Cherrywood Challenge - Old & New

Cherrywood Challenge

The Old Challenge: The Lion King

A while back, I got some goodies in the mall that I forgot to write about.  

Backstory - From the 304 entries of the Cherrywood Challenge: The Lion King, 138 finalists were chosen. I was fortunate to be among them and earned a spot in the book. 

From those 138 finalists, 120 were chosen for the traveling exhibit.  My entry didn't make that cut but is being retained by Cherrywood to display in their booth at different quilt venues around the country. Works for me, as my quilt has already been to Manhattan!

The Lion King challenge was co-sponsored by The Disney Theatrical Group.  They are the ones that sent the goodies:

Canvas tote bag

Pin

And I bought a few things too

The New Cherrywood Challenge:  Van Gogh

Just revealed on November 2nd, the new challenge runs from now until August 1, 2017. 

My fabric arrived the other day.

Now to find an inspiration and start designing.

Bonnie Hunter' Annual Mystery Quilt - Colors Announced

It's that time of year again. Bonnie Hunter has announced the colors for her annual mystery quilt on her blog, Quiltville's Quips and Snips. 

Check out the Mystery Quilt Intro Post:  http://quiltville.blogspot.com/2016/10/en-provence-quiltville-mystery-intro.html  

The colors for this year's quilt are inspired by the following pictures:

 Bonnie translates her color to paint chips to help quilters find the right fabric range.

I'm going a little different in my colors and I'm planning a miniature this year. I reduce the unit size in half which ends up being a quarter of the finished size. So from the planned size of 87 inches square, my quilt will be 22 inches square.

I've done several of the BH mystery quilts and have used all batiks in the past.  This year I am using all  Cherrywood hand dyed cottons and staying a little tighter in the color range.

or

Not sure what will be my neutral(s) yet. Maybe creams, maybe black, or maybe the blues at the left end above.  The mystery starts in 16 days!

An In-Between, Non-Fiber But Definitely Sewing Related Project

Way back in February, I purchased this at a local estate sale for a grand total of $30.

Life got crazy and it was relegated to a corner of the Studio.  After finishing up Fly Away Home, I dragged it up onto the sewing table for a closer inspection.

Lots of things were crammed into her case, including the service paperwork from 31 years ago.  It was exciting to have an original manual in there. 

And shoved in the back behind the machine was a cache of bobbins - YAY!!

Pulling her out, I got a good look at her grungy little self. Ick! And the familiar old case stink was wafting out big time.

Thankfully, the finish on the 301a is a lot tougher than the finish on a featherweight.  This girl needed some serious scrubbing. SMO wasn't budging the grunge.  I broke the big cleaning guns  - 409 and an old soft toothbrush - and got down to business. Before and after shots below.

And the gross aftermath of paper towels and Q-tips.

While cleaning up the outside, I had to rotate the hand wheel. Can you say crunchy?  There was some definite resistance.  I opened her up to find the insides clean but the gear lube dry and of course, she was begging for oil.

Once I had lubed & oiled the action was much smoother.  Haven't threaded her up & put pedal to the metal yet. After the spa treatment, she spent some time outside enjoying the crisp, fresh autumn air, freshening up her parts and case.

Test sewing needs a project.  I may have a quilt hanging around here that needs to be quilted. 

It's a Finish!

Haven't said those words much lately!  Wow - maybe not even once this year. I need to check that.

Yep - I suck! Technically, I only had two other finishes this year. Not great by any standard.  At least I have two more projects queued up for this year. One is a quilt for a little boy whose out grown his baby quilt. Time to make him a proper twin size quilt. 

But I digress. 

FLY AWAY HOME is done! Quilted, bound, labeled & hanging sleeve attached.

My favorite part of the finishing is the trimming of the edge. I'm not sure what it is but it is so satisfying to hack off the extra bits.

It was a perfect day for taking pictures. Sunny with intermittent clouds. When the sun was shining bright & I got the back shot.

And cloudy for this shot:

The "New Quilt from an Old Favorite" entry form and pictures have officially been delivered to the National Quilt Museum.  The waiting begins.  I have a new, non-fiber, but definitely sewing related project to share next.

Quilting the Background Blue

I LOVE this Tahiti Blue batik!!  It was a so much better (richer, easier to see to quilt, cool, contrasting) fabric choice for the background.  Since I changed the plan & eliminated the borders, I have a fairly good size chunk (3 yards less the strips I tore off for binding) left over for the stash - YAY!

I had a wonderful variegated blue YLI cotton thread for quilting the background. 

Again the birds are quilted very closely so I need some fairly close but not overdone quilting for the background.  The center section set the tone for the rest of the quilt. I stopped counting at 8 bobbins of blue thread (size 50) for the background quilting.  The Singer workhorse uses size 66 bobbins - not the largest but bigger than Featherweight bobbins. I think with the binding, it came out to 11 blue bobbins. 

And no, this is not how I did the background quilting for the original "Midnight Flight to the Four Winds".   I didn't particularly like that so I knew I wouldn't be repeating that part of the quilt.  I started with the center (duh, of course) in the hopes I would be inspired.

And just figured it out as I went along.

The blank blue corner squares posed a challenge, with the only solution being to quilt 'ghost' birds into them.  I first traced a finished bird shape,

  

then cut a cardboard stencil from a file folder to draw around.

At first I only had the bird outline quilted, thinking that would be enough. Not so much.

I so needed all the other background stitching to make it look finished. And yes, the extra stitching was added after I had the binding done.

Positioning the ghost bird shape was a little tricky.  I did okay on  this - only a little off on one of them, which I discovered when I did the background quilting around the bird. But I'm not telling where it is. 

Up next - the whole FG quilt is done! 

Thirteen Out of Nineteen!

Thirteen out of Nineteen - Oh My!

I was physically out of the house, travelling for thirteen of the first nineteen days of October!  Thankfully, for the first four of them, I had my machine & Flying Geese project with me.  Otherwise by now, I'd be way stressing out about getting the FG quilt done and entered by the deadline.

OH - And the deadline, which I was sooooo certain was November 1st,  is actually November 4th! Not a huge difference but that gives me at least four extra shipping days to get the cd and entry form package down to Paducah. 

All the travelling has been fun, exhausting and an adventure.   I'll be posting some select pictures from the trips later but I can tell you I was out in Los Angeles 

Coral Beach, California - Pacific Ocean

& Boston in the span of a week!   

Singing Beach, Cape Ann, Massachusetts

Bi-coastal fall adventures - one country & yet worlds apart. 

On the quilt front, my focus in the evenings and weekend home has been quilting, quilting and more quilting!  Twenty-four Bird blocks take forever to quilt out. 

Okay. maybe not forever but it sure felt like it.  Doing this on a domestic machine requires a lot of start, stop, turn, wrestle, re-position, and repeat - as in sew 2 inches,stop, turn, sew a half inch, stop, turn, swear, re-position the entire top, sew 2 inches, repeat, repeat, repeat.  I actually had a moment of thinking that it was time to seriously research a mid or long arm machine - something I've resisted for forever.

Once I had the birds all quilted I had very few ideas of how to quilt out the background.  One day I'll learn to think ahead about the whole quilting pattern, I swear.  Or I can hope. 

 Since the birds are very closely quilted, I chose not to quilt the flying geese themselves, just all the blue background around them. I will say the Tahiti blue batik is much easier on the eyes than a solid black would ever be!

Sandwich on the Floor

The new quilt got about a third of the way pinned into a sandwich 

before I ran out of pins. DRAT!!! 

While the quilt was stretched out on the floor waiting  for me to get more pins, the dining area underwent another transformation.

It makes a great workspace! 

I spent some time staring at the quilt all laid out, trying to figure out how to start the quilting on it.  Finally, I remembered a great place to start would be original version of this quilt - "Midnight Flight to the Four Winds". 

I liked the way I quilted the bird blocks so that was easy to decide to more forward on them.  The background quilting took a little more time to figure out, and even then I've only decided on the inner part of the yellow bird center.  

You know it's a serious quilt session when I bring two machines with me.  

I prefer the Singer Scholastic 6510 for machine quilting anything larger than 36 inches square.  The guts of this machine are mechanical, not computerized, so it handles the demands of machine quilting and travel on a road trip.

I'm not one for rolling or folding the quilt sandwich, I'm a puddler. 

And a yanker, a pusher, a puller - anything to get the job done.