Bloggers Quilt Festival Fall 2014 – Large Quilt

I know this quilt is a little older, but I was rearranging rooms this fall and came across it (in a sadly underused room) and fell in love all over again. The colours are so bright and happy, especially with the weather turning gloomy outside.

The fabrics are from V and Co’s Simply Color, one of the best fabric lines ever! I am hording all my scraps from this line as I don’t come across it often now.

This quilt was made as part of the In Color Order HST BOM. I think the colors work so well with this pattern and it came together wonderfully. My daughter loves all the colours and it is a great quilt to snuggle in this fall as I am in denial that winter is coming!

The quilting follows the chevrons from the backing fabric. I like the simplicity of it and how the angles in the quilting goes well with the angles in the blocks on the front of the quilt.

 

I am entering this quilt in the large quilt category of the Bloggers Quilt Festival hosted by Amy’s Creative Side.

 

Quilt Stats:
Fabric: Simply Color by V and Co for Moda
Backing: Chevrons by Riley Blake
Pattern: HST BOM or HST Sampler by In Color Order
Size: 54 x 67″
Quilting: Done by me on my Juki

Finish-a-long 2014 Q4

Well I didn’t finish all my projects last quarter (I actually did better than I thought I would, which is great).  This quarter is all about getting ready for the holidays – for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to make a lot of gifts this year (smart right).  Most of these projects are presents for people, so I am not posting too much detail (I doubt most the recipients read this blog, but just to be careful).

1. A Coastal Cruiser pillow. (Finished –  Nov. 20th)

2. A Pillow (this one will go with the Coastal Cruiser house, so it has the same background, but will have a different subject) (Finished – Nov 24th)

3. Stockings – With the new addition to our household this year we need another stocking.  As my husband and I don’t have any at our house (Christmas was usually spent with one set of parents or the others) I need to make us some as well – at least they will all match! (Finished – Dec 19th)

4. Baby quilt – This quilt is for a special little baby that decided to arrive early – guess she couldn’t wait to meet her parents!  That being said now her quilt really needs to done and it is still in pieces (all the pieces have not yet been cut either!). (Finished – Oct 27th)

5. This quilt from my Guild’s Mystery Quilt series needs to be quilted and bound so it can go to its new home this Christmas.

6. A custom quilt for a friend!  I have made several baby quilts for her (she loves to give them as shower presents) and I finally get to make on for her to keep!

7. Why not through this on (would be nice to have it for Halloween) as it just needs to be quilted and bound!  I would love to be able to snuggle with my Ghastlies soon!

8. I also have a Ghastlies mug rug that needs to be finished for a present (no pic sorry as I am sure this person looks at the blog!).

 

Oh dear, 8 projects in less than three months – I better get to work!   Hopefully I don’t get distracted with too many side projects over the coming months, although I am sure there will be a few of those as well.

 

 

Monkey Christmas

I know it is a bit early to be thinking about Christmas, but I am thrilled to finally have this quilt finished. It started 3 years ago when my Husband picked me up some sock monkey fabric with elf monkeys on it! I started looking and found some fabric to go with it and figured out a design. Then it sat, and sat and waited  for me to get to it. I came across it almost a year later and fell in love again. This time I got it pieced together in just a couple weeks, and it sat again.

Months later I got it out and did some quilting – strings of Christmas lights!  Again other projects came up and this one sat in the to do pile, waiting to be trimmed and bound.  I am excited to have this quilt for Christmas this year, finally after years of waiting!

This quilt is backed with some nice flannel to make it nice and cozy in the cold Canadian winters!

This is my second finish for the third quarter of the 2014 Finish along (original list here).

Quilt Stats:

Size: 54″ x 63″

Fabric: Santa’s Little Helper (Moda)

Backing: Funky Monkey Flannel (moda)

Quilting: Free motion Christmas lights, done on Juki

Linking up to Needle and Thread Thursdays, Lets Be Social, I Quilt Thursdays,

Simply HST

Wow, August is turning into a month of finishes for me, which is great.  I love seeing all these quilts come together, yay.

This week I managed to get all the binding and labelling finished for my Half Square Triangle Block of the Month (HST BOM) quilt from In Color Order’s BOM.  She did the BOM in 2012, but I was not able to start my quilt until January of this year.  I was trying to be good and keep it as a BOM, but in June I got excited and started going ahead.  I am happy I did as I love how it all turned out and that I will have this bright happy quilt for the fall and winter.

I did the quilt using Simply Color fabric line from V and Co.  I love this fabric and all the happy colors in it.

The backing is rainbow chevrons from Riley Blake in large.  This took a little planning as I needed to piece it and I didn’t want the seam to be noticeable.  I managed to get it pretty close but not perfect – no one has noticed so far, lol.

For the quilting i wanted to stick with something with angels to go with all the triangles on the front.  I decided to quilt it with straight lines in a chevron pattern.  To make things easy, I simply followed the chevrons on the back (and quilted it upside down which was interesting to make sure I didn’t hit any pins!).

Quilt Stats:

Pattern: HST BOM from In Color order

Fabric: Simply Color layer cake, + Kona Snow

Backing: Large Rainbow Chevrons, Riley Blake

Linking up to Finish it up Friday at Crazy Mom Quilts. and Needle and Thread Thursday.

 
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Squares of Eden

Let me start by saying I love this quilt – just getting that over with.  But seriously, the colours are fantastic and everything came together really well from the quilting to backing.

That being said, this quilt took me over 3 years to complete – not because it was difficult but because it kept getting pushed to the bottom of my pile of projects.  I would start working on this and then another project with an actual deadline would come up and this one would be pushed to the side.  This is actually the second quilt I ever started.  It has come along through the move to the new house, getting a dog, graduating with my masters and two new jobs!

This quilt is now in its home – on the bed in the spare room/ my quilting room.  There is no way I could part with it at this point.

This quilt was made using a layer cake of Eden from Lila Tueller for Moda, the white fabric is from Connecting threads.  I started this quilt from the tutorial at Crazy Mom Quilts for her Film Strip Quilt.  Once I had all the blocks made and started to lay them out, I decided I like an alternating layout better.  I haven’t regretted that decision for a minute!

I did a simple stipple for this quilt (but quite small) in only the white are to help the colours pop out.

Quilt Stats:

Size: 76 x 76″

Top: Eden layer cake and white from Connecting Threads

Backing: Connecting Threads (it has sadly been discontinued)

Pattern: Film Strip Tutorial from Crazy Mom Quilts

Bloggers Quilt Festival – Applique Quilt

I have decided to enter a quilt into this year’s Blogger Quilt Festival this year.  This is a quilt that is a little older, but it is still one of my favorites.  I made this quilt for my Grandparents 50th Wedding Anniversary.  To celebrate their wedding and their life together, I decided to make them a family tree quilt.  Each branch represents one of their children while the grandchildren and great grandchildren are on the leaves coming off their parent’s branches.  Not all the leaves have names (we aren’t quite that fertile!), but represent the generations to come.

The tree is cut from one piece and machine appliqued onto the background.  The leaves and medallions have family members names printed on them (fabric was fused to sheets of steam a seam and ran through an inkjet printer) before being raw edge appliqued onto the quilt.

For the quilting, I tried to make the trunk and branches of the tree look like bark, and I wanted to outline the leaves to make them standout on the background.  The background of the quilt is done in a tight stipple to help the leaves stand out.  I love how it turned out and you can still see the tree by the quilting on the back!

I hope you enjoyed my quilt and you check out some others in the festival!

Honeycomb

Happy New Year everyone.  I am going to squeeze in one last quilt for the year.  This quilt has been a work in progress for a long time now, so I am very excited to finally have it finished.  I fell in love with this fabric when I made the quilt for my Mother and was able to get myself a layer cake.  When I saw Hexagon Park on Moda Bake Shop, I knew that it was the perfect pattern for my layer cake.  The hexagons reminded me of a honeycomb, which worked well with the bees and nature theme of the fabric.

I quilted this with the long arm machine at Sparrow Studioz.  I decided to quilt each hexagon and square with a daisy flower to keep with the whole “nature” theme in the fabrics.  It was my first time doing any free motion quilting on the long arm, so the flowers get a lot neater and more even as I went, but it still looks great.  I wanted to keep the quilt light and soft, so I kept the quilting in the white space to a minimum.

I am happy with the way it all turned out, and now I just have to figure out what I am going to do with it.  It needs a home somewhere, I am just not sure where that will be yet.

Quilt facts:
Pattern: Hexagon Park by Lily Quilts on Moda Bake Shop
Fabric: Cherish Nature by Deb Strain for Moda
Backing/ Binding: Wide Quilt back (I don’t know the name)

Race in the Woods

When I signed up for the long arm quilting class, I was told I would need a quilt to practice on – something that I wouldn’t be upset about if the quilting didn’t turn out great.  There weren’t any tops like that around the house – most that I was working on were presents for someone or had taken me quite a while to finish (for various reasons).  I had been wanting to play with some Walk in the Woods fabric and I had also been interested in trying a jelly roll race quilt after seeing so many at a local craft show a couple of months ago.  This seemed like a good project for the practice quilt – as I didn’t have any other reason to make it other than to practice quilting and it would be quick to put together.

I watched the video from the Missouri Quilt Co. on the jelly roll race quilt and got to work with my jelly roll.  I tried to mix up the colours as I was putting it together, but ended up with a lot of them matching up into “clumps” anyways.  I still like the final quilt, I just wish the reds were a little more spaced out.

The quilting was a pantograph, and it was really easy to follow once I got used to moving the machine around.  I like how the curves go well with the bows in the fabric (also used as the backing).

I used the blue and white stripes for the binding, which I love.  I decided to not do a machine binding this time (I love the machine binding usually), so it took a couple of days to get it all sewn down, but it goes well and doesn’t take away from the quilting.I am happy this went well and I enjoyed quilting it on the long arm.  You can hardly tel which was my first pass across the quilt unless you look really close at it (and most people won’t!).  Thanks to Sparrow Studioz for all the help!

Gradations

A while ago I offered to make my brother a quilt, he was the only one in my immediate family that had yet to recieve on (Mom, Dad and Grandparents all have theirs).  When I asked what he wanted I was informed that he wanted something that wasn’t too busy and was done all in greys.  This stumped me for a while as I am a colour person, I didn’t know what to do with a quilt in all grey.  At first I thought maybe a version of Cherry House Quilt’s City Harbor done in grey. However, one day as I was getting ready to order fabric and trying to choose enough variations of grey to make it work, I came across this quit.

It was perfect, and I would need fewer versions of grey – less chance of me mixing one up and then having to rip out tons of seems!
I got to planning after that, as there was no pattern, I started drawing out a sketch to figure out how much of each fabric I would need to order.  I did calculations for a larger quilt first and then he decided a lap quilt would be good, so I just modified the size of the squares.  Now I guess if he ever does decide he needs one for his bed I have it all figured out – lol.

It was a breeze to piece together as it was all squares and was a nice change after the last big quilt top I finished (which will be posted soon!).

This quilt using a wool blanket as a batting – he specifically requested that as he loves the warmth and the weight, but not the scratchiness of the wool blankets.  Thankfully my mother in law was cleaning out her closets and had sent a few blankets to me.

Fabric from Connecting Threads

I decided to quilt it with squares as I like how it went with the other lines in the quilt and the backing fabric.

It is now all ready and wrapped for Christmas – hopefully the blue isn’t too much color for him!