seaside pillows finished

The seaside pillows for my SIL's school auction are finished and on their way to her!

I quilted each of the 16" pillow tops in an overall loopy pattern with a medium blue thread.

Twinkle finished!

I've checked one more item off the UFO list - my Twinkle quilt!

In my last post about this quilt I mentioned that I was a bit hesitant about my choice of magenta thread for the machine quilting. But I think it was a great choice! It isn't as obvious in the darker blocks, but in the lighter ones it really stands out and looks fabulous...

The quilting pattern is an overall swirl - a different one than I've used before, but I'll definitely use it again. I do love a swirly quilting pattern :) Carol Linder in Hampshire did the long arm quilting for me.

The binding fabric is the same as the star points: Art Gallery Oval Elements in Mood Indigo.

The backing (the whole nine yards of it!) is Kaffe's Kite Tails in Emerald - the Pantone color of 2013. I know, I'm so on trend, right?

I want to always remember that my friend, Sharon, gave me all of the luscious fabrics for the quilt front, so I put her name right on the label...

I brought the quilt last week to my Crystal Lake Modern Quilt Guild meeting for show and tell. Here I am reading the label to Sharon...

And this was her reaction :)

That leaves only 6 items on my "Group A - Almost Done! Really Want to Finish!" UFO list.

27 total UFOs, but still, WOO-HOO!!

Quilt stats:
Pattern - Twinkle by Cheryl Wittmayer
28 blocks at 14" square
84" x 98" finished size
Warm and Natural batting
Star points - Oval Elements Mood Indigo
Star Centers - Kaffe Fassett Shot Cotton in Apple
Block Fabrics - 168 unique fabrics from Kaffe Collective, Anna Maria Horner, and Amy Butler
Backing: Kaffe Kite Tails in Emerald

new challenge

Lorrie and I have taken on a new project. It's called the Border Challenge class at Acorn Quilts in Rockford, IL. The class meets once each month, and our homework before the first class even began was to find or create a block, medallion, or centerpiece that we'd like to use for the center of our quilt. This is what I created...

The pattern is from the book Material Obsession Two, and the quilt this block is from is called "The Seasons" by Sarah Fielke. It measures approximately 21" square. To make my spring tree "leaves" I pieced strip sets from Anna Maria Horner, Kaffe, and Amy Butler prints, and then used the EZ Dresden ruler to cut the wedges. So it's basically a half-dresden plate with smooth edges instead of the usual points. I turned under all the edges and appliqued it to my background - Oval Elements in Mist by Art Gallery fabrics and Tents in Green by Brandon Mably.

The trunk and branches (Spots in Brown by Kaffe) were also hand-appliqued, but I used the freezer paper method and starch to turn under the edges rather than needle turning it - that would have taken forever! It still took a fair amount of time (all those curves!), but I wanted a smooth edge (rather than raw) so it was definitely worth the extra time and effort.

We received our first border assignment late in February at the first class. Each month's challenge is to add a border to your medallion using the "rules" for that month - an assigned color and design element. But not even the instructor knows what those two rules will be until the class is underway, so it's also a kind of mystery class. An envelope was drawn by one of the participants which stated that our color rule would be determined by a blind drawing from a basket of crayons. Lucky Lorrie was chosen to draw and we got... brown. Sepia to be exact. You can use as much or as little of the color as you wish, and since I already had some of that color in my center, I decided to use A LOT of it...

If you guessed that the design element rule was flying geese, you'd be correct! The rule sheet stated that another participant should choose a number in some weird range like 23-167, which in turn indicated the page number from a book of quilt blocks. And on that page was flying geese. Not my favorite block because of all the trimming involved, but I'm pretty excited about how my first border is turning out! More photos of that next time...

I'm not adding this to my UFO list, because I'm actually working on it. Soooo, it's a WIP. Which is a completely different list, don'tcha know ;)

a few more trees

Progress! Trees 6-11 are completed...

Thank heavens for a long iPod playlist of Christmas favorites to sing along with while wearing a carpet path from the sewing machine to the ironing table and back!

Only four more to go...

Tree of Life grows again!

Remember this lonely little tree from May, 2011?

She was rescued from the work-in-progress pile last week and now has four mates!

The majority of fabrics are from Sarah Fielke's line "From Little Things" released in early 2011. The dots on white are my favorite - I'm using the lavender, grey, yellow, and teal dots for my tree backgrounds.

The stripes are also from that line, but I've thrown in some Kaffe (of course!) and some Art Gallery Oval Elements to mix things up.

As always happens when you let projects sit for too long, it took me some extra time to get back in the groove of what size and quantity of fabrics I had to cut for each tree. While each 14.5" block is still more time-consuming than you'd think, I've cut it down to about 2 hours each by making 4 in a row uninterrupted by other projects.

The other thing that happens (to me, at least) is that after some time is allowed to pass, occasionally I'm not as excited about the borders and sashing fabrics that I originally chose. So those funny birds (I'm kinda done with that whole "put a bird on it" fad) and wacky vines that were slated for setting triangles and borders will now likely end up on the back. A wild new Kaffe print and some bright fuchsia stripes are taking over as setting triangles and sashing. The border choice is currently undecided - the two leaders are a new floral from Philip Jacobs and a oldie but goodie leaf print from Kaffe - the final choice will be made when the rest of the top is complete. I'll show you some photos of those beautiful fabrics next time. It's going to be a wild one, for sure!

Five down, three to go!

Or maybe seven to go - if eight trees are good, then twelve trees are better, right?

I'm Sew Very Happy

...with this new wall hanging I made for my sewing room.

It was inspired by this photo I saw in a Better Homes and Gardens special interest publication (Do It Yourself, I think) a couple of years ago, and I've had the project on my to-do list ever since. I'm pretty certain the photo example is done in paper, but I wanted mine to be made from fabric.

I started with a great fat quarter of Art Gallery Oval Elements for the background and several Kaffe Fassett scraps from my Crayon Box quilt for the letters.

These punch-out 2" letters were at my local JoAnn's store. I traced the letters onto fusible webbing then ironed the webbing to the wrong side of the fabric scraps.

I just eyeballed the placement of the letters on my background doing my best to center them on the fabric without being too mathematical about it. The dots certainly helped with that!

After fusing the letters to the background, I sewed a very small zigzag stitch in a coordinating thread around the raw edges of each one to secure and give them a little more definition.

This adhesive foam-core mounting board and my frame were purchased at Michaels. I cut a piece of very thin cotton batting and placed it against the adhesive side before layering the appliqued design on top.

After removing the glass I placed the whole thing in this 12" x 16" frame and promptly hung it on the wall.

I just love it! I'm even thinking of using the same motto on a pillow with script lettering - what do you think of that idea?

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!