Intertwined

This is the finished quilt (featured in this post as a quilt top) that I am giving to my son and his fiance as a wedding gift.  The bridal shower is on Saturday, so I finished it just in time.  I decided to call it "Intertwined" because the center panel had the nice intertwined lines and I thought it was a good symbolic name for a wedding quilt.

The quilt is hand quilted.  The center panel is quilted following most of the black lines, which is then echoed in the tan areas, and along each of the concentric rectangles around the center design.  The narrow border strips are quilted in the ditch and the wide border has cables quilted into it.  The corner squares are quilted in the ditch around the brown corner "arrows" and the blue/green patches are quilted a quarter inch in from the seams.

I think the quilt turned out looking very pretty, but I wouldn't recommend this fabric (Stonehenge ginkgo) if you are a hand quilter.  The silvery marbled effect makes it VERY difficult to see the tip of your needle when you are quilting.  It almost drove me crazy.  Well, that not a very long drive, but anyway...

A Fat-Quarter Bag

I finished this project today (I started it yesterday afternoon).  It is a fat-quarter bag made from a pattern in Fat Quarter Quilts by M'Liss Rae Hawley.  It was really pretty easy to make, but it does take a lot of fabric.  It may not be easy to tell from the photograph, but this bag is huge!  To give you an idea, it is made from sewing together six fat quarters.  The lining (including the handles) calls for 2-1/8 yds. of fabric.  So yeah, huge.

The pattern suggests using it for carrying quilting projects or for an overnight bag.  I'm not sure I would use it as an overnight bag, since there is no closure of any kind on the bag, but it works great for carrying larger quilt projects.  I used it to take a sofa sized quilt (that I'm sewing binding onto) to my sewing group today, and there was room to spare in the bag.  I'm sure you could easily carry a twin sized quilt in it, and probably something even bigger than that.

Cat Fabric!!!

I just got this new fabric in the mail yesterday and I absolutely love it.  The little kitty cats make me so happy.  I ordered it from Feline Drive on Thursday, July 11 and received it yesterday (Monday, July 15).  I had never ordered from her before, but I'm sure I will again in the future.  The fabric is good quality, the prices are reasonable, and the service was great. 

The Christmas fabric with the kittens on it is for a Christmas quilt that I am planning to make using the Saratoga pattern.  I'm planning to use this fabric for the larger patches - all or some of them, I'm not sure yet.  The other fabric, all or some of it, will probably end up in a scrappy 1930s style quilt that I've been thinking about, and collecting fabric for, for several years now.