150 Canadian Women

I finished both of my 150 Canadaian Women quilt tops.  70 blocks in one, and 80 in the other. It's weird how one extra row makes the quilt look so much bigger in the photo below.

I have plans for the backings - both will be pieced so there is some work to do there before I'm ready to quilt these.  I guess I missed Canada's 151st birthday. Maybe they'll be done before 152 rolls around.

May UFO Finish

It's not the one I had planned to finish, but I did manage to squeak out a UFO finish for May.  This quilt is made of all the leftovers from a Kaffe Fassett quilt I made.That one isn't quilted yet, but I took all the leftover strips and put them together to make this quilt, with a few solids I had in my stash to round it out to donation size.

Well, "all" isn't quite true.  A while back, I made this little quiltie with the first set of leftover strips.

And it looks like the main quilt was finished back in 2016, so it's been waiting a while to be quilted. It is on the list for this year, so hopefully it will come up one month soon and I can get moving on it.

PEI Modern Guild Mystery

It's done!  The deadline is May 31 to enter the draw for the PEI guild mystery quilt along, and I managed to get the whole thing finished, quilted and bound in time!  I made two quilts, but this is the one that got finished. It's an almost-tradiational layout (the other will be more modern).  I needed to stretch the quilt to make it 70x50", so I moved the corner stars in from the sides and out from the top and bottom to accomplish this.

It took a few extra pieces to fill them out. And one re-working, after I rotated a piece in one of those blocks. Someone nicely pointed the error out to me, and then I promptly forgot about it until the quilt was half-done.  Fixing a block at that point was challenging, but had to be done.

I played around with custom quilting on this one. I had hoped to play with various relief designs, but my batting wasn't thick enough to give the look I hoped for, so I just went with a more overall fill instead.

The colour on these last photos is pretty bad - it seems to be trade-off I get when I turn off the flash to help accentuate the stitching lines.

Since I'm done in time, I'm linking up with the rest of the party at the PEI Modern Guild blog.

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.