The Last of the 2010 Projects

I tried, and tried, and tried, and tried... to finish up projects or get them significantly further along before the turning of the new year.  Here's how I fared.

CMQG Name Tags

Back in June, my quilt guild had a sew-in project to work on pillowcases for ConKerr Cancer and a nametag project.  I decided to model my name tag after our logo (which is the Chicago skyline in fabric) and a couple of people liked it and asked me to make one for them.  Well I ended up with so many to do that I didn't get to finish mine or my friend Vicki's, so here they are:



Oh Cherry Oh! Disappearing 9-Patch
I went CRAZY buying Moda's Oh Cherry Oh! line of fabric.  Every time I could find a fat quarter, or a jelly roll, or a charm pack, I bought it.  I found a layer cake & thought I'd died & gone to heaven.  My brilliant idea was to take the layer cake and make a couple of quilts - this was before I decided to buy Mr. Darcy (my longarm) so I liked to keep quilts under 60" so I could still finish them on my table top machine.  Well, after I cut up the layer cake, I needed more yardage for the sashing, and more for the binding, and pretty soon, I had 4 quilts on my hand.  Well, I pieced all the tops, pieced all the backs, squared them up, and got them ready for quilting:


I also made the binding for all 4 quilts - two will be bound in green and two in red.  I finished these so fast, I forgot to take progress photos!

Art Quilt Coasters
Back in 2009, I got a custom order for a wedding to make 100 art coasters (or sets, I can't remember which) for a wedding, and I ended up having leftovers.  I finished up some yellow and purple sets - 18 total - and I think I'm done with these for a while:


Gyleen's Pineapple Quilt
When I went to Quilt Market, I was helping Gyleen Fitzgerald in her Pineapple Quilt Exhibit, and purchased her book and new pineapple ruler.  While working on a video technique for the AccuQuilt strip cutters, I decided to make a sample block to demonstrate how to use these two tools together.  Well, now I have a pineapple quilt going!


I really love this block but I worry that my obsession with symmetry will make this project unsustainable.  I might relegate this block to the back of the quilt & do a completely random scrappy one instead, but in the mean time, I have a new quilt project.  :)

Double Wedding Ring
This is a "leaders & enders" project for me - whenever I'm piecing another project, I'm working on this one at the same time, so progress on it was expected to be pretty slow.  That is, until someone requested that I do a video on it.  Well, I ended up completely re-doing the technique I was using for piecing, because I found it pretty frustrating to try to demonstrate it via video, given all the swearing and ripping I was doing.  The new technique gives a much better block, without set in seams, and you basically get the quilt to the point where you can sew it in curving rows. I ended up producing 4 new videos to cover it all - it was like doing a television series!

Here's how far I've gotten thanks to the video production:

So I'm back to "leaders & enders" on this project, but I'm really glad to have gotten this far.  Unfortunately it also means a little bit of seam ripping on my Cothron Wedding Quilt so I can assemble them the same way, but I'm glad to know this project will be so much easier to piece now.


Bargello Table Toppers
Remember my insane Bargello project that generated almost 30 table toppers?  Well, that project is seemingly endless.  I did decide to railroad these onto Mr. Darcy using a single piece of backing and batting:


I used it as an opportunity to use up the Warm & White batting that I don't like very much anymore, and to practice several pantograph designs.  I used about 3 different designs across the 23 toppers that needed to be quilted still.  Next time I decide to railroad, WIDER is BETTER.  I was using up a bolt of 60" muslin, but I would have been better off stitching them together & working with it in a 120" wide section.  Why?  Well, when you're railroading, you have to advance the quilt after every pass.  Since I could only fit 3 across on a 60" width, I had to advance 8 times.  Had I used the 120" width, I would have cut that in half, and it would have been a much better use of my 12' machine.  So, lesson learned!!  I'm going to keep that in mind when I work on the Oh Cherry Oh! quilts; even though they have 4 separate backings, nothing is stopping me from stitching those together so I can railroad those 4 quilts too.  It makes sense for quilts that are going to have the same pattern or thread used, to railroad them on the frame.

While I worked on these, I ended up having to splice the batting while it was on the frame:


I overlapped old with new by about 4", then I cut a wavy line through both layers (being VERY careful not to cut the backing too!)  Then I handstitched the two pieces together.  I normally don't like seaming batting in the middle of a project, but for something small like a table runner or wall hanging, it's not a big deal.

When they were all done, I pulled them off the frame.  I think this came out to 60" x 150" - so the equivalent of a king sized quilt:


I think they look cool railroaded like this, and it seemed a shame to cut them apart.  In any event, I did, and stitched all the binding onto the front (you'll recall I made 54 yards of binding for these) so I could practice my machine stitching binding to the back.

I decided to give my Martelli Binding Foot another go; I didn't have much success with it before, but with so many bindings to do, I wanted to give it another shot.  I swear - for every 10 inches I stitched, 9 of them were missed.  It was incredibly frustrating to constantly rip out and reset.  So I went back to my pinning method and using my stitch in the ditch foot:


This worked out pretty well; I did have a couple of misses here & there, but it was significantly less than with the Martelli foot.  So many people swear by this foot but I haven't been able to get it to work for me yet; I think because I like really full bindings, I use a 3/8" seam allowance when attaching 2-1/2" binding by machine, and I think that may not be enough leeway for the Martelli foot to stitch down & consistently catch the back.  I'll have to try this again, but it's too late for this project since all the bindings have been stitched at 3/8".


In the end, I got 6 of them bound, but there are just too many of them to finish and I want to move on to something else.  I don't expect these will be UFOs for long, but I really wished I could have finished them before the end of the year.

And so ends 2010!

Happy quilting!