Fall Pillows

We just moved to Florida from Maryland and, in the process of packing, decided to purge a lot of stuff. Old furniture that wasn't worth moving, clothes we hadn't worn in ages, and some holiday decorations. When I went to find my fall decorations this week (after all, Starbucks has pumpkin spice lattés, football is back, and it's in the balmy low 90s here), I couldn't find them. Sad day.

So, I decided to make some pillows. I've always thought the traditional maple leaf pattern is kind of kitschy and yuck, but after seeing my friend Kelly post some quilt pictures on facebook with a more modern take on maples, I knew I should give it a shot.

I love the first pillow in kona cotton orange and yellow. My sort-of sashiko quilting was a booger to try to do but I love it, wonky and all.

I learned a valuable lesson with the second maple leaf: contrasting thread! The quilting was next to impossible to do on the maple leaf because I literally couldn't see it. The sashiko is pretty on most of the red, but you have to look way too closely to see that.

And the last pillow so far. I saw a pattern of 9 blocks sewn into a cube, then cut into quarters. The quarters are then rearranged and sewn together. Which makes a fun, random design. This one's for a friend who likes Halloween :-)

Little Stella's Quilt

I recently found out about this little 18 month old girl's fight with cancer through a mutual friend that I share with her mother. I haven't been able to get her out of my head and wanted to do something for her. My 2 1/2 year old loves her special quilt, so I asked my Modern Quilt Guild if they'd be interested in helping me make a quilt for Stella. We had about a week before the next meeting, so I wasn't expecting much... but they came with enough squares for two sides of a quilt with some left over!

I did the palest purples, pinks, and yellows on the front. There are lots of fun patterns for Stella to look at with various animals, nursery rhymes, and flowers. The binding is purple with little bunnies and flowers. Sorry about the dark pictures - I shot early in the morning before my coffee and forgot to adjust my shutter.

The back has the more vibrant colors.

This special square on the back was made by my friend Hayley. I used it to write a message for Stella so she'd know about the wonderful people from Baltimore and DC who lovingly pieced these beautiful squares together.

"For Stella
With love and prayers-
The Baltimore and DC Modern Quilt Guilds"

Baby Girl's Quilt

I wanted to make a quilt for my little girl, and when I saw the Nursery Versery line with cute drawings of the Itsy Bitsy Spider, Country Mouse & City Mouse, and the Five Little Piggies, I knew that was it. 

I wanted to do a more traditional pattern to work on my technique a little bit more. When I finished the checkerboard top and the hexie daisy back, I decided on a concentric swirled heart quilting pattern so there wouldn't be a super obvious right and wrong side. 

front

I finished the ends with a quilted daisy chain. 

daisy back

craaaazy quilting

 Best part is, she loves it and played on it with her trains and blocks almost all day yesterday. :-)

Colorcentric - Quilt #5

December was a hard month for us. A really hard month. And it was my first month experiencing real winter. So, a couple of weeks before Christmas, I  decided that I needed a bit of a distraction and my husband needed a good present. He'd jokingly mentioned that everyone has gotten a quilt but himself, so I knew I what I had to do.

I wanted to keep this quilt a surprise, so that meant really working hard during my daughter's nap time and then putting everything away before he got home at night. The piecing of the quilt was super fun because it was like a big puzzle, trying to fit the pieces together.

But the quilting was a nightmare. I wanted to do concentric squares and rectangles, but just a few scattered throughout. The only problem was that after I quilted a handful of them, I knew I had to repeat it over the entire quilt because it looked so great. But I don't have a long arm machine, so mashing and pulling the quilt in and out of my little machine was exhausting. 

But totally worth it. 

 Since the front was so busy, I did broad stripes in leftover colors on the back to show off the quilting.

I was thrilled with how it turned out and so was my husband, so I thought the chapter was closed on a happy quilty Christmas until I got an email asking if this quilt could be included on the new Modern Quilt Guild website. After I picked my jaw up off the ground, I replied and anxiously awaited the new website's debut. And then, one morning, I saw it: http://themodernquiltguild.com/portfolio.

Aunt Susan's Quilt

So, looking back on this, I made four quilts in four months. And that's insane. But I guess that's what happens when you move to a new city and know like 6 people. Anyway, this is quilt #3. I decided to make a nice big lap quilt for my aunt's birthday and for Christmas. I knew she'd prefer a more traditional look, and I'd been wanting to try a more traditional kind of pattern anyway, so I decided to give granny squares a shot. I picked out Lida Enche's Painted Summer because she had a hydrangea print, which is a flower that I know my aunt loves. The nice ladies at Pink Chalk paired it with Michael Miller Geranium, and I did the binding in a coordinating yellow.

Free motion quilting experiment #2

Renee's Quilt

My cousin and his wife have the cutest little girl who is about the same age as my little girl. I wanted to make her something special for her birthday in July... and then we moved 12 hours away to an apartment that lost power for 5 days the night we moved in thanks to a freak storm, and I just forgot.

Fast forward a few months and I took up quilting and decided to make her a toddler quilt for a veeeery late birthday present and an early Christmas present. I had some fun scraps and thought I'd try piecing them together into workable squares. And then I found out after finishing the quilt that there's a name for this.

*Disclaimer: it was dark and raining and I had a dying camera. These pictures are terrible.

But I finally did get a free motion foot and tried out some crazy squigglies on this and had such fun. My toddler did exactly what I hoped Renee would when she saw the quilt: crawled on it and picked out all of the animals, fruits, plants, and nursery rhymes on the quilt. It's backed in denim with one simple stripe of random girly fabrics.

Adam & Jamie's Wedding Quilt

I have one sibling and wanted to do something *real nice* for him when he decided to marry his lovely girlfriend. I had just started quilting and was nervous about gifting a quilt but wanted to give it a shot.
They like sleek, modern decor, so I thought I'd combine his favorite color, green, with her favorite color, turquoise, and some neutrals: white, slate, and gray. Their wedding color was clover, and I knew I found the perfect shade of green when I came across an old yard of Robert Kaufman clover on etsy.

I was too afraid to wash my first quilt and sent it to Florida with my mom for her to do it in her agitator-less machine. The finished product (not pictured here) looks quiltier and more puckery, just how I'd hoped it would.

I did some fun little heart appliques on the sides, but since I didn't have a free motion foot yet, they had to be intentionally wonky hearts. I kinda like the funkiness. It's quilted with straight lines and slightly squiggly lines. And a fun thing about this quilt is that my bobbin winder stopped working when I had like three stripes left and a serious deadline, so my mom and I hand wound the bobbins. And then I decided never to sew again.

As usual, I like the back better (or at least as well as) the front. I pieced together remnants from the front and added some Riley Blake circles to represent wedding rings, and some chevron scraps and triangles from my first quilt for good measure.



Happy Wedding, Adam & Jamie :-)