Not Much to Share

Life has been getting in the way of quilting and will continue to do so for the immediate future.

A little over two years ago my husband was laid off after working for almost 20 years at a local airline manufacturer. He has spent the past two years back there, working as a contractor. Now he is going back fulltime but he will be working at their new data center that is currently being built in "The Middle of Nowhere, Washington". This means that we will be moving, probably by the end of the year.

So, to that end, we have been busy doing all sorts of home improvement projects in prep for getting the house ready to go on the market. First up was a much needed bathroom remodel. To go with that I made a quilted shower curtain based on Elizabeth Hartman's Sparkle Punch pattern. The bathroom walls are painted a very light shade of gray that almost looks lavender. I dug thru my stash for all my grays and blue-purples with a few red toned purples for punch. I added tabs on the back to fit over the rod and placed the liner hooks between the tabs and minimally quilted a few of the white areas just to hold it together with the backing (no batting). I did this so that I can easily turn it into a quilt if I don't have a need for a shower curtain in our new home.



Since the next few months will be filled with more home improvement and lots of sorting of 22 years worth of stuff. This blog will most likely be quiet for awhile.

Blogger's Quilt Festival: Spring 2012

I'm excited to be participating in the Blogger's Quilt Festival. I am a first time participant and feel quite honored to be part of such a talented group of quilters.

My entry is my Christmas quilt from last year. This is my second full sized Christmas quilt. My first one, had a very unfortunate accident with the red flannel backing bleeding despite having been prewashed multiple times. It bled so bad and my efforts to remove the bleeding literally destroyed the quilt.

So, here is the new quilt. It is a medallion quilt. The center portion, is from American Patchwork & Quilting magazine. But, I wanted to make it queen sized and I wanted to try Tonya's free-pieced letters. So the last two borders are my addition. This quilt is 96" and heavy. I used flannel for the backing and the heaviest weight cotton batting from Quilter's Dream -- next time I will stick with wool, my favorite batting.

I started the center portion of the medallion with some of my leftover Dalmatian puppies Christmas fabric. I had used this in a Christmas tree skirt a few years ago. What you can't really see is that the white on white fabric also has little dog bones. If there is a fabric with Dalmatians on it, you can bet it's in my stash. I also have an inordinate amount of polka dotted fabric too.....hhmmmmm......

For the free pieced border words, I tried to used appropriate fabric. If you enlarge the pictures, you can see I used holly fabric, candy cane fabric, snowflakes etc. The packages between the words were also free pieced and acted as good filler. 

The most difficult part of this quilt was putting the borders together after all the words were made. Since the words were all different lengths, trying to get them to fit the sides of the quilt was quite a challenge. I quilted this on my HandiQuilter with a holly pantograph. And, because of difficulties with my thumb which no longer allow me to do hand binding, the binding is machine stitched. 

Thank you for giving me the chance to share this with all of you. 

Gifting Quilts

One of the greatest joys I receive from quilting is gifting a quilt. Last week not one but two quilts were received by their recipients so I can now share them here.

First up is this Happy Scrappy Houses, a Bonnie Hunter Quiltville pattern. This was a joint project project with my dear friend on the other side of the state. Janet & I became friends through the HandiQuilter Chatters list. Happy Scrappy Houses was made for another mutual friend from that list who has recently moved into a new home. We decided she needed a house warming gift. We each made our house blocks and then Janet put them together  into the top and I quilted it and sent it on it's way.

Can you think of a better house warming gift? I certainly can't. This quilt just oozes happiness.

I also sent out a baby quilt the same day. Little Eden wasn't due for another week or so but she surprised everybody and arrived early. Her quilt arrived just a day later. I had a hard time deciding what to do for her quilt. All I knew was that it had to be predominantly pink and had to have Minkee on the back because that's what I put on the back of her brother's quilt almost 7 years ago. And yes, he still uses his quilt everyday. I've known little Eden's mama since she was about 6 or 7. She's an identical twin and her Mom used to paint their toenails to tell them apart--yup, pink & blue. To this day, Mom's favorite color is still pink. After several false starts, I started seeing granny square blocks popping up all over the internet. Inspiration struck and I started digging into my stash.

I pulled out a pile of pinks and lavenders and set them with some Kona pink. And yes, the backing is pink Minkee -- it is so soft. I am definitely going to be putting some Minkee on the next quilt I make for myself.

Meanwhile, today I got to actually see the little babe thanks to the wonders of  Facetime and her Grandma who was visiting and had her iPad with her. She's a little sweetie.

Yeah, I think she will probably be using her quilt at least as long as her big brother and that makes me very, very happy.