Category Archives: UFOs

breezy

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Here’s a quilt I started in 2006, Breezy. It was a challenge quilt for FFFC and was supposed to take a week to finish. This was one of those “my eyes are bigger than my stomach” situations. It actually took more like 4 years to complete, mostly because I was hand appliqueing the wool felt petals with a few too many strands of rayon embroidery floss … if 1 strand is good, 4 strands are better, right? ;-)

Breezy
by Laura West Kong

So last fall I took it out of the UFO hangar, finished up the remaining hand applique and proceeded on to a much more enjoyable step: hand sashiko quilting with topstitching thread. Now I’m sharing the photos with you. Hope that it brightens your day!

Breezy, detail

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wip wednesday: and more autumn leaves

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Here’s an autumn leaf UFO from fall 2006. Or maybe those are autumn flowers, I can’t remember. It’s my own original design so it can be anything I want it to be.

Either way, the top is nearly complete. The hand-dyed cotton petals are all machine appliqued and the solid wool felt petals are hand appliqued and beaded. I still need to finish the applique on a few of the wool petals. Then I’m going to do some sashiko-style hand quilting in the background.

in case you were wondering … february quilting

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In case you were wondering, I have not turned in my appliqué needles for knitting needles. Here is February’s UFO sighting: This is one of those crazy quilt deals like Stack-N-Whack except the cuts are all random. I made these blocks quite a few years ago and did a little bit of machine quilting on it almost every evening in February.

Once upon a time there was actually some sort of plan for the borders and what this quilt was supposed to be in the end … only the border fabric got separated from the blocks along the way. Now I can’t remember what it was, but I decided it’s going to make a nice little kitchen table runner once I get the binding on (perhaps the binding will be my goal for March).

If you want to try it out for yourself, this is a fun little project. Here’s how:

1) Stack up 8 squares of different fabrics a few inches larger than you want the finished blocks to be. (They will shrink up quite a bit depending on how many times you cut and sew them back together again.) Make a random diagonal cut through the whole stack at once so each square has the same 2 pieces, “A” and “B”. (A sharp blade on your rotary cutter really helps here.)

2) Mix the pieces up so that each square has different fabric for the “A” shape and the “B” shape. Sew the new pairs together. (Don’t stress overly much about making them exactly square. You can square them all up at the end.)

3) Stack the blocks together and repeat cutting, mixing, and reassembling until you get a good mix of crazy quilt pieces in the blocks, then square them up.

4) Rotate some of the blocks when you sew them together into your quilt top and it will be hard to tell that they are the exact same block “pattern”. Or repeat with 8 new pieces of fabric and mix the second set of blocks with the first for a larger quilt top with even more variety.

=(^_^)= happy quilting!

january ufo sightings

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My goal for January was to reduce the mending pile and I fixed 15 items. (hip hip hooray!) My DD’s jeans above were patched on one knee early in the month, but by the end of January as you can see, the other knee is in need of a patch as well. I might have seen that one coming.

I added the resolution to finish one UFO per month as well, so here is Mariposa, done with reverse appliqué, sashiko quilting and beaded fringe.

At January Moonlighters we had mini workshop/demos and learned different ways to make quick stashbuster quilts from strips, how to pin baste a quilt top that is not flat and square in order to make it flat and square, and one of those flippy techniques for making curves. That reminded me of my Cathedral Windows quilt that I started way back when. This is probably my first ever quilty UFO sighting. At right you can see how far I got. There are hundreds left to go. I don’t remember it being all that difficult, so I brought it out again.

To make a long story short, I don’t remember how I did it, and the book didn’t help either so I took all the Cathedral Windows pieces, a bunch of Double Wedding Ring pieces and templates from another pattern in the same book, along with the book itself and deposited the whole lot at the Sew What table at the January CBQ meeting. Wow! Did that ever feel good to get those off my hands and let somebody else worry about them. You can be sure I will see them completed at Show and Share one day.

Coming soon: My Quilt Green recycled quilt is finished as well as some knitting and crocheting that I need to take pictures of. And you thought I’ve only been looking at other people’s quilts. ;-)