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! 😉

Another UFO Bites the Dust!

About a year ago, at the height of my Farm Girl Vintage frenzy, I was doing projects left and right. It was around this time that I realized my "style" or quilting, so I took advantage and made project after project. No harm there! However, I have a few unfinished projects here and there in my sewing room as a result fo the FGV mania. This weekend, I finally finished one of them.

First up was getting the batting ready. I have so many 6" or 7" wide scraps of batting, most of them leftover from quilts taken to the longer-armer. I can't say it was a real joy to piece them all together, but it did yield enough batting to finish the project.

I butted the pieces up against each other and sewed them together with a wide zig-zag stitch then flipped them over and did the same on the other side. Stitching a second time may not have been necessary but I wanted to be sure they wouldn't come apart. A good pressing with the iron flattened them out nicely.

The main aim was to "git 'er done!" so I opted for a quick straight line quilting job. Easy peasy! Typically, I'm a fan of attaching the binding by machine and then hand-turning it. I love the look of a binding with no visible stitches, but lately I've gotten a lot better at doing the binding completely by machine. That's now my go-to binding method for some projects, mostly quilts that aren't going to end up on a bed or a lap. Within four hours, I had four of these little cuties quilted and bound...

The design was inspired by the Blue Plate Special pattern. This particular placemat is mine; I'm a lefty, so the cutlery pocket is on the left. ;) Although I have a couple projects that I've yet to finish from when I first learned to sew and quilt three years ago (don't judge!), I was happy to tick this year-old project off the list! Not only did I get satisfaction from that, but the patchwork pumpkin design also somewhat sated my desire for autumn. I am not a summer lover, and I'm looking forward to cooler temperatures, shorter days and those comforting foods of fall. These will be on our dining room table for a while.

Lastly, I finished my aunt's quilt - the Jinny Beyer project that scared me half to death and ending up being not so terrible - and mailed it off to her, but I completely forgot to take a photograph of the finished quilt! Ugh. She was kind enough to share a photo of it with me.

I'm happy that she is so happy with it!

I'm linking up again with Sew Fresh Quilts this week. Lorna is so creative and makes beautiful patterns...go give her a visit. Now if you'll pardon me, I have to make a torturous decision - start a fun, new project or tackle a long-idling one. Decisions! Decisions!

Great Granny Squared and Done!

Sixty-four squares later, I have a quilt top! The 6" blocks were done in just a couple of days, and before adding the borders, I settled on an arrangement for the blocks and pieced them together.

Not too shabby, eh? Or IS it shabby...intentionally?! :) It's 48" square at this point.

I waffled between half a dozen border ideas before settling on flying geese, using the mango solid as the background. I wanted to get these flying geese done quickly, with little waste and still be scrappy, so I consulted my handy dandy All-In-One Quilter's Rererence Tool for the cutting sizes to do four flying geese at once. As much as I like the snowballing method of making them, this is a more efficient method for making a large stack of them. I spent an evening cutting, sewing and piecing them and used 24 different prints for the wings.

I love all the color! The part I tend to get the fussiest and most obsessive about is sewing the blocks together, because I don't want too much of the same color near each other. And if I somehow allowed the same prints to butt against each other? Lord, help me.

I'm not exaggerating when I say it took me an hour to settle on the above configuration before sewing them together. Ay yi yi. What a nut.

And there's the completed top! I'll quilt this one myself on my sewing machine. I've yet to use the Janome for quilting, so I'm excited to give it a go.

I also got a start on another new project, more on this one next time...

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!

And She's Done

I know myself well enough to know that if I plan on doing something when I get home from work, I bester do it right away. Once I find my way to the couch or the bed or to the Wavy Lays (it happens), all bets are off for the evening! I wanted to get the top for this quilt done today, so as soon as I walked in the door and took care of the dogs, I headed straight to the sewing room. And GET 'ER DONE I did!

This is the picnic quilt setting from Lori Holt's book, Farm Girl Vintage.

I made the borders just a couple of inches wider than the pattern suggested and staggered them with partial seams. If somebody knows the actual name for that type of border, please enlighten me. This was my first time sewing partial borders, and it was far less difficult than I anticipated when making the top, so I went ahead and did the same on the borders as well. I'm happy with the outcome! (The bottom border isn't wavy; it just needs to be pressed) I'll piece the backing - hopefully this weekend - and send it off to the quilters straight away.

And then it's back to yet another of Lori's fun projects, her Bloom Sew-Along. These are the first 8 blocks I've sewn.

This one is my first applique project, and though I'm satisfied overall with my progress, I can definitely see areas for improvement. Even still, it'll make a fun surprise gift for a surprise somebody!

How Many Projects Is Too Many Projects?

Like most quilters, I suppose, I tend to work on several projects at a time. The second I get bored with one, I switch to another to avoid complete disinterest in another long-term project. One of the ones I keep coming back to is this fun little lap quilt.

It's the picnic quilt setting from Lori Holt's great (and addictive!) book, Farm Girl Vintage. I've had the book since it was released about a year ago, and I'm still making projects from it. I wanted a simpler block since I was going to be making fifty-two of them -- some 6" and some 12" -- so I went with the crystal star block, a modified version of the simple star block.

I used fabrics from some of my favorite designers: Lori Holt, Pam Kitty Morning, Lecien, and Ellis & Higgs among others. I love how scrappy it is and that it's so bright and colorful. All that's left to do on the top is to attach the borders, and then off to the quilter she goes! One of my local quilt shops, Millie P's, always does a great job quilting them on the long arm. Smaller projects I'm willing to tackle myself, but for bigger projects (and when I'm feeling exceptionally lazy and impatient) I will gladly hand over my dough to the professionals and let them do it.

Once I attach the borders, I'll have a better quality image of the finished top. After that, it's back to one of the eight(!) or so other projects I've got on the back burner.

Today I'm also linking up to one of my favorite pattern designers, Lorna McMahon at Sew Fresh Quilts. She created the pattern for this reindeer block that I used to make these pillows.

Until next time, a glass of wine and Chinese takeout is calling my name...