My First Finish of 2020!

After being somewhat unhappy with my Trio of Random Sister's Choice quilts, I decided to use the rest of my 9 patches for something completely different. You'll be seeing several very similar quilts in this pattern with different colors.

I alternated the 9 patches with half-square triangles/quarter square triangles in a diamond layout. The recipient's nursery, according to her dad, was "all colors and especially purple." So I chose 4 different purples of different shades and arranged them in lighter and darker bands around the center for contrast.

I quilted with freehand swirls with hearts mixed in. I tried to get at least one heart per 9 patch and per purple triangle. I wrote "love" in cursive on the center block 3 times but forgot that I loaded the quilt in my frame sideways so the words are sideways on the finished quilt. I'm a little peeved at myself for that but the recipient's mom saw it and thought it was special and didn't notice or care about the sideways words...so I guess I shouldn't either.

First pass complete on the frame

Detail of the center block

Oh, and totally accidental awesome moment: I used a striped binding and had the closest pattern match happen without trying at all. Made me smile.

I couldn't have gotten this close if I tried!

I realized, as I was adding binding, that one of my corners was scant and needed me to patch some fabric to cover the batting. I made it a 'humility corner' and patched it with the fabric I had immediately had handy instead of cutting off a piece of the purple that was short. I kind of like how it looks, a reminder that nobody is perfect.

Humility Corner

Completed quilt photos:

Front of quilt

One of my better hearts

Label

Another decent heart

Center block's sideways "love love love"

For fabric purchases, I'm going to go ahead and count both purchases I have made this year by time of publishing this post. I purchased 4 yards of Essential Dots Chocolate Yardage for a backing on my Nice Nice Niece Quilt (top is complete and in my to-be-quilted pile) and 3 yards of Kona Ash for sashings in a new Mod Mosaic Quilt.

My goal for this year is to use more than I add to my stash. I'll be back in the black next week, I'm not worried.

2020 Stash Report:

Fabric used this week: 5.5 yards
Fabric used year to date: 5.5 yards
Fabric purchased this week: 7 yards
Fabric purchased year to date: 7 yards
Net fabric for 2020: (1.5 yards added)

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!

Moving, Northern Lights, and Other Assorted Awesomeness

After finishing Niece Egg's quilt, I had two more quilts to work on pretty much immediately. This post will be about one of those. I found out that one of my friends, who we'll call M, was pregnant over the summer of 2015. I didn't know M too well but she was married to a friend from college and seemed really nice. Her husband worked with mine and they rode the bus to work together an hour each way, plus her husband loves playing board games and so do hubby and I. We found out about M's pregnancy after we announced our pregnancy to her and her husband - M and I were due 2.5 weeks apart.

M and I started spending a lot more time together. We commiserated about the unglamorous aspects of growing a tiny human, about living continents away from our families, and about our fears and insecurities about becoming parents. M was born and raised in Finland and married our friend, who's an American citizen. As we were all struggling to pick names for our fast-approaching tiny humans we joked that one American way to name a baby seemed to be to find a random word in a foreign language that you think is pretty and use it, regardless of the meaning. We decided to call their daughter Potato; it actually does sound pretty in Finnish - Peruna.

Since M was missing Finland, I wanted to do something with the quilt to remind her of it. M is a very conservative dresser compared to a lot of Americans with respect to color. I don't think I saw her wear anything that wasn't black/white/gray/navy/tan until she had to buy a pair of new sneakers to fit her feet as they grew a bit with her pregnancy and the only ones that fit her and were comfortable had pink stripes on the sides. This is where it got really hard.

I love color. I have never done a super muted quilt, color-wise. But doing my usual colorful quilt would have overwhelmed M and I didn't want to do that. I asked her what color they were generally trying to stick to with little Potato's stuff and she said purple, so that was the one color I let myself use.

I decided to use the Northern Lights as my inspiration for the quilt. A streak of color through an otherwise dark-ish sky would work well for my limited color pallette and would translate pretty well into a quilt. A bargello quilt would work for my intent, but I wanted to go beyond just sewing a bunch of black and white strips into a tube with some purple and seeing how it turned out...I wanted to know how it would look before.

In drawing it out I lost a little of the bargello functionality because every vertical strip wouldn't have every fabric in it, but I wanted the stripe to go like that through the center. I also knew I wanted the colors to be in a gradation - the lightest purple would be in the center of the streak, the darkest next to the black and white fabrics. I also laid out all of my black and whites in dark-to-light order so that the blackest fabric would be next to the dark purple. Basically, I took a bargello quilt and made it harder than it needed to be...but when has that stopped me?

I didn't get any in-progress pictures because I was pedal to the metal to get this quilt done before we moved. I was juggling having my own tiny human with quilting (and the sewing machine being in the room where tiny human slept so I couldn't work on it unless he was awake) and getting ready to move back to the United States.

In the end I messed up and didn't have a good backing fabric for it. I went through everything in my stash and finally decided on a light blue fabric with darker blue ginseng leaves on it, which seemed kind of appropriate since Seoul has ginseng all over the place (unfortunately; they're pretty but the berries smell AWFUL). I also had cut out a helicopter to do my usual label...and it got packed. So I just embroidered my initials and the year on the backing without a helicopter. But still, I'm proud of how the quilt turned out. I tied in Finland and Korea for a present to a little Finnish-American baby born in Korea...and that's a win in my book. Please excuse the terrible quality photos - they were taken with a backup cell phone while standing on a hotel bed. The laundry by the side of the bed...well...it's life. But life or not, hotel room living with an infant or not, I finished the quilt and delivered it before I left the country.

The motion in this quilt makes me smile.

Korean-inspired backing on a Finnish-inspired quilt.

Fail label. Still mad I didn't save the label from the movers.

Hope you like it, it's definitely one of my top few favorite quilts!