Quiltville Mystery - En Provence

Its been quite some time since I last posted.  I had a loss in my quilting mojo for a while and didn't enter my sewing room for more than a month.  The year has gone by quickly and its December already.

The day after Thanksgiving, Bonnie Hunter over at Quiltville started up her yearly myster quilt, En Provence.  I didn't participate last year, but decided this year I wanted to.  Its helped me want to get back into the sewing room.

Clue #1 was posted Friday, November 25th.  Its a fairly simple clue with 221 four-patches of neutrals.  Here's my first two pairs to make sure the ended up at the correct size:


As I was pulling strips from my bin of pre-cut strips from other projects and then sewing them into pairs, I ran out of thread on my prior thread cone.  It was a pretty hefty cone at 2500 yards of thread, but nothing like the Big Bertha of cones that I have next up.  Its a whopping 25,000 yards of thread.  I'm curious to see how long this thread cone lasts me.  Its from Superior Threads and I was able to get it on sale earlier this year.


I didn't have enough time to completely finish all of the four-patches.  I honestly don't know how some of the ladies keep up with the clues... other than that they may be retired and not have to spend 40-60 hours a week working for corporate America.

I was able to finish (and press) 100 of the little buggers.


And another twenty sewn and ready for pressing.  Only 101 left to go!



Hop on over to Quiltville's Mystery Link-up (for part 1) to see how the other quilters are faring so far.

Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations

Quilty Update

I finally got back into my sewing room this weekend.  It is the first time in about two or three months that I've spent any real time in there.  It felt good to be sewing again.  :c)

I made some progress on the Mariner's Compass quilt that I've been working on.  The quilting is slow-going as it is lots of little tiny pebbles.  However, so far it has been worth the effort.  I used wool batting on this quilt from Quilter's Dream, which gives a nice puffiness to the minimally quilted areas.  I'm also using Superior Threads' So Fine in the top and BottomLine in to the bobbin.  The denseness of the quilted portions really allows the points of the compass to pop-up


I'm really loving the texture that the pebble quilting is giving on this quilt.  The little circles really offset the straight lines of the rest of the quilt.


Can't help myself... another close-up picture.  :c)


So aside from stressing about work the past few months and not getting into my sewing room.... I have actually been exercising a bit more.  I realize during the summer that I just wasn't happy with where I was in terms of body size, weight, etc.  I finally decided to do something about it.  It may sound weird, but I went out and purchased a FitBit.  I got the Flex version as I wanted something that was easy to carry around with me.  I always had trouble with pedometers that either clipped on the waist or went in a pocket as I don't typically have pockets on my clothing for work and the waist option was just annoying.

The first week or so I simply wanted to track how much I was actually walking without changing any of my existing habits.  I was surprised to find that I wasn't walking nearly as much as I thought I was.  All my "running" around at work was really just going from meeting to meeting and then sitting for an hour or more.  Since then I've paid attention to how many steps I was getting in each day and forced myself to get up more frequently.  Instead of picking up the phone, I would walk to someone's desk.  Instead of parking close to the building, I parked further away.

I'm happy to say that with tracking my walking and a few small changes to my diet, I've been able to lose almost 20 pounds since September.  I'm routinely walking about 7,000 - 8,000 steps a day and when I go to the gym (2-3 times a week), I'm close to about 12,000 steps those days.  In the fall when the weather was nice, I was really walking a lot and most weekends had close to 20,000 steps on both Saturday and Sunday.  I'm looking forward to the spring weather in another few months and I hope I can increase my amount of walking again.

I saw that Karen posted about recently getting a FitBit.  I've had success with it and really like the features that the Apps have.  You can challenge friends during the week and on weekends to meet step goals for a day or for an entire week or just a weekend.  Sometimes its surprising how much a little thing like an easy way to track steps can help, but for me, it helped a lot.  It made me aware of the fact that I didn't walk nearly as much as I thought I did, which made me want to walk more.  I look forward to each day when I get that little buzz towards the end of the day signaling that I met my step goal.

So while you are sewing...don't forget to get up and walk every now and then!  :c)

Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations

Mariner's Compass Quilt

Over the summer, I didn't get a whole lot of quilting done, but I did make progress here and there.  The bulk of my quilting time was spent doing stitch-in-ditch and outline stitching on the Mariner's Compass quilt.  Once that was done (which was tedious, but worthwhile), I could finally get started on some of the more detailed quilting.

Here's what the overall quilt looks like again

Here is the outermost border.  I did "piano keys" that are 7/8" wide and every other one has dense quilting in it to make the texture show up more.

Here's a close-up of the ribbon border that's around the quilt:


And here's the filler stitching that I've finally been able to start.  I decided to keep it simple with pebbles to showcase the straight lines of the piecing.


I was able to get about 1/8 of the center section done this afternoon.


Overall, I think I'm going to love the texture this creates on the quilt.  Since I used wool batting, the non-quilted areas really stand out.


Hope everyone is enjoying their Sunday afternoon.


Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations

Mariner's Compas Progress

Despite not positing much about it, I have been making slow progress on the Mariner's Compass wall hanging.  Before loading it on my frame to baste it, I drew out the compass pattern I wanted to quilt in the large triangles in the corner of the quilt.  It was much easier to do the marking without the puffiness of the batting.

I'm using Quilter's Dream wool batting on this one as well as Superior Threads (So Fine, Bottom Line, and Lava).  The wool batting gives a very nice loft to it and once I have the filler stitching done, it will really make the designs pop out.

Here's one of the corner squares with most of the basting stitches pulled out.  I still have to do the filler stitching to make the compass motif stand out, but you can get the general idea of what it looks like.  There was a lot of stopping-and-starting on this one due to the straight lines and doing it on my regular sewing machine.  It was also a lot of maneuvering the quilt around, but it will be worth it in the end.



For the ribbon border around the center motif, I've decided to do a lot of straight line quilting to cause your eye to travel down the curling ribbon.  The red pieces have parallel lines spaced a half inch apart.  The blue pieces have parallel lines stitched a quarter inch apart.


Again, this caused a lot of starting and stopping (and lots of threads to bury), but I like the look of it.  The white triangles outside the ribbon will be stitched with dense quilting to cause the rest of the design to come to the forefront.


I've also done all the outline stitching around the center compass, around the outside borders and I've done some free-motion loops on the dark colored squares in the outer border.  I'm saving a lot of the dense quilting until the end.  The exact method of the dense stitching is still a bit up in the air until I get a little bit further in the rest of the quilting.  I'm debating whether to just do dense stippling or to do something like McTavishing or some other fill (circles, waves, etc).  I'll probably end up decided at the last minute.  LOL.

Hope everyone is having a great week so far!

Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations

Lots O' Thread

Just before my birthday (which was this past Sunday), I finally got around to purchasing thread so I could do the quilting on the Mariner's Compass quilt.  As typical, I bought my thread from Superior Threads.  Their threads are great and are very low lint, which is good for your sewing machine.  I don't want to be a "thread snob", but I've tried a bunch of different threads in the past and these ones are definitely my favorites.  I have yet to have ANY issues with the Superior Threads, regardless of which line of threads I use.

So the small cones in the picture below are actually for quilting the Mariner's Compass quilt.  I already had some great blues left over from the Lone Star quilt that I will use in the blue sections of this quilt.  The red will go in the large red sections of the quilt and the gold is going to be used in the pieced outer border where the fabrics switch from yellow to blue to red to green.

You may be wondering about those large cones in the back.  Since I was ordering thread anyway, I decided to indulge and get some very large cones of thread for piecing.  I use Masterpiece threads for my piecing, and typically use the cream color.  However, Superior had a great deal on some of their large cones, so I also picked up the gold/yellow colored cone.  It was originally supposed to be $107, but was on sale for $40.  Very hard to beat that kind of price.



So if you're wondering on the actual size of the new cones....

The two "small" cones of So Fine! and The Bottom Line are both about 3,000 yards.  That big cone...a whopping 10,840 yards of thread!  :c)  The cream color cone is even larger at 15,000 yards.  I have a lot of piecing ahead in my future to use up these babies.  LOL!



I still have some prep work to do on the Mariner's Compass top before its ready to start quilting, but I'll be sure to share some pictures on here.  I have to mark some things on it prior to loading it onto my quilting frame for basting.  Because I have a small throat space on the machine on my frame, I will only baste it on the frame and then do the actual quilting on my regular sewing machine.

It may seem odd to some of you, but if you only have 5" of throat space on a frame and your quilting design is larger than 5" you end up constantly having to adjust your rollers and where the quilt is positioned.  I'd spend half my time just trying to move the quilt on the rollers and not mess up my stitching lines.  So the quilt gets basted on the frame and then detail work is done on the smaller machine where I can more easily continue my lines of stitching.


Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations

Superior Threads

I'm going to start out this post by saying that I am not receiving anything from Superior Threads for posting my opinions about their threads or their services.  This is not a paid advertisement or anything like that.  I just want to share my opinion about what a great company they have.

When I first started quilting, I wasn't very particular about my thread choices.  To be honest, I didn't think it mattered.  How wrong I was!  :-)

I started using Superior Threads after I had a minor thread meltdown with my Viking MegaQuilter.  I had picked up some thread with a nice sheen to it and I hadn't ever had a problem with it before (I'm purposely leaving out the name of the thread here).  However, the thread was 40% rayon and while my standard sewing machine (with a max stitch count of 900/minute) didn't have a problem with it, when I put it on the MegaQuilter (max stitch count of 1600/minute), the thread proceeded to just melt due to the friction of it moving through the machine.

It gummed up the bobbin area of my machine so badly that my bobbin was thrown off kilter and it was rotating 180-degrees from where it should be and snapping every needle that I put into the machine.

I guess it took a problem like that to learn my lesson. 

So I started using Superior Threads because I had heard a lot of great things about them and they had a HUGE selection of threads.  What a different thread really does make!

The better threads not only make my machines run smoother, but they also produce less lint and they feel great when you do hand-sewing with them, too.

I think one of the things I like the most about Superior Threads is their customer service.  I had ordered a few thread cards earlier this year and they were out of one card.  They kindly called me at home and let me know they were out of that one and asked if I wanted to substitute a different card or they could refund my money for the card.  I gave them the replacement card number and they shipped them out that day.  Even better....I received them the next day!

Their shipping is absolutely incredible.  I placed an order on Wednesday morning of this week and they shipped the order out on Wednesday afternoon.  It was shipped via priority mail (their cheapest option) and I'll probably receive the thread Friday.  You really can't beat ordering thread and receiving it within 2-3 days.

They are a great company and are actually considered a small business, so I'm all for supporting small businesses especially here in the US.  If you haven't checked out their threads yet, I highly recommend it!


Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations

  

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