Progress on the plus-quilt

(Linking up to WIP Wednesday today :-)

Inspiration struck me, and I grabbed it by the neck and wrung a quiltbacking for the Pluses Galore Quilt out of it :-) I came up with this echo pattern of the plus theme, using a leftover block I had made by accident.

So here you have the finished back...

... and the finished front. Right now it's about 71"x85".

Here it is pin basted and ready for quilting.

Have you noticed the odd thing about it? I basted it with the backing face up. Simple reason for this: I had no clue how to quilt it based on the front, but the back inspired me to do echo quilting around the plus shape!

Here is what the echo quilting looked like. Note the tense... Yup, I hated it. But I kept going. Don't quilt with a deadline, it sucks! The quilting did not grow on me. 

Yes, you guessed it. I'm undoing it all and have switched to mussel shell quilting. This feels right. I'm quilting it from the front now. Just make taking out the pins a bit trickier... My guess is that I'm about 2/3 to 3/4 done. Hard to tell under my 33 year-old Singer :-) everything is bunched up right now...

Red White Tropical

This is one of my ancient UFOs. I've finally had a reason to work towards finishing it: a quilt show!

I promised the organizers some quilts, but haven't actually finished that many in the past year. The quilts will be picked up in a week, and I've been busy busy busy picking some UFOs to finish.

This little quilt (about 30"x40") started as a quilt class demonstration of the disappearing nine patch block. I had made the various stages of this block, and aftere the class was finished, I completed all the stagesa and put together the center of this quilt. The tropical-patterned border fabric was a find at a fabric store closing sale. It is not 100% cotton and was interesting to work with (stretchier).

I've just finished quilting this piece but haven't had a chance to take some photos. Stay tuned!

Plus quilt layout

I finally settled on making a 5x6 block layout, and after trialling a gazillion differrent arrangements, I'm happy with this one. It was unavoidable having several similar prints together because otherwise I had too much of the same colour in one place, which looked worse. I took photos of all the layouts so that I could scroll through and make a gut decision :-)
Now I could finally press the blocks so the seams of the blocks nestle... Maybe I'll get to make all the rows today!

Progress on the plus quilt

I've finished quite a few blocks of this quilt, and am currently debating whether to go with a 5x6 layout (would need 7 more blocks) or stay at 4x5, with a few blocks left over for the backing, pillows or similar... 

I'm linking up with Freshly Pieced Modern Quilting for WIP Wednesday today.

Pluses galore

I've seen plus-quilts (sometimes called crosses instead of pluses) all over blogland and decided that this would be great pattern to showcase a bunch of Moda Wonderland fabrics I bought ages ago.

I liked one blogger's design of having one reverse plus in the pattern, to shake it up (see here http://kindaquilty.blogspot.de/2014/09/finish-it-friday-final-purge.html). Most pluses will be a wonderland print on blue background, except the one you see here on the bottom.

A couple of days after, I now have a huge pile of block components ready to sew into 30 plus-blocks. 

I'm already looking forward to free-motion-quilting all this background space!

Warm and fuzzy corners

I've decided on a design for the corner triangles of the Warm and Fuzzy quilt.

I've also finished the binding and did a single line of hand-quilting in the middle of the black border (it's a bit wobbly at times, but I did it spontaneously while visiting my grandma in hospital, so it's connected to a personal story for me and not a flaw).

With all that, I now declare this quilt... finished!
And once the sun comes out, I'll take some photos of the entire quilt!

Inspiration

This would make such a lovely quilt pattern! It's wrapping paper, and someday I'd like to turn this into an applique quilt...

Galactic finish

These were actually done ages ago, this past summer. But alas, time flies, and too little of it is used for blogging :)

I have some semi-finished plans to give two of these away instead of hanging them as a triplet wall-hanging. We'll see if these plans pan out. Enjoy these photos of the quilting. It was so much fun making these and playing around with free-motion quilting.

They finish at 16.5 x 22".

Fabric bins

I used this easy tutorial to make my very first fabric bin. 

Since I couldn't find my iron-on lining stabilizer stuff (Pellon-equivakent), I used batting and quilted all over the place. It's not super sturdy, but I don't have any comparison of what it would be like with the Pellon... and it stands up without problem, so the bin works for me.

Now I gotta figure out what to put inside... :-)

Heisenberg

Happy New Year!

My partner and I watched the series Breaking Bad a few months ago and were big fans. As a memory, I made him a mini-quilt with the silhouette/shadow-face of "Heisenberg".

I started by googling images online but ended up having to piece together two images, one for the face and one for the hat. I traced these images right off the computer screen onto some tracing paper.

Then I thought: "How the heck do I get this onto fabric now???"

Luckily, I remembered some fantastic posts I've seen in the past, about sewing right through the paper. So that's what I did.
 

First I sewed the outline of everything, then I started filling in the shaded bits.

After that: time to pick out all the paper. Some fiddly small pieces! But they come off so easily after being perforated by the needle.

I cut out the shape of the hat and machine appliqued it on top of the hat, then framed the whole thing slightly off-center with black binding.

Here some close-up shots:

And here's the back. I put loops into the corners (just out of some ribbons that I cut out of T-shirts -- those that stores use to hang T-shirts up, but which always poke out of the neckline when one puts the shirt on, so definitely needs to be removed in my household!) so that it could be hung up on a wall or pin-board easily.

I forgot to measure it, but it's roughly 6" x 8".