Red and White Resolution

When I left off in my last post, I was working on a small red and white quilt, but due to a mistake I ended up with two different sized blocks:

I needed to enlarge the birdhouse blocks by a half  inch so they would match the pineapple blocks.  I thought of adding a border to them with some solid white fabric strips that I left over from another quilt.

But, as I think you can see in the photo, they were actually too white and wouldn't quite match.

If you recall, the original challenge for this quilt was to use only fabric from your stash, so I went looking to see what else I had.  Luckily, I found a scrap of white fabric about the size of a fat quarter that I could use:

I had just about enough to frame each of the birdhouse blocks:

I trimmed them to match the size of Pineapple blocks, but then decided to turn them into Snowball blocks to help hide the fact that they had been expanded.

Seemed like a logical choice, but it took me many tries to get the red triangle corners to match up to the Pineapple blocks.  The test block above shows several attempts.  Each one of those triangles pictured in the test block was a slightly different measurement. Also, I had to be careful not to cut into any of the embroidery.

Eventually,  I decided to go with what I had, and I sewed the blocks together:

I'm not thrilled with the way the 2 blocks meet at the seams, but at least they are consistently inconsistent, and I can live with that.

A half inch white inner border, and a 2 inch red outer border will bring this mini quilt up to 20 X 20" which is the maximum size for my guild's challenge.

Fun to see what you can come up with using just your stash, which I think is exactly what the goal of this challenge was supposed to be.

Snow days and Sew days

Two days of winter weather were the perfect excuse to stay home and just sew.  Luckily, we didn't lose electricity during Snowpocalypse 2015, so I was able to use my sewing machine.

The quilt I am making is a Mini Lotus pattern by Jaybird quilts.  I had all the pieces cut out  before the storm, so I began by sketching out a diagram and using colored pencils to figure out how I wanted to sew them all together:

I needed a diagram, because the quilt is made up of triangle units,

but I wanted to make some of them look like flowers:

(Although, in this weather, they started to remind me more of snowflakes.)

After piecing the rows, the top looked like this:

The pattern calls for simply trimming the sides into a rectangle, and leaving it at that.  But,  I added a narrow border of the background fabric, and then a wider border of the print that I bought to match the jelly roll:

I kind of love it!

Tiny Dancer

My most recent project has been making a Mini Tiny Dancer quilt, designed by Julie Herman of Jaybird Quilts.

I started by sorting through my batiks and pulling out all my beloved jewel tone shades.  From each one I cut a trio of half-hexagon shapes.

I knew I was going to like the final result, when even the trimmings looked pretty enough to photograph:

Then it was time to put down the camera,  and pair them up two by two:

There were ninety half-hexagons that each needed a little triangle topper:

Then it was time to lay out the 15 blocks the pattern called for:

I liked them so much, I made 5 more:

Aaah, that's more like it!

The blocks are pieced together in rows, and all the seams are pressed open.

The back is almost as fun to look at as the top!

And then it was done!

I haven't yet figured out how I want to quilt it, but I would like to accent the little "dancers".

Show me the Minis!

To say that I have been bitten by the mini quilt bug would be an understatement.  I am having so much fun with these, and have now completed six of them.

Four of them are Thimbleblossoms patterns:

Shown in the above photo are Spools, Puddle Jumping, Swoon and Red Letter Day.  All are mini versions of the original larger patterns.    Everyone seems to credit Camille Roskelly for starting the mini quilt craze.  As I understand it, she wanted to have smaller versions of her quilts to take with her when she travelled to Quilt Market, and a new trend for mini versions of quilts was born.

Joanna Figueroa of Fig Tree Quilts got into the mini quilt scene and introduced four mini versions of her quilt patterns.  Pictured below is my version of her mini Canned Pears:

Julie Herman of Jaybird Quilts has also published a line of mini quilt patterns.  Here is my version of her mini "Come What May" pattern.

With these 6 quilts I have a good start on my own mini quilt gallery.  I'll have to decide the perfect place to hang them.  In the meantime, I am enjoying  just seeing them stacked up into a lovely pile of minis!

Have a great week!

Hooray for the Red, White and Blue (and Green and Orange)

My most recent mini quilt project was an appropriate one for the week of July 4th:

The pattern is called Red Letter Day, designed by Camille Roskelley.

I started with this selection of fat eighths:

The two fabrics on the left have a nautical theme of sailboats and anchors.  I was not sure if the navy/white sailboat fabric might be too big in scale for a mini.  I took a small ruler, and used 1/4" marking tape to create a viewer with a window the same size as the finished blocks in the quilt.

I still had some doubts, but I decided to go ahead and use the sailboats.  It was a bit of a leap of faith to  visualize the final block.  You can see that there's a big difference in the look of a finished block compared to an unsewn block.

I'm glad I stuck with the sailboats.  Here is the finished mini:

Kind of looks like fireworks to me.

Happy Fourth of July!

Canning season

I finished putting together the top for the mini "Canned Pears" quilt.

I decided to go a little rogue and put two of the leaves on the right instead of the left.  

The checkerboard border seemed like it should go together quickly, but it actually took me all day.

I thought I had been clever by cutting up any scrap pieces as I went along into the small strips that were needed for the checkerboard.  After the pears were assembled, I had a tidy basket full of strips ready to go:

I strip-pieced all the small segments into longer strips

then I trimmed them apart, and started sewing them together again

and so on, and so on....

After many ups and downs to the ironing board and the cutting table, I had only these:

It was barely enough for one side of the border.

See, I only thought that I was being clever.  Turned out it was much more practical to go back through my fabrics, and cut a strip from each one, pair it with a background strip and cut away...

I did end up using the pieces I made in the beginning, but it went much faster after I started cutting new strips.

Something else that should have made things easier, but for some reason was hard for me is that the pattern calls for the inner border to be cut a little extra large so that it can be trimmed down to match up with the checkerboard.  You can see in the photo that I trimmed a little off the top and bottom to make it even with the side borders:

In my excitement to see how it looked, I sewed the side borders on before I made a similar trim to the other 2 sides.  It took some fussing to figure out how make the top and bottom checkerboard border to work out,  but I got it eventually.

Anyhow, it's a really cute quilt, in a color palette that was very new to me but that I might just have fallen in love with.

These pears are just peachy

The next mini quilt that I wanted to make was  Mini Canned Pears  by Fig Tree Quilts.  I liked the color palette of the quilt on the pattern, and decided I would try to use some Fig Tree fabrics to make it.  Lucky for me, my local quilt shop was having a "Friday the 13th" sale.  The deal was 13 fat quarters for $13.00.    I knew this was a good chance to pick up some Fig Tree fats, so I headed out in a downpour of rain, determined to score my 13 fabrics.

I scoured the fat quarter bins, and came up with 6 fat quarters of Fig Tree-ish colors, and padded out the rest of  my 13 with some fun kid friendly prints for a future Quilt for Kids.

Then, I went to the bolts of yardage and bought some 1/4 yards of  fabrics to round out my purchase:

This is an unusual color palette for this jewel tone gal, but I thought I would give it a go.  Picking pairs of greens for the leaves was not the challenge I thought it might be, and allowed me to use up some small scraps of green from the scrap bin.

Next came cutting all the little pieces of white background fabric that would turn squares of fabric into leaves and fruit.  There were so many small pieces of similar sizes, that I had to make myself a spreadsheet to keep track of them:

By the time I went to bed last night, I had everything cut out, diagonal lines marked, a new needle in my machine, and a full bobbin ready to go.  Today, I spent my time sewing, and I have my 9 pears ready to be put together into a quilt top.

Don't they look good enough to eat?