Chilhowie

Chilhowie was Bonnie Hunter's mystery quilt for 2022.  I essentially used a lighter version of her fabrics, with a dark background.  Some of the fabrics are scrappy, but so similar in tone that they look like a single fabric - I decided I didn't want another really scrappy quilt this year.

The backing was made from one super-sized block and I added borders to extend the feeling of the pattern to make it big enough.

 

Complete with label - which I stitched right into the backing.  No way that one's going missing.

 

2023 Quilt Along

For the past several years, I have designed a quilt - either a mystery quilt, or a quilt along/block of the month - for a couple of guilds I belong to.  This year's quilt-along was a bit challenging. Usually I use EQ8 for designing, but it doesn't play nicely with non-standard settings, and this one was definitely non-standard. So I reverted to the trust pencil and graph paper to sketch it out.   And I enlisted the help of a pattern tester to make sure it was correct, and achievable.

This one is called "A Wing and a Prayer", because I mentioned to a quilting friend that I pulled fabric from my stash that "looked like enough" to make my version as I designed it. So, before I knew the fabric requirements.  I got lucky for the most part.  I ran out of background twice, but my fill-in matches pretty well, so you can hardly tell. And the binding is not what I would have chosen, but it was what I had enough of to make it. So it has a little flange of my 3rd background fabric, and the main binding is the blue.

The center section is made as a square, then turned on point, and the corners with the 9-patches were added, and finally the top/bottom border. The quilt ended up 66x90" - a bit bigger than I planned, so I also offered instructions & fabric requirements for smaller versions - a baby quilt that ends with the triple border around the center square, and a lap quilt without the top & bottom borders.

There are 2 months left in the quilt along, and I can't wait to see what everyone has done with it.

Down on the Corner

 I participated in a virtual mystery quilt in January, with Quilt-agious quilt shop.  They do one every year, and this is my second time.  The pattern was a lot of fun to put together, and the weekend was great fun.  The finished quilt had 12 blocks and was sized for a double (queen?) bed.  I decided to split the blocks in half to make two donation quilts for Victoria's Quilts Canada. I added borders to bring the half quilts up to size, and substitutes a couple of blocks on the second one to make up for the missing bits, so that I didn't have to remake any blocks.

I do wish I had used a different background for the stars, but that is the risk with a mystery quilt.

Goats in Pyjamas

 I was inspired by a pattern the other day, and decided to make myself a little baby goat in pyjamas. The pattern is from Art East, and it is just the cutest thing!  She was just the right size for a laptop bag, so I used some faux-suede I had sitting around for the background/body of the bag, and a few bits and pieces from my scraps for the goat herself.

My new laptop fits perfectly, and Chloe is an adorable addition.

Frolic leftovers

Back in 2020, after I finished Bonnie Hunter's Frolic mystery, and her Unity quilt along, I had a lot of bits and pieces left over. I'd used the same fabrics in both those quilts, so I took all the odds and ends, and made several new blocks - most a variation on Frolic's blocks, and then some random playing with Unity leftovers.  I played around with the bits, added in some additional fabric, and came up with this quilt.

I quilted it some time ago, but was avoiding binding it, because I went with a flange binding - it was the only way to stretch the fabric to finish it.  But that's such a job, to sew 280" of 2 binding strips side-by-side to make the binding. But I finally did it, got it bound, and it's off to Victoria's Quilts next month (as soon as I make a bag and get it into the wash).
 

Block of the Week

My poor little block of the week is DONE!  This started way back in 2014, as a weekly block from a local quilt shop. If you finished your block and took it in, the next week was free. If not, it was $5.  It was a lot of fun, and the shop did a TON of work - they actually let everyone pick their own border fabric, and worked out the colours for the blocks from that - so almost every one was different. Like I said, a ton of work.

I managed to keep up and get all the blocks done, then the alternate blocks were finished fairly quickly, and that's where the wheels came off. I had let the owner talk me out of buying enough of my border print to use the edge pattern for the border - it was one-sided, so would have needed over 8 meters of fabric for borders.

I searched 5 times over the next 5 years, looking for more of that print - Robert Kaufmann Effervescence. I found every colourway except mine (and no, I don't want to know that you have 4 yards sitting around your sewing room, thank you very much).  I could not let it go, and changing the border fabric never crossed my mind. Eventually, I gave up my search, made a 2-part border for the other 2 sides, and called it "good enough".

And then I thought I'd custom quit this baby. Lots of opportunity in those little blocks to do some nice work - so it sat. And stared at me every time I went into my closet. And sat some more.

This year, I joined a 100 day UFO challenge, and when asked about our oldest UFO, this baby came out, with her story.  What I didn't mention above is the falling out with the quilt shop that happened about a year later, and when I wrote the story of this quilt for that UFO group, my resentment was clear, apparently.  Everyone said, just let it go.  Release the quilt, and release the old feelings with it.

So I decided to do just that. No more custom quilting plan. Out it came from the closet, I found a nice design that fit the blocks and played about with my automation software to make it look like each block was quilted with this design individually, when in fact it was a pantograph.

Not perfect, and if you look closely you can tell, but I love the overall look, and most importantly, IT IS DONE!

 

Paris One Block Wonder

 This poor little quilt has been finished for years, but apparently I never took an actual photo of it. It is one of my favourite one-block wonder quilts.  I bought the panel during my OBW buying phase back in 2017 or so. It took a long time to sort out the arrangement - all those straight lines from the tower were hard to deal with, but I love the way it ended up.