Brigid's Finally Done!

As some of you may remember I started this quilt some time ago and yes, I finally finished it and got it mailed out. My cousin Kelly had her baby girl, Brigid, in September and I got the quilt sent out in January. I know, not that bad by some standards, but I wish I could have had it to her about a month or so after Brigid was born.  I haven't heard back from her, but I'm hoping that she got it and that she likes it.  So here it is, this is my second time doing the pattern, Bella Baby, from Baby It's You by Amy Hamberlin, and it's also my second time doing a quilt with a minky backing.  The first quilt I did this way was Elizabeth Ann's quilt, and I think this one turned out just as beautifully.

I did try quilting the hummingbird, dragonfly and flowers that are patterns in the fabric. The tension was a bit off and I've noticed that sometimes the minky backing will come through in the stitches, but overall I think my free-motion designs look pretty good.

Flower

Hummingbird

Dragonfly

The first few were a bit shaky but I feel like you can tell what they are, and that's what counts.  I did some more flowers and skinny leaves in the borders, unfortunately I didn't get the best pictures of them, but you might be able to see it on the picture of the back of the quilt.

The back of this quilt showed up so different than Elizabeth Ann's, but I think that's only because I bought these two minkys at two different stores.  The first minky seemed to have longer fuzz (is it called fuzz?) so it hid the quilting on the back.  This one has a shorter fuzz and the quilting really shows up.  After my first minky I learned that they really stretch when you put them on the longarm, so this time I was prepared.  I made sure everything was squared up and tried not to pull too tightly on the backing while I was rolling up the backing.  I think it worked out well.  I also really love how the fabrics made different square patterns, I'm really going to have to remember that if I ever do this one again, I adore how that happened, completely unintentional but very amazing. 

I have to say that my mom has been coveting this quilt since I started making it, and I have a feeling that if it didn't have Brigid's name on it, my mom would have stolen it.  But I am really happy with how it turned out and I really hope she likes it!

We're Off to See the Wizard....for Christmas!

And I'm back again, I know you all missed me in my 4 hour interlude, lol.  I wanted to share with you all the pictures of the gift I made for my boss this Christmas.  It's based off of the "Tahoe Tote" pattern from Pink Sand Designs.  I found this pattern to be very easy and incredibly enjoyable.  I had previously made the "Don't Mesh with Me" tote by Karen Comstock of Quiltricks, and it's a beautiful bag but I was put off by all the binding.  In the Tahoe Tote pattern there is no binding at all, yippie! I had used this pattern previously to make a bag with a Sleeping Beauty panel that I had been saving for years.  I had chosen to embellish it and found it very easy to alter the pattern to fit my designs.  This was also the case for the tote I made for my boss. She loves the "Wizard of Oz" and once I found my fabric I knew it would be perfect for her.

Font of Bag

Back of Bag

Side of Bag

Inside of Bag

I really love how this bag turned out.  I did some stitch in the ditch and meandering to quilt the bag. I love the differences in the outside of the bag and the inside of the bag, and I especially love the handles.  I found the nylon straps at my local JoAnn Fabrics and found them to be better suited as handles than the pattern's recommendation of fabric and interfacing. It took me a bit less than a day to make the whole thing.  I have some leftover fabrics so I'm sure you'll be seeing another post about another "Wizard of Oz" bag soon!!!  I hope all of your Christmas gifts gave you as much joy as this one gave me when I made it!

A Birthday Quilt for Kate's Mom!

Hello everyone, well I've been a bit incommunicado, and here's why, drum roll please......  I had my first commissioned quilt to complete!!!! YEAH!! So it was an intensive one month project (unfortunately that was all the time I had to complete it). My mom's co-worker, Kate, wanted a very sweet home made quilt to give to her mom for her birthday, and who did she chose for this very special project....ME! So, of course, I chronicled my journey through pictures, did you expect anything less?

So here's the rub, since it was my first time doing this, I didn't put any restrictions on Kate. I will know better for next time, heh heh heh.  With only a month to complete I should have limited the pattern choices, but the good news is that I had the opportunity to try several new techniques. So I've included some pictures of how I put the quilt together as well as the final product pictures.

The pattern I used is from "Blocks to Diamonds: Kaleidoscope Star Quilts from Traditional Blocks" by Cheryl Malkowski, Kate chose the Desert Flower pattern.  I used a variation of her pinning technique, and here's what I did:

So the first step was making the small diamonds for the inner star, which involved lots and lots of paper piecing...several mistakes were made and several seams ripped, but here they all are.

The next step is to sew your nine diamonds into 3 strips, and this is how I pinned them to get somewhat clean points.

Insert pin through corner on top diamond.

Make sure pin goes through the corner on the bottom diamond.

Making sure that your corner pins stay straight, pin through both small diamonds as often as you would like. This will hopefully ensure that your diamonds will line up like they should.

And voila! you have two diamonds attached.

I repeated this process to attach all the diamonds together.

Three strips of diamonds.

To get the strips of diamonds attached to one another I put four pins in to make sure my points lined up, one at each corner, before pinning my strips of diamonds together.

One completed diamond!

The center of the quilt!

Getting all of the paper piecing done and getting the diamonds to match up was the hardest part of this quilt.  I applied my pinning technique to the rest of the quilt, but I had to make the quarter inch lines on all of my pieces.  Like below, I marked out my lines to help with my Y-seams. The book was very helpful with instructions on how to complete these pesky Y-seams. 

Square marked with quarter inch lines.

The first Y-seam is complete!

Diamonds and squares! The center of the quilt is complete!

The next set of diamonds I completed in the same was as previously discussed. Again it was 9 smaller diamonds to make one bigger diamond, and then they were joined together with, surprise surpirse, Y-seams!

And finally a single seam to add on the triangles and make it into a finished quilt top square!

In the book, the quilting was done in a couple of different colors, Kate really liked this effect so I tried to duplicate it for her, using a blue to accent the corner flowers.  I was really happy with the way it turned out!

The first round in just grey.

Accented with blue!

Here's a pretty close-up of the center of the quilt, I did a blue and grey flower in the center here too.

Kate wanted a special message for her mom's birthday.

The entire completed quilt!

I am really happy with the way it all turned out.  I think the colors Kate chose go very well together and I love the pop of the hot pink. When it was all bound and finished I wished that I had some more time so that I didn't feel as rushed, but I think it would have turned out the same way. I learned a lot about paper piecing, sewing diamonds, and Y-seams.  I'm glad I gave Kate free reign when choosing the pattern, but I'll make sure that I only provide appropriate patterns for the time constraints the client gives me. It's beautiful and I really hope Kate's mom enjoys it. And here's where I do my imitation of Kermit....YEAH!!!!! It's done!

Cousin Kelly's Second Baby Girl!

Kelly's adding another one to her adorable family! Little Brigid has already been welcomed into the world, unfortunately her loving cousin is a bit behind in her quilting. I've just gotten the appliqueing done, and am planning on getting the batting to do the quilting tomorrow.  Again, this one was a learning experience, and I'm going to be attempting a minky backing again. Well here's the preliminary shots!

Here's the whole top. It's all batiks, and I love that it's a mix of all different hues of pink.

I did her name the same way that I did with my previous baby quilt. I absolutely love the font, I found it at dafont, they have a ton of fun fonts that can help make your quilt so much more personalized.

One of two flowers in the corners of the borders. I made them out of minky....this proved to be a little tricky. You're not supposed to iron minky, so using Steam-A-Seam was out. I hand cut the individual petals out, and traced the design onto the border with the washable Dritz marker. I used very small dots of Liquid Stitch to hold the petals in place.  I waited about 10 minutes before stitching. Again, I used a blanket stitch, and I had to be very careful because the hairs on the minky move making it hard to judge where the true edge of the fabric really is. I did find that if the minky got a little unruly, it was easily corrected by some close trimming with embroidery scissors.

I'm not sure how I'm going to quilt it yet, I'll most likely try mimicking the flowers in the borders in some of the blocks, but I was thinking of throwing in some hummingbirds and dragonflies like there are in the fabric. Hopefully I'll be getting the batting tomorrow and having a quilting party on the longarm over Thanksgiving!!

Elizabeth Has Arrived!!

Little miss Elizabeth has graced us with her presence! She is the cutest little bundle, and you all know what that means! I finally got to finish her quilt and give it to her wonderful mother, my cousin.  As planned I cut out the letters for her name and blanket stitched them on. I used Lite Steam-A-Seam 2 to stabalize the letters on the quilt top. So, drum roll please, here are the pictures!

This is the quilted and bound, finished product.

I learned something very important while appliqueing: Be careful when putting a light fabric on top of a darker patterened fabric, it has a tendency to show through.

Some of the quilting that I did in the blocks, I did get to put the little birdies in, just like I planned, chirp chirp!

The quilting in the borders, I absolutely love the little rosebud, can you see it?

I changed the game plan a little bit and went with a minky backing. It's the first time I ever used one, and I put in on the longarm. I found that it was very stretchy, so using my side clamps had to be done with a lighter touch. I also noticed when I was done that the minky covers up most of the quilting, I was a little disappointed with that, but it's really good if you've got a couple of stitches that you're not so fond of.

Overall I loved making this quilt. The new mommy, daddy and grandma really seemed to like it too. When her daddy came home from work one of the first things he did was put the minky up to his face! Incorporating the bedding that she used in her room turned out to be a big hit too.  The quilt matched perfectly with her entire room. I'm so happy I was able to make this for her.

Longarm Sampler

So I heard about using Crayola Washable Markers to mark up a quilt, from Turbo Quilter. I love her stitching and I say where she wrote that she uses thes markers to draw on the quilt and then washes it out.  I'm still very new at using my longarm and quilting in general, so I thought this method might be for me.  I went to Joann Fabric and got a bunch of muslin and some cheap batting. I drew all over the quilt with every different color marker in the box as well as the washable marker from the quilting notions section.  While I was drawing on the quilt I did make some mistakes, so I did as Turbo Quilter suggested and sprayed the offending spot with water. Unfortunately this did not work well on the Crayola markers but was suprisingly effective on the quilting marker.  I tried my best to follow the lines, granted I didn't always, but I was very pleased with the results. Even though the Crayola markers didn't come out with a spritz, every color came completely out with washing.  The quilting and drawing process took me 3 days total before I got the quilt into the washer.  I don't know if it would be harder to get the markers out after a longer period of time.  I just need to get a little better on my tracing capabilites before I put this on one that I'm going to give away! Here's the picture, I wasn't with it enough to take a picture with the quilt all marked up before the stitching, but here's before washing and after washing.

This is the front before going in the washer, you can see the part on the quilt where I tried to spritz out the red marker, all it did was bleed.

Here it is fresh out of the washer, absolutely no marks at all!! Lovely!

Holiday Block Swap

One of the groups I belong to on facebook is holding a holiday block swap for it's members, and I decided to participate.......we'll see how this goes.

I decided to use my pretty pretty EQ7 to make some unique blocks for the lucky ladies in my group and the results were varied. The blocks that I chose that were completely pieced turned out great, the blocks that I decided to paper piece......well it was challenging to say the least. I had to completely re-do one of the blocks because I messed it up so bad.  Apparently I have no concept as to how to cut the pieces before you use them.  Now I'm not a novice at paper piecing, I've been in the process of completing a pattern from Starr Fabrics for a while now.  So I thought I could handle it....apparently not. I wasted the most beautiful sparkly black fabric, but alas I went to fabric store got a different black and tried again. Needless to say I am now an expert at measuring the approximate cutting sizes for paper piecing! Tell me what you think of my blocks:

Christmas

Easter

Halloween, one of my favorites! Didn't want to send this one away.

Hanukkah

Independence Day

Mardi Gras

New Year's Eve, another favorite.

Canadian Remembrance Day

Thanksgiving

The only criteria to create the blocks were to use the colors that the requestor specified.  I think I did a pretty good job, but I won't find out until the middle of October! Yikes! Fingers crossed.....

Cousin Karen's New Baby!

I finally got to show my cousin the baby quilt that I made for her.  So far it's just the quilt top, she's not due until the end of October. But here's a preview:

Her colors are pink and brown, could 'ya guess? I made sure to incorporate the bedding that she registered for from Pottery Barn Kids.  She chose the Penelope collection and I tore up some pillowcases to make the white inner border.

I love the little birdies, and I'm hoping to use them in the quilting design.  The roses are appliqued on, I cut them out, as is, from some yardage and blanket stitched them on.  I plan to do this with her name too, once she's born that is! More pictures will come once the little lady graces us with her presence and I can finish the quilt!

OBX Lighthouse Cross Stitch

One of my big purchases from my vacation last week.  My family and I have been travelling to the Outer Banks since around 1996.  I absolutely love the area and would live there if I could.  I've got a bunch of plans for quilts for when I hopefully get a beach house there.  These jumped out at me when we were at the Wright Brother's Memorial.  I'm thinking of incorporating them into a quilt. 

Here's how the first one came out. It was very easy to do, only took a day and a half, and that was with work in the middle. I think I'm going to have to do a more traditional type quilt if I want to fit these in.  Which is good because all of the other ideas for OBX quilts that I have are very bright and fun.  So maybe this can be a wonderful, traditional, kinda serious quilt. Ideas are still brewing.....