A Finish!!!

I finally finished something! I joined the guild’s PhD challenge and decided to work on something from the list last week. I finished the tumbler table runner that has been a finished top for well over a year. I’m not very good with free motion quilting so I decided to practice and meandered the table runner. It’s not too bad, but I had some tension issues at the beginning. It doesn’t look too bad actually 🙂

Tumbler Quilt

Well it only took me a couple of hours in front of the tv last night to cut out all the tumbler pieces. It was pretty easy! I just lined up the 5″ mark with the edge of the strip and it cut it to 2.5″ across the bottom of the piece. When it’s all put together it will be a finished 2″ tumbler. I found that EQ doesn’t calculate the way I thought it did. When I originally designed it, I was basing it on the yardage. Well, that wasn’t quite correct. I got a lot more blocks out of the strips that I thought I would since every time I cut it was the side of the next block. I had almost NO waste! I just redesigned it to match the number of blocks I have and the center layout is now 39″ x 52″. Now that I’ve finished lunch, I can start working on putting the blocks together!!!!!

February BOM

I finally got all 4 blocks finished for the Quilt Show BOM. I really like the Irish Chain blocks, they look really cool with the scrappy colors. I’m not happy with the way the stars went together, but I think that’s because I screwed up one of them and had to rip out 4 seams to fix the issue! This is farther than I got with last years BOM, I’m hoping I’ll have the fortitude to finish this year, I think I will though! Now to wait until next month for the next set of blocks!

The Quilt Show 2010 Star Crazy BOM - Month 2

Jelly Rolls

Ok, I know I don’t need to be starting ANOTHER project, but I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with this jelly roll I bought a while ago. I’ve looked at many, many books and just haven’t found a pattern that I liked. I was thinking about it while I was out today, because I was listening to a podcast and she was talking about heart themed projects for Valentine’s Day. I’ve FINALLY decided on the project! I’m going to cut these strips into tumbler shapes and put it all together randomly. The blocks will use the full 2.5″ height so I should be able to use just about everything in the jelly roll. I have a template, but it’s for 2″ tumblers which was just too small. Below is the EQ drawing – no, it’s not colored correctly!

So anyway, now that I decided what I was going to do, I needed to figure out how big this was going to end up being and figure out the layout – how many rows and how many in each row? Off to EQ to try and figure it out! But I needed to know how much yardage there was in the jelly roll to make sure I was making it a realistic size. I could not find the yardage ANYWHERE on the web! So I finally decided to calculate it out myself! I know there is 36″ in a yard and these are 2.5″ strips. You can fit 14.4 strips in a yard of fabric. Most jelly rolls are 40 strips of fabric, so I can figure that there’s about 2.75 yards in my jelly roll. This made it easy for me to determine the right layout in EQ since it tells me how many yards of the fabric I need! The center of the quilt is 42 x 32 and I need 528 tumblers to make this quilt. Now to cut them all out!!!

The good news is that I also have a tub FULL of 2.5″ strips cut from old projects that I can make a totally scrappy one too! But first to use the jelly roll!!!!

It’s been awhile….

I know, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted. But I’ve been busy! I did manage to get some applique Dear Jane blocks finished though. And today I completed a couple more blocks. I have more in the works, hopefully I’ll get them done soon, as I’m almost at 50 blocks completed!

I don’t have any pictures yet, but I recently aquired a treadle sewing machine! I won’t go into the relationships as to who I got it from, but I have found out that it was manufactured somewhere between 1913 and 1920. It needs a lot of cleaning up and I need to replace a few parts before it will work. I’ll have to see if I can take some pictures in the next week or so to post.