Accuquilt – No Idle hands here

Charity Quilt

It is much easier for me to give quilts to charity than knitwear. It doesn’t take as much time and effort to make a quilt.

Every year LAMQG chooses a charity. This year it is Harvest Home, a haven fro homeless pregnant women and the babies that are born there.

I have leftover blocks and plenty of fabric, so it was time to get working.

I had heard of the method Headers and Enders, as a way of creating quick blocks as an afterthought. Bonnie Hunter popularized this method. It didn’t make sense to me until I heard her speak about it on a podcast. I won’t explain it here, go to her blog.

I have quite a few 2.5″ blocks and it’s very easy for me to cut more on my Accuquilt.

p1170121 I can’t do straight forward scrappy, I need a plan. So here we go, take an orphan block and build a border out of these newly made blocks.

My decision is to have two sides cool colors, blue-greens. the other two sides warm – yellows and reds.I went to LAMQG sew day and finished up this top. This is happy and bright, should keep any baby not only warm but stimulated.

p1170302 The quilting itself is a very basic free motion quilting. I think it took me maybe an hour to quilt. I always find that it really is the quilting that brings it all together.

p1170304 Plain backing. I did add my label. I made this after all.

p1170301 Sun sparkling on the surface of these scrappy squares is lovely.

p1170305 One of these days this hippo will be gifted to someone. Until then, he gets a place of honor on my quilts.

Next meeting I will be very happy to hand over the quilt and hope that it becomes a cherished heirloom for someone.

Leah

EPP Hexie, progress report

Slowly but surely, the quilt grows. I didn’t bring the actual quilt on my trip, it is getting large and unwieldily – even though it’s only about the size of a small baby quilt. What I did do was cut up a lot of paper and fabric on my Accuquilt, bagged them up and sewed quite a few of them on the trip.

Once home I went right back to adding them to the quilt.I am being very mindful of color placement. I know quilters who just throw things together, willy nilly and their quilts look amazing. I am trying to balance to the colors, so they are spread out over the quilt. Since I’m only a third of the way done, if that, I still have a lot of room to work with.

One issue I’m having is the size of the fabric hexies. When cutting by hand, I gave myself a lot of extra seam allowances. Although I cut many more of them on the die cutter, they have exactly 1/4″ seam allowances – which to be honest is very tight.Moving into the yellow and blue you can see the seam allowances are much smaller. This does create a problem, less seam allowance means less stability of each patch.Here is a close-up, in some cases it almost looks like 1/8″. No, I am not going back to cutting by hand. My whip stitches are very close together, so that should hold things in place. Also, I am going to do some kind of overall quilting, by machine! I will not be hand quilting this! The quilting will help hold things in place.I am also changing the paper/card stock I use. The colored card stock is lovely but it is slightly thicker than the mail card I cut up. That tiny increment makes a difference when folding over the fabric. So I am saving all magazine inserts, the ones that used to drive me crazy. As well as envelopes and other junk mail. How’s that for really recycling and reusing!

Leah

Fun with tools

I’ve been quite addicted lately as you know. Which is why there haven’t been a lot of other projects going up here. Yes my son thinks I’m crazy – YOU ARE SEWING THAT ALL BY HAND?!?!

Yes, dear I am. But I am trying to figure out how to cut down on the work load. I had heard of all kinds of die cutting machines. I thought this one would cut fabric so I bought it. It’s a fun little tool. Of course this is just the initial expense, then come the actual dies, which aren’t cheap.I bought this set, thinking I can cut paper and fabric in different sizes. Ooops, turns out this machine only cuts and embosses paper. For a while I was cutting the paper templates as well as providing fun for grandchildren.It’s a good workout for them to crank the handle and they love the resulting images, which do end up in the trash. Fun with grandkids is always worth it. Meanwhile, I kept going back and looking at Accuquilt trying to convince myself that I should buy one. I kept saying to myself: after this quilt I will be so over the hexies, really, I don’t need this. Two things, first of all, I may only be a quarter of the way through this. Second of all, they came out with a clamshell die – which opens up a whole new range of possibilities .I bit the bullet and ordered the GO, you can see, it folds up nicely for storage. I had already bought the hexie die in hopes that I could use it with my Big Shot. Remember how VHS wouldn’t play Betamax. (Ok, I am really dating myself here, I probably could come up with a newer example). Well The same is true with die cutting machines. This die is just millimeters too big for the Big Shot. I tried to shave down the edges and realized I am probably wasting my time and might even ruin the die. As Here it is open and ready to use. The Go is much sturdier and heavier than the Big Shot, I did get value for what I paid.I can now cut six layers of fabric at one time, making 24 hexies in one crank. Fabric and paper ready to go.Action! Cutting the dies.

In less than a minute – this is what I have.

I showed this puppy to my son in law, boy did his eyes light up. He had just started a clamshell quilt and was not enjoying the cutting at all. So I promptly ordered the 8″ clamshell die (I’m waiting!!!). It better get here before Saturday, I am going to Israel for a week and promised my SIL that he can borrow this fun tool for just that purpose.

Now I really feel justified in my purchase, knowing how much use it will be getting.

Leah