Some Hot Sewing

July 26, 2019 See Kim Sew1 Comment

Well, we’re into our fourth day of temperatures in the low to upper 90’s here in Germany. (That’s the upper 30’s if you’re into Celsius temps.) Which ever way you measure it – it’s hot! My husband is in Africa this week and tells me it’s a little cooler there. That’s just not right!

Since we don’t have air conditioning, I am trying to move VERY slowly. That’s why this new sewing project is really perfect.

I saw this quilt online and fell in love with the colors and fabrics.

It’s called “Beauteous” and features the Indie Folk fabric collection by Pat Bravo. The pattern was a free download online but it came out in 2015 (I’m a little behind). It was a little hard to track down all the fabrics since they’ve been out a while but I did. I found them all at Hawthorne Supply Company online and they shipped them to me super fast.

These fabrics are Beauteous! They say they’re 100% premium cotton on the selvage and “Feel the difference” and I will say they have a silky feel to them and a little stiffness. Really different.

After I printed out the pattern, it took me a little bit to figure out that I needed to tape all the pages together for the pattern pieces.

After cutting out the pattern pieces, I dove right in.

These blocks are basically ALL curves. I haven’t done any of the paper pieced blocks and not sure how that’s going to work. There are 15 of those blocks and this pattern spans 2 printed pages. I don’t know if I want to make all those copies. I’m saving those for last so I can cut out all the other block pieces first.

For sewing all the curves, this means lots of pinning and slow sewing. With the heat, I just aim a fan at myself and take the time to do all that pinning.

The pattern says that this quilt will measure 72″ X 72″ but I don’t think that’s correct. The finished measurements of the blocks are 10″ and there are 7 rows of 6 blocks each so I think it should end up being more like 60 1/2″ X 70 1/2″. I’m no mathematician though. I was thinking about adding a couple borders to make it a little bigger and I need to decide which of the fabrics I really like and order more of it for a border. That’s a tough decision to make.

Anyway, back to eating Popsicles and pinning curves.

1930’s Farmer’s Wife Quilt finished!

July 22, 2019July 22, 2019 See Kim Sew6 Comments

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I put all my finished blocks into the layout I wanted. Then I moved things around until I thought everything looked the best.

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These setting triangles required some math ( that didn’t quite work out because I added the sashing dimensions to each block). They ended up larger than I needed and so it was easy to just cut a little off.

Then it was just the tedious task of sewing the rows all together.

You can see I laid out my border fabrics to see how all the different colors would look together.

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I had this sweet lavender fabric that I originally wanted to use for my smaller border but after laying everything out, I realized there was a lot of yellow in the quilt and a different yellow fabric seemed to pull the whole thing together.

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The quilt came out looking very feminine and summer-y with all the pastels. It now measures at 72 inches x 91 inches.

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It was so much fun to make but now I have to decide if I’ll hand quilt it or have it machine quilted.

84 Blocks

July 10, 2019 See Kim Sew3 Comments

The day has finally come when I’ve finished all the blocks that I need to make my Farmer’s Wife 1930’s Sampler quilt!

I had decided (probably last year) that I wasn’t going to make my 1930’s Farmer’s Wife quilt like the one in the book. I just hate when patterns call for you to cut blocks in half. I mean, you made the whole block – you want to see the whole block! That’s just my opinion.

So the quilt layout in the book called for making all 99 blocks included in the book. My layout plan calls for making 83 blocks. I plan to set them on point with sashing and setting triangles, a lot like the original Farmer’s Wife quilt.

I was more than ready to finish making these blocks since I started with the easiest and they were getting really hard by the end. You might have noticed that I said I needed 83 blocks but I made 84. Yes, one came out very badly so I don’t think I can use it. After that block, I thought I would paper piece the last few but the paper pieced patterns were completely messed up. I went on Laurie Hird’s website and found 19 pages of corrections for the book which explained my problems. I went back to using templates after that.

Using the templates was slow going but it worked.

These are some of the last few blocks I made and you can see they’re very intricate.

Today I’m cutting out white sashing pieces and hope to start laying everything out. I can’t decide if I should make my sashing cornerstones all one color or a scrappy variety of these 1930’s prints that I’ve used. I have a 1930’s green for my setting triangles.

I think I’ll just have to lay everything out and see how it looks.

I’m so happy to finally be able to put this quilt together!