Wednesday Sewing - North Star Potholders

I've been working with North Star (or Sawtooth Star) patchwork for a few weeks now and love this pattern!  It's easy to get a really nice looking block - as long as you pay attention to a few simple things like matching the seams and sewing just on top of the point.  You'll see!  The first project I made was a potholder - actually two!.  I had some fabric left over from the 4th of July quilted table mat that was perfect for a coordinated set.  I have another project that I'll have a tutorial for in a bit - it's turning out really well and I'll give you a tiny preview at the end of this post.

Materials:
*Two coordinating fabrics
  Fabric A is the background fabric
  Fabric B is the star fabric
*backing fabric
*1 yard bias tape for each potholder
*fusible felt
*optional - Insul-Brite or other insulating material

1.  For each potholder cut:
  four 1 1/2 x 2 5/8 inch rectangles from Fabric A
  eight 1 1/2 x 1 1/2 inch squares from Fabric B
  four 1 1/2 x 1 1/2 inch squares from Fabric A
  one 2 5/8 x 2 5/8 inch square from Fabric A
  two 1 1/2 x 4 7/8 inch rectangles from Fabric B
  two 1 1/2 x 7 inch rectangles from Fabric B
  two 1 1/2 x 7 inch rectangles from Fabric A
  two 1 1/2 x 9 3/8 inch rectangles from Fabric A

2.  Right sides together, place one Fabric B square on one Fabric A small rectangle, matching corners on one end.  Beginning at the point where my finger is, sew from one corner of the square diagonally to the other.  You can crease the fabric with your fingernails or draw a line to help you.  Trim and press open.

3.  With right sides together, place another Fabric B square at the other end of the Fabric A rectangle.  Beginning at the inside corner again, sew from one corner of the square diagonally to the other.  Trim and press open.  You've now made one flying geese rectangle!  Make three more.

4.  Attach two of your flying geese rectangles to opposite sides of the Fabric A large square.  Pin right sides together, matching corners.  Sew in a 1/4 inch seam (use the same seam width throughout) along the long end of the flying geese rectangle, sewing just over the top of the point (where the seam ripper is pointing).  Press open. 

5.  Sew a small Fabric A square to each end of the other two flying geese rectangles.  Press open.

6.  Attach the last two flying geese rectangles to the two open sides of the large Fabric A square, making sure you match the seams.  Press open.

7.  Your block should now look like this!

8.  Sew a shorter Fabric B rectangle onto two opposite sides of the block.  Press open.

9.  Sew the longer rectangles onto the two open sides of the block and press open.

10.  Sew the shorter of the Fabric A rectangles left to opposite sides of your block.  Press open.  Sew the longer rectangles on the two open sides and press open.

11.  Cut a piece of backing fabric, a piece of fusible felt, and an optional piece of Insul-Brite the size of your block.  Fuse the felt to the back of your block, layer the Insul-Brite under this, and the backing on the bottom.  Pin in place.

10.  To quilt, I used what's called "stitch in the ditch."  Some people do this with the quilting foot and/or with the feed dogs down.  That doesn't work well for me, but give it a try on a scrap piece and see how it works for you.  The idea here is to sew exactly in the "ditch" of each seam - put your machine on very slow and it's not too hard to get the hang of.  An alternate quilting method would be to sew just outside each seam in an outline quilting stitch.

11.  When finished quilting, I folded the potholder in quarters and cut a rounded corner.

12.  Apply bias tape (see here for a tutorial) and you have a potholder!  Here's a view of the back.

And a sneak preview of the next North Star project!

Happy Creating!  Deborah

Monday Project - Red, White, and Blue Tie Dye!

With Fourth of July celebrations a week away, you still have time to tie dye up some great red, white, and blue t-shirts!  These are the shirts Big C, my mom, and I tie dyed for our family barbecue last year.  Yep - nine of them plus a onesie.  Our arms about fell off rinsing them all!  Big C and I had planned to start the summer off with a blog on new tie dye designs, but that was before she got a job in Portland as little c's nanny.  We'll do that post in late August!

Materials:
*several tubs - I get mine at the dollar store
*a wire rack
*lots of paper towels or several old towels you don't mind having stained
*heavy plastic gloves
*a dust mask (hardware stores)
*measuring cups and spoons and a funnel that you will ONLY be using for dye projects (no cooking!)
*rubber bands
*something to stir with - I use bamboo skewers and wood chopsticks
*gallon size plastic bags that can be zip closed
*soda ash - this fixes your dye to the fabric.  It is not the same as baking soda but is the same as the additive for pools that raises pH.  Some people use unscented laundry soda, but I've never tried this.
*fiber reactive dye - I use Procion powders
For these shirts, I used Procion Fire Red and Procion Cobalt Blue
*100% cotton T-shirts - I buy Hanes T-shirts by the 5 pack at Target.  I get the regular ones for summer wear (it's hot here in Phoenix) and the heavier ones for winter wear
*plastic squeeze bottles
*optional - artificial sinew (goes by names like waxed linen or waxed string, sometimes)


Where to buy supplies:
There are several on-line sites to buy dye supplies from and if you are lucky enough to live in a university town with a fibers program, the local art stores will probably carry a basic line of materials.  I order mine from Dharma Trading Company.  I've been a happy customer for about 20 years.  They're friendly, knowledgeable, and always willing to answer questions.

See this past blog post for directions on tie dying T-shirts.  There are a couple of videos demonstrating how to tie the shirts for spirals and stripes.  For the shirts in the middle of the opening photo, we pleated the shirts vertically and then tied the pleats only up to the arm pits.  Above that, we scrunched them up and added the blue in splotches.  It's a very uncontrolled method!

A few hints --

Be sure to leave a good size buffer of white between the red and blue to avoid getting purple.  It was close on some of these, but we managed to only get a little brown on one shirt.  Brown?!  Yeah, we couldn't figure that one out either.

Be prepared for lots of rinsing!  Both of these colors seem to need that.

You'll have pinkish tinges on the white when rinsing.  Don't panic!  Wash in Synthrapol or another dye dispersing detergent and you'll have white again when they come out of the washer.

Try other types of shirts too!  I made this one for my husband with a rayon button up shirt from Dharma.  I had very little pattern in mind - so I got very little pattern!  But he liked it.

Happy Creating!  Deborah

Friday Inspiration - North/Sawtooth Star Quilts

Oh boy .... this is how I felt when as an adult, I found out George Washington didn't really chop down a cherry tree and tell the truth about the deed!  For some reason, I loved this story as a child - it could have been because I loved cherries.  And I had the worst poker face in the family, so I learned quickly that trying to lie just didn't work.  When my mother wanted to know what happened, she'd focus on me!

So what cherished story did I just find out is now viewed as controversial, to put it mildly?  Actually, two stories - I also just found out that Betsy Ross didn't stay up for nights on end sewing our first flag.  In fact, she didn't even sew our first flag.  Hmmph.  But the one really bothering me is that civil war and quilt historians do not think there is enough evidence to support the stories of quilting patterns being codes on the Underground Railroad.  And that there are big, big holes in the story.  Hmmph, again. I love this story!

This all began when I started researching the history of the quilting pattern known as the North Star or Sawtooth Star.  This is the next pattern I'm working on projects for (come back next Wednesday and see the first one) and I "knew" a little about its use as a signal on the Underground Railroad.  Maybe, maybe not.  One of the problems with the history of the Underground Railroad is that is was an underground movement.  And if your underground movement is going to be successful, you don't write stuff down about what's going on!  Afterward, people will write memoirs, articles, and start talking - but the whole story is often lost.  In the case of quilt symbols, there is apparently no mention of it anywhere except by one person who told the story to the authors of the book Hidden in Plain View, writer Jacqueline Tobin and art history professor Raymond Dobard.  Just because only one person told of this system of quilt codes doesn't make it a myth, however, others have not been able to find any evidence of this.  And parts of the story contain dating errors - patterns that were said to be part of the code were not used until decades after the Civil War.  If you'd like to read more about this, there are articles by quilt historians Kris Driessen here and Patricia Cummings here.

What I was able to discover about the history of the North Star/Sawtooth Star pattern is --- not too much!  It is old.  The oldest example I found is a quilt from around 1800 recorded on The Quilt Index.  The unknown quilter used indigo dyed wool in constructing the blocks.

This quilt, also from The Quilt Index, was made in the 1850 - 1875 time frame by a quilter known only as Ellen.  She hand pieced and stitched it from cotton fabric on her family farm near Versailles, Kentucky.

And the last quilt I have to show you brings us back to the Civil War.  This quilt, shown in a 2001 exhibit at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, can be seen and read about in detail on the Historic New England website.  It was sold at the 1836 Boston Anti-Slavery Fair - be sure to visit the website and read the poem that was embroidered in the center.  More about the anti-slavery fairs can be found on Barbara Brackman's Civil War quilts blog.  In fact, if you like quilting history, you'll probably love her site and her book Facts and Fabrications: Unraveling the History of Quilts and Slavery.

The thing about cherished stories is just that - they're cherished.  I'll probably always think of the Underground Railroad when I see this pattern, just as I won't totally discard my visions of Betsy Ross selflessly toiling away on our flag or a young George Washington bravely doing the right thing.  Escaped slaves traveled at night and we do know they followed the North Star.  I may just hang onto my vision of a North Star quilt in some way marking their next station.

Who knows .....

Happy Creating!  Deborah

Wednesday Sewing - Quilted Fourth of July Table Mat

This year I'm going all out making 4th of July themed table linens!  This table mat uses the same base pattern and general directions as the Valentine Day themed and Spring table mats, so I'll just give the general directions here.  See those posts for more details.

Materials:
*1 1/2 yards fabric for back and front
*fat quarters of four different 4th of July themed/colored fabrics
*2 1/2 yards bias tape
*fusible felt
*Steam-A-Seam 2
*firecracker pattern found here
*table mat pattern found here

1.  Cut two of the table mat pattern from the 1 1/2 yards of fabric.  Trace 4 firecracker bodies and 4 firecracker tops onto one side of Steam-A-Seam 2 and fuse to the wrong side of the 4th of July themed/colored fabrics.  Cut out, remove the backing paper, and arrange on the table mat front as shown below.  Fuse to the front.

2.  Finish the edges by sewing with a blanket stitch or machine zigzag stitching around - I used a .2 length and 3.5 width.  Add fuses to the bottom of each firecracker.

3.  Cut one piece of fusible felt using the table mat pattern and fuse to the back of the front piece.  Layer these two fused pieces with the backing piece, pin, and quilt.  I used free motion quilting - if you're new to this, see the tutorial here.

4.  Use one of your machine's automatic stitches to add star-like fire below the fuses - on the Brother, this is stitch 24.  You can also do this by hand, sewing six-sided stars with straight stitches that cross each other as in the example to the right.

7.  Using the same stitch, sew lines of fireworks going off and add single stars.  I did the single stars with the same stitch, sewing slowly and just stopping when one star was completed.

9.  Finish the edges with bias tape - see the tutorial here if needed.

10.  And here it is in use with the place mats I made from last week's leftover tablecloth fabric.  They're so simple, they don't even need a tutorial!  Cut an 18 x 13 inch front and back piece and the same size piece of fusible felt.  Fuse the felt onto the back of the front piece and layer with the back piece.  Quilt.  Finish the edges with bias tape.  Tada!

Happy Creating!  Deborah

Monday Project - Layered Felt Summer Bookmarks

Summer!  I love it!!  Vacations, swimming, gardens, and summer reading!  I read all year round, but there's just something about summer reading that seems special - maybe it's because I'm reading in different places than my usual non-summer spot on the couch.  Every summer I re-read a few favorite books or favorite series and a stack of new books.  Last year I re-read The Lord of the Rings trilogy for the umpteenth time and loved it just as much as when I read it for the first time as a teenager.  I think I'll go for Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy this summer - it's probably been about 15 years since I read that and remember just loving the story of Earth's first colonizers to Mars.  It's good for dreaming!  It's very unusual for me, but I don't have my new books lined up yet - probably because I wasn't able to drive and get to bookstores after my broken toe "adventure."

If you like mysteries and are looking for some good summer reading, I recently finished SJ Rozen's Shanghai Moon and loved it.  It kept me guessing right up to the end.  And Martha Grimes The Black Cat is lots of fun!  It's partially told from the point of view of a cat and dog - and it works!

To keep your place in all that summer reading, I have four summer bookmarks - a surfboard, watermelon, flip flops on a beach, and a sunflower.

Materials:
*felt
*embroidery floss
*1/8 or 1/4 inch ribbon
*embroidery needle
*felt or tacky glue
*patterns found here

This is the last in a series of seasonal felt bookmarks.  If you haven't made any of these yet, you might want to look over the first set, Autumn, since I go into more detail on how to get everything put together.  For the rest of the series, Winter can be found here and Spring here.  I have a tutorial on blanket stitch embroidery here and one on the other stitches I use here.

Surfboard:
1.  Using the patterns, cut two surfboards and one surfboard design from felt.  Attach the design to the front surfboard with a few dots of glue.  Sew around the edges of the design with 2 strands of floss, using a blanket stitch.

2.  Sew front to back using 6 strands of floss and a blanket stitch.  Punch holes in both sides and loop ribbon through, taking a few stitches through the ribbon to keep it from coming undone.

Watermelon:
1.  Cut two 2" by 6" rectangles from felt.   Using the patterns, cut out 3 watermelon centers and 3 rinds.  Attach to the front of the bookmark with a few dots of glue.  Sew around the edges with 2 strands of floss, using a blanket stitch.  Add seeds with 3 strands of floss, using french knots.

2.  Sew front to back using 6 strands of floss and a blanket stitch.  Punch holes in both sides and loop ribbon through, taking a few stitches through the ribbon to keep it from coming undone.

Flip Flops:

1.  Cut two 2" by 6" rectangles from felt.   I used a heather tan that reminded me of sand so it would look like the flip flops were on the beach.  Using the patterns, cut out 2 flip flops.  Attach to the front of the bookmark with a few dots of glue.  Sew around the edges with 2 strands of floss, using a blanket stitch.  Sew the straps with 6 strands of floss, using an outline stitch.  Sew the starfish with 6 strands of floss and a lazy daisy stitch. 

2.  Sew front to back using 6 strands of floss and a blanket stitch.  Punch holes in both sides and loop ribbon through, taking a few stitches through the ribbon to keep it from coming undone.

Sunflower:
1.  Cut two 2" by 6" rectangles from felt.   Using the patterns, cut out 6 petals, 4 leaves, 1 center, and 1 stem.  Attach the stem and the center to the front of the bookmark with a few dots of glue.  Sew around the edges with 2 strands of floss, using a blanket stitch.  Attach the leaves with a few dots of glue and then sew around their edges with 2 strands of floss, using a blanket stitch.  Continue up each leaf with an outline stitch.

2.  Attach the petals with a few dots of glue.  Sew around the edges with 2 strands of floss, using a blanket stitch.  Add seeds with 3 strands of floss, using french knots.

3.  Sew front to back using 6 strands of floss and a blanket stitch.  Punch holes in both sides and loop ribbon through, taking a few stitches through the ribbon to keep it from coming undone.

Happy Creating!  Deborah