Treasure Map

I finished my son's quilt a few days before he arrived.  (Although as I took the pictures I realized there were some loose threads in the back...so it is only functionally finished.)

It is the Treasure Map from Pixel Play by Emily Cier.  It is supposed to be twin sized, but I shunk everything in half and decided in the beginning it would be ok if it wasn't perfect.  (It also meant that I had many squares with a finished size if 1/2" by 1/2".)

Now, I've had tons of time to stare at the quilt in its finished state, but there are so many issues.  Since the blocks are small lining them up was hard.  The smallness also created a ton of very noticeable wrinkles when quilting,  I ran out of ocean and ordered more, but the dye lot is different...and easily seen in the 3am lighting that I have.  The quilt is not square.  I missed quilting a few small places.

But...it was made with love and has already gotten a lot of use.  I'm happy with how it turned out, overall.

I quilted the water with ocean currents (or swirls) and the land with pebbles.  The outside border has a cross-hatch that pretends to be straight.  I was going to do some cool tree trunks and leaves but with all the wrinkles decided that I shouldn't.

The back is a light blue minky.  It's fun to see the different colored threads on the back.

There are several more quilts that I really like in the book...but it'll probably be a while before I'm ready to do another.

Joining up with LAAF,  whoop-whoop Friday and Finish it up Friday.

world and paper airplanes

I've been on a roll finishing quilts this week!  First up, the map and paper airplane quilt.  It is for a lovely, although unmet, girl who made her appearance in the world about six months ago.  The family is currently in the middle east, but they're coming home for a vacation in a month...so it'll be just the right time to give it to her!

The center is a panel that doesn't seem to be around much anymore.  The paper airplanes where designed by Kristy from Quiet Play and you can find the (free!) pattern here.

This quilt had several firsts...the first time I experimented with tea dying and the first time I did a bit of hand quilting.  I ended up doing tea dying because I didn't look at the pattern closely enough before buying the fabric and didn't realize that I needed three different fabrics.  So I solved it by dying the inner fold and giving the paper a white back.  My biggest fear is that the tea stain will fade over time or over washes, but I'll probably never find out.

I also did a bit of hand quilting to make the flying lines.  They're hard to see...the thread I choose was a little bit too light.  But they're there, all nice and chunky.  It was a nice thing to do while my son played outside, so I might need to work on getting a small quilt top ready this winter for next summer and only hand quilt it.

Lastly, the quilting.  The sea and air have swirls.  I used a varigated blue and white by Aurifil...it was getting near the end of the spool and I had a few more breaks than I normally do with Aurifil thread.  The continents are pebbled (because land has rocks) with a thread color that matched the continent color.  Oh, and the red border has wonky diamonds.

Family quilt - finished

Six months after I gave this quilt as a Christmas present, I finally finished it.  I'm blaming the baby...I was really happy to get the top and back pieced by Christmas, but after that my energy and caring plummeted.  They came back though, so I got it done!


Here's the top.  I got the inspiration for the layout from Gemma @ Pretty Bobbins.  You'll notice there are two blank spots...those for for pictures of the expanding family.  (At Christmas I put an ultrasound picture in one of the spots...it was how we announced the baby to that family. :D)

My son really liked this quilt because he recognized people on it.  We spent quite a bit of time naming everyone.  Here he is pointing to one of his pictures.

The back.  Cars, motorcycles, and flames.  (And some solids because I didn't calculate yardage correctly.)

I also didn't get enough of the inside backing fabric, and so made an emergency run to my LQS to see what I could find.  We found something that matched pretty well, but not quite as well as I wanted.  So I did spirals in the outside border to make it match the inside fabric design and tie everything together.  The inside background got squares and rectangles.  I did not quilt over the pictures, but I did stitch-in-the-ditch for a few of the larger ones.

I ended up using Spoonflower for printing the pictures because we don't have an inkjet.  So far I've been very happy with that choice!  The pictures were a bit dark, but not so much that one would notice.  I washed the quilt once without detergent and the pictures still looked good.  

My son thinks he should always get a turn with the camera, so here I am trying to pick off the white cotton fuzzies that got on the quilt while taking pictures.  They're everywhere!!

A Christmas Quilt

I finished quilting the Christmas quilt for my Grandma.  (Although the quilt is from my mother-in-law.  It's fun to work on family quilts.)

I did spirals on the outside, swirl scrolls in the inside borders (per Angela Walters), and copied the quilting for the inside squares...I thought of them as leaves. I thought the leaves would be a ton harder than what they ended up being.  There are so many lines that needed to look straight...but they do!  I did mark the center of each block and I think that helped a lot.

It's rather snowy right now, but I enjoyed the lighting that the snow gave.  When the snow isn't directly in the picture everything is illuminated nicely, but when it is in the picture everything else looks dark.

The quilt pattern is Rosemary and Thyme by It's Sew Emma.

Map quilt

I finished quilting the map quilt yesterday!  It was the quilt that I've enjoyed quilting the most so far.  I used lots of quilting patterns, different colors of thread, and I didn't feel intimidated by the machine every time before I pushed the ON button.

On the map section I used swirls (from Angela Walters).  I chose them because they look like ocean currents too.  Then I did some triangles (Angela Walters) because I wanted to try something new.  Then some back and forths (Leah Day, I think.  But I can't find a direct link) because the boxes gave me a nice grid to work in.  Then some more swirls (inspired by Malini) and triangles to pull everything together.

Then I got to the outer sections!  I did pebbles in the white squares and city scape (Leah Day) in the city squares.  It took me a while to figure out what to do in the city squares, but the city scape was perfect for it.  At that point I was really worried about the outer border because there were wrinkles all over the place.  I had been planning on just doing light quilting for it, but decided I needed something more dense to hopefully get rid of the wrinkles.  For the most part it worked.

I'll admit though, this picture of the back is probably my favorite.  If it were my quilt I might end up hanging it backwards some of the time.  Maybe I should think about doing a whole cloth quilt.

And a close up of the back...it is easier to see the different colors that I used.  Well, it is easier to see in real life.

Joining up with Free Motion Friday.