One more time...

Once again, I needed a baby quilt and I turned to my old faithful pattern.  These are darling puppy dog (and a few kitty) prints that were gifted from my friend, logcabinquilting.  This went together like a charm (as it always does) and was in the hands of the new grandmother within a week of cutting the first fabric.  So thankful for generous friends -- and I have many of them.

Speaking of puppy dogs, this is our newest family member.  Farley joined us three weeks ago today and he does love fabric.  He's happy to sneak a scrap (or quilt block) from my quilt room and carry it around. I am not happy with that behavior so we're working on it. He's about six months old and still a puppy -- literally.

I hope you have generous friends, great patterns that never let you down, and a faithful companion of some sort who also loves fabric!

Best wishes for a wonderful family filled Thanksgiving!

Jan

Yet again...

I really should count how many times I have used this pattern in baby quilts and lap quilts. It is my "go to" when I want something quick and a little on the less traditional side.

It is from Kim Schaeffer's "Cozy Modern Quilts" book and I have a love-hate relationship with her patterns as some of you know. Her designs appeal to me and I have made a lot of them. Her instructions are a little sparse. The only reason I mention this in almost every post where I have used one of her patterns is to caution anyone buying the book (which I recommend) to read through and make sure they understand the cutting instructions for every component before they start.

This particular quilt is heading to Texas to a young woman who will be delivering her first child in a few months. Married a little over a year, her husband was deployed to Afghanistan and she promptly found out she was pregnant, alone on a base in Texas, family in South Carolina, and not sure her husband would be home in time for the delivery. As it turns out, he is home and will be there for the blessed event!  Love happy endings.

I just stippled it as it's hopefully going to get lots of use and lots of washing. These blocks lend themselves to some fun quilting - but I would never do that for a baby quilt. They need to be much more utilitarian!

I hope you are working on something that makes you happy and enjoying the pleasure of marking one more thing off your quilting "to do" list!

Jan

PS -- these pix are dreadful.  I must have had a yellow filter on!

1 in 8

I love these fabrics?  Aren't they the greatest?  I love them for so many reasons....

My niece-the-quilter gave them to me.
I love pink.
I love that salmon can be pink and that the "white" one is pink when compared to white.
I love the hot pink.  It is really HOT!
I love they are Konas and feel like a dream.
I love that I have leftovers.

Here's what I don't love.
I don't love that we still have to have a month devoted to breast cancer.
I don't love that 1 in 8 of the females reading this blog will get breast cancer (at least in the US).
I don't love that we do not have a cure.
I don't love that too many women I do love have had breast cancer.

If you're a reader of my blog periodically, you may have read this post entitled a Quilter's Fairy Tale last year.  This is a tribute to a special friend who successfully fought IBC (Inflammatory Breast Cancer).  But it was a terrible battle.

This year I happen to be reading the book "The Emperor of All Maladies" by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Subtitled "The Biography of Cancer" -- it is fascinating and horrifying at the same time.  I am particularly interested in the references to breast cancer early in the book.

Would you believe the first documented case of cancer was breast cancer and was noted in an Egyptian papyrus believed to be from the teachings of Imhotep who lived around 2625 BC.  It's a very clinical description.  The next documented case of cancer appears to be IBC and Atossa, the queen of Persia, around 440 BC. What's the irony in that?  The first two cases of documented cancer are still being battled today!

Since it's October and Breast Cancer Awareness Month -- and this is a pink pink pink quilt -- I'm linking to Amy's Creative Side's Blogger's Quilt Festival.  If you have a chance, check it out.  She does a wonderful job of providing an opportunity for all quilting blogs to post and for us to wander through a quilt show of blogs.  There are prizes and voting and, most of all, inspiration.  I'm going to link under the "Throw" category (I did think about 2 color but I thought that was stretching it!) -- not because I'm soliciting votes but because I hope a bunch of women will read this post and make sure they are doing breast exams and getting mammograms -- and pestering other women they love to do the same.

Details on the quilt:

• Modified from Cozy Modern Quilts by Kim Schaeffer
• 65" x 65"
• 21 shades of pink from Robert Kaufman's Kona line
• Phillip Jacobs fabric for lattice
• Quilted with Lava by Superior (no rush to do that again although I love the color changes)
• Bobbin was So Fine by Superior
• New overall pattern I wanted to try -- learned a lot and will use again

For a giggle -- here's how I started my month!  It's given me some opportunities to talk about breast cancer to people I might not have -- servers in restaurants particularly!  I'm happy to stay they are still intact. I wasn't sure if we would get through the month together.  I now think we will.

I hope you are

Playing with fabric you love
Finding inspiration at the Bloggers Quilt Festival
Doing breast exams and getting mammograms!

Jan

A Finish and Fun!

Finally!  Have you ever had one of those "holy moly" moments when you realized that a gift quilt is going to be needed sooner than you expected?

Meet the quilt top for Baby C who is coming in August.  I'm not sure why I hadn't focused on the fact that August is around the corner and I will need a gift in July.  Seriously....it comes at the same time every year.  I had my "holy moly" moment two weeks ago and started looking for fabric that would work with this pattern.

Luckily, I remembered I had been hoarding this Moda Three Sisters  fabric for a baby quilt and had more than enough to make a quilt for Baby C.  And, there was diversity in patterns -- different scaled florals, fabrics that read as solids, stripes, polka dots, paisley.  All in all, I decided it should work.  These fabrics were those that I bought in an absolute panic to make a quilt for a young woman who was diagnosed with bone cancer while in medical school.  She was in the same high school class as my son, we were in Chicago and feeling very far away, and I knew I had to do something.  So -- I wanted to make a quilt that was peaceful.  This fabric fit the bill!  I was very busy at work and impulsively ordered a 50 fat quarter pack so that I didn't have to spend time searching!  I have also used this fabric for my Oak Park Beauty.  And I had some left over which was sequestered for another project.

So, Baby C will have a lovely feminine baby quilt and I'll continue to look for the right nursery fabrics for a later quilt.

This pattern is from Cozy Modern Quilts by Kim Schaeffer and is not the first baby quilt I've made from her book.  As you can see from this post, I made two at once by resizing the block and improving (I think) the construction process.  The Mahalo quilt was also made from this pattern. So, it's tried and true and fast!

Making this quilt top should have taken less than a week but it ended up taking a bit more than two weeks.  But I have a very good excuse!  One of the kind and generous quilters from our little church group loaned me her Accu-Cut Studio cutter.  Oh, how fun!  And efficient! This shelf of men's shirts was attacked in full force.  The smaller cuts that you see here are sleeves and they are awkward to cut with a rotary cutter.  With the 2.5" die in place, they all were cut and scraps thrown in the scrap bag!  Great improvement in the shelf.

And for good measure, I cut a bunch of fabric that I had bought for baby charity quilts and finally had to force myself to stop cutting.  Otherwise, I was going to start pulling fabric "willy nilly" from the shelves to cut with no idea what the final purpose was.  I managed to cut 10.5" stack of 2.5" strips and came to be a believer in the Studio!  For those of you who have them, kudos to you!

I have to say, I'm feeling pretty productive and I have a lot of blocks leftover and believe I can make a quilt for a friend's daughter that will "fit the bill" as well.

I hope you have had a creative week -- productive or not.  

Jan

Harder than you think...

Remember the first time you went in to a quilt shop to "pull" a quilt?  I suspect most of us go in with one idea and come out with a completely different palette.

That is the case with this quilt top.  My-niece-the-athlete asked me to make her a batik quilt.  Seems easy enough to say yes to that.  But I had a few stipulations, knowing this young woman as I do.  SHE had to pick the fabrics.  SHE had to pick the pattern.  SHE had to lay out the blocks when they were done.  And, SHE will have to choose which quilting pattern SHE wants before this goes on the long arm during my next trip to Chicago. To say she is a woman with strong preferences would be a slight understatement (wouldn't it, doll, if you are reading this?).

Prior to starting the decision making process, she had been drawn to all the bright and geometric quilts I've made -- particularly those with white sashing and small blocks.  She spent hours and hours looking at jelly rolls in batiks, various color palettes and slowly began to narrow down her preferences.

That's so easy until you walk into a quilt store with about 200-300 bolts of batiks and everything flies out the window.  I had taken Cozy Modern Quilts by Kim Schaeffer since we obviously needed to know what the pattern was before we could go any farther. Her book has a lot of very geometric and striking designs and the minute my-niece-the-athlete saw this pattern, one decision was made.

Now the fabric.  That process took a little longer -- like hours longer.  She pulled bolts, we looked at bolts, we added, we took away, we closed our eyes, we opened our eyes, we added more, we took away more, we talked to other quilters in the store and ultimately -- SHE decided on the fabrics and the sashing.  And we were done.  At least with that part.

She did a fabulous job.  I went into the store thinking I was going to be working on a "knock-your-eyes-out" bright quilt.  I left the store with beautiful, soft, calming fabrics that have created a very different feel when they have all been put together.

There is a LOT of sewing in this quilt.  The 90 blocks each have 21 pieces in them (sashing finishes at 1") and then I sashed the left side and top on each block as I went.  I did not want to trust getting all those little 1" square sashing blocks out of alignment for my geometric girl!  It worked and the blocks pretty much lined up with minimal "scootching" required.

While I love this book and am about to start a new quilt from it out of my beautiful pink FQ bundle from my-niece-the-quilter -- I urge you to read it carefully and work out the pattern in your head.  I've fussed a bit before that the quilts are all reduced to minimal steps and without caution, you can over cut.  I actually was able to do a little bit of strip piecing on this quilt by thinking it through and speeding up the process just a tad.  In the end, this quilt is 7.5' x 7.5'.  It's not a small quilt and mis-cutting batiks would have made me very very very unhappy.    As it was, my waste has been minimal.

I hope you have someone in your life that loves your quilting and wants to share in it in some way!

Jan

Two quilts and two processes

Longarming or domestic?  What's faster in the long run?  Which is easier?  Which do you like more?

Let's start with the part I like the LEAST when I think about both processes.  I cannot stand basting whether by needle for hand quilting or pins for using my domestic machine.  This little cutie was small enough I could avoid the floor and use the kitchen island.  The problem is that I can't secure the backing to the granite to be sure I don't get tucks.  Binder/alligator clips aren't big enough.  Painter's tape is like silly putty and pulls right off with any pressure.  I don't like the sticky-sticky tapes because they cause fraying.  So, I didn't secure the backing and adjusted when I quilted it.  More on that later.  Mr Iquiltforfun later suggested picnic table clips (hidden somewhere in the depths of the garage) and I think he's on to something.  We just have to find them for the next time!  Once a quilt is basted -- life gets easier and my attitude improves considerably.

This is the finished product (sans binding which I'll add today).  I used my little Janome Platinum Jem which is a bit small.  The Bernina just came back from getting cleaned on Tuesday and I couldn't bear to start out with a machine quilting project and fuzz her up again.  I'd like to just piece on her for a while!  Every time I machine quilt these days (baby quilts are my limit), I am amazed that I used to do queen sized quilts (straight line and mediocre free motion) on my domestic machine.  I stand in awe of those who produce works of art on their machines.  Amazing!  Kudos to you all.

Since I had committed a quilting faux pas and had not secured the backing, I was concerned I'd get tucks in the back if I had any looseness at all.  So, instead of cross hatching or quilting vertically and horizontally in any form, I did all the quilting in the same direction and tried to alternate from each end to keep it from pulling too much.  This is my "go to" quilting option when I want to do something a little playful and still have a bit of control.  I think it works fine with this quilt design and fabrics and more importantly -- it's done!

The twin was done when I went to Chicago and used my friend's Gammill, Sadie.  I use zippers for quicker loading and unloading and have finally figured out how to put them on.  I've been known to do those wrong and then have to take off the zippers and pin to the leaders anyway.  Pinning and I do not get along and I prefer not to bleed on the quilt if I can avoid it.  This particular quilt has a minkee backing and I knew it had to be done on a long arm or I would have been on the floor with T-pins if I'd had to quilt it at home and stretching minkee is a challenge on a good day.

I mentioned in an earlier post that this is the easiest quilt ever.  It's modified from Kim Schaefer's Cozy Modern Quilts and I simplified her directions to use strip piecing and reduced the 8" blocks to 6".  I literally made one top in an afternoon after church -- like in 2.5 hours and I'm not fast.  I had some of the strips cut but not many; so start to finish, it's probably 3-4 hours to make a baby quilt top if you've already ironed your fabrics (presuming you wash -- which I wanted to do with these brights to make sure there was no bleeding).

One is bound (striped binding on bias which is perfect but doesn't show up in pix) and will be delivered locally this week to a young man who I adore.  The other one will be bound this weekend and sent to Montana to another young man who is very special.  Both were high school friends of our son and there are nothing but good memories about both those young men.

I hope you're finding time to finish a few things so you can start all kinds of new and fun things!!!!  Jan

Another challenge finished

This is yet another challenge quilt among some friends.  We all started out to make the cover quilt from Cozy Modern Quilts by Kim Schaeffer.  Link to Amazon:   http://www.amazon.com/Cozy-Modern-Quilts-Pieced-Projects/dp/1571206221/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1313184338&sr=1-8#_ The last challenge was solids (which is yet to be quilted); the original challenge is this quilt where fabric was supplied and we all did our own thing.  http://iquiltforfun.blogspot.com/2011/03/blog-post_19.html?showComment=1311037552658#c1696207205153164836

As you can see, mine doesn't exactly match the cover quilt.  When I put the squares together, they were too mushy for me and not enough definition -- so I added sashing and setting squares.  Others from the group were much more "true" to the original pattern although I'm not sure everyone got around to the border blocks.  I didn't.  I was ready to stop and move on to something else.

The "reveal" was so much fun.  There were two from batiks that didn't come close to looking the same; one from Cherrywoods that was wonderful (not seen here), another from blue and white (with a bit of orange) shirts from Goodwill (also MIA), and one from homespuns.  They were all incredible.  And then there was the red herring which was presented by a quilting friend:  a piece of fabric that matched the pattern perfectly.  It was her "whole cloth" quilt and not a stitch was sewn.  All she had to do was cut it off 1/4" from a row of blocks all the way around in case she decided to put a binding on.  The beauty of quilting friends is that was okay with everyone.  "Friends" is the operative word and "quilting" is the adjective.

Because I was trying to use up my 30's fabrics, I chose to piece the back and cut squares 12.5" x 12.5" or 6.5" x 12.5".  I also added three extra blocks and called the deal done!  For the most part, my 30's fabrics are gone, the back is sort of fun, and I don't have orphan blocks looking for a home in the future. 

The next challenge is with fabrics that were supplied by one of the group and we're to supplement with a certain number from our stash if we want.  It's due in October and the way house hunting is looking, I won't be able to get to my fabric by then so I'll definitely be late in my "assignment".  That will be fine with everyone and we'll "reveal" mine at a later date.

I hope you're having lots of quilting fun and are lucky enough to have quilting friends who challenge you in all the best ways!  Jan