Little Deer block

The only block that I needed for the June meeting of my Moda group was the Little Deer block.  I actually finished it the day before the meeting.  As it turned out, I didn't actually get to go to the meeting, because my husband and I had to make an unexpected trip to the urologist's office.  (The ups and downs of prostate surgery recovery.  Thankfully nothing too serious, but it's always better to be safe with these sorts of things.)  But at least it was finished on time and I can show it at the next meeting.  I even did the embroidery!  Go me!

More Art!

 A watercolor dandelion I painted for my mother's Mother's Day card.

 Some abstract watercolor tulips.

 A pencil drawing of a cat.

 A pencil drawing of a lamp from a reference photo a tore out of a magazine.

 An abstract watercolor cat face that I painted from a demo I found online.

 A line-and-wash (ink and watercolor) magnolia that I did from a reference photo I took in my neighbor's yard.

A pencil drawing of my youngest granddaughter.  I'm not including the reference photo because my stepdaughter is particular about sharing her photos online.

A watercolor ice cream cone that I painted for my husband's birthday card.

I like some of my efforts better than others, but I've been enjoying the learning experience.

Baby Boy Quilt finished

This one I quilted myself.  It is done in diagonal lines through the darker patches of the four-patch blocks.  I originally started marking it on the diagonal through all the blocks of the four-patch, but I decided that was too much quilting for a baby quilt.  I like to keep them soft. 

It is also machine bound, which I don't normally do.  I attached the binding strips to the back instead of the front and turned it toward the front.  I did a zigzag stitch on the top to hold the binding in place.  It's not my preferred way of binding a quilt and not my favorite aesthetic either, but I don't hate it, so that's something.

Again, I finished this quilt last month (just 10 days from when I started it), and I'm just now getting around to posting about it.  This year has been very hectic - two trips to Washington State, one trip to New Jersey, several trips to Dothan for doctor visits, my son's graduation in Tuscaloosa, and most recently my husband's surgery last week.  I hope that the second half of the year is less eventful!

Mischievous Wife Quilt

On our trip home from New Jersey last month, I finished the binding on this quilt.  It was my adaptation of the Gypsy Wife quilt that our Moda group did last year.  It was quilted by the Gammill Girls at the Front Porch Quilt Shoppe.  I bound it in the same fabric as the border.

It's a nice sized quilt, a bit longer than the ones I have photographed on the fence before.  It hangs down onto the ground by several inches.  I still don't know what to do with it.  It's okay and all, but I still don't love it.

Little Boy Baby Quilt

This little quilt top went from idea to finished quilt top today.  This morning I bought some fabric to go with some older fabric from my stash.  Because the older fabric had been washed, I washed the new fabric, too (after lunch).  Once it was all washed, dried, and ironed, I cut out the pieces and got to work sewing.  It's obviously a very simple pattern, and it sewed together very quickly and easily.

The center focal fabric of the quilt was a 14-1/2 x 20-1/2 inch scrap, but it could easily be cut from a fat quarter.  In fact, my idea for the pattern, in general, is to use it to showcase a fat quarter.  I think it is a good way to use larger scale novelty print fabric.

My plan for this quilt top is to quilt it myself in a cross-hatch pattern.  Once it is all finished up, I plan to donate it to the Methodist Church as part of my guild's on-going support of their tradition to give a quilt to all babies baptized there.

The pattern is available here for free.  Enjoy!

A little art

I've been playing a little bit with watercolor painting off and on recently.  I've posted at least one watercolor project before.  Today I decided to try the new watercolor pencils that I bought the other day.  As a general rule, I tend to be a perfectionist, so watercolor is not an obvious medium for me.  But the goal is to get outside of my comfort zone and do something a little freer.  As you can probably tell, I haven't reached that goal yet.  I still tend to be very rigid with my work.  I think it looks nice, but it's not exactly what I'd call free.  The watercolor pencils are good for detail, so that's good for my more exacting side.

This is a sketch that I drew from a photo of my oldest granddaughter.  I think it turned out pretty good and recognizable from the original photograph. Here is the original photograph that I was working from.

Butterfly Garden

I finished the binding on this one two weeks ago, but I just got the label attached and a picture made.  I've been so behind on things lately!  I decided to name it Butterfly Garden for a couple of reasons.  One, it has both butterfly fabric and flower fabric.  Two, the fabric line is called Tea House and my tea house has plants around it that are supposed to attract butterflies, and at times they actually do.

It is nice to actually be able to call something a finished product.  It seems like it's been a while since I got to do that!

Vintage Christmas blocks for April

 

I got them finished in time! I don't know if anyone will notice or not, but decided to make the gingerbread house a little simpler than the directions called for. I really felt like the original design was more intricate than it needed to be. I'm fine with my door not having a window in it and my window not having a frame around it. Oh, and I also omitted the sidewalk. It still looks plenty enough like a gingerbread house to me.

Baby Doll quilt top

I've been so busy lately that it took me almost a month to get around to adding the borders to the baby doll block, and some of the pieces were already cut!  Oh well, at least it's done now.  Unfortunately I have three blocks to make for this month's Moda class and very little time to do it in.  Obviously sewing hasn't been much of a priority lately.  I'm sure I can get them done if I make it a priority to do so.

Baby Doll big block

One of the other blocks we were assigned this month was the baby doll block.  I'm not planning to use it in my Christmas quilt, but I decided to make it anyway.  Instead of making it in the 6-inch, or 12-inch size, that was given in the book, I decided to scale it up to a 36-inch block.  No tiny pieces in this one!  Now all I have to do is add some borders and I have a cute baby doll quilt.  Big block baby quilts are fun.

Holly and Ivy block

I only needed one block out the ones that were assigned to us this month.  I'm not super happy about how it turned out, but I'm not a fan of making 6 inch blocks, so I'm not planning to do it over.  It'll do.

Cotton Rose Block

My quilt guild, The Cotton Rose Quilters, decided to have a contest among the members to design a "cotton rose" block.  It could really be anything we wanted it to be, but the idea was to somehow make it representative of the guild.  I chose to combine a carpenters wheel block with a friendship star block, using the colors of an actual cotton rose bloom. 

I've always felt like the outer part of the carpenters wheel block mimics a flower.  I thought changing the inner star from the original to a friendship star would represent the friendships that we develop through the guild, and mimic the yellow center of the cotton rose bloom. 

I'm pleased with how it turned out, but there are soooo many half square triangles that making just one block is time consuming.  If I made it again, I might change my method and make some units as flying geese instead of HSTs.

Here are some pictures of actual cotton rose blooms.  They can be single (top) or double (bottom) blooms, and they change from white to pink as the blooms age.

The pattern for the block is available here for free.  Enjoy!

More Star Blocks

Today I used some more of my red, white, and blue scrap fabric to make a couple more star blocks for the National Quilters Day Out/Quilts of Valor project.  The one on the left is a Simple Spinning Star block and the one on the right is an equilateral (or 60 degree) triangle star.  Both of them went together really quickly and easily. 

They both turned out really true to size.  The units that make the points in the Spinning Star block were made oversized, so that they could be trimmed down to 4-1/2 inches squares, which made the final piecing easier to keep true to size.  The triangles in the equilateral star block were cut with a 60 degree triangle ruler, so they were very precise too.  The height of the block was actually accurate from just sewing the rows together, and the sides were trimmed down to make it a 12-1/2 inch square.

Simplish in Circle Play

Last month at our Moda class, our extra project was a quilt called Simplish.  The pattern is available as a free download from Shabby Fabrics.  The original pattern uses precuts from Wilmington Prints fabrics (a 5 karat mini-crystals, a 10 karat mini-crystals, and 1 essential gems), which are all 24 count packages. I used a Benartex layer cake (42 count) in Circle Play fabric, which I already had on hand, and cut 2-1/2 inch strips from solid black yardage for my quilt. 

I still need to find fabric for the backing.  I didn't buy any yardage from the fabric line when I bought the layer cake, so hopefully I can find something that will go well with it.  I plan to bind it in the solid black.  The finished quilt will be 56-1/2 x 70 inches, so it makes a nice sized sofa throw.

Sunglasses Required!

I just realized that I had forgotten to post a picture of this quilt that I finished right before we left to go visit family in the Seattle area at the end of last month.  It was a nice day and I took the picture outside, but then I forgot to post it!  Oh well, better late than never. 

I've been calling this quilt Sunglasses Required, because it is so bright and colorful.  It is a two fabric bargello quilt, made from an ombre fabric and bold print fabric.  It was really pretty easy to make, yet produces a very striking result.  It was machine pieced and professionally longarm quilted.

Ohio Star block

This year my quilt guild is doing a simple sampler quilt for our monthly project.  In January we were given instructions for making an Ohio Star block - a very traditional block.  I wasn't even planning to make the block, because I wasn't sure that I wanted to make the quilt, which will ultimately consist of nine 12-inch blocks. 

However, a nearby quilt guild is planning a National Quilters Day Out project for making Quilts of Valor, and quilters are asked to come by and make, or make ahead and donate, red, white and blue star blocks.  So I decided to go ahead and make the Ohio Star block, but do it in red, white and blue fabrics so that I could donate it to the Quilt of Valor project.

Vintage Christmas - January Blocks

This year our group that meets at the Front Porch Quilt Shoppe is doing Lori Holt's Vintage Christmas blocks.  Some people are doing the Vintage Christmas quilt that is pictured on the cover of the book, which involves making 6-inch squares for all 42 blocks in the book.  Some are doing the Christmas Eve quilt, which uses 25 of the blocks done in the 12-inch size.  Probably some people will do some of the other quilts featured in the book.  I probably won't be alone in doing something completely different with the blocks.  At least one other person mentioned that they were going to do something different.

What I really need, when it comes to Christmas quilts, is a Christmas wall hanging.  Everything featured in the book was either too big, or too small, for what I was wanting.  I decided to use blocks from the book and make up my own wall hanging size quilt.  It will feature a 12-inch block in the center, surrounded by sashing, 6-inch blocks, more sashing, 3-inch blocks (made from an element of one of the 6-inch blocks in the book), and an outer border.

For the class, we were assigned 5 blocks for this month, if we were doing the cover quilt.  Of those blocks, I only wanted to use 2 of them in my quilt, so that's all I made.  On the left is the Christmas Candles blocks and on the right is the Glisten block, both in the 6-inch size.  Lots of tiny pieces here.  That's not my favorite thing to do, but I'm willing to do it for a quilt that I want to have.  Maybe I won't go crazy before the year is over and the project is finished!

2018 Goals In Review

At the beginning of 2018 I set some goals for myself:

1. Finish the year with fewer unquilted quilt tops than I started the year with
2. If I start new projects, use fabrics that I already have on hand.
3. If I buy new fabric, it should be to finish an existing project or complete a project I've previously designed.

So, how did that work out?  Well . . . not so good actually. 

I did accomplish the first one.  I did, in fact, end the year with fewer unquilted quilt tops than I started with.  Of the 19 unquilted tops I started with, I got 7 quilted.  I then created 4 new quilt tops that haven't been quilted, although one is at the quilt shop to be quilted, so I'm not sure that one should count against me.  But that is still a net improvement, so I win that one.

On goal number 2, I was doing pretty good there until I got to July.  The two fabric bargello quilt wasn't really something I designed, but it was something I had been wanting to make for quite a while and the quilt shop finally got in some ombre fabric that I could use.  I couldn't pass that up.  Then I found out that my step-daughter was expecting her first baby, and of course I had to buy fabric to make a quilt for her that would match what she wanted for the nursery.  These seemed justifiable, because one was unforeseen circumstances (new baby) and the other almost meshed with goal #3.  However, in November I just gave up.  There were quilts that I wanted to make that I needed to buy new fabric for, so I just did it.

On goal number 3, I was doing pretty good until the quilt shop had a low bolt sale in August.  Her supplier brought in boxes and boxes of "low" yardage bolts, (I put that in quotation marks because I don't really consider 8 yards that low and most of them had that much) and anything that didn't sell was going to be returned.  It was $6.99 per yard, which is GREAT for quilt shop fabric, so I couldn't pass that up just because of New Year's Resolution (aka quilting goal), right?

So for 2019 my quilting goals are to have fun and enjoy quilting.  My only resolution or limitation that I'm adding is that I want to avoiding making quilts that I don't really want to make.  I made two quilts in 2018 that I didn't really like.  I hope to avoid that this year.  Wish me luck!

Sisters Ten Star Quilt

I finished my re-imagined Sisters Ten Sampler quilt top.  Once I saw the finished quilt tops of my fellow guild mates, I realized that I liked the 9-inch square version better than the 12-inch square version.  I also liked the quilts that had a dark background fabric better than the ones with a light background fabric.  And finally, I liked the background to have a slight pattern in it instead of being a total solid.

I saw this black constellation fabric at the quilt shop and thought it would make a great background for this type of quilt.  It gave me the idea of making all the squares be star blocks instead of using the blocks in the original pattern.  The only block that I reused from the original pattern was the Ohio Star block.  I'm really much happier with how this one turned out, at least at this stage in the process.  Hopefully I'll like my original quilt better once it is quilted.

Merry Christmas 2018 quilt

Merry Christmas 2018 is all that I put on this quilt's label.  Since it is being donated to the Salvation Army I didn't want to put my name on the label.  That's probably silly, but I don't know if the kids think these gifts come from Santa Claus or what, so I just went with Merry Christmas and the year.  I used a simple zig-zag stitch to turn the binding.  I wouldn't want to do all of my quilt binding this way, but I think it turned out nice, and it was soooo much faster than doing it by hand.  I would have felt rushed trying to get it finished before Sunday.

I really hope that the child who gets this quilt will like it.  It is such a simple quilt, but when I was in middle school I loved hot pink!  I really like the way that the quilt feels too.  The diagonal quilting makes for crossed quilting lines every 4-1/4 inches.  That seems like a really good distance to give the quilt body, but also be supple and soft.  I'm really irrationally happy with how it turned out.