Surgery recovery can be dangerous to your pocket-book!

 So I had my a2 weeks ago.  I'm glad to say that I know longer have the intense pain in my leg; however, I'm still having severe nerve pain periodically, and have a tendency to loose my balance.  The doctor the next couple of weeks will be up and down; I'll have good days and bad days.  Currently when I move I have to move "like a log"; i.e. no Bending, Lifting (anything over 5 lbs), or Twisting!  I've had moments when the pain hits, that I just want to cry, but everything will heal in God's time; not mine!

So as I continue to be incapacitated.  I've been continuing to become acquainted with my sewing/quilting software.

I'm continuing to advance my skills with EQ8 (Electric Quilt 8).  My latest thing has been designing hexagon blocks and quilts.  I discovered a "log cabin hexagon" block which I fell in love with, and a pineapple hex:

Hexagon squares

One of the quilt layouts I've done is using the Log Cabin Hex: 

I haven't decided if I'll leave it shaped as is, or make the sides more straight.

Since I did so many quilts during the Covid break (over 20 quilt tops), my husband told me I should invest in a Long Arm.  I'm not quite ready to take the plunge yet; as I am still investigating the different manufacturers and features.

So I've been looking at alternatives to sending my quilts out (The cost would come to over $4K if I sent all of them out).  I just realized I can do the quilting on my machine using my embroidery machine.  I'm trying to decide if I want to invest about $300 in a quilting addition to my current embroidery software, possibly Floriani Designer Quilt II or Perfect Embroidery Pro's My Quilt Planning.

I've been thinking now might be the time to get comfortable with free motion quilting; but large quilts are hard to manage on a domestic machine.  

I sat in on a virtual seminar yesterday with Pins and Needles, Cleveland Ohio, and DIME is offering "Weightless Quilter Frame", that is supposed to help with quilting of large quilts.

Photo from Sewing Machines Plus

This costs $299 on sale.  I was reading thru some blogs/forums, I found this in the Missouri Quilt Forum: 

Image from Missouri Quilt Forum (Alternate Setup)

Pet Grooming Arm and Harness (from Missouri Quilt forum)

Jumbo Clamp (image from Missouri Quilt forum)

This setup is a log cheaper (only $80 total) and is portable.  I can take it down when I want to use my sewing table for garment sewing.  I have a koala Treasure Chest cabinet wtih add-on shelving that is waist high and is solid and sturdy; so I won't have any problem clipping these onto my table.

Since I've had the back injury, I've been looking for ways to minimize possible injury to my back.  Since I'm working with large quilts, and want to make use of what I have for the most part, I just discovered using "pool foam noodles" to create my quilt sandwiches.  I found out about this at: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzx4dQqfkO4

I just bought some of the jumbo pool noodles and they are expected to arrive end of July; hopefully I'll be recovered enough by then that I can try everything out.

Happy Sewing Everyone!

2020 Survival Sewing: Log Cabin Block

 One day I'll get back to my garment sewing; when Covid has subsided and I can go places.  So for now I continue my sewing with my quilting.

My next design uses the log cabin block.  

As usual I scanned in my fabrics and played with quilt layout using Electric Quilt 8.  

After some playing I came up with the final layout: 

Line Drawing of the final quilt layout.

I chose to set the blocks on the diagonal. Once I had my fabrics scanned in, the final quilt design turned out to look like this: 

My original design used 3 borders of 1" in width.  I decided to switch to single border 2" wide.

Here's a preview of the design in Electic Quilt 8

Now for the final completed quilt (Sorry for the lighting, had to do my photo's inside due to the cold weather): 

The FINAL QUILT!!!!

I love me some Electric Quilt!  Before I would have done this using paper and color pencils!  

Talk about saving tress!!!

Now onto my next quilt.  I'll be making the infamous John Lewis quilt seen in this photo.  

Photo from Reddit.com

I've already drafted my pattern in Electric Quilt.  I figure this would be great for using scraps.

On to the next quitl.

Happy Sewing!!!

My Very Own African King!

Like every seamstress, I do all types of sewing; garment, smocking, heirloom sewing, quilting, etc.

I can't really tell you which is my favorite, I tend to cycle thru them.

I belong to a quilt guild here in Denver.  I have been working on a quilt design for our 25th anniversary.  We decided to go with the African Queen quilt block.  Each member will make a version of the block which will be used in Guild Quilt.  This block is pretty easy to find on the internet, and very easy to draft.. (Sample layouts of African Queen).

Since we have some male members, we needed a African King pattern. I couldn't find a variation of a African King pattern. So I set up on the task of creating my own African King pattern.
I use the Electric Quilt 8 software to generate my African King.

Both blocks were drafted on a 3x3 grid.  For example for the head of both designs is a 3" square. 
The body is a 6" square:

The Electric Quilt software made it very easy to draft both designs.  Here's a sample of the line drawing for the African Queen:

The nice thing about EQ (Electric Quilt) is that I can easily print out the pattern for the design in a  pieced, applique, or rotaty cutting format.  I can also resize with no-effort. My current design is for a 9" finished size square block. 

Creating a quilt layout using the blocks is very easy in EQ.  Two of the layouts that I've played with are below:

EQ also provides me with yardages for the quilt design along with the final quilt measurements.  The layout above results in a 80"x80" quilt.  (YEA! I didn't have to pull out the paper, pencil and calculator).

EQ made the whole block design and layout simple. I can still play with it, as I figure out a layout design that will work based on the number of completed blocks I get back.

We're expecting to have the project done by May of this year.  I'll take pix and post here.

Happy Sewing everyone!