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 :-)

My First Quilt

So, we're in a new city for one year while my husband finishes up his fellowship. Back in September, I decided to take up a new project while we're here: quilting. My mom gave me a basic Singer machine a few Christmases ago, and even though threading it left me baffled for couple of years, I thought I'd give it a shot. I ordered a Robert Kaufman quilt-con pack since I didn't know anything about matching colors, and then  naively thought that triangles seemed both fun and simple.

And then I discovered that triangles are the devil's shape.

And, as I've learned is usually the case when I quilt, I ended up liking the back better than the front.