Cork Board Project

This project didn't involve any sewing but it was a fun and easy way to use up a little fabric.  It's the first project in the book, One Yard Wonders.  You simply cut some cork board to the size of a picture frame and staple fabric around the board before you put it back in the frame.

I obviously need to tack some snapshots or something onto this newly decorated message board but I am just enjoying the lovely framed AMH voile piece for now. 

Ornament Swap, Anyone?

[Bird Ornaments from the Purl Bee, tutorial here.]

So, my baby has definitely been giving me a run for my money lately.  I am tired.  I haven't had a full night's sleep in a long time.  This afternoon, when she went down for what I knew would be a long nap, I said, "Screw it.  I am going to take a long nap too."  Now it's nearly 2 am and I can't sleep.  She's sleeping and I am on the computer thinking about organizing a Christmas ornament swap.  I am also trying to distract myself from ordering this and this from Hawthorne Threads.

Would anyone be interested in making 6-12 of the same ornaments, sending them to others throughout the country, and receiving several handmade ornaments themselves?  There are lots of tutorials out there that seem like fun and I love the look of handmade/patchwork decor.  The only restrictions I would put forth would be that this swap would have to involve sewing the ornaments (i.e. very minimal - to no gluing), have a modern aesthetic (sorry, no Thimbleberries), and no craft felt (sorry - I've seen how badly that stuff deteriorates and I want these things to last a while).  

So, who's in?

Guest post on BMQG

Check out the BMQG blog for a summary of my participation in last weekend's LQF Panel discussion on the future of quilting here. 

Gifts for Friends

I have finally joined the Jane Market Tote club and I made a few recently.  This one is a very belated birthday gift for my sister.  She loves blue and green together:

 I have a few book-lover friends who deserved a treat:

 Finally, I made an armrest pincushion (tutorial by BMQG's very own Aimee at During Quiet Time) and a brainy ball for Alexis as a thank you for her significant role in making the BMQG quilt show happen.

This blog may be a little quiet for the next few weeks because I have more gifts to make and I think the recipients might be blog readers.

BMQG at Lowell Quilt Festival

This picture is SO fun - so I had to start with it first.  After the panel, "The Future of Quilting" that Rachel and I participated in, Mary and Marianne Fons came over to our gallery and took in our show. 

 It wasn't long before they started dismantling our displays.....  Just kidding - they had the great idea to have us hold Rebecca's awesome guild logo quilt for the above picture. 

 Mary and Marianne were so fun, funny, warm, and encouraging.  I really enjoyed visiting with them.  I will do a post on the panel and what was discussed within the next couple of days.  They really did love our show and I was excited for the few BMQG members who got to visit with them. 

 Here's Alexis, Rebecca (holding Charlotte), Alice, and I manning the table on Friday afternoon.  Sitting at the show was really a lot of fun.  It was fun to chat with friends and interact with the show visitors. 

I had Charlotte with me for most of my shifts and she was a real trooper.  The poor girl is not even 6 months and has already been to her fair share of quilting and fabric related events/venues.

 I submitted 3 quilts and one mini to the show.  Here's one of them (I also submitted my mod mosaic bee quilt as well as the African Heart quilt):

 This is a selection of most of the mini quilts that were showcased.  You can tell how diverse and talented  our guild is from just this one picture.

 Here's Alice's Ghastlies quilt.  I heard a rumor that a Mills resident asked her to sell it to her.  That is a great compliment!

 I am so impressed that Lia managed to quilt this beautiful "Birds of Paradise" quilt on a longarm when she was 9 months pregnant.  It is just gorgeous (pattern by Sarah Fielke).

 Here's Rebecca's stunner that has received a lot of attention from The Modern Quilt Guild.

 Jane's tumbler quilt was stunning and makes me regret destashing my Echo bundle:

 I love this beautiful quilt by Alexis. 

I couldn't include pictures of all of the quilts in this post but if you find the BMQG Facebook page, you will see albums and links to other blogs that help to document the whole show.

One of my favorite parts of the weekend was the Friday night reception.  Lots of guild members attended with their friends and family.  It was so fun to hang out with each other and celebrate the accomplishment of hosting a show at a major festival and we all couldn't get over at how professional and polished it all looked.  I feel so indebted to all of the guild members who pitched in to make this possible. 

It was New Year's Eve morning (2011) that I received an email from the director of the New England Quilt Museum asking to meet with me.  I was able to go over right away and I soon agreed to participate in the panel discussion as well as the guild show.  I was 7 months pregnant and the commitment felt overwhelming.  But it wasn't long before our guild members rallied together and this weekend was a very satisfying culmination of their efforts and passion for the guild.  I won't name names but you know who you are - thank you so much!

Another Finish: Character Quilt

I never know what to title my quilts but I am happy I finished this UFO recently.  I am trying a personal experiment: alternating between finishing a UFO and then allowing myself to start something new (that I must finish instead of creating another UFO).  I have been doing this for a few weeks and it's been satisfying to have less WIP's hanging around but I am not getting too bored with always working on old projects.

One Sunday afternoon, everyone in the house decided to sleep at the same time and I was amazed that I was able to quilt this entire quilt while everyone else snoozed.  I went with wavy lines for the pink area, a squiggle in the border, and ditch stitching between the squares.   

 I am pretty happy with how the quilting came out but maybe I should've skipped the stitching in the ditch part because it seems to have really pulled the fabrics this way and that way.

 I backed the quilt in this Japanese print from my stash.

I had wanted to do a pastel rainbow stripe for the binding but I am glad I shopped from my stash instead.  The binding is a 2006 strippy dot print from RJR. 

I definitely have to credit Nellie, from A Quilt is Nice, for creating her beautiful quilt, which I copied imitated.

Tutorial: How to Make a Quilt with a Super-soft (and stretchy!) Backing

"Ironic" is the word I would use to describe the fact that my son prefers a store-bought Carter's baby blanket to the 6 quilts I have made him.  This blanket comes along with Gregory wherever he goes and as he approaches his 3rd birthday this fall, I am still a little annoyed that he hasn't "attached" to any of the special quilts that I have made him.  I really think it comes down to texture and the softness of the blankie.  This is why I have taken it upon myself to learn how to make a quilt with a soft backing on my domestic machine.

Disclaimer:  Attaching Minkee or Soft-and-Cuddly fabrics is kind of a pain in the butt.  I recommend you only endeavor this technique if texture and softness is really important to the intended recipient of the quilt.

Step 1: Quilt your quilt top directly onto batting with nothing else - it's just two layers.  I baste my quilt top onto Warm and Natural batting (from Joann's) with safety pins and then I quilt it on my machine.  Then I trim off the extra batting on the sides, as shown below:

 Step 2:  Tape a piece of soft backing fabric onto the floor, "good side" down.  I tape each corner - and that is it.
 Step 3:  Pin your quilted top onto the backing fabric with a few pins around each side.

 Step 4:  Cut your backing fabric to size around the quilted top.  Give yourself a little breathing room because you are going to pin more in the next step and you don't want the backing fabric to be too small.

 Step 5:  Use a lot more pins to make the quilted top more firmly affixed to the backing fabric, trim the backing more if necessary.

 Step 6:  Use a zig-zag stitch to go all around the edge of the quilt.  You will have to go slowly and pay special attention to the backing fabric trying to wiggle and shrink away from the quilt's edge.  Just be patient and do this step carefully. 

Step 7:  You will also want to attach the quilt onto the backing on an area besides the outer edges.  The pattern I used made it very easy for me to stitch a square in the ditch. 

 You can't see the square on the front of the quilt, but you can discern it on the back:

 Step 8: Bind your quilt as you normally would.  If you find that your quilt is a little thicker than normal, I would recommend using a wider binding.  For example, I used a 3" binding on my Girly Spiderweb quilt. 

So there you have it, a quilt with a soft backing.  As you can tell, the backing is a little loose/lumpy on the back but I am satisfied with it.  I have used soft backing on other quilts and each backing fabric I have used has varied in difficulty to work with.  Of course, this soft whale fabric I used for this tutorial probably was the most annoying one I have encountered- being particularly stretchy on the horizontal grain.  (Is that even a real term? I don't know.)

I hope this tutorial is helpful to some of my readers, let me know if you have any questions.

Whale Quilt, Part II

Thanks to everyone for their kindness and encouragement regarding my Anne Kelle Christmas projects.  It was no small feat to get all of that completed after having a baby!  But it was worth it - I truly love her fabrics and creating something for her blog was literally a "bucket list" kind of accomplishment for me.

So, after getting all of that stuff done- I definitely had Anne Kelle fabrics on the brain.  Earlier this year, when I learned that I had had a baby girl, I knew that a pink version of my son's whale blanket must be made ASAP.  So here is Charlotte's fourth quilt (and she's only 4 months old!):

 I bought this pink whale sleeper shortly after she was born, knowing that she would eventually have a whale quilt to match:

 I debated doing a fuzzy/minkee-like backing, but my decision was easy when I spotted this whale "soft and cuddly" fabric at Joann's:

 I bound the quilt in the leftover strips from the front:

 Here are my two little rascals cuddling their quilts together:

 I just love the whale fabric, the simple design of squares in squares, and the effective use of solid fabrics. 

During the process of making Charlotte's quilt, I attempted to take pictures of the process of making a quilt with a minkee-like backing fabric.  Tutorial to come very soon!

BMQG at the Lowell Quilt Festival

I would like to invite all of my readers to attend our quilt show that is coming up in a few weeks.  I learned of this opportunity on New Year's Eve last year and I can't believe it's now only a few weeks away!  Our guild is so thrilled to have this chance to show our work to the public in a very major show in our own venue.  Additionally, I will be speaking on a panel on August 10, Friday morning with Mary and Marianne Fons as well as my friend from the guild, Rachel May.  See a description of the Panel Discussion here. 

Christmas in July

Check out my tutorial on how to make this quilt on one of my favorite fabric designer's blogs: Ann Kelle.  This quilt was a lot of fun to make and the pattern I created yielded a fair amount of scraps.  In this post, I will show you what I did with all of those yummy leftovers.

Making a Christmas stocking for our family's newest edition was a no-brainer.  Using 2.5" squares, I created a youthful patchwork design and hand-embroidered her name on the cuff. 

I created a simple design on the back, using some Kona Cotton Clover and more Jingle.

Finally, I was thrilled to make a Christmas tree skirt to replace our family's TJ-Maxx special we'd purchased right after we were married.  I made teeny dresden plates with Kona solids that match the Jingle line (Red, Rich Red, Chartreuse, Bubblegum Pink, and Clover) and centered a Jingle print in each of the 16 plates.

I hand appliqued the plates and circles to the quilted tree skirt.  It actually didn't take as long as I thought it would and it looks a lot better than machine stitching.

I used my old tree skirt as a makeshift pattern for the shape of the tree skirt after I had quilted a large whole-cloth quilt on my machine.  I bound the skirt in bias binding and used buttons and hair elastics to make the skirt be able to open and close.

Thanks so much to Kelle for letting me play with her Jingle fabrics.  I had so much fun making all of these items and look forward to using them this Christmas season and many more years to come!

Double Nine Patch Completed!

My family has been attacked by a horrible stomach virus this past week.  I have never seen my son so sick and having my little baby effected has not been fun either.  There was one day where my baby was happy and healthy (and napping a lot) and my son could do no more than watch Disney movies - and this is the only reason why this quilt became completed so quickly. 

 I promise this quilt is square, it's just hard to get a picture in our backyard without wind effecting the quilt. 

 I am pretty happy with how this quilt came out.  It's 50" square, which is definitely bigger than what I would normally make for a brand new baby.  I didn't want to have leftover blocks and it can be used for a long time, right?

 I sashed the blocks in a Cosmo Cricket Early Bird cross-hatch print.

I made a pieced backing with leftover fabric pieces - a process  that always makes me feel relieved to put some prints/pieces to good use rather than continuing to languish in my stash. 

 I bound the whole quilt in a blue polka-dot binding.  I am looking forward to delivering this quilt to my friend and her new baby- but I am definitely going to wait a little while to be sure that our family is germ-free!