Project Update: 15.11.2022

Hello Friends and Welcome!

November has brought to me the first glimpse of Winter with some snowfall this past weekend. The large flakes falling through the golden sunset light was certainly a beautiful sight to behold!

And while I'm certainly no fan of the cold, the Wintery weather is the perfect time to cuddle up with a quilt!

Of course, snow wasn't the only thing this past weekend brought, I also had an amazing and productive dining room quilt retreat with my Mom! We worked on our Wild Goose Chase blocks as well as some independent projects, and made some delicious turkey soup and apple crisp!

With so much time spent working on projects over the past few weeks, I have lots to share with you this week!

Summer Garden Block of the Month

Starting off with the results of the BoM weekend with my Mom, we have the Wild Goose Chase blocks from the Summer Garden BoM!

I had previously put together the black and white playing card version of this block as a sample to be sent to my quilt guild. Unfortunately, it wasn't done in time for the November meeting, but it will be there for December in case anyone wanted a look at it!

In addition to that are the rose garden versions of the block. The chains of flying geese reminded me of the thorny stems of a rose, so I once again decided to use a monochrome green colour scheme.

I really love how these blocks turned out! The vibrant greens are a beautiful contrast to the starkness of the card block and should make a great background for the red and white rose coloured blocks once I start those!

Mom also made some great progress on her Wild Goose Chase blocks!

As I've mentioned before, her colour scheme will use a black background fabric with rainbow accent colours. For the month of November, she chose to use orange as her accent colour!

Rather than using a vibrant, true orange fabric, she decided to use a softer, peachy coloured fabric. It has a really strong contrast with the background and looks amazing!

Unlike many of her blocks, the Wild Goose Chase block isn't particularly scrappy. Orange isn't a colour my Mom has worked with much in the past, so she didn't have many remnants to choose from and she ended up using two fat quarters instead.

Mom completed two of her Wild Goose Chase blocks and made some good progress on the other two. She has all her pieces cut and some of the units sewn. But after trimming a couple dozen flying geese, she decided to take a break to work on some of her other projects.

I don't blame her, that was a lot of geese!

Both of us are thrilled with the progress we made during our weekend together and are looking forward to doing it again next month!

The Summer Garden BoM is an ongoing project designed by me. Free pattern instructions for the Wild Goose Chase block can be found in last week's post!

The Generations Quilt

Another project my Mom is involved with is our intergenerational collaborative quilting project; the Generations Quilt!

In my last update, I shared some recently completed Six Pointed Star blocks. Completing those blocks meant I could shift my focus to a totally new set of blocks with a totally new colour scheme!

Since then, I've started experimenting with two new colour schemes!

The first uses black, white, and yellow metallic fabric. This combination was inspired by a butterfly printed fabric remnant found in my stash. The colours felt stark and mysterious and really inspired me!

I cut and pieced one Star block composed entirely of the butterfly fabric. I find it really interesting to see how a print interacts with itself when cut up and pieced back together!

I'm still deciding on background fabric for this block, so it's not completely finished just yet. I think I'm leaning towards yellow, but may wait until I've pieced a few more for this set before making my final decision.

From the rest of my butterfly fabric, I cut about five pieces for Dresden Plate blocks. While that won't be enough for a whole block, that was all I could cut before the fabric ran out.

I decided I wanted to make the Dresdens scrappy so I could use the few butterfly pieces and began gathering some fabric that would match. I can also use those prints to make more star blocks to match the original butterfly one!

I've really loved the direction this print has taken me so far and I'm excited to see how all the different blocks turn out!

However, I found that the black, white, and yellow colour scheme was reminding me a lot of some of the other projects I've worked on recently; the $3.31 Quilt and some Generations blocks from last fall. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, really it just means I like the combination of blacks, whites, and metallics, with a little hint of colour. But I have been craving something new.

I dug into my stash and pulled out some really beautiful tealy-blues, as well as some golden yellow and chocolate brown. These are colours I've paired a lot in the past while colour planning, but which have never made it into a quilt together, so it's their turn now!

I really love the contrast between the blues and the yellow, and the addition of brown brings in a darker value that adds a lot of depth!

From these prints, I cut enough pieces to make four Dresden Plate blocks, and in doing so used up all of both blue prints. It's great to see fabric that's been living in my stash for quite some time get used in a project!

With the blues used up, I'm not sure that I'll be making a set of Star blocks with this colour scheme. For now, I have lots of fabric selected, pieces to be cut, and seams to be sewn, so decisions for future blocks can wait for the future to arrive!

And speaking of the future, this coming weekend I'll be getting together with my Mom and Grandma for a few days. The visit won't be entirely focused on the Generations Quilt project, but I will have a few updates about it coming up next week. I can't wait to share that!

To read more about the background of the Generations Quilt project, check out my introductory post from last year!

Deep Frost Mage's Robe

On my next project, the quilted Deep Frost Mage's robe, I've been making slow but steady progress.

After making some adjustments to my original pattern of pixel placement, I've continued to applique 1" squares onto my robe panels.

I'm currently working on one of the front panels and am really happy with how it's coming along so far! I think the robe will really benefit from the alterations I made to the applique pattern and that it will be a lot more interesting and detailed now!

Aside from actual sewing, I did make progress towards collecting and marking more of my little blue pixels. While visiting Mom for the weekend, she kindly shared some of her blue fabric scraps with me!

Blue is her favourite colour, so Mom had a lot of blue fabric, including many prints that I don't have. The additional fabric squares I got from her will add a lot of great variety to the pixelated design on this robe!

Aside from that, I haven't done much. Hand applique takes time and there are a lot of pixels to be cut, marked, and sewn. Regardless, I've been having a lot of fun with this project and I can't wait to be able to wear it!

For more about the Deep Frost Mage's robe project, check out my progress post from October!

Historically Inspired Linen Shirt

With so many projects currently in progress, I'm thrilled to be able to share that I've actually recently completed one!

After nearly a year of sewing, my hand-sewn, historically inspired linen shirt project is finally complete!

Just yesterday afternoon, I finished sewing the buttonholes and buttons. This is my first time doing hand sewn buttonholes, so this may not be the most amazing example of this technique, but I learned something new and thoroughly enjoyed the process!

Unfortunately, due to the shortening days of late autumn, I haven't been able to get any photos of the completed shirt in use. No one gets home early enough to hold the camera. I'll share some photos once a second set of hands is available to take them!

Although I don't have many pictures to share at the moment, I can share the completion of one of my Autumn goals! This project was just expected to make progress, but with so little left to do, it got completed instead! I'm so excited about how it turned out and I can't wait to get this shirt in use!

For a look back at where this project started, check out my linen research post from last winter!

Friends, it has been amazing to see all the projects I've made progress on, have completed, and the ones that I've made a new start on!

And while I completed one of my Autumn goals, there were a few that didn't get acknowledged in this week's update;

I haven't made any new progress on the $3.31 Quilt since I'm waiting on the release of the next set of block instructions. They'll be out sometime tomorrow and I can't wait to see what animal I'll be making next!

I also haven't progressed on the quilting of Simply Woven. This is due in part to my excitement over other projects, but mostly to the very limited space I have available for machine quilting since the sewing room renovations are still in progress. I just don't have the table space to quilt a full sized quilt right now, so Simply Woven will have to wait.

And Friends, I would love to hear your thoughts on my projects and stories about your own! You can leave comments below, send an email through my contact page, or reach out to me on Instagram @v.a.fibre.arts!

I can't wait to see what we make of the rest of November!

Until Next Time Friends, Keep Creating!

~VA