Hiccups

Ah, the darling apple quilt. All the pieced borders are on, and the quilt has been folded up on a pile for a week. Problem is that my great zoom-zoom-done baby quilt kit means that I'm now exactly one 4" stripe of sashing fabric short because I cut smaller strips for the baby quilt, and the store doesn't carry the fabric anymore. Typical.

Now, all is not lost. I can stretch the sashing I have, it just means straight joints instead of diagonal ones, which I think are nicer, but on a solid fabric maybe won't make that much difference. Before I go that route, though, I will check another store in the area (luckily it was a chain store where I bought the original fabric!). It's a bigger franchise and might still have the colour in stock.

I have made great progress on the character quilt, though!


I have a feeling that the tope will be completed by the end of today! Photos to follow next week.

I also have to take one little sidetrack and share another great recipe from Nanci at Quilting At The Cottage with you. She's taken my disinterest in making home-made pizza away! Check out her recipe, it makes beautiful pizzas and the dough is easy.



Thanks to all of you who shared tips about quilt backings!

Apple Owl Quilt

Another recent fabric purchase were the half yard cuts of 4 prints of Timeless Treasures Apple fabric. I decided on a 9-patch baby quilt, since everyone seems to be blogging about 9-patches these days, thanks without doubt to AmandaJean :)

My proudest moment was when I selected and cut out all the fabric needed for this quilt except the backing. I felt like I had a quilt kit in my hand, zoom zoom, done!


Thanks to my enormous fabric purchases earlier this year, I have all kinds of solid fabrics in my stash and felt like I was in a fabric store, wandering around with the Apple fabrics and matching the solids to the prints.


The green leafy fabric will be the binding, and the grey-beige the sashing.

And while that plan stayed the same, I quickly decided from looking more and more at the fabric and how cute it is, that I wanted a big quilt with it. If I had made the baby quilt first, I wouldn't have had enough fabric left over...

So, I went back to cutting, and then started making 9 patches...

Making a big quilt had the advantage that I could strip piece more of the 9 patches! 3 strips per fabric pair gave me 8 9-patch blocks, and since I had 4 fabric pairs, that got me up to 32 blocks. I made 3 extra for a 5x7 block layout.


Originally, I had planned 1.5" inner sashing and 2.5" outer sashing, but with only 5x7 blocks, I needed a bit more width, so rather than using more blocks, I made all the sashing 2.5" wide.

Here are the 4 fabric pairs showcased:


I love the owls!



By cutting along the selvage, I managed to get strips long enough for the width of the quilt.


I pieced the outer sashing for the length of the quilts, and am in the process of adding a pieced border out of the left over pieces of apple/owl fabric I had from strip-piecing.


This is how far I've gotten in 3 days, gosh, it feels good to make progress like this! I have the top and bottom pieced strip ready, then there'll be another sashing border, I'll probably use the 2" strips I already cut, because I'm getting low on this particular fabric, and the it's time for binding. Oh, and a backing.

Does anyone else have a hard time picking out backing fabric???

I always try to match the backing to the front, though I see many of you don't, and it still looks great.

Also, I think of quilt backs purely as a necessity to hold the batting in, I look at the top, not at the back, so I don't want to use pretty fabric that I might want to use on a quilt top some day... very tricky!

Any tips and tricks how to overcome this backing-block? :)

Busy Girl!

So, as I said, inspiration struck, not just today but over the last week. I felt quilts just pouring out of me, so I got started.

First, I cut into the polar bear fabric I bought in BC. Time for framed theme quilts!
I've been planning these for a while and bought lots of fabric for them, just never got around to them...

I have a dark blue background planned for this quilt right now, I'll lay it out to see if I like it, choosing fabrics was difficult for this one - it never really popped until I added the beige borders.



Next, I decided to use the cool cutlery fabric I bought recently. I matched a blue fabric and at first a pale yellow, which also shows up in the cutlery print. However, that combination looked totally blah.


I wasn't entirely happy with the green either, but everything else made the quilt either too bright or too boring. This way at least I have a dark, a bright and a pale/mute print.

I decided on a very simple rail fence pattern in a zigzag layout.


This quilt top came together so quickly, I could barely blink, and I do like the strange colour combination in the end.

Let's see what I'll come up with for borders!


The next project really deserves its own post, so I'll put that up tomorrow! Stay tuned, but let's just say that with all the 9-patching going on in blogland, I couldn't resist any longer...

Start of the Character Quilt

Some of you might remember the mad hunt for all kinds of very specific fabric for a quilt based on interests of a good friend of mine.

I found some weird fabrics and gave up on some others. I thought long and hard how I wanted to frame my blocks. I settled on the black/grey fabric, my friend being a male and all. That decision almost turned out disastrous because I didn't have enough fabric and the store I bought it at is 4 hours away and only open during the week. Yikes!

So what started out as mixed width borders (to get wonky placements) from 2-4" was quickly trimmed down to 1/2 - 2" to salvage enough material to frame all blocks. I just managed, the last blocks are framed by pieced borders - oh well, he won't notice!


I had another photo showing more blocks, but it turned out so aweful on closer inspection, I'll have to take a better one. I'll blog about this quilt in more detail as I go along, it's on hold right now because inspiration struck...

My First Quilt (for Parade of Quilts)

I just read on Nanci's blog that two quilters named Camille and Carrie decided to put on a parade of quilts. The idea is to show your first and last quilt and describe what you've learned. I think these kind of shared quilt stories all compiled on one site are great to meet more quilters!

Well, my first quilt is the Late Fall Quilt that I showed for the Blogger's Quilt Festival - it's a double Irish chain pattern that I learned at evening school taught by two lovely volunteers, Helen and Leona. I learned how to machine piece, strip-piece, machine-quilt (free-motion stippling and wavy lines and straight lines with a walking foot).


I guess I kind of have two first quilts actually, because I took a second class at the same time to learn hand-quilting, and started and finished the Jungle Baby Quilt for my newly-born nephew at around the same time as the Late Fall Quilt. It was a similar class, taught at a different school by a different teacher (Cathy). We learned a variety of block patterns and hand-quilted them.

(Four Patch)

I quilted these diagonal lines without guidelines - then I discovered fabric pencils, what a difference!

(Rail Fence)

(The Jungle Panel)

(Bow Tie)

(Friendship Star)

(Log Cabin)

MY LAST QUILT (so far!)

I'm really glad I finished this next quilt just a few days ago so I can blog about it because I love it! It was made for friends of mine who were getting married last Saturday. I blogged about it in the post just before this one. It's an adapted Bento Box pattern. I saw a bento box quilt on Ginny's blog and really liked the pattern. I did my own math and figured out all the block and strip sizes I wanted and even wrote a tutorial about how I made the quilt.


And what have I learned between my first and last quilt? Let's make a list, shall we? :)

1. more confidence picking colours for a quilt
2. not to feel guilty for buying fabric cause I love fabrics - the joy I get from them is worth every penny!
3. lots of new patterns and how to figure them out from looking at a quilt or diagram. I don't work well with pattern instructions and like to adapt quilts that inspire me to my own wishes
4. that giving a quilt to someone you love or means a lot to you is one of the greatest feelings ever because these quilts are truely works of art and lots of effort so they express how much I value the recipients
5. not everything has to be stippled - if you follow the wedding quilt link you'll see there's not a single stipple on that quilt - I'm diversifying :)
6. quilters are a lot of fun and very generous!
7. triangles are not that scary after all
8. that quilting will be with me for the rest of my life, and since I'm only in my 20s, I'm hoping that will be a long time! (Oh, and if there are ANY 20-something quilters out there reading this post, I'd love to hear from you - I'm starting to think that I'm weird because I've found only 2 people under 40 here who quilt, and I know NO quilters under 30 here (here being PEI, Canada).

I look forward to looking at all the posts next Monday and finding lots of new sites of inspiration! Hope you enjoyed my post and I appreciate every comment you leave :)

Wedding Quilt in Full

It's finished and delivered! I clipped the last thread at noon on Saturday, 3 hours before the wedding!



After all the work, I never though of bringing something to wrap it in, so it ended up going to the gift table in the white plastic bag I carried it around in - at least it was logo-free :)


I hope the couple likes it, I sure like it a lot!

Off To Deliver A Quilt

So, the wedding quilt is done, I put the last binding stitch in on Tuesday, attached a big label with lots of good wishes and am just now hiding the loose threads. I'm happy I finished on time, it took 5 weeks to make this queen size quilt.

I'm hoping to get some helpers at the wedding to hold the quilt up, because as we saw before, it doesn't fit on my living room floor well, and short of hanging from the ceiling, I can't get high enough to photograph it properly!

I'll post when I get back!

Happy stitching!