This time it’s not me teaching, but my very talented friends. Deborah Boschert is one of my fellow Twelve by Twelve members and one of the incredible women who I am proud to include in my Circle of Friends. She is one of 20 artists who are offering a WIDE variety of fabric and stitch workshops coordinated by mixed media artist Alma Stoller.

STITCHED is a collection of 20 online video workshops by 20 talentend fabric artists. Students have access to all 20 workshops and can choose to view and work on the projects any time of the day, any day of the week. Registration opens on Dec 1 and the workshops kick off on Jan 1 and run through June 1. Registration is only $89. Deborah is teaching a workshop titled, “Branches, Buds and Blossoms: A Botanical Fabric Collage.” She includes videos on selecting fabrics, adding surface design, composing and improvisational hand embroidery.

Also part of the STITCHED team is another fellow Twelve, Nikki Wheeler. Nikki’s class will explore her quirky method of backwards quilting, make fabric paper, secretly share dreams and wishes on some fabric beads, and share the big secret of sewing these boxes 100% on the machine.   Plus, she couldn’t resist throwing in some extras, like Treasure Tea Boxes and Nesting Boxes. These are jewels of projects and look like they could become quite addicting!

Several times a year, I teach a beginning Patchwork class at my local park. The first class made a sampler quilt; the second a tote bag, pillow cover, and table runner; the third a paper pieced pineapple quilt; and this time, a tote and a baby quilt. My goal with these classes is to give my students some basic patchwork skills that they can expand upon in their own projects, and/or recognize in patterns, and so have the confidence to try the projects that appeal to them.

Jill is learning rotary cutting, and making liberated stars.

Dez is playing with color. In the foreground is one of Jason’s stars.

Darlene is amazed at how effective the flocked backing of a vinyl table cloth is for laying out blocks and transporting them to and from class.

And I learn too. With a scrap piece of paper and a little origami skills, a trash bin is always at hand. Kathleen whipped one of these up each day.

Our first project was a lined tote bag with a fused applique of a naupaka flower. The top one is Kathleen’s, to the right is Jason’s, front and center is Darlene’s, and the left one is my sample.

Here’s another Kathleen with her happy Hawai’i print tote.

Deb made two totes, one for a friend, and the second with my very own Naupaka and Taro print fabrics from Spoonflower, complete with coconut button! I’m going to have to make one of those too.

Kathleen T’s tote.

And finally, Katie’s tote made from fabrics she bought in Paris on her summer vacation. Now she’s got a souvenir she can carry with her whenever she wants.

Our second project was a Star Baby quilt. Fun, liberated stars, and a not-too-big size. Lynn says this top, with it’s puppy print, is for her dogs, but we all think it’s way too cute!

Jill didn’t quite get her’s finished, but it’s well on it’s way.

Barbara’s froggy print quilt is going to be extra snuggly since she’s replaced the backing and batting with fleece. We all learned that it’s important to leave a generous amount around the edges as the fleece likes to shift.

Darlene was the first finished project. She wowed us with her serpentine quilting in metallic thread!

Naomi fussy cut fabric with a Dresden Plate print for the star centers.

Kathleen chose an aloha print for her star centers and built her other colors around it. Tying finished the quilt off quickly and now she’s got her very first finished quilt to enjoy.

Kathleen T’s brightly saturated quilt looks like colorful fish in tropical waters. She even chose a fishy fabric for her backing.

Katie (our third Kathleen) went for a tropical Christmas theme. She tried using a fancy snowflake embroidery on her machine for her quilting. Not convinced it worked so well on this project, she made a pillow from one star block and outlined it with the snowflakes for a much better effect. Note that Katie adapted the piano key border from the tote in a previous class for the border on this quilt. That’s exactly the kind of skills I want to instill in my students.

Jason is another of my “advanced” students. He added a liberated half square triangle border, and a pieced backing. He said he loves this easy and affective star pattern and is planning on making star quilts for his whole family (but not necessarily all this year!).

Since Darlene finished her quilt early, she made a bonus project, the Mod Log table runner. I’ve never seen a version of this I didn’t like, and Darlene’s is no exception. She used a single line of fabrics so everything coordinates perfectly, even though they were scraps from another project

We’re done for now, but everyone is excited to start up a new class on January 23rd. We’ll make the sampler quilt and add some more traditional blocks to our skill library.

Back to school means back to Ho’ae’ae Park for cool classes! I really enjoyed the session where we made a tote bag, a pillow, and a table runner. I think everyone felt very productive. we’ve also gotten a good reaction to the Pineapple Log Cabin quilts. So, this session will attempt to bridge both with two projects: a tote and a small quilt.

First we’ll make a lined tote bag with an applique naupaka flower. Since we did needle turn last time, we’ll do fusible this time. I see this project as a chance to get warmed up and acquainted with your sewing machine.

Then we’ll jump into making a quilt. this is the perfect size for a baby gift, or something to stash in your car or office drawer for impromptu picnics or reading a book at the park or beach on your lunch break (yes, we can do that in Hawai’i). This liberated star is a great block to have in your patchwork toolbox as it doesn’t require great precision, can be made with coordinated fabrics or scraps, scales perfectly, adapts to many aesthetics, and looks great!

For those who want to dress it up even more, it can even have extra little bursts here and there.

I’ll be teaching at Ho’ae’ae Community Park in Waipahu (Village Park/Royal Kunia neighborhood). Classes are Monday mornings from 10:00 until 11:30 (ish). Classes start on September 12th, 2011 and run for ten weeks. The fee is a mere $20 though you should bring your own sewing machine and will need to bring your own fabric and basic supplies — which we will talk about on the first day. Registration will be August 25th and 26th at the park. That’s this week!!

Any questions, leave a comment or call Ho’ae’ae Park at 808-676-8832. The address is 94-709 Ka’aholo Street, Waipahu HI for the map savvy.

I am proud to announce that I have an article in Volume 4 of “In Stitches” eMagazine!

By the creators of Quilting Arts magazine, this digital magazine has the advantage of including videos and slide shows with the tutorials, plus taking up a lot less space on your coffee table! My article is about making small art with a big impact using collaged fabrics and crocheted and embroidered details. See how a piece evolves from auditioning fabrics to layering the elements and adding three dimensional stitches and other embellishments. Other volumes of In Stitches include articles by fellow Twelve by Twelve artists Deborah Boschert and Terry Grant, and by circle of friends pal Natalya Aikens (Deborah actually lives in both camps!). Go check it out.

Intro here.

Part 1 here.

Part 2 here.

Part 3 here.

Part 4 here.

Part 5 here.

Part 6 here.

Part 7 here.

Part 8 here.

Part 9 here.

Part 10 here.

“Pau” means “finished” or “done” in Hawaiian and that’s pretty much where we are with our Aloha Pineapple quilts! After tying the three quilt layers together, all that’s left is binding. I’ll post photos of the process below, but there’s already a glut of excellent tutorials on the web, so links may suffice. First though — to the quilts!

Mine looks great on daughter’s bed, but I have a family in mind I’d like to give it to.

Jason’s turned out great and really honors the Aloha shirts that gave their lives for the project. I hope he enjoys many happy years under this quilt. (You gotta click these photos to see them big.)

Katie’s bold man-quilt will be for her guy when he returns from deployment. What a great reminder it will be of their time here in the islands.

Lynn brought her top, but has the backing and batting already laid out at home so I know she’ll be done soon. Her’s is a gift for a friend who loves the soft, country colors. I hope that it too, provides years of enjoyment.

I am so incredibly proud of my students. Deb and Kathleen are still working diligently on their quilts and I can’t wait to see their finished masterpieces. We’re already talking about the next class in September. We are going back to a variation of the last project class. It will probably be a pillow and a tote or table runner. One applique project and one pieced project. Yo-yos will be involved. When I teach these classes, my main goal is to familiarize my students with some basic construction skills so that when they see a pattern in a magazine or store, they can say, “that’s applique and I do/do not like that,” or “I see the half square triangles in that design and am confident I could do that,” or “paper piecing sounds daunting, but I actually like it.” What really excites me is when my students take the skills I’ve taught them and branch out on their own.

Katie and I put our heads together to enlarge the half square triangle pillow and make an Aloha baby quilt for a fellow service member and new mom:

Flush with her baby-quilt-making skills Katie also went off on her own and whipped out this blue pineapple quilt for another baby friend:

Jason’s working on a quilt for his niece who’s about to have a baby too. Pink, brown, and butterflies were his instruction. It’s gonna be adorable when done!

So, on to the binding. I usually just cut 2.5″ wide strips from the width of my fabric and sew them end to end (at a 45° angle to reduce bulk), but I hear anecdotally that bias binding wears better in the long run. Marcia Hohn’s Quilter’s Cache (a great resource in and of itself)  has a nice tutorial for both methods and two ways to sew the binding on as well.

Start with a square of fabric and put two pins in opposite sides. Cut the fabric on one diagonal.

Pin together those two sides with the pins, right sides together, and sew with a 1/4 inch seam allowance.

Starting on one long side, mark the wrong side of your fabric with the desired width of your binding (I like 2.5″). I use pencil on light fabric and chalk liner on dark fabric. If you have a skinny strip left at the top, just cut it off.

Pin the two short ends together, lining up your drawn lines, but offset by one row. Also be sure you are lining up the lines not at the edge of teh fabric, but 1/4″ down, where the seam will be sewn. Sew with a 1/4″ seam allowance.

Starting with one of the off-set end rows, cut along your marked lines to make a continuous strip of bias binding like magic!

Iron your strip in half and you are ready to sew it on to your quilt.

I like french binding sewn on with mitered corners. It looks good and it pretty much the default method. Heather Bailey has a nice graphic tutorial here. She talks about glamorous corners, and I have to say, I think mine are more glamorous these days, but that’s just years of practice. The more accurate you are at the corners, the more square they will be.

To sew your binding on, first mark or trim your edges nice and straight and make sure your corners are square. I was confident that the edges and corners of my quilt top were where they wanted, so they are my guide. The batting and backing are left rough so that they don’t accidentally pull back and not get sewn into the binding on the back of the quilt. If I do have to trim the top of a quilt, I tend to cut all three layers since, in general, your quilting will hold everything in place. Align the raw edges of your binding strip with the raw edges, or marked line, of your quilt top. Start somewhere in the center of one side. Leave about a 6″ “tail” and sew 1/4″ from the edge. I’d basted my border 1/4″ from the edge, so I moved my needle position a few clicks to the left to make sure I would hide that basting in the seam allowance. Oh, and if you have a walking foot for your machine, now is the time to use it! Stop sewing 1/4″ from the corner (see my pin). The more accurate this stop is, the more glamorous your corner will be.

Pull the quilt out from under your needle, but you don’t necessarily have to cut the thread — just give yourself a little room to work. Fold the binding away from the quilt making a 45° angled fold. The raw edges of the binding will now continue the line of the next edge of the quilt.

Fold that binding back onto the next side of your quilt, making sure the fold aligns with the raw edges of the first side. It will cover up that pretty little 45° fold underneath.

Rotate your quilt 90° and continue sewing your binding, starting from the fold, along this next side of the quilt.

Continue around your quilt like this until you approach where you started. Stop about 10,” or even a bit more, from where you started and remove the quilt from your sewing machine — this time cutting the threads. Lay your binding tails smooth on your quilt top and overlap them. Cut the end of one tail square, and cut the other one so that their overlap is the width of your unfolded binding (in this case 2.5″).

Pin those squared binding ends, right sides together, at right angles.

Sew corner to corner across that overlapped box of binding. Test it to make sure you sewed across the correct diagonal before you cut off the excess fabric!

Trim excess fabric 1/4″ from your seam line and finger press the seam open.

Fold the biding back in half and sew this last section onto the quilt. You’re now done with the sewing machine work.

Cut off any excess batting and backing, leaving a nice 1/4″-ish of quilt material in the binding seam allowance. Fold the folded edge of the binding over to the back side of your quilt and sew it down by hand near or on the machine stitched seam using a blind stitch. Some people machine stitch this too, and Ricky Tims has a very schamncy way of doing this, but I like the clean, invisible hand sewn method and find it a quiet way to spend and evening or two on the couch.

When you get to the corners, sew your first side down all the way out into the seam allowance of the next side, making that boat-like angle fold as close to 45° as possible. Folding over the next side will bring that angle over what you’ve just sewn down and should make a nice mitered look both on the front and on the back. Tack that fold down and then continue on blind stitching the next side. I think that traditional quilt show competitions want that miter tacked down on the front side too, but I never bother since they seem to hold up just as well for me this way and I like to just power away at sewing the back side down.

Your quilt has been handled a lot at this point and might want to be washed. I use the gentle cycle on my top-load machine, cold water, and a textile friendly soap like Eucalan. A bed quilt I will more often than not put in the dryer too, on a low-ish heat and finish off the drying outside on the rack. An art quilt that has surface design that can’t handle the stress of the machines, I will soak in the tub and dry flat on towels on the floor.

Enjoy your quilt — you are PAU!

Intro here.

Part 1 here.

Part 2 here.

Part 3 here.

Part 4 here.

Part 5 here.

Part 6 here.

Part 7 here.

Part 8 here.

Part 9 here.

Oops, I skipped ahead to the tying without covering borders as I had promised. After all your pineapple blocks are finished and sewn together, and the foundation paper is removed, give the whole thing a good press. Now you can add borders if you’d like. These pineapple blocks are pretty intense, and though I don’t always add a border to everything I sew, I think this really calls for something to finish it off.

Katie’s was pretty straightforward. The solid color in her pineapple blocks is black, and the background in her border print is black. All the colors coordinate, and the scale of her border fabric is a nice contrast to the scale of the pineapple blocks. So a nice wide border was all she needed.

The rest of us liked the look of a thin border of our solid fabric, followed by something that pulls it all together. I used the last scraps of my fabric to piece this piano key border. I made four strips of “keys,” each long enough to lap at the corners.

Remember Deb’s plan with the thin red and then a border of the fabric she’d been using within the blocks? She’s still looking for the right fabric, but I love the this idea of showing in the border what’s been hinted at in the blocks. I also think that this bold leaf design will compliment her bold colors.

Jason has really got the concept of borders down. He’s used a thin orange-ish border on his quilt front, followed by the turquoise fabric he used for the center of each block (ties it all together). The backing fabric he wanted to use wasn’t big enough, so what did he do? Added borders until it was large enough, of course! I like how the skinny inner borders mimic the borders on the front of the quilt.

Adding borders is relatively simple. There’s just a few tips to keep in mind. If the sides of your quilt are different lengths, then simply adding borders the same length as each side will only emphasize the wonkiness. The solution is to ease opposite sides to the same length.

If you are confident that your blocks are accurate, then you would know, for example, that a side with 9 blocks that finish at 7″ each, would mean your border strip would need to be 63″ long, plus 1/4″ seam allowance at each end, for a total of 63.5″ long.

If your blocks aren’t quite such an easy number, or you think your seams aren’t very consistent, then you need to measure the quilt top. I like to start with the long sides, so measure the longer dimension of your quilt on each side and down the middle. The measurements should be within an inch of each other — less if it’s a smallish quilt and if you are a consistent sewer. Take the average of those three measurements and cut two strips of your border fabric to that length and your desired width for that border (we chose 1.5″ for our skinny borders, and 3.5″ to 7.5″ for wider ones).

Pin each end of your borders to your quilt and then add more pins along the length, gently easing in any discrepancies. Sew, using a 1/4″ seam allowance, with the puffier fabric underneath (whether that’s the border fabric or the pineapple blocks). The feed dogs on your machine will help take up a little extra fabric, making it easier to sew a smooth seam.

Now measure, average, cut, pin, and sew the shorter sides. Voila, you have a border. If you want several borders, like Deb’s proposed thin and wide ones, sew the first (thin) border on all four sides, then repeat the process and sew on the second (wider) border. For my piano key border, I sewed four strips of piano keys longer than I needed them, then trimmed the length to size when I was ready to sew them on, as if they were one solid fabric. I made mitered corners, which I won’t explain here, but can write up separately if requested (a tutorial can probably be googled, and instructions are in many quilting books).

Lynn is working on half square triangles for a border. Because you don’t necessarily want to cut a triangle off willy-nilly (it will look markedly different than all the others in the row), a pieced border like that will require a little advance planning. I like to add a thin border first that will take the quilt to an easily divisible number, like two (which will be the finished size, in inches, of the half square triangles). Then divide the length of the sides by that number and you’ll know how many to make. plus four for the corners.

Happy bordering!

Intro here.

Part 1 here.

Part 2 here.

Part 3 here.

Part 4 here.

Part 5 here.

Part 6 here.

Part 7 here.

Part 8 here.

Since it had been two weeks since the last installment, and we worked on two phases of our quilt construction, I’m posting TWO parts. The basting probably went pretty quick, so the next task is to hold teh layers of the quilt together permanently.

These pineapple blocks have a lot of seams in them, which could be difficult to hand quilt over. They are also visually quite busy, so free motion or pantograph designs could get lost and therefore not be worthy of the time spent creating them. I’d suggest simple straight line machine quilting, like diagonal lines X-ing through the centers of the blocks, or in-the-ditch quilting.

OR, you could tie the layers together like was often done on old utilitarian quilts. I’ve decided to continue my scrappy theme and use up some of my embroidery floss bits and bobs. Jason plans on using deep blue for his, and Katie will use black to match the solid color in her quilt.

Use a large eye needle embroidery or chenille (and a threader to make life easier) and thread it will a long length of floss. Stitch from the front of the quilt, through all three layers, and back out the front, about 1/4″ away. Pull the floss almost all the way through, but leave a tail 1″ to 2″ long.

Put the needle back into the quilt right next to where you did the first time and, again, back out 1/4″ away, near where you came out the first time.

Pull it taught, but not so tight it puckers or pulls the floss all the way out (then you’d have to start over).

Tie a square knot with the ends.

Looks good!

Cut the tails (mine are on the long side, but don’t cut them so short they could pull out of the knot) and move on to the next tie. I tied my top in the center of each block and at the intersections of the blocks.

I think it is smart to use a batting with some polyester in it when you are tying a quilt. You want something that doesn’t need to be stitched too closely. If you want to use a more delicate batting, that might clump over time, then machine stitching closer together would be the way to go.

All that’s left is to bind the quilt!

Just for fun, here’s a real pineapple. After more than two years, the pineapple top in my back yard has finally decided to fruit. At this young stage, I can almost see how it inspired the quilt block.

Intro here.

Part 1 here.

Part 2 here.

Part 3 here.

Part 4 here.

Part 5 here.

Part 6 here.

Part 7 here.

Our progress is really showing now! Most of us have pieced our tops together (pineapple blocks + borders), and are at some stage of getting our three layers together.

Deb’s pile of blocks is looking wonderfully colorful and Hawaiian. Once the blocks are done, then they need to be laid out in a pleasing arrangement.

Here Jason helps Kathleen lay out her beachy blocks. She’ll label the backs and then sew them together (see Part 7 for a tutorial).

Then comes the layering and basting. Here’s Katie’s backing laid out, face down, on the floor. Tape the fabric smooth, but not so taught it’s pulled out of shape.

Taping works well on a smooth floor like this, but you can use straight pins to secure your layers if you have a carpeted surface.

Lay the batting on top and smooth it out, starting in the center and working out towards the edges. Depending on how well your batting “sticks” to the backing fabric you may or may not want to tape it to the floor too.

Center the quilt top, face up, on top of the batting. Smooth it out, again from the center, and tape the edges in place.

Use safety pins (curved ones are easiest to use) to pin all three layers together, spacing them about a hand’s width apart. Start in the center and work your way out to the edges. You could also baste with needle and thread using very big stitches and a thread color that contrasts with your top. Once the layers are basted together you can remove and dispose of the tape. Now you can take your quilt anywhere to stitch or tie the layers more permanently.

Here’s Jason’s basted quilt, showing off his pieced backing that is dramatic enough to be a quilt on it’s own.

Katie’s color just glow!

And here’s Deb’s blocks — almost ready to be sewn together!

My friend Kim has found an effective way to baste quilts without crawling around on the floor. Click here for the video she learned from and a tutorial with her own adjustments to the method.

First off, thank you all so much for the lovely comments on my book giveaway post! I love reading each and every one. And, there’s still time to comment on that post, if you haven’t done so already, and get a chance to win “my” book and a lovely bundle of Hawaiian fabrics.

On to other fun stuff. I’ve been having my own little quilt along here with the Aloha Pineapple quilt, but I also found another quilt along I couldn’t resist. Cherry House Quilts was making a simple, striking, small, quilt that just plain appealed to me. The small size meant that if I could find appropriate fabrics in my stash, I could join the quilt along without disrupting all my other projects (too much).

All the little squares are from my scrap bins — I just kept grabbing pieces until I had enough, not paying tooooooo much attention which, or how many, colors I had. Only one square from each fabric though, so it’s kinda like a charm quilt. Then I laid all the squares out and rearranged them until I liked the columns. There’s some stuff in there you wouldn’t intentionally put together.

Cherrie’s example had straight line quilting, which looks great, but I knew I could do that. So, I decided i’d try something still geometric, but with a little contrast. I drew the center circles (sort of evenly distributed all over the quilt) with a water soluble marking pen and then carefully followed the line with the walking foot. For each successive circle, I lined up the edge of the foot with the previous line. As the circles got bigger, and the curve less extreme, the quilting went easier. Of course, pulling the quilt, even gently, around those curves resulted in some distortion. I basted with safety pins, so maybe this would be the kind of situation where spray-baste would be more appropriate. I switched thread colors every 3 to 5 rounds. I also worked on all the circles at once, adding rings all over until I liked the sizes and overlaps. I did not plan at the outset how large each one would be. So, there’s some puffs and a few unsightly tucks, but it’s all part of the learning process.

Overall, I like this quilt very much. When I was mostly done with it, Cherrie put out a call to quilters for baby quilts for the Early Head Start program in Boston where one of her daughters is a nurse in training. I was happy to send this perfectly baby-sized quilt in response. I hope that it gets spit-up on a and dragged around and loved and no one will care that the quilting is not perfect because it’s just a nice warm place to be swaddled in. I didn’t put a label or name on it because I just wanted it to go out into the world and be. But here, I think I’ll call it “Charming Puddle.”

Intro here.

Part 1 here.

Part 2 here.

Part 3 here.

Part 4 here.

Part 5 here.

Part 6 here.

Part 6 here.

Not exactly Part 7, but I wanted to share some more pineapple blocks.

Commenter DianeY was actually the one who encouraged me to take on this project. She thought Aloha print Pineapple blocks would be fun, and while she couldn’t make it to my side of the island for morning classes, she was definitely up for some sort of group push. So, following along with her stash of red and neutrals, here’s a taste of what DianeY’s been up to:

I like how the limited color palette allows her to mix up the arrangement of the lights and darks in each block and have it still look very cohesive.

On the other end of the spectrum is Laura’s free pieced and polka dotted Loco Piña! If Betsy Johnson and Freddie Moran made a quilted collaboration, this might be it! Laura was a little apprehensive in including her version with the rest of the group, but I just love how it shows that there’s a lot of leeway in these traditional blocks. You can be as controlled or as crazy as you want. It’s all good!

Mahalo DianeY and Laura for Quilting Along with us, and for allowing me to share your quilts in progress!