Another baby quilt

This is a baby quilt I made for some college friends of my husband's last summer.  Their baby was born the same week as mine, and I worked on the quilt off and on through the summer (often with my baby asleep in the bouncer chair next to my sewing desk).

I got the idea for the pattern from a quilt in a blog post I read last spring, but I didn't love the way the pinwheels were arranged in that quilt.  Instead, I chose 5 blocks from an old modern half-square triangle quiltalong, and made them 8" square.  I found this awesome paper airplane print for the back, and some typewriter keys for the binding (the mother is an archivist, so I thought she would get a kick out of those prints).

Then I quilted the HST blocks in the ditch and filled in each of the large bars with a different FMQ design.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out!

Moda Love Baby Quilt

One of my good friends from grad school had a baby girl in mid-April, and I wanted to send a quilt for her.  I decided to finish this little quilt top, which I stitched up in November 2015.  The quilt top was really cute, but it had two problems: it wasn't flat, and it was too big for the 1 yard of backing fabric I had bought when I bought the charm pack I used for the top.

I did exactly what I had outlined in my previous post about the quilt top.  I trimmed a few inches off two of the borders, and pieced a row of leftover charm squares flanked by grey strips into the back.  It was a tight squeeze (the pieced back was exactly the same size as the top!) but it worked.

This is the first quilt I quilted on my new vintage Singer.  I did an orange peel pattern in the grid, and wavy flower vines in the borders.  The non-flatness of the top was indeed not a problem, especially after I washed the whole quilt.  It's soft and cosy - not too densely quilted.  I forgot to measure the quilt after I washed it, but I think it's about 40 by 42 inches.

I'm very happy with how this little quilt turned out.  I like the pattern, and I could definitely see myself using it again, either as a baby quilt or as a bed quilt for a full or queen sized bed (using 10" squares instead of 5").

Modern Arizona Wedding Quilt

One of my best friends got married last June.  I wanted to make a quilt wedding gift, but what with my graduation last May, I didn't get it started until the beginning of June.  Of course, I didn't have time to finish it before their wedding (I think I got the top finished), and then we moved cross-country in July and then I started my new job, and I finally finished it in February.

I made up the quilt pattern based on a picture of a quilt I had seen online.  I like it because it looks sort of like a double-wedding ring, but without the crazy template piecing.  I used two jelly rolls of Arizona-themed fabric from connecting threads.  I picked this fabric because my friend and her now-husband met and still live in Arizona.  It was a happy coincidence that several of the fabrics are a kind of coral-ish orange color, since our bridesmaid dresses were coral/orange!

My favorite fabric is this adorable cactus print:

I quilted loops in each row of the quilt, and bound it with leftover jelly roll strips.

Here's my sketch of the quilt blocks.  It's a twin-sized quilt (I didn't measure it after I washed it, but the blocks finished at 30" by 30", and it's two blocks wide by three blocks long).

Free-Motion Quilting!

I'm working on a quilt-as-you-go machine quilting sampler. It's going to be a bed quilt, and it is definitely a long term project. Recently l quilted these top two squares using free-motion designs I learned at Quiltcon. l think they turned out really well! The flower one has two layers of batting, which was a little bit difficult to manage near the edges.  Now I have six (of thirty-six) squares done, and fabric washed for four more!

Quiltcon!

I went to Quiltcon two weeks ago!  I had an awesome time!  The quilt show was really beautiful and inspiring.  Many of these are the kinds of quilts that I like and aspire to make (and feel like I could realistically maybe someday make quilts like them).  There are a lot of really amazing quilts at quilt festival, too, but so many of them are art quilts, using techniques I can't ever see myself learning, or are very traditional or otherwise not really my style.  I took lots and lots of pictures of my favorite quilts in the show.  I also enjoyed the vendor hall - I found some really great fabric for a baby quilt I'm going to start soon.  And there was a really generous swag bag!  There were several fabric samples, and patterns and magazines, and little gadgets.  The tote bag itself is really high quality, too.

But my favorite part of Quiltcon was the classes I took.  The blocks up there are from Lee Heinrich's Advanced Piecing Crash Course on Friday night.  I learned paper piecing and partial seams!  Paper piecing is something I've wanted to do for a long time, but I was afraid of it.  Now I'm confident!  Lee walked us through the two blocks and gave us a bunch of tips to make the pieces fit together and place each new piece.  The only downside was the sewing machines ... I'll probably never buy a BabyLock.  The machines in the class were BabyLock Rachels, and they were advertising a special show price that I don't remember, but I think it was in the neighborhood of $500 plus or minus 100.  The machine was about the same size as my little Brother machine (which has a tiny harp space and cost about $100) but didn't sew anywhere near as well.  Several of us, including me, had seemingly unsolvable tension problems.  It was computerized (which my machine is not) and had a needle down feature, which was nice but not worth the other problems it had.

The other class I took was Elizabeth Dackson's Find Your Go-To Fill.  It was great!  We used wonderful HandiQuilter Sweet16 mid-arm machines and did a lot of sketching and practice of five or so different filler patterns.  In contrast to the BabyLock experience in the other class, if I had a spare $5000 and a permanent space to set it up, I would definitely consider buying one of these machines.  They quilted so smoothly and were really easy to use!  I came home inspired to do more free motion quilting!

Mod Baby Quilt

One of my very good friends is having a baby very soon.  Her baby shower was last week, and I made her this baby quilt.  She has a very modern aesthetic, and I wanted to make the quilt to match that, so I used this tutorial from Oh Fransson to make the blocks for the front and I enlarged this block with a low volume scrappy background for the back.  I really love how the back turned out.  Also, this friend is a mathematician so I was really excited to find the black print - I don't think it's visible in the picture, but it is an arithmetic print!

The nursery has dark blue, lime green, and orange furnishings and decorations, so I looked for fabric in those colors for the front. 

After I finished the five mosaic blocks, Robert helped me choose a layout and draw it to scale, and I worked with that to cut the background fabric.

I quilted it with freemotion starbursts on vertical lines.  I got the idea from the quilting on this quilt by Kelsey at Everyday Fray. 

I used light grey thread on the back and switched thread back and forth on the front, with navy on the background and light grey on the mosaic blocks.  It was a little bit frustrating at first to get the tension right with different colors on the front and back.  I never got it perfect, but it's not bad.  It got a little bit better after I washed it. 

The quilt seemed to go over well at the baby shower.  I hope my friend and her family enjoy it!

"Girl Vomit" Quilt

My church's Fall fundraiser/auction was last weekend, and I donated this quilt (which I had finally finished the week before!)  I pieced this quilt top in July 2012, but I didn't get around to basting, quilting, and binding it until this Fall.  I liked the fabrics a lot when I bought them as a bundle, but I don't think they work very well together.  There's not enough value contrast.  Also, it's a LOT of pink. 

I am really proud of the free-motion machine quilting I did on it, though!  I used an idea from Leah Day's site: Quilt Busting Flower Power.  I quilted five large flowers and then filled in the rest of the quilt with a loopy meander. I think it turned out beautifully!

I'm glad to be finished with another project, and glad to have improved my fmq skills!

A quilt finish!

 Before I went on vacation, I finished my moth quilt.  I've been referring to this as my "half-bed quilt" - it covers my half of the bed only, because I'm usually cold.  For daytime, I've usually been draping it across the foot of the bed. 

The plan for this quilt was that it should be a manageable project and provide free motion quilting practice.  I think it did both, although it did take me a lot longer to quilt than I expected!  I did a sketchy outline of all of the moths, using continuous lines and overlapping and jumping between moths as necessary. 

 You can see the back in the next photo.  The front is a single piece of Anna Maria Horner's Sinister Swarm from Field Study, and the back and binding are Free Spirit Designer Solids (the back is also a single piece of cloth).  I machined the binding on both sides by attaching it in the normal way to the front, clipping it to the back with binding clips, and stitching in the ditch from the front.  It worked really well!  I stitched in the ditch on the top with the same purple thread I had used for the purple and in the bottom with a thread to match the binding.  I wasn't sure I had enough of the purple thread, so I went ahead and bought another spool, but I almost didn't need it.  I ran out of thread just as I finished backstitching after I had stitched all the way around the quilt!  I did need the extra thread after all, though, since there were three or four spots where I didn't manage to catch the binding on the back, so I had to go back and fix them.