Wednesday, May 1, 2013

WIP Wednesday: Boston on my Mind (and Machine)

Sometimes It is always important to put aside time to do the projects that really matter to you. When I started to see the posts about making flags and quilt blocks for Boston, my second thought was, I have no idea when I am going to fit that in. My first thought, of course, was I can't wait to do that! Guess which thought wins today!

Top of my WIP list was to make a pair of flags for The Vancouver Modern Quilt Guild's To Boston with Love project. I was hoping for company and was so excited when my friend Tanya said she would love to help out. Did I mention that Tanya has this cool Phaff embroidery machine and lots of great embroidery designs? (Don't worry T - I adore you for more than your machines!)

Bee wip

First we stitched out a Bee ('B' for Boston, get it?) on a piece of off-white cotton. It was from a red work design she had and she isolated the bee from the design and enlarged it quite a bit.

Bee Flag wip

I brought over some fabrics that I wanted to work with. I took a little liberty with the color palette because I was really feeling the red, orange and grey thing for some reason. Oh well, gotta go with the inspiration when it strikes, right?

Heart Flag

Then we embroidered this Scandinavian-esque heart. Tanya has that Danish-design flair and this heart was just was so her that I insisted we use it. We played a bit with the layout of the piecing: I sewed the flags together and Tanya did all the pressing (she has a magic touch with an iron, I swear!)

Flag pair finished

Here are our finished flags! I am going to work on my quilt block next for the Quilts for Boston project. I think I am going to use a paper piecing pattern I designed a while back based on a blue Sonia Delaunay painting.

I'll end on this note today: I was franticly trying to finish a quilt at the beginning of the week. My sewing machine was was acting like my dog when he doesn't want to come in from outside (are sewing machines like dogs? who knew...) It seemed like the feed dogs (aha! you knew that pun was gonna happen!) were not working quite right, so I opened it up and took a look inside. About twenty minutes later, every machine part was on the table as well as a gigantic pile of lint (Monica from Happy Zombie acurately called it a 'lint harvest')

Spring Cleaning


I think I am also going to take my machine in for a full spa treatment. After WIP wednesday, though. I have a few things to sew first...

WIP Wednesday at Freshly Pieced
#98 on WIP Wed today :-)

5 comments:

  1. Anonymous01 May, 2013

    Very cute flags, love them!! Nice job.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Your flags are great! I am always in awe of my 'lint harvest' and I try to clean after every large quilt! I bought my machine two years ago, and after 14 quilts it stopped FMQ correctly (the tension could not be corrected), so I took it in. Came back a happy machine! I think I will try to take it in after only 10 quilts this time ;-)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Okay, you inspired me to sheepishly admit that that was two quilts and a few sewing projects worth of lint. And to add fuel to the fire, after it was fixed and I had been quilting for a few hours, the bobbin ran out and I took the quilt off the machine and took a look at the back there were loops everywhere. ARRGH! The needle had gotten a burr on it and it was a mess. Hours of ripping later I started again. Some projects are just more 'fun' than others!!!

      Delete
  3. Oh, those flags look amazing! I love the combination of embroidery and quilting together. Your post is reminding me that I really need to clean my machine too. Sorry to hear about your quilting disaster. That happened to me recently too and it was so heartbreaking to have to rip it all out.

    ReplyDelete