The Red and White EQ Blog Hop is only on it’s second day. Already there are the most wonderful tutorials and inspiring tips. Here are the links for the whole week.
Last weekend at Quilt Retreat Sherry and I were experimenting with Bonnie Hunter’s Strip Twist to see if we could make a quilt that she envisioned making for her son. Somehow we couldn’t get the pieces for the blocks we wanted without making a second block (and in the end a second quilt). But Monday morning, I decided to take the holiday to give it another spin. Using strips from the 2-1/2″ strip bin, this is the result. It is the Strip Twist pattern from Bonnie with the colors going from dark to light in the strip sets. When the strip sets are joined, it creates a block that goes from dark to light on one side and light to dark on the other side. When set into an on point layout, it creates this great design.
At quilt retreat, I almost finished this one (which is the double rail fence with 3-1/2 x 6-1/2 inch rectangles) and continued to work on it at home. It went onto the longarm on Sunday and was quilted. The binding was stitched on with the quilting machine, so I am going to finish the binding–maybe by hand while watching movies in the evening.
Here are some pics from quilt retreat. We had a great time.
This is yesterday’s project. It was complicated only by the fact that the backing was only one inch larger all the way around than the top. After talking with the client, we decided to trim 1-1/2″ of the border all the way around. The border was originally just over 6 inches, so this left plenty of border on the quilt, and it gave me enough room to do the quilting.
The pantograph is Sumptuous by Hermione Agee. This is the second time I’ve used it, and this time I reduced the size to 5 inches. The original size is 14 inches which is much too open to suit me.
What is really funny is that my husband came in while I was quilting and said, “I thought that was your quilt”. He was remembering a blue and white quilt I made several years ago for my Mother that used exactly the same prints.
Donation Quilt for Meals on WheelsBack of Quilt
And here’s the hat. Last year I was knitting lots of hats and this is the one that I made for Owen. He wore it a lot. Then his Mom washed it in the machine, and the blue yarn was felted–that’s what happens when you use scraps. Besides being smaller, the hat also lost it’s stretch. I cut out the felted top and re-knitted a new top. He still wouldn’t wear it. So, I went to the yarn store (spent $30-ouch!) and got new almost matching yarn and knitted a new one. Now he likes the old one better. What can I say?
This week has been busy with a new project. Every time I write a Craftsy blog post, it seems it ends up with a new project. This time I am making it into an embroidery project that I can offer for sale. It’s very simple, but has lots of potential. Teaser pics are below.
Somehow I totally lost my mojo after the holidays. We did some traveling, I stopped consuming as much caffeine, and came down with a terrible cold all at once. It seems this all conspired to bring my energy to a complete halt for almost two weeks. Thank goodness I woke up Sunday morning feeling like a new person and ready to conquer the world again.
I am also working on quilting a donation quilt for Meals on Wheels. Hopefully will get that done today and can show you pics of that tomorrow.
Slowly but surely the re-do of the jelly roll race quilt is coming together as a chevron quilt. And I like it. The goal was to use only quarter square triangles. I didn’t like the bulk in the center seam so added 1-1/2 inch strips between the triangles.
The triangles have the seams pressed open. I know you are all aghast at me for that as I preach pressing to the side. But this time it was the right thing to do.
And as I stitched I found that I could match the points with the strips better if I stitched with the pieced strip on top. However to keep the seam allowance from flipping as I stitched I had to use a stylus.
So what do you think? Are those strips too distracting? Other possibilities were to use different fabrics for the black strips and varying widths for the background strips but I took the easy way this time. How would you do this one?
