quilt

This year the Proper Bostonian Quilters Guild has been working on a mystery quilt which is a sampler of star blocks.  There have been lots of stitch and flip patches in the blocks. Those stitch and flip units have "waste" triangle units which are really ready-made half square triangle blocks!

I decided to make those little triangles into a couple of doll quilts. Here is the first one. The little pinwheels finish at 2 inches square and the larger ones at 3 inches square.

It's quilted with Big Stitch Quilting using #8 Perle cotton thread and there are French knots in the pinwheels.  When I first started quilting and was using a lot of applique, I added details with embroidery. Now that embroidery is making a big come back, I can see using it, sparingly, to add a little pop to a quilt. I've been adding dots to lots of my drawings so I decided it would be fun to put some little dots in this doll quilt!

This is a little doll quilt--a size chosen to be used with my Baby Waldorf Doll. Doesn't Lucy Birch look comfy under the quilt?

I have enough left little half square triangles to make one more quilt about this size. The design is done and it's ready to sew, so I'll share it soon!

Dalmatians and Half Square Triangles

The Dalmatian fabric I used in the "Dalmations and Diamonds" quilt has now been used in 3 quilts and one improv block (see my last post). That fabric is all gone now! Here is the second quilt in the series. I picked colors from the cool side of the color wheel for this quilt.

I call this one "Calm in the Kennel, Chaos Outside"! The blocks in the large diamond are all arranged into small diamonds. The blocks outside the large central diamond are all random.  I had thought this was going to be a totally random HST quilt. But when I saw the central diamond begin to appear, I really liked it so went with it.

In the gallery below you can see some of the process of transforming it from a stack of half square triangles to its final design. I use the black and white photos to look see if the more intense colors are balanced in the quilt. It's easy to go from color to black and white on a cell phone, but the photography program on a computer can do it too. These are quick design-in-progress photos so not "pretty"!

The top two images are the same. The HST blocks had just been put up on the design wall randomly. There is no sign of the central diamond.  You can begin to see it in the bottom two photos. The blocks inside the diamond in the lower photos are still random.

Here's final photo of the quilt. The wind has flipped an edge so you can see the back.

The third quilt in this series of Dalmation quilts features colors on the warm side of the color wheel.  I'm quilting it now so it should be ready in time for my next post.

Half Square Triangles: The Tree Quilt

Here's my half square triangle Tree Quilt.  The designs in the fabrics include cross-sawn tree trunks, tree branches, flowers and woodland animals.  The large yellow square block has quilting intended to look like tree bark and a reverse circle imitating a hole in the "trunk."

Detail of quilting of the "tree trunk"

The quilt has a wool batting.  It has a lovely, light loft and quilts beautifully.

I initially just quilted the diamond pattern and the close quilting in the yellow block. The quilt seemed to float.  But I decided that the quilting just wasn't close enough for use over the long term.  So now each of the half square triangles has quilting outlining it.  It doesn't have the quite the same floating feel now but still is a bit puffy.

I'm really pleased, however, that the diamond pattern of the quilting is still what draws the eye.  I think that's due the layout of the blocks and to the 2 lines of quilting 1/4 inch apart alternating every 2 rows of blocks in the quilt. 

This is a happy fall quilt and I really look forward to using it on the chilly nights which will be here soon!