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!

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!

I'm in Fabric Heaven!

I'm in fabric heaven!  I went to the mailbox last night and retrieved 10 small squishy packages.  Ten!  It was Christmas in Ju..well ok, Christmas right before Christmas!  First I unwrapped that small bag I won in the SMS giveaways from adelaidelemonade.  Don't forget to hop on over to her site to get the tutorial for the bag so you can make one too!  The bag was sooooo much cuter in person. And even more gorgeous when I stuffed it with fabric.

See that pink and red yard of Folksy flannel from Anna Maria Horner sticking up out of the bag above?  You should get some, the pattern is so subtle and the colors are wonderful. I want to get a ton of it and make this baby quilt, from Anna Maria's website - soooo soft and pretty.

Next I opened a bunch of fabric from a quilt I'm being commissioned to make.  What's not to love about a quilt commission???  You get a bunch of gorgeous fabric sent to you for free, you get to play with it until you're sick of it, you get to keep the scraps, and then you give it away.  Sounds like normal to me.  Except you get free fabric to play with, free scraps and money to boot!  What's not to love?  And all I have to do is put in about 100 hours of hand sewing labor.  Big deal, i'd be doing that anyway.  And having said that, let me also say I love all the trust there is in the quilting world.  She trusts me to send me the fabric, then I trust her to pay at the end.  I love our quilting community, don't you?

Lovely Amber sent these fabrics to coordinate into a copy of Finn's quilt.  She chose some Kokka Japan as her focus fabric:

Then she pulled all the colors out of the focus fabric with these:

So cute!  The organic cloud fabric she sent even came with two tiny swatches to intice you to buy the whole collection, and guess what, it worked.  Now I want the mushrooms and orange dots too.

Enjoy!