It feels good to be sewing again

The algorithm in life, things happen in threes.  First it was my car, then it was the TV.  Then the dryer.  All three things have been fixed by us.  All very technical but doable if you have the right tools.  I have had graduations, illness of the whole family, Dad was hosipitalized, and I worked overtime which all converged and became of cluster of time.  Things are normalizing!  Normal is lovely.

In my last post, Vintage Sheet Quilt in the Works, I showed you my preferred method of using vintage sheets because they are scootin’ little critters.

I have sewn the large interfacing panel and got that completed but I did not account for shrinkage with all those 1/4 seams….a duh quilter moment.

This is the size I started with

In the midst of things, I snapped a few photos in between the start and the finish.

And finally, laying on the same mattress (twin) I have ended up with this.

No overhang anymore which is ok.  I will shear this off on the edges, add some white and have already started more gridded squares going for a row all the way around after the white.  Sometimes when quilters start projects and don’t plan ahead, you end up not knowing what to do.  It sometimes turns into a UFO.  But I am enjoying this process so much as it is quick and easy, that is it is just enough for my creative mind.

I have a whole shoebox left of squares and anticipating making many quilts with a grid theme.  My next one will be a square of smaller squares and then star points added with larger pieces of sheets.  Goodness me I have amassed quite a collection of these with another planned swap in late summer.

Pictured here is the back of the quilt top after all the rows were stitches.  It was so nice to sew and sew and sew and not have to iron.  I ironed at the very end.  I am curious to know how this will quilt up on my DSM.

In other news, I am involved in a fabric swap with the members of the missouri star forums.  That starts today and we are swapping reds, oranges, and yellows.  I can’t wait to see what I end up with.  The last fabric swap I was in, the theme was polka dots, and I made this quilt from those 10 inch squares.  And I see I cannot go and retrieve that file because my archive expired.  😦 as the rest of the internet images of it on pinterest.

Here is a small thumbnail of it though, all polka dot fabric, front, sashing, and back with bubble quilting all over.

I start working overtime again this week so my sewing will taper off again.  But because I am working with a smaller piece of interfacing I should be able to sew a snippet of this every night and still make progress, just on a smaller scale.

I look forward to hearing from you!  Feel free to comment about Random things in the comment section.  Comments are fun!

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Vintage Sheet Quilt in the works

Last summer in June a group of us forum members from Missouri Star Quilt Company put our thinking caps on and decided we could take one vintage sheet, cut it into fat quarters and share/swap with one another to benefit from great variety from all over the United States.  The swap was a huge success.  For more info on this you can read here.

A few months back I took those manageable fat quarters and using the accuquilt cutting system turned them into 2 inch pieces.  Working with vintage sheets can be frustrating.  A normal rotary cutting session is NOT normal.  Of course like all fabric they have a warp and a weft, and bias too, but because they are thin, they scootch even while being held down by the heftiest of templates and pressure.  That is when I realized to cut with scissors or to die cut.  I have a whole shoe box full after this project to continue with vintage sheeting craftiness.

Because it was a simple square pattern piece, and because of the shiftyness of the sheets I decided to use a technique using gridded interfacing.

Oh a few years back I was watching Maxie Makes videos on youtube and discovered this technique.  It went back into the old rolodex files in my brain to be retrieved for this process.  I could not find that video, however, I did find a clear, concise one and here is the link.

The process involves ironing pieces to your gridded interfacing.  Easy.  Because I was using poly/poly-blend sheets I set my iron accordingly.

I later got out a piece of parchment paper and turned the iron up all the way to get the best bond between the fibers and protected my project from melting.

First, the fun was laying out the pieces and deciding what went where.  I enjoyed this part of the process most.

By the way, I selected on point interfacing grid.

I ironed a little section at a time until I had filled my pellon yardage full of squares.  The great thing with this system is your accuracy can be off and you still get perfect results.

The piece I had almost covered a twin bed.  The bottom picture shows a closeup of all those pieces ironed into place.

Then it was onto sewing.  Dealing with extra weight when piecing was difficult for me.  Next project, I will cut my pieces into more manageable sizes.

The last picture shown I have sewn all my parallel lines going in one direction.  Clipped all the intersections and have sewn a few perpendicular lines.  The pieces look so small, but scrappy.  If you notice, because of this interfacing method, your seams nest perfectly every time, every row, every intersection!

I am going to be the first to admit, there were some of these sheets that I did not care for.  Bright oranges, greens, and browns were not my favorites.  But once they were combined with the blues, pinks, and other pastels, those colors really grew on me.  My next vintage sheet buy, I will keep this in mind as it adds so much variety to the space.

In other news, the last month and a half were hectic.  Readers I apologize for not getting my keester here often.  I had overtime, graduation, hospitalization, family for graduation, and then illness for me (the summer flu sucks) and the whole household got the bug.  I had not sewn a stitch until last weekend  Three weeks for not sewing for me is a record and I hope I never break that record.

It is good to be back in the norm.  And yes I set aside my quilting of Jelly Roll Wrong which I renamed Just Smurfy.  Remember the smurfs?  If the smurfs were having a good day or a bad day they called it smurfy.  And because that quilt is full of blues, appropriately named I think.  Stay tunned as I hope to get back to quilting.  Thanks for visiting my blog!