Mystery quilt kind of going - part 2

Okay now I'm on part 6 and 7... that only took me a week to get to

Here's a picture of all my part 5 have square triangles. At different stages. The second to the left top are just cut but needs to be opened (I'm following the modern quilt books suggestion about opening up seams rather than having them to one side). The left top are opened up seams that need to be ironed. Bottom left are ironed, middle bottom is the other side of the ironed half square triangles so you can see I'm splitting the seam.

The bottom right is part 6, I have to make 48 of those and another 48 with the accent color going the other way.

The top right is part 7, I have make 48 of those and another 48 with the colors going the other way.



I have never felt less accomplished with the amount of work I have put into this quilt so far. I think because these parts are so tiny. We are working with 2" squares here and we have to make 96 of almost everything!

I hope to get passed this and on to part 8 by the end of the week. I don't know though...

Cutting Tip

During the Mystery Quilt day two Sundays ago. We had a new quilter join us - Patti.

She was super new. Holly and her Husband, Mike were teaching her how to cut fabric correctly.

There was a tip that Holly gave her.

When cutting multiple strips from the same fabric, you want to cut the bigger one first because if you mess up you can probably easily convert them to the small strip sizes.

I never did that! But it's sooo logical. Why have I never thought of it? Anyways totally doing that from now on and I feel that it will be quite helpful in the future.

I know this seems random but I was thinking about starting a new quilt in my mind while staring at a test and that tip totally came in my mind when I was thinking about cutting dimensions.

grid paper and how to calucate half square triangles

I personally like doing half square triangles but making the squares and drawing a line in the middle and sewing two lines 1/4th from each side. That's just me. I tried triangles on the roll, it's nice, but having the tear out all that paper was never really that fun to me and it seems like one more step till getting to ironing.

Well here's the website that shows you why adding 7/8ths to any finished half square triangle using my favoriate method of doing it works.
http://www.robertkaufman.com/quilting/ask_margrit_fall_2006/
I love how neatly he laid it out and the pictures help lots! ^_^

If you like the grid paper method (triangles on a roll) and you don't have triangles on a roll or can't get them for some reason or need to do what you need to do now. I found a website that has 1", 2", 3" and 4" printable grids.

Here it is
http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art10208.asp
It's on the bottom of this website.

To let you know though. A long time ago I tried photo copying some triangle on a roll that Holly gave me because I needed a few extra squares for a side project and The Granery didn't have the size I needed so they suggest just photo copying the ones I haven't used yet (since I was showing them the sample I got from Holly to buy it). Trying to just use regular printer paper to do the triangles on the roll method = bad idea. I would just have been better of waiting for the triangles on the roll to get in rather than dealing with printer paper version of it. But like I said if you're in a bind you can use this.

One block wonder Fabric

I picked a fab fabric for my one block wonder! Here it is.



Well okay I don't love it, but I have time to stubble onto other fabrics since Holly can't have her lesson till probably next year. Haha I wonder how many fabrics I'm going to collect by then... I'm so bad sometimes. I would like this fabric more if the red wasn't so all over the place, it's almost like they were running out of red when they printed this fabric.

Oh well Holly and Cheri said that some of the best one block wonders come from kind of ugly fabric... we will see how that turns out. Hehe.

Wow this is a lot of blogging for one night! I hope this will keep blog readers busy! Haha, I will try to keep this more up to date, no promises though! Someday I hope to write a review of all the quilting books I have collected in the past few months... It's a lot to let you know... like 10 of them! I'm a crazy quilting book collector... I really need to stop...

Goodies from the quilt show!

I got a few things at the quilt show. One I'm not going to show off now because I am saving that for a later post.



I got a moffet templet and the super 60 ruler for when Holly has time to do the one block wonder.



I got the dice em and slice em book. Holly and Cheri showed it to me when I did the mystery quilt and thought I really wanted it. I also got two neat patterns, one for a cute purse and one for 3 glasses case that are shaped like butterflies, frogs and turtles. I thought they were super cute, the lady said it should take a few hours to figure out the first one, but after that they are pretty quick to make, about an hour she says.

Love them!

There were a lot of things I was tempted to buy. Like the professional cutting board that Holly has, but that was like 200 dollars or so, but it would have been pretty nice for all this cutting I'm doing for this step 5 of the mystery quilt. Yeah. Hehe. Oh well maybe next year I'll buy it. All I need to do is save 20 dollars a month and I'll have more than enough to buy it next year.

I know what you're all thinking no fabric!!! I know. Maybe next year. ^_^ There were some Japanese fabric I thought looked neat but I couldn't choose... actually that was my whole problem, I couldn't choose... I think by next year I will have a better sense of color, maybe have quilts in mind to do so I can choose fabric for them. ^_^

The quilt show 2007 highlights

I walked around and took pictures of the quilts I liked best. I choose a couple to show off. I think I got some ideas from them. Very cool quilts!

Here we go.



The golden stitch from Harry Potter, very neat.



Bald Eagles I like the use of color and technique here. Not sure what they did but it's neat



Oh this one was cool. This lady has been with her husband for a really long time, and took all their old clothes to make this memory quilt. It's very lovely.



I like the swirly quilt parts. It's what I noticed about this quilt I think it was very well done.



I just thought that this had a neat old black and white picture feeling to it. Okay maybe I just thought the flames on the car were cool. ^_^



Got to show a Halloween quilt of course. I like this one the most. It reminds me of when I was in grade school.



I like pigs what can I say? I also it reminds me of the pillow quilt top that Lynn made about a year ago. ^_^



River with bridges thought that was a neat idea for a quilt.



I thought this was pretty cool. The bicycles are appliqué and are really black ribbon! I wouldn't have thought of doing that, but now I'm totally going to use that if I do something like that.



Here's the best for last. It's only quilted. It's black fabric with colored quilting tread. I thought it was pretty good, no wonder it won a prize. ^_^

Okay I'll admit it. There are probably a lot of other wonderful quilts that I missed out on. I didn't take pictures of everything, just what kind of struck me, and these are the highlights. Some of you will have different views about what you thought was neat or cool this was just what I thought.

Mystery quilt kind of going

Last last Sunday. Sorry I haven't blogged in a while ^_^ Been busy.

Anyways last last Sunday Holly had a Mystery quilt day. Me and Cadence worked on it for about 6 hours and we are only on step 2! There are 14 steps... It's sad I know.

Here are pictures of what I have done so far.



I have been working on it for about an hour each night or so. Not much farther. I'm on step 5 but it involves a lot of cutting. Like 192 squares 2" and 96 half square triangles of light (purple for me) and accent (orange for me) fabric and 96 2" x 31/2 rectangles of main print (the black fabric). I only have the light cut out right now.

I have no idea how it's going to turn out. I'm sure some of you out there do... but I'll just leave it as a surprise ^_^

Oh by the way if you don't have triangles on a roll for 1.5" finished square, you can cut 2 and 3/8th squares and just draw a line in the middle and sew 1/4th from that on both sides and it's just as good. I had to calculated that! It seems for any finished square you add 7/8ths to get what you want from this method of doing half square triangles.