what is up?

What a great question - quilting and crafting is NOT up! **big frowny face here**

My semester started and, with five classes on two campuses, things are mega nuts for me. I'm not even sure why I'm blogging because I should be grading something or reading something. I don't know. Maybe I'm too tired to work any more today! (But that isn't the case - will work after dinner).

I have a couple works in progress that I can update on--nothing special, but they are projects I'm excited about.

First, I have most of my block parts together for my sparkle punch quilt along quilt. I don't see a lot of pics on flickr with this QA but maybe everyone is being shy.

(You can see my ironing board is perhaps 20% cleaner after being washed!)

The lower part shows the last 3 blocks I have to do parts for. The upper left are all my finished sets and the upper right shows my leftover charms that I pulled from. I plan to fill in the partial stars with these once I figure out the layout of the full blocks. I have all the white I need cut!

The second project is one that has been slow in the making. I finally cut into this yummy mess to make my brownie quilt. I have the blocks cut but haven't really sliced many of them up. It is on the list. Someday.

You can see my gifty I got myself - one of those rotating cutting mats! You can spin it in circles as you cut so you don't have to pick up your blocks. I love it. I also love that it fits on my ironing board so I don't have to go to the other room to trim things up.

postage stamp blocks - almost done!

Progress has been made on my postage stamp blocks first introduced here. I love how fast blocks come together once you start working with larger blocks! I have 16 patch units right now that will be grouped together to make 64 patch units! WOWSERS!

So here is a nice stack of 32 patches.

I had avoided really planning this quilt until now - it was more of a "just sew and use up some odd ball strips" kind of project. I guess quilting luck was in my favor because I have enough "half blocks" to make 9 full blocks - the perfect amount for a 9 by 9 block quilt. Below is all I have left from my 16 patch units!

 I'm going to add sashing and perhaps do some framing for each block. I need to let it marinate for a bit. This is my first postage stamp quilt and I did it old school style - sewed all those buddies together! I thought about using the fusible web method but wasn't sure how stiff that would make the top. I might try it in the future if I do another postage stamp quilt.

color help

I've decided to, along with my BFF, play along in the Sparkle Punch QAL hosted by Elizabeth Hartman of Oh, Fransson!

As part of my New Year goals is to bust through my stash. I had some charms and cakes from Connecting Threads and I wasn't sure what to do with them - until this QAL came along.

The top section - that are charm squares - are the base for the quilt. I'm trying to add in some other colors to make the top awesome. I pulled some of the bottom fabrics - the blues, brown print, red dot, and the light yellows - to try out. I'm not sure about the blues and brown down in the lower right corner. There are browns in the other prints and one has some blue so that is where I started. I think the top needs another color but maybe blue isn't it. Or I can just bust through and do it, right?

I would love to hear what you think. Blue or no blue? Other color ideas or maybe something else to consider?

 

ETA: I spent some time playing around with the fabric today since the block tutorial is going up tomorrow and found some additional charms to round out the collection. I noticed the greens and blue-greens in the Golden Afternoon collection that a few of the orange/red/yellow fabrics are from. The greens really add a nice touch and aren't as.... bold? .... as the blues I had above are. I have a good number of charms to do the boarders so some fabrics will repeat. I'm not too worried about that!

beejeebers, wonky house round 1!

This year I am trying something new - a quilting bee! I talked about it a little bit here but now that the year has started we have our first go for January - blocks inspired by a wonky house quilt. It is totally cute and so far three or four of us have blocks done and posted! You can check out the action in our little bee on our flicker site.

I decided to try a house. It looks like a mushroom a bit, no?

My house was a bit small so I added a little tree. I plan to do a little embroidery on the block and maybe add some small buttons. I have to see what I have.  It totally needs a big puffy cloud in the sky! I'm thinking about making a second block to send along too for fun. The bee is a 1-1 swap but surprises are always nice!

ETA: The finished block with cloud!

You can also see my nasty, nasty ironing board cover. No worries, that is spray starch making it brown! I need to give that cover a good old bath. Maybe I'll toss it in a tub to soak while I grade papers. No ironing board = get my grading done :) (never mind I have 3 other small ironing surfaces I can use). I am quite sentimental with my ironing board. I might tell that story another time.

finished wonky baby quilt

I finished my wonky log cabin baby quilt a couple days ago. Now that all my holiday company have left the house, I have some time to catch up on grading papers and blogging about what I've been up to!

This quilt is based on a pattern I found online discussed here. I wanted to do cross hatch quilting but the bias in the backing was more than I had time to battle with - it was very stretchy for a cotton! So I did uneven straight line quilting about two inches apart vertically on the quilt. I am pretty happy with how it all turned out! I used the black/white dot fabric for the binding, which looks pretty cool with the little yellow dots. I also tried something new with the binding this time. I usually just piece by binding end to end, which is kinda bulky. So this time I tried angling the binding strips together. It worked well and was easy to hand finish. Makes me wonder why it took me soo long to try that out!

new years projects

Over the weekend I worked on finishing a couple small projects. One is a baby quilt for my friends N and E back in Seattle. The other is a top that I finished a few months ago and just got around to quilting. It feels good to check things off the list!

First, the lattice quilt. I have the deals on this project here. I quilted it by following about 1/4 inch on each side of the seams to make a cool looking grid across the top. For binding, I found some blue in my stash that doesn't really match but it gives the quilt a nice little detail. I once read that quilts are more interesting if they aren't matchy-matchy. My new computer died and I'm waiting for it to get fixed, so the pictures aren't edited as nicely as I usually do - my laptop doesn't have the fancy version of Paint on it. Yes, I'm super high tech!

The full quilt and a detail of the quilting and binding. Pattern is super awesome and online here for free!


The other quilt that I'm finishing up is the wonky baby quilt. This was an exciting and fun quilt to work on that I first mentioned when I got the sweet blue, magenta, yellow and black/white print fabric that would be used for this project. I finished the top yesterday and will baste the backing tonight and quilt it tomorrow so that my mom can take it back home with her when she leaves on Wednesday.

 Of course, I don't have a lot of floor space in my tiny apartment so I laid it out in sections on top of a drying rack. I used the old camera phone trick to try to remember what order to sew them in. Of course, that failed a little bit!

And here it is... a little detail at least! I'll post a full shot when I get it quilted and finished. I made 20 blocks that were 6.5 inches square and laid them together. I thought about doing a thin white sashing between them but didn't have enough time or energy to entertain that idea for too long! I did big, fat boards in Kona White. I really like how it ended up looking. Clean and sharp and very modern and funky!

I have a lot of projects going on right now, so I'll be back soon with more updates on what is going on in my little sewing lab :)