2010 Fall Blogger's Quilt Festival

I tried to decide which quilt to feature for the 2010 Fall Blogger's Quilt Festival, and I have to say, I still think my Mossy Monkey Mechanic is pretty darn cool! It's really the quilting that gets me every time! The polyester batting I used added such dimension to the pebble quilting - I never would have expected it, and I actually used the poly stuff in a "don't-really-care, it's just an experimental quilt" way, trying to use it up and switch to cotton/bamboo batting entirely.


Now I'm not so sure I won't go out and buy more poly stuff for whenever I plan to pebble quilt!!!

I made this quilt because ever since starting to quilt, I wanted to make a Monkey Wrench quilt - I'm intrigued that a bunch of triangles can make swirls!

I cheated a bit, though I consider it a wise choice to use a shortcut, and used a slightly different block design/arrangement (the brown sections are solid squares instead of triangles from the adjacent blocks). Hey, it worked for me and saved a bit of piecing time! Plus, I love figuring out the math for stuff like that :)

As I mentioned in my original post (and I don't think I can say it any better, so I will copy some of these descriptions ad verbatim): Don't you want to jump on the little pebbles and bounce???

They look just as lovely from the back!


I've already raved so much about this quilt in other posts, and shared my little mishap in the piecing progress, that I'll just leave you with pictures of all this quilty goodness!


I just want to shrink (yes, just like in "Honey, I shrunk the kids") and bounce on it, from pebble to pebble, and then run and hop along the swirls... I've never had a quilt make me feel like that before - it's a teensy bit scary :)

I'm off to push my fingers into pebbles again and giggle at the puffiness :) (Better than that bubble-wrap!)

Blogger's Quilt Festival

Ah, I'm so tired these days - too much computer work, but I just didn't want to miss the Blogger's Quilt Festival... so here's my last minute contribution.

The first quilt that popped into my mind (apart from the very recent quilt finishes :) is the Brown and Turquoise Quilt I made for my best friend back home.

The front

I had the idea only a short time before visiting her (shipping would have been expensive and I'd chew all my nails off worrying about the quilt being lost in the mail! Though I don't really chew my nails...). However, the blocks are 13" square, so that saved lots of time :)

The back

The quilting was also relatively quick: big BIG spirals all over the quilt. I really like how that pattern turned out and have used it again very recently.


All the colours in this quilt are favourites of the recipient, though I'm quite partial to the brown-turquoise mix myself... just not so much of a pink person :)


My friend was thrilled to receive this quilt and I know she'll treasure it - what more could a quilter ask for???

Fall Quilt Festival

You must have heard about it! It's time for the Fall Quilt Festival!

Here's my showcase quilt, the famous Character Quilt :)

This quilt is for someone very special in my life, a friend with a 'boy' in front of it.


I collected fabrics that illustrated his interests and hobbies. It was a long and winding road - who would have thought that cheese-fabric is so hard to come by??? (Blogged about here and here.)


Each framed blog represents a hobby or interest, for example:

He likes to cook:


He collects sea shells:


This quilt taught me a lot.

I tried my hands at applique when I couldn't find the fabric I wanted, for example a vinyl record since he likes to collect old records:

I also learned how kind fellow quilters are!

I'd been searching for sheet music fabric everywhere when I saw it in a quilt at a quilt show. The maker of the quilt was there and I asked if she had any scraps left. She sent me the small pieces she had left and I managed to join them into a block:


Then there was Ginny, who gave away some great coffee-themed fabric in a give-away package. I emailed her saying all I needed to win was the coffee fabric, so she sent me some of it (which was great, because I didn't win her give-away - I never win those!!! Boohoo). It made a beautiful block for my espresso-loving BF:


And lastly, I learned a new way of free-motion quilting: pebble-quilting

It was a lot of work, and like everyone says, it uses a lot of thread, but I love the effect, it feels great!

Since a lot of the theme fabric will likely not be used any many other quilts, I added some blocks to the back of the quilt, so now it's somewhat reversible:

I put the final binding stitches in 30 min ago - it's really hard to sew on black binding to black backing fabric using black stitch - lighting is key here. Of course I used Mal's invisible ladder stitch for the binding, the link is in my Quilty How To's menu on the right.

This will be one great birthday gift next month!

Now let's see your quilts!