Quiltville Old Town Mystery ~ Clue One

 Hello Scrap Happy Quilters!  I did it!  The first clue of the Old Town Quiltville Mystery is finished. 

 I started cutting fabrics late afternoon on Monday using Bonnie's ruler that I bought a couple of weeks ago. One set of test blocks shown below. Normally when making flying geese I use the four at a time method which requires larger pieces of fabric.  Using this ruler and sewing small pieces reminded me of my earlier years in quilting before discovering the rotary cutter, acrylic templates, rulers and quick piecing techniques.  One of these days I'll time Bonnie's ruler for flying geese and the four at a time method to see just how much time is saved, if any.

   On Tuesday I finished cutting the remaining blocks and had them completed by 9pm.

I was hoping to only work from scraps, but my lighter green scrap bin was lacking pieces large enough to make matching sets of flying geese.  So, I pulled a few fabrics from yardage and will use them if needed for the rest of the quilt.  

The white background fabrics used in these blocks is 100% from the scrap bins. Yes BINS, I have two bins overflowing with low volume white scrap prints.  

Let's take a quick look at Bonnie's Essential Triangle Tool Ruler.  Mine was purchased on Amazon.  It can also be purchase it on her website.

It comes with a booklet with great instructions for both rulers. The only thing I don't like about this ruler is the color of the lines. I prefer black lines because they show up better on fabric.  I use a lot of red and aqua in my quilts.  Those red and teal lines won't be easy to see.

Do you need this ruler to make a Bonnie quilt?  NO. I got a wild hair to buy her ruler.  All of the rulers below will work.  Plus, in the mystery quilt instructions she gives options for making the same unit without her rulers.

Before Bonnie designed her own ruler, she suggested the Companion Angle Ruler and the Easy Angle Ruler. I bought them years ago at Joann's when I first started thinking about making the yearly mystery quilt.  

They both come with basic instructions.  I've misplaced the instructions for the Easy Angle Ruler.

I'm not sure where, when or why I purchased the Fon's and Porter Ruler, but it too would work and has pretty good instructions.

If you're interested in the Quiltville Old Town FREE mystery quilt, you can find the first two free PDF's patterns here.  The first one tells you everything you need to know about the quilt along.  The second one is the instructions for the flying geese blocks.  The PDF's will be free until sometime in January or February 2025.  After that they will become a paid pattern on her website.  

You can see my three Quiltville Mystery quilt finishes here.

Besides publishing a blog, Bonnie also has a huge Facebook group, over 138,000 members. This time of year, is when it's the most active.  Many quilters are like me and change the suggested colors of the mystery quilt.  It's fun to see the different colorways come together into quilts.  There are some rules in order to join the group.  Join the group here.

Hope to see you there!

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Yellow Bow-Tie Blocks

Woohoo!  Another 100 Bow-Tie blocks are finished!  I finished piecing them Sunday night but didn't get them pressed and ready to store until Monday afternoon.  Of course I had to play with these pretty yellow blocks.

When I say play, I mean grouping them.  In the Joann Fabrics bunch there is one Hancock's print on the far right.  Since I only had one fabric from Hancock's I added to the Joann's bunch.  And in the poly-cotton group there is one poly cotton thrift shirt on the far right.

When I first started building my fabric stash, I did a lot of thrifting and repurposing of fabric. Most of the thrifty fabrics have been used in quilts and there is very little left in my stash.  So, when I run across a piece of thrifty scraps it makes me smile.  The yellow floral thrifted sheet (far right) is one of my favorites.

A few years ago, I made a super cute quilt and sashed it with that adorable sheet.  The red gingham in this quilt was also a sheet.

Funny how we know where most of our fabric was purchased.  Some of these Walmart prints were purchased way back in the early 2000's when Walmart decided to get rid of the fabric department.  It was a dream come true for me because they put it all on clearance.  At that time, I was a single mom with very little extra cash.  Every little bit of extra money went towards Walmart clearance fabric.

Even my most loved designer fabrics were purchased on sale.  My collection of Lakehouse Drygoods is fairly large.  Most of it was purchased during clearance sales for about $5 a yd.  From time to time, I still troll the internet looking for Lakehouse fabrics to add to my stash.  But these days they are very expensive.  The seller always uses the words RARE and OUT OF PRINT.  And then slaps a ridiculous price on them.  I've seen them for as high as $45 a yd.  Not worth it!

  I'm a collector of Lakehouse but I don't all their fabrics. Take for instance that cherry print in the middle of the picture below.  I used the last small piece to make this block.  I grouped it with the Lakehouse but I don't think it's a Lakehouse fabric.  Do you know the manufacturer and designer?  

Well playtime is over, and the little cuties have been stored with others.  700 Bow-Tie blocks.  The tutorial for the Bow-Tie block can be found here.

 

Only 200 more to go!

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Yummy Brown Bow-Tie Quilt Blocks

It might be time to address some concerns if your quilting project starts to resemble food.

It's not just any food we're talking about, but the wickedly delightful kind – sweets! 

Brownies, sweet rolls, cakes, cookies and puddings.

As I arrange the blocks for these pictures, thoughts of salted caramels, gingerbread, and pumpkin pie dance through my mind.

The photo shoot was over so the temptation should subside.  As the brown blocks were placed into the finished bin, my mind wandered off to a whimsical world of fruitcakes, M&M-studded chocolate chip cookies, luscious strawberry pies, and fluffy pistachio pudding speckled with marshmallows.

Then I started thinking about why?  How has my brain connected quilting with yummy sweets? Well, it's clever marketing, that's how and why.  It's hard to resist these sweet must have fabrics when they are connected to sweet food names that we all love to eat.  I bet just saying the words Jelly Roll triggers our brains to want sweets, thus causing us to impulse buy them as if they were delicious treats we could eat. Think about that for a bit.

Jelly Roll

Layer Cake

Honey Bun

Today's plan... keep my hand out of the cookie jar while I hand sew the binding to the back of my JELLY ROLL Twinkler quilt.  Wish me luck, for some reason writing this post has made me hungry.

HAHA!

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Fabric And Fun

 Over the last few months, I've been seeing a shift in quilting fabrics, one that I've been waiting to see come around again.  It's a slight shift but it's there none the less and it tickles me pink. The shift is color, bright happy colors. My pallet of choice can be summed up with my Promenading Tulips quilt.

For the last few years colors have been muted or tainted with grey and brown undertones.  And red fabric has been almost impossible to find.  Oh, they would label the color red, but it wasn't a true red.  More often than not the color would be more tomato soup or raspberry.  One good thing about this muted fabric trend is it slowed down my fabric purchases and that made Mr. Podunk very happy.  But look out my dear sweet man, color is coming back!  Just take a look at this new line called Summertime by Camille Roskelley. It won't be available until next April, my birthday month!  Everything I need in one line of fabric.  I've worked with her fabrics years ago. The reds weren't as red as I like but they were pretty close.

The Dilly Dally line is set to drop this December.  Just a couple of weeks from now.  I love 30's floral reproductions.  Santa I've been a very good girl this year!  

This week it took all the strength I could muster to not order this Garden Party bundle from Bear Creek Quilting.  Each piece is 10.5 x WOF, it's the same amount of fabric as a fat quarter but I prefer fat quarters, they are easier to fit into my stash.  So, I did a little search and found a fat quarter bundle on Etsy.  And again, resisted temptation... at least for now. HAHA!

The title of this blog post is Fabric And Fun.  We covered fabric, now it's time for fun.  Yes, I know fabric is fun but sometimes we need to leave the sewing room and live a little.

Yesterday I spent a little time at the Senior Center in our area.  My dad, Jack (78) is a singer in an all senior band.  The band does a small concert once a month at the Senior Center.  Half of the band was out sick or caring for a sick loved one, but they made the best of the situation.  Here's a couple short videos of my dad singing. 

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Finished Or Not Friday

 Hi quilty friends!  Progress is being made on the Twinkler quilt.  The quilting is fairly light with very little ruler work and a lot of free motion.  The quilt police might frown upon skipping the stitch in the ditch technique, but if they think it looks better, they can issue me a citation and move along. 

I'll start quilting row four later this afternoon.   I've got a morning and early afternoon jam-packed with excitement.  More about that tomorrow.

The brown Bow-Tie blocks are also coming along but at a pretty slow pace.

Half of them finished and the other half are almost finished.

Just 300 more Bow-Ties left! Woohoo! I'm eager to see all 900 blocks assembled into a beautiful quilt.

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Twinkler Quilt Finishing Instructions ~ Jelly Roll Quilt

Quilting the Twinkler quilt is underway at last!

Today I'm going to share how I set my blocks and some basic quilt information to help you recreate the quilt.

The first thing you need is a Jelly Roll or (42) 2.5 x 42 strips of fabric.  You can get by with 40" strips or a tad smaller because there's a little scrap leftover from 42".  

I used a Lori Holt Flea Market Jelly Roll plus (2) fat quarters because there were only (40) strips in this roll.  The background fabric is solid white.  I did not do the math for how much I used or what will be needed.  I let EQ8 do the work.  EQ8 says the quilt will need 6.75 yards of background fabric.  If I wasn't working from a full bolt of fabric, I would buy at least an extra half yard for human and computer errors.  So that would be 7.25 yards of background fabric.

Each Jelly roll strip makes one block.  There are (42) blocks.  (6) blocks across and (7) down.

From each jelly roll strip you will need.

B (4) 2.5 x 2.5

C (8) 2.5 x 3.5

Background cutting for the blocks only 

A (546) 2.5 x 2.5

D (168) 3.5 x 3.5

E (168) 2.5 x 3.5

You should have a small piece of scrap left over from each strip.  This is enough for one sewing or cutting error per block.

The star points were made using the flippy corner method.  Place Fabric A and C, right sides together, sew from corner to corner, then cut 1/4" away from stitched line. I pressed to the dark.  Pay close attention to the direction of your diagonal seams, we only have enough scrap fabric for one error per block.

For my quilt the blocks were set without cornerstones.  If you prefer cornerstones, you will have enough fabric leftover from the jelly roll to add them to your quilt.   Below is the sashing and border cutting for my quilt.

Sashing a quilt with no cornerstones isn't hard.  Here's how I make sure the blocks line up perfectly.  Below is row 1 and the first (G)sashing sewn in place.  Now that they are sewn together, you'll need something for making a small mark. I prefer a blue water-soluble pen, but anything will work as long as it doesn't show through your background fabric.  We will be marking on the backside of the fabric.

 

Make a mark in the seam allowance at the sashing seams.  Do this at the sashing between each block.

Here I've pressed the long sashing towards the sashing and added row 2 below row 1.  You can't see the marks because they are on the back of the long horizontal sashing.

Now flip row 1 onto row 2.  Line up the pen marks with the sashing seams between each block on row 2.

Of course you want the edges of the fabric to line up before pinning in place.  Pin at each sashing and each mark.  And anywhere else you would like to pin.  I'm a pin-aholic so I added several more to the area with blocks.

Sew the rows together, press to the sashing and TADA perfectly lined up blocks and sashing!  See that's not so hard and it's much quicker than cutting and sewing cornerstones.

Continue adding each long sashing in the same manner then add your borders.

For the backing I chose to use (3) yards of 108 wide backing from my stash.  Since this quilt is only 86" wide, I trimmed off the excess on the sides.

Here she is on the frame and patiently waiting.  There's a lot to do around the house today but I hope to get at least one more row quilted and make a few more Bow-Tie blocks. 

 

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