What Are Quilters Blogging About Today?

Mom asked me to make a quilt for a young girl. Of course I said yes.

What is her name, I asked. She did not know. 

How old, I enquired. Not sure, she replied.

Orange, Pink and Sparkly

At this point, I gave up. There is only so much eye-rolling I can do. I set about picking fabrics. Since I knew nothing about the recipient, my aim was to please my mother.

I chose a simple block using cream, pink and orange fabrics.

Design Wall

25 blocks

Ruby Star and Alison Glass Fabrics

Paul: Who is this for?
Me: Some ...

Quilting

If I could be doing anything quilty, it would be improv piecing.  It is like taking a journey. "Come hither ye fabric scraps; together we will travel and see where we end up." 

Here is the Island Batik Challenge for March. It reads 

"March brings a free month for you to determine your own project of any size, using any theme and any technique!! This is an opportunity for you to express your creativity without guidelines. Have fun!"

And I did have fun. See how the bits and pieces grew.

Starting Point

And then there were two

Growing

Coming Together ...

My last big project of 2022 has been finishing a quilt I called “Happy Accidents” because it was inspired by a piece of woven paper my Roomba had chewed up. You can read about it here and here.

I thought it was done, and started the quilting. I managed to quilt most of what I wanted with a walking foot, and planned to do details with hand stitching. Like many plans, that didn’t go as expected. I found that working needle and thread through four, sometimes five, layers of cloth was challenging. After doing a bit of backstitching, my ...

 For many reasons, this has been a very busy week!  Today was our church Christmas Bazaar so I was adding some quilting to some placemats every time I had a bit of time to sew this week.  For this set, I quilted along the red stripes both vertically and horizontally, creating a grid. 

Wavy lines were sewn in the boat and house sections of these placemats. I though they might be nice for a cottage. 

These red and white placemats had a few rows of wavy lines added. 

Organic wavy lines were quilted onto these paisley placemats. 

Lots of people ...

The Ultimate Travel Bag

The October 2022 Island Batik Challenge is "Its in the Bag", sponsored by Patterns by Annie.

Soft & Stable - For Bags that Stand Tall

Pattern and the Hardware

I chose fabrics from the Spring 2022 Sunset Plains Collection. It is a beautiful collection with bright greens, reds and maroons designed by Kathy Engle. I love the Cactus print.

Flowers on my morning walk - Collection Inspiration?

Fabrics

For the past few years, I have participated in Quilting Jetgirl's QALs and I have to say, they've never disappointed. This year, the quilt pattern is Planview and it is awesome!

The pattern comes in 6 different sizes, from wall hanging to King. I chose to make the baby size because I thought it would be easier to manage given everything else I had going on over the last few months. But Yvonne's QALs are broken-down in easy to complete steps and she provide more than enough time to get each step done before publishing the next ...

I made a few more batik blocks this week for my Quilt for a Residential School Survivor.  I only have two more blocks to make.  I am contemplating ideas...  Finn likes to "help" while I am sewing, or should I say, trying to sew... 

I am going to make 12 blocks for this quilt--3 of each type.  Here are my three log cabin variation blocks.  I made the bottom one today and the one on the right with the green border earlier in the week. 

Finn is here!  Our daughter is quite busy at work for the next few weeks so we have Finn here to keep us company.  He loves to sit on the back of the couch and keep an eye on the comings and goings outside, as well as watch my husband and I.  Finn likes to keep track of his people.  He's staring at me as I type this blogpost on the computer...obviously, I need supervision!

Finn is not allowed in my sewing room so I have a baby gate up at the doorway so he can still see ...

Rhythm & Repetition. This is one of those challenge themes that is so easy... but also quite difficult. So many things would work. Three of anything really. Three 4-patch blocks. Three chickens. Three triangles. The possibilities are endless! On my first challenge quilt this season I made a wholecloth quilt and toyed with making wholecloth quilts for each challenge. But then I used two fabrics for challenge 2. So here is my every other wholecloth quilt. I decided to take inspiration from Jacquie Gering and feature my repetition in the way of walking foot quilting. On a small scale. My initial ...

I have finished and submitted to my first SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates) exhibition. The Northern California/Northern Nevada region issued a call last summer for a juried regional exhibition entitled Prism Play. From the start I loved the vision for this exhibition. The quilts are all required to be 15" wide by 45" long and monochromatic, following one of the color cards from Joen Wolfrom's Ultimate 3-in-1 Color Tool. The selected quilts will hang in multiple full color spectrum groupings during the exhibition.

In phase one we each signed up for a color (or colors) and were assigned ...

My hubby and I decided to buy some new living room furniture for Christmas. A new beautiful dark grey couch and chair as well as new end tables. Now we have seven grand-children and I would like the new furniture to stay new-looking for a while so we protected the new couch and chair with a stain-resistant treatment and I decided to make two table toppers for the tables.

The pattern I used to make these is One-Eyed Monsters from Cheryl Brickey's book "Just One Charm Pack Quilts". I got the book for free because I was a tester ...

My boss, who's also a dear friend, is going to be a grand-mother this month. I waited to find out the sex of the baby and the nursery colours before I started planning the quilt. And once I had that information, I started pulling fabric and looking for a pattern to showcase the beautiful prints.

The pattern I used is Pretty in Pluses by Michelle Cain (From Bolt to Beauty). The pattern comes in three sizes: baby, throw and twin. I made the baby quilt and it finished at 40.5" x 48.5".

The instructions are really clear ...

I have a new finish to share but would you, could you wait till I share some news? Pretty, please.

I am in a magazine...well, my work is.

A couple of weeks ago I received an email from Diptee Raut of Quilt Stories, asking if I'd consider contributing to India's first quilting magazine.  I was so slammed at that time that I told Diptee - Take a look at my blog and use whatever you like. Diptee chose the tutorial for the Picket Star Quilt Block and here is the link to the magazine. 

Courage uses the Picket ...