Hippo quilt, part II

She's coming along steadily. I'm hoping to finish the appliqué today so I can cut and piece the blocks tomorrow. That means one more hippo from scratch (more cutting and fusing, ugh) and then sewing three of them down onto the foundations.

Hippo quilt, part I

I picked up this fabric at my quilt guild's show back in November, before I had even joined the guild. I knew it would be perfect for my friend Megan, who has a special affection for hippos. And since she's getting married in a couple weeks, I had the perfect opportunity. (I don't think Megs reads this, but if you do, scram for a while!)

I've been a bit slack about showing quilts in progress, so I thought I'd chart my work on the hippo quilt, which I want to get done by Wednesday, when my guild meets next (so I can figure out who sold me the fabric). Wish me luck!

Once I had the fabric, I started noticing hippo designs in my stockpile of vintage craft books.

Sources, clockwise from upper left: Better Homes and Gardens Appliqué, McCall's Stitchery Vol. II: Appliqué, Scrap Saver's Stitchery Book, Quilting in Squares

They seemed to share an aesthetic sensibility with the hippo fabric—you can't see it in the scan, but the fabric has hippos wearing bow ties, just like one of the appliqué patterns! I scanned the designs and used EQ6 to trace the hippos into appliqué motifs. Then I used a custom set quilt to draw an irregular grid of blocks, dropping the hippos around and filling the other blocks with the hippo fabric and similarly coloured prints.

The red hippo fabric is from Ikea and was amazingly just about quilting weight (I may use it for the backing, too). The other prints aren't exactly the real fabrics I'm using, but they're good enough for getting the overall picture. The hippos will probably shift about a bit too; that one in the corner is really too tiny to sew. Since it's a pain to fiddle with custom-set blocks, I'll just make tweaks on the design wall. I used my satin-stitch trick to test thread colours—because I want Megan to be able to use the quilt as a picnic blanket, I'm using zigzag-stitch appliqué for washability.

Setting up the EQ6 quilt let me easily print out full-size appliqué block patterns for each of the hippos, which I could then trace onto fusible web. I'm pretty much using Sue Nickels and Pat Holly's technique from Stitched Raw Edge Appliqué. I wasn't sure I'd do much fusing, but I like their method a lot (even though they mainly use blanket stitch), and though I don't think they mention it in the book, it's an efficient use of fusible web, since you cut out the centers from each fusible shape and then can use it for smaller shapes. (On the other hand, I'm craving hand appliqué and must get some blocks of something ready to stitch!)

All this explanation is really just to prove to myself that I actually have been working on this project as the deadline looms. 'Cause this is all I've got sewn together so far:

Even that's misleading, since the only things stitched down on the dapper, bow-tied hippo are his toes. More updates as I fiendishly sew!

Some tips. If you're doing zigzag appliqué like this, Kona Cotton is great for foundations. It's got a little more heft than the average quilting cotton, and the extra stiffness helps stabilize the fabric. A spritz of spray starch can help, too, especially on lighter-weight fabrics.

To save myself the frustration of turning corners and starting and stopping, I'm just going to sew around the bottom of this hippo's feet with the darker thread that will outline the body. This way, after I sewed the arc around the top of each toenail, I could lift the needle and presser foot to spin the hippo round for the next toenail, all without clipping the thread. The threads between the nails ("jump threads," I think we'd say, if we had an automated embroidery machine and if we were opting to use the royal "we") will be concealed by the stitching around the bottom of the foot—click on the photo to zoom if it's hard to see.

I am NOT becoming a cat lady

Yes, I know I just posted about Felis Domesticus. But you need to see what I have to contend with at home. (Ignore the dusty apartment, made uglier by the addition of the cat's hair absolutely everywhere.)

You can't see me, sitting on the sofa and minding my own business as the beast prowls around the cookie jar (three guesses what I'd been stuffing my face with moments before).

The beast becomes curious. She must like the hippo cookie jar we scored at the flea market.

Or perhaps she's drawn by the sweet aroma of cookies?

No, she just can't leave loose round objects well enough alone. She actually managed to get a cookie out of the jar, but it slipped from her claws before she could bat it to the floor.

I never fail to marvel at the extent of her evildoings, and I offer these photos as evidence of the nastiness felinekind gets up to. But hear this: just because I'm putting photos of my the Other's cat up on a blog, I am by no means becoming a crazy cat lady. I don't even like cats. I particularly don't like Felis Domesticus here, especially when she's conniving ways to steal my sweets.

An innocent face conceals a sinister soul.

As for hippos, more on them as the week goes progresses....

If you're the Other, don't look

Sigh. 'Twas a long week of work deadlines, but I found my afternoon free today, so I plopped down for a bit of hand-sewing. I've recently taken to stockpiling patterns (and untold megabytes of any other PDF I can get my grubby digital mitts on) in nicely organized folders, which is lovely to browse but not tremendously useful unless I'm actually going to make something. So knowing the Other needed a pincushion for his slowly blossoming sewing exploits, I printed out this hedgehog pattern from Urban Debris and whipped it up. The Other gets a pincushion, I get a nice afternoon project, and my patterns folder gets some justification.

Cute, isn't he? I've been sewing a lot of small felt stuff in the last couple weeks 'cause it's quick, easy, and relaxing, and I can't seem to get the sewing room tidy enough to start cutting for the next quilt top. But I'm under deadline for a wedding quilt, so must get arse in gear!

Quilting Her Majesty

I've been hand quilting Her Majesty's Stamp Collection off and on for a while. I traced the main contours of the portrait that appears on the Machin series of British stamps in EQ6, printed it out and taped it together (twice, actually—measure first, dumbo), transferred it to the quilt top, basted, and finally curled up to start quilting. It's been going in fits and starts because, though I love quilting by hand, the tiny circles in her necklace and crown make me strop, and because I didn't initially trace the crown detail very well, so I'm having to make it up as I go. But the crown is all that remains to be done, along with the 1 from the "£1" in the corner (also traced from the stamp).

All that remains, that is, of the portrait itself. The background still has to be quilted somehow. It's a little hard to make the quilted face out, as you can tell from the photo—I'm OK with the subtlety, but I do want to make the texture stand out a little more. The original plan was to just quilt a quarter-inch inside each of the pieced squares that fall outside the portrait, but I'm wondering if echo quilting around the portrait itself, all the way out to the border, is a better plan. Any thoughts?

Oh, and the Other will give me a slap if I don't mention that using the portrait as the quilting design was his idea. Thanks Other!