A Seasonal Quilter

I've been thinking about this for the past week and I've decided that it's weird. *grin* I absolutely adore quilting. I love quilting. I love sewing fabric together, I love picking it out and cutting it up. I detest ironing (or pressing), but will spend however long it takes to get that new fabric pressed and ready to be put in my stash. I also love watching new color combinations come together to make a beautiful quilt. So, here comes the weird part.

I've decided that I'm a seasonal quilter. I prefer quilting during the fall and the winter. Oddly enough, in the spring and summer, I prefer knitting. Oh, on cooler days, I do drag out my quilting again and move a little further on whatever I was working on before the heat hit, but I usually just knit. I don't know. Maybe it's a female internal thing. One year during the summer, I knitted all of my children and the neighbor's children new scarves for the winter. Last year, I tackled slippers for the boys and myself. I haven't quite figured out how to do more 'difficult' things. I consider myself a "hobby knitter" and a "serious quilter." Therefore, all my 'snazzy' skills are in quilting, not knitting. *smile*

I will admit that my knitting and quilting will mix and match for awhile. I'll knit until I drop and then switch back to quilting for awhile. I'll quilt for a week or two and then switch back to knitting again. All I do know is that I love to keep my hands busy. If I'm just sitting there, whether it be at one of my sons' practices or watching TV, I hate the wasted time if my hands aren't busy. However, if I'm quilting (hand work usually) or knitting, then I feel like the time has been productive. That and it also helps keep me from biting my nails. *grin*

I prefer taking knitting with me outside. We can have the most horrendous winds around here, especially in the spring. Mind you, I don't think you can do anything in 30 mph winds, but even in the lighter breezes you can't really piece or applique very well. Yarn holds up much better to that than does thread.

So! What am I going to make this year during the summer? Well. I have discovered that I dislike sewing or quilting for sale. I don't like to sell my quilts or anything of that nature. However, I did just discover that I don't mind knitting for money. *grin* Just small stuff that I can finish easily. I probably don't mind the idea of selling my knitting because I have NO clue what to do with any of the small things I make. LOL It then leads to indecision because I don't know what I'm even going to make. Now, my acrylic yarn is going to make little squares for wounded soldier afghans. Yesterday, I just bought a lot of pure 100% cotton yarn (I adore cotton. Must be the quilter in me. *grin*) to create kitchen sets to sell at a craft sale closer to Christmas. I'm not sure how many I'll get made, but I'm hoping for a minimum of 3 sets. I know, I know. That doesn't seem like a whole lot. However, we are moving in late August to mid September. I'm just trying to keep my goals reasonable. Besides, each kitchen 'set' includes a dish towel and 2 dishcloths. All the extra cotton I have left over from creating the sets will then be used to make extra dishcloths.

With that, I'm going to head on out. Instead of knitting or quilting, I bought some little pots and seeds yesterday. The boys and I are going to go plant them soon and watch them grow. I just hope I can convince the boys to just look at them and not pick the little plants as they come up. *grin*

Have a great day!

Hand Piecing

There are still many quilters out there who hand piece. Many of us find it very relaxing and enjoyable. Others use it to get precise points and edges on blocks that would be very difficult to piece by machine. I sort of fall into both categories. I also hand piece for convenience, oddly enough. As a mother with 3 boys, time in the sewing room is a precious commodity. I sometimes don't even get to go in there for any amount of time for days. That can put a serious crimp in piecing quilts and quilting them.

Currently, my main sewing machine is set up for free motion quilting. That makes it difficult to switch easily from quilting to piecing mode. I also want to keep it set up until my current quilt being quilted is complete. It has 48 blocks in it, each needing extra quilting to hold the batting in place. It's slow going, but it's turning out beautiful.

Back to hand piecing. I currently have a total of 3 quilts and 1 block in hand piecing mode. I've never been too good at staying with a single quilt until it was finished. *smile* The current one I'm working on, and have been for several days now, is one that could actually be pieced by machine easily enough. So I guess that begs the question of, "why are you hand piecing it?" Well, it's simple really. When I started it, I was deep in 'hand piecing mode.' When I got sick and tired of one hand piecing project (it's still not finished), I started looking around for something else to work on. My son's quilt was finally all cut out and ready to start piecing. It was available and easy to grab when I went looking. It's an I-Spy quilt using the Hexagon Star pattern. I started thinking that it was never going to get done last night. So I sat down, counted out how many hexagons I still had to do, multiplied that by 2 because that's what the sewing machine instructions say to do, put 2 triangles on opposite sides before sewing them all together. In hand piecing, it works differently, but the counting idea works the same. *smile*

So, I sat counting out hexagons. I can't believe how many I cut out! My kids are going to get completely overwhelmed by this quilt. I still found it a lot of fun looking at the patterns I'd picked though. *smile* Okay... I have 80 hexagons left to sew in. See, a lot of them. Multiply that by 2 and you end up with 160. Wow. You know what? I don't have that many triangles ready to sew. I tend to only make a few at a time. It gets boring drawing them and cutting them out. Anyway!! That gives me 240 total pieces left for this top to be finished (we'll just ignore how the edge gets finished for now). I'm not sure how many are already in there because I didn't feel like counting those ones. LOL So, here's my goal. With 240 pieces left, if I did at least 3 pieces a day, then I should have a finished quilt top in 80 days.

You know. When I hand piece, I do it in a circular pattern. Take the hexagon. I started on one side, put on a triangle, then continued around the edge of the hexagon until all the triangles were in place. Then, I went around all the triangles putting in the next 'round' of hexagons. And so on and so forth. What this does is allow you to keep a longer sewing thread going. Less cutting and tying off. If I remember correctly, it also makes it stronger because the thread is spread out among more pieces so it takes the stress off of one single section.

Hmm... I guess I should count the triangles I have and then start making more of them. I'd hate to come to a screeching halt again just because I ran out of triangles! That's what happened to me last time. That was very annoying. Oh, the idea of holding up a finished quilt top in about 80 days that I actually hand pieced is an incredible idea!

Umm... I think I'll just ignore the fact that I don't know how to quilt it yet. I really don't relish the idea of hand quilting it even though it would be really weird machine quilting it after taking all that time to hand piece it. LOL Oh, well. It's my quilt, I can do what I want... So there!