Happy New Quilt Year - 2023

 It is that time again when we can refresh our UFO lists (I've done mine on another tab of this website), and get inspired to spend more quality time indoors working on our projects.

I was fortunate to spend New Year's Eve with some fellow guild members and did a 12-hour Virtual Sew Day!  What a wonderful way to spend the day!  I've been busy working on my Bonnie Hunter Chilhowie mystery, and finishing off a Quilt of Valour project that will be going to a veteran at the end of this week!

How about you?  Is your New Year off to a good start?  Are you considering doing the Declutter challenge by Karen Brown of "Just Get It Done quilts" or are you like me and still in the depths of the annual Bonnie Hunter mystery?  Even if you don't mark the new year in a special "quilty" way, I hope you'll join me along the journey as this year I plan on blogging more than in past years and sharing my experience and journey with all of you.

Of course I need a new project!

 It's the most wonderful time of the year - Bonnie Hunter's Annual Mystery.  This year's mystery, Chilhowie, will be another epic project and while I certainly don't NEED, a new project, this is a project just for me that I wanted to undertake.

Unfortunately for me, Bonnie wanted to use orange as her primary colour, with this photo being one of the sources of her inspiration.  These irises are beautiful, but there was something about orange being a dominant colour.  If you want to see her introduction to Chilhowie, you can find it here:  Bonnie Hunter's Quiltville - Chilhowie Mystery

My Bonnie Hunter mystery started last year and utilized the colour orange and my local guild mystery quilt also contained orange.  I wanted something OTHER than orange as my dominant colour!

I took the advice of a great friend to look in my local quilt shop (If I must, oh darn) for a multicoloured fabric that I found inspiring and draw my colours from that.

I found this fabric line from Northcott - Modern Love by Deborah Edwards.  It was carma!  Deborah had come to speak at our guild last season.

No ORANGE!  There was something positive and beautiful that spoke to me.  I then went to my new favourite fabric line, also by Northcott - Chroma.  You can see the full line here:  Northcott Chroma

All of my colours came from this line and were drawn from the inspiration fabric:

Each week I'll get the fun of working with these beautiful fabrics!  I can't wait.

Quilt Guild Inspiration

This week I had the pleasure of attending not one, but two, quilt guild meetings.  

The first group had Kellie of Silly Moon Quilting Co.  If you have not seen the Silly Moon quilting rulers, you are missing out on a wonderful set of tools.  I personally own two of her rules already and after her presentation, I'll be looking for more.

Anyone who has a ruler named "Turkey", is good in my books (and yes, I own a Turkey ruler of my own)

The second group had Joen Wolfrom as their guest speaker.  That name didn't ring a bell for me until I realized this is the lady who created the Ultimate 3-in-1 Color Tool.  I've had her Color Tool on my wish list for a couple of years now and it was fascinating to hear her speak.

Her talk was both beautiful and inspiring.  My whole understanding of colour shifted slightly as I grew up with the red-yellow-blue primary colour set, but she helped me understand I should be using Yellow-Cyan-Magenta.  It is a subtle shift but it changes everything.

Quilt guilds are a great source of inspiration and I encourage you to consider getting involved in one or more, like me!

Franken-backing

Have you ever finished creating the top of your quilt, only to realize you don't have enough fabric for a single backing piece?  That's the time to embrace the inner Franken-backing creator inside of you.

The civilized term for a Franken-backing is a Pieced Backing.  It is an accidental opportunity to create a secondary work of art.  I lay out my scraps and look at them like a jigsaw puzzle.  How do I combine these to make enough fabric to equal the size of backing I need?

It takes a bit of time, but once you put the jigsaw together, you end up with a thrifty work of likely modern art!  What a great way to use leftover fabric and have a one-of-a-kind backing for your quilt.

Now I'm off to load the long-arm!

Perfect is the enemy of Good

 The saying "Perfect is the enemy of Good" is something that comes into play with my quilting.  

I took a moment to look up the origin of that saying, which is attributed to Voltaire.  I've also found references like, Robert Watson-Watt talking about a "cult of the imperfect", in which he stated, "Give them the third best to go on with; the second best comes too late, the best never comes".  Even Shakespeare had a thought on this, with King Lear's Duke of Albany, warns of "striving to better, oft we mar what's well" and in Sonnet 103:

Were it not sinful then, striving to mend,

To mar the subject that before was well?

This weekend, I was in a virtual Sew-Day with the Quilt Guild I am a member of and I realized I was sitting there agonizing over a border for a mystery quilt that did not have perfect points.  Should I rip it all apart?  Would I be any better off if I did?  How much time would that consume?  I decided to ask for a little perspective from my quilting family.  

It was they who said that unless I was seeking a competition-level quilt, leave the borders and send the quilt on its way to be quilted.  Take the lessons I learned from piecing it together and recall the memories of working through the clues and change it from an object of frustration to a piece of imperfect art that someone in my life would thoroughly appreciate.

What do you think? PS - this was also my triad colour quilt - Green, Orange and Purple.  Using a triad is supposed to allow the quilt to look extra vibrant. 

I give this one piece of advice freely - if in doubt, seek a second opinion from your quilting family!

Just keep quilting, just keep quilting

Do you ever find life so busy that you actually have dust accumulating on your quilting projects?  Sadly, that is the state I am in.  I work full-time and I volunteer for multiple organizations and I found myself lacking the time to do the thing that always makes me feel in tune with my creative self.

So, starting today, I'm planning on a few things to help me prioritize my quilting time.  One of those is my 20 minutes per blog post.  This blog is something that has suffered from lack of attention too.  No quilting = no content to write about.  

I have found that my Blogger app is great to use on my phone.  It is easy to snap a picture of what I'm going to be working on and add it right in.  

That's one of the ways to build habits that add value to your life.  Take something you struggle to do and allow a few minutes to focus in on it, in this case, today's blog post.  Reward yourself with something you love to do, in my situation that would be time with my quilting projects.  Finally, add a time limit to the whole thing so it doesn't overwhelm you.  I'm shooting for 30 minutes.  If after 30 minutes I'm having fun and nothing else is pressing, then keep on quilting.  At least this way, if all you do is 30 minutes, that starts to build forward momentum.  I don't want to look back at the end of a week and say I just let dust accumulate on my quilting projects.  With multiple 30 minutes blocks, there is no doubt great progress will be made.

So what will I spend the rest of my 30 minutes today on?  A dancing date with my longarm, trying to practice my feathers.  

How about you?  How do you find time and motivation for your quilting?

Feather Frenzy

I, like a sizeable portion of quilters, have admired Angela Walter's work and thought "one day", in regards to participating in one of her Free Motion Challenges.  If you are someone who has not heard about this, Angela periodically organizes a multi-week event (approximately 8 week period) where she challenges quilters to learn and practice their quilting skills.  She produces a series of YouTube videos with a weekly "how-to" demo video and a weekly live chat check-in.  There is no cost to participate and I am grateful to her for sharing her knowledge and experience so openly.

She does produce an optional fabric and coordinating thread collection, if you want to practice on a whole cloth piece that she has designed for the purpose of the challenge.  This time, I saved up, and I got the panel, matching borders and thread collection.  This time was the "Fabulous Feathers" challenge and feathers terrified me up until now.  Think of this as a new school sampler.  It is something, when finished, that will serve both as a beautiful wall hanging and reference for quilting skills in the future.

Add in the new-to-me long arm and we had quite the challenge ahead.

It has taken me longer than I hoped, buy I'm on week 6 and doing corner feathers.  My feathers sometimes look a toddler with mittens trying to work an etch-a-sketch, but it is slowly improving.  Here's the latest portion of tonight's efforts:

So now, I sit and say, can I do better?  Do I want a Mulligan, a do-over?  Stay tuned to find out if I carry on, or embrace that many times used tool, the almighty seam ripper!  Here's a hint (thanks to the Quilting Marine): it's only fabric and it's only thread!

What about you?  Do you offer want a do-over?