Recently in Groovy Stack n Whack Category
On Friday I picked up a special gift for my daughter -- the Groovy Stack n' Whack quilt was complete. It's quilted and has a soft plush purple backing out of a fabric called Minky. It's a bit heavy, so it will most likely be a winter quilt for a summer baby. Minky is machine washable, so it makes a nice backing for a baby quilt -- and it actually comes in some "adult" colors, too. I'm thinking it would be a nice backing for a quilt for John and I as well.
I've talked about this quilt a lot in the past and I don't have many more details to add... so most of this post will just be images.
My Zosia Butterfly has butterflies quilted into her quilt. Butterflies are something of a theme in her room, so when I picked the quilting design, I looked for one with a butterfly motif. The quilt has a very simple binding made up of one of the background fabrics. This seemed like the best way to go since it didn't introduce any new fabric and it seemed like simple would be best for a baby quilt.
Clearly it will take her a while to grow into her quilt!
Looks like the recipient likes it. What could be better than a baby smile? (And none of you are allowed to tell me that they don't smile this early or that it's just gas... she makes this happy face at us all the time... don't burst a new mom's bubble!).
Love you, baby girl. I'm looking forward to adding a few more quilts to your collection in the future.
In a surprising burst of effort, I turned all my star blocks into an actual quilt top on Saturday. Amazing what a cloudy, grey, cool weather day can do for my crafty motivation. Which is to say that when it's cooler outside, it's much more pleasant to be in my third floor office/craft space.
I'm very happy that I went with the pieced, multi-color border. It was more work in the end to do it this way, but I think it's the perfect border for the multi-colored stars. I give credit for the little corner pieces to Colette -- I just wish I could remember what she called them, since they have an actual quilting name for borders done with those little corner pieces.
Amazing how a picture can make things look more perfect than they are. I assure you there are plenty of small alignment mistakes when you get up close to it. But this turned out much better than Serenity did from that perspective. Every time I sit down at my machine, I learn a little more about making seams come together better, and this project taught me a good deal about careful block construction -- and why sewing triangles on the bias can be a little tricky. Next time I tackle a similar project, I'm sure the construction will improve again. I think that's one of the fun parts about learning a new craft -- in the beginning, you see so much progress in your technique and skill with every project.
This quilt is going to be off to the machine quilter sometime in the next week or so -- just as soon as I can get it to Quiltology for the hand off. I'm going to have it backed with a lovely plush, washable fabric, in a soft lilac color, that I think will be very baby friendly and give it a little extra thickness. Hopefully it will be back in my hands before the Z baby decides to put in an appearance. I think it would be awfully nice to bring her home from the hospital and greet her with her very own quilt.
Here's the moment I've been waiting for with my star blocks: seeing them all together and putting them into the final order I want them to be in for the Z Baby's second quilt. While I was laying them out yesterday morning, I grew extremely happy with my decision to put each star on a background of the same fabric. They all just popped out so well. Not to mention the fact that I think the choice of background fabrics turned out even better than I could have anticipated. They work well with the fabric in the stars and they play nice together in the quilt as a whole.
When I was laying out the blocks, geek girl that I am, I had to follow some rules. I didn't want any two blocks with the same background fabric on either the vertical or horizontal axis touching each other. In order to make this easier, I started with EQ5 to work out the generalities. Can you see the symmetry in the blocks (don't look at the stars themselves, but the background fabrics. The pink and purple background fabric blocks mirror each other, as do the aqua and green print fabrics. This morning, in my office, I worked out the details. I ended up swapping the locations of the aqua and green print fabrics so that I could make sure that the stars were distributed the way I wanted them to be -- I didn't want whole rows or columns that contained too much of one type of star pattern, though it wasn't possible to avoid completely, given how much of that light blue/dark blue striping was in the pattern that I started with.
One of the little pleasures I got from laying the blocks out was discovering how well the seams in my blocks line up and how, overall, I did a pretty good job of getting these blocks to within almost the same size of each other (the very first block, the pink one in the top left corner being something of an exception) . I feel very confident that when I sew these blocks together, that everything is going to line up nicely if I sew carefully. This is a distinct improvement over Serenity, my first quilt top. I was also amazed to find that when these blocks are all together as a whole, all my concerns about some of the wonky centers went away. It's almost impossible to demonstrate in a blog-sized photo, but even when you're up close, you don't notice those wonky centers very much. All the other activity going on in the quilt makes some of the problem minutia go away.
The last thing that remains is the border. Initially I was going to use some more "Feelin' Groovy" fabric (the fabric the stars are made of ) to border it, but after talking with Julie and Colette we all decided that that would be too busy and would probably detract from the blocks. Another option was to introduce a completely new fabric to go around the edge, but that didn't really feel right to any of us, either. Then Colette suggested that I consider a simple pieced border, where I use the background fabrics in the border, changing the color with the edge of each block and always using a different fabric than the block itself (sorry if that isn't clear, it will become more obvious when I put it together). I purchased a bit more of each background fabric to do the job with and I hope to get the top seamed up this weekend. Just like the finishing work on a sweater, I find it a lot easier to crank through the finishing work on a quilt top when I feel like I'm getting close to the endgame.
Well, this is all she wrote for the Groovy stack n' whack star blocks. Right here is the very last block. I think it turned out well from both a technical and visual perspective. The center looks reasonably well pieced and the colors that border the star are very complementary to the star itself, while still providing adequate contrast. A nice way to finish up the blocks.
And really not a moment too soon. I was getting to the point where I was getting a little bored with sewing up these blocks and looking forward to seeing them all together and figuring out what border I wanted to put on them. Originally, I was thinking about using the original Groovy fabric I used to cut the stars out from as the border. But now I am beginning to wonder if that will make the quilt feel too busy. Clearly a little time with the blocks and the Groovy fabric and a few pictures are in order.
I've been meaning to mention this for a while, and I imagine most of you are already aware of Clauida's efforts to raise money for the MS Society through a seriously long bike ride. She's done an incredible job so far -- she's well over her $30,000 milestone, which goes a lot towards showing the power of a friendly community and the Internet. She's also got some great prizes for people contributing to her fund raising -- though I know none of us needs prizes as an incentive to do good things. If you haven't had a chance to participate and have the funds to consider putting towards a good cause, I'd like to encourage you to think about it and pledge towards her ride.
MS is definitely a tough disease to live with -- and believe it or not, you can do a lot with $30,000 . It covers the significant portion of a salary for a young researcher for an entire year (I made $27,000 when I was a post-doc). Or an awful lot of research supplies. Or it could buy a piece of equipment to help a research group work on finding a cure or a better understanding of the disease. Or to help with therapy for someone suffering from the disease. According to the MS Society, over 400,000 people in the US, the majority of them women, suffer from this disease. So your donation really does help to give a lot of people more hope for the future.
More squares today. For the first time in a long time I managed to get in a work from home day where I was pretty much able to be focused on the geeky side of my work life. So fun to get completely absorbed in interacting with code (although, I know, clearly that beauty is the eye of only particular beholders).
It seems that the more of these squares I put together, the better the centers seem to come together. Must be something to that whole practicing thing after all. I had a hard time deciding whether to have more of the greenery in the center or to put the reds and flowery bits there. In the end, I liked how the ring of flowers created the illusion of the star being the center of a flower.
Only one more star left until the finish line! Well, at least until I have to start putting the squares into a larger whole.
I am coming into the home stretch with my stack n' whack stars. This is the 10th out of 12 blocks. It's my hope to get them all finished up this week so that I can get the quilt assembled before the Z Baby arrives. The quilt is destined for her nursery, and, in the interests of time, if I can get the top finished, I'm going to have it machine quilted by someone else. Just a few too many other things on my plate between now and her arrival. I'm happy with this completed block and think it embodies the "groovy" qualities of the fabric I started with.
As a follow up to yesterday's post, I just wanted to say that my trip to the OB's office Monday morning had a much better outcome for me than Thursday's trip. The fasting blood sugar levels were absolutely fine, the doctor expressed no concern over the fact that at this point the Z baby seems to prefer a head-up position and I don't have any signs of pre-term labor that would suggest that my bit of dilation is anything to be concerned about. In fact, exercise is fine as long as I don't over do it and it doesn't irritate my sciatica too much. I'm still not supposed to get too far from home, but that's a do-able restriction, since I wasn't planning on any real travel after June anyways.
Probably the biggest surprise for me with this visit was having the OB I saw today (amazing for the fact that her own baby is due in two weeks and she barely looks like she's started her second trimester) tell me that Dr. Serious had reservations about my condition due, in part, to what she felt was worsened sciatica (I assume because it suggests increased downward pressure on the nerves that might indicate the baby getting into position or my uterus getting active). She never mentioned this to me -- if she had, I would have happily told her that the sciatica was no different than it had been for the past couple of months that I've been dealing with it. I guess this falls into the "hazards of a large practice" place where my previous mentions of it to other doctors didn't get entered into my (what is becoming a very large) file, thus it appeared to be a warning signal and really wasn't It would have been nice to have this explained to me by Dr. Serious. Certainly it would have made for a better experience. Probably for both of us.
After all the reorganizing I managed to get my office desktop cleaned off and to find some time to work on another stack and whack quilt block. This one is relatively sedate. The center is, well, rather off-center, but the rest of it doesn't look so bad, amazingly enough. I am not sure to blame this on my sewing or my cutting of the original diamond shaped pieces. But I've decided not to sweat it too much.
I am finding, as I do a few more of these "sedate" squares that are mostly greenery, that I like them more than I thought I would. Hopefully these less busy squares will provide calmer places for the eye to rest when the quilt is completed and in use.
Before I sign off, I wanted to make a little broadcast request. One of the folks responding to my de-stashing was Mercedes Tompkins. She was interested in the Jaeger Chamonix that I had for sale, but someone else got to it before she did. She asked if I might know anyone else who had some of this yarn and I told her that I would be happy to ask about it on the blog. She's looking for a few more balls of this yarn in colorway 900. If you have any of this yarn and would be willing to sell or trade, would you please email Mercedes? Her email address is: m.tompkins@comcast.net -- I know she'd be very appreciative.
I finished up this star just before I headed to Toronto, but actual knitting content got in the way of me posting it before now. I'm rather happy with how this star turned out. The center looks good and the kaleidoscope effect works well. This is the eighth star in my Groovy Stack n' Whack project. I am now officially 2/3rds of the way through the star creation process.
Unfortunately, this project (and all my other quilting projects) have been in a holding pattern for a while as John and I re-organize our office space. This re-organization process has definitely been one of those "gets worse before it gets better" sort of things with boxes and books and craft supplies everywhere as we figure out what goes together with what and what should just go. The purging process is certainly therapeutic in a lot of ways, but it also cuts into time that I would normally spend crafting. It's also hard to do too much sewing when your machine is surrounded by things that you need to put away or get rid of. This weekend we made a lot of progress, so I'm hoping that a few more quilt blocks for this project will start to materialize.
I've actually been feeling a bit guilty about my quilting projects -- Serenity remains to be quilted, and there is still a good deal more sewing of strips remaining in my Blooming 9 Patch. I have a good excuse for Serenity -- I need to pin everything out on the floor, and I'm finding it hard to be on my hands and knees much since one of my hips gives me a lot of trouble when I try that. But I have no such excuse for the 9-patch project. Ah well, there is a time for everything, I suppose, and life is too short to spend a lot of it feeling guilty about craft projects that don't progress as fast as one would like.
In some ways, these quilt blocks are like candy. Everytime you finish one, you want to start another to see how it is going to turn out. The challenge now is making sure that the background and the star turn out to be complementary together -- and that I'm orienting the stars so that I don't end up with too many that have the same feel. I'd like each block to have it's own unique quality.
I'm back in Chicago now. Funny to think that I have probably taken my last out of town trip -- certainly my last airplane trip -- for a while. I did really enjoy Toronto and I do want to go back, but it's also nice to be home. It was really nice to sit on the couch tonight, prop up my swollen feet, and watch some things off the DVR while John got to feel the baby move. I feel like we're all supposed to be together right now. And it makes me happy that John wants to feel her move and share that part of the pregnancy experience with me.
And should you want to see a few more pictures of me in Toronto, Stephanie got some fun pictures of me and my bump with her sock -- I feel quite honored to have been able to pose with the sock, and I know that it must certainly be a good karma thing for Ms. Z.
To those of you in the states, I wish you a peaceful Memorial Day weekend with good weather and time to enjoy the things that make you happy. Is there anything nicer than a three day weekend in late spring? To everyone else I wish the same, but that you can get equally good mileage out of two days instead of three.
This star marks the half way point through the blocks that I am putting together. It has a real "jungle flower" feeling to me. And I like the sort of flower within a flower pattern you get (if you think of the star design as something of a flower motif). I do wish that bottom left piece had fit in just a little bit better so it looked like there was just one little flower in the center. However, it is as several people have said: very slight variations in the diamonds* can have an impact on how the center looks.
It has been suggested in my comments that perhaps I should show off a "bump shot" so that you can all see how Ms. Z and I are progressing. Since I am now closing in on 29 weeks and I suspect that I will soon be ending the "cute" part of my gestational period (signified by the fact that several of the cute little tops that I bought are getting a little more belly baring than I like, I thought it might be a good time to take a picture. Hotel bathroom mirrors aren't entirely ideal, but they do work okay. That said, I am not feeling quite bold enough to make it a feature picture on my blog for a day. However if you would like to see how the Z and I are doing just click here. I'm getting to be a very round biologist! And my little passenger almost never sits still for very long. I think Z is preparing for a career as a professional soccer player!
* I know that a few people have asked how the pieces for the stars are made. The idea behind stack and whack is that you find the repeat in your fabric and then you stack as many pieces of fabric on top of each other (matching the repeat) as you need to to create the geometric shape that you want to feature. Then after you "stack", you get out your rotary cutter and "whack" -- i.e. create pieces of the size and shape that you need to make to get the central block feature.
