Holiday Projects...Already?

I've been putting off this project, and the fabric's been collecting dust, so it was time to do something about it. I know it's still March - though barely - but Halloween fabrics are hitting the market soon, so I'm in the mood. When this happens, I have to get to work or the feeling fades pretty quickly.

I've had this bundle of fabric for a while, Spooky Delights by Bunny Hill Designs for Moda Fabrics, and I'm finally putting it to use. I didn't even really have a real design idea when I sat down in front of the machine, but sometimes that's okay. Today it seems to have worked out, judging by block one anyway.

I decided on a cream spider print from the Happy Hauntings line by Riley Blake. Fun, right? Or creepy. I'll take fun or creepy.

I cut some 5" x 2.5" pieces from strip sets (which always feels like it takes foreeeeeeevvvveeer) and used a Dresden ruler to cut them.

Cutting is the worst part of quilting for me. I'll take ironing over it anyday, but pairing up the different fabrics for each block alleviates some of the boredom that task manifests. To lessen that monotony even more, I turned on one of my favorite Halloween films...



Halloween II. It's one of those movies I can recall seeing for the first time, and it's stuck with me all these years later. But back to the fabric!

Chain piecing the units through the machine is the fun part for me. Once I'm in the groove and let the machine do it's work by gobbling up each piece of fabric, I can feel the project coming together. A string of Dresden petals is kinda festive, like a series of pennants. Except even better, because they're Halloween pennants!

🎃  🎃  🎃  🎃  🎃

After that the Dresden plate comes together rather quickly.

It's cute enough on its own I think, but I figured I was going to be bored with just a plain circle in the center of the plate. That's when the idea clicked to add a Halloween-themed applique to the middle. It was also partially inspired by Lori Holt's Sweetie Pie sew-along. I had too many projects in the hopper or on hold (this being one of them) to participate, but I think this will fill that void. I'll to an a few different appliques to the center circle, but this is the first fella that came to mine.

Isn't he cute? My embroidery skills are really pretty basic, but I'd have to put them to use to give this fella some eyes and a mouth.

There he is in his final...resting place? I opted to applique him with black thread to give him a little more definition and make him stand out from the cream background fabric. His eyes aren't as even as I'd like them to be, but I shan't stress about it. I'll figure out some friends for him to be the center of the other blocks.

This is a quilt I'm looking forward to finishing. I just have to make sure I don't make it all up as I go along.

I Present to You - Aunt Gracie's Garden

I am done with this quilt top. DONE! Over three months in the making, and I'm so thrilled to be done with it. Not only because I love it, but because it was a challenge. Piecing the blocks wasn't terribly difficult and, in pieces, the applique itself wasn't either. However, there are a lot of applique pieces and getting them on was so time consuming.

At first, I wasn't sure if I should attach the borders and then add the applique or add the applique to the border and THEN attach the borders. I'm glad I did the applique first. It's quite a chore cajoling a queen-sized quilt around the sewing table. The corner flowers on the border had to go on last after the borders were attached. Honestly, I was about 60 seconds from throwing things at one point. I'm pretty even tempered, but the moving all the fabric around - and, at one point, getting a grease spot from sewing machine lubricant on the white fabric (gone now, thank goodness) - was frustrating.

By the end of it, I had to trim up the outer border because it had frayed quite a bit after being moved around so much. Mitered borders aren't my favorite and they're far from perfect, but I'm mostly happy with the outcome. Next, she gets quilted. I can't wait for this one to be done! It's the first, and probably last, queen-sized quilt I'll finish. Famous last words...

The quilt is 83" x 105" so it's too big to get a flat shot of the whole quilt in my small house. Here are some photos. Enjoy!

I'm also linking up to Sew Fresh Quilts! She does beautiful work and I love her fun patterns!

OMG! REMEMBER ME?!

I'm fairly certain I noted early on in my blog that I'm pretty well terrible at blogging and that I eventually stop keeping up. Well, looky there! It happened...I stopped keeping up. Is it post-election depression? Is it laziness? Is it the coming zombie apocalypse? Who am I kidding - it's laziness. But here I am!

Though I have most definitely been slacking on ye olde blog, the same cannot (thank goodness) be said about my quilting efforts. Here are a few examples of what I've been up to in the past several months.

I've been doing a lot of smaller projects between bigger bed-sized or lap-sized quilts. The Prince love symbol pillow was my first paper-pieced project and was for our annual friends' Christmas gift exchange. My friend Shawna was the recipient and was good enough to share her photo with me, as I forgot to snap one (in my defense, I was on my deathbed with an awful case of the flu). The BB-8 pillow was another paper-pieced project and was really fun! He took the place of the Christmas pillow.

This is a 16.5" squared tabletopper I pieced this weekend. It's a simple pattern I improvised - sixteen 3.5" scrappy green pieces that were snowballed on three corners with 1.5" squares. The stem was appliqued on after the piecing was top. It's on top of my living room end table right now.

Several of these are projects I'm using as a distraction from adding the borders to this beautiful monster...

It's a free pattern from Fons & Porter called Aunt Gracie's Garden. The piecing was fun and not at all difficult - just four-square units, half-square triangles and triangle recs. It's the borders I'm dreading. Mitered corners and applique. Honestly, I don't know what I'm waiting form. I've already made all the applique pieces (flowers and leaves)!

See? It's all right there! I just have to do it. I'll get over it eventually, but till then...why do today what you can put off till tomorrow! 😉

Bloomin' Away

I'm getting back into the swing of things, and taking care of some projects in various stages of completion. Today, I'll gift a quilt that I finished about a year ago and haven't had a chance to mail (translation: the post office feels so far away!). The good news is that I'll be able to give the gift in person, so that'll be fun. There's always the anxiety of "What if they don't like it?" but I'm smashing that as much as I can. I'm sure it'll be loved!

This weekend, I finished block sixteen of Lori Holt's Bloom Sew Along.

This one was a fun one to piece. As I said in my previous post, I'm really (finally!) learning to use the point turner to smooth out the curved pieces when they're not as rounded as they should be. I wish I took more care to do it when I started the project. Oh, well! You live you learn.

These are the other three blocks that will make up the row. I really love the block in the lower left. Those heart shaped templates make for great flower petals! I can't wait to finish these blocks, piece them into rows, sew on the borders and move onto the next projects! After that, I should finally finish up the Christmas quilt top I finished in December 2014; I'll post of photograph of that later tonight when I get home.

Speaking of Lori Holt - she's full of ideas that appeal to me - she mentioned a great gift idea on Instagram that I loved so much I took to the sewing machine straight away and churned one out.

It's a little 5" x 7" block, created from her Sew Simple Shapes. I'll head to Michael's tonight to see if I can find a frame suitable enough for containing its cuteness. Don't you just wanna pinch its little cheeks? Adorable!

A Paisley Hiatus - Quilting Odds & Ends

Paisley Park - Chanhassen, MN

Ay yi yi. What a week it's been. An emotional up and down. I wouldn't dare make a ridiculous statement indicating that I'm the biggest Prince fan, but I'm one of many dedicated Prince fans. There are tons. I've seen him eight times and associated Paisley acts too many times to count. I have friends who've seen him dozens - even hundreds - of times live, and his music has gifted me with a tight circle of friends. Though his death has been tough, it's been beyond helpful and therapeutic the past week to spend time with friends, reminiscing about live shows, bootlegs, favorite performances and Paisley Park memories. I saw him there only one (Prince was a night owl, I am not) but he wasn't performing. Standing in back, dancing and having a good time as Morris Day and The Time performed. His death is painful, but the music will always be there and I'm thankful for it. One of my fave extended videos below.




So, onto some sewing bidness...

Since much of the last week was spent with friends I haven't had much time to quilt, and that's a major drag. The best cure to grief is getting back to a routine, and that is precisely what I'm doing! I've been working on Lori Holt's Bloom Sew Along and having fun with it. It's been a great way to sharpen my newbie applique skills.

These are the three newest blocks I'm completing. I've still got to add the borders.

If nothing else, this has been a great way to improve my curved edges when doing applique, using a point turner to slightly stretch those muthas into place when the curve isn't sewn as good as I'd like! I've been hesitant to piece the blocks together as I go, because my fear is that it will read as a hot mess at the beginning and a glorious masterpiece by the end. We shall see. Look at those curves. Aren't they brilliant? Not really, I know, but it's good and certainly better than when I started. Apologies for the darker pictures; I didn't have time to correct the white balance.

Next up for me are the beautiful blocks in this book. I need to sharpen my paper piecing skills, so I've printed out a selection of blocks from this sampler.

They're all beautiful, and they're all on the ever growing to-do list. :)

Berry Cherry Potholder

I've finished two quilt tops in the last few weeks, so I'm taking a wee bit of a break from big projects at the moment. I almost took the weekend off from doing any sewing at all but decided yesterday to break my boredom with a bit of time in the sewing room. I thought about doing yet another small project from Lori Holt's Farm Girl Vintage book, but I've already done approximately 1,305,211 projects from that to date. I can't help myself! And then I saw Lori's Bloom Templates when I was digging through the drawer on my sewing table.

Why not do a block from Farm Girl Vintage using the templates? Easy peasy! I need to keep brushing up on my applique skills anyway. I would only need two of them: A-3 and A-11.

I picked out a few fabrics...

...and a few tools, and I was on my way. That little Clover 1/4" bias tape maker has come in handy lately, and I also really like using lightweight sew-in Pellon as backing for the applique pieces. One of these days I'll give a go at hand-turned applique, but for now this is my comfort zone and it makes for good results.

I went with this guy  at first, because I love the little Scotties, but in the end it was too close in hue to the other red I was using and went with a pink print instead.

In virtually no time at all, I had a little cherry block! I'd been wanting to try the Fat Quarter Shop's tutorial (their video tutorial is at the end of this post) for using the backing fabric as the binding to see how I liked it, so after a quick quilting job...

...I attached the backing fabric, and cut and pressed it according to their directions.

Then it was time to sew the binding to the front of the block. It's only an 8" square, so binding only took a half an hour or so to get the job.

And there's the finished product. Cute as a li'l button! I'm not sure how much I love the backing/binding method. The corners look good not great. Perhaps it's just a matter of getting the method down, but it certainly was more than adequate for a first time, and I have another adorable little nugget to use in the kitchen.