A finished quilt and more...

This week was spent finishing up the quilting on my Marmalade quilt.

I won a layer cake of "Bliss" and decided to use the pattern exactly as pictured (a rarity for me).
The quilting took a while - lots of custom feathered wreaths and leaves.
And I'm happy with how it turned out!
I'm headed to CA tomorrow, so the blog will be silent for a bit. I put some UFO's up on my design wall. I'm going to make some progress on these when I get back.

"City Lights" from City Quilts. I'm making this for my urban son who'll be moving to a new apartment this Summer.
I've got 8 or 9 Joseph's Coat blocks done and I've decided to put them together into a small wall quilt. Just need to read the directions carefully and figure out how to put these together.
My Soul Blossoms Dresdens are multiplying. These go pretty quick and I'll be putting them together soon!
I pieced some of my leftover triangles into Zig Zag rows. I'm not sure I'm really loving this. I did it because I had triangles I wanted to use up, but I'm not sure it's worth my time if I don't love the result. Mmm, waste time or waste fabric? What do you do?
I got a Stylish Blogger Award this week from Natalie at Threaded Mess. When I get back I'll be sharing 6 of my favorite new blogs to pass on the award. Thanks Natalie!

Of course I'll be watching the reports from Spring Quilt Market. Always an exciting time. You can find who'll be blogging from Market with all the scoops here.

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Monday Morning Musings...

The second one should be 2x easier, but it's actually 10x easier...Kool-aid is really good...
You can't go to Paducah and NOT come home with stash fabric...
You have to buy what your friend's buying or you'll regret it when you get home...
I never thought I'd use gray in a quilt and now I'm drawn to it...
It's a good day when you get home from a fabric buying spree and there's more in the mail...
A good motto to live by...

Lisa Leonard Designs

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Backpack...

I'm off to see the grand-kids next week and I have to bring something cute! I used the tutorial from Sew, Mama, Sew to make this backpack. It was really easy! The fabric is Sugar and Spice by Riley Blake.I was a little worried about doing the straps, but they were a breeze!
One down and one more to go. Even at 1 1/2, Maddy needs a backpack. She's familiar with backpacks thanks to Dora and she has to have whatever her big sister has, including wearing underpants over her diaper!

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More Info...

Issue 5 of Fat Quarterly Magazine (an e-zine; electronic magazine) is available on Wed. I'm thrilled to be featured in this issue - I even broke down and sent in a picture of myself. I thought it would be fun to take it in the sewing room. Four pictures of my quilts are also included in the feature.

There are also a lot of great articles and patterns in the magazine. For a sneak peek, you can visit the blog. The e-zine can be purchased here.
I had a few questions about how I did my block in the last post. I used a Kaleidoscope ruler that I've had for a while - there are other rulers you could use. The top needs to be a 45 degree angle. The background triangles were cut from a 4" strip and the colored triangles were cut from a 6" strip.

Simply sew the triangles together like you would a pinwheel. Notice that the colored triangles are bigger than the background triangles. Then trim the block to a 6 1/2" square.

Here it is all trimmed up.

In my quilt, I alternated white and gray backgrounds. I had to carefully lay out the colored triangles so I'd use the same fabric in adjoining blocks to make the stars. That was the tedious part!
Hope that helps!

April 27th - oops! This post was updated today with some corrections on the block. In my original post the background and colored triangles were switched. Hope nobody made the whole quilt incorrectly last night! Amazing how clearly things look in the morning after a cup of coffee. ~C

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When 1 quilt becomes 2...

I've been wanting to try the pattern on the cover of this magazine for a while. I knew I wasn't up for a big quilt and thought I'd do a small wall quilt. I changed the block up a bit and used my 45 degree Kaleidoscope ruler to cut the blocks. So far so good.

I did the math. 5 blocks x 5 blocks = 25 blocks. Each block needed 4 green or coral pieces. 25 blocks x 4 pieces per block = 100 pieces. I had 8 fat quarters of each color (coral and green). I divided 8 into 100 and got 12+ pieces from each fat quarter. Do you see my mistake? I should have divided 16 into 100 and cut 6+ pieces from each fat quarter! I have 100 extra pieces.
Here's my little wall quilt. I love how it came out and it was tedious - small is fine!

So I'm playing with my remaining pieces and decided to add some aqua. I've come up with 3 possible configurations for my long, skinny triangles. A kind of elongated zig zag...
Diamonds...
Pyramids...
What would you do? I'm leaning towards the zig zag.

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Some finished quilts...

A couple of weeks ago I got 2 quilts back from my awesome longarm quilter. They've been gone for over a year and a half - she's good, but she's busy. And I figure they would have been sitting on my shelf too for a year and a half. It was somewhat of a reunion!

This took me a while to applique, so it was probably started 2 1/2 years ago. The pattern is from Kim Diehl's book Simple Traditions. It was fun looking at this and thinking about how my style has changed in the past few years. But I still love my traditional roots.

The quilting is fabulous! Butterflies...
Swirls and feathers...
This also came home and is bound. It was designed by me for my third book, but got cut for space.
I love how she quilted a feather wreath in the center.
One of my goals this year is to clear my pile of quilt tops. I'm getting closer! Thanks for visiting!!

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Hexagons...

I was inspired by this book:

This quilt in particular, called Honeycomb Hexagon. It's made of quite large hexagons and requires "Y" seam piecing to put the rows together. I decided to use the template in the book for the half hexagon that is used to fill in the top and bottom. I cut my hexagons in 2 pieces making it 10 times faster to piece. It does mean that there's a seam through the middle of each hexagon.
If you're using small scale, tone-on-tone prints, the seam would be really negligible. But not me, I'm using big prints and lots of them. I cut the bottom and top halves of each hexagon from one piece of fabric, so although they won't match perfectly because of the seam allowance, they will be close.
From a distance you can barely tell and I think when it's quilted the seams will be even less noticeable.
Here's a closeup of how they matched up.
Today was a gorgeous Spring day. I couldn't help but photograph it in the sunny garden!

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