Retreat at Lake Tahoe

Last weekend I got to get away from everything except friends and sewing, with a little wining and dining and lots of fun. A group of quilters that started as an off-shoot of the Dear Jane ™ group, but has expanded, has been retreating yearly, working on quilts, chatting, and generally having a good time. This year I brought along handwork, the Farmers Wife Sampler binding, the Loving Hearts binding and the Celtic knot border for Women of Faith. Both bindings are done! (Thank you Rita for helping with the Hugs for Marilyn Quilt), and two Celtic knot borders have been basted!

“Loving Hearts” is a group quilt made for Marilyn, the organizer of our retreat. Many women contributed heart based blocks and I set them into a quilt, and quilted it. It was a secret until we could show it to Marilyn, but now she knows about it and I can talk about it. That was the big reason I was so silent on quilty progress earlier this year!

I also got signatures for my album block quilt. And I thought of a working title, “An Album of Quilters”. The old blocks are now up on my design wall, 24 of them, got 9 more signatures this weekend, for 33 blocks, need between 42 and 49 blocks, so need a few more. Currently have 44 done, we will see if I need more.

Farmer's Wife Sampler top done

It is a top! OK, not completely done, but a very important milestone. Now to decide if I will quilt it or I will pay to have it quilted. So it will rest a while, and I will go onto something else. And that has been decided, a quilt for my DD who is about to head off to university, far away. And I will miss her, so need to send something with her so she will feel the love.
Looking at the picture, I don't see the green in the border. It is there, but subtle.

Farmer's Wife Sampler Center assembled

Here it is! Started in October of 2009, I have had the blocks finished for a while (since October 2010), but hadn't assembled them into the center of the quilt. About 540 parts later (sashing, cornerstones, setting triangles and 113 blocks), it is a center. Only need to find the perfect border (not that easy to do, I am thinking), then I can complete the top and figure out the quilting. There is a Shop Hop in June, so if I don't find something before then, this will be making the rounds.
6/2/11 - decided to do the skinny border with the brown I used for sashing, and found a muted green fabric for the final border, with just 3 yards left on the bolt. Must have been meant to be, I needed three yards! I should have enough of the light fabric used for the setting triangles to make pillowcases, along with the brown for the accent color on the end.

Farmer's wife Sampler blocks are done!

When I get close to the end of the block piecing I tend to have a final spurt of energy, and so it was with FWS. A variety of methods were used, but mostly using Marti Michell templates, and a bit of strip piecing, and finally paper pieced about three of them.
This top picture shows all of them on my new design "shade", the vanishing design wall. It pulls down quite a ways more (twice as long as it is wide), but not so easily with the sewing cabinet in front of it!

Farmer's Wife Sampler - 96 done now!

Three of these I finished last weekend, and three I finished today.
67 Pine Tree was done with paper piecing.

74 Ribbons - used marti Michell templates, trimming a rectangle to get the paralleogram. I pressed the lighter parellogram out, and the darker one in, so that piecing them together went together pretty easily.

76 Sawtooth - Paper pieced

77 Seasons - debated about templates, but went with paper piecing.

98 Waterwheel - Marti Michell templates

99 W.C.T.U (Women's Christian Temperance Union) - Cut with Marti Michell Templates.

90 blocks done for the Farmer's Wife Sampler quilt

Plugging away here and there, here are some of the latest attempts.
64 Peace and Plenty - made up of lots of 1 1/2" HST (and so is the next block). For a change of pace, I didn't use Marti Michell templates. Instead I cut squares 2 1/2" of each fabric, put right sides together, stitched 1/4" from the center diagonal line (both sides), cut down the center (between the stitching lines), pressed open and trimmed the sort of square to a perfect 2" square (to finish at 1 1/2"). They were then laid out and pieced together using a scant 1/4" seam. Mostly I pressed to the dark side when pressing the HSTs open, except for the corner squares in Peace and Plenty. The pressing worked much better if those squares were pressed to the light side (so the seams nested together when piecing the two squares together).

62 Old Windmill

60 Noon and Light - Marti Michell templates - Background pieces are (finished sizes) 1 1/2" squares (A-5), 1 1/2" QST (A-7) and 1 1/2" HSTs (A-6) in the center. Red triangles are also 1 1/2" QST (A-7). For the diagonal strips I used a 3" HST and then cropped the corner with A-7.

58 Mother's Dream - I used a border print for the background green bit and wanted the lines in it to go around the block, so I pieced the corner HSTs using two QSTs. Marti Michell templates where I could and templates from EQ when I couldn't (the rectangles). The center square is a 3" diagonal square (A-3), large setting triangle is a 3" QST (A-4) and the corners would be a 1 1/2" HST (A-6), but I pieced together two 1 1/2" QSTs (A-7) instead.

47 Homemaker - I used templates I printed from EQ, put double sided tape on the back of the template, placed it on the fabric and used a small rotary ruler placed with the 1/4" line on the seam line to cut. I did mark the seam lines so I could do the Y-seams. (I showed this block before, but it was a terrible picture!)

46 Hill and Valley - more Marti Michell templates, the large triangles are 3" HST (A2), the green HSTs are 2" HST (B-13), the smallest green triangles & brown triangles are 2" Quarter square triangles (B-14), and the square on the diagonal measures 2" on the diagonal (D-28).

45 Grape Basket is a Five patch block, so I paper pieced it.

FWS BOW #28 Silver Lane

This is block number 79 in the book, and my 62nd, Silver Lane. I used Marti Michell templates B14 (larger triangle on the outer edge), N79 (square) and D29 (small triangle). The parallelogram could be made with D29, but I just used it to trim the tips, using a paper template stuck to the fabric with double sided tape to cut the basic shape (placing a small ruler's quarter inch line on the sewing line and then trimming each side with a rotary cutter). The red 1" x 2" rectangles were rotary cut (1.5" x 2.5").

FWS blocks-Honeycomb, Farmer's Puzzle and Wild Rose and Square

Honeycomb was this weeks Block of the Week (BOW). I opted to print templates using EQ6 for this block, after I took out the center seams so two skinny triangles became one isosceles triangle. I made holes at the corner intersections with my 1/16” hole punch in each template. I cut strips first, to slightly wider than my templates. I cut out each fabric piece by placing double sided tape on the back of the paper template, then after sticking it to the fabric, used my rotary cutting ruler (4” square) to cut ¼” from the seam lines. I marked the corners with a pencil (through that hole I punched earlier). I used positioning pins on those points to align the odd shapes and pieced a row at a time, then sewed the rows together. Make sure your seams go in opposite directions from the row above or below and they will nest together nicely when stitching rows together.

I paper pieced Farmer's Puzzle from EQ6 printed patterns.

Not so happy with this block, don't like the fabrics in it, well I do, but they don't have the right values for their positions. I paper pieced it, in rows, and reversed the direction of piecing on each row so the rows nested nicely when stitching them together. That part went well. Sigh...

FWS - Bird blocks and BOW #15

Today I managed to get four more blocks done, mostly blocks with bird names (Flock, Hovering Birds, Hovering Hawks) and BOW #15 - Snowball. I am trying to just go in order, more or less, but once I started cutting out Flock (34) I wanted to use those Marti Michell templates again, and the next blocks I could use them for were for Hovering Birds (51) and Hovering Hawks (52). So, bird blocks. These were done with the A set, A2 (large triangle), A5 (square), A6 (small triangle) and one from the C set, C20, the odd shape in Hovering Hawks.



The BOW for this week is Snowball (81), a nice easy block made using our old standbys B12 and B13. They sure get used a lot in this quilt!

Farmer's Wife Sampler - 47 done, 66 to go

Farmer's Wife Sampler - forging ahead

18 Century of Progress - drawn in EQ6 to remove some seams, hand pieced

23 Country Farm - Marti Michell templates B12, B13 and B14

24 Country Path - Marti Michell templates plus 1.5" diagonal square template

25 Cups and Saucers - MM templatesB12, B13, B14 and D29

27 Darting Birds - N79, B13 and D29 (aka N80)

28 Duck and Ducklings - paper pieced

29 Economy - MM templates A1, A2 and A4 (would also be very easy to paper piece)

30 End of Day - MM templates - C19 trimmed with A6, and A6

32 Farmer's Daughter - Paper pieced

88 Star of Hope - paper pieced

43 done of 113 blocks

FWS blocks - Contrary Wife and Corn & Beans

BOW #12 for the Farmer's Wife Sampler was #21 Contrary Wife, which I was about to cut out anyway, so that was a pleasant surprise. Cut using Marti Michell templates B12 and B13.

While I had those templates out, I pulled out two more, B14 and D29, to make the next block in the book, Corn and Beans.

33 done, 80 to go. These blocks were sitting next to each other on the design wall, and the background fabric is the same. Boy, does each one look different.