Over the past two years, I have taught the Your First (Modern) Quilt class to dozens of (amazingly cool, smart, awesome) women, and it has been incredible amounts of fun.  Last year, I taught the class as an e-course, and this year I was inspired to offer it again–but this time, with a new format and some fun twists!  This class is a four-week online quilting course that covers all the foundational basics, from choosing fabric and cutting it straight through sewing a perfect seam allowance and working with triangles and curves, all the way up to the quilting stitches and the finishing touches.  It includes not just video, audio, and tons of images in daily lessons but also printable bonus patterns, interviews, live chats, and a ton of support and loving inspiration.  I really hope you’ll dive in and join us–June is going to ROCK OUT.  See all the details on the Essential Quilting page, and snag a spot while you can!

The spiky free-motion quilted project I mentioned last week is complete!  And just in time for a rainy, rainy day.

This is another 1600 quilt, like the Domestic Bliss one I made earlier this spring, but I actually completed this quilt top first, at our Winter Sewing Retreat.  So I think this one is probably a smidge smaller than the Domestic Bliss, primarily because as I was sewing the long seams on this one, the strips got a little twisted and I may have been more enthusiastic than I needed to be as I was hacking cutting the ends.  Still: lovely.  The keen of eye will notice that the strips go all the way from one side to the other here–I didn’t cut off the first 18″ at the end of the first strip, and clearly that makes a giant impact.  The colors here are what makes it fun, though.  It’s a Silent Film jelly roll from Robert Kaufman, all the greys and blacks and sort-of-not-quite-whites from their Kona cottons.

The back is all Kona cerise, with a chunk of grey dots that I randomly found in my stash.  This color really is so perfect–I have to thank Diana at the shop for giving me the idea, especially since it’s going to be smashing with the hot pink four-poster in our teen’s room.  She doesn’t know this is going to be hers yet, which actually made asking her to stand out in the rain holding it up a little bit funny. To me, anyway.  Is that wrong?

One of the many great things about these jelly roll quilts is that they’re such a breeze to stitch up that I don’t mind using them to experiment with my quilting stitches a bit.  I really like the idea of marrying the quilt design to the patchwork design, but I think the temptation to just use a meandering free-motion stitch or a straight-line stitch with every quilt is pretty strong.  So I’m trying to push myself more to be thoughtful about which quilting designs I use and how those interact with the quilt top to make a pleasing whole.  I’m certainly not all the way there yet, but having some larger projects where I feel like I can play a bit with the quilting stitches but won’t feel as though I’ve “ruined” it if I don’t love the quilting design is helping me learn better what effect the quilting can have on the quilt as a whole–a gestalt, if you will.

This spiky pattern seemed like such a cool way to off-set the black-and-grey-ness of the jelly roll, and I cannot get over how much I love it in the cerise thread across the body of the quilt.  I liked it OK before, when it was just the quilt top–I mean, the greys were pretty cool, and kinda chic.  But once the stitch pattern started to assert itself and really POP against the background of these colors, I loooooved the whole quilt so much more. And that’s what I think I’m reaching for: getting to where I feel as though the quilting step isn’t just a trial to be gotten through so that I can enjoy the fabric or the patchwork, but that it’s an integral and exciting part of the process of creating a quilt, and that each of the bits stands alone PLUS working together to make a cohesive and alluring finished product.

Along those same lines, the binding here isn’t the solid cerise I’d been planning, but is a bit of Anna Maria‘s Loulouthi that I’d been hoarding.  And I’m over the hoarding–use ALL the fabric, I say!  I like that it doesn’t quite perfectly match, that it’s unexpected, and that it really adds something soft and comforting to the colors of the quilt top.

Off to run this through the dryer and then snuggle under it while it’s still warm.  Hope your garden is getting the rain it needs!

I find myself in the same boat I’ve been in before, and so I thought a flashback post might be in order. My husband and I are heading out to an event tonight that’s “black tie optional,” and I don’t have anything to wear. A fact that I realized yesterday, naturally. The dress in the post below doesn’t fit any longer, since I was nursing when I made it and the…ahem…bustline is a bit more generous than strictly required these days. So I’m spending part of my afternoon figuring this out (and the other part denying that in 7 hours I’ll need to magically have a fancy dress that will make my husband proud). Wish me luck!

So, it’s 11 am on Tuesday. And I sort of lazily think about the rest of my week. I’m mulling over the classes I have to teach on Tuesday and Thursday, and then I wonder: What am I doing Wednesday night again?

GASP.

I am attending a very, very large social event with my husband and massive numbers of older men in his profession. No pressure or anything. Also: NO DRESS.

I had planned to make something to wear, and had it on the calendar. And then I stacked some things on top of the calendar, and moved the stack to a stool in the corner and avoided going through the stack for a while, and now there I was: 36 hours to go time and nothing to wear.

So I did what we do when we sew: I got sewing. Boo-yah.

This is the same silk I used to make my Burda dress, but in a different colorway (I think that one’s “spice” and this one’s “poppy,” or something like that). The bodice is a McCall’s and the skirt is a vintage-look Vogue. Lining on the bodice is that wonderful Ambience rayon that I heard about from Amanda, and lining on the skirt is a lustrous poly china silk that I got on mega-sale.

The bodice took the most time, but was totally worth it. It’s actually a bodice with an overbodice–the pleated portion is separate, and has a full bodice underneath, for modesty. I love the whole overbodice thing, but wish I’d avoided the princess seaming in the underbodice. I also could have made it a size smaller. When you wait until the last minute, you don’t have time for last minute adjustments. Because you’re still putting in a hem 30 minutes before the car pulls out of the driveway. Just sayin’.

I love the fullness of the skirt, and didn’t even miss the crinoline I didn’t have time to go buy. What I did miss is the pockets I didn’t put in because I was worried I needed the extra 30 minutes to finish sewing. Which I did, but still. Pockets in a formal rock.

Hem: hot mess. There, I said it. I decided to reduce an inch from the hem, so rather than re-cutting all the pieces, I used the serger to take off the bottom inch while finishing the edge. Then, rather than easing out the fullness, I put in a super narrow hem by turning the serged edge under and stitching close to the stitches. Lazy, but it got the job done. The lining is even worse: I serged an extra two inches there, and left it undone. Which kinda stinks, because I meant I didn’t want to show off the yummy lime green-ness of it, which contrasted so strongly with the plaid in such a fabulous way.

I say all these things for a reason: generally, I recommend very strongly that we never apologize for our work. In fact, Stitch by Stitch Power Phrase #3 is “Thanks, it turned out really well.” We tend to point out flaws where other people don’t see flaws, and undercut the well-earned praise we ought to allow ourselves to accept. Shame on us. I’m making a point of sharing the flaws in this dress, though, because I think when a lot of projects–mine included–are blogged, only their best parts are pointed out, and it creates this illusion that there are some who sew perfectly every time and that YOU will never be as cool/perfect/talented/awesome. Totally not true. This dress looked great, and other than my forgetting to calculate my ridiculously short waist into the pattern, no one who was at this event of 400+ professionals ever knew that the hem was bootleg or that the lining was wonky. In fact, I got boatloads of compliments on my imperfect dress–which I accepted and was grateful for. I knew it wasn’t perfect. I also knew that if I’d worked to make it perfect, I would have missed out on a fancy party with my handsome husband in a tux where we got to have grown-up conversations and remember why we fell in love. And there is no way I would ever trade that for a flawless hem, y’all. No way.

Go. Sew. Be bold, and own your mistakes. They’re hidden from view, and are part of becoming better at what you’re doing. And most of the time, no one will ever notice. Not even your husband, when he holds your coat and tells you you’re beautiful.

It took months and months, but I finally decided on a tile for our kitchen backsplash.  And once the decision was at last made, I pulled the trigger and we got it done.

I was initially inspired both by John and Sherry’s penny tile, but it was really this image found through Pinterest that sealed the deal:I adore penny tile, but was worried that in our mid-century mod house it would read too cottagey, and I wanted to avoid that.  But seeing the image above, I got a really modern, clean vibe and thought it would be great in our kitchen.  Which worked out, because until it was installed, I didn’t realize that you can actually see it from nearly every door and pass-by opening in the entire main floor.  Which could have been a complete disaster if this didn’t work out, so: whew!

We had some lovely Lithuanians come over and installed the tile for us, because as deeply as I believe in DIY, I don’t for a second believe that you’re obligated to DIY everything–and that sometimes, the peace of mind of having a couple of professionals do it while you work on your needle-turn applique blocks is worth every penny you’re spending.

This is what greeted them when they arrived Saturday morning:

If you recall, the entire kitchen was country blue, with wallpaper and dark, dark brown cabinets.  The cabinets are 60% of the way to completion (don’t judge me), and the new counters are, of course, amazing.  But the backsplash wasn’t even primed (why waste the paint?) and the wallpaper is soooo not my color palette.  And it stared at us every morning and evening.  I had almost gotten to the point where I didn’t quite see it anymore–almost.

So the real pressure for me wasn’t even really the aesthetics of the thing, it was functionality: behind the faucet and behind the stove, we were getting water and grease spots on the drywall, and that could only last a short period of time before it started to cause serious issues.  And when you’ve already done un-sexy renovations because of problems you didn’t foresee and that didn’t turn up on any of the inspections (new furnace, lead paint, new windows, mold, rodents, spiders), you really don’t want to create problems for yourself.  So we were very motivated to get the tile in pretty much the instant we knew what we wanted.  Which mostly amounted to my husband saying, “Please, honey, just pick something.”

We had two workers, an older man and a younger dude, both speaking flowing and exotic Lithuanian the whole time and taking smoke breaks every 8 minutes.  They were seriously awesome–such nice fellas.  Here’s the older gentleman applying the thinset to begin installing the bullnose.

Because we chose penny tile, which comes on sheets, we needed to also have some end tiles to make it all water-proof.  The end tiles, called bullnose, come in a variety of styles, but I wanted something nearly invisible.  I brought home some 2″ x 6″ pieces in hopes that they’d be able to cut them down to around 1/2″ or 3/4″–the same size as the pennies–so that we wouldn’t notice it hardly at all.  They totally did that, and I love the look.  It might be nice if this were a single piece of long bullnose, but I don’t think it comes in 18″ lengths, and I’m happy with the result–the skinny is so in right now.

This is the left side of the kitchen after the first sheets are installed, but before the grout.  I chose a super light silvery grey grout that picks up the veining in the marble counters, and I loooove it–even more after it dried, because it was just a teensy bit too dark when it was still wet.  I’ll be taking Belinda’s advice from the original Pinterest image and sealing it suuuper well, since I can already tell we’ll need to do that.

But I’m not going to show it to you yet.  Because I really, really want to get those doors on and do a Grand Reveal, or I won’t be able to live with myself.  I’m shooting for next week, but feel free to pressure me.  Plus, we already have houseguests coming in both June and July, so I’d better make it pretty for you all before I have to make it pretty in person!  Cross your fingers!

I’m working on quilting another jelly roll project.  And this time it’s spiky FMQ a la Elizabeth Hartman.

Wait for it.