Quilts by Julie Ramsey
planned
Quilt insomnia
Aug 11th
It’s 2:30 AM, I’m awake, and I can’t get back to sleep. What do I do? Why, I get up and goof around with my quilt software for two hours, that’s what! My husband suggested I make a quilt for our bed, since the one we have has gotten fairly torn up, and I’ve practically been dreaming new designs; I haven’t been this motivated to do a quilt in a long while.
I “borrowed” this design from a pattern I found online and worked it out first on graph paper, and then in Electric Quilt. The smaller half-square triangles will be 4″, and the finished top will be 100″ square, which should be plenty big for a queen size bed.
I think I like this color scheme, though I’m messing around with a version in all different shades of blue. My husband doesn’t share the same quilt-color tastes as me (he thinks most of my projects are WAY too bright), so something subtle like this should work nicely for the both of us.
Next step: counting pieces and figuring out yardage. EQ can supposedly calculate fabric amounts for you, but it assumes that long pieces, like those for borders, are cut in single pieces parallel to the selvedge rather than being pieced by strips along the fabric width. I think I’ll do it by hand, just to make sure I’ve got things right.
(Click to enlarge.)
Rainbow Sherbet
Jun 18th
My husband is going out of town for the weekend, leaving me at home to go on a quilting spree. I need to put the binding on my table runner and do the piecework for a baby quilt, but since I should finish those fairly quickly, I decided to pick up fabric to do another lap quilt once those are finished. This design is from Creative Two Block Quilts by Trice Boerens, and I really look forward to making it.
Fun with Electric Quilt
Apr 21st
My fat-quarter assortment from Connecting Threads showed up on the doorstop today, hooray! Now I just need to finish off my two commissioned quilts so I can start in on this one.
I made up a rough draft of the next quilt in Electric Quilt; the colors aren’t quite right (slightly less obnoxious than these!), and the design will be more scrappy, but hopefully it’ll be a good approximation of the finished result.
Retail therapy
Apr 10th
My car needs to go into the shop, so I’ve been stuck at home all by myself for several weeks now. I’m in a spot where none of my non-urgent projects seemed all that appealing, so even though I can’t drive to Jo-Ann, I did the next best thing: shopping online!
I’ve had this pattern from a magazine sitting around for a month or so, and decided to take advantage of a coupon I had for Connecting Threads and order the FQs I needed to make this. I ended up picking up a FQ pack from their “Slip of Summer” collection, and I think the colors will be very cheerful:
Of course, this puts my to do list as such, in rough order of priority:
It may sound like a lot, but I do have a regimented order to finish everything, and it’s actually best for my sanity to have my sewing somewhat scheduled out like this. And with unemployment marching on, keeping myself sane is a top priority right now.
Two new geek ideas
Mar 15th
Idea: quilts inspired by engineering!
Engineers use diagrams like these to design circuits, and I think they’d translate fairly well into a quilt. There wouldn’t be a lot of color involved, nor a lot of actual piece-work, but I think a satin stitch to do the lines, and my embroidery machine to do letters and numbers, would make for something very cool.
My dad and my little brother are both engineers, so I may need to recruit them to do up a simple circuit design for me to play with.
Another fun project, once I get the hang of appliqué, would be a circuit board quilt– though hopefully a board a little less complicated than this one. The background would be pieced in the light and dark green to represent the paint on the board, and then I could appliqué on the chips, resistors, and whatnot. It would look especially snazzy if I used silver metallic thread to embroider on the letters and other small details!
Plenty to Do
Mar 7th
Exciting news: I picked up two quilt commissions this week! One is from my mom, who would like a quilt to give as a gift to her doctor. The other is for a second cousin who liked the pictures I posted on Facebook so much that she wants me to make a quilt for her grandbaby. Unfortunately, I’m still waiting on some batik fabric to come in the mail for the first quilt, and my cousin is still picking a design for her quilt. This leaves me, gasp!, with nothing to work on for the moment.
I picked up a copy of 200 Quilt Blocks to Mix and Match at the used bookstore the other day, and found lots of fun stuff to play around with. One of their suggested layouts was something along these lines:
I picked up fabric for it last night– thank goodness for Electric Quilt’s “calculate yardage” feature!– and will be starting in on it today.
“Just a spool of thread…”
Mar 1st
I stopped by the fabric shop today because I needed a spool of invisible thread to finish off binding two almost-complete projects. Of course, I had to take a quick swing through the fabric section… would you expect me not to? 
This fabric store has a little more eclectic selection than Jo-Ann, and sometimes there are very neat things hidden in the clearance section. Today was no exception! I was on the lookout for a fun kid-friendly print that I could use some of the rainbow scraps from the Tetris quilt, but instead I found something else fun: a Hello Kitty quilt panel!
This will be a great way to get some practice at free-motion machine quilting, which I have sort of a love-hate relationship with. I’ve become very good at doing different size meander patterns, but I’ve only ever attempted to do any sort of planned design once. I really need to stretch myself and try something a little less free-form, and I think this will be a great way to do it. I can trace the shapes in Hello Kitty’s body, do echo quilting of the outside silhouette, “stitch in the ditch” around the square borders, and maybe do some sort of large, loopy pattern in the open spaces and border.
I tend to dread the machine-quilting bit of projects, preferring instead to do the planning, shopping, and piecing, but I’m actually looking forward to playing with this one. If that’s not a good motivation for learning, I don’t know what is!
Charity Work
Feb 20th
A poster in the Livejournal Quilting Community made a post about Quilts for Kids, a charity that provides donated quilts to sick children. I plan to donate one of my Easter-fabric pinwheel quilts to the cause.
Not only do they accept donations using fabric from your stash, but they’ll send you fabric to turn into a quilt to donate. They get scrap fabric from major designers and use it for quilt donations rather than sending it to landfills.
If you need yet another project to keep yourself out of trouble, work up a quick baby quilt for the charity!
Shopping victory
Feb 16th
While running some other errands today, I decided to stop by Jo-Ann to check out their selection of fat quarters for the Tetris quilt. I really lucked out: I was able to find fabric in three shades for each of the colors I needed!
I also did a test-run with the new block-construction method this afternoon, using some scrap fabric I had sitting around. (I think black, grey, and white will be a good method to show the different contrasting fabric pieces when I take the “final” pictures for the printed pattern.) Unfortunately, I messed up the math; I can never get the calculations for half-square triangles right! In this case, I think that to have 4.5″ finished blocks, I’ll need to cut the initial squares at 6 1/4″ in order to cut down the squares twice.
This leads to another bit of math– and to think I hated math in school– as I figure out how many pieces I can get out of each fat quarter, and whether or not I’ll have enough fabric to construct all the blocks. If my triangle calculations are correct, I may be short on the “medium” fabric for several colors. I’m reasonably sure I can finish the necessary pieces out of my stash, but I’ll need to account for that when I write up the pattern.
In all, I’m very excited that the fabric shopping went so well, and I’m looking forward to creating another geeky video-game quilt!
Tetris Quilt 2
Feb 16th
I’m currently working on a nicely-formatted written version of my Tetris quilt pattern, hopefully to sell as a PDF on Etsy or somesuch. The more I work on the pattern, I realize that my initial design was awfully complicated, using 1″ half-square triangles in each of the block corners, which made for an overwhelming amount of work overall.
So instead of using the complicated version with lots of itty-bitty pieces, I’ve decided to simplify the design a bit. This new version still gives the blocks a 3-d appearance, but will ultimately be a lot less work: 5″ squares sewn into triangles, cut in half, and then resewn to create the four-piece blocks shown here. The result is just as impressive, I think, and will require both less effort and less fabric shopping– only three shades of fabric per color instead of the original five.
The additional benefit of making the pattern easier to create is that it makes me a lot more motivated to craft a second one. My first quilt wasn’t the greatest, craftsmanship-wise, as I hadn’t been quilting for very long when I started the project. Now that I have several years’ experience under my belt, I’m sure this one would turn out a lot better.
Who knows, given the popularity of the first one, I could see about making several of these to sell and probably make a good profit on them. Maybe if I’m lucky, I could even see about getting one accepted into a Child’s Play benefit auction or something like that.
At bare minimum, I’ll need to create a single set of colored blocks using the new pattern, since I’d like to take pictures to include in the written instructions. If it turns into a full quilt, then that’d be an added bonus!
