Squaring up and Making a Path

Can you believe it?  A Podunk Picnic is off the quilting frame and ready to be squared up.  I think that was the fasted I've ever quilted a quilt of this size. 70 x 90 or 75 x 90...well it's somewhere close to those numbers.   Sitting for hours sewing the binding on is a well deserved break.

But before squaring up and attaching the binding I need to clear a path for the delivery of packages. The six inches of snowfall has made huge snowdrift on the front walkway and porch. I'm pretty sure the deliveries won't make it to my front porch if the snow isn't cleared.  This didn't take long because the snow is so powdery, it's like shoveling clouds.  This is one time I'm thankful for super cold weather.  Just a few degrees warmer and this would have been a real chore.  The warmer it is the heavier the snow.

The driveway isn't so bad, no drifts out here.  If you look closely at the middle of the drive you can see scrape marks on the top of the snow.  Those were made by me and the snow plow that is attached to the front of the 4-wheeler.  My plan was to clear the drive for Mr. Podunk.  It would take far to long to tell you about all the problems I encountered.  All that really matters is the 4-wheeler died when I went into the road to turn around. 

How was I going to get it out of the road if it doesn't restart?  I suppose I could find a way to pull it with my car?  No, that's not a good idea.  So many things could go wrong there.  More than likely the car would get stuck in the snow.  So I calmed myself and thought through the situation.  Why did it die?  GAS?  I can't see the gas gauge due to its frosted over on the inside of the gauge.  Then I remembered there's a gas reserve, I just need to flip the switch. I said a little mental prayer  "please lord don't let me be on the reserve tank already".   I find the switch that has 3 settings but I can't read them because I don't have my glasses.  All I can do is flip it and try to start.  The first flip of the switch and she didn't start.  The second flip and NO START!   NO NO NO!  This is not happening to me.  So I flip through the different settings again and finally she starts.  Hallelujah!  Let's get this thing out of the road before she dies again.  It was straight back to the garage to park that crazy machine.  I need some coffee and a little quilt therapy. 

Back in my happy place and feeling oh so much better.  In here I know how to make things work.  Let's get this girl squared up and ready for binding. 

To square up the corners of the quilt I'm using Marti Michelle's Diagonal Set Triangle ruler.  It's not meant for this but it works like a charm for the corners.

This ruler is for cutting set in triangles for an on point quilt.  When I purchased it I thought it would be easier and quicker to cut those triangles from strips instead of squares.  I like cutting them from squares.  It's faster and there's no scrap fabric.  

The long edges of the ruler are perfect for squaring up the corners. Sixteen inches from the corner out to the point.

I was pretty happy with the corners, not too much to trim away.  Just a tiny sliver at the very tip.  This is rare for my quilts.  Often my corners become skewed when I baste them down on the quilt frame.  Over the years I've tried so many different tips and tricks to keep this from happening but the one thing that has helped the most is starch.  Heavy starch.  Making the fabric as stiff as paper is best. I like to buy concentrated starch so I can mix it to my desired stiffness.

One down, 3 more go.

After cutting the corner I switch to a 6.5 x 24 ruler for the long straight sides.

It only took about 10 minutes to trim all the way around the quilt.  Now to separate the batting from the scrap fabrics and sort the fabrics.

My backing was made from two different fabrics. I cut them apart and sort them by color and size.

I ended up with quite a bit of scrap bin sizes.  My scrap bins are anything less than a fat quarter.  The larger piece is about 7-8" wide and over 90" long so I'm going to put it in with the FQ's.

And then the smallest pieces are less than one inch wide.  I save these for making rope rugs.  If you have never seen the rope rugs, you can read more about them here.

The smaller pieces of batting and fabric will go into a scrap bag for making my baby girl Khaleesi a new dog bed.  I'm getting pretty close to having enough stuffing I just need to come up with a plan.  Do I go simple or a little more fancy?  Any suggestions on a pet bed pattern?

Khaleesi will not come in when it's time for daddy to come home.  It was about 10 degrees and snowing.  She sat out there for 45 minutes.  

 

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A Friday Flimsy and Cleaning The Quilter

 Happy Friday Quilting Friends!  First I want to thank all of you who shared your thoughts on naming this quilt.  It's unanimous, she will officially be named A Podunk Picnic.  You all know me well and have chosen the perfect quilt name. 

Bonnie's mystery quilts are usually inspired by an event of some sort throughout the year.  One year she went to China and the quilt that year was inspired by all the colors she saw during her visit.  And since this one is called On Ringo Lake, I'm pretty sure she visited Ringo lake in 2016 or 17.  Her Ringo quilt was made with teal, brown, white and salmon fabrics.  Perfect colors for a lake quilt.

Click on image to purchase pattern.

Thursday evenings adventure of the quilt onto the quilt frame.

Before quilting A Podunk Picnic I need to do a little preventative maintenance on my quilter.   The quilter has been setting unused and uncovered since early September. I think I've only quilted one quilt since September but it was quilted on my domestic machine.

My quilter isn't some big fancy machine with bells and whistles.  She's a Bailey Home Quilter 15.  I've made a ton of modifications to this machine over the last 10 years to make her work the way I want her too.  The only fancy feature she has is a stitch regulator but it isn't as responsive as the newer stitch regulators on the big girl machines.

The manufacturer of this machine suggests oiling the bobbin area in between each bobbin used. I don't usually do that unless the machine sounds or acts like it needs it.  They also suggest oiling the bearing behind the bobbin area often.  When I talked to the owner of the company on the phone he suggested I oil after ever quilt because at the time I was quilting quilts to death.  These days I don't quilt my quilts to death but I still like to keep her oiled and running smoothly.  Taking it apart and oiling it between each quilt is much easier than having it lock up with a quilt on the frame.  Been there, done that and it's a chore.  You have 2 choices when that happens.  1. Take the quilt off the frame and oil it.  2. Leave the quilt on the frame and oil it.  It only took one time of doing #2 and getting oily black gunk on my quilt to change my mind about oiling in between each quilt.

Clearing out the gunk on the bearing is the worst part.  One or two drops of oil on the bearing and let my machine run for about 15 minutes.  Here's the oil I use to get into those tricky spots.  Before I found this I was trying to put a few drops of oil in a drinking straw to try to reach the inner workings of the machine.  Oh boy did I make a mess. This loosens up all the gunk.  Then once it's nice and warm I speed up the machine it throws the gunk everywhere.  Again it only takes one time of throwing gunk everywhere and you learn to cover the bearing with a rag or scrap fabric.  Could you imagine having this on your pretty new quilt top?  My goodness she was a dirty girl.

Cleaning the machine from start to finish takes about 2 hours.  While it sits idling and loosening up the gunk I dust and clean other areas of the machine and frame.  At last I can start loading the quilt backing.  With a pieced backing I like to have my seams running horizontal.  Vertical seams can cause puckering issues about halfway through a quilt.   You would think that it was as easy as pinning it on and rolling it up onto the bars.  NOPE.  I roll it up on the front bar, then roll it all onto the back bar and then back to the front bar.  Hopefully by this time the seams are lining up perfectly straight with the front bar.  As you can see in the picture below this one is perfect.  Yah!  I can get this girl loaded and based down before bedtime.

Oh but there's a snag in the works.  GRRR.  My quilt top is 75 x 90.  The only batting on hand is 72 x 90.  Sigh.  I could dig through the scraps of batting and make a franken-batting but it's late, I'm tired and I hate piecing batting.  Looks like I'm done for the day and there's going to be a road trip in the morning.

Oh well, I need to catch up on my reading of the book 

"Earthing, the most important health discovery ever"  

Boy what a long title.  When I was younger my books of choice were by Steven King, John Grisham, Danielle Steel and V.C Andrews.  I wasn't too picky as you can see by the list of authors.  These days novels bore me to death.  So I read books that teach me something.  I wish I had this love of learning when I was younger but that's a story for another day.  

Earthing?  What is it?  To sum it up short and sweet it's about putting your bare feet on the ground outside and the health benefits of doing so.  Who knew this is so important.  If your interested and would like to know more without reading, here's a link to the free documentary on Youtube.  It'll give you the basics in about an hour. 

I've been Earthing, also called Grounding, for a little over a month.  To my shock there have been some changes.  Could it be a placebo effect? Possibly.

  But here's what I've noticed.  Top of the list is I sleep more than 2 hours at a time.  For years(all my life) my sleep has been very little at a time.  Now I sleep 7-8 hours with one bathroom break. 

 As a quilters we stand or sit for very long periods of time.  For me the sitting causes leg swelling and the standing causes back pain.  Since grounding while doing either and grounding while sleeping, my swelling and pain have been reduced.  Especially the morning roll and groan to get out of bed.  It was a shock to me the first time I woke up and just got out of bed.  I didn't notice.  I had made it to the coffee pot one morning before it dawned on me how I just popped out of bed, dressed, made through the house without groaning in pain or running into anything. 

I could ramble on all day about this topic but I've got a batting run to make this morning.

  Hope you all have a Yippy Skippy day!

 

Happy Stitching!

I haven't joined in with a linky party in a long time.  While reading quilting blogs this morning I saw this one and thought " What the heck, lets link up!"  Hop on over, you might find a new to blog or a must make to add to the ever growing list.

http://alyciaquilts.blogspot.com/2021/02/suitable-for-framing-finish-and.html

 

  

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On Ringo Lake Quilt Top Finish

 Hello Happy Quilters!  The sun is shining here in Podunk.  Maybe not outside but inside it's sunny and 70 degrees.  The On Ringo Lake quilt top has been finished for a couple of days.  The backing was made from 2 different green prints pulled from my yardage stash.  A yellow backing was my first thought because I knew I had about 8 yards of white dots on yellow but my goodness it was just too much yellow. 

The green print is from Choice Fabrics called Treasures From the Attic.  And the green dots is from RJR called Crazy For Dots and Stripes.

The pattern for On Ringo Lake calls for the inset borders to be the same color as the corners on the nine patches in the image above.  So in my quilt, since I change the colors, the border should be green.  This didn't set well with me.  It looked great on Bonnie's quilt due to the center of the quilt being a little more subdued than my bright fabrics.  Her quilt shown below.

click on image to purchase pattern from Bonnies store.

I played around in EQ with the border color.  If you have been following me for awhile you know I like lots of white in a quilt.  There's no reason other than it pleases my eye.  I'm in no way saying Bonnie's eye is wrong.  We all like what we like.  I like White!  

In the excitement of finally having the top complete I forgot to take a picture of the completed top so you could see the border.  After a little digging I found this picture from when I was testing the piecing of the set in triangles.  If you missed that post you can read more about it here.

Before putting this bright beauty on the frame I still need to make the label and the binding. The reason I do this is so if it becomes a UFO I have everything needed to finish the quilt someday.  In the past I would store the quilt top by itself.  And when the day came that I finally decided to quilt it I would struggle to find matching bindings and backings.  Making the backing, binding and label along with the top allows me to store them all together in a plastic bag as a kit for later quilting.  Yes I said plastic....I know the "experts" say that's a no-no but I'm not into the quilt police nonsense.

  

Do you store your quilt tops with the backing, binding and label together as a finishing kit?

One more question:  I'm considering two different names for this quilt.  On Podunk Pond or  A Podunk Picnic, which would you choose? Leave a comment below. 

 By the way, if you are not getting an email response from me when you leave a message it's because you are a not comment blogger.    

Our morning walk....she's on the MOO-VE!

Read more about what MOO-VE means to me.  My word of the 2021

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Making Changes to On Podunk Pond Quilt

 One of the great things about quilting is there's more than one way to do just about anything. If you don't like making half square triangles by cutting and sewing two triangles together you have other options.  There's techniques to make two at a time, four at a time, eight at a time and rolls of paper for making oodles at a time.   The unit below is for the inset border triangle of my version of Bonnie Hunters quilt pattern On Ringo Lake.  The pattern calls for these units to be oversized and trimmed down after piecing the quilt.  For me this method doesn't work well.  And I'd really rather not spend anymore time ripping out stitches this week due to trying to do a technique that I know doesn't work well for me.  Let me say before moving on.  Bonnie's pattern is perfect, I'm not in anyway saying she did anything wrong.  I just need to do things the way I know works best for me.

 I decided to use EQ8 cutting instructions.  Bonnie's way of making these units were easier to cut and assemble than this odd shape below.  Since it's an odd shape with uncommon cutting measurements I made a test piece from paper before cutting into my precious fabric.  Using paper to make test pieces can be done with any pattern.  Years ago I would make test blocks from fabric.  If it came out wrong I wasting fabric.  Then one day I had an epiphany....make the block with paper.  It can be tossed in the trash or upcycled for a cute way to take notes or leave messages on the fridge.

For this test piece I used construction paper.  I keep construction paper on hand for when the grandkids come to visit.

The two different colored paper were layered together and cut at the same time.  

It was much easier than it looked.  So far things are looking great.

Now to sew the paper together.

That's right, I'm going through the motions and pretending it's fabric.  

I even pressed the seam to the dark side.  Wouldn't want the quilt police on my tail. Haha!  Tip if you try this method of sewing paper:  You'll need to make your seam allowance just a tad larger.  On my sewing machine I move the needle to the left 2 clicks.

If these triangle units fit on the top then I start cutting the units from fabric.

It doesn't look like it's going to fit.

I was teasing you! It fit perfectly!  Yah!

It's smooth sailing from here.  The process was repeated using fabric.

Layering the fabrics right sides together before cutting makes things a little easier.  I can cut a left and a right odd shape at the same time and they are ready to be sewn together.

All they need is a few little pins.

This unit will fit perfectly with no trimming after it's in the quilt.  I think I'm going to go the extra mile for accuracy sake and trim those tips with this ruler by Fons and Porter

TADA!  No trimming the entire quilt top or in my case no wonky quilt top.  Now I can start piecing the rows with confidence.

What do you do to add a little sunshine into your life?  Is there's something that always makes your heart sing?  For me it's fabric play.  Of course listening to some 70's rock music also puts a pep in my step and a smile on my face.  Word of warning,  put done the rotary cutter if your going to disco dance in the sewing room....that's a story for another day.😂

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