Blogger's Quilt Festival 2013 - Flag quilt

I'm entering this year's finished flag quilt in Amy's Blogger's Quilt Festival throw category. It could have gone in the scrappy category or maybe the group quilt one too, I suppose.

I've blogged about this quilt a few times. The first time I mentioned it, it was a six-year-old UFO. Four years later I finally finished it.

In 2003, at the AQS show in Nashville, my friends and I spotted a quilt hanging in the Opryland hotel hallway and decided to duplicate it. We bought the blue fabric at the show to use in each block for continuity. We planned to swap the 5-inch blocks each month using a variety of golds and reds from our stashes. We did swap for a few months, and then life got in the way.

I'd pull the project out from time to time and make some blocks. With the pieced stripes of the flag finishing at a half-inch, the block is a bit tricky to sew well. One reason the quilt languished. Eventually I got all the blocks done and added the sashing. Also half-inch finished strips with half-inch cornerstones.

Maggi Honeyman quilted the flags in a Baptist fan pattern on her long-arm machine, and I got the binding finished at the beginning of the year. Looking back this is the only non-baby quilt I've finished this year, but as we all know, good quilts take a lot of time!

Thank you, Amy, for hosting the festival again. You can check out all the categories and quilts here at Amy's Creative Side blog.

A decade in the making

Flag quilt, 56 x 77

I first blogged about this quilt four years ago when it was a six-year-old UFO! My flag quilt was quilted by Maggi Honeyman in a Baptist fan pattern on her longarm. I don't remember how the original was quilted, but this old quilting pattern seemed appropriate, like wind blowing the flags around.

Yes, those cornerstones are half-inch squares.

The binding was completed some time ago, but I kept forgetting to get a picture. After the binding is on, I consider the quilt done, but lately I've been feeling a bit guilty about not putting labels on my quilts. It's taken 10 years to get this far, what's a little more time to add the label? Does anyone have a good method for making labels?

Ooops! Missed September

I'll have to recap that month later. Lots of travel, not a lot of quilting.
I did finish the flag top. Ta da!


My version of the flag quilt.

Picture of the original old quilt.

Only eight years in the making. Of the top anyway. We'll see how long it takes to get it quilted as I seem to have quite a pile of those.

I'm quilting the star baby quilt now. Actually, that's done. Working on the binding. Used the star scraps from that to make this little number.

Twelve inches total with half-square triangles finishing at one inch. Not sure what I'll do with it. Pillow? Mini quilt? Add to the pile of similar bits?

No end in sight

Lots going on, but not much of it sewing related. I'm still plugging away at the flag blocks, sewing four flags together and then sashing with white strips and red cornerstones, which finish at a half inch.



Finished sections of the flag quilt are pinned to the design wall.

I'm determined not to pack up this project until I have the top together at least, but it's slow going and tough to be accurate with such narrow sashing. I don't want to sew too long a seam with that sashing so I'm sashing on two sides and will sew those groupings in sets like four-patches. Eventually, I'll have to sew a long seam, but I'm putting it off as long as I can.

I've been meaning to share the monthly email from the International Quilt Study Museum, but keep forgetting. Barbara Brackman mentioned it on her blog a long time ago, and I signed up. Every month a different quilt, and lots to see on their site too.

This month's is in memory of Ardis James who passed away early last month. According to the New York Times, she and her husband "established what is now the largest collection of quilts in the world". They began the Quilt Study Museum in 1997 with their donation of almost 1,000 quilts.

Here's the link to the August quilt:

http://www.quiltstudy.org/collections/quilt_of_the_month/

Off to sash some more flags while watching a George Clooney movie. I suspect I won't get all that much done tonight.

This might be a brief post

I'm having a bit of an issue with Blogger: Most of the display is missing. Took me 5 minutes to figure out that blank square was the New Post button. I looked all over for it! Now, I can only see the Add Image button if I resize my window so it's teeny tiny. We'll see how this goes. (Not well. Had to ditch Blogger in Draft to get any photos into this post.)



Isn't this the cutest fabric? Wendy Slotbloom for In the Beginning.

Lots of excuses for not blogging lately. Blogger is only one of them! Been very busy, but not on the sewing front. A weekend in Des Moines, a weekend shopping at Nordstrom's big sale with a visiting friend, a trip to Oshkosh, WI, for the annual fly-in (we drove), etc. Some pics of that once I breakdown and read the instructions for my new phone so I can get the photos into the computer without emailing them to myself. Usually, I just poke around and figure it out, but not having any luck this time.

Here's the layout. I'm trying to keep the plaid going all the same direction

even though it won't line up exactly. I'm just a little anal retentive.

Yesterday I decided to make a baby quilt for neighbors who had a little boy, but weren't able to bring him home because their house was one of the many in our village with sewage backup in their basements caused by one of the many storms hitting the Chicago area lately. We were lucky and no flooding this time.

This is the 5-inch flag block. Not as blurry in real life.

And I did make some progress on the flags. Only 22 more of these blocks to make, and then I can sash and cornerstone them.

I can't quite reach the top of the design wall with this one.

Happy Birthday, USA

They'll be no cake, but I'm hoping to get more of these flag blocks done today. Yesterday was mostly spent rummaging through the cupboard for different red, white, blue and gold fabric, cutting tiny pieces for the 5-inch blocks and ogling Bradley Cooper in the A-Team. Concentration should be better today thanks to a British mystery series. Phew! I only made one block last night before going to bed. It was easier handling those 1-inch strips than I remember. Guess my sewing has improved over the past eight years!

A happy belated Canada Day too!

What happened to/in July

Yikes! It's a week into August. How'd that happen?

Nothing to show for July? Really there was. Here's some of it.

July 4th inspired me to pull out my flag blocks (take pictures and then put them back in their UFO drawer). My friends Joni and Angie and I went to the AQS show in Nashville and saw this quilt hanging in a hallway of the Opryland Hotel.

We decided we could make 15 five-inch blocks every month, send five to each other and keep five and in less than a year we'd have enough different blocks to put together this wall hanging. We even bought blue star fabric at the show to unify the blocks. Well, it's been six years now, and this UFO isn't any closer to getting done. The blocks are simple, but those stripes finish at 1/2 inch, and so it takes some effort to get them nice. And only the best effort will do for your swap partners!

I made this tea wallet for a friend using this tutorial. Her favorite color is grey, and this daisy print said Heather to me. She really seemed to like it. She got us drinking tea at work every afternoon at 3, a tradition we're trying to maintain now that she has left us to marry a Dane and live in Copenhagen.

My friend Fran came to Chicago with her daughter, Maddie, for a day of shopping at Nordstrom's big July sale. I think they spent all their shopping money before lunch! They stopped by, left a pile of bags and went out again. I stayed at the office and worked. Boo.

We had dinner at Frontera before Maddie left for the airport and went back to Orlando. Rick Bayless' Mexican food is so good! One of the best dishes I've ever had was the ox tail at Frontera. This time, he had his winning tongue tacos from Top Chef Masters on the menu so we had to try them. They were good! Really. I doubt I'll be making them at home, but the recipe is on Bravo's site. (Love the recipe from this week's winner, which can be made in under four hours. Ha. Won't be making that for dinner.)

The next day we drove with hubby to Spring Green, Wisconsin, to see Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright's house. All three of us had read "Loving Frank" by Nancy Horan and were excited to see the house. If you haven't read the book, I recommend it. But don't look up anything about him, his mistress Mamah Cheney or the house before you do. It'll spoil the book.

Good thing I'd ordered house tour tickets ahead of time because our tour was full. Would have been awful to have driven three hours to see the house and then not be able to. But it was worth the six-hour round trip. The tour was really good. Wright was an amazing man. The guide explained how Wright was constantly changing the house, such as adding a study to his bedroom before it was photographed by a magazine, and adding a library so his friend Guggenheim would have a nice place to drink his coffee when he visited.

We couldn't take pictures of the inside, which is too bad. The amazing thing was all the plywood! A new building material at the time, and Wright seemed enamored. Now it seems odd. Also, no kitchen in sight!

Wright's grave is on the left of the big pine tree near the family chapel, although our guide told us his last wife's family dug him up and had his ashes scattered in Arizona. Mamah Cheney is buried under the pine.

On the way home we stopped at Culvers. We had to get some cheese curds for Fran this being her first trip to Wisconsin. They didn't have fresh, but the fried were good. We got some fresh at the farmer's market the next day before I took her to the airport, but they didn't squeak. Very disappointing. She probably thinks I lied about that.

Speaking of food, July was a good month for trying recipes and reading food blogs. This is one of my favorites. I've made her zucchini, pizza dough, pie crust and blueberry crumb bars. And, I found this amazing potato salad recipe. Amazing because I, who hate mayonnaise and pickles (and ketchup), actually like this (after cutting the mayo in half and still having way more dressing than potatoes). For those who know me, my eating mayo is one of the signs of the apocalypse.

Our neighbor gave us a big bowl of currants so I boiled them, strained them and added sugar to make a drink as he instructed. Wasn't sure what else to do with currants besides make jam.

And, in July, I started a new project! On the plus side, this got me motivated enough to get one of the Monkey Wrench tops done so I could use the design wall for the new project. I deleted the Monkey Wrench pix because as I was going through them I saw that I'd turned one unit around and sewed it in backwards. It was, of course, in the middle of the quilt necessitating a rather long session of "reverse sewing."

The finished top and the new project in the next post. Later this month. Promise.