Saffron and Cyan {2 finished quilts!}

The DCMQG has a tradition of making quilts for new babies.  That’s a lot of baby quilts each year, so volunteers coordinate specific quilts. I always love making a block or two to contribute to a quilt, but this past fall I changed it up a bit by volunteering to coordinate a quilt for a little boy, which is exciting for me since I normally sew for girls. 

The mom-to-be gave me some specific ideas for color palettes and quilt design (she really likes Denyse Schmidt’s Hop Skip Jump pattern) which was so helpful since I was a little bit nervous about the responsibility of coordinating the quilt.

I tried a new quilting design from one of Angela Walters’ books in the center orange portion of the quilt.  Then I did my old stand-by of teardrops in the blue section.

After assembling the baby’s quilt, there were quite a few very usable strips of fabric left over, and I hated to waste them, so big brother (he’s two years old) got his own quilt too!  I think I enjoyed putting this quilt together even more.  Picking out solid fabric from my stash for the block backgrounds was my favorite part, along with figuring out how to make enough strips out of the leftovers once I’d used them up and still needed a few.  A couple of strips have orange and blue in them for that reason, but I think the mismatched strips add to the playfulness of the design!

This bigger quilt I stippled…I love the quickness and texture it gives a quilt.   Normally I go with one fabric for binding, but this quilt specifically asked for a scrappy binding and I was happy to oblige.

Both quilts were well received and I’ve already seen a few photos of them in use on Instagram, the best kind of thank you

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.

Polaroid Quilt

This summer I participated in a very cool swap for little Polaroid blocks on Debbie’s blog A Quilter’s Table.   Then a bee mate, Lindsey, very generously sent me dozens of little blocks after she caught the Polaroid bug, too. 

This quilt measures 45” x 51”, hopefully just the right size for a three year old’s lap quilt.  I used three different Kona solids (chartreuse, marine, and ash) for the background fabrics and a cute frog print I won in a giveaway for the border—thank you, Leona!

I just love the little dogs on the back, although for the record I am a cat person.

My favorite part of this quilt is the little boy’s name appliqued on the front.  It was kind of a last minute solution to not planning the number of Polaroids I would need to make the columns even and then coming up short.  One of the most difficult parts of the quilt planning was picking “boy appropriate” pictures since little things sometimes escape my attention.

I was kind of undecided as to how I would quilt this one, but I ended up going with just fmq squiggles which is always my go-to choice.  Since I’m gifting this quilt I wanted it to look its best and not do too much “learning” on it.

Linking up to Finish It Up Friday on Crazy Mom Quilts.  What have you been working on this week?

Hourglass Stars Complete!

This finished quilt measures 36.5” square. I am really happy with how it turned out.

The Kona celery sashing is a buttery-green color.

The back is simply Kona ash.  I used gray thread from Connecting Threads for the quilting on the front and back.

I really like the look of stippling.  This is one of the last quilts I finished before my husband modified my sewing table, so I am ready to try some new fmq designs.

Do you machine bind or hand sew your binding?  I am so impatient that I nearly always machine bind everything.  The first couple bindings were pretty poor looking, but practice really has improved my ability to match up the zig-zag on the front and back.  There is only this one little hiccup where the black thread shows a little bit on the backing.

I cut my binding 2.75” wide instead of the regular 2.5”.  I attach the binding to the back and then stitch it down with a zig-zag to the front.  I don’t use pins or Clover clips to hold it down.  I simply feed it through my machine matching up the needle with the first binding seam.  It’s easy to get arcs if you are pulling on the binding, but as long as you don’t manipulate it too much, the zig-zag will be pretty smooth.  I think cutting the binding a little bigger reduces the need to pull on the binding.  The entire rest of the binding looks perfect like the photo above.

Linking up to Freemotion by the River and Fabric Tuesday.  If you are interested in making a similar quilt, this is the tutorial for hourglass stars.  Have a great day!