Almost Amish Granny

Do you have any of Lori Holt’s amazing books? I have them all! The diagrams are so clear, the directions always accurate (how many books can say that?!), and the photographs are taken in Lori’s house, so they are just as pretty as can be.

The Fat Quarter Shop is revisiting Lori’s second book, Great Granny Squared, which I already made a project from last year. This time I wanted to add a “twist” to my project, so I opted to the make the full-size great granny block, which finishes at 12”, but in bright monochromatic colors that take on a different look than Lori’s normal scrappy-happy style.

Most of the fabrics are from the Basic Mixologie collection. The colors are so vibrant and gorgeous! But then my Tucker Prairie fat quarter bundle arrived (from the big after Thanksgiving Sale at FQS!) and the two collections looked like they were meant to be together. Keen-eyed fabric aficionados will also notice that the light pink block has a Hoffman Me + You modern batik print too.

I quilted an overall swirl pattern in light beige thread which was a little nerve-wracking since the thread shows so much on the black background fabric, but it turned out awesome! I haven’t attached the binding yet, but this green Tucker Prairie stripe is ready to be sewn on with this pretty Aurifil #1231.

Overall this twist is something I’d love to try again! The black background fabric and monochromatic blocks make the quilt look almost like an actual crocheted granny square blanket or maybe an Amish-inspired quilt. Thanks, Fat Quarter Shop, for letting me play along with your Great Granny Square Twist Blog Hop!

The Fat Quarter Shop has generously let me give away a copy of Lori’s book, Great Granny Squared, to one lucky visitor today. Just leave a comment to be entered and a winner will be picked Monday.

Wild & Free Pillows {a finished project}

My oldest daughter was lucky enough to have a student teacher for the first part of the school year.  What better way to say thank you than matching pillows for her teachers?

I used the new line of fabric Wild & Free by Maureen Cracknell (+ a few scraps).  I always thought the arrows would be my favorite print from the line, but once I saw it in person, Sun Tracks was clearly my fave!  I bought extra after getting my preordered fat quarter bundle, and used it for the backs of these pillows.

I also quilted each pillow differently.  For one I did cross-hatching, simply for the reason that the spool of thread on my machine was nearly out and I thought maybe I could eke out an entire quilted pillow from it (I couldn’t). 

There is just something about straight lines that makes my heart swoon when I see them on pillows! 

Quilting always seems to show up better on the back.

Then I quilted the other with a free motion pattern so they were the same but still different.  Also I was a bit tired from all the straight lines.  FMQ is so fast!

The quilting pattern blends in a lot of with all the different fabrics on the front.

The teachers liked the pillows and I got a message from one later that night informing me her 16 year old daughter already claimed it for her bedroom. 

I promised that this would be the end of pillows for a while, but I was wrong.  I already started another with the leftovers from this project and some scraps that have already overtaken my sewing room and are threatening to take over my house…

Have a wonderful weekend!  Linking up with Fort Worth Fabric Studio and Crazy Mom Quilts.

unicorns and rainbows {another pillow!}

My daughters had two birthday parties to attend this weekend (in addition to all the regular holiday hoopla which was crazy)  so last week I thought it would be a fun idea to make each birthday girl a unicorn & rainbow pillow.  Of course I wasn’t organized enough to take a pic of the first pillow, but the second one, which is virtually identical to the first, I clicked a pic of minutes before leaving for the party.

Now if you think the pillow looks uber-stuffed, you would be correct.  I ran into Joanns with the kids last week one day after school and hurriedly grabbed some pillow forms for upcoming gifts.  I guess instead of 12” pillow insertsI picked up 14”.  Luckily they fit in the 12” covers just barely!

The quilting turned out nicely on both pillows.  I took a photo from the wrong side before adding the envelope back because the design shows up much better that way.

One of the fabrics I used for the back says “Always be yourself, unless you can be a unicorn, then always be a unicorn.”  That’s something I would have loved to read over and over again when I was a kid.

The fabric is called Unicorns and Rainbows by Riley Blake.  You can still find the fabric available online.

Hope you had a fun (and not too crazy) weekend!

Blessed

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving with family and friends.  Ours was nice and relaxing because my mom hosted this year.  The food and company were great, and it was even better that I didn’t have to cook or clean anything!

Esther’s pillow is finished.  Originally I wanted to turn the embroidery, designed by Sarah Jane, into a wallhanging for her bedroom, but she was adamant that she wanted a pillow.  Of course the kindergartner won that argument!

Lately I’ve been on a sewing-room-organizing-kick, so I was able to use my shoebox of 2.5” squares to fill in around the embroidery to make the pillow 18” x 18” square.  It couldn’t get any easier than that!  I feel like I’m getting the hang of picking fabric.  I auditioned a lot of squares, and like the final result.  Circles are Esther’s favorite shape (“because they are round”) so I tried to use lots of little prints with circles.

Then I saw this AMAZING (and easy!) free motion quilt tutorial on Christina’s blog “A Few Scraps.”  If you’ve never checked out her blog and you are interested in free motion designs, you have to take a look at the video tutorials she’s posted.  Spoiler Alert:  my quilting looks nowhere near as good as Christina’s!

Even though my quilting isn’t perfect, it was fun to try this new design and Esther loves the extra circles.  Win-win!

I did an easy envelope back using Denyse Schmidt’s line Piccadilly.  This medallion print feels so bright and ornate for something designed by Denyse Schmidt.  LOVE!

Not only was I blessed with a wonderful Thanksgiving, I also won two giveaways this past week!  A huge THANK YOU to Fat Quarter Shop for the Bella Naptime Solids fat quarter bundle and Hawthorne Threads for a fat quarter bundle of their exclusive new line Calliope.

I hope you’re enjoying the weekend and maybe some turkey leftovers and time to sew!

Dottie Dresden {a finished quilt}

In the beginning of November, Rachel of Stitched in Color announced a scrap challenge from one of her sponsors, Lark Cottons.  The fabric was a sweet fat eighth bundle of polka dot fabrics.  The only rules were the project had to be finished by November 30 and you had to use all the fabrics in the bundle (you could add your own fabric). 

I wrote a tutorial detailing how I made the dresdens.  The blocks each measured 15” unfinished.  Then I decided to sew up the rest of the scraps to make wonky sashing to go between the blocks.  That’s my favorite part of the quilt!  I tried a new fmq design called “Ribbon Candy” by Angela Walters and it is magical!  It was easy to do and looks so good.  The light was coming into my sewing room so brightly and just illuminated the stitching in this photo.

Deciding how to quilt everything was the hardest part, because I still always want to just stipple everything and not try a lot of new things.  But I really went out of control on this quilt.  I used Aurifil cone thread in Dove.  Love!!!

I stitched flowers in the center of each plate, several sections of pebbles, and some teardrop shapes.  Then I tried to make scales in the negative space.  I’m not sure if I like how the scales turned out, but overall I’m happy with the texture of the quilt.  It is surprising that the quilt is not stiff at all, but still nice and soft.  I haven’t washed it yet, but I bet it will be even softer!

The back of the quilt is one of the bird prints from Heather Bailey’s line Up Parasol.  The fabric reminds me so much of our cockatiel, so of course I had to use it for something!  The binding is an unidentified light solid pink fabric I found in my stash. 

I had a slight problem putting the binding on the quilt…I couldn’t find my Clover Wonder Clips anywhere!  Finally I remembered they were in a tote bag.  We were asked to share fun quilting gadgets at the last guild meeting and I never emptied out the bag.  After I found the Wonder Clips, binding was a breeze!

I’ve been using the Wonder Clips for over a year, but just a few weeks ago I figured out that I could clip the mitered corner and sew a continuous line all around the binding without backstitching and stopping at each corner.  Duh!

Tada!  A pretty good looking corner!

The finished quilt is 30” x 30”.  Originally I was going to use this quilt as a wall-hanging, but now I can’t make a decision.  It’s so soft and has a lot of fun fabrics, so I think it might make a nice baby quilt. 

Thanks for visiting and I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving with family and friends!

A little holiday sewing {a finished project}

I’m not sure what exactly motivated me to get hopping on some holiday sewing, but recently I’ve started a few fall & winter projects and have one all finished to share today!  Maybe it’s that reality has set in and I know I need lots more time to finish everything I want to, so I’m getting a head start?

More free motion quilting and even some feathers of sorts (my first ever!!!).

The fabrics are all from my stash—the quilter’s linen (not actual linen, but quilting cotton) is by Robert Kaufman.  The green polka dots is from that awesome shopping trip in Maine from earlier this year.  I thought it was Amy Butler or Kaffe Fassett, but it happens to be by Hoodie, not sure who exactly that is!  And all the low volume background prints are from my stash.

The backing is an Aunt Grace polka dot from years and years ago.  It is from one of the very first quilts I ever made—back before I even had a blog.  That was when I thought you really needed 5 1/2 yards of fabric to back a twin sized quilt.  Ha ha, how times have changed!!!  

And the binding is the same, from a box of bindings I made years and years ago before I started making my binding slightly larger (usually I cut it 2.75 inches wide).  Many of the 2.5” squares came from my scrap box.

I’m counting this as scrap project #3 of 52. 

Have you started any holiday sewing?  Do tell!

Scrap Control

Are your scraps out of control?  This past week I found myself with some time on my hands and I decided to start using them up or cutting them into usable sizes for future projects.  Starting with cream/white, I cut 2.5” and 3.5” squares, and then used the leftovers to piece some improv slabs.

You can see I also did a few dark gray/black blocks too.  I had no idea how good this was going to look until I started laying out the blocks and took the photo.  I made a serious dent in the lighter scraps, but still have tons of other scraps to work through…

I’m thinking of focusing on aqua and orange for the other blocks to include in the quilt with the cream and dark gray.  What do you think?  Maybe lime green, too.

I also finished up quilting my nested churn dash wall hanging.  It is not perfect by any means, but I’m really happy with how it turned out.

I did not follow Angela Walters’s advice to use thread that will blend.  Instead I used what I had, which was light aqua and highly contrasted with the charcoal fabric.  I really need to work on either starting and stopping more unnoticeably or learn how to bury my threads…

My regular sewing machine was having issues again and is in the shop (it went in the day after I finished my Michael Miller challenge quilt), so I’ve been using my daughter’s Janome in the interim.   The binding on this wallhanging will have to wait a while because my daughter’s machine doesn’t have a walking foot, a necessity for machine binding!

Thanks for visiting and have a great weekend!

Quilting Fail? Part II {a finished quilt}

About a week ago I posted about a top for the scrap basket quilt along I wasn’t too happy with.  Here it is in all its glory:

Things I didn’t like about this top:

• no visible color scheme
• too much red in three blocks clumped on left side
• just way too much going on!
• no opportunity to do any interesting quilting

Things I did like about this top:

• it was made completely from 2.5 inch strippy scraps with not a lot of cutting necessary
• the vibrancy of the dark and light colors together

I thought a lot about what I could do to improve this top and came up with this:

I separated many of the rows from the original quilt top, moved around some blocks with red in them, and resewed together a chunk of 7 rows.  Then I added some negative space in the form of a solid gray border at the top and bottom.  Improvement?

The one thing that was nice about this new arrangement is that it allowed me a lot of blank space to try some different free motion quilting designs.

I have been watching Angela Walters’ classes on Craftsy lately, so the large and small circles are taken exactly from her class.  It took so much thread to do this design that I had to skip it for the bottom of the quilt or I might not have enough gray thread for my MQG challenge due later this month.

These concentric squares were also part of the Angela Walters class.  I have learned so much from her class and her positive attitude encouraged me to just go for it and try something new.  She was right, even with mistakes and not-so-perfect or straight stitching, the designs still look pretty good.

Angela suggests using thread that blends when you’re first starting out, but I had this black sheet I’d always intended to use for another quilt but never had.  Also I had this crazy idea that it would be fun to see exactly what the stitching looks like. 

If you squint and don’t look too closely, it looks pretty cool!

The binding is also something from my stash, a pearl bracelet fabric in metallic gray.

The finished size is 53.5” x 66.5”.  It’s ready to be mailed to Margaret’s Hope Chest.

Many thanks to Amanda Jean for organizing another quilt along!  I joined her last one 4 years ago and never finished the quilt.  That was before I could sew a consistent 1/4 inch seam allowance without tears, so maybe I should dig out that WIP and finish it up too?

I’ll be linking up to Fort Worth Fabric Studio and Crazy Mom Quilts later this week.