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!)

Progress and What the HECK??

I've made a bit of progress on my Blue String Quilt QUiP! Originally, I had only 9 blocks done, now I'm up to 24 and it's starting to take shape. I like it!


Of course, this scrap-using project is producing new, smaller scraps. Sigh.
I just can't bear to throw fabric out if it's wider than 1/2" in at least one direction. So I started a new project and that's taking on a life of its own, literally!

I'm admit I'm kind of scared of where this is going.


What I did was layer brown cotton with batting and light blue cotton. I didn't even tape it to the floor, just smoothed it out and pin-basted it. Then I laid out blue scraps in random arrangements on the brown side until I was happy with the layout. Pinned those down and started free-motion quilting about 1/4" inside each shape, somewhat like the Ticker Tape quilts that have been going around blog land.


I thought it'd just be an artsy baby quilt, but like I said, it's starting to grow out of proportion . Because I started quilting, without a plan. This is like doodling on a sewing machine. Things just happen, my hands just move, my brain just comes up with ideas.

Here's how far I've gotton.


I started with an eye in the center, then I tried to remember some quilting I'd seen on Diane Gaudinsky's blog, but I was too lazy to turn on the computer, so I tried to do some stuff from memory. There's a bit of Diane-Shiko to be glimpsed on the right edge of the quilt.

Next, my hands wanted to do a double feather, with two rows of feathers along the shaft. Okay. I also wanted to leave my mark on this quilt, so I outlined my hand, not sure what I'll quilt inside it yet. I'm considering doing the actual lines on my finger prints etc. That wasn't enough though, so in the setting sun, I outlined the shadow of my face on a piece of paper taped to the wall and quilted that with some wild and flowing hair in the top right corner. Once the quilt is done, I'll show you some detail shots.

I just took the photo above quickly the other night to have a record of this quilt before it totally gets out of hand. It now has enough quilting on it to classify as wall-hanging, since it's getting too stiff for a quilt.

Who knows where this is going next... I'll be as surprised as you, that's for sure. It feels strange when a project gets a life of its own like this. Next, my quilts will grow legs and take over the world, uhoh!

Happy Halloween!

We have a great farmers market in town - it's held every Saturday, and yesterday I saw the most amazing and cute cup cakes with eyes! I bought one of each kind with eyes - they're adorable!

So let me introduce you to the Mummy:


The Blue Monster:

And the Spider:

Look at his cool legs!

I can't decide which one's my favourite, the mummy (so cute behind all its bandages) or the monster :) I saw the monster first and thought it was the grouchy garbage can dude from Sesame Street - that shows how much I'm into halloween, right??? *Grins*

On the way home from the market, I was thinking I might just keep the cup cakes and look at them forever (so cute!), but I figured the cup cakes might grow mold. Then I thought I could just keep the tops with the decorations and let them get hard for eternal gazing at the cuteness - the cup cakes themselves would be quite happy to reside in my stomach.

However, I made that plan without considering the Blue Monster!

Look, he ate both his buddies within minutes of me taking the group photo! Gasp! I guess he didn't like liquorice - he left the spider legs behind...

So no display of cute monsters in the next few months...

Now, before I go and wipe some icing off my chin (how did that get there, anyway????), I need to announce that Prince Edward Island, Canada, yes the far north (*smile*) has had its first snow of the winter yesterday! I took pictures to prove it!

See those white specks against the blue house??? Yep, that's snow, take my word for it! *So* exciting!


It turned into a gentle hail (does that exist??? It looked like hail but it drifted instead of falling and hitting things at high speed) not 5 min later (and then sunshine 10 min after that), but I'm pretty pumped about winter right now anyway.


Yeah, I know - that'll last just until the 2nd good snow storm and the 3rd morning of scraping my car...

... but hey, the days are getting pretty cozy starting around 5pm! Candle light just warms the heart, doesn't it?

Discovering Batiks

A few months ago, I bought 4", 5" and 6.5" pre-cut packs on etsy, and recently I added some 5" charm packs from Connecting Threads to the mix. I do like the look of batiks, though I'm still trying to figure out how to mix and match them.


The pre-cuts have quite a mix of plant prints and tie-died fabrics, which is nice - all patterned would be a bit much for me.


Can you tell I can't get enough of these? :)


I decided that these batiks would be handy to try a larger curved-piecing project, so I printed out Crispy's 6" block for a drunkard's path, and lo and behold, once I added the seam allowance to her template, the pieces fit perfectly onto charm packs and the 6.5" squares I have :)
I did one practice block to make sure the seams are working - I'll redo this one though, because I have a near-pucker in the center, must practice the curved-piecing a bit more!


I played around with colour matches for a while - I'm going to have to spend some more time on this, because some of the combinations don't have enough contrast...



This will be my main project for the quilt retreat which is coming up in a bit more than a week, hooray! I'm so very much looking forward to the retreat! (Same as last year).

Quilt Class!!

Here are some photos of a recent quilt class. I'm teaching my whirly quilt (see the quilty tutorial page above) in different sizes. It's wonderful to see all the different colour schemes my 7 students chose for their quilts!

We've got blue and pink...

... camouflage...

Yellow and blue...

(as you can see, we're working in a library! It's in a small junior high school, cute place out in the country)

... and a few other combinations.

This lady wasn't quite happy with the pattern, so I showed her a few other layouts possible with HSTs. Boy, what a can of worms I opened! Too much choice can be a problem, we found out, but I think she enjoyed trying all the different layouts!


One of the ladies has this neat needle cushion ring - check it out!


It consists of a plastic bottle cap with two small holes drilled into it and a rubber band (hair elastic type) protruding from it (your finger goes through the loop). Into the bottle cap, you glue the bunched up edges of a fabric circle filled with batting (green plaid here). The lady edge covers up the bottle cap. Pretty handy!


A couple of my students are getting close to finishing their quilt tops. Soon we'll put on borders and start sandwiching! 5 more weeks to go... It's all so very exciting!

Tickle Feather

My disappearing 9 patch variation has a name, thanks to the quilting I chose: Tickle Feather :)

I decided that all that white space around the quilt was primer property for some feather quilting practice.


I don't like marking patterns very much, so I just outlined a wavy line that was mirrored on both sides of the quilt and free-hand quilted the feathery loops. It's quite obvious it was done free-hand, but hey, it's a cuddly baby quilt and not a show quilt!

In the narrow strips, I quilted a doubly-looped vine, there wasn't that much space for anything bigger.


I also quilted-in-the-ditch around the large squares in the D9Ps - at least turning a baby quilt around and around is manageable!


Here's the quilt before washing:

And after (note that this is the crinkliest of all the pictures I have - lighting makes a big difference...)


All the pink chalk markings came right out of the white (PHEW!!).

One more project checked off on the QUIPs list!

Quilt Show 4

At the quilt show, there is always a Merchant Mall with local and regional fabric stores represented. I restrained myself (you should have seen the batiks!) and only bought three 1-yard cuts (which I don't need, but hey...).


Because it's tradition by now that one fabric bleeds, you know what's coming. To my surprise, the red fabrics turned out lovely, but the grey ran like it was being chased! Right onto some Wonderland fabrics, boohoo. I should just stop being so lazy and do separate loads. I know. I thought I had prewashed it enough, but I guess I didn't take the fabrics out of the machine quickly enough after the spin cycle.

Alright, more quilt show pics!

This next one I had seen at show and share at a monthly meeting before. It was neat: the lady who made it fussy-cut the flowers out of the fabric used for some of the circle quarters and then appliqued them exactly on the fabrics in the circle, so effectively, the flowers were growing out of the circle onto the surrounding fabrics.


This photo was taking looking straight at the quilt, though when you look at just a section of it, it seems that I was taking a slanted photo of it, eh? Neat optical illusion!




This one was part of the mystery quilt we made. Mine is in the right side bar titled "Mussel Mystery" if you want to refresh your memory. However, I chose a different layout. I have to smile everytime I look at this quilt, because the quilter also didn't follow the pattern, though from what I've heard her say, it was unintentional. Suffice it to say that the pattern was quite symetrical in its block arrangements! ;) I think it's a cute quilt and is quite quirky thanks to the non-traditonal layout.


I love how visible the quilting is in this quilt! If I remember correctly, it was quilted by hand!





Let's end with this impressive quilt: At least part if not all of the blocks were inherited by one of the quilters in my guild from her grandmother, made with the fabrics of the time. It's handquilted, and even the practice block (has a different background fabric but it took me forever to find it since it blends in so well) is included. Don't you love old quilts with a story?