Design Wall Monday 8-3-2015

August started as July ended:  way TOO hot! Hopefully it will end without the temperatures being so hot! Enough said. 

I've been finishing little projects recently.  Several I have already shown.  One I'm holding until the Grands are here this weekend.  We're celebrating their birthdays this weekend.  

You've already seen what's on the design wall so I'll show you what is on Ruthie. This is a small quilt and I chose to place a triangle quilt design on each solid triangle and a small, uncomplicated triangle in the floral part of the two colored squares. (Squares?? Really, I mean the triangles.) 

Here's a close up at an angle to see the quilting.  You really can't see any quilting in the floral print centers.  It seems like a waste of time but it does need to be quilted for the integrity of the quilt. 

I've actually been doing quite a bit of piecing this past week.  I've finished one of last year's row from the Row by Row Experience which I showed here. I've got another one well on the way.  I'm making units for Talking Turkey block from the April class with Bonnie Hunter. Here's a bunch of units I worked on watching TV the other night.  

Goals were achieved for the most part. 

Week of July 27, 2015

Trim and bind table runner√

Load and quilt handprint quilt didn’t get to this one

Finish 2 more 2014 Row X Row sections √ in progress

Quilt triangle quilt √ quilting will be done today

Work on aprons for grands√ finished

And this week:

Week of August 3, 2015

Load and quilt handprint quilt

Lunch for the tea group at my house

Finish last 2014 row, start sewing rows together

Have fun with the Grands this weekend (and their parents.)

Do a little studio spiff up work: clear cutting table! 

Here's why I need to clean up the cutting table!  New fabrics, left over fabrics, piles of fabric.  CLEAN it up, girl! 

That's it for this week.  I'm linking up with Monday Making at Love Laugh Quilt, Main Crush Monday at Cooking Up Quilts, and Patchwork Times.  (Anyone else notice that not much quilt talking is going on at Patchwork Times?) 

Happy Quilting All! 

15 Minute Studio Spiff Up #18

OOPS!  I missed last week, sorry.  I was out of town at Kevin's house helping with getting Ellie to daycare. Two weeks ago Vicki commented that she needs some ideas on organizing finished projects.  Yes, they can overwhelm us.  As I start a new project Pat always asks me who is getting that one.  My standard response if I don't have a plan for it is "It's going to live here for awhile." Yep, we do tend to gather lots of finished projects.  

So today's job is to

Organize our finished projects.

We all love to make quilts -- big ones, little ones, wall quilts, bed quilts, table runners.  You get the idea.  Some quilts are spoken for before you even start them. But others you make just because you like it.  Or maybe you want the challenge.  Or you're tired of the old projects you keep pulling out in hopes of finishing some UFOs.  At one time my quilting goal was to own 4 large quilts. Time passed and I've got way more than 4 large quilts.  And bunches of medium quilts and small quilts and . . . Needless to say I store a lot of quilts of all different sizes. 

Here are some suggestions on how to store your finished projects.  

In my house bed size quilts are generally folded, rolled and then stored in an old pillowcase.  I have several Christmas quilts that come out right after Thanksgiving.  They spend most of the year in a pillowcase stored in the closet of the room they are displayed in.  While Christmas quilts are on display the regular quilt is stored in the pillowcase.  This isn't the best way to store them but it works for me.  I do try to refold them with different sections getting folded  at least once a year when I return them to the pillowcase.  I should probably do it quarterly. 

My small wall size quilts are stored flat on a shelf in the walk-in closet in my studio. One of the things I wanted when we were designing my studio was a space to store my quilts.  I have a set of wooden shelves.  I've got plastic shelf liner on the wood and I store my collection of small quilts on the shelf.  Smaller ones are stored flat.  Larger ones are folded.  I need to go through this pile and refold all the quilts and put all the flat ones at the bottom.  These get rotated on to my wall of small quilts. 

Many of my medium wall quilts seem to be in this pile of quilts.  They need to be moved to hangers. Here's how I store many of my medium quilts.  These include wall hangings and some lap quilts.

Some of  my quilts are stored on plastic coat hangers that I've put a piece of pool noodle on.  If you look carefully below you can see where I've cut a slit in the length of the pool noodle.  I slip the noodle on to the hanger and then hang the quilt over it.  I use an Exacto blade to cut the noodles to the right width and then use it to slit the side.  The best time to buy pool noodles is at the end of the season when they go on clearance.  (Note to self -- buy more pool noodles next fall!) It makes more sense to actually store quilts with the front on the inside and the backing showing to protect the quilt front from dust.  The problem with that is it takes a bit more than a glance to identify the quilt. 

In all honesty these are not all of my small to medium size quilts.  Some are still stored in the various closets and dressers in which I found room for them when we first moved into this house.  I need to gather them all up and move them into this closet.  Hum, I may also have a suitcase full of quilts somewhere.  I need to look for those too. 

For many years I've also stored unquilted quilts.  Those are still in a fairly small Rubber Maid box.  But quilts I've finished in the last 4 to 5 years but haven't quilted are stored in the same closet as all the quilts shown above. These are all my quilts waiting to be quilted.  Some have their backings and some still need backing.  If I have customer quilts they are stored on hangers with paper tents over the hanger with whose quilt it is and when it needs to be done by.  The far right is a skirt hanger with some small nylon flags hung on it. The far left is a skirt hanger with a smaller quilt on it. (Hum, more ways to store a quilt.) Notice on the quilt to the left the fold is not clamped by the hanger. 

Last, but not least, is this picture showing several blocks I took off the design wall and hung with a skirt hanger.  Normally I'd think nothing of folding blocks but these have fusible web holding the appliqué pieces that have been machine blanket stitched.  I really don't want these folded.  

It seems to me I need to do some more organizing of my finished projects.  As I've written this I realize I have spare quilts all over the house.  I need to gather them so that they can be stored in this closet which is air controlled.  Of course, the bad part of storing in here is if there ever were a fire I would not be going upstairs to the former attic to grab the quilts. 

One of my friends stores her quilts on large tubes (6 or 8" diameters.) That way she doesn't have any folds in the quilt.  I'm not sure if she does that for all of her quilts or just special ones. Please let me know how you are storing your finished projects. 

Unless I get a brilliant idea or two in the next week this will be the last weekly 15 Minute Spiff Up. You can find links to all of the spiff up posts on the tab at the top of the page.  Over the next 7 months I hope to post a monthly reminder to spiff up your space.  I may even give you a focus area to help keep your space neat and usable.  Thanks for spiffing up your studio with me. 

Happy Quilting All. 

15 Minute Studio Spiff Up #17

I'm running out of ideas folks!  If you have areas we haven't worked on send me an email or comment  on this blog.  I've been ignoring this particular area because I really don't want to work on it.  Sorry, truth hurts but I think it is a big task.  

Organize all those stray patterns and quilts and paper you've either cut from quilt magazines or printed from the Internet or gotten from a class. 

While the long arm was stitching away today I pulled out a pile of papers I had with mystery quilt instructions, individual block patterns, mini quilts -- you get the idea -- all sorts of stuff I want to save but also be able to find more easily. 

What a surprise for me to find it isn't as disorganized as I thought it was.  I have several fat 3 ring binders full of quilty papers.  And, I have this one pile of papers that actually have been organized some what. This doesn't look so bad. 

When I moved my studio into my new space a year and a half ago (or maybe longer) I took stacks and stacks of paper to the dining room table and put like things together.  Some actually got stuck in the binders.  This pile is all that's left from that effort.  Unfortunately, somewhere is a stack of pages I've accumulated since then. Luckily those are mostly one page patterns because I tend to leave things on my computer now.  I only print items I want to refer to frequently, i.e. I'm actually making the item.   Hum, I wonder where those papers are?  

Although these are somewhat organized it's still over an inch of paper here that needs to find a home. Somewhere I have several empty 3 ring binders too.  Pat was all for getting rid of them but I knew, eventually, I'd want to use them. Big issue is I have NO CLUE where they are.  

I had been thinking of how I wanted to organize all these papers and had left myself a note.  Here are my categories.  You may have others.  I'm not much of an appliquér so I don't have a notebook for it.  

Paper piecing -- yikes, I already have 2 notebooks for that category. 

Mystery Quilts -- Mysteries for Relay does a mystery every other month or so and I've done LOTS of them.  But, I also have several Bonnie Hunter mysteries and Inspector Cluesew mysteries. (Not sure if I spelled that correctly...) 

Small Quilt Patterns -- Fun to do and generally pretty fast. 
Bonnie Hunter Patterns -- I've used many of the free pattern's on Quiltville.com so they have their own notebook.  But do her annual mysteries go in the mystery notebook or this one? Definitely this one! 
Single Blocks -- I'm in one block group, plus I get blocks from various places.  The print outs can go into this notebook. 
Quilt Patterns -- I'll put free standing patterns from the Internet or classes here. 

That's as far as I've planned on the topics.  I had hoped to index each notebook by typing up the content on my computer and printing out the pages to put at the front of the book.  One, I have a hand written list for but that is as far as I've gotten.  Oh well. You'll notice I've used a mixture of future tense and past tense.  Sorry, it does sound disjointed but truth is some of these things I've already done and some need to be done -- past tense and future tense.  

Enjoy your paper challenge this week.  You might surprise yourself with what you'll find.  Getting organized takes plenty of time and I've fallen off quite a bit recently.  But, if nothing more, I have a great guide to what I should be doing or finishing.  Today, I actually removed a scrap batting from my computer list because I had used the batting piece. I got out the computer and looked up what sizes I had.  It was a lot easier to find on the computer than going through my big bin of left overs.  Now to measure some new ones to put away and to add to the list. 

Happy Quilting All!