A+ Quilt {finished Penny Patch quiltalong}

The title of the quilt really has nothing to do with the design.  It is a Christmas present for my daughter’s teacher (for her almost 2 year old daughter).  So my husband started calling it the A+ quilt when we were working on it, and the name stuck.

I wanted to use the new Wallflowers fabric by Allison Harris (Cluck Cluck Sew) and a bunch of stash fabrics for the red, blue, and yellow color palette.  I love how the low volume grays, blues, creams, and whites make the bolder colors sparkle.

There were quite a few small squares left over from making the penny patches, so I used them on the back along with a scrappy star I made from leftovers too.  I’ll have Bea sign the label of the quilt when she gets home from school today.  She assisted with all the cutting, piecing, pressing, and pinning.  Unfortunately my machine was skipping stitches like crazy and had to be repaired twice before it was fixed (and I’m sad to say it still skips stitches every once in a while—but that’s another post), so we ran out of time to do the quilting and binding together, but there’s always a next time!

I quilted a fmq flower in the center of each block and then used a decorative squiggle stitch over the seam lines to make a grid. 

The finished size is 41.5” x 53”.  I have quite a few favorites in the Flickr pool.  You can check them out here.

Moving Along

Last week was rough.  I was sick, which was no big deal but I just didn’t want to be around people for a few days.  That can be hard when you are a full-time stay-at-home mom with two little kids home all day.  On top of that I gained about 10 pounds from eating scones and tea or hot chocolate for every meal while I was feeling under the weather.  I am feeling back to normal today, yay!  Back to exercising, eating healthy, and getting outdoors.  To celebrate, my husband helped me get a few photos of the Penny Patch quilt top all sewn up!

I am so happy with the way it’s turned out.  My favorite part of the quilt by far is the little diagonal rows the penny patch blocks create.  I always have a hard time visualizing how things are going to look, and the effect was such a happy surprise! 

Now it’s time to decide what to use for backing and binding.  I had a little bit of penny patch scraps left over, so I made a horizontal scrappy stripe for the back.  I’m leaning toward Kona Ash for the rest, and either Alison Glass sunprint text in charcoal or her bike path in teal for binding.  Any suggestions would be appreciated! 

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

More QAL Progress

These are the blocks Bea and I made for the Penny Patch QAL so far.  We need to have 32 done, so only 14 more to go.  Bea sewed a few, but she preferred doing all the ironing, which made making these blocks really fast.  We had a system down after just a few!

This bird block is my favorite of all of them.  The color scheme of red, white, and blue is probably my favorite.  Hopefully the yellow adds a !pop! of color.

I’m going over my cousin’s house later this week to help her get her blocks done.  I volunteered to do all the ironing and help with pinning, so maybe we could get all 60 of hers done in a few hours? 

Hope you are having a great day!  Thanks for visiting!

Quilt Along Progress

Well, the fabrics are cut for the Penny Patch Quilt Along I am doing with my sister and daughter.  We are ready to start sewing!  In order to be more prepared for helping (and hopefully not making as many mistakes as usual), I started my own Penny Patch quilt in fabrics that would look good on my living room couch.

The penny patch block is so fun to make!  You really can’t go wrong with color/fabric combinations and they go together pretty quickly.  It’s not too late to join the quilt along!  This quilt is so perfect for a beginner who wants to make a quilt that’s more interesting than just solid blocks sewn together.  And the baby quilt would be really simple and fast.  Bea and my sister are making the baby quilt size.  I’m still not sure what size I want to make, but I’m leaning toward throw size.

How sweet are these little birds?  Even a block sewn backwards looks good!  I’ve done quite a few in opposite order, but ripping and fixing the mistake is simple enough. 

The fabrics are from Feathered Friends that I purchased at Hawthorne Threads; the rest are just from my stash or scraps.

Have a wonderful day!  Linking up to WIP Wednesday.

Penny Patch fabrics

The fabrics for the quilt along arrived yesterday!  Last night I got busy cutting the fabric in half to make fat quarters and bundling them up to mail to my sister in Maine today.

My daughter Bea and my sister are going to be making the same quilts—Bea is going to give hers to her teacher’s daughter as a Christmas present and my sister is making hers as a baby gift.

My sister is relatively new to sewing/quilting.  And Bea wanted (desperately) to learn how to use the rotary cutter.  So, I suggested we do a family quilt along.  My sister started out by going to the Fat Quarter Shop and picking a few fabric lines she liked, and then I did a little mixing and matching and this is what I came up with.  I suggested the Fat Quarter Shop because they seriously have such a wide selection you could spend hours scrolling through it all.  It was interesting to see what collections she picked—batiks, civil war repro, novelty prints—her choices were very diverse. 

I ended up picking Riley Blake “Enchant” that she liked as the base for all the other fabrics.  It has some really cute deer, rabbits, and foxes and novelty prints, but I didn’t pick those because most of the fabrics Rachel picked for her quilt were small scale prints.  One of the things I tried to do when I first started quilting was “recreate” a quilt from a pattern, but a lot of times my efforts would fall flat because I didn’t pick appropriate fabrics.  Plus I was remembering how much trouble I had with directional fabric when I first started sewing.  I was a little worried with only fat quarters for cutting, we might have to use a few deer  butts instead of heads in some of the blocks and nobody likes a body with the head cut off.  At least I don’t!

The two “reds” I ordered online and was a little nervous about how they would look together.  The Enchant floral was labeled “pink” and the Wallflowers print was labeled “red,” but my gut said they’d go together.  I’m quite pleased with how they look.

Just when I thought I was getting better at selecting fabric, low volume prints have become popular and thrown a monkey wrench into it.  I ordered some of these low volume fabrics with the other fabrics, but about half are from my stash.  There’s one more fabric that isn’t in either of these photos.  It’s a very light blue floral, and I’m not sure it qualifies as a “blue” or a “low volume,” so we’ll just have to see as the quilt along develops.

Hope you have a quilty weekend!