sailboats for Caleb

I've just finished another baby quilt top for a new baby boy in the family. Caleb was born in January - another beautiful boy for my niece Sarah!

Sarah and I spent a lot of time perusing Pinterest for baby quilt ideas, and the one she chose featured sailboats like these...

She loves the colors and graphic patterns of these Joel Dewberry Modern Meadow (and other assorted Denyse Schmidt) fabrics and opted for the light grey solid as the background. I saved the argyle plaid for the backing.

Each sailboat block finishes at 12" square and requires eight 3" half-square triangle (HST) blocks, so I cut forty-eight 4" squares each of print and grey solid to make all the HSTs needed plus several extras to ensure enough variety in the finished blocks.

You can see the method I use most often for sewing HSTs here. I use Option 2 and cut my squares a full 1" larger than the finished block size needed and trim them to the correct size after pressing. The trimmed HST size needed for this quilt is 3.5" square which yields a 3" finished block.

A 1" sashing between the blocks and a 2" border all around brings the finished quilt size to about 42" square.

The backing is made up of a 28" center square of the argyle print surrounded by 7" x 9" rectangles of other prints used in the sailboat blocks.

I haven't yet decided on a quilting pattern. Any thoughts?

Field of Tulips top finished!

Hopefully this will hasten the arrival of spring here in the land of unrelenting snow and cold (aka Illinois). Maybe it's working already because just last week I saw tulip bunches for sale at my local Trader Joe's, and this week our temps are finally going to climb above freezing!

tulip update

I wish I had more progress to show you on this quilt, but it's been slow-going here in the sewing room this past week. I've been working on a little hand embroidery project for my LQS and trying to finish that up and get the directions written. I'm excited to show it to you next week - it's a Valentine project!

As I wrote last week, I really wanted to use some red in the sashing for this quilt, and lucky me (!), I found the perfect one buried deep in the red drawer. Red with pink dots - yes, please!

2014 impulse project #1 - scrappy bear paw

Last week I rescued these lovely fabrics (Meadowsweet by Sandi Henderson) from the depths of my stash and joined a few other quilters on Instagram in starting a scrappy bear paw quilt. (This is the sort of impulsive decision that is a direct result of not having a 2014 goal list prepared, but that's another story for a different day...)

a quilt for my mom

Earlier this year I found myself stopping and staring at the same finished quilt every time I shopped in one of my local quilt stores. This was the quilt - the original Amish with a Twist pattern by Nancy Rink.

When I'd look at the bolts of solids used in the quilt they didn't seem nearly as bright and saturated as they did against the black background of the finished quilt. And you know how I love the bright colors! I really wanted to make one, but I have no queen sized beds at my house, and I couldn't think of anywhere I would put it, so I shelved the idea.

Then a couple of months later, I discovered on the Hancock's of Paducah website that Nancy Rink had created a few different colorways of the same pattern and I asked my mom right away what she thought of this version...

Yep - she was all for it! So here we are several months later, and I've finally managed to take some photos of the progress. The pattern is sectioned into five "lessons", each one slightly increasing in difficulty so that beginners can feel comfortable starting out and learning new skills as they progress.

Here are the blocks from Lesson #1 - strip pieced rail fence, four-patches, and nine-patches. Nancy does a terrific job in this pattern with diagrams and clear, well-worded instructions. Any confident beginner could jump right in a have great success with this pattern.

Lesson #2 focuses on half-square and quarter-square triangles to make hourglass, star, and pinwheel blocks utilizing the best method for success - constructing the sub-blocks larger than needed and then trimming to size!

The fabrics used in this quilt are Centennial Solids from Marcus Fabrics. It will finish at 88" x 105.5" - perfect for my mom's queen sized bed!

The pattern for the version on cream background was not re-written to utilize the new fabric colors, but both Nancy Rink and Hancock's Paducah were able to send me a conversion chart so I could order the correct colors and change the color names in the original pattern. Honestly that has been the most challenging part since there are three colors that are used in both the dark and light versions, but not in the same places. That part is keeping me on my toes! Next time I'll show you blocks 7-12 from Lessons #3 and #4.

Happy Weekend!!

P.S. At the time I was ordering these fabrics, the kit for the light version was no longer available for purchase from Hancock's Paducah, but their telephone rep and Nancy Rink were both so helpful in guiding me to the correct colors and quantities I needed. So if you are interested in making the same quilt, you can click here to see the dark version pattern available for sale at Hancock's Paducah, and here for Nancy Rink's contact information.

Modern Maples top done

This quilt top wasn't really finished in one day - I've been steadily working on it for a couple of weeks now. I started with this lovely stack of fall fabrics and about 4 yards of Robert Kaufman Quilter's Linen in a sandy/taupe beige color way.

In my version I opted to fill all the negative space from the original pattern with smaller leaves - 6" and 9" finished.

Adjusting the size of the blocks is not difficult. The maple leaf block is basically a version of a nine-patch block, so instead of each section finishing at 4" for a 12" block, I scaled the sections down to finish at 2" for a 6" block and 3" for a 9" block. The stem sections for the 12" block are cut at 2", so for the 6" version I cut them at 1", and for the 9" version I cut them at 1.5".

In this shot you can see the seam lines between blocks a bit more clearly. In order to "size up" the smaller leaves to fit the grid created by the 12" blocks, I bordered the 9" leaves with a 1.5" border on all sides. The 6" leaves were paired together with 6" background blocks into a four-patch block or bordered by 3" of background fabric.

And here is the "ugly duckling" fabric I mentioned yesterday. It caught my eye at a sidewalk sale five years ago where it was priced at $3/yard.  I have no explanation for buying it other than the fact that it looked so dimensional and I was caught up in the frenzy that is a fabric clearance sale. I honestly had to touch it to verify that it was printed cotton and not a chenille textured fabric. I really liked the colors, it had the requisite "bold, bright and loud" factor, so I just blurted out, "I'll take seven yards!" Why seven? Who knows?  I guess I thought it would make a great quilt backing that would probably require five yards, and then I might want to use it as a border also, so that might be another two yards. So yeah, seven seemed like the right number.

Since then it has been languishing in my fabric stash just waiting to be put to use. I'm so glad I didn't give it away or chop it into fat quarters for an "ugly fabric" guild challenge - which was my most recent plan to put it to use - because I think it is THE PERFECT BACKING for this quilt :)

Good things come for those [fabrics] that wait. Aaannnd wait.

P.S. This version of the Modern Maples quilt will finish at 63" x 85" finished (twin size). It will be late November before I get this one back from the longarm quilter, and (sadly) the spectacular sight that is Fall in the Midwest will be long gone by then...

Modern Maples in progress

Because one fall quilt just wasn't enough for me this year, I jumped on the Modern Maples bandwagon and got busy making piles of these HSTs...

Which led to a big pile of these 12" finished maple leaf blocks - 19 to be exact...

These are a few of my favorites...

But then I was uncertain about the layout. The original pattern (available for free download here) calls for 18 maple leaf blocks in a 30 block (6 rows of 5 blocks) grid leaving lots of open negative space...

I just wasn't feeling the whole negative space thing on this quilt (and yeah, I wanted mine to be a little different than the original) so I added in some 9" and 6" maple leaf blocks to fill the grid that I expanded to 7 rows of 5...

Check back tomorrow for photos of the finished top and the "ugly duckling" backing I bought 5 YEARS AGO at a sidewalk sale because I thought that one day I might make the perfect quilt top to go with it :)

How old is your oldest chunk of yardage bought to use as a backing?

P.S. You can see lots of lovely Modern Maples quilts finished and in progress here at the Falling for Modern Maples Flickr group and on Instagram at #fallingformodernmaples and #modernmaples.