Turquoise

Sometimes a vision just doesn't come out as planned. This project was going to be 2 quilts.  I fell in love with the turquoise print at a quilt shop, and bought it and a few friends. Got home, and realized I didn't have enough fabric, so I supplemented with some purple and turquoise from my stash.  I absolutely loved the colours, piled up on my table. But putting the quilt together, it's just a bit much, I think.

The other "half" of the project was triangles with dark stripes on the end - which was supposed to be a second quilt.  I carefully sized all my bits so they'd be the right dimensions to donate. But now I don't like either one in the original form.

My friends suggested combining them all, like I did for my practice sample a few months ago. So I tried that out.

I'm definitely much happier with this layout. It's still a lot of purple/turquoise, but the dark bands seems to help it.

PEI Modern Guild mystery

These are two of my "not enough fabric" quilts from my retreat last weekend.  I arrived at retreat all set to assemble these quilts, since the reveal came out on the 1st.  But when I started to put it all together, I discovered I had completely messed up how one of the units was to be assembled, and I had cut my fabric incorrectly. And of course I didn't take any extra with me.

I thought I was stuck, and 2 projects were going back into the bag. But one other quilter had forgotten a part for her sewing machine, so she reached out to an attendee who hadn't arrived yet. And who, it turned out, just happened to be standing in the quilt shop that carries the fabric I needed.  She relayed a request for 2 half-yards of fabric (black and white Kona), and my retreat was saved!

These tops are my versions of the PEI Modern Guild mystery.  Changed up from the reveal, to make 2 tops that can be donated to Victoria's Quilts once they are quilted.  That may take a little while, because I have an urge to do some custom work on them.

Update:
No bonus points for spotting the error in the white one.  It's been pointed out already :) (fortunately before I got around to quilting this).

150 Canadian Wonen

At quilt retreat this weekend, and the theme is "I didn't bring enough fabric for this quilt". So far 3 out of 4 projects have hit that blockade. But this one I did manage to put together. It still needs borders, tomorrow. This is 80 out my 150 blocks from the 150 Canadian Women quilt project which started in 2016.

Single Girl Garden

Sometimes a plan just doesn't work out like you envisioned. I had these blocks from a Single Girl quilt, leftover from some repairs. Each of them had a small tear, where stitches were unpicked and the fabric damaged. I thought I could put them together, applique some flowers, and turn it into a garden quilt.  I also wanted to make sure it could end up as a donation, so I needed a bit more size than the blocks provided on their own. 

This is the result of that attempt. Not great, but hopefully cheerful enough to make someone happy.  A stormy day, raining Kaffe Fassett flowers down from the skies.

Because the flowers were appliqued with fusible, I quilted each of them heavily to make sure they would not lift off. The rest of the quilt is more lightly quilted, to try to keep it soft enough for snuggling.

Jars

A couple of years ago, I picked up a set of fruit & vegetable fabrics, from the free table at one of my guilds.  At the time, I knew I wanted to turn them into a jar quilt (something on my bucket list, but not something I wanted to actually go out and buy fabric for - so this was a perfect find).  They sat around for a while, until I needed a project to take to retreat last year.  I made more of the jars there, but ran out of fabric for the lids and background, so the blocks went into a box and languished for a while.

I finally pulled them back out for another retreat, added some fabric to replace the missing bits, found sashing fabric (a nice wood grain for the shelves) and trucked it all back to another retreat.

After sitting in the UFO closet for several months, I pulled it out last month and finished it, as part of my March finishing blitz. This will head out to Victoria's Quilts this month, where I hope it will find a good home.

One-block Wonder

This is  a mini one block wonder I've been working on. I had a lovely fabric, with a very small repeat.  So I thought I'd turn it into a one block wonder, but in miniature since hte repeat was so small.

Turns out I made a slight miscalculation - the pattern repeated across, as well as done, so I ended up with some duplicate blocks in the end. But I went with it anyway. Then I took the opportunity to try out the 3-D cube effect in the result. The first picture is how I designed it - but I realized when I got home that all of my cubes were upside down/inside out.  So I turned it over.  Now the lighting is right for the cubes, but my lights are in the lower right  I suspect that will be the final layout/orientation anyway - because I am not unsewing any of this.

Giant Scrappy Swoon

It's DONE!

This quilt started as a quilt-along on the Quilting Board. A giant scrappy swoon block, made from 3" squares of fabric.  I dug into my purple and gold fabrics, and managed to get the center block completed.  Then I realized that a 76x76" top wasn't all that useful to me, so I added some borders to turn it into a rectangle that would fit my bed.

This was started in March 2015, and I finished the top in February 2016.

The backing was a saga in itself.  First attempt was the completely wrong size, because I forgot I'd added the borders to the quilt and didn't bother to check before making the backing.  Second attempt went much better, and resulted in the backing seen here. The purple/black stripes are arranged in a fibonacci sequence.  The gold stripes at the top are made from all of my gold scraps - sewn together randomly to make a strip of fabric long and wide enough for this border.


May 1 Update:
My April UFO (#5) was already done, so I pulled this one from the "missed" list for one of my UFO challenges, and decided to finish it up for this month.  And Bonus - it is the UFO drawn by Judy over at Patchwork Times for May. So a double finish :)  I'll pick one of my other misses - either my Kaffe quilt, or 150 Canadian Women - to finish this month instead.  And in the meantime, I'm linking up over at Patchworks Times.

3D quilt

This quilt top comes from a class I took a year or 2 ago.  We made turned regular blocks into diamonds and created the 3-D blocks from those. The class included fabric for 1 block - which I managed to stretch to 2. Then they sat for months waiting for me to find other options to go along with the original fabric.

I finally pulled some out, took it to a retreat and made a few more blocks. The 3 9-patch blocks are where I got tired of doing the work to translate triangles into half-diamonds :)

I used an ombre fabric for the background, and matched it up (as best i could) to shade the same way the light is falling on the blocks - light in the upper right, and darkest in the lower left.  It's a nice lap size quilt, and now it just needs to be quilted - hopefully sometime this year as part of my UFO challenge.

April UFOs

Well, how adorable is this.  Both of my UFO challenges picked the same number this month - #5. Which just happens to be an "extra" I finished in January.  So, an easy month (already done)?  Or do I pick a replacement?  Time will tell.

Giant Scrappy Swoon just needs binding now.  And Kaffe Jacob's Ladder has a backing ready, but it really wants custom quilting. I'm not making any commitments today, since I didn't finish last month's plan and I'm feeling a bit behind on customer work right now.  Maybe next week I'll have something more definitive than "something will probably get finished this month".

In the meantime, I'll just bask in the glory of my 3rd finish for March.  My scrappy pineapple quilt is complete and ready to be donated.  Quilted with a rainbow variegated thread, and my favourite "Swirls" pantograph.

And I love the flannel backing I found for it in my stash.