Soft Quilt Part 1

These fabrics are so soft, and the colours are much more intense than on this photo. I think it's called Cotton Basics, and the interesting part is that two colours make up each fabric, one is the vertical weave, the other the horizontal weave. That's why they look vivid and dynamic.


No clue yet what this is going to be, but I'd like to make something along the lines of MelanieMade's Summer Quilt, but instead of a strip across the quilt, I'd like to use larger patches and have one big area in the center of the quilt, or slightly off-center. We shall see... these fabrics are too nice to rush into a quilt.

Grandma's Teddy Bear Quilt (Four Patch and Panels)

Here's a quick quilt! I was inspired I guess, because my machine was just purring along.
My grandma collects teddy bears, so this will be a perfect wall hanging for her collection room.

The bear "Trip Around the World" panels came as is, with their blue or green border. I made Four Patch blocks to separate the panels, used some material from the Late Fall Quilt as border, and a cool bear fabric for the backing. Tadaaa! This was also my practice piece for free motion machine quilting. I just went ahead and did crazy patterns all around the yellow border to get a feeling for the machine. That helped a lot with the quilting on the Late Fall Quilt.

I put in a little free motion heart on every side of the border...

Late Fall Quilt (Double Irish Chain) Part 3

Finished!

Having created a quilting room really helped the process. Here's the finished product:





All I have to do now is hid the hundreds of threads hanging out and wrapping it up for christmas...

Here's a close up of the two more interesting fabrics I used, an English Toile in red brown, and the leafy fall theme. The yellow fabric I call wallpaper fabric in my mind :)

Cole's Jungle (Sampler Baby Quilt) Part 2

Here are the final steps of the sampler baby quilt I made for baby Cole:

The four sampler blocks we did in class:


The whole quilt before quilting...


... and after. (It really is rectangular, but it's warped here from lying on the back of a chair)

Here are the individual blocks and close-ups of the hand-quilting.
Handquilting was an interesting experience for me, though not my finger tips. I can't get the hang of the thimbel, it doesn't feel right, so I had some pretty pricked finger tips... :)

(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)

Late Fall Quilt (Double Irish Chain) Part 2

The quilt top is now finished, including the borders.


Here it is pinned to the backing and batting - what a tedious job that was!!!


And I'm now busily quilting away on it. I did the binding first, which I might not do next time around in case of shifting material, but since I had used so many pins, my teacher said it'd be okay to bind first, quilt later. I started by stabilizing the quilt with outlines of all the main blocks. I'm doing free motion around the outside (dark) border and in the open (dark) spaces between the crossing chains. In the red-brown border, I'm doing an interlacing curvey pattern.

This is my quilting set-up so far. It's not ideal, because there's so much material pulling, despite being on the table. It's a major pain in the... Also, I've been eating my meals sitting on a camping chair in the kitchen, because I'm obviously not taking this whole machinery-quilt concoction off the table 3 times a day...

Quilting Obsession

My quilting obsession has not abated. I've made another small quilt, this one for my grandmother's teddy-bear-collection-room in 4 days. I need to balance my life more, what do you think?

I'm still happily plugging away on the double quilt from my class. Still have a lot of actual quilting to do (I'm never quite sure what that term refers to. I think putting the top together is called piecing, and then joining the back, top and batting is called quilting, but the overall term is quilting, too?)

I've also rearranged my apartment and gotten rid of the junk room - it is now my quilting room!

Cole's Jungle (Sampler Baby Quilt) Part 1

In my other class, we've been working on a log cabin pattern. It has a yellow or read square in the center, representing the hearth of the log cabin, and then the logs layered around it to look like a log cabin seen from above. Here's my progress from Saturday night:

Here are the pieces laid out in the right order:


You sew one on after the other, turning left in between to align the next seam. It helps to chain-sew them together, saves some thread and gets you a kite-tail like string in the end:


You end up with four of these:


And they can be aligned in oodles of different arrangements:

I settled on this one:
since we're only using one block in our sampler quilt. For a big quilt I'd probably use the second last pattern that makes the quilt look like a triangle pattern.

I find quilting really engaging. My cheeks get hot and red because I'm concentrating on my perfect edges. I guess quilting works well with perfectionists, because if you're a millimeter off, in the end it ends up to an 5 cm since there are so many blocks to sew together. I'm especially excited to see the final product of my big double-sized double Irish chain quilt. I can't really picture the final pattern yet.