crazy mom quilts | Needle and Foot

Over the past year my friend Sophia and I have been trying to work on some older projects. We have done a decent job of it and gotten a few things finished up. I have another one to share with you today! This one came about because I had to take my Bernina to the shop. Fortunately I have a back up machine for these times. It is an older Kenmore and works well. However, I don’t have a 1/4″ foot for it. I wanted to work on something where precision wasn’t key.

My unfinished Ring Me quilt was the ticket. This pattern has no points to match making the piecing very simple. This project was started back in early 2017. I took part in a blog hop to announce the release of No Scrap Left Behind, written by Amanda Jean Nyberg (aka Crazy Mom Quilts). I love this book! Amanda has written two quilt books, Sunday Morning Quilts and No Scrap Left Behind. I have both of them in my library. She had an incredibly popular quilt blog but chose to stop blogging at the end of 2018 after a ten year run. Fortunately, she left the blog up so we can all still access her amazing ideas, tutorials and quilt patterns. She is definitely the queen of scrap quilting!

Back to the quilt now. When I was due to publish the project for the blog hop, I was really in the early stages of making the quilt top. I posted progress pictures (see above) and that was as far as it got.

In a relatively short time, I was able to complete the quilt top. With a charcoal gray background, the solid ‘rings’ add vibrant color. To make the rings, I gathered solid fabric strips and trimmed them to about 1 1/2″ or 2″ wide. After making strips sets I cut strips that were 1 1/2″ wide. These were combined with 1 1/2″ corner stones of the gray and stitched to squares.

I encourage you to find a copy of the book if you don’t already have it. The book has many patterns made with scraps with the projects categorized by shape of scrap (eg squares, triangles, strips). Before I knew it, I had my top completed and sewing without the 1/4″ foot was a non-issue.

Yesterday the sun was shining through a window in my bedroom and I knew it would light up the quilt top. Isn’t this stunning? I love the way it looks with the light pouring through.

Stained glass, right?? The seams on the back side of the flimsy look like black framing around the color and the sashing strips. Such a cool effect. This is as far as I took the project though. I wanted my Bernina back for quilting it.

Today I was able to go pick up my machine. I have one quilt in process where the quilting is nearly finished (I was working on it when the Bernina decided to get stuck). Once that quilt is done, I will baste this one and get going on it. Can’t wait!

This week has been a bit of a drudge as I have had a cold. While I can’t prove it, I am guessing I caught it when I was babysitting the girls last week. Who knows? Historically, my sweet grand daughters have been very generous in sharing any germs they might be harboring. We went home on Thursday, Friday the 3 year old started running a fever and on Sunday I started to feel sick. Oh well. They are worth it. We had so much fun with them. My son and his wife took a well deserved trip to Hawaii. Ray and I had the pleasure of spending loads of time with the grands. Here are some pictures of the fun we had:

Playing in puddles.

So much dancing, wrestling and gymnastics happens with these two. They love to perform for an audience.

This silly girl was having some dessert and watching a show on the iPad. I had to laugh when I walked by and saw her sitting like this. Ouch.

We did a number of art projects with the kids. This one was fun. I put blue painters tape down and told them to paint the sections however they wanted to. It was a challenge to peel up the painters tape though. I should have used heavier paper (or even cardboard). The tape was pulling on the paper a lot so I had to go super slow. The results were great though.

Aren’t these pretty??

We went shopping one day and H (age 6) saw this make up kit that said ages 5 years and up. I was very hesitant to buy it so I texted the parents a picture of it to see if they approved. She was overjoyed when Mom and Dad gave the go ahead. Oh my gosh, the glitter and color these two had all over their faces for the remainder of our time together. It was so funny.

The girls love their grandpa and he enjoyed lots of snuggle time.

Overall, the week went well. We came home exhausted and happy. These two kids were one of the reasons we wanted to move up to Washington. Ray and I grew up with grand parents who were actively involved in our lives. It is so special to have a close relationship with the girls.

It is time to go plug in the Bernina and get it set up. I have missed this machine and am anxious to have her back up and running! If I don’t post again, I wish all of the US folks out there a Happy Thanksgiving next week!!

Linking up with Alycia at Finished or Not Friday

That’s the truth, right? If the colors don’t work, the quilt doesn’t work. This has happened to me more than I like to think about. Color doesn’t just happen. So, this month’s Might Lucky Quilting Club challenge resonated with me. Taught by Amanda Jean Nyberg of Crazy Mom Quilts (which I know you already knew!) the lesson is all about color, scale and value. At the risk of repeating myself, I have great admiration for Amanda’s sense of color, her use of every.single.scrap of fabric and her down to earth style of communicating. Her blog is one of the first that sucked me into this awesome on-line community.

I joined the Might Lucky club in January and I will be honest with you. I am not thrilled with it. I was hoping the monthly lessons would speak to me – some did, but most? Not so much, until this month. This month Amanda explains selecting colors, working with value and scale, and making the quilt more interesting. It made sense to me. I am only beginning to play with her ideas.

I have a huge collection of charm squares. Some I have purchased, some were cut from my scraps, and some have been won in giveaways. One collection that I have been holding on to is the Michael Miller Gem Tones pack. I received this one for free from Alyssa at Pile O’ Fabric. Last year, over Thanksgiving weekend, Alyssa had a huge Black Friday sale. I ordered a number of basics from her. Somehow her inventory was off and there were a number of items I ordered that she couldn’t ship to me. (She was also hugely pregnant at the time and having a tough pregnancy – just to further explain.) She kindly refunded my money on the items that were not available and then threw in this charm pack – which was above and beyond, right? I liked the colors in it, mostly deep jewel tones with the addition of some orange and brown. It was quite bold. But there were thirty charms total and I had only one pack.

Reading Amanda’s lesson, I decided to start pulling from my other charm squares and build out the collection.

Above is the original set of charms. I apologize – this photo is blurred and I didn’t see that until it was too late. Whoops. It is a nice set – good colors, but all seem similar in value (light vs medium vs dark) I pulled all sorts of other charms to see what else I could add in.

Some of these worked and some (most) did not. But when I added the two lighter dotted fabrics (center and upper right) I saw that it would help to add a lighter set of charms to brighten the darker Gem Tones kit. I took out most of the squares I had tried, leaving some of the solids and just a few prints. Then I cut a pile of charms from a Kona cream color that I had leftover from my Harmony quilt top.

This worked well. It makes each of the charms stand on their own and the colors seem to become more vibrant when not adjacent to each other. I love the simplicity of patchwork but thought it made things a bit more interesting to put the blocks on point.

I circled some of the blocks that were added from my charms (that were not part of the original set. I think I succeeded in adding some lighter values and a few prints that changed the scale a bit. I love the look that resulted from playing with these charms. The quilt will be a gift for my niece who is expecting her third child in January. I want to get it finished up as I will see her over the Thanksgiving holiday.

This was a good exercise for me. Amanda’s lesson includes a few more ideas for curating fabric pulls. I would like to make some time to do those exercises (not necessarily even to create a quilt with – more for practice). It is a great way to learn and goodness knows, there is plenty of fabric in my sewing room to pull from. 🙂

To the same end, I have been reading this book that I picked up for a dollar at the thrift store a couple of weeks ago. It is really an interesting explanation of right and left brain processing and how to encourage your artistic abilities.

Written in 2005, by Katie Pasquini Masopust and Brett Barker, this book has a series of lessons to help the reader understand color, perspective and value. The language they use is relatable (which so often isn’t the case for me). I think the right/left brain information is so interesting. They talk about the left brain being so controlling and the difficulty in turning off the negative self-talk that we constantly play in our minds as we quickly dismiss our abilities. This is something we should all work on, right?

Color– it’s all about color for now. There is so much to learn and, thankfully, so many fun ways to put the learning into practice.

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