Doctor Done

My Doctor who quilt is finally done.  I finished the binding last week and hung it up on Saturday.

Each block is hand embroidered, and each one took about a month to embroider.  I wasn't rushing to finish, I would do it while watching TV.  Then assembling, and completing it.  I quilted it in the ditch.  Took about two years from start to finish.

Working with wood

So I joined Milwaukee Makerspace.  It's a place where you can make things.  They have tools that are available to use once you get trained on them.  I decided I wanted to see what I could make out of the wood shop.

We have some plastic adirondacks in our backyard that stay out all the time.  They have been outside for a few years and the plastic is getting brittle.  They are cracking and pretty much falling apart, so I figure I might be able to make some nicer ones out of wood.  I asked if anyone had made one on the makerspace e-mail list, and I found someone who made one and even blogged about it.

I wanted to make two chairs, so I got enough wood for two.  I cut all the boards one evening.  It took me between two and three hours.  These were just rough cuts, all at 90 degrees.  I decided I'd cut the angles in the boards later when I assembled the chairs.

Sara took the kids went to Minnesota for Christmas, and I took the bus a few days later, so I had time to work on the chair all at once.  I didn't take any pictures of the work in progress, because I didn't think ahead.  But here's the final product, after about 5 hours of cutting angles and assembling, I have one complete chair, and one that needs a little work to complete.  All that's required now is paint!

Complete

Finally, Space invaders quilt is all done.  I quilted it and used a technique I learn from craftsy to use the back for the binding.  No hand sewing required. :)

I'll be a little while before my next pixel quilt.  I have a superhero applique "quilt" almost done, and a Doctor Who quilt that needs to be quilted. 

I might make a Fresh Beat Band Applique quilt next.  We'll see how I feel after I finish the stuff I'm working on.

Invaders... from Space!

I finally finished piecing my Space Invaders pixel quilt!

I waited until the instructions I made up were on Fandom in Stitches before I posted it to my blog.  So if you want to make your own, just follow the link all the instructions are there.

Just have to quilt it and viola, another quilt.  

Superheroes

So it's about time for a new craft.  Well, not really a totally new craft, but a new way of making a quilt.  My four year old daughter is watching Superhero cartoons on Netflix.  She really only likes the ones with the girls, so we're watching X-men (lots of girls) and we flip through episodes of Justice League until we find one where Wonder Woman is the "focus" of the episode.

Well.. I decided to make a Superhero logo quilt.  I decided on about a 7 inch long or wide logo.  Some logos are wider than they are long, so 7 inches wide and whatever height for scale.  So I picked up 2 yards of white fabric for the quilt top, which is 72 inches.    So, 72 inches... divided by 8 inches (7 inch logo, plus an inch between logos), that's 9 rows of logos, and 42 inches across divided by 8 is 5 logos.  So, 9 times 5 is.. FORTY FIVE?  I'm making a quilt with 45 logos?  What was I thinking?

So I made up a document of heros that have logos.  The first ones are easy, Wonder Woman, Superman, Batman... but near the end I'm scraping for logos.  Hit Girl, Greatest American Hero... So I wanted them dispersed through the quilt.  I used random.org to give me a random sequence of 1-45 and out them in a spreadsheet.  

I am using Gimp to draw all the logos, because I need the colors separate.  It's a slow go, but I'm making progress.  I'll explain later how I'm actually doing all the work (tracing and heat-n-bond light), but for right now, I completed the first logo, and it is Wonder Woman.  Center, top of the quilt.

Baby Trent

So I have a friend who is having her first baby. I wanted to make her something unique for her, not just a "standard" baby gift.

She likes very hard rock, so I thought maybe a band logo, and Nine Inch Nails seems like it could be simple to turn into a quilt block

So I googled for quilt patterns for Nine Inch Nails, and came up blank. The pattern looked pretty easy, so I looked into the quilt block creating software everyone seems to use. It's called Electric Quilt. However, it costs about $190.  Someday I'll probably get it, but not today. I thought about other options, like hiring someone to make the block, but then I found quilt assistant, which is free design software that can do paper piecing. 

After some stumbling around with the software, the first draft had 12 separate pieces to assemble.  But I figured out how to get all of them into one block.  Now I had my template and I was ready to pick fabric.

At first I was thinking about getting some babyish pattern fabrics, like little rattles or something, but when I was at the quilt store and looking at their sample quilts, I was afraid that NIN would get lost in the fabric pattern.  Instead I decided to go with the standard baby colors for both boys and girls, yellow and green, and I went with the most babyish fabric I could find.

It turned out kind of small, so I decided to make some type of border, but I wanted to stay with the theme, so we looked at three different fabric stores before we found a fabric that fit the theme.  CORN!

The logo was too small, and there was too much corn, so I wanted to cut it back a bit.  I was going to add more green and yellow, I even went to the store and got more, but once I cut it down, I liked the size it ended up, so I free motion quilted it, and finished it,  viola!  Here it is!

I think the baby is going to like it.

Jelly roll... and a challenge

This...

...is a jelly roll quilt top. It's a fairly straightforward build.  There are instructions on the web.  This one took me between three to five hours to assemble.  The most time consuming part was making sure there wasn't a "twist" in the long strips.

But now, the challenge.  After taking a craftsy class by Leah Day, I decided to try something different when quilting it. I'm going to try to free motion quilt each strip with a different pattern (found on web, in a book, or made up).  There are 32 strips, so 32 patterns.  Let's see if I can do it!