Dave's Homespun Plus Rag Quilt

The back of the quilt

The raggedy front

       I have been fascinated by the various "plus" quilts I have  seen on quilt blogs.   I was planning to use up some left-over homespun plaids and checks to make a quilt for my son.  That pattern seemed perfect. 

       I have made two homespun rag quilts:  

Pam's quilt

Andrew's quilt

     I also had made (in 2003) an appliqued quilt using homespuns.

I used reds and greens and used fusible interfacing on the hearts, and then used a machine blanket stitch around each heart.  I quilted it with a meandering stitch in red.

This quilt has been a cozy couch quilt for a decade!

     When I had initially tried to organize my stash, I found I had some leftover squares with hearts already attached.



Little left-over hearts.  I still have more - another project will surely follow!

      I cannot believe how much homespun I had leftover - even after making those three quilts! 

     I cut the homespun fabric into 6 inch squares, and tried to get 10 squares for each "plus".  (front and back with little batting filling)   Some of my scraps only yielded 5 squares, so for those "pluses" the back and front are different fabrics.


     I cut the batting into 5 inch squares, planning for 1/2 inch of extra fabric for the raggedyness.  Next time, I would leave a full inch all around.

The batting squares.  This turned out to be a good way to use up those leftovers from trimming quilts!

     Mid-July, we had a trip that involved some long drives, so I took some of the homespun sandwiches to quilt by hand in the car.  I planned on simple "x"s to stabilize the batting.  I chose a dark red thread, rather than go with either cream or black.  The handquilting, in a moving car, proved to be very slow, and not particularly enjoyable.  The squares below were the ones I finished.  The car ride each way was 7 hours!  The pattern I worked out called for 224 finished squares.  If I continued at this pace, the quilt would be finished in 2030!  



     Once I was home, the little squares got quilted up in short order on the Bernina!


Stacks of 5 squares - I ended up also stitching around the perimeter, since some of the batting in an earlier quilt had bunched in one of the earlier quilts.

The tricky part was laying out the squares in the pattern, and then sewing them up in the right order.  I had to leave this laid out on my living room floor until it was done! 

     I had some special snippers and used them to cut into the raggy seams.  If I had used the 1" seams, I think none of the batting would show. 

I ended up washing to quilt twice, and had to remove the threads from the lint trap every 10 minutes. 



A close-up of the red quilting on the blocks. 

The heart blocks!

The finished quilt is large - about 70 x 80 inches.  It is soooo soft and warm.   

The warm quilt on the new white chair.  The old chair finally fell apart!

     I still have more leftover homespun than I expected, but much less than before!  I will be adding my label to this quilt today, and sending this off to Dave this weekend.   I have four other projects underway, and hope to have another finish to share soon. Enjoy the holiday! 

Take care,
Gretchen

The Pagentry Quilt

     This quilt is finally finished!  I began this project in September 2013, when I saw a quilt on a blog.  I printed out a picture for inspiration, and now cannot find the link I saved to give credit where credit is due.  If I find it later, I'll link it up.   I was trying to use up scraps (a never-ending project) and was taken by this design.

      I figured out some dimensions. I wanted 9-inch finished blocks with the white stripping to be 2 inches finished.  I looked through my scraps for pieces that were at least 7 1/2 inches long.    I put on scrap in between two matching scraps, and didn't worry about getting those dimensions exact at all.  The outside pieces were roughly the same. 

Laying out the fabric choices

More fabric choices

The three piece blocks before trimming to size.

 

Adding the white strips - on on the side, one on the bottom.

Trimming the blocks, and having some coffee, too!

I used my floor to lay out the blocks, and then sewed them together. 

      I was done with the top in October, and then I put it away while I worked on some other projects. I did make a backing and pinned it together, but I wasn't totally crazy about it, and got excited about some other projects, so it sat for some time all pinned and ready to go.

      If I hadn't already pinned it with the backing and batting, it would still be in a pile of unfinished projects.  But, it was taking up too much space, so I decided to use it as a sampler for new quilting patterns.

     I decided to try pebbles for all of the white strips. It ended up being fairly dense quilting.       

A section showing the pebble quilting before washing and drying.



Here is the same pebble section after washing and drying.

       I decided to try a different quilting pattern in each colorful block, and tried to match the density of the pebble quilting.    This took alot of time and alot of thread.  I started with 8 bobbins of white, and easily used 18.   

       I have several projects underway that I was much more excited about than this one, and the time this was taking to finish was pretty aggravating.  I ended up doing a block at a time, and then ended up quilting while watching the World Cup and seasons 1 and 2 of 30 Rock on Netflix. 

       In the end, some of the patterns I tried were awful, but there were a number that I quite like and will use again on other quilts, although perhaps not so densely.   

Big fairly uniform loops. This looks happy to me, and also went quickly.

Dense leaves.  I love how this looks.  It is very dense, and took quite a bit of time and effort, but I will certainly use it again on a special project.

 

Flame stitches.  I also liked this pattern quite a bit.  It shows up much better on the red than the floral.

 

Interlocking curves.  I think this has some charm, and I would be a bit more careful with the size of the loops.

Not sure what to call this, but I like it.

      I pieced the back out of two large pieces of green floral fabric.   I had leftover binding from other projects, and used two different red bindings to finish it off.  This was the first quilt I have sewn the binding on totally by machine.  It did make it finish up quickly. 

     Once the quilt was finished, and held up by my trusty quilt holder, I liked it better than I had during the construction.  It now reminds me of all the flags and colors from the World Cup, and so I think of it as a pagentry quilt.  The finished quilt is 54 x 63 inches.



Chester giving the quilt his seal of approval!

     Now that this quilt is finally finished, I can move on to a few more projects.  Among other ideas,  I have a triangle quilt top ready to pin together and quilt, a civil war reproduction scrap spider web quilt being pieced and a homespun rag quilt that I am going to try using a plus pattern.  

 

Enjoy your summer!

 

Take care,

Gretchen