Quilt Restoration

A couple months ago, a woman in my neighborhood reached out asking if I could assist in a quilt restoration. She found an heirloom quilt at her grandmother’s house and really wanted to keep it despite some discoloration, fraying, and tears. With young children at home, the tears could only get worse with use. The request made me nervous because 1. it was my first restoration for someone not myself and 2. handling an aged quilt can be very tricky. Washing and handling can deteriorate it more and you always want to be sure that your repairs don’t take away from the original’s sentiment and craftmanship.

Lucky for me, my client was very flexible and comfortable with changes to the original. The original binding was made of triangles that had completely frayed. I wasn’t able to retain them but she welcomed my offer to add a traditional binding.

The back had almost completely discolored over the years so I suggested we add a new back while keeping the original as batting. To add a new back, new quilting was required. This is a very large quilt, queen size I believe so I asked if it was ok to machine quilt even though her grandmother had originally hand sewed the ENTIRE thing! Impressive! We agreed that half machine quilting and half hand sewing would be appropriate to help with structure and retain aesthetic.

Once I got started working on this quilt, all nerves swept away and (without getting too cheesy) I felt a closeness and comradery with its maker. What a privilege to connect with another person’s art and help prolong its life for further generations. I really feel honored for the opportunity and hope she would approve of my work.

Front Before

Front After

Back Before

Back After - Waterfall Kona Cotton from Knit and Bolt. The photograph makes it look darker, the color is actually extremely close to the original.

SHOP Open!

The day I’ve been working toward for all of 2021 is finally here…the launch of my e-commerce shop on my website! A little back ground regarding how I got here…

I started this site a couple years ago to showcase quilts I had been making for friends and family. My long term, post retirement goal has always been to sell quilts full time, either at craft shows, online, my own brick and mortar, or a combination of all three. Shortly after the pandemic hit in 2020 I was laid off from my job as an analyst in the healthcare industry and found myself as a full time care giver, distance learning TA, personal chef, and housekeeper among other things.

As distance learning picked up in the winter months and routines evolved, I was able to sneak in more sewing time . Missing the math and planning I enjoyed from my career, I started drawing quilt patterns and testing out my own designs. Using leftover fabric I had along with a ton of fabric gifted from my Mom and Aunt, I was able to make some test quilts that I’m donating to the Harriet Tubman Center in Minneapolis. After perfecting my patterns I now have 5 beautifully quilted throws ready for purchase on my SHOP page. Today we’ve reached the year anniversary of the pandemic, my son is now attending in-person school 5 days a week, and my dream of having a quilt shop has been realized!

In preparation for this launch, I worked with Kelly at Parkplace Studio to get the amazing photographs you’ll see in the SHOP. I was already familiar with Kelly’s work so my expectations were higher than I should have allowed them to be, but she still managed to exceed those expectations. She is so much fun to work with and has an uncanny ability to bring out the very best in her subjects. All photographs you see on the QUILTS page were taken by me.

All items in my SHOP are unique and one of a kind. Once they are purchased, there won’t be another for sale that matches 100%, but I can always re-create one similar through commission. New sale items can also be found by following @blue.bird.sewing on Instagram.

All quilts on my QUILTS page are past work that has been gifted or donated (along with one commission). Some can be similarly recreated or used as inspiration for commission. To request a commission, I can be reached at jen@bluebirdsewing.com.

Am I a Millennial?

I feel too old to be called a Millennial. I’m 40, born in 1980, and I have a full head of gray hair. I know Millennials aren’t that young anymore but I still feel aged out. It’s hard to find a concrete answer regarding generations on the internet because depending on where you look, some sites say the starting year is 1980 and some say 1981.

Regardless…nothing makes me feel more like a Millennial than this quilted throw. I dyed some white and cream fabric with dye I made from avocados…and the result is a rosé colored fabric! I mean…that coupled with the fact that I refuse to answer phone calls and only text, basically signs off on my Millennial card.

The power of sleep

My favorite problem solving tool is a good night’s sleep. I don’t think I’ve ever solved a large problem(well) after 4pm. At least as I’ve aged, I think my brain starts to slow a bit after 4 and doesn’t tackle things as well as it does first thing in the morning. So I’ve found that if I haven’t tackled the day’s trials by 4, it’s best to set them aside and sleep on them. Cut to, the quilting of my December quilt.

Last Spring I made a hex quilt with a fleece backing that pushed me to swear off fleece quilting for good. Depending on your quality of fleece, it can move more than I’d like for quilt backing and makes me struggle with puckering. But I have an every day, sitting on the couch, fleece blanket given to us from my inlaws a few years ago that is really warm and wonderful on one side, but bumpy and has become rough and permanently linty on the other side.

I decided to fix the side I dislike with a quilt top. I found a design on Pinterest that Brandon and I agreed would look nice enough when it inevitably ends up on our couch all the time. I made a pattern out of it and got started. The piecing was quick, simple, and lovely. I was very pleased until I started quilting it to the fleece. I pin basted as I normally do but the fleece moved so much under my needle , the first line made my master piece look like a master piece of garbage. I promptly walked away and stewed on it for a few days. On a morning 4 days later, I woke up with an epiphany. I remembered reading a blog from my favorite quilt blogger, Suzy Quilts, about different basting techniques. She mentioned a technique using basting spray that I remember breezing past because I have always had great success with pins and Suzy wasn’t super keen on it either. But as I woke up that Thursday morning, it was this technique that I imagined to be the only technique to save my new quilt. I re-read Suzy’s blog post and quickly ordered some basting spray.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so anxious waiting on a delivery in my life. When it arrived at noon on Sunday, I was ready with garbage bags to lay under the quilt outside on my patio, because in Suzy’s blog comments, people recommended spraying outside to limit the mess. The comments also recommended ironing after sandwiching your fabric, so I did that too. I was so happy with the way it stuck together for the first half of my quilting. As I got to the second half, things started to get away from me. Gathering fabric within my machine had caused the basting to un-stick a bit. So I still have some puckering at the back and I have some pulling in the front, but this finished product is WAY better than it would have been without the basting spray. Basting spray won’t be a staple quilting tool for me going forward, but it’s nice to have it if I decide to quilt with fleece again some day. And no one will notice the flaws as this is crumbled in a ball on my couch :).

Learning through failure

Before

As the saying goes…’If you don’t have time to do it right the first time, when will you have time to redo it?’ . I’m learning patience as I grow as a quilter. When I began 5 years ago, I only wanted to machine sew and take all the short cuts. I’m only now starting to recognize the benefits of ironing and hand sewing. Sewing is a precise craft but it does lend itself to failure fixes, as represented in this pillow, you just need a seam ripper.

Curves have always intimidated me in sewing, but they are so pretty when executed. Having some general experience behind me, I felt it was time to try what I dreaded. I decided to start small with a pillow so I could control my focus and patience. I bought some adorable Cotton and Steel fabric to invest myself in the finished product, rather than using leftovers that felt like a throw away. The beginning piecing turned out really well because all my pieces lined up as expected. But when they suddenly didn’t, maybe my cutting was off, I struggled with what to do. My impatient self told me to power through so I decided to allow the fabric to gather and line up the whole pieces. In the end, this would have been fine if each piece was consistently gathered, but they weren’t.

I had such high hopes for this clamshell, I really wanted it to look how I envisioned it. I had enough fabric to start over but after a good night’s sleep and the realization that I didn’t want to look at this pillow anymore in it’s current state, I decided to seam rip out the bad parts and do them right. The intricate shape didn’t make this easy but I did learn that for this shape, it’s better to cut extra fabric than to gather it. And through lots of internet searching, this shape might just lend itself better to paper piecing.

English Paper Piecing

I recently learned about English Paper Piecing (EPP) from the Minneapolis Modern Quilt Guild and quickly became intrigued. I read several blogs about the method but couldn’t fully understand why I’d ever want to paper piece instead of regular machine sewn piecing. So when a class popped up at my local fabric store, I jumped at the chance to enroll and roped my mom in along with me.

EPP allows you to make very precise, perfect shapes that would be infinitely more difficult simply sewing fabric together. It’s also a really fun hand sewing project that pairs well with Netflix. My sewing machine is currently in our 3 season porch, but with ungodly heat, it’s more like a 2 season porch, so a portable project that I can enjoy near my family in the air conditioning is right up my alley.

During class, our teacher taught us a method of EPP where you only use glue to attach your fabric to the paper. I learned that this is not my favorite method as the paper removal is much more annoying than when you hand sew, BUT glueing is the perfect craft project for my 8 year old! There’s most definitely an EPP transformer in our future.

I decided to gift this pillow to a Dolly Parton lover so I added a sweet quote on the back. I need more practice with embroidery.

Blood, sweat, and tears...not for the faint of heart

I lost a part of myself making this quilt. Quite literally, I made the rookie rotary cutter mistake and somehow managed to slice off a good chunk of thumb and nail.

I have been so excited about this Elizabeth Hartman Norm and Nanette pattern since she teased it last year. I knew right away it would be the perfect design to make for my parent’s 50th wedding anniversary. My parent’s are as adorable as gnomes and my dad’s middle name is Norman.

I decided to make 5 gnome sets, one for each decade they’ve been married, including an embroidered year starting the decade between the two gnomes. The first set represents their wedding with black and white attire. The second represents the states we lived in during their second decade, IA, IL, and NY. Technically, my family lived in WI also during that decade, but WI is not in the fabric pattern…so…

The third set represents our move (back) to Minnesota. My parents met in Minnesota and my brother was born here, so back for them, a first for me. My dad consistently wore a bright yellow sweatshirt during that decade which was cut off him when he fell off our roof during the decade that followed. My mother owned a purple sweatsuit in this decade. I don’t think she had fond memories of it, but yellow and purple or indicative of MN.

The fourth set represents my parents in retirement, my dad is an accomplished woodworker and my mom, as I’ve already mentioned, is a beautiful quilter. The final set of gnomes is on the back. It’s cheery in pink, blue and green. Pink for inner peace, blue for wisdom, and green for prosperity. They also look great in pink with their white hair.

I put a lot of thought and time into this. I was SO excited to give it to them that my excitement got the best of me as I was nearing the finish line, cutting the binding. I still don’t really know how I did it. It was fast, and something I’m seasoned enough to know much better than to do. But, since it is something I will NEVER forget, as I look at my misshaped thumb on the regular, I’m glad that the memory will attach to that quilt. Not a random scrap quilt I made on a whim just for fun. But one I cared enough about to give a chunk of my thumb for… if I’m being melodramatic.

Introduction

Hello, and welcome!

I’m Jen! It’s my 5 year quiltiversary so I decided to celebrate by creating my own site to showcase what I’ve done and where I’m going.

Growing up, my mother always sewed. She mostly made clothes for herself, me, and my dolls. She made my prom dresses, sorority formal dresses (seen below), and even my wedding dress(also below)…which was made with the lace detail from her own wedding dress.

As much as I was interested in sewing and had my won aesthetic that I asked my mom to produce, I was never able to execute clothing on my own to match my vision.

My mom’s sewing hobby started to shift to quilts at some point. She has made so many beautiful quilts for every member of our family. When I was pregnant I was very picky about the style and color of the first quilt my mom would make for my son. Don’t worry, she’s made him 3 others of her own aesthetic since.

The desire to create on my own never went away so in 2014 when a coworker/friend was pregnant, I thought I’d use her baby shower as a chance to try my hand at quilting. I asked my mom to help me with a pattern from a Modern Patchwork quilt book I bought her. I felt like I understood quilting more than I understood making clothes…or maybe quilting understood me. I’ve been hooked ever since.

My quilts so far have been made 80% of my mom’s leftovers and scraps. I LOVE working with scraps. There’s something about fully using something that really satisfies me. My mom loves to shop for fabric so we make a great pair. If I have a specific color in mind for a quilt, I always check with her before heading to the store. I love the challenge of making beautiful color combinations from what I have. And the feeling of having just enough of something to finish is pretty thrilling for me. The quilt top below is a prime example of this. I was even rummaging through my trash bin for fabric pieces big enough to sew together to complete.

In the photo you will also notice my archaic sewing machine that was handed down from my mom. It doesn’t do anything fancy, but it does everything I want it to. Several of my thread spools are hand-me-downs from my grandmothers as well.

So far I’ve mostly only made quilts as gifts for baby showers, and the occasional quilt to gift a friend just because. I’m hoping to someday have a supply of scrapped quilts to give to charities or sell. In the meantime I’m open to requests.