I am continuing my EPP work with my Low Volume Flower Quilt. I made nine new flowers this week. I now have a total of 40 flowers for this project.

This piece is based on the fabrics in the Ivory Basics collection produced by Wyndham Fabrics. I decided that I wanted to purchase yardage of specific fabrics in the collection to continue work on this quilt. Unfortunately my searches left me with no alternative but to purchase fat quarter bundles of the entire collection. I found them at the Missouri Star Quilt Company for a good price. They were pennies shy of $50.00 per bundle. That brought the price of the fabric to $10.00 per yard, which is quite good for a collection of fat quarters.

I purchased three of these bundles giving me a total of 15 additional yards of low volume fabrics for this project. I am sure there will be leftovers. Although I wanted specific patterns, I believe that the other fabrics will come in handy for other things. I may even use them to piece a back for this quilt.

I am linking back to Jessica’s Monday Morning Star Count over at Life Under Quilts.

Those of you coming to my blog through the Monday Morning Star Count you may enjoy seeing the progress I made with my Log Cabin units last week.

I am going to be making the four unit assembled piece into a cover for my bedroom end table.

I decided to do this when I was looking for more solids to cut up and came upon a really nice Kona solid, which I believe is called Sweet Pea. I cut a few 1.5 inch strips for future log cabin units, but i also cut four 2.5 inch strips to use as a border for my end table cover. I attached the borders.

I cut the backing.

I even made a bias strip binding so it would be ready to go after I finish quilting the piece by MACHINE!

It would be so much faster and easier to quilt this by hand because that is what I know how to do, but I am actually going to quilt this by machine. I want to challenge myself, and this is going to be my first machine quilted piece. I don’t count the quilt as you go pillow case that I made because that was just adding strips to a square of batting and backing, and there were not visible stitches on the front of the work, so it hardly counts.

I am planning to quilt this using the even feed (walking) foot that came with my Janome Skyline S5.

Here is where I intend to place it.

I spent time this week cutting new strips so I can keep making log cabin units with Kona solids. Here are my lights…

… and here are my darks.

And here is another block in progress.

In my last post about the log cabin blocks I was questioning the wisdom of using the bright green in the dark areas. I’ve decided that I will use those blocks to make a night stand cover for my husband’s side of the bed. I am not sure what color I will use on the edge of his.

The block in the lower left of this configuration does not have any of the bright green in it. I think I will make another one that has some bright green and swap it out.

I am going to continue to make more log cabin units, and I am not sure yet how I will arrange them in the final quilt. I love being spontaneous.

The bed quilt is going to be machine quilted too, and quite frankly, I am trying to whip out something that I won’t be afraid to quilt by machine. I would be terrified to quilt something by machine that I had spent 900 hours stitching by hand.

As of last week I had 24 flowers complete for the low volume quilt. This week I added seven flowers to that pile making a total of 31 flowers so far. All seven of the flowers above are made with different fabric patterns.

I spent a good deal of time this week sorting out my low volume hexagons so they are matched up and ready to sew into flowers. I also basted quite a few Kona Snow solid fabric hexagons for the centers of flowers.

Seven flowers isn’t all that much progress in one week, but I have a very good excuse. I have been doing a lot of log cabin work, and I posted about it last Wednesday. A follow up post will be coming shortly.

I am linking up with Jessica’s Monday Morning Star Count over at her blog Life Under Quilts.

Jessica has been posting a lot on Instagram these days, and I started following her there today so I can see her work unfold. She has a good point when she says that it is easier to post to Instagram as she is sewing than to stop and write a full blog post. My local quilt guild members seem to like posting to Instagram, and the guild itself has it’s own user name there, so I am already following a few accounts over there. Instagram seems to be the hot thing for quilters these days, so I had better get with it and get more involved with that aspect of social media.

If you want to follow me on Instagram search for “terrischurter”. A search for “hexylady” or “hexy lady” also works since I have changed my real name to “HexyLady”. “Hexy Lady” did not work as well in searches.

After returning from the Slow Stitching Movement Retreat in Lambertville I finished up this one relatively large log cabin unit. It is composed of four smaller units joined so the darker strips meet in the center. I had initially planned to back this and quilt it, but I have decided to make a few more like it and join them for a larger piece. The piece above is 20.5 inches by 20.5 inches. I am thinking of making another eleven of these. that would create a finished quilt of about 60 inches by 80 inches.

I am considering quilting each large square unit separately in a “quilt as you go” fashion and then joining the pieces. In order to be certain that they will all fit together perfectly I may add a two inch border of a unifying color to each of the blocks. That would give me plenty of leeway to trim the quilted square to an exact size for joining. I am thinking of using a burnt orange color as my unifying element. That would divide the lighter segments from each other with a medium value cross shape.

Since completing the unit above I have made the four small blocks pictured below.

I could join them together immediately as shown below, but I won’t. Instead I will accumulate the blocks and match them up later.

One of the things I have done to work on the unity of this piece is to cut more of the deep red strips.

Looking at the arrangement above I am slightly bothered by the brightness of some of the green strips, but I guess that is the best reason to postpone assembly so I can find just the right place for them, or leave them out altogether.

I am finding the repetitive work on joining strips into log cabin blocks to be very relaxing.

Last week I had finished putting together 15 flowers for my new Low Volume Quilt. Since then I have put together 9 more flowers for a total of 24 flowers such as the one below. They are created with a variety of values and patterns.

It has taken me a great deal more time than I expected to sort my basted hexagons to find six identical hexagons for a flower. There are 19 different fabrics swimming around in that big bowl of basted hexagons.

I stumbled upon a way to make the task of matching up my hexagons a bit easier. At first I was reaching into the bowl searching for 6 hexagons of exactly the same value and pattern. Then I realized that some of the patterns are repeated in two or more values. It turns out that the patterns are easier for me to identify than the values, so I have taken to sorting by pattern.  Below you will see three piles of hexagons where it is easy to see that the patterns are the same, but the values differ. Once I have a pile with the same pattern, it is easier to go back and resort by value, so that is what I am doing now.

Learn from my mistake people. If you ever have a nice jellyroll of low volume fabrics that you think you are going to want to make into flowers, by all means keep the fabrics separated when you baste them and resist the urge to throw them into a big bowl.

I am wishing now that I had put these piles into sandwich bags. I cut those squares nearly a year ago. The coolness of the big bowl of hexagons is far outweighed by the hassle of trying to match them up later.

Once I get my hexagons sorted into sets of six I have been sewing them together in preparation for joining.

I am linking up with Jessica’s Monday Morning Star Count. I am so happy it is back on a weekly basis. I love to see what others are doing and to share with them. Please stop by Jessica’s page to follow the links and see how people are progressing on their EPP.

For quite awhile I participated in the Monday Morning Star Count over at Jessica’s Life Under Quilts blog. A few months ago she went to a monthly format, which was fine, but we didn’t share in May. That means that the last time we had a star count was back at the beginning of April.

I’m really happy that Jessica has decided to renew her commitment to the weekly format because I have missed sharing with everyone. This week I am going to link to my main web site URL. I encourage all of the Star Count folks to scroll back to April if you have not been to my web site since the last star count.

To summarize my activity since the last star count, I have attended the first Slow Stitching Movement Getaway, nearly finished the piecing of the Batik Flower Garden quilt, reviewed the Apple Watch, and purchased the Janome Skyline S5. The machine was a demo unit offered at the sewing getaway. I’m getting to know her with some simple log cabin piecing, and I have a class set up at Pocono Sew and Vac for July 18th. There I hope to learn about the feet that came with the machine. I am anxious to try some free motion quilting and some quilting with the walking foot too.

My latest endeavor in EPP is a low volume Flower Garden quilt, which I am working on rather spontaneously. So far I have 15 flowers completed as seen in the photo above. I have not photographed all of these flowers individually, but I will show a few of them below. They are all basically white from a distance, but each pattern has it’s own color tone. Some read as green, some as blue, some as white, and others as cream. I am really enjoying this project, though matching up the basted hexagons from my big bowl of hexies is proving to be a real challenge because some of the fabric patterns repeat in subtle color variations. The patterned fabrics are from the Ivory Basics collection, and I am using Kona Snow as my unifying element for the center of the flowers.

I am not yet sure how I am going to assemble these flowers, but I am leaning towards making columns of flowers with a similar color tone. I’m going to remain flexible about the arrangement for as long as possible and simply enjoy the fun of stitching the flowers.

I am linking back to Jessica’s Star Count today at Life Under Quilts.

I took one of my Kona Solid “Not That White” bundles and washed the fat quarters. I usually don’t wash fabrics before using them. However, my plan for these fabrics is to use them to lengthen a few kaki skirts that I own. Because the skirts have been laundered multiple times it is essential to shrink the fabric.

I prefer long skirts, but LL Bean has stopped making long kaki skirts.

A while back I felt the need to patch the two remaining long kaki skirts that I own using hexagons. One of the skirts had been stained with nail polish. The other had developed a rip in the back in the seat area. Because they could not be replaced they had to be repaired.

I have a few shorter kaki skirts which I intend to extend using the fabrics in the bundle pictured above. This post is about what I have accomplished so far.

I pressed my fat quarters and then cut 1.5 inch strips from all twelve pieces after sorting the colors into light and dark sets of six.

I had my new Janome Skyline S5 set up on a counter so I could stand to sew, and I had my ironing board set up right next to it for easy access.

I decided to create twelve log cabin units to use to extend one of my skirts. This is all very improvisational. I have no idea how large the units are going to be, or how many I am really going to use.

In the above photograph I used the darkest fabric I had for the upper most strip. Rather than choose another color for the second portion of this darker “turn” on the log cabin, I decided to cut four more strips of the darker color, which would be enough to allow me to finish this turn with one color.

This is where things stand right now. Although I completed the twelve units identically up to this point, I think that I will finish them off by using random selections from the light and dark collections respectively to achieve a sense of variety in the outer portions of the units.

I’m still not sure how I will set these units. I’ll add two more turns to each unit and then reevaluate the situation.