pillow sham for epic college map quilt

As promised, here are the details on the pillow sham I made to coordinate with the Epic College Map Quilt...

It measures 21" x 27" to fit a standard sized bed pillow. I came up with a couple of different design layouts utilizing some of the 100 flying geese blocks left over from making the quilt. Thing 2 liked this first design best...

Which surprised me because I thought for sure she would choose this one since it more closely mimics the quilt...

The entire sham was sewn with leftovers from making the quilt :) Using the quilting designs Carol put on the map quilt as a guide, I free motion quilted the same loopy motif in the flying geese units and added horizontal lines and key words in the larger bridge fabric areas to personalize the pillow cover and tell a bit of "her story".

Yep - her name is Natalie, and she intends to study engineering physics. She is a whiz at physics and also really enjoys studying calculus and mathematics. Just thinking about studying those topics kinda freaks me out, but not Thing 2!

She plays both the trombone and cello. Her cello (named Pascal) moved with her to college and is currently occupying a very large portion of her dorm room closet when she isn't practicing :)

Ballet and lyrical dance are two of her other favorite loves. She is taking a ballet class this semester at school and practicing with a contemporary dance performance group on campus for a show in November. So it's not all math and science all the time!

The pillow top was quilted with my tried and true combination of a layer of plain white prewashed flannel (instead of batting) and a muslin backing. Pillow tops generally don't require the same loft as quilts, so a layer of flannel is perfect. The green borders of the pillow top are a Peppered Cotton from Studio E fabrics designed by Pepper Cory, but I'm unsure of the color number/name.

An envelope style closure on the back finishes the pillow sham perfectly.

Natalie is currently having the time of her life meeting new friends and learning new things about herself and her favorite school subjects. It's a new chapter of life for her, and for me too because after 21+ years it's just me and my husband at home again. It feels strange and exciting, sad and joyous all at the same time to have sent both of our girls out into the world and to watch them from the sidelines. New adventures are out there for all us... Onward!

epic college map quilt complete!

I could not be happier with the way this quilt turned out!  It is exactly as I pictured it in my mind thanks to the amazing quilting done by Carol Linder in Hampshire, IL.

The map portion is quilted in a 3" grid to mimic the latitude and longitude lines on a wall map. Thing 2 made a list of 40 city and country names that she wanted to be placed randomly over the quilt top in lower case script - places she has visited as well as places she hopes to visit in the future.

Carol had some difficulty finding a script font that would string letters together to form words; all of the script fonts she already owned would stitch a hard start and stop for each letter. That's a lot of starting and stopping spread over 40 words!

But she persisted and was able to find this font, and it's perfect stitched in medium grey thread!

The final requirement was that the words interrupt the grid lines and be randomly scattered across the quilt in both the horizontal and vertical directions but only in the "ocean" areas, not on the continents. And again, Carol rose to the challenge plotting out all the lines and words on her computer to perfect their placement.

She had to quilt all the lines in one direction first, then remove the quilt from the long arm and rotate it to quilt the perpendicular lines. It all worked perfectly!

A repeating looped stitching pattern in olive green thread fills all of the flying geese units.

Bridges on the back symbolize Thing 2's interest in Civil Engineering and Physics.

We haven't washed the quilt yet, so it's still crisp and crinkle free, but I'm anxious to see how it looks after washing.

That will have to wait a few months though, because it's living in it's new college home now.

I asked Thing 2 if she was disappointed that more people wouldn't be able to see her quilt since the bed is lofted so high. Her response - "Mom, so many more people are going to see the quilt on your blog than would ever see it here on my bed!" :)

Next time I'll show you the coordinating pillow sham I made with some of the extra flying geese units.

If you would like to know more about how I created this quilt top, you can read these earlier posts:

• epic-college-map-quilt
• progress-report-epic-college-map-quilt
• applique-finish-line
• and-done

improv challenge baby quilt finish

My improv challenge baby quilt was finished in time for our last Crystal Lake Modern Quilt Guild meeting a couple of weeks ago, but I just finally got some decent photos yesterday thanks to my helpful volunteer - Thing 1!

I free-motion quilted it with randomly spaced vertical wavy lines, some closer than others, with a couple of sections of wonky log-cabin-like stitching to repeat the shape of the blocks in the negative space.

I used a lime-green thread, and even though you can't really see the color unless you look closely, I think it gives the negative space a lot more zing than just a plain white thread.

I washed the quilt right after it was completed (an entire day before deadline, thank you very much!) because I was a tad disappointed with my quilting stitches. I'm sure it was hot up in the sewing room, so I probably tried to speed through the quilting process and because of that my stitch lengths were very inconsistent. But the puckering from the wash and dry does an excellent job of hiding those flaws.

 

A fun Michael Miller dot backing and a black and white stripe binding cut on the bias give it a little extra zip!

My guild is in the early planning stages of hosting our own quilt show, so I'll probably hang on to this quilt until that takes place. But after that, I'm not sure. It's okay to have a pile of quilts that you made for the sole purpose of learning a new skill or even just for the joy of working with the fabrics, right?

Yeah, that's what I thought, too :)

One more question: I used to prefer the crisp look of a quilt before washing, but now I really love the softness and texture (and flaw-concealment!) that only washing and drying can provide :) Do you prefer washed or unwashed??

baby quilt for Joel, part 2

Just a few more snapshots of the quilting and binding that are now completed!!

Continuous, concentric squares - say that fast three times! I marked out the spacing for each square with a wash-out blue marker, but occasionally varied the number of squares within each space to mix it up a bit...

A shot from the back showing some quilted arcs. You can also see the bias-cut striped binding (because that's more fun than straight cut) and the circle print backing, both from Heather Bailey's Nicey Jane line. The binding is entirely machine sewn to make it more durable to stand up to lots of carrying around and washing :)

In all the sashing and borders I quilted these stacked triangles. So easy once you get into the rhythm...

My first attempt at a swirly scroll. They were so much easier to sew than they look! I did practice drawing them first, but seriously - not that hard...

And finally these pulleys. They kinda remind me of diaper pins which are not exactly mainstream anymore. Does that make them cool and retro?

This week I'll be writing a label for this quilt, and then it will be off to Joel's house!

Photos and instructions for all the quilting patterns I used in this post can be found in this book by Angela Walters (my new favorite machine quilting book!)

baby quilt for Joel

My nephew and his wife are the proud parents of a new baby boy, Joel, born on May 12 - Mother's Day! I've had the quilt top for this new little guy done for a couple of months and just this week started quilting it.

The day after he was born I got busy pinning it. Just a bit of a teaser here to give you an idea of the color scheme without giving away too much...

And here are some detail shots of the quilting I've done so far. My favorite part - the sun!

Some spirals...

Clamshells...

Pebbles in the stream...

And a little bit bigger teaser...

Except for the spirals, I've not quilted any of these patterns before. I used Angela Walters' book Free Motion Quilting with Angela Walters for both inspiration and how-to help. Her instructions are diagrammed so clearly that I just jumped right in and tried some new things! You can find it online here.

So far I have three of the six main sections quilted - halfway there! My goal is to finish the quilting this weekend, binding next week, then off in the mail it goes to baby Joel's house :)

quilting decisions

My long term piecing project - The Tree of Life quilt top - has been sent off for some heavy-duty custom quilting. I dropped it off last week with my long-arm quilter, Carol. The top is about 83" square, so I wasn't about to tackle that by myself!

I knew that I wanted some dense custom quilting rather than an all-over background pattern. Carol suggested I choose a wool batting (which I have never used before) to make the quilting really stand out. I'll confess that while making this quilt, I decided that when it was finished I would enter it into a judged show - something I've never done before. Maybe the upcoming September show in Madison, WI will be the one. Wool batting is supposed to spring back from being folded better than cotton batting and also hang better, so wool it is.

Several quilting designs were churning around in my head, so I tried some out on graph paper (love that stuff!) to see what I really liked best. First I drew a grid of most of the entire top of the quilt to figure out the scale of blocks vs. sashing vs. borders. On this go-around I sketched out my top ideas for sashing quilting...

Then I made a larger diagram of a single tree block to see what filler patterns looked good in the backgrounds...

It seemed that adding a little color to the diagrams would help with choosing thread colors, and by this point I had also wised up to the fact that if I made copies of the diagram I wouldn't have to keep drawing them over and over to avoid erasing. Duh.

Design decisions for the tree blocks were made pretty quickly, but the border decision took much longer. I am not a fan of "feathers" in quilting designs. I know lots of people think they are beautiful and flowing and organic, but to me they just look like (and forgive me if this ruins your love of feather quilting) intestines. I know, gross, right? But that's what immediately comes to my mind every time I see them! So here I am doodling away trying to find something that is appropriately scaled and dense enough to stand up to the block quilting designs I've chosen and not be stuck with feathers. Leaves? Nope - not dense enough. Spirals? Nope - scale is all wrong...

And here is my attempt at a variation of feathers that includes swirls (you know I love swirls!) but this one just looks like intestines drawn by Dr. Seuss. Definitely not the right theme...

I ended up choosing a pattern from Carol's library of border designs that incorporates a little bit of leaf with some swirl action too. Whoops - I should have drawn it before leaving her house so I could show you here!

Carol will be using many colors of thread - magenta, turquoise, sea green, gray, purple, yellow, and a blue green to add lots of dimension to my already colorful quilt top. It won't be ready until early July, and already I can't wait to see it!

I pulled all of the sketched quilting designs from three different books, all great references to have in your quilt book library:

Beginner's Guide to Free-Motion Quilting by Natalia Bonner
Free-Motion Quilting with Angela Walters by Angela Walters and
In the Studio with Angela Walters by Angela Walters

And lastly, a funny story about this quilt that should have a photo accompaniment, but doesn't... I purchased a couple of different border fabrics that I really liked (at the time) about 2.5 years ago when I first had this tree quilt idea. But now they seem kind of ridiculous (and on the verge of [gasp!] ugly) so I pieced them into the backing. Said backing was hanging over my upstairs railing a couple of weeks ago when my husband spied it and (pointing to the ridiculous fabrics) said to me, "Did you buy that fabric? I mean, did you pay money for it?" Hilarious!

going once, going twice...

Another auction item for donation! This one is for my SIL, Lisa, who is the principal of a Lutheran K-8 school. Every spring the school (which includes all grades from K-12) hosts a big dinner and auction to help support school functions and student programs.

If you are a long time reader, you may recognize this quilt top from this post over two years ago! It's been safely tucked away, waiting to be quilted and finished so that a new baby or young child can enjoy it.

The pinwheel center is quilted with a meandering large stipple pattern, while the inner border has some lazy intersecting curves.

On the outer borders I tried something different and quilted the cursive lower case alphabet - it seemed appropriate since the border was already filled with letters!

I wanted the quilt to feel somewhat personalized even though I don't know where it's new home will be, so I used one of my favorite quotes on the label. I don't know who said it, but it always makes me smile when I read it.

The backing is more letters - lots and lots of letters on this quilt! And a machine-sewn binding for durability.

I didn't make a resolution for this to be a year of sewing finishes, but it feels pretty good to have two things done right out of the gate :)

pretty in pink

I am so lucky to be a part of a charity quilting group at my church. We meet every week and sew quilts and other projects for organizations such as Lutheran World Relief and Project Linus, as well as quilts and gift baskets for various local fund-raising efforts.

Our latest project is making baby quilts for the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit of a local hospital. These small quilts will be donated to families with babies being cared for in the unit.

This little pink lovely is my first contribution to the group's donation set of quilts.

I started with a WOF strip scrap bag from an LQS purchased a couple of years ago. I think most of these fabrics were from a Moda Basic Grey line, but sorry I can't remember the name. I cut all the strips in half and sewed 16 of them into the center section. With the remaining strips I constructed some four-patch units to add to the sides with a 2" finished strip of white-on-white to separate them. The final border strips are the same 2" finished white-on-white bringing the total dimension to about 36" x 39" - perfect for new babies :)

The center and four-patch borders are straight line quilted in a pale pink thread.

Within the white border sections I free-motion quilted a continuous line of pale pink hearts.

The backing is a cozy pink-on-white stripe flannel.

It gives me such a great feeling knowing that this little quilt will be given to a family with a tiny new baby girl receiving extra special care and attention before she's able to go home.

I've got two more quilts for this hospital donation in the works. More about them later!

Hope you are all enjoying your week!