college quilt top completed

The quilt top for my college-bound girl is complete! She laid out all the blocks to her liking, and I think she did a fabulous job evenly balancing the lights and darks.

The pattern is "Green Glass Door" by Blue Underground. The finished size of this quilt is 78" x 87" which I thought was big enough for a dorm-sized bed. But I've just learned that dorm beds are 80" long! So I think we're going to add a 7" or 8" strip to the top edge of the quilt to add some needed length. Maybe a near solid in a darker teal, or a strip of a bigger patterned print bordered by some 1.5" width strips like all the blocks. I don't think either will look too out of place, since the top will be covered by a pillow most of the time, but if you've got a different idea let me know ASAP!

There are lots of Amy Butler prints from a few of her fabric lines in this quilt - Daisy Chain, Midwest Modern 2, and Lark. Also a little Joel Dewberry Modern Meadows, and of course Kaffe - shot cottons and prints. A nicely blended hodgepodge of teal and turquoise :)

I'm sending it out to be quilted - this thing seems huge to me! It's the largest quilt I've made to date. As I was crawling around on the floor pinning the last long seam I thought to myself, "this is why you haven't made a king-sized quilt for your own bed!"

It definitely needs a name. So far I'm drawing a blank...

more twinkling

My good friend Lorrie at SewMod had me over for a sewing fun day last week, so I was able to crank out 10 more of my Twinkle blocks. My tally is now 14 done, 28 to go! Each block seems to go together faster than the previous one, even with the initial partial seam required from this pattern.

Here's a grouping of pink blocks:

Some magenta/red blocks:

And lastly some purple ones:

Have any of you reading made this pattern before? I'm not a fan of repeating the same block construction forty-two times, but since every single fabric is different, I haven't become bored yet. I've stuck with my plan of only working on these blocks when I'm away on a sewing outing, so that probably also contributes to the lack of boredom.

Lorrie and I are planning another work day this week, but I'd really like to make some headway on my SewMod row quilt, so I think I'll tackle that. I've got some pretty elaborate machine applique borders planned, and the shapes are already traced to the fusible webbing. All I need to do is buckle down and commit already to the fabrics to use. Having Lorrie around always ramps up my ability to make quick decisions. I'm not sure why that is, but maybe it's because she's the speediest quilter I've ever seen! You should head over to her blog and see the fun quilt she's making now from a Cluck, Cluck, Sew pattern with Art Gallery and Kona solid fabrics!

And I apologize if this posts with double spacing between everything. Sometime since my last post Blogger has changed, and I can't quite figure out how to insert single-line spaces between photos and text paragraphs. Everything I used to do produces no spaces, and inserting HTML break codes produces double spaces. If you've had this problem too and solved it, please tell me how!

jumping from here to there

At my February Breakfast Club II class, I asked all the students to count up their UFO (UnFinished Object) projects and bring the oldest of those projects and their total count to our March class. For a project to qualify as a UFO, it has to have been started - meaning some cutting and/or sewing has taken place. It doesn't count if you've just got all the fabric gathered and a pattern selected. That's a future UFO, and a whole different story...

So of course I had to count up all of my own. My total? Twenty-three. I was prepared for a number much higher. And actually, only five of those are actively being worked on right now. So that proves I do have a very little bit of focus, after all ;) And don't panic - I'm not going to show you photos of 23 UFO's - I'm just going to highlight the oldest and newest ones.

Most recently added to the UFO category are these 4 completed blocks from my "Twinkle" quilt project...

You may remember that some time ago a very sweet friend of mine actually cut all the large pieces for this quilt from her stash and gave them to me. Then I hemmed and hawed over which fabrics to use for the star points and center squares. As you can see I finally made those decisions (Art Gallery Oval Elements in Mood Indigo and a Kaffe shot cotton in Apple) and chose this as my traveling project to work on when my SewMod group meets for sew-ins. So forward progress will be slow, but at least it's progress! Four down, thirty-eight to go!

My oldest UFO? It's either this hand-pieced sampler...

Or this "Thru Grandmother's Window" block of the month hand applique (1 of 4 completed, 8 more to go) which are both circa 1997, but I can't recall which class I took first...

I did manage a couple of finishes during my hiatus. Both were Breakfast Club II class projects so there was a deadline - hence the "finished" status! Most recently graduated from "UFO" to "finished" status are some bright batik placemats...

And a table runner using the new Maude Asbury Calypso fabrics...

So how many UFO's have you got? What's the oldest? Do you think you'll ever finish it? Right now I doubt that I'll finish that sampler (it needs to be hand-quilted), but there's a good chance the hand applique will some more progress one day.

Happy Weekend to you all!

displaying my quilts

Whoa! That was a longer break than I had planned! I have been sewing, but kind of jumping around from project to project without making any real forward progress on any of them. But I do have a few things planned to show this week.

We've been planning a re-do of our living room, and just this past Saturday we got the walls painted. They were some variety of boring beige (with a more hip-sounding name that I can't recall, courtesy of that lucky-duck with the paint-naming job. Who does that job? How does one get that job? Sounds like a pretty good gig to me... but I have strayed off topic...) Now the walls are light, bright, and the color of whipped butter. The room faces north and was previously so dull and dreary that no one ever used it, but this new color is so lovely and inviting :)

Since I've made quite a few bright quilts, my husband decided to make a custom quilt ladder to display them in our redecorated living room...

Pretty amazing, right? The entire ladder is 4 feet wide and 8 feet tall. Each rung section is 2 feet wide, and they are spaced 18" apart to allow a large section of each quilt to be visible.

Just in case you want your dear someone to make a similar one for you, it was built with 1" x 4" by 8' maple boards stained lightly and covered with polyurethane. Each of the four dowels is 3/4" diameter by 48" long. It simply leans against the wall, and the weight of the quilts keeps it steady. The dowels are inserted into holes in the maple boards and secured with small screws drilled into the back of the maple boards.

I'll show you the rest of the room once all the furnishings are in place. It's going to see a lot of use from now on!

quilt for a baby girl

My baby girl, that is. Thing 1 is headed off to college far away later this fall, so I've started a quilt for her to take - a little piece of home to have with her every day.

These are a few of the blocks I've completed up on the design wall. I'm using a pattern from Blue Underground Studios called "Green Glass Door", but Thing 1 chose teal, turquoise, and blue as the colors she'd like to have, so we'll have to come up with a different name :) It finishes at 78" x 87", which I believe should fit those extra long twin dorm beds. Please give me a shout right away if you know from experience that this is not the case!

The pattern features six varied block sizes all bordered with 1.25" finished strips. I've got two of the six block sizes bordered - the biggest and the smallest - all finishing at 14.5" high. The width of each block is where the variation comes in. You need 20 fat quarters for the blocks and about 3.5 yards total of solids/near solids for the block borders to complete this quilt.

Oddly enough I had already purchased half-yards of most of these blue and teal fabrics to make another Blue Underground pattern (Rear Window) at the time she chose these colors, so there is a similarly colored quilt in progress in tandem with this one. Lots of blue and teal in the sewing room right now!!

Dotty Star borders

Over the weekend I chose a new layout for my nine Dotty Star blocks. The layout I posted last week felt like there was too much blue and not enough yellow. But this new one feels more sunny overall :)

The borders were cut and placed to correspond with the main color of each block. So now with the 3" border all around, my quilt top size is 60" x 60".

I purchased a black with white dots fabric last week for the binding, so now I've just got to find a backing and decide how to quilt it. I'm pretty set on sending it out to be quilted, but I'm not sure if I'll have her do an all-over pattern or something more custom. The quilt photographed with the pattern has the stars ditch-quilted with various circular motifs quilted in the background square spaces. Any suggestions for me?

9 out of 9 finished!

I am just floored by what can be accomplished when I stick to one project at a time! This week I managed to crank out the last five of my Dotty Stars, and here they all are together on the design wall...

I'm not sure if this will be the final layout; the borders need to be cut and placed around the perimeter before I decide for sure. I've got a close-up shot of each of the five new blocks for you next, but be sure to scroll all the way to the end of this post for some helpful tips should you decide to make your own Dotty Stars quilt!

Tips and Tricks for making your own Dotty Stars Quilt

Nine stars provides quite a bit of practice, so I made a few notes to help you with yours :)

1. I am a big believer in Mary Ellen's Best Press spray. There are tons of bias edges in these quilt blocks, so do yourself a favor and stabilize all that fabric with Best Press or another starch-like product before cutting anything.

2. Make it easy on yourself and just cut a mess of your scraps into 3" squares. You'll need a ridiculous amount of HSTs cut from 3" squares to make this quilt.

3. For each star you'll need 28 dark HSTs and 20 light HSTs cut from your 3" squares, and 9 total 2.5" squares - 5 dark and 4 light. Cut these center squares from your pile of 3" squares after you've made the triangle sections.

4. Add some yellow to each block to pull everything together in the end. I wish I had added some black and white to each one as well - I think it would have given more contrast within each star.

5. When sewing your small triangle units (the point sections of each star) use the full 1/4" seam allowance, but when sewing the center four patches use a scant 1/4" seam. The first couple of blocks my pieced triangle sections were always bigger than the 4 squares at the corners and the center 9 nine patch; the only way I could fix this (since all my corner squares were already cut) was to vary the seam allowance slightly between the triangle and square sections.

6. When sewing the main nine sections of each star block together, press those seams open. For all other seams within the block sections, press according to the pattern instructions.

I used all scrap fabrics for the colored portions of each star, but I did purchase 12 different 1/4 yard cuts of dots on white to use for the backgrounds. It doesn't seem like I used up that many of my scraps. My friend Lorrie thinks that scraps multiply once you start cutting them, and it sure seems that way here. I feel like I've still got enough HSTs cut to make another quilt. What should I do with them? It's so hard to throw away perfectly good fabrics! Maybe I'll make something like this or this with the leftovers?

But there I go again getting ahead of myself. Borders on this one first, Shelley, borders on this one first!