Pillows

I wanted to make a couple of pillows to match my Bonnie Hunter "Christmas on Ringo Lake". I took a couple of leftover blocks, added some borders, and then made them into pillows. The back of the pillows matches the back of the quilt. I have an invisible zipper on the back of each, so they can be switched out for different seasons (and washed).

It's interesting, seeing them beside the quilt here, even though they are the exact same block from the quilt, without the sashing and with the borders I used, they look quite different.

Can't wait to use them for the Christmas season this year!

Murder Mystery

I am participating in a murder mystery this year at https://murdermysteryquilt.com/, and have been trying desperately to keep up with the clues each month. This was July's clue, which I finished in plenty of time.

I laid it out with all of it friends from the first half of the year, and I still have no idea where this mystery is headed.  I also need to catch up on my reading, which I hope to do this month.

Celtic Links Revisited

I created this pattern last year, and showed my first stab at it here https://kristaquilts.blogspot.com/2019/02/celtic-links.html. Since I wanted to publish the pattern, I needed to write it out and then test the instructions, so this is the official "made from the pattern" version of the quilt.

This time, I pulled some different colours from my stash and paired it with a basic white Kona background. I fixed a minor error in the border blocks so that they now weave correctly.

The quilting is a modern design that I hadn't used before. I think it worked really well with this quilt, and I'll keep this around not only as a pattern sample, but to showcase the pantograph in my longarm studio.

Swoon Quilt

This is a friend to the little quilt I showed the other day.  I had collected all of the fabrics when I made the class piece, to make a queen sized quilt using several different colour combinations for the stars.  Instead, I decided to put a few of the fabrics back into my stash and made a small version instead.

This will go to Victoria's Quilts Canada to keep a cancer patient warm.

Finishing up a UFO

This little project has been sitting around for years. It was the sample block for a quilt I taught back in 2013 or so. I thought it was time to finally get it up and out - and took an opportunity to practice some free motion quilting at the same time.

I was pretty happy with how it came out, playing with some patterns from Angela Walters's border challenge.

One Block Wonder Take 2

With the leftover blocks from the one block wonder I showed the other day, I decided to make another quilt. Noting goes to waste :)

It was missing several blocks to make it the right size for a donation, so I made up some cubes to fill it out.I had originally planned cubes for the first version, but had trouble finding fabrics I liked. In between projects, I stumbled across the perfect ombre fabric to make the light orange cubes.

A few leftover bits added into the border, and it is complete.

For being the rejects from the first quilt, these blocks played together very nicely.

One Block Wonder

My one block wonder obsession continues.  My design wall was busy when I started this one, so I laid it out on the floor.

This was the original panel. I had about 3/4 of a panel leftover, so I placed the blocks around it. <

Up on the wall, with all of the hexagons around it, the panel seemed to get lost. And the more hexagons I added, the less I liked the end result.

So back to basics. I pulled off all of the hexagons and started over. I used about 1/2 of them, before the design started to lose the look I was going for.

A little border creativity, and I have a quilt I really like. My math got away from me at one point, as I was working without a design wall, so the quilt is about 6.wider than I had planned. But overall, I'm very happy with it.

Thread Painting

I took a thread painting workshop in the spring, to learn something new. I've never done it before, but the concept always interested me, so when the opportunity came up through one of my guilds, I jumped at the chance.

We spent an afternoon with Bridget O'Flaherty, doing a little "thread painting by numbers" as she called it. I had some extra time, so I played with some additional shading in mind. I hope to put some of this into practice with a quilt that is gelling in my mind.

Oriental quilt

This fabric has been sitting in my stash for at least 5 years. I fell in love with the gold flecks fabrics when they first came out, and bought a yard of each for a future project. Oriental fabrics seem to jump into my cart randomly, so I finally put them all together at a recent retreat.

The sashing is 1/2" finished, which allowed me to split the panel in a couple of places without distorting it. The piano key borders were made from all the leftover bits I had in the end.

This was my own design, put together on the fly, so there are no repeating blocks in the design, although I did manage to make it in 3 horizontal sections to simplify assembly.

Quilting is a new pattern I picked up for a customer project.  I liked the soft swirls, and picked a gold thread to blend with the gold in the fabrics.

Catching up

I've been AOWL for a while, but that doesn't mean I haven't been quilting. Keeping up with a longarm business has left me with very little energy for blogging, but I hope to find a balance between the two (or 3, if I count actually making my own quilts).

So, looking back earlier this year, these two quilts were a mystery from one of my guilds. It was supposed to be one quilt, but I decided to split the blocks up and make two donation tops instead.

These are actually quilted and ready to donate so I'll try to dig up a photo of the finished product for a later post.

Butterfly Done!

The butterfly one-block wonder is now complete and bound!  I hunted for binding for this quilt - the grey is a little bit on the green side, and the black in the border is not a true black, so it was challenging to find a matching fabric.  A friend actually pulled out this batik for me, and it works great.

This makes my sixth finish for January, which puts me well ahead of schedule. Hopefully I can keep this up, and avoid starting new projects.

I added cubes to this quilt, which nicely filled out the number of hexagons I had to make the rows all even.  I quilted it with a pantograph called "optical illusion", which I sized and rotated to fit into the cubes, to help enhance the 3-D look.  Borders were quilted with Quilt Path, so the straight lines are nice and straight, and evenly spaced.  Getting them to the precise 45 degree angle was a challenge, but by the time I finished the fourth I had it all figured out :)

Celtic Links

I needed to design (on short notice) a mystery quilt for a guild this year. This was my first stab at it, but I decided the assembly was too much of the same thing, and not well suited to be an interesting mystery. But, I still liked the design. So I made it up from some stash fabric at one of my retreats. And eventually the pattern will get finished and posted on my Etsy store.

One-Fabric Quilt

This poor quilt has been in my UFO pile for ages. I bought the fabric - a border print - way back in 2013 or 2014. It was going to be a final border for a mystery quilt, because it was from the same line as the rest of the fabrics I bought.  But in the end, it did not work out AT ALL. The border print was much too busy and heavy for the quilt that we ended up with (with lots of empty background space).

So, the print went into the stash.  Then one day I saw a book on "one fabric quilts" and thought it looked interesting. So I picked it up and pulled this fabric from my stash.  In the end, I didn't like the One Fabric process - it was quite wasteful. So I fudged a bit, to get the maximum blocks I could from my fabric. That meant that my blocks were all unique, rather than getting many of each of two different blocks.  So the layout is a bit creative. And you can see here how busy the fabric was, since the "background" in this quilt is quite busy.

This is now complete and bound, and will be headed out as a donation quilt to one of my guilds this month.

Joshua's Star

This quilt is from Missouri Star Quilt Company. I did a demo for my guild last year, and picked "Joshua's Star" - mostly because I'd never seen it before. Then, when the demo was done I made enough additional blocks to make a donation for Victoria's Quilts Canada. The block uses 4 prints and 4 background layer cake squares - and makes 2 blocks each time.  So it was a quick quilt to make. 

The binding is a continuous bias binding made from 9 of the leftover layer cake squares.

Summer Sampler

Last year, I joined in on the Summer Sampler project put on by Freshly Pieced. I decided to use my own fabric, in an effort to make a dent in my scraps. And I really liked the rainbow layout in the sample, so I tried that.

Additionally, I knew this quilt would end up as a donation, so I resized all the blocks to 10" blocks so the end result would be 50x70". That sounded great, until I figured out that taking a12" block down to 9" is easy, but 10" is a bit more tricky.

However, I persevered and this is the final result. A little scrappy binding to finish it off, and finish number two for 2019 is in the books. And it's headed off to Victoria's Quilts.

Butterfly OBW

I bought this beautiful fabric last year on my birthday. I was shop hopping with a friend, who was looking at every fabric with a view to its suitability to be a one block wonder. She found this in the last shop we visited, but was determined to hold firm and not buy any more fabric after her earlier purchases.  I couldn't let it just sit there, so I rescued it :)

There is a LOT going on here, with all of the colours.  But hopefully I can make something of it all.

I eventually decided that cubes would spice it up, and maybe give it some sort of focus, so I dug through my stash for some suitable fabrics.

The borders were purchased a few weeks later, at a completely different shop. I walked in an saw this border print and said to myself "Those look like the prefect colours for that butterfly quilt. I purchased 2 meters on a whim and a hope that I was right. Turns out, the print was from the exact same line as the original fabric!  No wonder the colours were so perfect.

I had thought at one point that I could applique some of the original, large-scale, butterflies onto the top - maybe flying out of some of the cubes. But the quilt is so busy that it turned out to be a bad idea.

I had my butterflies fussy cut already, so instead I repurposed a backing that has been hanging around for YEARS, and put some butterflies on it instead.  Quilting is now complete, and final pictures to come as soon as I get the binding on.

Good Fortune

Making progress on my Bonnie Hunter Good Fortune quilt. At retreat this week I got the center put together and the first three of four borders.

Now I have to make all the blocks for the final border, because I switched the colors after the reveal. I think they will be light purple/dark purple.

I love this quilt, but didn't want something really big, so I left two rows off. That kept the center balanced. But what I did not realize is that the shorter edge was then not the right size for an even number of the small bonus triangles used in border #2. So I tweaked the middle of each of those two borders to make it fit.

This also means that my last border is not going to fit, so I'll have to think about how I'll tweak that one.

First of 2019

My first official finish of 2019!

I bought this fabric over 5 years ago, because I loved it. Then it sat around for a while, and I realized I didn't love it any more. So it sat a bit longer.

I was heading to a retreat a couple of years ago and tossed the pile of fabric into my bag as a "just in case" project, for if I finished everything else. I had no idea what I would do with it, but I was sure something would come to me.

And sure enough, on day three I was hunting for something else to do. So out came this fabric and some paper to come up with a plan. The end result is based loosely on a pattern I've seen online, but sized and tweaked to fit the fabric I had available. Every single scrap of the print was used, and most of the others.

This quilt was on my UFO list all last year, so I decided it deserved first chance on the longarm this year. It's all done now and will head off to Victoria's Quilts s soon as it's had a nice trip through the washer.

Border play

I am loving my new computerized longarm machine (well, not so new anymore). I took the opportunity recently to play with some computerized border placements on a quilt I was doing. This photo could be better, but there are are 3 different borders, all different sizes and patterns (this is the back of the quilt, which shows the quilting a bit better than the front).  I think by the time this was all done I had pretty much figured out the intricacies of placing borders with Quilt Path.

High Tech Tucks

This is actually a 2018 finish. It's just been waiting for me to get around to posting about it. I took a class in December with one of my guilds - "High Tech Tucks".  The background is a panel, and it is overlayed with fabric strips - black on one side and ombre on the other.  Portions of the strips are "flipped" to give the bright path down the quilt (yes, the picture is sideways).

The class was a lot of fun, and I definitely learned some things during it.  The quilt is complete, all the way to a hanging sleeve, so hopefully it will find its way onto the wall in my longarm room soon.

Winding Ways

In 2015, one of my guilds ran a "Crayola" challenge. You picked a crayon, and had to make a quilted object using only that colour. I got grey.  I was very uninspired by that selection at first, but once I realized how many shades of grey one could find, things got a little more interesting.

I thought about what quilt I wanted to make, and remembered that I had a template set for Winding Ways (which I must have bought around 2008), that I never used. So, a plan was born.  The challenge was due in June 2016, but I figured I could make a lap quilt in that time.  I plugged along, and by April I had this much don. Looking good - except none of those pieces are actually sewn together.

Around that point, I abandoned the idea of finishing in time for the challenge, and decided to make the quilt a bit larger as a potential gift down the road. So, I grew.  And grew. And I ran out of fabric.  But then I found some more. And it grew again.   Eventually it became big enough for my queen bed. After this photo was taken, the final border (a 6" dark border) was added. And now the poor baby resided in the "to be quilted" pile, patiently awaiting its turn.

I have grand ideas - and eventually I'll get up the never (and the time) to try bring them to life on the quilt.

2019 UFOs

I made such fantastic progress on my 2018 UFO list (18 UFOs completed) that I'm going to try again. I'm still way up there in UFOs (25 to quilt, 13 in progress), so I'll aim for 19 in 2019.  12 official ones for the UFO challenges, and an extra 7 to throw in as I have time throughout the year.
My list of UFOs for this year is here.

If I can find a place to link it up I will, but I'm a bit late. I will however be following along each month with PatchworkTimes and APQ

Here's my list of all outstanding projects on Jan 1, 2019

Tops in progress

1. spinning star
2. small bulging checkerboard
3. squedge stripes
4. ombre quilt
5. Patchwork Year 
6. Gardener's Alphabet
7. Apple Core 
8. Cathedral Window 
9. string star 
10. Bonnie Hunter Good Fortune
11. Turquoise orphan blocks 
12. Blue border print one block wonder
13. Italy OBW (needs 2 more rows)

Tops to quilt

1. Winding Ways - top done Apr 2018
2. purple/olive quilt (needs borders) - top done Jan 2018
3. mini one block wonder - top done
4. 3-D cubes quilt - top done
5. Row by Row (Water theme)
6. Edge of 17 shop hop
7. Tell it to the stars - Patchwork Times 2014
8. Border Creek mystery
9. Kaffe Handkerchief 
10. recipes wall hanging
11. paper pieced houses
12. paper pieced stars
13. Easy Street - Bonnie Hunter 2012
14. Block of the week
15. One fabric quilt
16. modern abstract quilt
17. Triangle log cabin table runner
18. diamond chain
19. reflections of the north
20. Judy Niemeyer Storybook Pastures - top done, October 2018
21. Block Party Turquoise - top done, July 2018
22. Paris One Block Wonder 
23. Swoon
24. baby swoon
25. Summer sampler

Other UFOs (need binding etc.)

1. Confetti
2. Baby Makes 3
3. Butterfly OBW

Plus current projects (not yet UFO worthy)

1. OVQG Mystery
2. Almonte Guild mystery

New Projects started

1. Murder Mystery quilt
2. CQA Mystery

Fabric bought

1. green/white OBW 
2. Butterfly OBW

Sigh

The big reveal of Bonnie's Hunter's Good Fortune mystery came out! I love the quilt. But this is what my version is looking like :(

Not good :( I switched the colors around so I knew things would be different than Bonnie's. But that green just is not working for me in any location. It's going to have to go.

I kind of like this. But there isn't enough of that fabric to make all the blocks.

Digging through my stash, I found a similar but darker fabric which isn't too bad. My fellow quilters declared it just right (or maybe what they meant was best of a poor selection)

I'm going to continue on, although I did decide to make it a smaller quilt, which might just mean I have enough of that other fabric...

While I contemplate options, I'll continue making these blocks. The more I think about it, the more I think I like the idea of at least a few blocks in the other fabric. And with all the extra 4-patches we made, I can definitely make up a few, risk-free.

Guild Challenge

Last year, one of my guilds had a panel designed by Grace Noel when she spoke at our guild.  Everyone received one fat quarter, and our president challenged us all to make a project using the fabric.  A lot of bags were made, but I wanted to do something different. I've been on a One-Block Wonder kick lately, and decided that would be a perfect way to show off the panel.
I reached out to the designed, snagged an extra 8 fat quarters, and tried to create a wall hanging from that.

A few false starts, and I eventually ended up with this layout.  I wanted a couple of borders to set it off, and decided to use the blocks on the back of the quilt to avoid getting too big.

Carefully stitched 1/4" dark border, a blue flange on the binding, and my wall hanging was ready for the reveal at our December meeting.

The quilting design is intended to look like water, keeping with the theme of the river flowing through the center.

And the back - the extra blocks from 8 of the 9 panels I used.