Tumbling Critters Baby Quilt

A dear friend and his wife recently had a very much wanted and anticipated new addition. As soon as I saw this adorable owl fabric, I knew it was meant for this family. They waited til the baby was born to find out the gender, but don't subscribe to "x is a boy color, y is a girl color" sort of thinking so I had total freedom in making this.

This also gave me a chance to use my tumbler ruler from Missouri Star Quilt Co. Because I was just using the one shape, this came together quickly. Not only was this done well in advance of the baby shower, I think it's the best thing I've done so far! The fabrics all play so well together! The foxes and owls are from Urban Zoologie from Robert Kaufman. I backed it with a nice soft flannel.

In a first, I used scraps from the blender fabrics to make a scrappy bias binding. Wasn't as complicated as I thought it would be and I think it looks great!

A smattering of recent projects

Turns out summer means way less time for sewing. I'm almost looking forward to winter so I can guarantee time in my studio more regularly. Here's a round up of what I have been doing recently.

- Dresden Plate table runner!

I've mentioned before that Dresdens are my favorite, and sunflowers are my favorite, so this has been on my to do list for a long time! It was all stash, and at just over 17" across, the biggest Dresden I've ever done. I hand quilted this one with a simple running stitch. It sits on my coffee table, and makes a great backdrop for my many charcuterie plates...

- Flags for a themed campout!

On the left is what I was working from, and on the right are the completed banners. The camp theme was castle based, and what's a castle without a crest and banners? These were made from ripstop nylon which behaves VERY differently than what I'm used to. The appliqués were cotton though. Lots of needle turned appliqué. Overall, I'm pretty pleased with myself.

(Bonus castle shot!)

- Drawstring bags!

I also made these little guys as gifts. Super quick and easy, and a great way to use scraps.

- Still in progress: Picnic blanket

This is getting close to being done. It's a picnic blanket using Eat Your Veggies by Pat Sloan. I wanted a crisp way to use these charms, so I went for half square triangles set in the Barn Raising pattern. Should be about 5' square when it's finished.

- A new sewing machine!!

This is Tweety.

Tweety is a Janome DC 1050. I killed my old machine (RIP) working on the nylon flags and decided it was time to upgrade. Tweety is computerized and has a host of fancy features that are already making my life easier. My local sewing machine repair shop demoed one of these for me, and then I purchased on Amazon. As much as I want to buy from the local shop, Tweety was $150 cheaper online. I will be taking it in for repairs and maintenance to the shop though.

One more order of business: I finally joined Pinterest and you can see my pinning feed over on the right hand side of the blog. I'm trying hard to only pin things I can see myself doing, or is something I want to learn to do better. We'll see how it goes!

Scrappy Four Seasons with Into the Woods by Moda

This started out as just a proof of concept. While knocked down with a dreadful flu, I mainlined Missouri Star Quilt Co. tutorials. This one in particular blew my freaking mind.

I get mega bored during repetitive cutting, especially of small things (I know I know) so this was a real life time saver! Once I could be upright again, I rummaged around in my precuts and decided to give this a go with Into the Woods by Moda, and some Kona charms in Snow. But I was tired of pinwheels, so I decided to have a go at the Four Seasons block from this MSQC tutorial. And I'm so glad I did!

I have a hard time with scrappy quilts. I like things to be clean, and symmetrical, and orderly. But I wanted to break out of my comfort zone and try a scrappy quilt. The Into the Woods line has all of these fabrics in it:

(pic from Emerald City Fabrics)

As you can see there's seven different patterns and 4 different color groups. Making this quilt perfectly even color and pattern-wise was not going to happen. But all the fabrics go well together (as is the point of a charm pack.) So I decided to just have at it.

First you make the small units, then you separate your big stack of half color, half white squares into 2 equal piles. One of those stacks you'll sew color to color. (Photo above left.) The other half you'll sew white to white. It's imperative for this block the the parallelograms you're creating all go the same direction. (See photo above right.) These 4 square units become the building block for the overall pattern. I had a *really* hard time putting the 4 square units together. I kept trying to make them all a perfect balance of patterns and colors, which math has proven would be impossible with 2 charm packs. My quilting friend, PM, was watching me try to mix it up, then stall, then sigh, then mix them up, then try... She finally came over to my work table and gently moves a few around to help me get out of my head. At any rate, four of those become your full block. 

There's your block! And when you put a bunch of them together...

I love how this pattern comes out! All told I ended up with 21 blocks. And, that's all she wrote on that one for now. I don't have a specific plan for it, so I'm going to tuck away the completed blocks until inspiration strikes again.

One thing I want to say about using MSQCO's method for making half square triangles: all your edges become bias edges. Take special care to not stretch or tug your fabric as it goes through the machine. I tend to be a little lax on such things and my final blocks were all slightly wonky as a result. I'll probably use this technique again but I'll be much more careful about the bias stretching.

On to the next project!

OMFG BACON Quilt for Tawny

My friend LOVES bacon. I mean, really loves it. When I got an invitation to her birthday party, it hit me like a bolt of lightning. A bacon quilt. She *needs* this in her life, clearly. With a month til her birthday, could I pull it off? Fortunately for me, there was one other person who knew bacon quilt needed to be a thing.

 My trusty project book.

A quick google search led me to this post by Barbie Mills over at The Quilting Mill. I would have never come up with using Dresden wedges to make wavy bacon. Thank you Barbie for being a genius and saving me the trouble of trying to figure out how to make bacon happen. I used her technique for the bacon, but put my own spin on the whole.

For the letters I hand drafted them to be 8x10 inches. Then I cut them out of fusible webbing. Fusible webbing basically makes it so you can iron your fabric to another fabric and it'll stick.

This quilt came out 56" x 60" which is pretty darn close to the 60x60 I was aiming for. For my bacon I used three shades of red from Artisan Batiks Prisma Dyes Mottled. The fatty strips are just a cotton broadcloth in Natural. I thought if would be funny to have the background be silver like a pan, but it's also just a cotton broadcloth. The letters are some bright orange patterned cotton that I've had for awhile. The backing is Kona Cotton in Fuchsia because my friend loves her some bright pink. The binding is black cotton.

Though New England winters are brutal, I didn't want this to only get used when it was -5 out so I went with a low loft 80/20 cotton/polyester batting. I machine quilted this on my old domestic machine. I don't have the patience or technique for hand quilting anything larger than a crib quilt, and I've yet to tackle long arm quilting. That's on the list to learn this year though. All that said, I did end up hand stitching all the letters to make sure they didn't come up around the edges.

And I did finish it just in time! There was much jumping up and down and shouting when she unwrapped it :)

Rainbow Pinwheel Garden for Cindy

This quilt was inspired by a special lady named Cindy. She has always been very kind to me, and tried to insist last Christmas that I not give her anything. I wanted her to know how much I appreciate her. Cindy loves to garden, and had recently gotten some bad news health wise, so I decided to put my stash to use in a cheerful garden that will be in bloom all year.

This is where the magic happens.

I went at this with no pattern. No specific plan. I've always had a real fondness for the Pinwheel block. This quilt was largely stash, believe it or not. I've been collecting fabric for over 15 years now, and almost all of my fabrics from the beginning are floral in nature. (Sometime I'll show you my sunflower fabric collection!)

On the left is my fly by the seat of my pants attempt at a Double Pinwheel. You can see that even though my center points match up well, the outer edges, where the solids meet their patterned counterparts are out of alignment. 

On the right, my solution: a black border fashioned from a strip of 1/4" bias tape.

My freestanding quilting hoop. All kinds of great.

Before quilting. You can see the grey/black batting.

All told, this was about 3 feet square. I mostly machine quilted it, with the exception of some vine looking handwork around the middle square. The batting was a grey/black low loft polyester. For the back I just added strips of each fabric to add a little pop with the black. She loves it and it's hanging at the top of the stairs in the family home.

Quilts for Little Boys

These were Christmas presents for two little boys. The 2 year old likes cars, trucks- really anything with wheels. The 1 year old, well he doesn't have a lot of preferences yet, but he sure does love the family's assorted dogs. These were the first quilts I'd finished in years, and even at just 36x46" the largest. I took my cues from Elizabeth Bett's Car Quilt from Beginner's Guide to Quilting.

The tops are pieced in cotton. I did go out and buy fabric special for these as I don't keep a lot of kid oriented fabric on hand. They were both supposed to be all 5 inch squares, but the construction equipment print ended up being too big for that. A very nice lady at my Local Quilt Shop suggested making large squares of it instead. Brilliant! The backs on both are flannel. Rather than the usual binding, I just brought the back around. I used a low loft all cotton batting. For the quilting, I did it by hand with with a perl thread. Thank goodness I have a standing quilting hoop because it saved me a lot of backache.

Overall, I'm very pleased. The dog one especially came out exactly like I pictured. I washed them with color catchers before wrapping them up and got a tiny bit of bleeding even still on the cars one. I hear from their mom that they're getting a lot of use out of them!