Bloggers Quilt Festival

 It's time the fall Blogger's Quilt Festival hosted by Amy's Creative Side.
This is one of the few quilts I finished this year; getting ready to move took up a lot of my time.  It i entered in the Scrappy Quilt category
This quilt is make from blocks that my friends in the Friendship block exchange group made for me.  I asked for Anvil blocks made with "made fabric"for the center square and the half square triangles could be made fabric or not. I asked for yellow or orange for the backgrounds.  Victoria (Bumblebeans) had requested that her followers make  anvil blocks with a blue background which she makes into quilts for people recently diagnosed with cancer. My friends made one block with the blue background and one block for me with yellow/orange background to make a quilt for myself.  I think I sent 12 blocks to Victoria and I had 12 blocks for my quilt from my friends and I made the rest.
The blocks are 12 inches and the half square triangles in the borders are 3 inches.

 I used one anvil block and some "made fabric" squares along with a piece of floral fabric that I had to stretch the backing fabric of which I had not enough.







Below are 2 close up shots showing the all over quilting with rows of the Bernina # 4 stitch. This was the first time I used this stitch for spaced rows and I like the look and I will use it again.









If you want to know more you can click on "anvil blocks".
Be sure to check out the other quilts in the Blogger's Quilt Festival and be sure to visit all the categories.

Bloggers Quilt Festival

It's time again for Bloggers Quilt Festival. Be sure to check it out at Amyscreativeside.com  or click on the button on the sidebar.

This entry in the Baby quilt Category is my interpretation of the Falling Charms quilt in a Missouri Star tutorial. I made my blocks 5 inches and they finished 4 1/2 inches. In the tutorial Jenny used a 5 inch charm pack and 2 1/2 inch strips from an all white "Jelly roll". I used 2 1/2 inch strips of Kona Bone, which is a favorite of mine.

44 x 50 inches

I have been sewing scraps of fabric together to make blocks for a long time. At least 15 years ago I made a quilt with blocks made from scraps as an example of quilts we could make for our quilt guild Linus Project. It was just a straight set with sashing  I used a pretty floral print with pink and yellow roses on a blue background for the sashing, borders and backing. It was pretty and kind of quiet and nothing like this one. I wish I had a photo but it is one of many for which there is no photo.

More recently, I started "making fabric"  after being inspired by Bumblebeans "15 Minutes of Play". Most of the time, I prefer to "make fabric" about the size of the blocks I want and trim to the size I want, instead of a making a larger piece to cut up into blocks.


Close up of 5 inch blocks showing some of the quilting
in the light patches and stitching on the binding.

For "made fabric" blocks I don't like to use a paper foundation. I prefer to add a strip and press it and trim the seam allowance to 1/4 inch. I like to trim the edges straight that I am going to sew as I find that I am more likely to have a nice straight seam when I do. I usually work on 3 to 5 blocks at a time, adding pieces and chain sewing and then press and trim and add the next addition to all five at a sitting.

I always try to keep some semblance of order when I make fabric but the truth is I am messy. I might have things in order when I start but in the end I end up with it all tangled together. I probably spend way too much time trying to maintain order.

I like to keep all the pieces up on the design wall and on my design boards, along with strips and other pieces I want to incorporate somewhere. I helps me to keep track of what I need to add for balance.

Piano key borders are my favorite for scrappy quilts. Some people like to "calm down" the quilt with one fabric but every time I audition a single fabric for the border it seems to lack something. I make strips sets with 5 or 6 random width strips that are long enough to make 2 or 3 cuts the width of border. I sew the sections together with one or two different fabric strips between. I have to make more strip sets than if I used longer strips and sewed my sets wider but I like to keep things as random as possible. If I have a piece at the end of the strip set than is too small for a border section I  trim it and turn it sideways and insert it between sections as in the top section next to the bright blue strip. 

I quilted in the ditch around all the blocks. I also ditch stitched around the patches inside the blocks because it needed more stitching to lay flat.


Close up of the quilting in the solid light fabric

I use cotton quilting thread in primary colors with the #4 stitch on my Bernina for the quilting in the solid light patches. I considered feathers or something fancier but in the end opted for lines that followed the stair step pattern in the quilt, with the lines crossing at the ends of the steps. I wasn't really very happy the way the seams showed up in the solid light fabric but the variegated thread in the wavy pattern helped to minimize that.

I used a solid yellow for that back and Kona bone for the binding. I sewed the binding to the back and turned it to the front and finished it with the #4 stitch. I think the #4 stitch is in keeping with the informal whimsical nature of the quilt.


Close up of stitching on binding and inner border

Now hop on over to Amyscreativeside.com and check out all the rest of the quilts.



Quilt Festival Reticent Stars

This is my entry in the Bloggers Quilt Festival in the wall hanging category. I have posted about it as I was working on it and when it was finished. In this post, I put it all together for the Bloggers Quilt Festival.
I named this "Reticent Stars"; although I wanted the stars to show up, I did not want them to be the main attraction. For that reason I quilted them with black thread and not metallic thread as I had intended. My original choice for a binding was solid black but when I was ready for the binding I changed my mind and went with the black and white stripe cut on the bias.

Reticent Stars 33 x 49

Here are some close up views of the quilting. The straight line quilting is about 1/2 inch apart and follows the overall shape of each diamond.
I belong to a group of fun and creative ladies who have been meeting for a few years to explore new techniques and avenues of creativity. We have always been rather loosely organized meeting as friends and not as an organized "group".

About 2 years ago we got together after a rather lengthy hiatus and  set a definite date each month to meet. We settled on a name "The Basement Diva's" and set some goals and challenges.

 

Here are the rules for our challenge.

The challenge shall be black and white and, if wanted, one other color. Color being defined as a color family. Quilters are to do something they have not done before using a book, pattern or tool that the quilter already has. No, that doesn't mean finish the thing, Yes, a book that has been used before can be used but not the same pattern in said book. No, it does not mean you can make "that pink quilt you made before, in black and white".
There is no size limitation or finish date established yet.
Quilter's should be ready to start, or have started at our next meeting in October.

We try to have as few rules as possible for our challenges so there were not many. Later we added an April meeting deadline to finish. You can see the Basement Diva's Challenge quilts here and here

 

I had the book "Quilts from a Different Angle" by Sarah Nephew and the smaller Clear view Triangle ruler to go with it. The publish date in the book is 1986 so I had it a long time (26 years can that be?).

 

I designed my quilt in EQ7 and I had many versions before I settled on one. the quilt I made evolved as I went along and I would go back and audition my revisions in EQ before proceeding. All final decisions were made on the design wall.

This was my start and I used most but not all of the fabrics that I cut, I  have a stack of leftovers and discards eliminations.

Sewing the diagonal rows together was a learning experience and sometimes a challenge as it was hard to tell at times if I had everything where it should be. As the rows were sewn they shrunk and when up on the design wall next to the unsewn rows I sometimes lost sight of where the pieces were in the overall pattern.

 

 Here is the back view of the top. I really did press all those seams open. When I work with triangles I have better results when I press the seams open; it  really is worth the extra effort.

 

 

 

 When I finally got it all together I made the changes in EQ to reflect the actual quilt and colored the EQ version with lighter values to save my ink and it be able to see quilting lines that I would draw on the printed quilt to experiment and as a guide when I started to sew.


I don't know why I never used my triangle rule until this challenge. I remember I was very enthusiastic to make something when I bought the book and ruler. I am probably going to do something again soon with the ruler and pair  up the triangles with hexagons and diamonds as I bought those rulers recently to go with the triangle ruler. I better not wait 26 years to start; I may not be sewing when I am 104.

Blogger's Quilt Festival

Blogger's Quilt Festival is here.

 I didn't have to think too long about which quilt I wanted to enter this year.This is my favorite quilt of those I have made this year, a spiral log cabin quilt or the Gigi (GG) quilt, as my husband calls it. He thinks the blocks look like G's.
I started this quilt last spring after seeing the blocks on Beth Shibley's blog, Love Laugh Quilt; where she has a great tutorial. I finally got around to finishing it in September. The fabrics are mainly floral or botanical from my box of 1 1/2 inch strips that are mostly from the years when I made color wash quilts. The best fit for category would be Scrap Quilt.




To make this more manageable on my domestic machine, I quilted it in sections.   I ditch quilted the body of the quilt first and later I quilted and then added the borders, first the side borders and then the top and bottom borders with the corner blocks added. I couldn't decide on border fabric and that held me up a while but I finally settled on piano key borders. I liked this quilt before I added the borders but after the borders were on, I loved it! The center of the quilt just seems to glow. 

For the back I used a vertical row of leftover spiral log cabin blocks between 2 sections of the backing for the body of the quilt and 

back

then added random size sections of piano keys to stretch the rest of the yellow backing fabric to fit as the backing for the border sections.

I live in an apartment and one bedroom is my sewing room the other room has a king size bed, that is one bed total, for which I have 2 quilts already. This quilt is  about 64 x 75, hardly king size. Both Jack and I like it so much I didn't want to relegate it to the closet or cedar chest.

so here it is on the bed. It covers the top of the bed from the foot to the pillows and from side to side. I have a  kind of furry/fuzzy white blanket under it and it works. We take all the extra pillows and the quilt off for sleeping and because it is not so big and heavy as a full king size quilt it isn't a lot of trouble.

 
If you are interested in seeing my posts about this as I was working on it, click on spiral log cabins and log cabin quilts on the side bar.



Don't forget to check out the other quilts on the Blogger's Quilt Festival. Amy does a great job of organizing this event and there are many wonderful quilts.  Click on this link here or on the Bloggers's Quilt Festival button my my side bar.

Bloggers Quilt Festival

This is my entry for the Blogger's Quilt Festival.
I didn't make it this year and I had a post about it last year. Looking through my photos I realised that this was one of my favorite quilts to make. It has a lot of color, many different fabrics, it has some traditional elements, there was some problem solving in putting it together, I used some printed motifs from the fabric I worked with, and the design of the quilt was my own. This is the kind of quilt I most enjoy making.

This was a group challenge quilt and started with the Sewing Diva fabric. We had to use motifs from the fabric and I think 3 elements from a book or two we were all working through at the time. I chose to make mine a self portrait of sorts and everything I used was something associated with something about me or something I like. The motifs from the Diva fabric are the sewing or thread chandelier in the window, the tomato vine and the white haired Diva. The other elements are the 16 patch blocks, the strippy lawn, the paper pieced sun, the lightning bolt and broken dishes (for sun rays). I appliqued some flowers from a Jane Sassaman fabric to fill  in two corners  where  my 16 patch blocks wouldn't fit the center of the quilt. There is always a way around those problems but it makes you have to think if you haven't planned ahead.

The funniest thing about making this quilt was when I told my husband I had to shop for ring for my belly button. He looked at me and paused a few seconds and said "you know.... you ought to think about it before you go ahead and do anything like that." He seriously thought I was talking about my own real life 75 year old body. He probably didn't have any idea about what I was working on or talking about but really...........

Bloggers Quilt Festival

This is "Ethan's Houses" the quilt I am entering in the Bloggers Quilt Festival . This is a first for me but I am having so much fun checking out all the quilts that I want to join the fun.

I made it about 2 years ago for my great-grandson. He saw a quilt I had made for our community quilts project using leftover blocks someone else had made and he wanted a house quilt too. He chose the sashing and border fabric from my stash, I knew he  would choose this  one because his favorite color is green although  he likes all colors. We started baby sitting one day a week with Ethan and his sister when he was 2 and she was 1. He always wanted me  to draw houses and when he was old enough to draw he drew houses or used foam stickies cut in squares and triangles to make houses. He likes things to be lined up and orderly so this is not a wonky quilt. In the windows of the purple house in the second row are two people who Ethan recognized as representing himself and his sister. I think that made it special for him.