Easy Ways I Help Myself Quilting / Beauties Pageant 167

 

One of my favorite people in the world is Future Michelle. My future self has a lot going on, though, so I try to set her up for success. Here are two ways I do that without spending a cent ...

Writing Notes About Projects

I like to have about a half-dozen projects going at a time. Having a few projects at various stages of the quilt-making process keeps things interesting for me and ensures that when I feel like cutting fabric or mindlessly chain-piecing or finishing a binding by hand, there’s something on my to-do list that can fill that urge. There’s a certain inefficiency with working like that, though. I often set aside a quilt in process, thinking I’ll pick it up again in a week or two, and not get back to it for months. It’s a great way to forget where I’m headed with a particular project!

So when I am about to change gears, I help Future Michelle out by jotting a few notes about where things stand so she can more easily pick up where I have left off. I have a sketchbook where I doodle new design ideas, do quilty math, and so on. This notebook seems like a good, logical place to write such notes, but it’s not. Instead, I write these notes to my future self on Post-its and pin them directly to the project. What can I say? Future Michelle is easily confused, and proximity matters!

Taking Care of Scraps Now

Another small thing I do for Future Michelle relates to the scrap scene here at From Bolt to Beauty world headquarters.

Let me start by saying that back in 2020, I participated in a big declutter event hosted by FeelGood Fibers. I went through all of my scraps and created order. Larger chunks got separated by color and placed in a drawer. Smaller or weirdly shaped bits were cut into 2- and 2.5-inch squares for future projects.

It was a ton of work, and I made some not-so-smart decisions, like cutting at my dining room table while resting my knee on a chair instead of setting up something more ergonomic at the kitchen island. When all was said and done (the process took weeks!), I had achieved my goal and messed up my right knee and sprained my left wrist.

The best thing I could do for Future Michelle, I decided, was to tend to the scrap situation here and there instead of all at once. Now, when I finish a project, I make decisions about the scraps right away, organizing the larger pieces, cutting the smaller ones, destashing what I no longer love, and recycling the unusable stuff.

Check out the photographic proof, above. I have somewhere in the neighborhood of a bazillion 2- and 2.5-inch squares. I delve into this treasure trove as needed and have a big square-busting project planned for (maybe?) 2023.

Tending to scraps promptly takes discipline, but it beats feeling overwhelmed down the road. I wouldn’t do this for just anybody—Future Michelle is worth it!

What are some easy ways you make the quilt-making process easier on yourself? Share your tips in the comments!

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My Gypsy Wife in Bonnie and Camille Fabric / Beauties Pageant 166

My Gypsy Wife quilt has been years in the making. I started it in 2018 as part of a guild sew-along, picked it back up in 2019 during Stitched in Color’s quilt-along, and vowed in 2021 that I would have it finished before the end of 2022. Here were are now, not even three months into 2022, and I am presenting my finished Gypsy Wife quilt!

Can I distill the multiyear process of sewing this beauty into a single blog post? Yes! What follows are the most noteworthy aspects of this finish, including advice if you’re considering your own GW project.

The Fabrics

Jen Kingwell’s Gypsy Wife pattern was all the rage back in 2014 or 2015. What prevented me from jumping on the bandwagon then was the huge number of fabric decisions the pattern entailed. It was intimidating! I am sure I could have found a shop that kitted the project. Instead, however, I made the fabric-decision process easier on myself by homing in on a subset of the Bonnie and Camille palette. 

I focused on red, pink, navy, aqua, and green (avoiding yellow, orange, and the different red from Happy-Go-Lucky and other earlier lines). I had a small B&C stash at the outset and supplemented that with everything from a layer cake and a jelly roll to fat quarters and yardage.

I started by making most of the focal blocks and some filler blocks, and then it was time to get everything on a design wall. I thought doing so would help me make smarter color decisions and avoid resewing certain blocks down the road. But to be honest, when all was said and done, I still chose to remake some blocks.

Low Volumes

I was surprised with how much fun I had sewing with low volumes in this project. I decided early on to use LVs for the long vertical strips, but there were many other LV prints that provided a nice variety to the mix of fabrics, like the aqua floral on white pictured below. I love how, when it’s cut up, the midsize design provides an unexpectedly irregular background amid the surrounding structured elements.

The back is also built around LVs. At first blush, it may seem to differ from my typical approach to piecing backs. (Read about that here.) It’s actually my tried-and-true recipe, amended to use up leftover swaths of yardage: I sewed two columns of fabric that were the length I needed and then added a third column in between them to create the required width. Doing so put the remaining fabrics from the top’s background strips to good use. The solid aquas from my stash fleshed out the LV palette nicely—and used up pastels that had the potential to linger long in my stash.

I usually use darker values for binding because they frame quilts so nicely, and originally, I planned to bind the project in the navy bias stripe found in places throughout the top. In the end, however, I used a LV—the bias stripe in gray—for the binding. That LV fades into the vertical background strips, letting the blocks take center stage.

The Quilting

After all of the time, effort, and money I invested in this project, it merited some special quilting. Plus, I was pretty tired of looking at the top by the time it was completed—I probably would have put the quilting off for another year if I hadn’t had the sense to send this project to Narda, of Maz Q’s Sewing and Quilting Studio, for an edge-to-edge panto!

Choosing a panto was an endeavor in itself, though. I wanted something that complemented the vertical nature of the GW design. Narda steered me to Julie Hirt’s 60s Mod Butterfly design. I am ecstatic about the results!

 

Advice for Gypsy Wife Hopefuls

If you’re considering your own Gypsy Wife project, my best advice for you is this: Do your homework first. Thousands of people have already tackled the pattern, and a few have been kind enough to document the process online. Some offer alternative ways to sew the filler blocks, info on errors in the diagrams, paper-piecing patterns for some of the focal blocks, and more tips on having a successful GW experience. Stitched in Color’s sew-along would be a good place to start. Good luck!

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Kitchen Table Quilting's Fire Truck Quilt / Beauties Pageant 165

Pulling fabric for a new project is my most favorite part of the quilt-making process. And although I make plenty of quilts that focus on a single designer’s prints, if not one collection in particular, I especially enjoy making scrappy quilts. After all, scrappy projects require a lot of fabric decisions.

You can see my latest scrappy quilt in these pictures. It’s a simple design—a pixelated fire truck from a free tutorial by Erica Jackman, of Kitchen Table Quilting—but it took me years to cut the necessary 750 squares because my fabric hoard lacked the variety to make the fire truck super scrappy. After culling through my stash and scraps an initial time, I set everything aside and waited (after all, the fabric scene at my house grows and evolves over time). I searched through my fabric again a year or so later and cut more squares. Nope, still not enough. And then recently, with the birth of a friend’s little boy on the horizon, it was time to start sewing.

I love how scrappy quilts tell a story only their makers can read. You may look at these pictures and note the spectrum of colors and designs or the fabrics you have in your stash, too. I look at them and see scraps I was given by different friends, leftover bits from this project or that, fabric I found on my last retreat with my guild. I can spot the remnants of the first fat quarter bundle I ever bought and that print I thought I’d never find a project for. : )

This is my first pixelated quilt. It will not be my last! I have been itching to make a Hello Kitty pixelated quilt that made its rounds on blogs and Instagram years ago. I have a two-year-old niece who loves the Hello Kitty Squishmallow I got her for her birthday. I’m thinking she needs a quilt to go with it!

Have you make a pixelated quilt? If you have, please share it with the rest of us in the linky below. 

Linking up with Needle and Thread Thursday ...

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The pageant rules are simple:

• Post your finish in the linky tool. (No links to your own giveaway or linky, please!)
• Point your readers back here with a text link or use the button above.
• Visit and comment on other participants’ finishes.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter