Starbound Finished

 Starbound is bound!  I can't wait to get her washed and on the bed.  This quilt was a great way to use up some bigger scraps of fabric.

The quilting is entirely ruler work. The outer border didn’t turn out as planned, so I added a bit more quilting than I thought was necessary. Since the outer border ended up over quilted, I left the red inner border unquilted to balance it out and keep it softer since it’s bed sized and will be used. Seems logical to me, though it might just be laziness. Haha!

The star block quilting was copied from a quilt I saw on Pinterest.  Reminds me of fireworks exploding.

Two fabrics were used for the backing.  The floral is a Walmart Pioneer Woman fabric and the dot is an old Riley Blake print.

I didn't plan for the gingham binding to look like a stripe on the front of the quilt, it's just one of those happy mistakes.

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This Weeks Progress ~ Scraps And Binding

 This week was a slow one for quilting, but I still made it into the sewing room every day, even if only for a few minutes. While sorting through the tiny scraps bin, I realized there were even more scraps tucked away in the “Sweets” tin, where I keep random triangles to turn into half square triangles. As you can see, they multiply like rabbits....it’s time to let them go!

There were three HST's in the tin, so they’ll be added to the hoard of HST's.

My scrap HST system is bursting at the seams with about 3,000 pieces waiting to be used. I plan to keep adding to the stash whenever the flippy corner method produces more, but I’m done making them from random triangles. Of course, there’s one exception to this rule that we’ll cover later in this post.

The image below shows what I accomplished in one hour last night. I processed a few more on Tuesday night but forgot to snap a picture before putting them into the scrap saver system.

Here’s the exception to my new scrap HST rule... I can save small triangles for HST's if I can’t cut a one-inch square from them. I know it sounds a bit crazy, but I already have some tiny one inch HST's in my stash, so adding more makes sense to me. Making a quilt from tiny HST's sounds like a fun challenge... someday.

Last night I finally unfolded the Mumbo Jumbo quilt top to let some of the wrinkles fall out. I don't iron quilt tops before quilting, unless there’s a stubborn crease that could cause a pucker during the quilting process.  I'm not excited about quilting this one because I'm not a fan of sampler quilts.  The quilting plan is to just get it finished with as little quilting as possible. 

Last but certainly not least, the Starbound quilt binding is progressing slowly...one side done, three to go. Fingers crossed for a Monday finish.

This is the end of the quilting updates, but I have a Khaleesi update. It’s been a while since I’ve shared about my girl. As most of you know, she has an autoimmune disease called Perianal Fistulas. I took her off all drugs last year and was treating her holistically.  She was doing well until this past February when things took a horrible turn and we had to put her back on an immune suppressing drug, cyclosporine. It’s a tough drug with some nasty side effects, but it was either that or let the disease run its course, which would have caused her to suffer greatly. She’s doing much better now with only mild side effects. At her vet visit this week, we learned she’s doing so well that we can start tapering off the drug. There’s a chance she could come off it completely and never need it again.

Here's my girl. She looks scared because it was storming outside. She’s a big ole baby when it comes to storms, usually hiding under the table or in the bedroom closet. It might sound silly, but those of us in tornado alley know she’s one smart dog for hide during storms!

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One Quilt Off The Frame....Next In Line

Starbound is off the frame, and now the only thing left is to hand stitch the binding to the back.

Before diving into the soul soothing handwork, I need to tackle the fabric scraps from this quilt. The large blue and floral piece will be placed in the scrap backing stash, and the batting scrap will be saved for franken-batting.  The small pieces on the left-hand side of the picture will be cut into usable sizes for the fabric scrap saver system.

Just 20 minutes of slicing and dicing, and TADA! Taking care of scraps as they appear is so much easier than letting them pile up for months. It feels great to have a tidy sewing room, though it’s a bit sad it’s taken about 40 years to finally have a somewhat organized space.

We’ll see how long it lasts... since our last chat, I haven’t touched this scrap drawer except to move it out of my way... haha!  And I'm still not ready to deal with it so let's go ahead and prep for the next UFO quilt to be quilted.

 I found this one tucked away at the bottom of a rolling cart this week while searching for a quilt ruler I’d borrowed from my neighbor. It had been prepped to be next on the frame back in February. By the way, I found her ruler two days later...so much for bragging about having a tidy sewing room.

Might as well go ahead and pull the next to be quilted.  

Moody Blooms is a baby sized quilt so it should quilt up fairly quick. It needs a label and binding. I don't like this quilt so I think I might use the backing fabric as the binding.   Maybe I'll use the tehnique where the backing cut larger and rolled to the front of the quilt for binding then machine stitched into place.  Quick and easy!  What do you think?  Do you use this binding method?

In order to make sure I don't forget it's next in line to be quilted, I made myself a note. 

I put it where it's sure to be seen. 

 

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Starbound Quilting And Tiny Scrap Sort Progress

Hello Quilty Friends! Just a quick update on my quilting progress since our last chat. A little over half of the Starbound quilt is finished, and since it’s entirely ruler work, it’s taking a bit more time. I’m hoping to have it off the frame by Thursday evening. You can find more details on this quilt and pattern by clicking here.

I spent a couple of days bouncing between quilting and sorting tiny scraps. I dumped them all onto the cutting table, thinking I’d cut them as I sorted....bad idea. There are way more one inch and larger pieces than I expected. So, they’re now sorted into “trash” and “keep” piles, and I’ll cut them little by little as I find the time. I’ll keep you updated on how long it takes.

This scrap bin had a few surprises, I found some applique circles and simple applique leaf shapes. I’m pretty sure they ended up there by accident, since I never throw away applique scraps. Of course, I added them to my applique scrap box. By the way, if you’re curious about making perfect circle appliques, I have a picture tutorial and a video tutorial you can check out here.

I was shocked at how much fabric was larger than one inch. Cutting them into usable pieces is going to take some time.   Sure, I could just toss it, but…sigh…the battle between me and the tiny fabric hoard is real.

Which do you think has more fabric, the keep pile or the trash? I considered weighing them on the kitchen scale but decided it didn’t matter. Regardless of how much the keeper box weighs, the cutting journey is going to be long..

The pretty little fabric scraps are in the trash. It’s hard to let them go.....sad but true. I’m emotionally attached to them. If you’ve ever seen the show Hoarders, that’s me when it comes to fabric. Just looking at this picture makes me want to go rescue them. 

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Starbound Quilt Top

 I started making this quilt from a picture I saved on Pinterest.  The picture had no information. Finding quilt pattern names is almost impossible these days due to algorithms that are supposed to make things easier.  I think it has made things worse.  I'm pretty sure he who pays the most gets pushed to the top of the search. Using all the key words I could think of I searched Google, DuckDuckGo, Pinterest, Bing, Instagram, and Facebook. I even did a reverse image search.  Thankfully my aging brain can still work things out with a little time.  I knew I had seen this quilt before, but where?  Since it is a simple quilt, it was easy to recreate without a pattern while my brain worked in the background to find the quilt pattern in its corrupted files.

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Using quilt logic, and assuming it was either a charm pack or layer cake pattern I started pulling fabrics from the scrap bins. When it came time to make the stars, I was running low on larger scraps, so I had to make the stars with no inner points.

Because I like BIG quilts, I added two more borders.  The red was cut from yardage, and the final star border was cut from leftover wide backing fabric.

Choosing the backing fabric was time consuming. I wanted a low volume print or more than one low volume, but this was the best my stash had to offer.   The large floral is Pioneer Woman fabric from Walmart and the navy-blue dot is an older Riley Blake print.

For the binding I chose a navy-blue gingham only because it was my first plan for the outer border.  After fussy cutting it and laying it on the floor with the quilt top, I didn't like how it looked.  So, it was fussy cut(again) into narrow strips. The gingham was carefully matched. When sewn together it looks like one continuous piece of fabric. Can you see the seam?

 

For now, this quilt will be put into the "needs to be quilted" drawer because I have a quilt on the frame waiting to be finished.  Who knows when this will be quilted because squirrelly is my quilty life.  So, when the time comes to put her on the frame I'll make the quilt label. 

About four days into working on this quilt I found the pattern!  My old brain thought it looked like a Primrose Cottage design.   Their designs are typically beginner friendly small square quilts.  The search was simple, start with page one of the quilt patterns and keep going until I found it or came to the end of the patterns.  It was at the bottom of page one!   Click image to go to the pattern.  Of course, I went back to Pinterest and added the name of the pattern in the comments of the pinned picture.

STARBOUND

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