First Charm Pack project completed

Hello, everyone.

As happens, a friend went into the hospital recently. And all that looking at mug rugs and baby things and table toppers combined with that to produce a simple project to give to her: a pitcher mat.

What's a pitcher mat? you ask. It's a cousin to the mug rug and the placemat and the trivet. It is to go under the little water pitcher they put at your bedside in the hospital--those little plastic pitchers sweat all over the table top--and keep a wet blob from forming on the surface.

It involves a quick-pieced heart that uses up parts of various charm pieces. The white fabric was from stash, the top parts of the heart are also from stash, and the bottom, dotted, pieces are from two charm squares. I added a tie ribbon to the opening before stitching it closed.

Steps:
1. Pick out your colors. I used three 5 inch squares of red prints and enough white 5 inch square to produce the hears, plus an 8.5 inch square of a background fabric and some Warm and Natural batting for the interior.
2. Use Quick piecing to make half square triangles in red and white. How to do quick piecing for the triangles. (This uses up all three of your red squares plus three white ones, and gives you some extra red and white half square triangles.) Press and trim the little "ears." Use a further white square to turn one of your half square triangles into a pair of squares with 1 red quarter square and the remainder of the square in white. (These are the top parts of your heart.) Press. Attach one top part to one bottom part of the heart for the left side, and the other top part to one bottom part for the right side. (Set aside your surplus half square units for later use.) Press. You should now have a tall left side and a tall right side, 4.5 inches by 8.5 inches. Square up your pieces, match the center of the dip of the heart and sew the center seam. Press and trim.

This is the general shape of the heart you're aiming for. You will need to trim the bottom squares to fit with the top ones, as the top ones have one more seam (with seam allowances) than the bottom ones.

At this point, you have some design decisions to make. Don't wait until after it's assembled to decide to embroider words, like I did, unless you like working without access to the back side! There is a big background area open above your heart. You can applique something simple there, avoiding a lump that will make the pitcher wobble, or you can embroider something, or you can leave it blank if the background is making a pleasant appearance. Driver's choice!

If you decide to embroider something, you want to use a flat stitch like chain or stem or similar. Mark your design (here, "Get Well Soon!") and baste the heart square to a piece of scrap muslin so you can hoop the piece and do your embroidery while the back side is accessible to you.You want to avoid big globby knots here and use tiny backstitches to secure the thread--the knots will make the pitcher wobble. After you embroider or applique your embellishment, you proceed to assembling the pitcher mat.

3. Place the heart square and the background square face to face and add the square of batting on one side. Using your walking foot, sew the edges except for your turning opening. Trim the corners so they will go inside without a blob.

4. Turn the square right side out. Gently poke the corners into shape.
5. Cut a piece of tying ribbon big enough to wrap around the rolled mat and tie a bow, fold it so one side is slightly longer than the other, and tuck the fold of the ribbon into the opening. (You want the ends of your bow to be approximately even, so you need to have one tail a little shorter, to account for the difference in ribbon taken up in the parts of the knot.) You may pause to baste here if you wish. to avoid playing with so many pins while assembling this last bit.
6. Close the opening, catching the ribbon in the seam. I used ladder stitch for this.
7. Quilt the outline of the heart and the edge of the square. If you didn't choose to do colored embellishment before, you might want to use quilting to embellish it now. I left the quilting very simple to avoid the risk of large rumples appearing.
8. Give to your recipient when you go visit!

Charm pack ideas

Hello, everyone.

I'm gong to 'fess up: I've never had a charm back before. And was running a little low on ideas, after having tried a number of different fabric combinations and realized that I needed to think about something different.

An idea or three, plus useful comments below.

More ideas.  Makes me think of aprons, too!

The latest playing with colors session:

I do have some 4" thick foam lying around the place, and a grandchild coming to visit at the holidays...maybe blocks are the way to go with some of it. (Would use up some stash, too!)

Auditioning fabrics

Hello, everyone.

I have noticed that a lot of people who quilt online seem to start with a particular fabric design and use its brandmates to make a quilt. They make a lot of lovely quits, table toppers, and so on by this method.

My method comes out of the scrappy-quilt universe. I pick a general theme: unisex baby, in the case of the mathematical tesselating quilt, and the general idea of the piecing and then start auditioning fabrics to join the project.

Fabric auditions for the mathematical quilt looked like this, in part:

I was in love with the peacock feathers and wanted something bright (to stimulate Baby's mind) and cheerful, that would work for either a boy or a girl.

I didn't use this boat design, but it was cute. The other color selection ended up in my Cafe Press shop on a couple of items.

Settled on tessellating design instead. The blue X marks are where the tessellation doesn't carry through. This stage was followed by several days of on-floor placement tests before the squares were labeled with their places in the grid and sewn together.

Quilt in use, some several months back.

Now I'm auditioning fabrics that will play well with the bright, cheerful Michael Miller Modern Basics charms I received. (Thanks, folks!)

These little blue birdies play nicely with the dots and houndstooths in blue. Possibly I could use plain black for the other color and call it victory. Or be brave, go for springlike colors and use pink and yellow.

The secondary colors play fairly well together, and then the only issue I find is visual compatibility in the pattern sizes. (Too much similarity in scale is tiring to look at IMHO.)

More playing in the secondary colors. The red is a quasi-solid. The purple is an actual solid.

Trying out a square design. I notice that making the small triangles for the top of the heart reduces the overall square size considerably. The red and white, though, go well with the small hearts pattern and the white on white fabric. Maybe I'll do the primary colors in hearts like this. The dots play better as the bottom of the heart than the houndstooth. Must consider more!

And that's where things are with finding the best use of the lovely charm squares. I am strongly leaning toward using dots and coordinates in the hearts and maybe doing something zigzag or pinwheelish with the houndstooths. The direction change on the heart on the right is a little bit dizzy making otherwise.

Braga, a brief side trip

Hello, everyone.

We caught a bus to Braga in the downtown square of Barcelos before the breakfast places in that city were even open. (It happens a lot on the Camino, that the pilgrim is ready to roll out and there is no coffee or other morning stuff available. We just rolled out anyway and had something when we found a place open. This day, we found breakfast in downtown Braga.)

When we got off the bus and started walking toward the tall buildings from the station, we heard drums and noticed that the streets were full of people in groups. About when we got to a coffee shop to eat, we discovered that the city's Marchas de Sao Joao was stepping off (9 am) and so we snapped a couple of pictures of the parade.

These were just two of the many marching units--two bands, of course, because bands are cool. There were also folk-costumed marchers and giant paper-mache puppets. The whole parade took about forty minutes or so to walk past the coffee shop.

 

One of the many magnificently-carved churches in the old city area.

The typical sandwich of the area. Francesina has a couple of layers of meat, a couple or three layers of bread slices, fried like  a French toast, gravy poured over, and this one had also a fried egg and an olive for garnish. French fried potatoes on the side. The Portuguese French Fries were uniformly good.

Wall of relics at the Bom Jesu shrine at the outer edge of Braga. This was in a different room than the giant, elaborate crucifux that is famous--both are in the Crucifixion shrine at the top of the very long staircase.

A segment of the long staircase of the Way of the Cross, showing the stone mosaic designs in the pavement.

View of the upper, allegorical staircase with its statues of prophets, kings, and virtues. The chapel of the shrine is at the top. This is a very "aerobic" sight to see!

Statue ready for procession in one of the churches in downtown Braga. They were doing up the flowers for the statues while we were there.

Vila do Conde

Hello, everyone.

Returning to our series of pilgrimage posts, the end of our day of walking on the boardwalk along the lovely beaches of northern Portugal ended at Vila Do Conde.

Vila do Conde is close to the beach, but not really spread out all along it. The place we stayed was on the plaza, which was decorated with symbols of different parishes. It turned out that this particular Sunday was the day of their Marchas de Sao Joao. DH got right out there to take a picture or two--yours truly was in the middle of washing dirty clothes.

Procession for St. John the Baptist in Vila do Conde on Sunday afternoon.

Ancient Monastery in Vila Do Conde area

DH views the Roman aqueduct ruins in Vila do Conde.

The weather that day was cooler than it had been, and it rained on us a little.

Y'all may remember comments about the great beauty of plants in Portuguese gardens. This flower escaped! It's a calla lily and it's growing out in the middle of trees.

Your humble blogger with the Barcelos chicken statue.

View of downtown Barcelos. Note another chicken on the building.

At Barcelos, at the Capuchin church of St. Anthony, we were blessed after Mass by the priest. This was the first pilgrims' blessing we received on this trip. One of the servers, a young man studying to become a Capuchin, spoke English. We were so grateful for their kindness and friendly welcome!

We stayed at Barcelos for two nights, as we planned on a little side trip here: a bus ride over to Braga.

Table Topper--Now I understand why they're so popular

Hello, everyone.

Being mostly at home and inside this past weekend, because of the rain quantities, a little quilting seemed to be the plan. The post at Spider Web Table Topper was interesting, but of course I thought I knew better how to go about things. So I was inspired but did my own thing. It was certainly challenging that way!

Instead of just cutting triangles out of a block of same-sized strips and assembling the whole, I started with a hexie and added wedges. And got all full of myself and used different-width strips to boot!  It was a learning experience, but it came out okay in the end. The colors are fall-seasonal, of course.

I didn't realize, while picking out fabrics, that the large-print you see at the outside edge of three wedges was going to insist on being the star of the show. The red binding is probably what tied it all together in the end, since there is a little red in the hexie as well as in the other Look At Me print. Quilting was a simple spiral in purple thread, which also helps to tie it together colorwise. (There's a purple ribbon all over in that one print.)

And I understand why people like making table toppers now: they go together fast and allow you to test out ideas and color combinations without doing a huge project that takes over the house and your life. It also allowed me to use up some more stash!

Downwind from the storm

Hello, everyone.

Yesterday we were in the large area that fell downwind from the famous hurricane Patricia.

The waterline in the rain gauge is around 3 inches. Well, that was where it was somewhat later when I tiptoed through the puddles to check it.

This morning we found that the lemon tree had bowed a limb onto the walkway and we had to walk around the whole line of citrus to get to the driveway. After church, DH got out the tree saw and cut it away.

In a little while I will post pictures of the fabric auditions for the Michael Miller Modern Basics charm squares. There are a few fabrics in the stash, besides solid black, that will go with them. Though the squares don't go well enough together to be in the same quilt I don't think--the very geometric color-plus-white means they need other friends alongside. Otherwise the design would get too busy.

Right now I have the primary colors plus Christmas Green in one pile and the other secondary colors in another pile. (Turquoise, violet, orange and a yellowish gold.) But that waits for me to do final choices on fabrics, and also to make decisions: mug rug sets? Baby quilt on spec? Table runner?  Leaning toward baby quilt on spec right now--it gets a lot more fabric out of the stash--but we'll see. Mug rug sets could be good, too--a four piece set in a colorway, say, with a spring theme if it can be carried off, would be good gifts.