Cherry Sherbet Baby Quilt

 Hello Quilters,

 

Hope you're all having a great extended weekend! Today I have to show a cherry red version of the lime sherbet quilt I made for my friend Cari. This one is a commission for a very special baby. Click each photo to enlarge.

 

 

You can see the grey elephants, hedgehogs and kawaii animals with balloons, all imports from Japan. There's also a Joel Dewberry bird and Heather Ross fish (times two) and weiner dog.

 

 

You can see the back here, flannel, like the red on the front. Satin binding with one corner left open for little fingers.

 

 

These are my two favorite blocks. Heather Ross from the mermaid line and Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail eating blackberries. I tried a smaller needle to see if indeed I got smaller stitches and I did! Enlarge and check out my tiny quilting stitches. Well, tiny for me, anyway!

 

 

Cheers!

Lime Sherbet Baby Quilt

Updated 9/6/11: photo of Braelynn on the quilt!

I made this little sherbet baby quilt to take to a shower for my friend Cari. She wanted pastel yellows and greens and also forest animals. Well there are lots of forest animals, plus some other fun stuff, like cupcakes! Yum. I used my favorite piecing method: fussy cut the inside square and then add enough fabric around to make the right size. Oh, all hand piecing and quilting as usual, of course.

I happened to have the perfect backing fabric in my stash, this chandelier print by Tina Givens. It is just the right color of yellow-green. I used yellow satin for the binding and it's perfect too.

Here's a boy for scale.

And a closeup of one of my favorite blocks, some dancing frogs by Heather Ross via Kokka Japan. That's Cari, Clay and the baby in the meadow. I previously used the rabbit family from the same fabric in this modern baby quilt for another friend, Sarah.

These colors don't really match each other but I wanted to put the owls in some trees :)

And of course some old Heather Ross prints on top, because I love them, and a cute big doggie.

Enjoy!

Modern Baby Quilt Finished!

It's done! Click here to see the beginnings of it and the directions on how to make the applique circles. I'm very proud of this quilt, because it's the first time I've made the quilting part of the design. I used to dislike the quilting, but I'm liking it more with every quilt. As an all-by-hand quilt maker I am usually in a hurry to finish. But not anymore!


Wolf is enjoying it for now, until it goes to my dear friend Sarah.



Here are closeups of the four quadrants of the quilt. I love how the quilting on some of them "breaks the plane" of the square it belongs to and draws the eye away from the block divisions.

I didn't mark any of the quilting. The circles naturally turned out at 1/4" intervals, I think because I'm used to "eyeing" quarter inch seams. For the straight lines I just took a plastic quilting ruler and ran it back and forth on the fabric, pressing down, so I could see the line.


Frog prince!


The owl and the pussycat!


Dandelion moon!


Hope you enjoyed seeing it as much as I enjoyed making it. Cheers!

Modern Baby Quilt Top

Edited to say: click here to see the finished quilt!

The baby quilt top is done! Click photos to see them better. It was fun and easy to do. See the quilt it's based on and my applique circle notes here.



I love this Heather Ross Far Far Away II owl and pussycat circle. I only used three novelty prints, but I made sure they read as solids from far away.



Here's three bunnies dancing in the mushrooms from some Japanese fabric I had. It's Sarah, Matt and the baby, Lilly D. I like how it echoes the Japanese folklore of a rabbit in the moon.

Do you guys like it?

Japanese Squares and Frames - Quilt Festival Entry

Thanks for stopping by! It's Quilt Festival time again! Go to Amy's Creative Side (Park City Girl) and check out everyone's entries. I am an all-by-hand quilter, I've never owned a machine and don't know how to use one, so everything you see is hand sewn. Feel free to check out my finished quilt gallery down the left side of the blog.

For my entry I have Japanese squares and frames. I'm a modern quilter and my absolute favorite thing to do is to highlight tiny motifs by framing them. I love that an overlooked, unassuming little animal or plant or whatever can get its moment in the sun.

Like this apple, for example.

Or these circles. Who ever highlights circles? They are the overlooked workhorses of the quilt world. Lol.

Or how about these cute little guys peeking out of the letterbox? Or the bird in the cornerstone?


These are mostly Japanese double gauze fabrics and organic Cloud 9 fabrics, with some Mingle and others thrown in. I made it for a baby named John William, who is Amber's new nephew, on commission. Amber, a non-quilter, picked out all these fabrics to go together! Good job Amber!

And here's John William on the quilt. Super cute!

So here's the pieced back, with the double gauze and a few more squares.

Back closeups. Cute Japanese orange dot for binding.

Well, now that you've seen it, I hope you say:

Thanks for coming and please leave a comment if you've made it this far. I solemnly promise to visit your blog and leave a comment if you comment on mine. Every comment gets a comment. Cheers!

A Finish! King Size Squares and Frames

Finally! I finished the king size quilt for my bed. I love it! I tried to fix the lighting in photoshop, but it just made the colors all weird, so I hope you can see these. Click on them to make them bigger if you want to see them better.


Here it is on the bed, with the blue and green rows on my husband's side and the pink and red rows on my side (plus the snuggle row in the middle of blue/green plus red/pink in each block).


The snuggle row is vertical with mermaids/green in this photo.


And here's the back. It took forever to quilt this thing, but I plodded through, with a goal of a couple of blocks per day, and it only took a month (!). The whole quilt has taken months, in between working on lots of other stuff, and has fought me at times, but I finally get to keep a quilt! Yay!

A Little Bit of This...

I haven't blogged much lately because I've been trying to quilt my ginormous wonky square quilt! It's slow going since there are 81 blocks, but steady. I'm outlining the two squares, plus one detail in the center square, like the pear, above and the bird, below.


I have managed to make my squares for Cancer is Sew Done, i'll be sending those off tomorrow. As I expected, they were a nightmare for a hand sewer, as I had to cut off all my knots and re-knot them after cutting out the circles, and now I can't zig zag them raw-edge to the backgrounds, so I'm asking the moderators to do that.


I got paid for the Japanese wonky square commission quilt I finished lately, so I made a trip to Austin's coolest, hippest fabric store, Stitch Lab and picked up these beauties. I "needed" them so I can make some more of the red and aqua gnome homes. Stitch Lab is the coolest because they have Japanese Kei dots (pink and blue below) which are like the Amy Butler full moon dots, but smaller, and because they have Echino in person! I've never seen them in person before, only online. I didn't buy any though, they are too expensive and the repeat is too large for me. I am a scrapper, I'd have to have a project in mind to buy a huge piece.


Oh! And they had this weird fabric, Edgie Veggies by Michael Miller. It's totally not my usual style, but I just couldn't walk out without some! I really like the eggplant and the kale (?) he's talking to. Two questions: why are there apples on a veggie print? And what the heck is in the pear's mouth? ;)

Bye!

This Thing is Enormous! Questions I'm Pondering

Why, one asks oneself rhetorically, would an all-by-hand quilter keep making such freaking huge quilts??? It just doesn't make good sense.


This is the half and half quilt I am making for my and my husband's bed that I started back in November. It was on hold waiting for backing while I made the Japanese wonky squares quilt. Here is my 25 year old daughter for scale. It's 10 feet by 11 feet! What the heck was I thinking? I must have just gotten carried away.


I planned to use a king size sheet for the backing (yeah, I know you're not supposed to use sheets but I like 'em). The one I had was too small so I measured the quilt carefully and bought a different king size sheet set that the measurements said would fit. Well, if you'll look carefully at the photo above, you'll see the corner of the sheet taped to the floor. What do you notice?

I just decided to take a row of blocks off the bottom and have it be 9 blocks by 9 blocks. I felt like the quilt was telling me that if it was 8 inches bigger than a king sized sheet (that gets tucked in!) then it just plain did not NEED to be that big. King sized beds are kind of square anyway. Another question: If one king size sheet did not fit my quilt, why did I think a new one would???

A final question: who wants nine 12-inch blocks? As an extra bonus, they are already sashed together! If you'd like to see which ones they are, click on the above photos to enlarge, they are the bottom row across. I will send them to the person with the best use for them in the comments by tomorrow lunch. Ok, Go!

A Tiny Baby Quilt

After I finished Amber's commission quilt I wanted to make a small present for the baby using up some scraps. To make this tiny quilt I took a cue from my sister who makes these for babies to use while strapped into baby seats, like this baby below.

They are just the right size to fit over their laps and keep them warm while providing a satin edge and minkee backing to feel. Then when they are older, they can use them to put dollies night-nights like my daughter does.


I found the perfect green minkee for the back to match the green in the fabrics. I'm not usually fond of animal prints but the green matched perfectly! I got the minkee at the most FABULOUS quilt store in all of Central Texas. It's called the Quilt Haus in New Braunfels and they have probably 500 bolts or more of exclusively designer fabric! When I walked in and saw the ENTIRE collection of Nicey Jane in every single colorway and print I just froze. My brain said 'turn around and walk out before you spend the rent!' Anyway, I digress.


Here's the back, I just quilted it very simply.


And here it is next to the one my sister gave me that I patterned it after. I LOVE the Heather Ross one, you should click the photo to see it bigger!

Enjoy!