Dreamcatcher {a finished quilt}

This quilt was made with Kate Spain’s new Daydreams line from The Intrepid Thread.  The colors are deep purple and pinkish corals with a hint of orange thrown in for good measure.

I modified the Criss-Crossed Quilt from February to make this quilt appear to have wonky 4-patch blocks, like this:

Or wonky crosses like this:

I don’t know which one my eye sees better when I look at the quilt.  But either way I like it!

What do you think of the texture of the quilting?  This double loop pattern came straight out of Angela Walters’s first free motion quilting book.  I never was able to do loops on my domestic machine, but I practiced on a drawing pad and then drew a diagram on an index card which I taped right on the front of my longarm machine.  After a few minutes I was able to take the index card off.  My brain knew what it was doing (for the most part).  Of course my quilting is nowhere near as good as Angela’s, but not too shabby for a first try!

The back is pieced with leftover gray fabric and pink striped fabric long forgotten but re-discovered to finally fulfill its destiny as the back of a quilt, along with a big section of Arcadia in Scarlet.

Arcadia features hummingbirds, rabbits, butterflies, and roosters and has such a fanciful feeling.  One thing is for sure, pieced backs always take longer.  I put this one together with four girls running amuck through the house this past Saturday and, for the hour or two it took, questioned my sanity several times, but the effect is worth the effort in the end…right?

I framed the cloth label in leftover purple and coral.  This quilt is for Veronica so I will write her name on there with an indelible fabric marker and date it.

She loves the quilt and even volunteered for a photo using it.

It finishes at 70” square.  The binding is Kona Punch.  The lattice is Kona Silver and the background is mostly Kona Shadow, but I ran out and had to improvise with some other grays from my stash.  I owe one to Bea for coming up with the idea of ombre.  How did she even know that word???!!!  I tried to cluster the darks in the bottom corner and have the color attenuate into light gray.

What do you think?  Would you classify this as a modern quilt?  Wonky with an edge?  I loved every part of making this quilt and hope it shows.

Linking up with Crazy Mom Quilts and Fort Worth Fabric Studio on Friday. 

Holy Tornado & Holy Snowstorm!

About a week ago, a small tornado came through our neighborhood, less than a 1/4 mile from our house.  The winds toppled a giant of a pine tree in our front yard.  The tree blocked off our driveway for several hours and thankfully missed our neighbor’s house by a measly 5 feet.  In the photo below you can get a sense that the rootball was taller than my minivan!   I told the kids instead of joining the pool this year, we’ll just pour some concrete in that hole and have our own swimming pool.  A few years ago another tornado blasted right through our backyard, ripping out nearly all the trees and knocking two of them on our roof.  Tornadoes?  An earthquake?  Now another snowstorm?  Seriously.  I am done with crazy weather!

We are expecting 6-10 inches of snow today.  I spent last night after the kids went to bed putting a new quilt on the longarm frame ready to be quilted today in daylight.  I’m trying a few new things this time.  Gray thread instead of white.  I fooled around with the tension a little after watching a few videos on You Tube. (Thank you, Mary, for that advice!  I learned so much in just a few minutes!)  And this time I am going to try basting the quilt first with the machine to avoid any tucks on the back, which happened with the most recent quilt I had on there.   I didn’t notice the tuck until I’d taken it off the frame, and while it was small and pretty insignificant, I don’t want that to happen again!

This quilt is quite large by my standards, 70” x 70”, which would have been doable on my domestic machine, but I wouldn’t have enjoyed the process.  I’m going to be quilting swirls all over this one to practice because I will be quilting a friend’s quilt very soon and I want to have my swirls lookin’ good!

As soon as I get this quilt done, I’ll be moving on to making a baby quilt and making something for the Pantone 2014 Challenge.  I wasn’t sure I’d have the time, but since purple is my all time favorite color, I decided this was my chance to make something awesomely purple, so I picked this pillow cover pattern by Jen Kingwell in the February issue of American Patchwork and Quilting.

I ordered two different solids in orchid that were supposed to arrive today via USPS (probably more like Wednesday at this point with the 4 inches of snow already on the ground, but I’m still holding out hope the package miraculously arrives in my mailbox this afternoon) and I’ll use that as my starting point for picking the rest of the fabrics. 

So far I picked out a few “orchids” from my stash, but I really need the solid before I commit to a shade.  I’m really partial to the purple in the Denyse Schmidt fabric, but I don’t have a lot in that color, so I’ll probably go with the lighter color so I have more fabrics to choose from.  But after looking at this photo on my computer monitor, maybe all the colors look good together.  Are you doing the challenge?

Strangely enough, I realized the other day that I painted our downstairs bathroom orchid last month. 

I’ll tell ya, it’s difficult to get a good photo of a bathroom without the paint or mirror reflecting the light.  This is the very photogenic corner of the back wall.  You can see part of the lovely owl picture my husband reluctantly put up and endures looking at every day.  The paint color is called “flower market” and is a mistint I picked up at Lowes.  You now, picking paint used to be a huge headache for me, but lately I’ve just been buying mistints off the shelf.  No more agonizing over the right shade, and you can’t beat the price!

Have a great day!

Letting the Light In

The new light in my sewing room was installed last week.  I just love, love, love it!!!!  Have you seen the show American Pickers?  Sometimes Mike, Frank, and Danielle find industrial fixtures on their adventures in old abandoned buildings.  Since I don’ t have $500 to spend on a rescued light from their shop, I found a pretty decent substitute at Lowes.  It’s industrial and modern looking and was just the right price!

It also helped that a reviewer said “you can perform open heart surgery under this light.”  That sounds about right for a sewing room!

The only drawback is the Edison bulbs emit a yellowish instead of white light.  It’s a small price to pay though and a drawback I’m totally willing to live with.  I took this photo of the light illuminated at light so you can see the yellow glow.

Speaking of light, my friend Sara sent this heart wall hanging to me recently which brought a lot of much-needed light into my life.  I’ve been having a bad couple of months on a personal level, so this was just the ticket to brighten my spirits.  You hear it so many times, but it’s true, the people in the quilting community are so generous and warm-spirited.

I love the fabrics she chose for the squares and polka dot binding since purple is my favorite color ever!  And the handstitching around makes it even more special.  I don’t know how she found time to make this heart plus all the other beautiful quilts and stitched projects she shares on her blog Growing Stitches.  Did I mention she’s also 39 weeks pregnant!!!???  She’s one busy mama!  Thank you, Sara, it looks fantastic hanging in my sewing room!

She was worried the coral color looked a little orange, but I think it’s the perfect compliment to the purple, so much that I used these colors for the inspiration for my next quilt.  The fabrics are all from The Intrepid Thread.

Have a super Wednesday and hope everyone is staying warm!

Front Door Makeover and Bee Quilt Update

Last year we got a new roof courtesy of Hurricane Irene.  It really made our house look great!  We ripped out all the boxwood across the front of our house and planted hydrangeas and azaleas.  They have grown in beautifully.  We also had a new screen door installed and replaced the white shutters with black ones.

I have decided our front door needs a makeover.  I am debating between painting the front door a dark gray or a shade of red.  We have some Adirondack furniture on the front porch that I am going to paint, too.  My husband just informed me that he is not working Memorial Day, so it’s a project that might get done in a weekend!

In case you’re wondering what it says in my window, here’s a close up.

The signs have greatly reduced the number of salespeople stopping by my house.  I can’t tell you how many pest control and meat salesmen (they are all men) used to stop by my house during the day before I put up these signs.  I was ill at ease in my own home!  But the last straw was a man who tried to sell me magazine subscriptions.  He told me he was a 2-time felon trying to get on the straight and narrow.  And he told me this while I was standing on my front walkway with my three year old and holding my baby. 

I do think our house is rather pretty.  This is what it really looks like.  What, you don’t have a teepee in your yard?

And now for the quilty--albeit brief--part of my post.  My “Come What May” quilt is coming along nicely.  You can really tell the background color is Kona charcoal in this photo.  I have seven blocks right now, counting the original I made for the tutorial.  I think I will pebble quilt the solid portions and maybe quilt right inside all the triangles with a pretty shade of purple.

Keeping my fingers crossed I won some Sew Mama Sew giveaways!!!

Fat Quarter Shop Challenge

Our Christmas was fun!  The kids and I woke up on Christmas Eve with pinkeye.  We were on top of it and got the first four appointments at Urgent Care…12, 12:10, 12:20, and 12:30 on Christmas Eve!  Four tubes of eye ointment later, we are all clear eyed finally.

Ronnie has been sick, so while holding a sleeping/coughing baby, I was able to complete the Fat Quarter Shop Challenge this morning.  Purple is by far my favorite color, but I have relatively few purple fabrics in my stash, actually none really!  So, it was fun to go shopping!  I am really loving the green dot fabric on the right in the second row and the stripe underneath it. 

I’ll be linking this mosaic back up to Quokka Quilts.