First February Finish-The Granddaughter Quilt #1

The Granddaughter Quilt #1 is my February finish for Country Threads Dirty Dozen UFO Challenge. Leave it to Eunice to escape from the time-out corner to let me know that it was time to finally finished the Granddaughter Quilt #1 which has been a UFO since 1999. I started quilting in 1996 and after I have made both of my sons’ bed quilts plus starting to accumulate a nice collection of fabric especially after getting a job at the local quilt shop, I had visions of making quilts for my future granddaughters and grandsons. Never mind that my boys were only in middle school and high school back then and definitely weren’t dating, but it was something I felt a quilter should make.

Although the flimsy was finished in 1999, I’m pretty sure I purchased the Jennifer Sampou’s Sweet Rose fabrics before I started working at the quilt shop. I remember seeing Sweet Rose advertised in a quilt magazine and went to Joann’s to look for it. One of the first things I learned as a new quilter was the difference between buying from a chain fabric store and a quilt shop. And another thing to remember was that if you really loved a fabric, and I thought Sweet Rose was the most beautiful fabric with roses, to purchase yardage which I did along with the blue stripe. I didn’t have a pattern in mind until after I started working at the quilt shop and one of the patterns to make with a large focus print was a simple Irish Chain made with plain squares and nine patches. It still is one of my favorite patterns. The red and white fabrics in the nine patches were not from the Sweet Rose collection but from Robert Kaufman and Moda.

I have wanted to finally finish the Granddaughter Quilt #1 (GD#1) since 2022 after the Grandson Quilt #2 and  the Granddaughter Quilt #2 were finished. I had listed all three quilts for the 2022/23 UFO Challenge but didn’t feel like quilting another twin size quilt when it was GD#1’s turn. I committed to finishing it for this year’s Challenge when the number came up so that’s how the GD#1 was finally finished with Eunice, my quilt alter-ego who always sew the right thing in my Studio, reminding me. Ironically, I did purchase the light blue backing fabric from Joann’s in 2022. I machine quilted with CT Essential Thread in a light blue with horizontal and vertical straight line quilting with crosshatch diagonal quilting. After the horizontal and vertical straight line quilting was done and while I was quilting  the diagonal lines, I was thinking that the quilting was going well, better than the Granddaughter Quilt #2, and  I thought too soon. After two rounds of the diagonal lines, the quilting felt too tight and some of the stitches were popping when I ran my hand over it.  There could be several reasons why this happened; it was Quilt Karma for finishing Granddaughter #2 quilt first, the bobbin thread was too tight or quilting with ricochet diagonal lines which is when you quilt the first diagonal line until the end of the row and then pivot the quilt to quilt the next diagonal line until the end again and so on until there’s no more space left to quilt. I spent several hours removing all of the diagonal quilting lines and redid the diagonal lines but with no ricocheting and quilting one row at a time. I also made sure whenever I started a new bobbin to check the tension to make sure the thread wasn’t tight. I did a combination meander and straight line quilting for the border. The binding was always going to be the blue stripe and has been sitting in the binding drawer for all these years. I hand stitch the binding down which is what I would have done if the quilt was finished earlier. I did check the Granddaughter Quilt #2 to make sure the binding was hand stitched also and it was. The Granddaughter Quilt #1 measures 63”x86” and is the smallest out of the four quilts by a few inches.

I am pretty sure this is going to be my biggest finish this year even though there are a lot of month left to sew. It was pretty ambitious of me, as a 20th Century new quilter to want to make four twin size quilts for future 21st Century grandkids. Two of the quilts were made from Jennifer Sampou fabrics and all were simple makes which is still my favorite way for quilting. One thing I very rarely do now is making quilts with borders. When Julie Herman’s book Skip the Borders came out in 2012, I fully embraced  this modern concept. It’s so much easier for machine quilting.

Here’s the quilt quartet, almost twenty-five years in the making, not a saga, just my determination to finish them despite only having one darling Granddaughter. To me, the fabrics are timeless and I still have these fabrics in my stash. The two granddaughter quilts will be going to the GP House and it’s time to look for a chest or hutch to hold her growing quilt collection.

With my February Dirty Dozen Challenge project a big finish, I am looking forward to having the rest of the month to work on current projects and maybe start new ones. I do have on my must-do plate a request from Demando and my project for the upcoming Villa Rosa Designs Fast & More Fun Blog Hop next month. Eunice is also bugging me with another project and if it’s finished this week, I am sending her to jail. It’s always a battle between Peace and Piece in my quilting mind.

Linking up with: My Quilt Infatuation/NTT

Peri-Pinkle Nine Patch Quilt

The month of July started the Country Threads 2022/23 Dirty Dozen UFO Challenge and I was busy. New to the challenge is besides a number being pulled for a UFO project, a color will also be pulled (a list of colors and the corresponding number was posted in June) and you have the option of working on a new or old project. This gives the participants a choice of working on a UFO or a new project which I thought was a great idea since there were several months that I wondered if I wanted to continue participating since I was getting tired of finishing UFOs. I also added another twist to this challenge by gathering five projects for each month corresponding to the Color which were a flimsie waiting to be quilted, a UFO project (in a block stage or less), a designer whose fabrics I’ve have in my stash and always wanted to make something with it, a fabric bundle waiting for a project and a scrap project. I have a choice each month of deciding which one of these projects I want to work on and given myself the allowance that new projects can be a flimsy finish. Number 10 and the color Pink was pulled for July and I chose to finally finish my Peri-Pinkle Nine Patch which was a flimsie I finished in 2000 or twenty-two years ago.

One of the reasons why I wanted to finally finish this quilt is because of the other name I gave it; the Granddaughter Quilt #2. The Granddaughter Quilt #1 is also on this year’s challenge list. I was working at the Quilt Shop when I purchased the fabrics for this quilt; it was during this time when other fabric companies were coming out with their own reproduction fabrics which before only Marcus Bros, Julie Rothermel was designing. The fabrics used in the Peri-Pinkle Nine Patch Quilt were from Moda (Sharon Newman), In the Beginning (Sharon Yenter) and Chanteclaire (Darlene Zimmerman). When I made this flimsie, my two sons were still in high school and middle school and thought that someday this quilt would be for a future granddaughter. Now this future granddaughter, the darling granddaughter is now five and may be ready for a big girl quilt or several big girl quilts so I thought this would be a great finish to start the Challenge. You would think this would be my oldest quilt finish but it’s not if the Granddaughter Quilt #1 is finished.

I would like to say that the machine quilting was a breeze but it wasn’t. My plan to do simple in the ditch quilting combined with diagonal crosshatching on the nine patch did not go well with the Ditch Quilt Foot which I used before. I should have realized after the first line of quilting that something was wrong but I ignored it. Two thoughts came to mind after I quilted it the first time, you’re never too old to make stupid quilting mistakes and if the first line of machine quilting isn’t right, stop and get the seam ripper out. You can see on the top pic how badly puckered the machine quilting was and my thought was maybe this is what it would have looked like if I had machine quilted it twenty-two years ago and maybe it wouldn’t be too noticeable if I photographed it at a certain angle. But I decided I needed to rip out all of the quilting which took two days. It should be no surprise that I binge watched crime and murder mysteries. The second time I machine quilted this quilt I used my walking foot, the ditch quilt foot has been placed in the time out corner on my sewing table. You can see how much better the machine quilting  looks on the bottom pic. When I showed my Hubby these photos, he commented that if I left the quilt alone the first time,  I could have called it the Puckered Pink Quilt.

I did hand sew the binding down which I would have done twenty-two years ago because doing it by machine was almost unheard of back then. You can see the backing is the pink Chanteclaire ticking stripe which I almost wasn’t going to use because back then I thought I might need it for another project but now I’m pretty sure there won’t be and it was just perfect for the backing. I normally am a cheapskate when it comes to backing fabric; I use sale fabric which sometimes is not part of the fabric line or used in the flimsie. BTW, the Peri-Pinkle Nine Patch Quilt measures 60”x80” which was a pretty big quilt for me back then.

And here’s a photo of the darling Granddaughter with her Peri-Pinkle Nine Patch Quilt wearing her matching pink shoes. If you’re wondering how I came up with the name, it’s a combination of the periwinkle blue and pink fabrics used in this quilt.

The Peri-Pinkle Nine Patch Quilt was a finally finish before mid July so I thought I would have time to work on other projects I had designated for the month. I spent the last week in June organizing my projects, a total of 60 projects and making a photo collage of the five projects for each month. I have to mention that I love each one of the projects chosen and that there were lots more which could have been included. The left top photo is the flimsie, the bottom left is the UFO, the top right is the designer bundle, the center right is the fabric bundle and the bottom right is the scrap project which I have to mention since Pink was the color of the month, my scraps are Tula Pink. There are some months I tweaked some of the designations and changed one of the fabric colors from stripe to neutral or free for all. We’re only traveling to the GP House every other weekend now which gives me a nice block of time to do some serious quilting and that I did.

Four Flimsies in four days-leave it to me to turn a Challenge to a Choice and then to a Am I Crazy Challenge by working on the other four projects which I don’t expect I will do each month. It helps that these patterns were fast and easy. And you know what’s even crazier….

I finished another flimsie, instead of quilting one of the other four flimsies, which was a DrEAMi but right now looks more like a Squirrel Scream. This flimsie did not sew fast as the others and glad it’s a finish. I’m hoping once the blue binding is on, I will like it better. I’ll post more about these flimsies once they are finally finished. I’m thinking some of these flimsies finished during this year’s challenge are perpetual and are going to appear on next year’s challenge list. I do like the idea of having less fabrics sitting idly in my stash.

Even though the month of July isn’t over for another three days, I’m tired. We’re leaving for the GP House this weekend and I don’t think I’ll bring any sewing but who knows what I’ll come up with after I clean my table. There are some interesting scraps laying around…..

Linking up with: My Quilt Infatuation/NTT