Journal Notes

Now that I’m almost done piecing the Blue Daisy practice block from Timna Tarr’s book, I want to make my own woodpecker quilt. I found a free photo on Pixabay, downloaded it to my laptop , went to my “Photos” app, opened the one I wanted, clicked on the three dots, resize image, then just adjusted the pixels until they were under 2.5 MB (because that is the maximum you can print for free on “Block Posters”. ). Pixabay says this is an AI photo but the user is Michael Heck (HeckiMG). Looks like he has lots of other great wildlife photos that would also make great quilts. I then went to Block Posters and chose to print it 3 pages wide. This wasn’t big enough because the size they quote you includes the borders on every page. With borders, the image is only 5.75 x 7.5” per page, So I had to print it again at 4 pages wide which should give me an image that is 23 x 30, which should be just about right. Took me forever to figure all that out! If this turns out well, I want to hang it in our new mudroom. April 15, 2026: got my poster pieces taped together and hung the poster on the wall of our mudroom to get a feel for it. I love it already. April 20, 2026: been itching to start on this quilt but life has been too busy the last few days. I’ve gridded and numbered the squares on my poster and am working on cutting out my 195 freezer paper 2” squares. May 12, 2026: finished tweaking the background. Changed up a lot of the background squares until I was happy with how they blended together and with the contrast between the tree, bird and background. I decided to extend the tree on the side and then made it two blocks wider to the left. I also then decided to make the whole quilt a little bigger by putting full quarter square triangles around the perimeter instead of just the tiny triangles on my pattern. Timna tells you to use full squares and then just trim the quilt top when finished but I don’t want bias on my edges. Hoping my method works. I used Monopoly thread with microquilter in the bobbin and a small blanket stitch for my appliqué Set tension to zero on my Vesta. I joined the blocks together on my industrial Juki using Omni and Bottom Line. I did 16 of my appliquéd blocks over again because I wasn’t happy with my fabric choices. I spent two full days doing all this tweaking and it was worth it. It looks much better! Timna’s method of appliqué was really fun to do, especially on my new Babylock Vesta! I found that for places where I had sharper curves it was bettter to use Appliquick fusible stabilizer instead of freezer paper and a fabric glue stick instead of my go-to Elmer’s. I finally got a chance to use my Appliquick sticks I bought years ago. They actually work really well for this. Only drawback is that the stabilizer must stay in the finished block. Some of my appliqué pieces were so small or thin that I had to back them with double sided fusible (steam-a-seam lite) and zig zag over the raw edges. I have many freezer paper squares left over. I didn’t need them for the solid blocks and for the blocks that only used one corner of the paper, I was able to use one paper square for two or three blocks. May 14, 2026: I’ve started piecing my blocks together. I realize now I should have drawn out all my outlines on the poster with my black sharpie before I started doing the appliqué, because I didn’t do it on the beak and some of my lines didn’t continue from one block to the next. Going to have to do some of them over again. May 17, 2026: finished piecing the top! Thread painted some details on the longarm and hid a few little critters in the quilting. Finding it nearly impossible to do tiny details with the longarm and have them look decent. I probably should have hand embroidered them but I was ready to be done with this project. I learned a better way to make mitered corners on my quilt labels. YouTube video by The Awl-Nighter called “how to sew mitered corners | sewing easy corners”