Gnome Homes Top Finished!

Hello all! Wow, it's been a long time since I posted. I went through a non-crafty period, but I'm back in the saddle now! I finally finished the gnome home top for my wonderful MIL for Xmas. I fell in love with these gnome homes last year and decided to make my own copy of some of the blocks I saw on the Bee Imaginative Blog, like these and these.


Click any photo to see the detail!


Here are a few closeups for ya. Ooops, I cut off the tree top! Oh well, still like it.


This poor gnome can't even live in his own main floor - it's a jungle down there.


Here's what my stash looks like now in my Ikea Bergsbo cabinet. The five piles on the very top are the only remnants of the quilt store fabric I used to buy before I discovered designer fabric! I have been slowly getting rid of it, and slowly increasing my stash of Amy Butler, Heather Ross, Tina Givens, etc. etc. After the great scrap bucket giveaway from two posts ago, I am down to the three buckets you see here.


How many designers can you identify from this closeup? Click to see bigger.


Here's why I haven't been posting much, too busy enjoying the gorgeous Texas "fall" weather with Mr. Babyquilts and kiddos at McKinney Falls State Park. Gigi says I'm 2 and too tired to walk anymore!

Cheers everyone, hope to post again soon.
Wendy

A Little Bit of Everything Crafty

Hello everyone! Since I finished the ginormous squares and frames quilt I've been kind of between quilts. I've been sewing some on my red and aqua gnome homes, just to have something to do. Here are my two latest.

My daughter is newly in love with owls, so she begged for an owl softie. She wanted it to be bigger than the ninja bat I made her last year, so here it is! I used the same tutorial from Juicy Bits that I used to make the owl ornaments last Christmas. I just cut out each piece in Photoshop and blew it up to 250%, then printed it out on its own paper. This pattern is so cute no matter what you do with it! Thank you Juicy Bits!

I've also been slowly adding to my stash of designer fabric, now that i'm a designer fabric snob in the most unflattering and haughty way. Here are the stacks of pink, red, green, blue, purple and neutral/white/multi in my Bergsbo fabric cabinet from IKEA.

And here are the stacks of yellow, orange, brown, black and grey, plus a stack of flannel backings. The solids are not good ones, just stuff I picked up a million years ago. My stash is super lacking in good kona/bella/butler solids, as in, I have none. Oh, except for that dark blue on top, that's Bella.

See anything you like?

Heather Ross News Updates

Heather Ross has announced a new collaboration with Spoonflower to reproduce some of her fabrics in different colors and they are on sale now!!! I looked at them and the colors seem way off to what she was showing on her website (above photo). I'll still probably get some. How about you?




In other HR news, it turns out, the new Far Far Away fabrics are NOT double gauze as I had previously reported when I showed the initial snippets. They are "a lovely linen cotton blend, a bit on the heavier side" which is fine with me, I'm going to use them as feature fabrics anyway, to highlight small things, so the majority of the quilt will be regular weight and no one will notice. I can't wait to make some Heather Ross wonky squares again!

You HAVE to click the photo above to see the fabrics larger!

I am sooooo in love with these fabrics, the photo above shows different pieces than I showed before. All I'm sayin' is do you SEE the owl and the pussycat??? Do you SEE those roses in the upper left??? OMG. How could any collection of fabrics be more perfect for a little girl?

More Flattery - Gnome Homes

More copies of the blocks from Bee Imaginative. Today's blocks are by one of my favorite bloggers in the whole blogosphere, Elizabeth at Oh Fransson. Love them! They are bigger houses than the others.

And here are my attempts at copying them with no directions! I actually think they turned out great! The colors are right.

Here's another Bee Imaginative block from my other favorite blogger in the world, Alissa from Handmade by Alissa. She reports that the gnome is bringing mushrooms back to the deer and bird.

And here's my copy below. I like how it looks like the gnome put a flower on top for a chimney!

More gnome homes tomorrow!

The Sincerest Form of Flattery

Ever since I saw the red and aqua gnome houses coming out of the Bee Imaginative bee, I've been dying to make some! I just decided, since this is my year of trying things that scare me, that I would just go ahead and try to make them with no patterns or measurements. I'm not imaginative enough to think up my own designs right off the bat, so I just copied the ones the bee members were producing as best I could.

Here's the first one I made. The one on the left below was made by John at QuiltDad and the one on the right was made by me. Hmmm...it appears that not all whites read as white! Oh well, let's try another block.


The block on the left this time is by Jacquie of Tallgrassprairie Studio and the block on the right is by me. Not bad! But my overhang leaves a little to be desired. This block also taught me that to make a red and aqua quilt you have to use the exact right fabrics. They have to be bright saturated reds and super bright aquas. If you vary from those, it just doesn't have the right look. See how hers is very crisp and mine is little less crisp?

I'll post a few more tomorrow, tune in then!

I'm In Love!

With these little red and aqua houses!!! I lurrrve them. The next quilt I make for myself will be these little guys. The whole point is that the houses are tiny and surrounded by lots of white, so when you see the whole quilt, it has tiny spots of color, like this.

These blocks were made for a tiny village for gnomes and fairies.

Check out all of them on the Bee Imaginative blog!

The houses and tree above were made by John at Quilt Dad.


And this one was made by Rita at redpepperquilts. Love the flower garden in the front yard!

Check them out!

Quilt Festival Entry - Finn's Quilt!

Hello All and welcome to my blog! I do everything by hand, I don't own a machine. So feel free to browse the completed quilt gallery on the left side of my blog for more hand made goodness!

For the Fall Quilt Festival, I'm featuring a quilt I made last month for my friend and boss, Angela (no blog). It's an all Heather Ross wonky square quilt, with gnome cornerstones and a pieced back. Above is Finn with the quilt!

Here are the front and the back, click to see bigger - they really do look better bigger!


And in case you're wondering who's back there holding it, it's this guy:


When I was quilting it, I got the idea to put in a small quilting detail on every block. Here I circled the mom and boy (that's Finn and Angela), the girl on top of the VW (that's Avery) and the man throwing the ball to the dog (that's Scott and Bailey the dog). The whole family! Minus the cats and ferret, of course. Click to enlarge.


On this one, I highlighted a fish - can you see the highlighting?


And here, a gnome.


It's hard to see, but on this one I wrote the baby's name. I quilted it instead of putting on letters like I usually do, since I'm now superstitious about "shouting" the baby's name on a quilt until he's older. This is more like a whisper so you don't alert bad luck that he's here. Click the photo to read the name.


Here's a closeup of the back so you can see the quilting better. Thanks to Chen for the idea to add white strips around the brown. I didn't add a detail to the ones on the back as they were quilted over.


Enjoy and thanks for visiting!

Wendy

Matching Onsies

My friend and co-worker Sarah wanted to make some onesies for Finn to go with his wonky squares quilt from my previous post. I made the little blocks and she used her machine to sew them on. Cute, huh? Click the photo to see them bigger.

The super talented Sarah transferred a font stencil and then hand embroidered an F on the right hand one - wow!

If you remember, I outlined a detail on the quilt in the VW print where Angela and Finn were the mom and son holding hands. I included that part of the picture in the four patch as well to echo the quilt. So sweet! Thanks Sarah!

Top Done! And Another Gnome Dilemma

The quilt top is finally done! I took your advice and gnomed up the sashing. Likee?


Now below I'm showing the pieced back two ways...


Angela wanted all gnomes on the back with the strip of floating blocks in brown. I only had a 3/4 yard piece of gnomes left that was not wide enough to make it all the way across (that piece is on top in the photos). But I remembered I did have a yard of gnomes that Angela had bought me earlier this year as a present, so I thought I might use that (bottom in the photo) because it is wide enough. Though it is wide enough, it is not, unfortunately, long enough. If I use that yard I am still short six inches, so I thought maybe i'd put a 3 inch strip of stripes on the top and bottom of the brown strip (I only show it on the top in the photo but it would be top and bottom).

If I don't put in the stripes AND use my gnomes, i'll need her to buy a yard and a half of new gnomes. Another option presented by Chen is to put in a strip of white on either side of the brown instead of the stripes, to make it less busy.

What do you think???

Need Your Opinion on the Sashing

Ok, so all 24 blocks are done and sashed vertically into rows. Now I need some help deciding on the horizontal sashing. I talked to my boss about how light white sashing would make the quilt but she really wanted white, so that's not the question.


Here is the quilt on the design wall with white horizontal and vertical sashing.
Click to enlarge, this quilt is too light to be appreciated from far away.


Now here is the quilt with gnome cornerstones in the horizontal white sashing. The gnomes are her favorite of all the fabrics and I think it gives the quilt some zazz. The binding will also add zazz, as I plan to use the dots you see here.

So what do you think? To gnome or not to gnome?

20 Blocks Done for New Quilt!

I'm almost there! I've got only four more blocks to go for the front and four for the back. I love how it's turning out! Click to see the photos bigger and tell me what ya think.

Does Anyone Like Heather Ross???

Of course you do! Silly question! Here's a look at the fabrics my wonderful boss/friend Angela bought for her soon-to-be-born baby boy. She didn't even think about fabric until she met me and now she's a Heather Ross collecting fool like the rest of us!

I can't wait to start making her some strippy and wonky squares out of these! These are just the selvages so I can mix and match colors easily, but I recently started keeping selvages too for a someday project.

So....what do you think? Cute???

Sorry for the poor quality of the photo, the lighting was bad. Double click for a better view!

Got Gnomes?! Sunday Stash

I do! A whole yard of gnomes! Hey, that's funny, a yard of gnomes. You know, because they live in your yard? Well, anyway, I've got gnomes! Sounds like a medical condition, but one I'm glad to have. My wonderful boss Angela knows me very, very well and for my birthday last week bought me a whole yard of gnomes on ebay. Go Angela!



The cuteness of this fabric cannot be overstated. I'd never gotten to see it up close before, but just look at how cute these guys are! I mean, for Pete's sake, the one on top is pushing a wheelbarrow full of red and white mushrooms! Come on! And of course, the trademark Heather Ross softness of fabric.



Here it is on top of what I have so far in my "blue" pile of fabric in my new Bergsbo cabinet. I am hard at work sorting and folding, so this is a sneak peek of a future post showing my total organization.

Happy Easter! Wendy