December ALYoF

I finished my goal for December, which was to quilt, trim, and hide all threads for this quilt.  The binding will depend on the gender of the baby.

It was actually done near the beginning of the month and I've had fun the rest of the month working on all sorts of things.

Linking up with A Lovely Year of Finishes.

scrap quilt 2

I decided on a layout for scrap quilt 2.  It started by sewing all the color strips together.

Wonderful rainbowy goodness!

2016 goals

There is a link up at Quilting Jet Girl for your 2016 goals.  I've had goals in my head in the past, but haven't put them down in words because I haven't wanted to get caught up in achieving those goals and forgetting to have fun.  This year, however, I'm going to try and do both.

1. Bring my average WIP number down to 15.  This year my average was 20 and at last count I have 18 WIPs.

2. Work on four quilts of my own design.  I have one idea ready, but really need to spend some more time with QDAD.  I would like to have some ready for the baby blankets that are sure to show up.

3. Do some hand binding.  I always think about entering quilts in big shows, but I need some binding practice first.

That's all.  It should be pretty manageable.

Math and quilting meet again!

For Christmas I was given some Lego in order to make a Latin Square.  I had never heard of the term before, but Lego is always fun.  A Latin square similar, but more simple, than Sudoko...every row and column can only have one of every color.

I was putting mine together and realized, "Oh!  This is a trip around the world block!"

So now you know...in math land, Trip Around the World blocks are referred to as Latin Squares.

December rollover

Just as I think I'm going to make the list go down something new comes up. :)  Ah well, it's fun to have choices to work on and apparently I'm really happy having about 20 of them.

1. Baby quilt.   My ALYoF goal for December (#26) is to almost finish this quilt.  It is Matrix by Anne of Springleaf Studios.  And by almost finish, I mean have everything except the binding done.  The gender of the baby is going to be a surprise, and the binding color will reflect the gender.

2. Space robot quilt.  I'll show you the front eventually.  In the meantime, the whole thing has been put together and almost all the paper has been removed.

3. The bee hive quilt.  I have a few blocks, and am still expecting more.  I will still need to make more to get the size that I want.

4. A baby quilt.  I found out about a baby that is coming in a few months.  So I used Meadow Mist Design's Plus Plus quilt.  I still need to put the blocks together.  I think this is another baby where the gender will be a surprise, so the binding will probably wait until the baby has arrived.

  

Other items on which I didn't make progress last month...
5. Sunset wall hanging.

6. Scrap quilt. 

7. Rainbow log cabin.  

8. Simply solids bee quilt. 

9. scrap quilt #2. 
10. map wall hanging.  

11.  Pluses quilt. 
12. Orphan rocket block 
13. Quilt nautical quilt   
14. Quilt Christmas quilt  
15. Jeweled floors. 
16. Lost piece (almost whole cloth quilt). 
17. Winter quilt. 
18. A baby quilt.

Finished - stack 'n whack

I've wanted to make a stack 'n whack quilt for a while.  (In case you don't know what that is, it is where you put several layers of fabric on top of itself, all lined up so the design is in the same place on each layer.  You then cut out your pieces and put every stack together, creating a sort of kaleidoscope affect.)  I was a bit unsure of the layout that I wanted as I wasn't thrilled with many that I saw.  Then I saw one that had many background triangles in it and decided I liked it...it gave the eye a place to rest.

Here is the fabric I started with:

I cut it up and realized that I didn't quite have enough stars for a full layout and decided to add extra background.  I love how it turned out!

My initial thought had been to slice up the circles into pie shapes, but then I realized that would be rather boring.  So I added some of the white background into the mix and got some fun designs.

The flowers are quilted in white thread using a flowerish pattern.  The background is quilted with leaves (from Angela Walters).  I think of it as ground cover.  It is quilted with a thread that is fairly ugly on the spool - brown and green variegated.  But it was perfect for this.

The back is a minky.  The colors don't really match, but the theme does.  The original fabric was full of butterflies and dragonflies and flower-type things.

As with all my blankets, I bound it in sateen.  I thought it was a bit more coral in the store, but when I got home it seemed pink.  Ah well, it still matched well.

The baby should be here any day now, so I'll get it send off soon!

Linking up with TGIFF and Finish it up Friday.  Finishing this was also my November ALYoF (#54).  I love finishing a little early and feeling like I can work on anything or everything for a few days.

...and some miscellaneous things

I feel like it's been a slow sewing month.  Not that I haven't been getting things done, but they've been random things, taking paper off the back of the space robot quilt, and the like.

Here are the two random things from this past week.  First up is a cape for a Legoman.  My husband is playing a role playing game at work and just got a new cape for his character.  It's made of two pieces of grey flannel and I did my first ever embroidery for it.  I was told the cape had a nature theme to it, so the embroidery is the stem stitch.  That was the closest I thought I could come and still have it look ok.

The cape is much more fragile than I was hoping for, but it should do the job.  It was a fun little challenge, although I won't say how many iterations I went through.

The other little project was a door frictioner.  The door to our bedroom likes to swing open.  We tend to like it mostly shut.  Real door stops are out of the question because I'm still getting up in the middle of the night with the youngest child and wouldn't be able to handle anything that needed TLC.  So I put a bunch of rice in a fabric tube and then folded the ends over.  It's been working rather well.

The fabric if for a new quilt that has been on my bucket list for almost two years now.  But when I finally get to it, at least it will match the door stop!

November rollover

1. Baby girl top - I would like to finish this for the November ALYoF (#54).  I thought the baby was due early December, but is actually due late November, so I don't have quite as much time as I thought.  I have the white "flowers" all quilted and am probably going to put some leaves in the background.

2. Sunset wall hanging.  I quilted a few more circles.

3. Space robot quilt.  The top is almost together...just two or three more seams.  I've started taking some of the paper out.  It will be a long process, but I was thinking I might start Gilmore Girls.

4. The bee hive quilt.  I made a sample block for my month, November.  Now I'm just waiting for them to come in!  The block is spinwheel.

5. Baby quilt.   It is Matrix by Anne of Springleaf Studios.  I feel like I should have put a little more planning into the colors, but still like it.

  

Other items on which I didn't make progress last month...

6. Scrap quilt. 

7. Rainbow log cabin.  

8. Simply solids bee quilt. 

9. scrap quilt #2. 
10. map wall hanging.  

11.  Pluses quilt. 
12. Orphan rocket block 
13. Quilt nautical quilt   
14. Quilt Christmas quilt  
15. Jeweled floors. 
16. Lost piece (almost whole cloth quilt). 
17. Winter quilt. 
18. A door stop. 

Swimsuit quilt

I finished quilting the swimsuit quilt for my mother-in-law!  It took a while before I figured out how I wanted to quilt it.  I thought about doing a beach scene, but wasn't thrilled with the idea.  I was looking around some of the blogs I look at for quilting inspiration when I saw some waves from The Inbox Jaunt.  It still took a bit before I decided to use them; my first efforts at drawing them didn't work very well.

But after looking at several other things that just weren't working for me I decided to go with the waves.  Mine don't look quite as nice, but for the most part they turned out fine.  One thing I should have done differently though is to figure out the best way of quilting ahead of time.

I had tons of starts and stops!  And then I decided the swimsuits needed to be tacked down a bit more, so I did a bit of stitch in the ditch.  If I had realized that ahead of time I could have saved myself so much time.  Oh well...not a big deal in the end though.

I also stitched bodies in for the bikinis.  It just didn't feel right putting water on top of invisible bodies.

It was rather cold the day I took the picture above...definitely not swimsuit weather.

Finishing this means I met my October ALYoF goal (#35)!  I'll also be linking up with TGIFF, Whoop-whoop Friday, and Finish it Up Friday.

Bloggers Quilt Festival: Large quilt

For the Bloggers Quilt Festival, I'd like to show He Is Risen. 

My aunt, a long time ago, had picked out all the fabric.  She gave them to me a few years ago after she realized she'd never do anything with them, along with a book on art/value quilts.

I wasn't quite ready to do an intricate layout, but thought a simple value layout would be nice.

For quilting, I did a wood grain in the cross and rays out from the center of the cross, like sun beams.

"For His anger is but for a moment, His favor is for life;  Weeping may endure for a night, But joy comes in the morning."  Psalm 30:5

For more information on the quilt, please see this post.

Bloggers Quilt Festival - Original design

For the Bloggers Quilt Festival, I'd like to show you an original design, Random Triangles 2.  (However, I spent a lot of time randomizing these triangles, so I'm not sure the title is accurate.)

All the triangles are one half the size of the next largest triangle, so that makes them a bit easier to fit all of them together.

There are also no unbroken seams across the whole quilt, and that is what makes this one tricky to put together.

I quilted it using a varigated thread so that the lines were perpendicular to the hypotenuse of the triangle.

For more information about this quilt please see this post.  To see the Random Triangles 1, see this post.

Space robots: pairs done

After months and months I finally finished all the blocks for the space robot quilt two nights ago.

Then, in about a half hour, I managed to sew them all into pairs.  I'm hoping the rest of the construction goes quickly, although after that I'll have to take out the paper.

Linking up with WIP Wednesday.

October rollover

1. Quilt swimsuit quilt - for my October ALYoF (#35), I'd like to finish quilting the swimsuit quilt.  I'm doing waves on the white part.  I'm about half way done with the quilting, but there are a lot of stops and starts (should have thought of that earlier) and so a lot of threads need to be buried too. 

2. Baby girl top - The top of my stack 'n whack is done.  I really like it.

3. Sunset wall hanging.  I finished quilting the actual sun in shiny thread and am now doing semi-cirles around it.  I didn't end up working on it as much this summer as I was expecting, but I hope to continue to slowly work away at it.

4. Space robot quilt.  I almost have all the blocks pieced!  I'm about half way done with my last five.

5. Scrap quilt.  I finished this at the end of last month,  but as I was taking a quick picture something just didn't seem right about it.  Maybe it was all the negative space just being intimidating.  So I put it on the bed to check the dimensions.  Over all it's pretty good, but I think I'll add some from the bottom to the top.  I had forgotten that pillows often cover up the top bit and don't want them to cover the stripes.  So I guess nothing has actually been done, but there is a plan.

  

Other items on which I didn't make progress last month...

6. Rainbow log cabin.  

7. Simply solids bee quilt. 

8. scrap quilt #2. 
9. map wall hanging.  

10.  Pluses quilt. 
11. Orphan rocket block 
12. Quilt nautical quilt   
13. Quilt Christmas quilt  
14. Jeweled floors. 
15. Lost piece (almost whole cloth quilt). 
16. Winter quilt. 
17. Baby quilt. 
18. A door stop. 
19. The bee hive quilt - make sample blocks for November

September ALYoF

I finished the top for September's ALYoF goal (#39).  My first stack-n-whack.  I really like how it is turning out.

I ended up with Kona Bonsai as the background.  A bit odd for me, as I usually choose a neutral, but there are so many flowery type things in the fabric that the green worked.  I also didn't have enough fabric to fill in the empty hexes, but I rather like the layout as it ended up.

Quarter Square Triangles

My mother-in-law made this lovely quarter square triangle quilt.

I wanted to try adding a secondary pattern to the quilt.  So the triangles that go up and down got loops for quilting and then the side-to side triangles had some more interesting quilting.  I tied together the side-to-side QSTs from different blocks by making some frames in them.

This one is hard to see, but the color is closest to true.  The grey thread stood out on the back pretty well.

The next two pictures have been photo-shopped so that you can see the quilting better.  The frames cover two QSTs from different blocks.  Pebbles on the outside, an empty frame, some loops, an empty frame, and then swirls and pebbles on the inside.

On the borders I did stacked triangles (from Angela Walters) and then more loops.  My official reason for the last loopy border is that it helps tie everything together, but really, I just wanted to be done with the quilt.  I really enjoyed doing the ruler work and feel like I got a lot better at it with this quilt, but it takes a long time.

Linking up with Finish It Up Friday.

Pillows

I was almost done with Random Triangles 2 when his mom posted that his sisters were feeling a bit left out.  Hmm...I can do something about that!  So I made some pillows.  Nothing too big, but at least they get something too.

Like my other pillows, I backed them in minky.  Because...soft++

This one is a heart...but it is hard to tell.  I should have added a border on it.  The inspiration image did.

This one is the only one with quilting.  I tried some graffiti...I don't love it.  Hopefully the sister won't care though.  I'd still like to tile this block (source) sometime and see what the result looks like.

This one is my favorite.  I love the transparency effect.  It is derived from this block which is derived from the Tic Tac Toe block.

I found out this morning that they made it to their new home safe and sound!

Linking up with TGIFF, Whoop-whoop Friday, and Finish it up Friday.