One Flower Wednesday x2

We have had a very sick household here. 3 trips to the doctor and 2 emergency room trips has made a dent in my schedule and life in general. If there is an upside to this, I have gotten a lot of hand sewing done waiting for all of these appointments. Here are my 2 flowers (one from last week and one from this week).

 

I have previously posted the work on the Red Hot Garden Quilt and I am putting on the border now. I have noticed a flaw in my technique that isn't horrible, but I think it is worth keeping an eye on. When I sew my hexagons together, I whip stitch and pick up 2 or 3 threads on each hexagon.When sewing the side that goes with the grain of the fabric, I noticed that I was seeing gaps in my hexagons. I looked at it and when sewing with the grain, I was picking up the same threads and I was making a hole kind of like a snag. I tried to take some pictures, but they wouldn't show up. I learned that when you sew the hexies together, always pick up threads in different rows so you don't snag the fabric. 

I love looking at the One Flower Wednesday pictures. They are very inspirational and lovely to see the progress. A big thank you to Karen for running the program even though her flowers are done. I can't wait to see the flowers for this week.

 

One Flower Wednesday and Red Hot Garden Update

I started going through my sewing room purging more of my old fabric stash. I have some knit fabric that I haven't used in over 5 years and I don't plan on using them in the future, so I am giving it to a few friends that are in the process of learning to use a serger. Goes to good use and I have room to put the treadmill in my big well lit sewing room. 

After I finish my Wednesday flower, I have been working on putting my Red Hot Garden flowers together. I have all the flowers in rows and am putting the rows together. Here is an updated picture of the garden coming together.

 So now to the business of the week, here is my One Flower Wednesday Flower.

At the rate I am going. It is going to be 9 years until I have all my flowers done. That doesn't include sewing the flowers into a top. I am pretty sure this qualifies for the status of life long project.




 

One Flower Wednesday

So a normal busy Wednesday and I finished my flower by today, yeah! I am running out of hexagons to sew (a good thing), so I have been basting at night before bed. I don't have to see well to baste, so I do it at night when I am tired and the lights are lowered. I have been keeping hexagons in the car so I can sew them when I have snippets of time. Time adds up while I wait to pick up my daughter from school, waiting an hour for gymnastics, riding in the car while I go to my family gatherings on the weekend, and waiting for appointments. Almost 3 hours a week! I sure do wait a lot. Anyways, here is my flower for this week.

One Flower Wednesday

This weeks Wednesday flower stretched into Saturday. It takes a lot longer to sew a 3/4" flower than a 1/2" flower. It's amazing how that happens, right? So I haven't budgeted enough time to finish my flower in a week. I started babysitting a 17 month old a couple of days a week which eats into my sewing time. I have decided to cut my sewing time to make money to feed my fabric addiction. Hopefully I can budget my time better this week.

Here is my flower for this week. My kitty (Quattro) wouldn't let me take a proper picture, so I took one with her in it. She doesn't normally have creepy yellow eyes, but it is a pretty good picture of her.

One Flower Wednesday

I have only done one flower this week, but have worked a lot on my Red Hot Garden quilt.

Here is the picture of my flower for this week.

I am working hard to finish my small grandmothers flower garden quilt. It will be about 18" top to bottom. I have 3 rows sewn together and I am working on sewing the rest of the flowers into rows.

 Here is a picture of the quilt so far.

I am working on basting the outer hexagons to fill in the top border. So I am moving right along. I can get a lot done while waiting in line to drop off and pick up my daughter. Every 10 minutes adds up.

30's Grandmothers Flower Garden for One Flower Wednesday

Since I finished my flowers for my Red Hot Garden quilt, I am moving on to working on my 30's Flower Garden. I don't have a name for it yet, so I will have to think about one. 

Here is my flower for this week.

This garden is quite old, at least 3 or 4 years, and I haven't worked on it in a while. I have written about it in some old posts, but I went ahead and took new pictures to see where I am at. The garden is 3/4" hexagons with a fussy cut black on black circle dot for the middle, 30's fabric for the petals, 1 green Jo Morton and 1 Olive/Lime mix leaf print for background. I am planning on making it queen size and the pattern calls for 500 flowers. I want to make each flower a different print, but my eyes are crossing at all the fabrics. 

Here is my progress on the quilt so far.

My flower garden with my finished flowers below it. The Garden has 38 attached flowers and 2 partially attached (one on each lower corner), and 11 completed flowers. I have no idea what I was thinking by not sewing the entire flower to the quilt. I must have thought they needed to go there and wanted to make sure they were sewn into the correct spot. For whatever dorky reason, my husband and I don't think it is right to count them til they are "completely" sewn. I told you, dorky reason. If it helps to get the size of the quilt so far, the pillows on the bed are king size. 

Here is a picture of my flowers not attached to the garden. 

So I ran into a not quite problem, but something I need to think about. Since I wanted to make every flower different, I bought entire lines of 30's reproduction fabrics. This means that I ended up with 3 or 4 different colors of the same print. So when I started this project all the prints were the same and all the colors were the same also. Now that I have been collecting fabric for at least 4 years I have a good mix of colors and prints. What I should now start doing is pulling from my newer fabrics to make a better color mix. So all of the flowers that are already sewn I need to keep until I get further along. Kind of frustrating that I can't use the ones in the picture yet, but I want to do it right because I am putting all this effort into it.


Here is a picture of all of the pieces I have cut up to this date. I am pretty close to having all of my 30's print flower pieces cut. I only have about half of my black dot center pieces cut and half of my green background pieces. There is a LOT of pieces here. The Hello Kitty lunch box is full size and the box beside it is a shoe box with 2 layers stacked on top of each other. I like to use the lunch boxes because they are hard so the papers don't get squished and the needles don't poke through, plus the boxes have the locked latch. Whenever I run out of hexagons, I add more fabric to the tin. 

I have also been working on Attaching all my Red Hot Garden flowers together and I will post updated pics next week.

One Flower Wednesday and Red Hot Garden Quilt

I have done 3 flowers this week and it finishes up all the flowers for my Red Hot Garden Quilt project.  I have decided to make a border of green all around the quilt, then do the hexagon ring binding described in this Hexagon Finishing Tutorial by Badskirt. Several people have told me they like this method and I really like the way it looks. Here are my flowers for this week.

I have done my layout and have started sewing them together. Remember these are small flowers (1/2" hexagons), so they are easy to make and put together. This is the first quilt that I have sewn by rows. I normally just sew the flowers in circles around the middle hexagon. I thought I would try and see if I liked it better.

I am still going to work on this project, but I am going to continue to do my One Flower Wednesday. I am switching my flowers to my 30's flower garden and continue my one flower a week. The 30's flowers are 3/4" pieces so they will take more time to sew. So working on 2 hand sewing projects will be a chore, but I am determined to finish some of these old projects.

A special thanks for the work that Karen does to organize One Flower Wednesday. She does this out of kindness and I know I appreciate it. Thank you Karen.

One Flower Wednesday

I have 2 flowers this week to post.

So I double checked and I have 3 more flowers to do before I do my layout of the Red Hot Garden quilt. I also checked out my fabric and my favorite one is big enough for the back! I have decided to do the binding in the green fabrics, but I don't know how many hexagon I will need just yet. One step closer, yeah!

I have also dusted off my other grandmothers flower garden which is a 3/4" hexagon with 30's fabric. I am hoping to make it a queen size, but I may not have enough background fabric. I have some pictures in my older posts. When I switch over working on the 30's flowers, I will repost the progress on the quilt. Marking things off my list feels good!

One Flower Wednesday

Here are my flowers for One Flower Wednesday this week. I have done 2 this week and I 

only have 4 more to go on this project.

I have finally found a way to finish off and bind my project that I like. There is a tutorial about making a hexagon binding that looked really cool. You make a ring of hexagons that go all the way around the quilt just like binding, then flip it over and tack it to the back. You can see the hexies on the back of the project, and the front still has all the hexie corners. Here is a link to the Hexagon Finishing Tutorial. I am really excited about trying this technique. 

Here in the next few weeks I am going to post some pics of unfinished projects that I am dusting off and trying to finish them up. Most of them have little problems that I haven't fixed yet. Here's to getting my sewing room cleaned up!

One Flower Wednesday and A New Project

I haven't posted in a very long time and I have decided I needed to start again. I read recently that if you set aside time everyday to do what you want, you are more relaxed and have a more positive outlook. Sounds simple, but is actually very hard. 

One of the things I used to do was the One Flower Wednesday. I love English Paper Piecing and it is very relaxing to me. I have several projects going and 2 of them are grandmother flower gardens. The original one you can see pictures in older posts below. I have started a new smaller one for a wall hanging. So as of today, I am making a commitment to start One Flower Wednesdays again. Here is my Wednesday flower (sorry it is fuzzy).

Here is a layout of the new wall hanging that I started. It is made with 1/2" pieces and the centers are small circle dots, petals are batiks, and leaves are 2 Jo Morton fabrics. None of the flowers are sewn together and I am still trying to decide if I want the final shape to be a diamond or hexagon. If I do a hexagon shape I will have 5 extra flowers. Maybe have a hexagon wall hanging and another small rectangle one  with the left over flowers? I have decided to name the project Red Hot Garden.

One Flower Wednesday

Time for the newest set of One Flower Wednesday flowers. I made 3 this week, but more importantly, I put several on the garden. Here is a pic of the 3 newest flowers.

Here is a pic of the garden to date. I went from 19 in the last garden pic to 28 in this garden pic. I didn't think I was making much progress, but I was pleasantly surprised when I counted them up. So in 4 weeks I put 9 new flowers on and made 18. Go me!

So the count is 3 new flowers, 9 completed flowers, and 9 new flowers on the garden.

One Flower Wednesday

It has been a couple of hectic weeks, but I am finally back on a schedule. I have finished 4 flowers in the last week, that brings the count to 10 flowers finished but not put on the garden. I am going to have to find a middle ground of finishing flowers and sewing them on the quilt. I also wanted to thank everyone for the comments on my posts. It is very inspirational to read them and keeps me plugging along on this project. I am so happy I joined the One Flower Wednesday group. A big thank you to Karen for organizing this group.

Now to the picture. I tried a new technique on taking my pictures, which failed horribly. The picture is fuzzy, but you can see the flowers okay. I think my favorites are the orange butterflies, and the zig zag stripe. They are probably some of my overall favorites so far. I will be going on a road trip this weekend, so hopefully I will have a new picture of the garden with several flowers added next week. Until next week, have a great Memorial weekend.

One Flower Wednesday

Checking in for my One Flower Wednesday posting. I have finished three flowers. If I keep at this rate, I might be done in 7 years instead of 12 years, lol. Nothing has changed on the completed flower garden piece this week.

One Flower Wednesday

Finally my camera works and I can post my first One Flower Wednesday progress report, yeah! This is a picture of two weeks of work on my flower garden. Since wednesday is probably my busiest day of the week, I work a little on Tuesday and Wednesday night when I am ready for bed. I am hoping to start posting regular weekly posts on Thursday morning.

This next photo is of my progress so far of my flower garden put together. You can see I am adding the yellow flower on the bottom right next. I pin a few flowers in and take a picture to see what looks best together. Since I am not waiting to arrange them on a design wall, It is the best way to make sure that I don't put two colors or fabrics next to each other. I am trying to make this a charm quilt with each flower different, but with 500 flowers it might not work. I only have about 470 more flowers to go.

This is the next set of fabrics I need to cut into squares for my flowers. After I cut these I think I will be pretty close to my 500 different fabrics for my flowers. Lots of cutting ahead too.

Well that is it for the check in today. I started a new class last week that uses the most unusual fabric I have ever seen, aka ugly. I will try to post some pics of my finished blocks in the next few days.