Groovy Stack n Whack: May 2007 Archives
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.
The slow crafting process continues Chez Biologist -- only one more quilt block to show for myself.
Once again, I like everything about this star except the very center. I can't quite figure out where the wonkiness comes from -- probably my seams are not quite the 1/4 inch that they are supposed to be. As the pieces get built up, there's a little more tendency for them to slide around a bit, at least in my hands. What I do like about this block is how the brown tree trunk pattern ends up forming a ring around the bees, and how the leaves fan out towards the points. I chose the pink background fabric to provide a big contrast against the green and to pick up the flash of pink in the wings of the little bees.
Sewing this block gave me the chance to think about knitting. Very specifically, I can't take my sewing machine to Toronto next week, and one sock cuff isn't likely to be enough knitting to keep me busy Sunday through Thursday. At the same time, this also isn't the time to start a large knitting project, because I don't want to haul that much knitting gear or yarn along with me in my suitcase.
So I got to thinking about one skein projects, and as I was moving my knitting books around, I came across Zoe Mellor's 50 Baby Booties to Knit
Here you have a block surrounded by the last of my four background fabrics. I chose the background to complemen the pink and purple tones in the flowers in the diamond shaped pieces. And I think, in the end, the two sets of fabric complement each other quite well.
From a construction perspective, this block started off well. In fact, up until the point I seamed the two large rectangles together to form the final square, I thought this block would be almost perfect. But, as you can see, there are issues with the center of the block, where one of the diamond points looks rather sharply out of line. Everything else lined up well, however, so I couldn't see a way to fix it that wouldn't have left me with an equally obvious/visible problem in a different part of the block. So I've left it the way it is. I think perhaps that when it is quilted and in active duty, it will be less noticeable than it is now.
Now I'm going to wrap up my LeMoyne Star Quilt Block process. This is where the sewing starts to get easy, but you do need to pay attention to how you are pinning things together. After the last post, the idea was to repeat the process documented in the first two entries to create a mirror image set of triangles.
This is what you should be looking at after the second set of triangles has been pieced. Most everything from here on out should be fairly straightforward. The most critical parts of the next steps involves making sure that you are pinning pieces so that the right lines line up correctly.
The pinning process here involves two steps -- securing the pieces together and making sure that the edge to be sewn is aligned correctly. For this seam, the most important thing to remember is that you want the place where the two different fabrics meet to line up as perfectly on both sides as it can. Believe it or not, this junction is actually more important than the center, because your eye tends to be drawn to places where it sees transition, and it will tend to make assumptions about what should be going on with the center of the square that wash out mistakes you make there.
To help you get things secured, the first thing to do is to pin the seams that make the "V" where the different colored fabrics are joined. Secure the one that is the farthest away from the seam you're going to sew, first. To do this, you really want the pin to go down through the center of the seam on the top piece and out through the center of the seam on the bottom piece, thus, aligning the seams. After that, you'll do the same thing for the seam closest to the edge you are going to seam together.
Finally, you're going to pin the edge you want to seam. Start with the place where the two fabrics join and make sure that it lines up on both the top and bottom triangle. Trust me -- even if other things aren't perfect, this is the thing you want to have line up correctly. After that, smooth things out from the middle and line up the points on either side as best you can and pin.
Once you've done the pinning and sewed the four sets of triangles together and pressed them (press the seams out just like you did for the first part of the process) you should have something that looks like the picture above when you lay the pieces out on your table. Now you have 4 blocks. The rest of the seams should be pretty obvious.
The pinning technique is similar to what you did for piecing the triangles into squares. Use those internal seams to help secure the two squares together. Then carefully line up the places where the fabric joins occur on the edge you are going to sew together. Do your best to make the center point seams line up on the top and bottom as well before worrying about pinning the corner where the background fabrics join.
After pressing out the pieces (seams out) you now have two large rectangles -- you're one more seam away from a finished block.
Yep, more precision pinning is required for this process. I didn't worry as much about securing the inner seams at this point, but you should feel free to pin down anything that makes you happy. For this piecing, I did start in the center and made sure the center lines came together correctly on the top and bottom pieces. Then I moved out from the center on either side and made sure the seams where the background and main fabrics joined were aligned before securing the outer corners.
One more seam from my trusty sewing machine and another pressing event with my iron, and you have a finished block.
See, not so hard. And a very pleasing result!
Well, I survived my high dose of glucose and the four needle sticks that the long form glucose tolerance test required. No results until late afternoon sometime today (Friday), but I'm optimistic. A lot more so than I was when I got on the bus to go to my doctor's office Thursday morning. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it was the nice woman who gave up her seat on the bus for me (completely unprompted on a very full bus) or the fact that it was such a nice morning when I had the test and I got to go walking between bleeds. Even if it doesn't help my glucose readings, the walking definitely made me feel better. How can you not be happy when the morning sun is shining over Lake Michigan and you can feel the breezes off the Lake? And I even managed to turn the heel on the second of my Sprung socks.
Anyway... to pick up where I left off yesterday, once you put those pieces back in place, it's time to add the next piece to the diamond, small triangle set that you have.
To do this, you simply place the larger triangle, right sides togther, aligned with the other edge of the diamond.
Once again, your pins are your friends! You want to line up the square corner of the triangle with the square corner of the diamond/small triangle combination and the edge of the diamond. You do this for all 4 diamond-small triangle pieces that you pieced in the first part.
As you did with the previous pieces you're going to iron open all the seams on the back sides of the pieces that you just sewed together. Now you have two triangles and a diamond fit together as a larger triangular piece that is the first half of the 4 square blocks that make up the larger LeMoyne Star block.
Once all the pieces are ironed, take them back to your table and lay them out where they should go. You're done with these pieces for a little while, but it's always nice to admire your handiwork.
The next thing you're going to do is repeat all these steps for the second batch of diamonds and triangles. It's the exact same process, only the final pieces are going to be mirror images of the first set of final pieces. When you're done with that, you'll be coming down the home stretch!
Thank you to everyone who left comments yesterday to help me with my concern about my glucose tolerance test. If you have time to think good thoughts at my pancreas tomorrow morning it will be much appreciated. And it will be the first time my pancreas has ever received so much attention in my life!
In the mean time, I've been documenting the process of putting one of the LeMoyne Star quilt blocks together. Let me state very clearly, a quilting expert I am not. What I am good at is listening to good instruction and taking advantage of what I have learned from other more experienced people. A lot of what I'm going to post today is based on the good advice I got from others. Also, rather than create one very picture heavy post, I'm going to divide the process up into some natural chunks.
The very first step is simply to lay out your block, getting the diamond shaped pieces in the orientation that you want them to be in, and selecting the background fabric that you want to surround the star. In this case, I chose the light aqua Kaffe Fassett print because I thought it was a nice background for the pink and blue elements in the start.
The order of sewing that I learned in my class makes a lot of sense when it comes to making sure that you piece the right things together. One thing that may not be apparent initially is that certain pairs of pieces have one orientation, while other pairs have the opposite. This is true of the diamond shapes and the small triangles, which ar ethe first pieces you want to put together. You can start with any diamond shape, and then flip the bordering small triangle onto it so that the right sides of the fabric are facing. You line up the long side and point of the triangle with the point and side of the diamond. And you do this for every diamond/triangle pair where the triangle has the same starting orientation -- in other words, you are going to do this with every other diamond/triangle pair.
This picture should make it clearer which edges should align with which other edges. The important thing here: don't be afraid to use your pins! This will help you keep the points from squirming away from each other when they go through the machine. Really, if I learned anything from this quilting workshop, it was just that: pins are your friends. Pin early, pin often. Use as many pins as you need to to feel comfortable that your fabric is going to stay where you want it to.
This isn't so much a step in the process as it is a handy tip that I learned from Carolyn. To avoid those nastly little thread globs that can show up at the beginning of a seam because the top or bottom thread gets caught where it shouldn't, use a scrap piece of fabric to start your chain piecing seam. This picture also shows another very helpful tool when it comes to making nice seams -- my Bernina #57 foot -- this foot has a 1/4" guide on the right edge that makes it very easy to keep track of where you need to be seaming. I love this foot!
For the other two tops I have put together, you just press the seams to one side or the other. when you open up your pieces. For these blocks, you actually want to open up the seam and press it down. The why of this will become clearer later when the pieces start getting larger. For this process it is very handy to have a nice, heavy iron. And I think a dry iron works best because there's no way for the pieces to distort with the addition of water.
The last step of this part is easy: just put the pieces back into the layout where they go. This allows you to admire your work and do a visual check on whether things are lining up well. Word to the wise: don't be afraid to rip if you aren't happy with what you see. It's a lot easier to rip at this point than it is when you've built the blocks up a bit more. And it takes a lot less time to rip and re-sew a seam than it does to rip and re-sew knitted stuff, so don't be afraid of the process.
For me, there's almost nothing more fun than finding software that can support a craft addiction. I like software that can help me visualize the final product before I actually cast on a stitch or cut a single piece of fabric. With quilting, I'm finding that there is a lot of color to think about, and that having the chance to examine a layout before you start cutting and piecing can really make a difference when it comes to getting something you really like.
A couple of weeks ago I got my hands on a copy of Electric Quilt 5*. What a fun piece of software. It's relatively easy to use (I went through the first set of tutorial exercises and it covered most of the basics you need to get started) and it comes "programmed" with a number of standard quilt blocks and a small collection of fabric so that you can "paint" the blocks with any fabrics you like and put blocks together in any order to see how they look. You can plan borders, applique work and quilting patterns as well. And if you don't like the fabrics it comes with, you can use a scanner to scan your own fabrics and put them in and see how they work. The geek girl in me digs it quite a lot, especially since the learning curve is relatively shallow when it comes to doing the simple things that most people will want to do.
While it was a little too much work to try to model each individual square in my quilt, I was able to put something together to see how the background prints might work in combination with the Feeling Groovy fabric.
Right now I have the border of the quilt in the Feeling Groovy fabric. That could change if I find something I like better between now and when it's time to put the border on. But I think this image provides a reasonable estimation of what my final project will feel like when I've got the top all sewn up.
Other than that, I don't have to much to show tonight... to be honest, I've been feeling a little down and grumpy and fogged in by a carbohydrate haze. Last week I failed my one hour glucose tolerance test (by one friggin' point!) so right now I'm in the midst of a carb-loading diet in preparation for the three hour blood drawing extravaganza that I have to get up way too early for on Thursday.
I'm not sure why I'm dealing so badly with this... probably I just don't really like the feeling of having "failed" the first test (especially by what I consider a negligible margin) and having someone else tell me what I have to do (I've never been so good at taking orders from other people) combined with the fact that all this carbohydrate is making me feel like a bloated hippopotamus.
Yes, yes, I know all the reasons why it's important to do this...and even though I repeat them over and over, I'm still feeling grumpy about it. I know, too, that I am not alone in this. Plenty of women have to deal with it and most people who take the 3 hour test don't end up being diagnosed with gestational diabetes. No doubt the winds will change and my mindset will improve (making quilt blocks is very therapeutic at the moment) but for the next couple of days it's probably going to be somewhat rough going. Overall the pregnancy ride hasn't really been a bad one, but it sure would be nice to have a few weeks of being pregnant where I wasn't getting stuck with a needle...
* Yep, I know Electric Quilt 6 is out, but I got a great deal on Electric Quilt 5 and it's upgradable to Electric Quilt 6 when I feel motivated to go in that direction.
Given all the office renovation and moving of things required for that, not much crafting was done. However, I did get started on the second block of my stack n' whack quilt. I also convinced my scanner to let me get an image of the fabrics that I am using as background fabrics for the quilt.
The top left and bottom two prints are Kaffe Fasset prints, the top left is a Fun Quilts print. All of these fabrics were selected to co-ordinate with some of the colors in the Feeling Groovy fabric that was the main fabric for the LeMoyne Stars. Although I started out thinking that each block would have a corner in each color, after putting a couple of stars on a background of just one color, I became convinced that the solid backgrounds helped pop out the stars better. So, since I am making 12 blocks, I will have 3 blocks with each print as the background print. Here's my first block with the greenish colored fabric.
I really like the contrast betweent he bright orange flowers and the gren background fabric. The yellowy tones are just perfect together. And I'm also generally pleased with the piecing. The important lines and junctions are where they are supposed to be.
The only thing I am not so happy about is that the block should be 12.5" x 12.5" and it is closer to 12 x 12. Somewhere along the way I lost 1/2 an inch. I don't think I lost it to the seams, but I also didn't notice any strange issues with the sizes of the pieces, either. So I'm going to have to do a little measuring compared to the first block and my existing pieces to see where that 1/2 inch went.
Since serveral folks commented on how impressed they were with my piecing, I thought that I would try to show off some of the tricks that I learned in my class that helped to make my piecing look nicer. So for my next block, I'll try to take good pictures to help show off the process for anyone who might be interested.
Once I had all of my star pieces stacked and whacked it was time to cut out the background pieces. All of this cutting was simple. It simply involved cutting two sizes of squares and then cutting the squares into triangles. I have four fabrics for the background colors for the stars. Three are Kaffe Fassett prints and one is from FunQuilts via FreeSpirit. I'd show you these prints, but I'm fighting scanner problems tonight, and it's late, so they'll have to wait until a later post.
At any rate, I just finished getting all my cutting done before I headed off to the second of my two stack n' whack workshop classes. In this class, we focused on piecing the blocks and optimizing the process so that we could employ chain piecing instead of working on one piece at a time. It was in class that I also decided to change how I was going to put my stars on their backgrounds.
If you look at the star (above) you'll notice that it can be divided into 4 quadrants. I was going to use a separte background color in each of the 4 quadrants. However, after laying out some of my squares that way, and then trying out the stars on "solid" backgrounds (like the one above) I decided that I liked the solid backgrounds better. So now I will have 12 stars, with 3 stars on each background color.
For this first star (which is the third star, right side pictured on the post two days ago), I opted for the Kaffe Fasset "Roman Glass" print in pink to work with the pinks in the floral pattern in the diamonds. I'm pleased with how it came together. My sewing is far from perfect, but I did get some great pinning tips from our workshop teacher, Jan, that helped make this block a lot better than it would have been if I had muddled through on my own (I'll try to document the process in the future). The over all result makes me happy, as most of the lines that need to match up, do match up and the center is no where near as wonky as it could be. Not only that, but the block is 12.5" x 12.5" -- exactly the size it is supposed to be at this point (not something I accomplished with my 9 patch blocks). A pretty good first attempt, I think, and I have high hopes that it will only get better as I work on more blocks.
Initially I was a little worried about my background prints, but I think this one does a nice job of providing a foundation without overwhelming the star. I think it's also compatible with being a baby quilt -- it was suggested a few times in class that my baby should love this given all the bright colors and contrast.
Today, I present a collection of my favorite stars from my stack n' whack project. Each pair of images represents both possible orientations for the diamond-shaped pieces that I cut out, as a demonstration of how much variation you can get from that simple rotation. I also tried to include as many different colors from the fabric as I could, to demonstrate how the fabric that I started with could yield many different color palettes.
Any favorites? I took pictures of all the possible star combinations so that I could "audition" the orientations on my computer. I find, quite often, that the camera helps me see things that I didn't with the naked eye alone. This is particularly true when I shrink and enlarge images to simulate distance.
The next step is to cut out my background pieces. I have some fun Kaffe Fasset prints for the background that I will show off tomorrow.
Believe it or not, this picture took me about 4 hours to create. It is 8 pieces of fabric cut to represent the same repeat and then meticulously stacked and pinned so that the repeats lay exactly over the top of one another. And yes, it's a set up for another quilt style that I am experimenting with as a result of another class I am taking at Quiltology. Clearly I have fabric projects on the brain these days.
What this picture represents, is the set up for a set of quilt blocks out of this book:
Yep. I'm taking a workshop on "stack n' whack" quilts where the stacking and whacking results in quilt blocks with kaleidoscopic effects. In this case, the base block that I will be working with is the LeMoyne Star. By creating a series of diamond shapes using the exact same location in a fabric print repeat, it's possible to create these blocks and get some incredible results.
The fabric I picked for the project is called "Feeling Groovy" and it's a Robert Kaufman fabric that I purchased from Quiltology. I selected it for three reasons:
- It has a diverse, dense print with a lot of color and a lot of variation
- I am going to do a crib sized version of the quilt, and I wanted something bright and happy that would be crib compatible
- I just fell in love with it when I thought about how it might look in my baby's room
That first element is actually the most important. In order to get good results from the stack n' whack process, it's important to pick a print that has a lot of variation and doesn't have a lot of "white space" so that your resulting blocks will have a lot of variation and interest as well. The second and third aspects of the decision are really just a matter of personal taste, and the fact that I don't really have the time right now to tackle another large bed-sized quilt. Not to mention that washable cotton items seem like more practical things to make for my August arrival than do wooly things at the moment.
The first part of the class involved identifying a fabric we wanted to work with, some contrasting fabrics to complete the blocks with, and learning how to cut out the fabric repeats so it would be easy to set up the stack we were going to whack from. It also involved learning how to do all the pinning so that the fabric stack would be exactly lined up and would stay in place when the whacking process began.
The pinning process* resulted in me gaining some greater understanding about why one would want to spend money on flathead pins to go along with some good sharp jabs in the fingers Flathead pins like the flower pins in the picture above, lay flat against he fabric and don't get in the way when you put a ruler over the top of them to set up your cutting. Since ruler control is pretty important when you are going to rotary cut through 8 layers of potentially expensive fabric, the extra cost of these specialty pins is worth it.
Homework for the next class was for us to get our stacks pinned together and whacked and to start working on cutting out our background fabrics as well, so that we could work on laying out our final designs in the next class and start getting a few blocks put together. The whacking process took a few tries for me to get comfortable with, but once I understood my tools and some basic dimensions better, I was able to create the 12 sets of diamond shaped pieces that I need to create my stars.
Up next: playing with the stars... creating kaleidoscope images in fabric.
* This process is interesting, but doesn't lend itself too well to blogging about it. The simplest way to describe it is that you run a set of pins through defined areas in the fabric to get the fabric pieces to align and then you use other pins to get things locked down and remove the first pins. And you do this at grid intervals all across and down the fabric. There's a lot of shaking and smoothing involved in the process to get things to lay right. It's all relatively easy, but pretty time consuming, especially when you are starting with a print that has a large repeat interval, as this one does.
