About last year at this time, I got the news that my book project was a go.

Yes.

I wrote a book!

It's still kind of hard to believe, even after having done all the work, but I did it. I wrote a book.

QuiltEssential is not a book of projects, but rather a reference guide for all aspects of quilting. It's my sincere hope that it will inspire quilters to start bringing their own designs to reality. It is chock full of different subjects like choosing a color palette, how to calculate fabric requirements, a look at various forms of quilting and instructions for different piecing and assembly methods. And that list is just a start! There is so much more including profiles on nine amazing quilters which will hopefully inspire you further.

To say I am excited is an understatement. I'm not sure I can put in words how wonderfully rewarding this experience was for me. Throughout the process, I enjoyed having a concrete project to work on that stretched my brain in the best ways. I did miss making things and blogging about them, but I hope that you now understand why much of the last year was radio silence on the blog. Thank you for sticking with me even when there wasn't much to see.

QuiltEssential will be published in September by Stash Books in North America, Bloomsbury in the UK and Sally Milner in Australia. You can pre-order on Amazon. The book looks different there - this cover is the final one and although the author info says that I write for Sew Mama Sew, I don't.  I will have some books available for pre-sale in my shop as well. More on that soon!

 

Also important to note: When I link to products on Amazon, like my book and the items in the sidebar, I am paid a small referral fee in the form of an Amazon store credit. I use this credit to finance the purchase of even more craft books and some supplies. Just so you know.

I finished a quilt this week.

I love that feeling.

This Crazy Star quilt is from Denyse Schmidt's book, Modern Quilts, Traditional Inspirations. I started it last July and have worked on it off and on since then. The foundation string piecing of the star was very fun and pretty fast and the rest of it came together easily, once I finally got around to cutting the background and sewing it together.

The color story here was dictated by this bundle of scraps I bought last summer at PurlSoho. I hemmed and hawed about whether or not to buy the scrap pack (I have enough scraps of my own!) and finally went for it. I added a few other blue, black and white prints from my stash and bought a couple additional ones as well. I sliced them all up into strings, put them in a bag and pulled them out blindly, only substituting when I had two of the same next to each other. I love how it came together.

I chose to use Kona Snow for the background of the star. No big surprise here - this is my favorite "white". And for the back of the quilt, I decided to use Essex yarn dyed linen in denim. Let me tell you, this stuff is dreamy. It's a little heavier and toothier than quilting cotton with a beautiful hand and texture. It (or something similar) was in the scrap pack so it was the perfect choice. And the binding? As I was piecing the quilt, I imagined that the binding would be pink. The little bit of pink ric rac that came with the scraps popped against the blues and blacks and I thought the quilt needed the same thing. Plus, it's smile-inducing.

The quilting pattern is the loop to loop that I have done on my last couple of quilts. I'm starting to have good muscle memory with this one - each time it gets easier and easier to get smooth loops. It's pretty easy to do, also. (I'd be happy to do a tutorial on how it's done if there is interest - let me know in the comments). The quilting is fairly dense. Combined with the foundation piecing and the cotton/linen backing fabric, this quilt is good and heavy. I'm not sure that it will get much use over the summer, but come fall, it'll be in heavy rotation.

I'm happy to have this finished before we begin work on the sewing studio/play room in ten days. All of my fabrics and supplies plus the girls' toys, games and a queen sized bed and four tables need to come out of the third floor of our house so the carpet can get ripped out and we can paint the floors (and most likely the walls and woodwork, too). Exciting, but the prospect of moving all that stuff is simultaneously terrifying. Wish me luck!

I finished sewing the last bit of binding on the Free Play quilt last Tuesday.

I love this quilt.

In the end, I went with a loopy quilting pattern. I marked a grid on the quilt top with a water soluable pen and used that as a guideline when I free motion quilted it. For the backing, I stuck with solid Kona Snow, which I also used for the binding. There is just something about all that white, negative space that makes the improvisational patchwork piecing sing.

This quilt was intended as a gift for Emily all along. I knew that I had a short window of time to make it for her before her birthday and I could not settle on what I wanted to do. As an incentive to get sewing, I decided that playing with fabric for an hour a day would get me going and I am so happy I went with that approach. The free play allowed me to jump in and make without over thinking. I felt extremely invigorated and creative while I worked on this. It was only after the majority of the blocks were pieced, that I started to make deliberate, calculated decisions on how it would all come together. And at that point in the process, I could see what the framework and composition of this quilt needed to be. As a bonus, being creative while quilting opened me up creatively and spilled over into my painting class. I was able to finish a painting that had me stumped before. Seeing that translation of playing was really cool.

My intent was to frame this quilt with patchwork borders full of various white and off white prints. As soon as I had pieced the first border, I knew it wasn't right. Actually, I knew while I was piecing the border. My gut told me it wasn't going to work.

Kona Snow for the win!

This solid is my go-to. I have never, ever regretted ordering it 15 to 20 yards at a time because I always have it on hand and it is such a good blending white, working well with prints and solids alike.

I got it all basted and started quilting on Sunday night. I did not like my first try at the quilting so I ripped it out. Yesterday, I was able to get half of it quilted and plan on finishing that today. Back here when it is finished!

 

I didn't get to log any free play yesterday - Wednesdays as a rule are super busy. But, I did sneak upstairs to the design wall for about fifteen or twenty minutes after dinner and arranged the blocks until I was satisfied with how they looked. I envision this quilt as asquare so I left blank spaces where I thought something else was needed.

This morning, still satisfied with my arrangement from last night, I separated the blocks into groups for sewing. I find it much easier to sew small groups of blocks together to make bigger blocks and then join the bigger blocks into a quilt top. This way, there are no inset seams and it is easy to stop and start without getting things too messed up. I should also note that I still would have photographed each step for a visual reference even if I hadn't planned on blogging it.

I started in the top left corner and took the first set of blocks downstairs to sew. The photo above shows the process after I sewed the first two groups into bigger blocks. Unlike when I originally pieced the smaller blocks, I was very deliberate about how I added fabrics so it would be a pleasing composition overall. The first two photos came in handy here - I could look at them and see what fabrics would be next to each other and if there was too much or too little of a certain value or color.

This is what I had before I sewed it all together. I took a good long look and threw some different fabrics in the white spaces to see what worked and what didn't. It was a happy accident that I needed to add some longer, narrow pieces to make all the blocks fit together - I thought the compostition lacked those shapes.

And here it is! The final size is 33.5 x 35.5 which is just about perfect as I wanted it to be about 36" square. I plan on adding some borders to it to make it about a 60" square throw quilt. I've already pulled the fabrics for the borders and will probably start on those Saturday. Fridays are also normally crazy. I plan on improvisationally piecing the borders as well, but will use much larger pieces of fabric to balance all the little pieces in the main patchwork.

I need to emphasize that so far this has been a very worthwhile and freeing exercise for me. And fun! So much fun.

Here are the blocks I made during my hour of free play yesterday. I decided to add some gray, but skipped the low volume and whites mostly because I think I have a plan on how I am going to make this project into a quilt.

And this is what I have after three days. I like what's happening for the most part, especially because it is so much fun.

The composition will most likely change and I think I won't be adding many more blocks to the group, but instead spending my next hour of free play (most likely tomorrow) figuring out how to put them all together.

These six blocks are what I had after one hour of improvisational sewing yesterday. I continued to pull fabrics from the bags, but went a little bigger than my first round of blocks. I also did some slicing of strips that I had already pieced and then sewed them back together in a different way. I like the feel of that.

And here they are mixed with Sunday's blocks. I don't think they will stay in this arrangement - there are a couple of hot spots making me crazy. But I mostly like what I see and I think I have an inkling of where this whole project is headed. That said, I'm leaving the blocks up on the design wall outside my studio while I sew downstairs today. I want to make sure that what I see here does not influence how or what I sew today.

I also think I may throw some white or a low volume print (or two) in the mix, as well as some gray. I think it needs some spaces where the eyes can rest.

We returned home from a spring break of skiing in Telluride. It was so nice to get away from winter, even if it is still winter in the mountains. Colorado's winter is different than what we have here. They have sunny skies and temperatures in the forties feel very balmy. And people, sun makes all the difference.

We skied seven days in a row! (Yes, my legs still hurt.) And along with the fun of skiing comes a chunk of time every day on chair lifts. I have always enjoyed this part of the sport, too - it is a forced rest and a great opportunity for conversation. Fatty and I spent a few rides up strategizing on how to make my workspace more efficient and usable. I have found that I have outgrown my little studio. There is very little room to work in that space (it was once a walk-in closet) and I have been doing the bulk of any sewing and quilting down two flights of stairs in our family room. It's not convenient to leave my messes spread out (although I still do from time to time) or to have to go back up and down the stairs to get small tools, pieces of fabric, etc. I know I am not sewing as much as I'd like because my space is not working for me. Fatty gets that, too, and I'm excited about the plans we hatched to make a bigger, better working space for me.

All of that talk got me thinking about what has been holding me back creatively beyond the optimal space to create. I have determined that much of what I have sewn in the last year or so has been about the finished product and not a bit about process. And I am OK with that. I have made some lovely things and they have all been enjoyable to create. But, I miss cutting up fabric with no goal in mind. I also miss starting a project when the desire strikes and not worrying about my long lists of other things I should be doing instead of sewing. I've also thought about the connection between my creativity and my comfort and happiness in my own skin. When I'm down for whatever reason, it is hard to make myself branch out and try something new, or, heck, even create something I've made dozens of times. Sometimes, though, it is the deliberate act of making and creating that will lift me up and make me shine. It's time to do something about that.

Still with me?

This is a very roundabout and circuitous way of saying that I know I could benefit from some free play. Just like kids who sit on the floor and build all that their mind can imagine with legos or play dolls for hours on end, I need to let go and play with fabric. With that in mind, and ignoring the last few loads of laundry from our trip, I pulled a stack of fabrics yesterday afternoon (the prints are all Field Study by Anna Maria Horner and the solids are from my stash).

And then I cut them up into various and random pieces, sorting them by size: small, medium and large.

I put each pile of fabrics in a separate bag (just like we did when I went to Denyse Schmidt's workshop) and gave myself one hour to sew. I figured that an hour of playing would be enough to feel like I was making without investing a huge chunk of time.

Pulling mostly out of the small and medium bags, this is what I had at the end of the sixty minutes.

You know what? It felt great! I remembered that I like to play! I got in a groove, I let my mind wander and just had fun. And now I want more. So, although I'm not sure where this will take me, there will be an hour of free play today, Tuesday and Thursday. If I can squeeze it in on Wednesday and Friday, then that will be bonus.

Just one hour, for four (or more days) of free play. I'll be posting the progress each day. If you feel like joining me, please do. I'd love the company.