Field Trips in Fiber - Adventures in quilting, hand dyed fabric and fiber art.

Field Tripping the Web – Issue 42

Eye Candy – Projects people have recently completed

• Kimy's Kitty Cat Garden baby quilt
• Julia's string scrap quilts
• Terri's small Valentine art quilts
• Vivian's Pods III small art quilt
• Sarah's Snoopy quilt
• Joyce's new art quilt
• Sandy's leaves wall hanging
• Cynthia's rainbow buildings
• Jeanne's recent finished quilt
• Floribunda's 2 crazy cats
• Ruthie's Kansas Troubles
• Beth's Scrappy bargello
• Wanda's blue crazy quilt

Longarm –specific Eye Candy

• Terri's customer quilt
• Randi's customer quilt

Fiber and Other Art

• Pat's treasure fabric book
• Linda's beaded pendant
• Nikki's food colored yarn
• Liz's angel and Sophia
• Possibilities' embroidered fish
• Guzziesue's art bag
• The Lone Beader's pink punk beaded poodle brooch
• Robin's January bead journal project
• Jeanne's fiber postcards
• Sue's new book design
• Jo's hand stitched postcards
• Kay's From the Heart book
• Cathie's Valentine ATCs
• Elizabeth's Valentine postcards

Surfaces

• Michele's painted and textured surfaces and snow dyed fabrics
• Cathy's soy wax batik

Garment Sewing

• Audrey's silk SWAP top

Tutorials and On-line Projects

• Myra's tutorials for sewing hexagons
• Maggie has a video on how to wrap pipe cleaners to use as embellishment and she shares a piece she made that includes the wrapped pipe cleaners
• Mary has a tutorial for her Strips and Strings Log cabin

Other Interesting Stuff

• Annie's blog is focused on building an embroidery band sampler – be prepared to spend a lot of time there!

I've got nothin'

nothin' to show, that is. This week has been all work (and my physical). It's just after 8pm and I just finished work for the day. I am preparing for meeting tomorrow night and Saturday morning. Hopefully after Saturday things will be better for a couple of weeks.

My Mom has been quilting so I thought I'd share this photo of her most recent quilt. The blocks are more of her Grandmother's UFO projects. I think Mom is giving this one to her cousin. She constructed it with a reversible technique quilting each block before putting them together with the yellow sashing. I think the yellow fabric was a perfect choice for tying all of these random blocks together.

We still have a lot of Great-Grandma Flora's UFO projects and maybe, between us, we will get them all done someday. But who's going to finish all of my UFOs?

Now, about that physical. This will sound really weird but it was cool to get a physical because I've never had a complete physical before. Well, since I left home where our family doctor was the doctor my Mom worked for! I have had a series of doctors that couldn't take 10 minutes with me.  I adore my current doctor and the best part is that she's younger than me so hopefully I'll have her for a long time! After leaving the office with a clean bill of health I drove right to Whole Foods and stocked up on my favorite unhealthy snack foods for a treat!

Enjoy Mom's quilt and I'll see you this weekend.

Field Tripping the Web – Issue 41

Eye Candy – Projects people have recently completed

• Julia's tumbler table topper
• Libby's square dance quilt
• Mary's penguin quilt
• Rose's Double Delight
• Karendianne's Mayberry quilt
• Amy's Chubby Chicks
• Joyce's fun wall hanging
• Cheri's Orange Crush
• Julie's scrap quilt
• Kim's Upon a Winter Day
• Stashmaster's Web Sampler quilt
• Nancy's Happy Scrappy houses
• Robin's Elements
• Kristin's zig zag baby quilt
• Quilt Pixie's with a hug and a kiss quilt top
• Jaye's Nosegay quilt
• Irene's snowmen tea towels

Longarm –specific Eye Candy

• Gayle's quilting on a Lonestar
• Suzanne quilted a wildflower quilt
• Desert Thread's quilting on a Double Wedding Ring

Fiber and Other Art

• Karen's fabric wrapped coiled baskets
• Sue's boxes and padfolio
• Judy's Friendship
• Gunnel's new fabric postcards from rust fabric
• Elizabeth's Valentine postcard
• Cindy's altered ballerina
• Lisa's Aurora
• Jeanne's embellisher peices
• Jeanne's embroidered pin cushion
• Elizabeth's felted scarf

Surfaces

• Elizabeth's soy wax batik
• Liz's transfer printing

Garment Sewing

• Summerset's knipmode skirt
• Tany's Vogue 8306 jacket

Tutorials and On-line Projects

• Brenda's tutorial for pieced letters
• Paula's polymer clay button tutorial

Other Interesting Stuff

• Jenny printed her own custom designed Tetris fabric

Points

Working on Judy's Star BOM has been an excellent exercise for me. I've used these blocks to try to improve my cutting and piecing skills. With measurements in 1/16ths precision cutting is really important and just the nature of star blocks means lots of points to match. I am getting better with each block and have had to totally re-cut and remake one since block #3. Today I got 2 more blocks made - yeah! Three more and I'll be caught up.

I thought I'd share the process that I've been using to make sure my points are perfect. I'm sure it's not new but I was in the mood to post so this is what you are getting!

 

Here we go. A pinwheel block.

 

My first step is to do what everyone does - stick a pin through the two block exactly at the spot where the points are. The pin is going from the back of the top piece and through the front of the bottom piece.

 

Align the fabrics so that the pin is sticking STRAIGHT through both pieces. This is how you know that the pieced points are lined up perfectly with each other.

 

With that first pin still in place and perfectly straight, place two pins on either side of the positioning pin. These pins are perpendicular to the edge of the fabric and are pinned with the point in the seam. Pull out the positioning pin. By pinning like this I can keep the pins in as I sew.

 

Yes, I do sew over the pins. Once I am withing about 3/4 inch of the pin I slow down and watch every stitch to make sure I am heading right for that point intersection (arrow). Because I am sewing so slow the pins don't cause any risk of breaking the needle. (Who am I kidding? I sew over pins all the time.)

 

See? Perfect!

 

But not always. Obviously I did not pin properly on this one. The point on he top piece is fine but the bottom one is not.

 

In this case I rip out about 1" on either side of the point intersection, say a few special words, re-pin and re-sew.

 

Fixed!

 

If I missed stitching the intersection wrong on both pieces I will re-sew the seam without ripping put the previous seam (unless the first one is too wide or I am going to press the seam open).

Lunch guests

There's a bird that we have been seeing at the feeder this week and today we finally got some good photos. this is a Pine Warbler. Pine Warblers don't seem to stay around here but, according to the book, it is one of the first birds to migrate back North. We only see this bird in January and always at the peanut feeder.

We loved this next photo of the Pine Warbler and Wren sharing the feeder.

 

Here are some other photos of one of many Cardinals, Wren, Blue Jay and a full house of Goldfinches.

 

 

 

All of these photos were taken from inside the house about 15 feet from the feeders. We have dozens of birds every day. Chris has to refill every feeder each morning.