Aviator | Up and Away Quilt

Several months ago, my friend Emily (CrazyOldLadies) asked me to make a quilt for her to display in our local quilt shop using her most recent fabric line, Up and Away.

Naturally, she picked Lella Boutique's Aviator pattern.  Aren't the airplanes the cutest?

I loved this pattern, by the way.  It's written so that it uses the ENTIRE fat quarter, which I LOVE (also - detailed cutting instructions for the win!).  I hate it when fat quarter patterns have tons of excess left over.  I'd rather just use it all up. 

This quilt told me it wanted crosshatch quilting in the airplanes and swirly/billowy air currents in the backgrounds.  It was a bit of extra work, but I obliged. Thank HEAVENS for matching thread (wink, wink).

To save time (and because this fabric was perfect), we used the same fabric for backing and binding.  I used Cluck Cluck Sew's life changing tutorial and just folded the backing to the front. 

And there you have it!  I made something that is going to hang in a quilt shop!  It was so much fun and I hope I get to do it again someday.  Any quilt shops out there want to hire me?  ;)

Quilt stats:

Started: February/March 2017

Finished:  April 2017

Fabrics: Up and Away by Emily Herrick (plus one or two blenders)

Batting: Not entirely sure - I'm guessing Warm N Natural

Finished size: Approximately 48" x 65"

Recipient: Corn Wagon Quilt Co. (for now)

Methods used: Piecing, straight line quilting, FMQ

Binding: Backing to front

Time to Make: About 14.5 hours

Lisa's Baby Quilt

Yay for baby quilts!  And yay for new babies!

I was so excited when my friend Lisa announced that she was having her first baby.  :)  I immediately hounded her about her nursery colors/theme so that I could make her a quilt.  She requested navy, gray, and lime green with elephants.  Here was the fabric pull I put together for her:

Her husband worked for Boeing for a little while (I think), so the airplanes were perfect.  The castles print reminds me of Lisa because she has been lucky enough to travel in Europe a few times.  :)

She even had a triangle quilt on her Pinterest board - probably for the colors, but I decided to run with that.  Equilateral triangles have been on my bucket list for awhile and I had just gotten a triangle ruler for Christmas, so maybe it was meant to be?

I used this cute (and SUPER SOFT) minky for the back.  Since baby was due in the spring, I decided to try skipping the batting on this quilt.  It worked okay.  I like the light, drapey-ness (why can't that be a real word?) of it, but I almost went bonkers trying to hand sew the binding.  I think next time I'm just going to use batting.  Or maybe a layer of flannel?

Since the greens in this quilt didn't end up quilt as lime-y as I wanted, I picked this bright lime green for the binding.  :)

And there you have it!  My first triangle quilt.  It was fun!

 Quilt stats:

Started: January 2016

Finished: March 2017

Fabrics: Dear Stella (pluses), Up and Away (green airplanes), Flight (navy airplanes), Magic (castles), Equestrian (arrows), and some others I can't remember

Batting: NONE

Finished size: Approximately 44" x 52"

Recipient: Lisa and Baby Boy

Methods used: Triangle piecing, straight line quilting

Binding: Hand Stitched to the Back

Time to Make: About 8.5 hours

WHW RS Sampler Quilt Class: Free Motion/Straight Line Quilting

Okay!  It's time to talk about quilting our quilts.  Free motion quilting is my favorite.  Once you get the hang of it, you can do so many fun things!  There are a surprising amount of cool things you can do with straight line quilting, too.

Like my last post, this one is going to be pretty much full of me linking to other awesome quilters who have already done the work of demonstrating how to quilt.  My handout has some basic instructions, but you should check out some of these tutorials for sure.

However, I do have one thing I want to say before we start.   I strongly recommend you practice with a small practice piece before you tackle your full quilt.  Make a couple of small practice sandwiches using fabric your not particularly attached to and practice practice practice.  You'll feel better if you work out all the kinks on a small, disposable piece rather than on the quilt you've spent hours and hours making.  ;)

Okay.  Let's quilt.

Start here.  This is one of the places I first learned to free motion quilt.  Her instructions are very good and they start from the VERY beginning.  YES!

A Few Scraps - She even has a few books available!

Free motion Quilting with a home machine:

Craftsy

A few blog posts with tips for succeeding at Free Motion Quilting:

Craftsy

Sew Mama Sew

Once you've gotten the hang of free motion quilting and are ready to try a few new designs, you have GOT to check out this site!  Leah has HUNDREDS of free videos demonstrating quilting designs.  She's amazing.  I hear she even has a couple classes available for beginners and non-beginners alike.  ;)

Leah Day:  Free Motion Quilting Project

Alright.  If straight line quilting is more up your alley, I have rounded up a few links that you may like as well.

Start here for some great beginner ideas for straight line quilting:

Pile O Fabric

Then go here for some more straight line quilting stuff, along with troubleshooting for when things go wrong.  Isn't Alisa great for including that information?

Pile O Fabric

And here are a few posts with some inspiration/tips for straight line quilting:

Canoe Ridge Creations

Sew4Home/Heather Jones

And here are the handouts:
WHW RS Sampler Quilt Class: Basting
WHW RS Sampler Quilt Class: Straight Line and Free Motion Quiltingn (COMING SOON)

Happy quilting!

King Diamond Ripple

It's finally time to share my Diamond Ripple quilt!
The original inspiration for this quilt came from THIS block by Quilt Matters (Can you see the individual blocks?), and THIS quilt by Hoosier Toni, which I apparently totally copied.  ;P

This quilt was my "back-burner project" for quite awhile.  It didn't really have a deadline, so I worked on it here and there when I could.  I actually made a lot of the blocks while on vacation at our cabin last summer.  Everyone thought I was crazy for bringing my sewing machine on vacation, but to me - sewing IS a vacation!

 

This quilt is for ME!  Well, more for my husband, but since we sleep in the same bed, it's all good.  :)

We acquired a new bed a few... years... ago.  Our previous bed was Queen size and the new one is a King.  All of a sudden none of our quilts were big enough.  Naturally, this called for a new quilt!  And this one is huge.  Trust me on that.  :)  576 HST units, in case you were wondering. 

Jeremy picked out the colors AND design for this quilt and I convinced him we wanted the gray background.  I love how the little pops of red make the quilt sparkle.

For the quilting, I kept things simple (Jeremy is always insisting that I quilt with straight lines.  He really has it in for pebbles and stippling).  It was actually easier than I expected (for a King sized quilt...).  I just quilted diagonal lines across the whole quilt, jumping across the colored sections and only quilting in the background.  Quilting straight lines can be pretty tough on a huge quilt like this, but I was pleasantly surprised to realize that quilting them diagonally gave me the benefit of having less quilt in the throat of the machine most of the time (compared with what it would have been like quilting horizontal/vertical lines).

For the binding, I chose the same gray fabric as the background.  Mostly because I had a bunch leftover and I was being economical.  You could also say I was trying to be modern.  ;)  The backing is a 104" wide denim chambray print from Connecting Threads.  Sometimes I really love a pieced back, but sometimes it's so nice not to have to worry about it. 

 And here it is on our giant bed.  No more fighting for covers!  Yay!

Quilt stats:

Started:  Planning/beginning stages of fabric gathering:  March/April 2014

Finished: April 2016

Fabrics: Various, Kona Coal

Batting: Fairfield 60/40 Cotton/Poly

Finished size: Approx. 108" x 108" 

Number of HST units: 576

Recipient: ME!

Methods used:  HST Piecing, Straight Line Quilting

Binding: Hand Stitched to the Back

Time to make:  Roughly 45 Hours

 

AND, this quilt was goal #1 from this quarter's Finish Along, so I'll be linking up!

 

Do.Good Stitches: Final Humility Quilt

Well, I finished another quilt for Do.Good Stitches!

This one was a little interesting.  At the end of 2015, we had several members decide that their plates were too full and they needed to let go of our little quilting bee.  (Sad face).  So in January, we re-evaluated.  Half of us wanted to stay, so I took over as quilter and asked for THIS block.  I picked something super simple and easy, because I was hoping we would be able to find some new members to flesh out our group.  In the end, we decided it was better to just disband our little group and spread its members out amongst other Do.Good Stitches groups in need of members.  We were all sad to see our little group broken up, but excited to start a new adventure with each of our new groups.  Besides, I feel like I have made a bunch of new friends and I will continue to follow their work! 

SO.  Without any more talking by me, here are the best pictures I was able to come up with for our final Humility circle quilt.  It is being donated to Primary Children's Hospital in SLC, Utah.  :)

March

I made another pillow!  I'm liking this trend and I already have a pillow design in mind for April.  :)

I've been seeing lots and lots of plus quilts around lately, have you?  I decided to try my hand at one in pillow form.  And of course, in honor of St. Patties day in March, I made it all green.  Lots of scraps went into this one.  Wahoo! 
For the quilting, I considered doing some matchstick quilting (have you heard?  Matchstick quilting is THE thing lately).  But in the end, I went with simple straight line quilting because I know that's what hubby likes best.  He's so spoiled.  :)

For the backing, I really wanted to use up the rest of those clover-like leaves, but it turns out I didn't have much left.  Not quite enough to properly overlap in the back.  So I added this little button to my envelope closure to keep everything from falling out.  Also, I've been following Amy's Pillow Collective blog hop over at Amy's Creative Side.  Many of her guest bloggers added binding to their pillows for a nice finished look, so I decided to give it a try and I LOVE it!  It's so easy too.  Win win!

Next up - Clamshells! 

p.s. I need to link up my March goal with Shanna and Melissa over at ALYOF.  I have a lot of projects to finish before the baby comes (T-minus 8 weeks!), but I'm choosing to finish my latest Do.Good Stitches quilt for my March goal.  It's all basted and ditch quilted.  I'm going to practice lots and lots of fun FMQ designs on this one.  Wish me luck!

Blogger's Quilt Festival: Deck the Halls

Welcome, visitors from the Blogger's Quilt Festival!  And of course, welcome to all my regular readers!  You all are the best.  :)

It's finally time to share my finished "Deck the Halls" quilt!  Yay!  I had the top finished almost in time for Christmas last year, and now the whole thing is finished with plenty of time to be used all season long this year.  ;)  You all know how these things go, right?

So here is the story of this quilt.  Way back in November of last year, I won a gift card giveaway - one of the best kinds!  I decided it was high time to make something wholly for ME.  I had Christmas on the brain, so I ordered myself these adorable Christmas fabrics!  Everybody needs a Christmas quilt, right?  I thought so too.  I'd also had my eye on the Fat Quarter Shop's free "Deckade the Halls" quilt-along and on a whim decided to jump on board (check out the Flickr group HERE).  It was so much fun and I love how my quilt turned out!

Fabrics from left to right:  1-4 Kate Spain's "In from the Cold," 5-7 Josephine Kimberling's "Hip Holiday", 8-9 Nancy Halverson's "Ho Ho Ho."

And then something awesome happened.  My husband got assigned to go to a two day weekend workshop in Las Vegas and his boss agreed to let me come with him!  I don't know about you, but sometimes a break from real life (and kids, mostly kids - even though I love them to death) is JUST what we need.  So while the hubby spent his daytime hours at his workshop, I holed up in the hotel room with the laptop and the iPad and SEWED.  It was so awesome!  I got tons of stuff done.  :)

Anyway.  I managed to finish the entire quilt top by New Year's Eve.  And then I decided it was okay to table this quilt for awhile.  Well, a few weeks ago I pulled it out, made a back and quilted it.

For the back, I originally planned to use a flannel sheet I had picked up at a yard sale, but in the end I didn't love it enough to force myself to use it.  So I decided to piece together all of my leftovers from the quilt top (plus a larger cut I picked up after the top was finished).  With the help of some of my IG friends, I ended up arranging the randomly pieced blocks to looks like presents.  

 For the quilting, I first stitched in the ditch around every. single. block using a clear thread.  I wanted my blocks to pop and intended to do some tight free motion quilting in the background.  But when I asked the hubby for advice, I found out that he pretty much hates pebbles, swirls, stippling - anything that is not straight lines.  He insisted that I should quilt diagonal lines.  And even though it was WAY more work than simple FMQ would have been, I did.  I like that the crosshatching is nice and subtle, which is kind of what I was going for.

Here are a few close ups:

It felt a little weird photographing a Christmas quilt on the fall leaves, but you've got to admit that they make a gorgeous background, don't you?

The binding was also pieced together using two of the leftover fabrics.  Machine attached, hand finished.

I am entering this quilt into the Large Quilts category of Amy's Blogger's Quilt Festival.  Go check out the rest of the quilts here:

Quilt stats:

Started: November 2013

Finished: October 5, 2014

Fabrics:  Kate Spain's "In from the Cold,"  Josephine Kimberling's "Hip Holiday,"  Nancy Halverson's "Ho Ho Ho."  Background fabrics were yard sale finds/given to me by friends.

Batting:  Various scraps given to me by a friend and stitched together - I think they were Cotton/Poly 80/20

Finished size: 59" x 68" (3 inch shrinkage after washing)

Recipient:  ME!

Methods used:  Piecing, Straight Line Quilting (on my home machine)

Binding:  Machine stitched to front, hand stitched to back

All previous progress posts for this quilt can be found HERE.

Also, this was goal #1 on my Quarter 4 Finish Along list.  So, come January I'll be linking up here:

Pan Pads

I got a new set of pans for Christmas.  SUPER nice pans.  8 of them.  Restaurant quality, Titanium, nonstick on both sides.  Expensive.  These pans will last the rest of my life.  They are that nice.

My mother-in-law has these pans too.  She has a set of hot pads that she uses specifically for keeping in-between the pans when she stacks them.  So they won't scrape each other.  Kind of genius.  The hubby decided we needed some too.  He asked me to make some.

Wahoo!  The hubby actually ASKED me to sew something!  He loves it when I sew "useful" things.  It's been nice working on these the past few days (weeks), because he wants me to finish as soon as possible (so we can actually open our new pans) and gives me plenty of time and space to work.  :)

I'm calling them "pan pads" and I made 5.  I thought it would be a fun chance to try out a couple blocks I've been eyeing lately.  Especially since probably no one will see them.  *Even though* probably no one will see them.  It's probably silly that I went through so much work to make something no one will see, but hey.  I had fun with them and now I know which blocks I don't like and how much I really like paper piecing (with freezer paper, of course - I'm still not converted to the regular method).  :)

I also got to try out my new WALKING FOOT!  Wahoo again!  My awesome mom finally broke down and bought me a super nice walking foot that will fit my Bernina (and I'm super grateful.  I know those things are expensive).  THANKS MOM!  I used it for all of the machine quilting, and the binding as well.  It worked out great!  I'm excited to try using it on something bigger.

The bindings were all sewn on completely by machine.  I felt like I needed more practice with this technique.  I'm getting there (and the walking foot seems to help a lot), but it's not perfect yet...

Here are my pan pads!  The awesome thing was, they are all made entirely from my small scraps drawer!  I used every LAST BIT of white that I had.  Good times.

This one is my favorite.  Circle of Geese paper piecing pattern found HERE.  Simple outline quilting that looks cool on the back.

Chevrons.  This one was a quickie.   Paper piecing templates HERE.  Outline quilting that took about a minute and a half to do. :)

DON'T LOOK TOO CLOSELY AT THE NEXT ONE!!!  I've been dying to try this block for so long.  However, the tutorial I found was for a 12 inch block and I wanted mine to be smaller.  Long story short - lots of tiny pieces + a bunch of them cut 1/4 inch to small + attempting to use them anyway rather than cut new pieces (or go to the store for more white fabric) + rushing through the final steps and choosing not to square up each piece before assembling the block = DISASTER.   It looks a little better now that it is quilted.  I went for a super tight spiral in hopes that it would help hide the imperfections in this block.  It turned out okay.  The hubby admitted that it's "not my best work," but I suppose I will keep it.

Snail Trail block tutorial found HERE.  Amazingly, this one is NOT paper pieced!  It was also really quick!  I'm thinking of incorporating this block into the borders on my Storm at Sea quilt.

 Starburst pattern found HERE.  The middle seam ended up SO bulky, though.  I wonder how I could have avoided that?

I probably should have used white instead of brown for the snail trail block.  Then it would have matched better.  But that's okay.  Remember how no one is going to see these anyway?

For the backs, I chose 5 larger pieces from my stash and used the stack and slash method to make 5 matching blocks.  Hubby says they look like fronts.  I guess my pan pads get to be double sided then.  Especially the one with the spiral quilting - it's my favorite one. 

Now we can finally bust out those new pans and finally have something yummy to eat!