Orchid, Brown, and Beige...

If you've looked at my blog for any length of time you've probably noticed that I am not good at doing controlled color schemes with my quilts. I can only think of a handful of quilts where I really stuck to a controlled color scheme. But...my husband's cousin was pregnant with a little girl and, after asking through family members, I found out that the nursery theme colors were orchid, brown, and beige. I know just enough about this cousin to know that I should do a fairly modern quilt layout and settled on a chevron design (there was a specific design I'd found that inspired this quilt but I can't find it now...).

The hardest part about this quilt was choosing the shades of orchid. I had very little in my stash that was what I'd consider orchid. I bought quite a few different fabrics and eventually settled on these:

I already had the two on the left

I made crumb blocks with my tan and brown scraps and cut those into half square triangles that would finish at 4" finished, then paired those with the orchid triangles I'd cut to match. Each column was a consistent orchid fabric with the scrappy brown and tans as a background.

Completed top, the lighting is better on this to see the colors

Quilted and bound

Backing and binding

For a backing I used one of the fabrics that I'd ordered but was too pink for the front. I finished the quilt and washed it the night before we left for a trip where I could deliver the quilt by hand to the new mother and her family. Everybody loved the quilt, especially when I pointed out all of the brown and tan fabrics in this quilt that were in quilts I'd made for my kiddos and my other nieces and nephews. A little cliche, but there's a metaphor in there somewhere about quilting and familial ties that bind us together...

2019: A Trio Of Little Girls

The title is misleading. I didn't really get a picture of the first of this trio finished...but it has been waiting for the recipient to get me a mailing address. It's hard when you try to make something for someone who you've only met online, but I'm holding onto it in case the mom gets back to me with it.

I did a sort of experiment with these quilts that I'm not entirely sure I like the end result of, but they're done so...I guess it counts as a finish/win in the end. I used the idea and layout of Bonnie Hunter's Random Ohio Stars, but used the stars from her Sister's Choice quilt instead.

I made a lot of 9 patches in the two sizes (4.5" unfinished out of 1.5" strips and 6.5" unfinished out of 2.5" strips). The backgrounds for the big stars were neutral tan fabrics, the backgrounds for the small stars were darker brown fabrics, and the alternate blocks used big/busy print fabrics that I rarely use. This is the part I'm not a huge fan of - they make the quilt too busy against the 9 patch stars.

A little busy, but still pretty fun

I really like the quilting texture

Busy...but it's sewn together and given to its recipient

Stars everywhere!

Pink binding for a little girl with a very active older brother

The third quilt is very similar, for a little girl with three older brothers.

Overall view

Quilted texture

Backing, binding, and label

I stopped after making these quilts and put the leftover 9 patches away to use later.

The only picture I have so far of the first one I finished but have put away until I can confirm if I'm giving it to the intended recipient:

Binding with my cuddly old puppy

Work In Progress

My quilting time is pretty scarce these days but I have been doing what I can when I can (okay, not always...the internet is far too easy to get lost in). But I am making a lot of progress.

Baby J-kwelin had a baby sister born on my birthday last year. Of course, since her older sister had one of my quilts this little girl needed one too. There was a block design in my 5,000 Quilt Block Designs book that actually had her name as part of it, so I picked it and haven't looked back. Funnily enough, this design is VERY similar to J-kwelin's design...like turn four half-square triangles in a different direction similar. So the sisters will have similar but different quilts.

Five blocks to go, then the alternate setting blocks.

I love how the design is turning out, even if every block pretty much has at least one place where a point has been chopped off. Seriously, it's a block made entirely of half-square triangles and flying geese. It's going to happen.

In other news, I won some fabric two weeks ago (but didn't have time to post last week)! Annie of Annie's Ruby Slipperz had a giveaway for 5 fat quarters on her blog when she recently came back into blogging. I won! I got to choose the color I wanted so I picked *gasp* neutrals. This is what she sent me - they'll be perfect for adding some variety into my stash. I've been using a lot of neutrals.

Yay new fabric!

Finally, I've been doing leaders and enders almost since I got seriously into machine quilting back in 2009-ish. For several years, my leaders and enders have been paper-pieced blocks from The Civil War Love Letter Quilt book by Rosemary Youngs. I've finished 34 blocks from the book so far. My book didn't come with paper piecing patterns, but I used phone book paper and drafted the blocks based off of the picture/pattern in the book. Some of these have some really small pieces and paper piecing definitely makes me more confident about the way the block will turn out in the end. My current block is this one:

First of five of these stars complete

What the block will look like

I've changed the colors from what they are in the book on all of these blocks. I'm sticking to a similar color scheme as the log cabin quilt from my last post - brown, green, orange, and blue.

Finally, my stash report:


Fabric Used this Week: 0 yards
Fabric Used year to Date: 11 yards
Fabric Added this Week: 1.25 yards
Fabric Added Year to Date: 6.25 yards
Net Fabric for 2017: 4.75 yards used


I'm still in the black! I've got a lot of quilts to make (this one, 3 friends are due in April and May, my neighbor's daughter in law is due in April, and a coworker of hubby's is going to be welcoming his first sometime soon as well) so time to sign off here and get sewing while I still have a chance!

Linking up with Stash Report Sunday and Design Wall Monday at Patchwork Times!

I Need a Bit of a Rant

I just went to my first quilt guild meeting ever last night (I'm back in the US and have a local quilt guild! Eeeee!) and we were making donation quilts, which was pretty fun and took some of the awkwardness out of it being my first time. I had a ton of fun and got more sewing done that night than I've done for a while (more on that later). But the fabric we were making the quilts out of...was obviously donation fabric. Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to be the first to donate my favorite fabric and keep my ugly/old stuff for my own use if I'm donating fabric. But there were some OLD fabrics in there. 1980s calicos and florals old, with a few newer pieces.

The design we were doing was supposed to have 3 values - there were white squares, darks, and lights. The fabrics we had weren't the easiest to divide up into lights/darks - a lot of them were medium tones, which would've been fine as long as we were consistent with using them as either a light or dark...but people were using them as both and, in one strip set I was handed to use, two fabrics with the exact same background color were sewn together with the only difference being that one strip had navy colored snowflakes on its pale blue background and the other was just a solid.

My mom's been telling me lately that she loves my eye for color, as she calls it. I'll be the first to admit that some of my earliest quilts are no longer my favorites - I used a lot of bright colors without much neutral to give the eye a place to rest. I still love scrappy quilts and make them all the time, but those quilts last night...they looked ugly to me.

I'm trying to figure out why I think they looked ugly (I had to leave early so I didn't get any pictures of them) since I love scrappy quilts and enjoy putting fun fabrics next to each other. Floral next to a plaid? As long as the values are right, sure! But something about those quilts just wasn't right for me. I think it's a combination of how the values weren't separated right and the total lack of a color palette. I'm all for rainbow quilts and using all kinds of colors, especially with a neutral like the white squares in our design last night. But there was no thought put into whether the fabrics everyone donated would work well together at all. A lot of the colors were very dated and the blocks just didn't flow well. Add to that the fact that a lot of the "dark" fabrics weren't dark (or that some blocks had the dark and light portions sewn in reverse) and the quilt's design just didn't come out.

I think if they'd stuck to a color scheme - everyone donate fabrics in these three or four colors - and then used those fabrics to still make a fun scrappy quilt but in a slightly controlled color scheme it would have worked a lot better. Or if they'd done a better job being consistent with darks/lights and had them divided up better within the anything goes color scheme (or cut everything into smaller pieces)...maybe.

Anyways. Enough ranting. I've got a lot of blogging to catch up on!

Last post I showed Niece Quiche's quilt. This post will feature Niece Egg's quilt! The pattern is Sister's Choice by Bonnie Hunter, though I added sashings and didn't do the borders.

This couch has been the setting of many quilt photos.

I quilted each square differently, but I'm not going to post twenty pictures to show each quilting motif. Here are a few of my favorites:

Plaid

Argyle

Squared off stipple sewn with a walking foot

Backing, label, and binding

I backed it with Winnie the Pooh fabric to coordinate with their nursery. The binding is more of the sashing fabric, which actually is one of little Egg's dad's old shirts. She and her family definitely appreciated the quilt and the personal touch the shirt added.

I'll end this here for now, more updates later (if anyone still reads this thing).

High Tech, Low Tech

I wish I could just write *insert witty opening line about not having posted in years here* and have one appear but, alas, life doesn't work that way. Instead, it moves on and before you've realized it has been two years since you even looked at your blog. Go figure!

My quilting has been much slower lately. Since my last post (seems ages ago, really!) my left shoulder hasn't improved, unfortunately. I have had two surgeries on said shoulder, which has put a big damper on rotary cutting. I'm now still dealing with that shoulder's issues (how am I this broken? I'm still in my 20s!) after I fell off my bike on ice and landed squarely on that arm. My latest MRI shows that I have what appear to be small tears in my rotator cuff and possibly some scar tissue growing through some of the tears. I'll find out in late February if I'll have to have another surgery.

I had resisted getting a Go! Cutter until a couple of months ago, when I finally decided that enough was enough and I was being utterly ridiculous. I bought the Go! regular with a 2.5" strip die and a 1.5" strip die (the value die came with it but I haven't used it yet). I love it...absolutely love it. It's easy to use and I get so much more cutting done. Up until fairly recently I had been able to do some rotary cutting but was noticing that I was having more issues with reliability of those cuts. I'd slip at the end of the cut and it would be just a little too big or a little too small, but usually enough to swag and make it work. Getting the Go! has completely eliminated that issue for me, and my 2.5" strip bags are quite healthy.

I haven't had any issues with the fabric being distorted with my cutter, though that could have more to do with the fact that I'm using the strips and not any of the shapes. One of the rubbery feet on the bottom of the center of the cutter has fallen off, but mine gets folded up and moved around fairly often so I'm not too worried about it. I wasn't expecting how much static electricity it produces, but it's not really a problem, just a minor annoyance. It might happen less during the more humid summers, we'll see.

Lately I haven't been able to rotary cut at all, though, so I've gone back to the old days of quilting...drawing lines and cutting pieces with scissors. The Go! cutter is great for making me strips, but I don't have every die and when I need a 2.5" by 6.5" rectangle I can't make it with the dies I have. Rotary cutters were around when I started quilting, but the nice lady who taught me (whose name, unfortunately, I have forgotten some 15 plus years later) was a template woman. She had somewhat opened to the idea of a rotary cutter to add a seam allowance but she would trace her template and then use the rotary cutter to cut .25" away from her line. She and I both hand pieced back then, so the line was necessary to know where to sew.

I became an Auntie recently and, unfortunately, that quilt is still in progress and a secret. I've got another neice on the way soon but her quilt is only a few blocks that are now on hold since baby Quiche's quilt backing finally arrived (names obviously changed for privacy!). The quilt is not quite halfway done with the quilting.

My most recent finish has been for my friend's baby. Baby J-kwelin (it's an inside joke) was born in September and I was able to finish her quilt in time! Her nursery colors are yellow and gray. Her quilt was Bonnie Hunter's Jack in the Box pattern, 4 by 5 blocks with .75" sashing.

Don't look at my messy buffet behind the couch...

And the obligatory shot of the label on the back...

It was a fun little quilt to make. My blocks were a good chance to play with color theory a bit. I found I am not very good at finding "light orange" in my stash, since those color combos invariably didn't read well value-wise. I also started playing with varied neutral backgrounds, though I'm not as relaxed as Bonnie is (each block had the same background, not mixing and matching like Bonnie's quilts usually are...also, all stayed well within the tan color family). I quilted it in rows since the blocks had been made over a long period of time and weren't exactly the same size.

My other finish recently was for baby Jorgito. He was born in August and he's the most serious, studious baby I've met. I used string blocks for his quilt; his nursery was green and brown, hence the color scheme of the quilt!

Oh look...it's my couch again!

I love the backing fabric.

Helicopter!

The binding for this quilt was actually leftover bits from Baby S's quilt a few years ago. The brown/orange/blue/green/yellow stripes really looked nice with the colors on the front of the quilt. I had just enough of the stripe (in the direction it needed to go) to do this quilt with about 8" leftover. Stash for the win!

That's enough for now...wrapping up with a link back to Judy L's fabric report! Nothing finished so I can't count anything used yet. Drat! By way of explanation: all added yardage is backings for the two neice quilts. My goal is to use 50 yards this year.

Used this Week: 0 yards
Used year to Date: 0 yards
Added this Week: 4 yards
Added Year to Date: 7 yards
Yards to Goal: 50
Net for 2015: 7 yards added

It's been a while since my last post...and I feel like I spend every post's beginning saying that. But oh well! I have lots of confessions and lots of exciting things and lots of pictures to show you all! So that being said...

Baby C's Quilt


I have a friend, whom we'll call K (yes, I use a lot of initials, but I don't want people to be angry about their identities appearing online...I'm a big fan of privacy) who has now just had a baby. She has an 18 month old son, E, and a newborn son, C. I've known K as long as I've known A and M from the previous post. I found out this winter that she was pregnant and I obviously was going to make her a quilt. She's dabbled in quilting and has made a top but never quilted it. She does do rag quilts and such though. So anyways, I was going to make her a quilt. The baby room was going to be done up in Mickey Sports stuff but she wanted a "bright quilt like you [I] make" so I had to oblige her. I went with a simplified bento box design that I had played around with in my spare time. I went bright and colorful and somewhat gender neutral with the colors and loved the result.

I just quilted in the ditch on this one. I thought about filling in the parts of the boxes with quilting but decided I wanted to leave the design to shine through without the quilting hiding it. I love quilting but sometimes you just don't want it to outshine the quilt itself.

Front of the quilt:

Back of the quilt:

Front and back folded together:

Binding:

All folded up and ready to give to mommy!

Baby S's Quilt


This quilt has been almost a year in the making. It was 7 months late, but his mom didn't seem to care. Her inspiration for the baby's room was this bedding set. I did log cabin blocks last June and got the top made up right before I started my international move. I took the top with me on my traveling before leaving the country and bought backing and hand-quilting supplies (mine had long been packed up at this point) to hand-quilt on the driving and flying to get to Germany. JoAnn Fabrics had the PERFECT backing fabric - a striped fabric with all of the colors (green, orange, brown, and blue also with a bit of white and yellow mixed in) which I used. I hand-quilted it with white thread in a combination of loops and stippling. It started out as stippling but I like it crossing over itself every so often...I like the circle-type shapes it creates. Because this quilt was hand-quilted, it got put on the back burner a lot, but it got pulled out more than a few times for driving. My husband usually drives when we're going on a trip, so I sit in the passenger seat and sew or read. This quilt finally got finished when I was back in the states at the beginning of June. I hand-sewed the binding, got pictures of it, and sent it off to the family who emailed me about a week later thanking me profusely.

Front of quilt:

Back of quilt:

Front and back:

Baby SM's Quilt


Baby SM's father is a coworker of mine. She (initials are of her first and middle name, to distinguish her from baby S) is the fifth baby and the first girl. So her quilt had to be girly, that's for sure! She's due August 1 and I've completed the top. I used Bonnie Hunter's Random Ohio Stars pattern and scaled it back from 12" and 6" stars to 9" and 4.5" stars. I tried to arrange the colors a bit like a rainbow, so the mostly red ones are at the top and the mostly blue ones are at the bottom. It isn't a perfect gradient but it's close.

My problem with this quilt is that I have NO IDEA how to quilt it. How do you quilt something like this? I can't just quilt in the ditch without spending a significant amount of time turning the quilt around to go around the sides of the triangle pieces. I can't do straight line stitching based off of the edges of the blocks since they overlap and don't go straight from one side to the other. I've only done one quilt (the doll quilt I entered in the Blogger's Quilt Festival) with free-motion quilting so I'm hardly an expert on that, but I'm thinking I need to figure something out to FMQ on it. But what? Will I have to do separate designs in the stars vs. in the background? I'm stuck. I don't even know if I'm going to do one of what my husband calls my "traditional" backings where I slice it up and put mini versions of the same thing as on the front in a row across it. This quilt just has me stymied! Also, I just used the word stymied. Any ideas ya'll have would be greatly appreciated! Oh, and I just noticed (it's hard to see in the picture but it's there) that one star has one set of points turned 90 degrees the wrong way. It's not in an easy-to-fix place so I'll just leave it as it is. My husband convinced me not to tear the whole top apart to fix one piece on a small star, somehow. Oh well, I guess it's got character like a lot of the old antique quilts you see.

The Wanna-Be Farmer's Wife Quiltalong


If you haven't been hiding under a rock or in a cave for the past two weeks, you've probably seen that there is a rather large group of quilters doing the Farmer's Wife Quiltalong right now. I really wanted to do it but don't have the book. Rather than buy the book and do it, I decided to instead do the Civil War Love Letters Sampler Quilt. My now Mother-in-Law (I think this was over the Christmas break where my husband proposed to me, but it might have been the year before, I'm not sure ) bought it for me as a Christmas present. My book, however, didn't come with a CD so I've been tracing the pictures in the book and teaching myself to paper piece with them. It's been a little rough but things are turning out okay. Some of the ones with more pieces are turning out slightly smaller than they should be, but they're generally working out okay. It's definitely fixable with some creative fudging on my sashing (whatever I choose for it). The best part is that I'm using all scraps (I've had to pull the bigger piece of one of the fabrics out when my scrap wasn't big enough one time so far, but other than that my usage is all scraps) from my brown, green, blue, and orange bags. My husband really liked the colors from baby S's quilt, so he requested that I do this quilt in those colors. This quilt will be for out bed so I'm going to do enough for two extra rows to make it rectangular. I have NO IDEA how I'm going to quilt this since I only have a tiny machine - maybe I'll find someone around me with a long arm that they can teach me how to use so I can use it? This quilt will most likely end up sized for a California King sized bed (our future bed when we get back to the states) so it's not going to fit in my little Jenny the Janome. *sigh* Maybe I should save up for a longarm? I can't imagine that I'll be able to save up enough for it to make it happen now or anytime relatively soon but I can always hope, can't I? My husband thinks it's cheating if someone else quilts my quilts, so getting it longarmed by someone else probably isn't an option. I don't know...maybe the size of this one will change that. We'll see.

The blocks I've finished so far:

Block 1: Enthusiasm

Block 2: A Secession Ball

Block 3: Healthful Region

Block 4: March in the Mountains (this one won't lay flat...it's not as funny-shaped as it looks like it is)

Block 5: Sorrows of War

Block 6: Liberal with Furlough (newest one finished and it really won't lay flat yet

Stash report number whatever it is...

Used this week: 2.5 yards
Used year to date: 13.0 yards
Added this week: 52 yards
Added year to date: 60.8 yards
Net usage for 2011: (47.8 yards)

Fabric Used:

.75 yard - binding for baby C's quilt
.75 yard - binding for baby S's quilt
1 yard - top for baby SM's quilt

Fabric Added:

50 yards of FQs (200 FQs from 2x100 FQ sets from Keepsake Quilting...some of it is visible in the picture above...some of my husband's present is also visible on the left)
2 yards of Fox print fabric also from Keepsake Quilting (I love foxes)

Back in the negatives again, sadly. And I have a TON to use up here before I am back in the positive. So help me use it. Give me ideas for quilting the Random Ohio Stars quilt for baby SM so I can pull a backing and quilt it. Help me come up with ways to use more fabric, because the year is half over and 47.8 yards of fabric is a lot to use up. I will get back in the positive...somehow...

Celebration

The weather this week has been absolutely amazing. It's been so warm that almost all of the snow has melted! Needless to say, my husband and I have been loving life. We spent almost two hours wandering around the pedestrian district of the city, and then had dinner with friends at their house. I got to play with the baby and the new puppy, both of whom were really cute and really fun. :)

Then, this morning at church I met a woman (through my real-life quilting friend) who's another quilter! She's a "hardcore" quilter, apparently - has a big sewing room, belongs to two guilds, including the one that Bonnie Hunter is coming to visit next month! She's going to get me in touch with that guild so that real-life quilting friend and I can go watch the trunk show! RLQF (it's easier to type instead of real-life quilting friend) said that her husband owes her a night without kids, so our husbands will hang out and watch the boys while she and I go to meet Bonnie Hunter! I'm excited. :)

This week's stash report:

Used this week: 0 yards
Used year to date: 0 yards
Added this week: 2.5 yards
Added year to date: 2.5 yards
Net used for 2011: (2.5 yards)

I've added more than I've used so far, but in my defense, it was bought for a specific project - it's going to be a backing for a quilt. So it's not that bad. Check in at Judy's to see how everyone else did this week!

Oh, and even this picture doesn't show a quilt, I couldn't not post this:

I hope you're having a great day!