Three day weekend - yeah!

It is going to be a busy three days. I was out the door early this morning to do my grocery shopping before work so that is out of the way. Saturday is a haircut then heading to a gig with my nephew's band in the afternoon.

I worked on the Yo Gabba Gabba quilt's border and it will be my goal to get the border tweaked, get the topped sewn together, and get it pin basted.

The other item on the list is getting two simple little girl's dresses made. Yesterday I received the lace, ribbon and zippers I ordered so I am all set with everything I need. All I have to do is draft a pattern and start sewing. I also bought a large spool of black quilting thread from the same company - Home Sew - that I needed for finishing the Halloween quilt. I may be using is also on the Yo Gabba quilt too.

If I have time I would like to get started on the Elmo quilt. Have a great weekend!

MQG meeting

There was a turn out of 9 women. There would have been 10, but one of the ladies couldn't stay because the room was too cold. The A/C was running hard since it is so humid here. We don't have any control over the system. A couple of the other ladies had jackets in their cars which they retrieved. I wanted to see her dye results from her time at the dye-palooza. Hopefully she will bring them next month and a jacket just in case!

Anyway here are some pictures of the dye results.

Then it was on to show and tell. Here are a couple of charity quilts one of the ladies made. She free motioned the drawings which she traced from coloring book. They have minky on the back and were very cute!

Another member was tearing off foundation papers from some half square triangles. She had hundreds of these to do!

Next was a quilt in progress and a plus sign cross top. For the plus sign top this busy sewer bought the fabric on Friday and finished the top before she came to the meeting! She said she needs to come to my house and use my big table to pin baste the plus sign top.

A couple of lovely pieces by another member.

I forgot to take a picture of another members baby quilt. She is expecting in November and made a quilt with a cheater fabric that was 1" squares in orange, yellow and gray for her baby boy. She did a fantastic job of quilting the quilt in a grid following the ditch between the squares. She did quilt every line both ways! The fabric was a linen blend and she put a very wide polka dotted flannel binding on it.

Adding the borders and a tutorial of how I do it

Here is the current state of the Yo Gabba Gabba quilt. I have about half the borders sewn together in sections.

Here are more sections ready to be sewn together.

This is a simple border, but I like the chunky look of it. Here is how I do it.

Lay two pieces of fabric together, one on top of the other, with the right side up for both pieces. Make sure you have a straight edge at one end.

I laid out my cutting ruler on top of the fabric. I wanted the width of the fabric border around 7 inches - that gives me some extra for trimming the quilt once I have the top sewn together.

I turned the strip and now it is ready for slicing.

Now it is time to slice the strip into chunks.

Now take the pieces and sort them. Make sure to keep the pieces in order. After sorting they are ready to be sewn together. Cool chunky borders!

Tonight is our MQA meeting. I am the host and it will be all about the fabric we dyed on the 18th.

Yo Gabba Gabba quilt top progress

I made the last two blocks for this quilt last evening. I will sew these twelve blocks together before I decide if I am going to make the quilt a bit bigger with borders.

More FQ's, Halloween quilt progress, new quilt top

I worked all day Saturday on going thru my stash and making more FQ's and some half yard pieces. Here is the box of FQ's and the 1/2 yard box is now overflowing.

Sunday I quilted on the Halloween quilt. I got 5 more blocks quilted and worked on the quilting the border also.

As I was quilting thoughts of what I needed to get done bounced around in my head. I need to get this quilt done by Oct. 31, BUT I need to get two smaller quilts done by early October so I needed to switch gears and start on those two smaller quilts. The first will be made with Yo Gabba Gabba fabric. This is the progress made. I like the way this quilt looks despite the goofy fabric.

The other quilt will be made with Elmo fabric. I dug thru the stash and found some tone on tone fabrics and some polka dot fabrics I will add into the mix.

BLue hand dyes and weekend plans

I worked on the blue hand dyes last evening and my second box of hand dyes is filling up quickly!

I have a few more blues to go thru and some green then the majority of the hand dyes will be wrangled! Here is what is left.

This weekend will be all about finishing up the hand dyes and getting back to quilting the Halloween quilt. To recap on the Halloween quilt, I have 10 blocks out of 30 quilted and part of the bottom striped border quilted. I plan on putting a serious dent in quilting this quilt this weekend.

Have a great weekend!

More hand dyed FQ's and a quilt I saw across the street

I managed to get more FQ's pressed, folded, and stacked in my box. I am going to have to start a third box soon. I have three more stacks of hand dyes to go thru.

Across the street is a junk shop that sells all kinds of stuff. They buy at estate sales and auctions. I saw this ocean waves quilt hanging outside yesterday. It is about a twin sized quilt. It is hand quilted - I forgot to see if it was hand or machined pieced. The batting is thick and the backing is off white fabric that looks a bit like feed sack. The quilt is more striking from a distance and overall is in very good condition. I didn't see any hole or tears. They are asking $165.00 minus 10%.

I like the section in this picture where the background fabric was used with a dark tan color. It looks like the dark tan triangles are floating. I am not a green person, but I do like this quilt.

Hand dyed fabric

Next month I am going to give a presentation to a guild on improv piecing. They are ok with me setting up a table to show some of my hand dyed fabric. I am going thru my hand dyes right now turning them into fat quarters and a few half yard pieces. I haven't been using hand dyed fabric as much and now it will be an opportunity for someone else to make something with them. Here is a picture of one full box of FQ's and the beginnings of another. The small shoe box is the 1/2 yard pieces.

Here is the fabric I still need to wrangle into FQ's. It takes more time than I thought it would. I still have a nice stash for myself on the shelf. I did find that the greens and blues have a tendency to develop fold lines where the color fades out. I don't know if this was due to too much light or not. My fabric storage room now has room darkening curtains that I made so light is not an issue. Before the new curtains I had some flannel covering the windows. I have sorted those pieces out as I have gone thru the fabric and will over dye those sometime in the future.

More dyeing results

I bought some of this stuff call Color Magnet. It comes in a jar and pen form.

I decided to try it out by stamping it but the stuff is like slime or snot and not easy to get to stick to a stamp. I should have bought the pen which has a foam end for applying the product. When I saw stamping was not going to work I decided I would free style it and brush on some stripes. I let the product dry and on Sunday we threw it into one of the dye pots and this is the result.

The spots where I had heavier blobs the dye absorbed more and is darker. It didn't seep threw to the back much. I am going to have to play with this stuff a bit more.

Another technique I showed was putting the dye powder on wet soda ash soaked fabric. This first piece I scrunched the piece - a pinky coral color - and sprinkled on burnt orange. To me it looks like the fabric is rusted.

This next piece I just laid flat and sprinkled the dye powder around. I did spray it with a bit more water. I should have thrown on some salt to see what that would do. I started out with fabric that was pink and threw on hot pink dye powder.

This last piece was also pink and I sprinkled on fuchsia powder. I rolled the fabric and then twisted it. I let it sit for an hour then rinsed.

Saturday's gig and Sunday's dye-palooza

We left my brother's house for the gig at 2 p.m. The band was to play from 6 to 8:30 with a break between sets. We got to the client's house - what a beautiful place! As we were setting up we heard police sirens. I thought we hadn't even started playing and someone called the cops!

As it turned out the police were headed next door. The neighbor was in their backyard, fell down and broke their ankle.

So here are some pictures of the backyard and the band. Since it was a party, things didn't run exactly on schedule. We thought we would be back to my brother's house around 10 or 10:30. I ended up getting to bed at 12:30 a.m. Everybody seemed to have a good time at the party and I sold 12 CD's and a couple of t-shirts. Michael autographed their CD's. One lady said she excited to say once Michael hits the big time that she saw him play at a backyard surprise birthday party.

I got up at 6:30 to get ready for the dye-palooza. I still had tables to set up and some straightening up to do. The dye-palooza went great! It lasted from 9 am to noon. Five women showed up - one with her granddaughter. I had a table set up in the laundry room and then one in the garage. The garage is attached and there are four steps to go up between the two. It worked out great. Five was just the right number. Any more and it would have been too crowded. I will post pictures of the results once we have our monthly meeting on the 28th. In the meantime here are a couple of shots I managed to take. It was hard to take pictures - I was busy trying to make sure everybody had what they needed. I did get one shot of Joanna's fabric after she rinsed it.

After everyone left I tore down the table in the garage and got some lunch. One of the ladies brought me peaches from a local orchard - oh, if you could only smell them! I will be cutting them up tonight. The ladies had cleaning up any mess so other than taking down the table there wasn't anything else I needed to do. Thank you ladies. We all decided that this was a good lesson in understanding why hand dyed fabric costs so much. It is hard work!