What Are Quilters Blogging About Today?

I've been a lot less active in the quilting community over the last few years, choosing to let quilting become just a hobby for myself, and instead focusing most of my attention and efforts on other endeavors. However, when Cheryl Brickey asked me to participate in a blog hop to promote her latest book, Just Two Charm Pack Quilts, I was excited to do it.

Shimmer is a very old quilt top, so old that I don't know when I made it nor the name of the fabric collection I used. I found the pattern in the book Striped Quilts Made Modern by Lauren Palmer, but I really wanted to use my Hex N More ruler so I did my own version, but the idea is definitely based on the book.

I came across the fabric bundle Yoyogi Park by Skinny Laminx a few years ago and was immediately enchanted by how adorable it was. I had already made one quilt, Yoyogi Park from it, but still had quite a bit left over. When I saw the pattern Plus Squared by Quilty Love, I knew it was just perfect for it.

I rate every quilt top I piece from 1 to 5, where 1 = What was I thinking, and 5 = OMG I'll keep it forever. Well, very few quilts ever become a 5, and even if they do, I very rarely finish them because I find it tough to finish my favorites! But I decided to pull out a 5 for my first quilt of the year, and Peaks is it.

Ikat is a pattern by Brigitte Heitland featuring fabric from her Fragile collection, one of my favorite fabric collections ever. I've made so many quilts with it, including Fragile, Paradox, and Critical Sunshine, and that's just the ones I've finished quilting! What can I say, I'm a sucker for black and gold.

I've tried to keep up a good ratio lately, trying to quilt 2 quilts for every quilt top I finish. (So far, maybe I'm succeeding at a 1.3 : 1 ratio, but baby steps). The quilt I chose to quilt next is Feathered Star, a pattern by Rebecca Bryan using a fabric line called Geogram by Samarra Khaja.

Periodicity is a quilt designed by Cheryl Brickey of Meadow Mist Design. The pattern is so graphic and the Kona solids so vibrant, the minute I saw it, I knew I had to make it!

I keep a spreadsheet of all my quilting projects so I can keep track of where they are, when I finished them, etc, but Insignia predated all that, and I have no idea how old this quilt top is! I barely remembered what it looked like, so when I pulled it out of the pile to finish it, it looked ... well, like all the colors of the rainbow dumped into a quilt. It is bright.

About 2 years ago, I participated in Christa Watson's Block Chain Quilt Along and made an adorable top using a charm pack of Crescent by Sarah Watts. After taking a long break from quilting this year, I decided it's finally time to finish this quilt.

In a way, I find that I'm forever playing the matchmaking game in my quilting room. I have a lot of patterns ... and I have a lot of fabric bundles. Finding the right pattern to go with the right fabric is a fun yet stressful experience, because besides taking into account whether the fabric looks right for the pattern, I also prefer to make matches where a majority of the bundle is used up.

After the ultra-colorful and bright Glass Candies, I wanted to pick a quilt top with more subdued colors for my next finish. I decided on Paper Chain, which is a block-of-the-month quilt that I made last year.

Since I've been on a journey lately to finish some of my favorite quilts instead of saving them for later, lately every quilt I've chosen to work on is special. But some are just more special than others.

The Atmosphere quilt along came along last year at a very unusual time. When it was first announced, the pandemic was barely a blip on my radar. By the time I was making the quilt top for the quilt along, however, things were getting serious. We had just started the lockdowns in my state, and my family was struggling to figure out remote learning. It's hard to imagine that that was almost a year and a half ago!

Without a doubt, Geode is one of my favorite quilt tops in my stash. In fact, it was one that I held onto for a long time, deeming it too-precious-to-finish. But since this is the year that I aim to finish at least a few of my most precious quilt tops, I decided to pull this one out.

It's time for another rainbow quilt! I decided to pull out Go Kites as I knew just what I wanted to do with it. Rainbow fabrics and lots of white space to play with in a block layout? That's my favorite type of playground.

Facets is one of my favorite quilt-tops from last year, so I didn't expect to quilt it so soon, but when I looked through my queue to decide which quilt to quilt next, it jumped out at me, begging to be quilted. Well, I can't resist that when it happens!

After a few bright and rainbowy quilts, I definitely felt the need to work on something a bit more graphic. Enter City Tiles. The pattern is by Quilty Love, and the fabrics are all from Art Gallery Fabrics, though different collections.

The Midnight Quilt Show with Angela Walters may have been over for more than a year now ... but I'm certainly not done making quilts that were featured in the show. My latest finish is Iridescent, a bright all-solids quilt designed by Slice of Pi Quilts.

For my first completed quilt of 2021, I wanted to pick something seasonally appropriate. The pattern's name is Lattice Vines by Cheryl Brickey of Meadow Mist Designs, but I named this quilt Winterfresh because the fabrics really evoke winter for me.

Since it's late October, I thought Bone & Chain would be a good quilt to finish and blog about! The pattern of Bone & Chain is by BasicGrey, and I used fabrics from Guicy Guice's Declassified line. I love the funky and fun colors in this quilt!