The baby quilt is finished!

I used a pattern from the book "Big-Print Quilts" by Karen Snyder. It was originally made with racing cars and bright fabric. My husband suggested this pattern and I'm glad because I like the way it came out. If you notice the three duck blocks are a little different. The printed blocks were given to me a while back from a friend and when they were cut they were not all even. So you make lemonade with lemons, right! The ducks were a little too small so I trimmed them down smaller and added a tiny blue border and white border then squared them the same size as the others. The fact that I used three makes it work. I'm real pleased.

This is the back. You can see the quilting I did around each shape and block. I used some new batting that I wanted to try. It is "Dream Green". Put out by "Quilter's Dream Batting". It is made using recycled plastic bottles. I thought it would be great for a baby quilt because it gets washed so much. I like the fact that it is thin and it feels soft and not real stretchy but when I had pin basted the quilt and started to quilt it the batting did not grab onto the fabric the way cotton batting does and so there was some slipping of the fabric. That is why it looks wrinkled. There are no puckers but I'm not convinced that I will use this batting again. I think I will stick with my cotton batting.

A close up of the back.

Close up of the duck block. You can see I did a continuous line quilting around the ducks and the wheels. It was easy using free motion quilting.

Close up of the center rabbit block.

This is my label. I had this idea to use grosgrain ribbon and my machine's monogramming program. It took me a little while to figure out I needed a stabilizer on the back and the size of my letters but I'm happy with it. I sewed it into the binding by hand.

Now off to work on another project!

Top finished...

The Christmas quilt top is finished. I got the pattern from Bonnie Hunter's website. I love this pattern. It was so easy and so fast. I'm not even bordering it. I will put a black binding on it and call it good. It measures 66 x 90. The person it is for is tall and I wanted him to be able to cover completely. I'm glad for this to be done. I'm also putting fleece on the back and no batting. It will be cozy and not heavy. The fleece will be a novelty sports print. It is his favorite team. I like to make it personable if I can. Now I need to get busy with a baby quilt. A family relative asked me to make one. Her friend is having a baby. She needs it in 2 weeks. I don't know why I always say yes to these things but I do!

I have been working...

despite the fact that I have not been posting about it. This is what has become of the 4-patches. I have all the blocks assembled and I laid them out on my design board then stacked them up and numbered them. They are ready to be sewed together into rows. This has really been a fast and easy quilt. And I love how it looks all laid out.

This is a quilt I quilted last week. A friend of mine owns a Tin Lizzie18 quilting machine. She offered for me to go over and quilt a quilt on it because she knows I want to purchase one. I was not blown away by it. I guess my expectations were too high. There are a couple of things I really liked about it and a couple of things I didn't like about it. I am rethinking buying one. I have done some research and I'm going to Houston Quilt Festival at the end of this month, I will try several machines out and see what happens. I may end up just staying with what I have. Which is a shortarm system using a B-line frame and Juki TL98E.

Here is a closeup of the quilting. I hope you can see it. I did big loopy flowers in the outside border and inside border. I also did a small loop-d-loop around the blocks. BTW, the center is a panel and the borders were added on. I purchased this several years ago and it was just sitting in the stash so I put it together earlier this year at our guild retreat and thought it would be the perfect project to practice on. It is not finished however. I will do some more quilting in the blocks around the redwork and flowers.

And last but not least this is a christmas gift for a member of a small group I belong to called the Woolie's. We, of course, work with wool. I will show a finished picture when it is done. I did the embroidery and added the pieced borders. Now I'm adding wool accents with the buttonhole stitch. I have not decided if it will be a table topper or wall hanging and I'm not sure how I will back it and if it will have batting or not. Any suggestions?

Quilt stuff...finally

I haven't posted anything quilty for a while and I finished the labels on these two quilts yesterday and took some pics. These quilts were made for my husbands Aunt. She is a nun and they do a lot of charity fund raisers. She sent me the embroidered blocks (done by her and a friend's Mom) and asked if I would make these into quilts for a fund raiser. No rush, just whenever. I got them last year around Sept. or Oct. and you know how it is, other things come up and these got pushed to the back burner a couple of times. But they were always in the back of my mind. My best friend and I worked on these together and we got them finished. We pieced them together and I quilted the smaller one and she quilted the bigger one (she had the harder job, that was a lot of blocks to custom quilt). I'm glad they are done and we will have to get them to her soon.

This is the larger one that my friend quilted.

Here are close ups of the quilting in the sashing and blocks. She uses a Juki TL-98Q sewing machine set on a table. It is hard to do some of these designs but she is getting good at it.

Here is a close up of the quilting in the border. I hope you can see it. It is quilted with e's and l's that have one echo stitch all the way around.

This is the smaller one that I quilted. I also use a Juki-TL98E set in my sewing cabinet. At first it was hard to decide how to quilt these. I knew we would have to quilt in the embroidered blocks but had never done that before. These were vintage blocks. That made me nervous but, I'm real happy with how they turned out. They are not perfect but they are quilted as my friend likes to call it "Machine quilted by Hand". Every block is different. It is not stitched by a machine so that they all are the same. You move the fabric and so sometimes it is not stitched exactly perfect. But you know what? It doesn't matter. The overall look is good and it is done! Sometimes I think that is the most important thing. To finish the quilt.

Here is a close up of the quilting in the blocks and borders. The border is quilted with e's that are echoed.

Here is a close up of the quilting in the sashing. This was something new to me. I did the small flowers and culi-cues. I usually do straight line quilting in the sashing. I like the way it came out.

I'm also starting to work on some Christmas gifts. I have a small table topper that has embroidery on it and some wool. I'm working on the embroidery right now and will get pics when it closer to being finished.

Every year I make a quilt for one of my in-laws for Christmas. I started this in 2001. The year I learned to quilt. The quilt this year is for one of my brother-in-laws. Making quilts for men and boys is fun and different. Using a different color arrangement to make it more masculine.

My friend is really good at choosing colors and knowing what looks good together so she will come and help me choose the fabrics, from my stash, of course. I'm really trying to use it up. Although, as much as I use it never seems to go down, instead it seems to multiply. Why is that? If anyone has any theories on this I would like to hear it.

Whew! I'm glad that is done!. That was a lot of work. I'm glad I had the four patches made already. This is the first block in the Orange Crush mystery on Bonnie's site. The first picture is the work in progress. There are 30 blocks and I had to make 120 half squares to go with the four patches.


Here they are all finished! I like the way they look. All scrappy and yet the red and black pull it together so it is not too busy. I can't wait to see the next step. I still have my orange fabric and light blue fabric to cut into. I know it will be big. Bonnie does everything big.

I also made a few more blocks for my Combing through your scraps quilt and this is what I came up with. It is a Crown of Thorns block that I used for the setting and I like it. I will try to get this pieced together before the end of the week. The blocks are on my design board and I have to stand back to see the design. It shows up really good in the picture but in person some of the fabrics blend into the others. I have to look at it in my reducing glass to see the whole affect. This was a lot of fun. I used some scraps (even though it doesn't look like I touched them) and I learned a lot about value.

Now I need to focus on the rest of my BOM's or my boss (aka..friend who is coaching me) will tan my hide. I still have my Thimbleberries for April and May to do and a Houses BOM I need to check on and see where I stand. That's it for me today. I'm off to run some errands before bringing my youngest son to his guitar lessons.

Busy

I can't believe it has been almost a week since I blogged! I have been so busy. The quilt above is the one I'm doing in my Hand quilting class from Quilt University. I got it together on the weekend and just marked the quilting and basted it yesterday.

This is a close up of the center quilting design. You can't see it that well but the center grid is 1/4 inch and there are wheat stalks and leaves with a 1 inch grid on the outside of the feather ring. There is also wheat stalks in the red borders. It was the first time I marked a quilt design using my light box. It worked quite well but the freezer paper design had to be made before I could do the marking and that took a little longer than I thought it would. But I'm happy with the results.
I'm quilting it with red thread so the quilting will show up good to take pictures for my class. Since the class is online that is the only way for the teacher to see our work.

I am also working on my Louisiana BOM for May. I will post pictures when they are done. And I'm ready to start on Step 4 of the Orange Crush mystery quilt on Bonnie's site. I will have some sewing time today so I think I will split it up between hand quilting and the Orange Crush.

Things just don't seem to slow down around here and I'm trying to figure out what to cut out to make things simpler. I love all that I'm doing right now but can't seem to spend the quality time on each individual thing. It is just a moment here or there that I have to give to it and it seems not enough. I will have to give it more thought. I don't want to give up my teaching of quilting. I'm enjoying that so much. It is overwhelming at times but rewarding. I have two classes on Thursday, a morning and night class. I guess things will slow down after my QU classes are over and my own beginner quilt classes finish at the end of this month. I'm looking for the slow lazy days of summer. Is there such a thing? I will find it. I have to. Well enough rambling. On to sewing. Have a wonderful day everyone.

Here are the split nine-patch blocks that I made for the "Combing through your scraps" class I'm taking from Quilt University. I love the idea of using a block (in this case the Variable Star) to make the whole quilt. I really liked using my scraps and the split nine-patch were easy to put together. I used the Easy Angle Ruler for the half squares. I did find out that I don't have a lot of really light fabrics. I have more mediums. I did as the teacher suggested and used the backs of several of the light to mediums that I had. It worked. I think I will make some more of these and make a different block. I have my eye on an Ocean Waves block and for that I need 48 split nine-patch blocks. It will be an on going project. That's what I worked on this weekend. I am also working on my April and May Louisiana BOM. I had to redesign one of them. It was for LSU in Baton Rouge and I had to do ULL for the university in my city. I now have to do the machine applique on it. I will get to it later this week. Hope everyone is having a quilty day!

We are back! A very pleasurable weekend away at relatives home. We had a wonderful time. We ate well, had good conversation and played a Wii video game. My son had been wanting one for a while and they are hard to find so when my daughter saw one at the store this weekend she picked it up for him. It came with the sports games and we had the best time this weekend playing with that thing.

I'm very tired today, though, the concert that my husband was going to out of town was supposed to be on Saturday night but unexpectedly was moved to Sunday night because of a double booking. We didn't get home until 2:30am this morning and caught a few hours of sleep before hubby had to get up and go to work. I, of course, could not get back to sleep after he left so I got up and started my day but I'm dragging. Maybe an afternoon power nap will do the trick. My hubby, on the other hand, will have to make it up tonight.

Because I don't have pics to show right now the progress I'm making on Bonnies Orange Crush mystery project, I will show you a picture of a quilt I did way back in 2001. It is a stained glass quilt. This was the second class I took after my beginner quilt class. I must have lost my mind at the time because this was not an easy quilt to make. It is paper pieced. I love the way it came out though, and it hangs in my bedroom.

Speaking of classes, I've signed up for three classes at the Quilt University online. I have taken classes with them before and I love it. I can work at home at my own pace. Which right now is very important since I don't seem to have a minute to spare lately. The first class is "Combing through your Scraps" with Karen Combs. I'm also signed up for "Tesselating Stars" with Cindy Thury Smith and "Hand Quilting" with Nancy Chong. I'm looking forward to learning a lot.

That's all for today. Hope everyone has a quilty day!

I'm home from retreat! What fun it was. Everyone seemed to have a great time. I did manage to get a little sewing done. Not as much as I had hoped but it is not all about sewing, at least for me, I love to visit and catch up on what my friends are sewing. Also, getting to know some of the new comers better.

These are the strip blocks that I got done. I think there are about 45 of them. I need 98, so I still have a way to go.

For the fun of it, I like to go around and gather a few of my friends scraps that they were going to throw away and make some small (4-1/2") crumb blocks. They are always amazed at what can be made from something they were going to throw away. I have some from last years retreat also, but I think those were in bright colors. Won't it be fun to put them together in a quilt and have memories from the several retreats? I love it. By the way you can find out about crumb blocks on Bonnie's web site. I think it is great.

I did get the borders sewed on this panel that I brought. Everyone thought I had did the actual redwork embroidery on these blocks. I guess that means it is a good panel. It was a kit and very easy.

This is a quilt that my friend Eva finished. There are a lot of flying geese in this one (you can click on the picture to make it larger). The fabric is the "Hawaii fabric" that we all got in our mini group from a friend that visited Hawaii. She challenged us to make a quilt with it and all the quilts looked so different. I think I have pictures of mine in the archives. Anyway I love that she finished it and I love the way it looks.

This friend has been working on this quilt at retreat for the last 5 years. It is for her daughter. She started it when she started undergraduate school and now is finished school. The quilt will be finished soon I hope. There is a story that the quilt tells, The blue and green fabrics have a rose print which signifies her love for her daughter, The blue flying geese going up signify "To reach for the stars", and the green tiny flying geese signify "To keep her feet on the ground". What a lovely sentiment. She does have many more rows to put together. It will be a big quilt.

That is all, I have to unpack and housework to do.

They were surprised!

Here is Chris with her quilt. She really liked it. I explained that she had the brights because she had a bright personality. I put a lot of thought into these. The friendship stars in Chris's because we became friends over the years.

Here is Mary Lee with her quilt. I did Aunt Gracie fabrics for her because it is more traditional and Mary Lee is a more traditional girl. Nine patches just seem to fit with the 1930's fabrics (and besides, I was sick of making friendship stars.HA!) You can tell by the expressions on their face that they were surprised! They both said they would cherish them forever. That was nice. I told them they were made to be used not put on a shelf and they both agreed they would use them.

They are finished!

I've been working on these since October. I wanted them to be a Christmas present for my two friends but I didn't even make Easter. HA! This first one is for Mary Lee. She is the one who owns the place were I get my hair cut. She is Chris's step mom. Such a special lady. So sweet and kind. I am going to try to get it to them this week.

The one below is for Chris. She is the one who actually cuts my hair. We have been seeing her for over 12 years. She is so upbeat and seems happy all the time. She is always interested and encouraging. I know they will love them and will be happy to receive them. Chris is getting married in August and is so happy about it. Her second marriage. She has three children. All young adults.

Now I can move on to another project. It just never ends. I'm doing Bonnie's Orange Crush Mystery and Step 1 was just posted yesterday.

Quilt til your arm falls off...

Morning routine. This is where you find me every morning. With my tea and my books. It gives me comfort to know exactly where I'll be each morning and what I will be doing before my day starts. I'm a very routine oriented person. I'm not sure I always like this about myself. Sometimes it is not easy for me when things happen not as planned or spontaneously. I'm learning, but it is a hard lesson.

This is a project for a friend of the family. I was working on it this weekend. It is the second of two quilts I am making for a grandmother to give to her granddaughter for graduation. The first was made in 2003. All the blocks are made from the older clothes of the grandmother, mother and granddaughter as a child. The quilt also has nine photo's in it. The picture below is of the first one I made and when I get further along in this one I will show pictures but they are the same quilt with small differences. Some of the fabrics are different because the girls wore different clothes as children but most are the same because they shared outfits and the mother and grandmother fabrics are the same. The difference is in the backing of the quilts and the pictures. I am still waiting for the graduation picture to come in so I'm trying to get as much work done on it as I can now. They want it for graduation on May 17th!

This is the quilt I quilted on Saturday, by the hardest. My thread kept breaking every other row and my frame was unleveled and caused some problems. I got it done though, and I'm glad. I need to do the binding on it and I have another one to finish. You have seen the other one before. It is the same as this one but in brights. I dyed the backing the other one and I need to square it up and get it ready for quilting. These quilts are for a daughter and step mom. They work together cutting hair in their own shop. They have been cutting our hair for over 12 years and are friends of ours. They will be so surprised to get these. The fabric hanging on the wall behind this quilt is a piece that was dyed on the same day as the other pieces I showed you in a previous post(check out March 10th). It is the one that looks like the backing for the other quilt (you can see a picture on that quilt here , check out Monday Feb. 11th.).

That's it for today. I need to get to work on these unfinished projects.

Quilt til your arm falls off...

Here is a small quilt I made this past weekend. The block is called many different names but our guild used it for a Lotto block and called it Square Peg. It was very easy to do. I'm not happy with the border fabric but I was trying to use the stash instead of buying something. I only had 1/3 yard of the dark purple and needed 1/2 yard. I had to substitute another dark purple to finish the blocks and find something else for the border. I would have liked a darker purple but didn't have anything else. It looks like a baby quilt. I don't have any particular plans for it right now.

Quilt til your arm falls off...

These are the BOM for March. The two at the top are for the Louisiana BOM and the bottom is for the Seasonal Delights BOM. I decided to get them done while I had everything out already. Now I'm glad I did them. I just have the Thimble berries BOM left to do for March. Don't know when I'll be able to get to those but I will do it before the end of the month. The crawfish was very challenging. It is fused and machine appliquéd. It had a lot of small areas to stitch. I'm happy with how it turned out. The fabrics in this kit are fabulous hand dyes and batiks. It blows me away every time I open up a monthly packet. Today I'm sewing up blocks for a new beginner quilt class I will be teaching in May. My SIL came over last night with her sewing machine she got for Christmas and I was able to show her how to thread it and make bobbins. I taught her a few other things about her machine too, like how to set it for some of the decorative stitches she has. The best part is I talked her into taking my beginner quilt class. It will be so much fun. Two of my SIL's and a friend of one of them. Will we get any work done! I hope so. I want another quilter in the family besides my MIL. We could have our own mini quilt retreats when we get together, without the men of course. That's all for today. Have a great quilty day!

Quilt til your arm falls off...

The is the housewarming quilt after it is quilted. My friend quilted it on my frame in an all over large meander. It looks great.

Here is some pictures of her quilting it on the frame.

I don't know why but a quilt always looks good to me when it is on the quilting frame. It may have something to do with seeing a quilt loaded in an old time quilt frame and being quilted by hand from pictures long ago.

She is trying hard to concentrate when starting out at the beginning of a row. It doesn't take very long to get to the end of the row because the sewing machine is a Juki a 9 inch bed. I only have about 6 inches of sewing space to work with at the beginning and depending on how big the quilt is I may only have 4 inches at the end of the quilt. It's frustrating but I can't afford a larger system right now. I'm saving up. It is teaching me patience. HA!

Today I'm quilting one of the Home of the Brave quilts that the mini group made. I have two of them to finish. My friend is quilting one on her regular machine. All together we will have four of them finished soon. Feels good to get projects done.

Quilt til your arm falls off...

Thought I would show you what I was up to yesterday. This is my friend sewing the border strips together for a quilt she is making for a housewarming gift. She started it on Monday and needs it finished for Sunday. The blocks were all done when I went to help her yesterday. We laid it out on her design board and decided on a setting. Started sewing the rows together. It went so fast with two people working together.

This is the finished top. (Sorry for the blurriness) It came out so good. I love the setting we chose. It measures 57 x 81 inches. A good lap size. If you click on the picture you can see the border better. We sewed the two border strips together first then sewed them on as one border. I love the way it adds a design element in the corners of the quilt.

This is a close up of the blocks. It is a Jacob's Ladder block. A lot of pieces. I don't know how she got those blocks together so fast. She said she did sleep!

I had a request for a picture of the machine my husband used to make the table leg. Here it is. The lathe was given to my husband by his Dad. He could not use it anymore so he passed it on. My husband loves woodworking and the lathe is a new toy. I think he will enjoy using it.

Thought I would show you what it started out looking like. This is how it was cut from the tree. My husband had to shave off quite a bit before he could put it on the lathe.

This is the boards he glued together to make the top. It will measure 18 x 20 inches. A little bit oval shape. This is all the wood he has and is having to make do. I'll show more pics when it is further along.

Today my friend is coming over with the housewarming quilt to quilt it on my frame. Hopefully I'll remember to take some pics when it is finished to show you.

Quilt til your arm falls off...