This month’s project focus was to make gifts for my parents, who turn 80 this year. Originally I planned to make one art quilt as a gift for both, but then I discovered a UFO that I had started for my dad about 15 years ago. He got something else for a gift that year, as I only managed to get half the top put together before my lack of improvisational experience caught up with me and I couldn’t figure out how to put the rest together without more flying geese units, and I had no more fabric for them.

By the time I pulled it out again I had forgotten whatever rules I was following at the time, and, with some cutting apart of segments and rearranging, I pulled a top together. I had just enough WoW for assembly and not enough to flesh out all the corners to 90degrees. But improv quilts don’t have to be square, so I called it good and sewed on a light blue inner border, using that to fill out the corners first. It still needs one more border. I hope my stash holds something that will work.

For my mom, I decided to make her a table runner (small projects finish quicker) from the fabrics we made her some napkins with, last Fall. That’s my NewFO for this month, and here’s some of the pieces.

This is not the planned design, just the focus blocks and some of the fabric strips I’m working with. I had in mind a colorwash style background but I don’t think these fabrics will give me the desired effect. I’ll save that idea for some other project. I’m not sure exactly what I will do, something with strips because I have a bunch all cut, but not log cabin.

Back in Part 2 I explained the initial creation of this top. I ended that post unhappy with the borders, but unsure how to deal with them. Last week I pulled the top out, put it back on the design wall, and cogitated for awhile. Trim the borders down to 2 inches? Maybe that would do. So I trimmed the top and right side to 2 inches, and cut the bottom up into the bottom row of blocks for a new 2 inch “border.”
Better, but not enough.

After more cogitation, and a bit of wine, I decided to rip the borders off completely. I left the bottom alone, and ripped the sides and top off. Okay, the birds stand out a little bit better now.  But it still needs something. Do I chop the whole thing up, add something to each block, and re-piece? Or would some simple strips to indicate branches do the job?

I was feeling lazy, and chopping the whole thing back into blocks sounded like too much work, so I grabbed some brown strips and laid them across the quilt here and there and stood back to see how it looked. Yeah, not bad. That will do, I think.

Somewhere between there and actually looking for fabric I thought, “the red and whites I used both have black prints, I ought to use black for the branches.” And I dug out about 5 choices, of which I chose one, black with a small green and red floral print on it.

Step one was to cut the top into basic sections, then I added branches one section at a time. I nearly ran out of the chosen black, had to piece some of the strips. The very last short strip ended up pieced from three scraps.

I cut the strips 1 1/4 inches. Any narrower gets hard to sew on, and wider would have created more distortion as they were inserted. I had to do a little trimming to put everything back together, but it’s an improv piece, so who cares? As long as I didn’t lose any birds I was happy.

And I added a few leaves, just to throw a little more color in, here and there. After slicing, I picked corners and replaced them with green before sewing the branches in place. That little bit of color livens it up, but I guess I can’t call it a red and white quilt any more.

Here’s the final top. The birds show up much better and the whole piece has more character.

I guess in the end I cut it up anyway, didn’t I? But this was more an “add sashing” exercise than redo each block. I could have done something like this with bias-type strips appliqued on top, but I felt like piecing it. I don’t know whether it was any faster this way, probably not.

I started this quilt for Project Quilting’s Across the Universe challenge. As many of my ideas do, the project grew as I worked and I was unable to finish it in one week. It didn’t help that I waited until Tuesday to start, then Thursday we took a day trip, and Friday I spent the morning running errands. Saturday I looked at a project that was going to take all day to quilt, then need a bit of applique, plus finish the edge, try to get photos in the dark, edit photos, write a blogpost, and get everything posted by 10am on Sunday. Since I am also trying to minimize the stress in my life and get plenty of sleep, I called it quits (for now) on this project and moved on.

Here’s this quilt’s story so far:
When I first saw the challenge I thought “ah ha, I’ll whip up a patchwork banner for my blog” — after all, the name is a contraction of Quilt Universe, so a banner to go across the top of my page would suit the challenge. But before I even came up with a plan I found a few lines of the Beatles song “Across the Universe” running through my head. “Pools of sorrow, waves of joy, on and on, across the universe.” Eventually it occurred to me to look up the lyrics, and sure enough, I’d remembered it wrong. I had the lines out of order. I debated for about 5 seconds whether to adjust my quilt plan, but I’d already cut fabric, so I said F-k it, this quilt is inspired by MY version of the song. Hence its title – Remix.

When thinking about how to portray pools of sorrow and waves of joy going on and on across the universe, I realized I’d better use fabric choice to portray the pools, waves, and universe. The universe part was easy to find, then after considering several other possibilities I found the fish-lips fabric for pools of joy. The waves of joy were more difficult. I found the perfect fabric but had already layered and quilted part of it. I finally found another choice, although I would have picked something more colorful if I’d had it.

NOW it occurs to me I could have finished quilting that perfect FQ, then appliqued the other rays over the top, bound it and been done. Why do I always try to do things the hard way?

To portray going “on and on” I realized I needed a vanishing-point. Okay, that means wedge shapes with points in the center. (In hindsight, the point part could have been off the side of the quilt somewhere.) Without much further thought, I layered my three fabrics and cut random wedges. Later I wished I had made them wider – it would have saved several steps in the sewing process. Not to mention a little less fabric pile-up in the seams.

I didn’t stop to think about overall size either. My sorrow and joy fabrics were about 18 inches wide, so I made the wedges 18 inches long. Easy to cut. Not so easy to sew, because it turned out I needed a lot of wedges. I even had a Plan B in case I ran short of wedges (having cut up all my joy and sorrow fabric) but didn’t need it. In fact, I have some wedges left over.

I decided after sewing two wedges together that I needed to trim them a little bit if I was going to have points in the middle instead of a hole with ragged edges. I should have cut the original wedges with a narrow end a bit less than half an inch, but my carefree cutting style wasn’t that careful. So I trimmed them and then sewed the double units together to make 4-wedge units, then those into 8-wedge units. By then I already had a seam pile-up problem, but what was there to do but soldier on? After some careful trimming, that is.

At that point I laid them out on my big table to see if I had enough to make a circle. Yup – and then some. I trimmed a little bit here and there, being careful not to trim too much. I also made sure the future seams did not have the same fabric on both sides. Then I sewed the 8s together into four quarter-circle segments.

By then there was some serious steam ironing going on, and some trimming of excess fabric on the backs of the points, but it still built up. I trimmed each section to just over 90degrees, using my biggest square ruler. Then sewed two quarter sections together so I had two halves.

Now I made sure each half had a straight line for the last seam. Here’s where I screwed up a hair – I trimmed the center too close. I don’t know if you can see it but there is a bit of “horizon line” in the very center.

The center also has a dense lump of many layers of fabric. I’m surprised my sewing machine even stitched through it all. And it would have looked better to have the points end a hair shy of the very center than get cut off by a hair. Did I mention I ironed all the seams open? I find that usually works well when you have many points coming together in the middle. But it isn’t enough to deal with however many seams this thing has in the middle! After that last seam I couldn’t open the center at all, steam or no steam.

I did get this portion spray-basted to batting with a layer of interfacing behind it. Next up is add the background around it. After quilting I will add a ring around the rays to cover the raw edges, and it still needs a backing. That was too much to face on Saturday. Now I’m working on a few other projects that I want to finish before the end of the month.