Here, Chicky Chicky

Looky here! It's pretty much ready! (Binding still to do)

I once again couldn't get myself to do an overall-quilting-pattern, so it's turned into more of a free-motion sampler :)


Thought I'd share the different styles I used with you:





A free-motion grid! I didn't do too bad with the lines, eh? I did mark them with a disappearing marker (pink, from Singer - it kind of disappears faster than I can quilt, actually), but I only had that idea *after* I started the first line and didn't want to take the quilt back out and start the line again, haha! So I marked the grid very awkwardly and somewhat haphazardly with a ruler while the quilt was in the machine (meaning I didn't have a very even surface underneath). The lines are about 3/4" apart. I kind of like the grid look, though this block reminds me of an oven mit - they must use that pattern a lot! :)

This was the easiest block, I just outlined the printed squares...


Feathers and loops (easier to see on the back, which means this was a great piece for practicing! Who says you can't practice on a real quilt????)


McTavishing on the opposite side:
And of course: PEBBLES!!!

I love this fabric, the bead curtain - so 70s! I went along with the pattern and did some connecting lines between beads of the same colour.

Concentric circles around these green rings that fell in the brown water:


This one was fun - I kind of just put the needle down, get an idea and go for it. So maybe these could be invisible plumage on the chickens???


And I guess the brown dotted block didn't photograph well - it has one big spiral on it, but didn't show up well in my lighting.

I love being at the binding stage of a quilt again. I love hand-stitching the binding. I know many people don't. Too bad, we could trade off unwanted tasks!

Bargello Update - Are You Ready???

Well, my little brown yellow bargello is now called BrownGellow and is not so little anymore...

It grew from this little experiment:


To this bedsized quilt!


I'm very happy with how this turned out, and I took lots of photos of the process, so will put up a tutorial soon for those of you who'd like to try a bargello of your own!

For not having used a pattern, I ran into amazingly few problems :) (mostly to do with me mixing up colours, sigh, here comes the seam ripper!) I also discovered that when I make one section of a seam-heavy quilt in the summer and the other sections in the winter, my 1/4" seam allowance is quite difference - which totally sucks when trying to match seams. I was pretty inventive with my cosmetic quilt surgery! :) And in the end, no one can tell! Hah


I've decided to quilt it first and then put the borders on, since I'm expecting a bit of shifting during quilting, so it's basted to an oversized backing and batting right now!

Last Quilt Class and Banquet Night

Booh, my quilt class is over!

It was a lot of fun to do this again...

Here, the ladies are busy quilting on their last night of class - they're all aiming to have their quilts ready for the banquet night "Show and Share"!




And here's the picture from our closing night - 3 students couldn't make it, unfortunately...

Don't the quilts look fabulous??

President's Block

Here's a very brief post to show you my completed Hen and Chicks block for the President's Quilt!

Quilt Show 7

That's it, the last quilts from the quilt show are posted below... Hope you enjoyed the viewings!

Poppies

I saw this beautiful fabric on the The Fabric Shopper recently, called Poppy by Laura Gunn for Michael Miller - my mother loves Poppies, so I decided to buy some of it and make her a quilt.

I saw the post on Wednesday, contacted Fabric Flair that same day to figure out a custom order - Christie was great and stuffed 8 yards of fabric into a regular envelope to Canada for me, yay for saving on shipping! On Thursday, I paid the order and it went out Friday - the next Wednesday it was in my mailbox, wohoo! I wish all my online orders would go that smoothly!

I don't know what pattern to use yet, but the fabric is here and there'll be some focal piece with the poppy print on it as I don't want to chop that all up ;) I also don't remember if I ever gave my mother this blog address, so hopefully she doesn't read about it now :)


Whatever it'll be, it's going to be fantastic (can you tell I'm excited about this fabric??)! And I even have Shout colour catchers now, so no more surprises in the wash, though I doubt that these fabrics would run, I love Michael Miller fabrics...

Holy cow, I'm giddy - I've been like this all day. That giddiness also made me spent a fortune on a fused-glass bowl, but it was just so so beautiful.... here's a photo of it:


Sometimes a gal just has to treat herself, and the fabric is technically for my mother :)

Guild Meeting

Last night was our last quilt guild meeting for 2010 and I wanted to share a picture of a very cool quilt that one of the ladies made!

It's a charm quilt, so every fabric only occurs once in the quilt, and it's English paper pieced.
The maker said that there are over 1500 pieces in this quilt, hard to imagine, but I've been surprised in the past, so I believe her :) It took her 4 years (picking it up and putting it away in between) to make. She cut a 1 foot wide strip for the border and appliqued the top to it. Quite something, eh?


We guild members also received instructions for the President's Quilt we make. The guild president serves for 2 years, then she (no men in our guild) gets a quilt made from blocks donated by the members (everyone's supposed to make one block). The president gets to pick the block, colours, size, etc.

This year's president chose the Hen & Chicks block, looks like this:


Her colour choices are Civil War Era and we were shown some examples of hues.


Picking the right colours was the hardest bit, but I got to work last night after the meeting and my block is almost done...