The H Quilt, or halfway to the goal

While I was visiting my parents in Michigan, I decided to make my daughter a quilt for her birthday. “When I get home, I’ll have 5 days. Day 1, pick our fabric from my stash. Day 2, cut. Day 3, piece. Day 4, baste, Day 5, quilt and bind. I can totally do this.” Dear readers, I could not do this. Work got busy, I was baking cakes, planning a very last minute party (texts to parents inviting their kids with 6 hours notice)… It was a busy and good week, but the quilt did not get finished. We were also dog sitting Amanda’s sweet and wonderful dog, and dogs need to walk and stuff. Wallace was very respectful of the quilting process though.

I never had a dog growing up, but I do see the appeal. It was hard to get work done when Wallace was just sleeping on the chair in the other room, looking so cute and snuggly. I managed to only take one nap with him all week. It was a glorious nap.

The last minute party was actually a success, and thanks to YouTube videos, I pulled off this crazy unicorn cake that my daughter requested.

The best part of the party was the reunion of Wallace with his family. He was so happy that they were home.

But this is not a cake blog or a dog blog. It’s a quilting blog.

I managed to make this quilt out of fabric entirely from my stash. Part of this is because while I was making the angel table runner, I had some second thoughts about the fabric that I bought. I wanted it to look more like the sky. So I ordered some different sky fabrics online, and buying online often means that you’re buying by the yard. Well, shipping takes longer than usual these days, and I was worried it wouldn’t arrive in time for the teacher’s last day. So I ordered a bunch from Joann fabrics and picked them up curbside. Also, 1 yard minimums. I ended up just going with the original fabric (which I had already cut and pieced… I think I lost my mind a little bit). Fortunately Helen is into celestial patterned blues and when she helped me pick out fabric, she was very interested in these impulse buys.

I got this idea from a quilt in Thomas Knauer’s book Modern Quilt Perspectives, which was a quilt constructed of H shapes that he made for his daughter. However, there wasn’t a pattern for this one in the book, so I had to do some quilt math and sketching on graph paper to figure out how to cut it. I also did some funky piecing of scraps to make the squares and rectangles.

I must also admit that I used a bunch of charm pack pieces that Amanda had gifted to Helen so that she could practice making her own quilt, but I am my mother’s daughter (very little patience and too much of a control freak to teach a child how to sew, sorry Mom, it’s true) and my daughter is her mother’s daughter (does not have the patience to sit still and learn to sew, even though she wants to). So that wasn’t going to happen. I’m sorry Amanda! However, Helen loved the colors, and we used almost all of them to make the blocks, along with a few other things I had in my giant tub.

I really like the colors that she picked, which was basically every color except green. I quilted about 1/4 inch away from each seam inside the Hs. (What is the plural of H?). It made the Hs kinda pop out nicely.

I put her name on the back with scrapped together blues for the background. It has a wool batting so it’s nice and warm, but it was heavy and kind of a pain to quilt, even with the Juki. And speaking of the Juki…

Something went very wrong with my walking foot, which is now broken. I’m not quite sure what happened, but it made a terrible sound. I don’t know if something was loose or what. It didn’t happen until I was binding it, thank goodness, because it was helpful in getting the thick layers quilted. I’m going to call Juki this week and see what they say. I’ve read other blogs suggesting that a Janome walking foot works well with the Juki TL-2010Q, so maybe I’ll try that if I can’t fix this one.

Quilt six complete! Halfway to my goal but only 1/3 of the year left.