Prism quilt and a free motion experiment

 

My most recent quilt finish is one that has been waiting in my sewing room for a few years. I very rarely remake a quilt that someone else has made, but this one caught my eye and for some reason I really wanted to make it just like the sample. This is the Prism quilt by Zen Chic which uses her fabric line Prism as well. 

The piecing was all done by paper-piecing which was actually quite fun. And satisfying since all the points lined up so nicely.  But when I was done, I was totally stumped on how to quilt all that white space. My generous friend Denise agreed to let me use her long arm for this one. So I started marking out the lines I wanted to quilt on this.

 Here it is in progress on the longarm.

I did a combination of ruler work and free motion within the lines. It's in no way perfect, but as it's my first attempt at this kind of work, I'm pretty proud of the results.

I deliberately chose a variegated thread that blended with the background fabric just in case my quilting was atrocious! But that made it really hard to photograph the actual quilting.

It was really fun to work this way and of course not be shoving this through my 5" throat space on my Bernina!

I used the fun dotty print from the line for the binding.

And the back is a solid piece of fabric that I got from my LQS that matched well. I don't remember the name of it, but it has a subtle pattern on it (again, to mask the quilting if it turned out terrible!). I have since added my label.

Overall, I'm so happy with how this turned out and I hope to get to do more of this work in the future!

 

 

 

Quilt stats:

Quilt name: Prism

Pattern:Prism

Fabrics: Zen Chic, Kona Cotton
Finished size: 73" by 73"

Finished: April 2016

Clamshell Quilt: a Finish

This quilt has been done for a while, I even took the photos months ago. It's just been so crazy I haven't blogged about it!  I was lucky enough to buy an Accu Quilt Go! off a fellow quilter who was upgrading to a larger model. My plan with the die cut machine was to be able to cut more difficult shapes that would need templates if I were to cut them by hand.  So I started with the 8" clamshell die and a layer cake.

This fabric line is Eva by Basic Grey. It was a layer cake that I've had sitting around for a few years waiting for the perfect project.  I think it's so beautiful and girly!

In some of these close ups you can see some extra fabrics that I added in to have enough to make this large enough.

There's some Tula Pink, Kate Spain and Joel Dewberry in there. My favorites!

My friend Denise (the feet you see above) was kind enough to let me long arm this at her place and I used this same panto that I used on this quilt. I love the girly swirls that have a secondary heart pattern.

Since this is so girly, my daughter is not enthralled with it. She "likes cool things, not pretty things". Sigh!  So this will have to wait for the right recipient!

 

 

Quilt stats:

Quilt name: Beautiful Clamshells

Pattern: tutorial from Glam Clam

Fabrics: Basic Grey Eva and stash

Finished size: 39"x47"

Finished: 4/2015

Anchor Quilt Finish #2

Back in October I blogged about my Coral Anchor Quilt. When I did, I talked about how I had made two of them.Well, I finally got around to quilting it! I blogged about that in April because my generous friend Denise let me use her longarm.

So finally I have photos to show of my finished Blue Anchor quilt!

I talked about this pattern before in my last post. It's a free pattern from Tula Pink that you can download. For some contrast, here is my coral one (it lives in Florida with my sister):

All the quilting was done by ME! But don't ask me the name of the pantograph, I don't know. It was one of Denise's stash.

This photo was kind of goofy, but you can see the quilting really well:

My little helper was there to help with the photo session so I just have to include her.

This quilt will be going on my son's big boy bed I think. I'm not sure I'm ready to let him use this!! I might have to wait until he's a bit bigger. But I have gotten some nautical accessories to go in his room along with this.

I forgot to take a photo of the back. It's just a bunch of Kona Aqua pieced with a strip of fussy cut octopus(es?) so we aren't missing much. The binding is scrappy leftovers from the anchor piecing.

 

 Quilt stats:

Quilt name: Coral Anchors Aweigh

Pattern: Anchors Aweigh

Fabrics: Tula Pink Saltwater, Free Spirit Pearl and Dogwood

Finished size: 90" x 95"

Finished: 4/20/14

 

Guess who I met this weekend?

That's me with Angela Walters, Modern Quilter Extraordinaire! And yes, our shirts are matching. Didn't you get the memo that Coral is the new black?? haha!


Philly MQG held a workshop and lecture by Angela. she was a great speaker and I'm thrilled I got to go to both.  You all know I'm a huge Tula Pink fan, so of course by extension I'm a huge Angela Walters fan!

Her workshop was great. It was a lot of demonstrations of the different quilt patterns that are her favorites.

She showed us some straight line shapes. I'm slightly obsessed with that bottom yellow square!

Then we moved on to swirls and curves.

This was an example of how different levels of contrast in quilting can create depth and show off or hide elements of your quilt.

And this one she showed us how to create textures by varying the size of your shapes.

Besides being a talented quilter, Angela is funny and a great speaker. One of things she said that totally resonated with me is, "if it takes too long, that's a valid reason not to do it".  I totally agree, quilting is supposed to be fun!

The quilting part is usually what I found tedious and skipped over. but seeing just what beautiful effects can be created with the quilting, I'm inspired to do more with mine in the future.

Not that I have any illusions of making masterpieces like this!! But her lecture was all about how she became a quilter and the message I took away is that, "if it can be done, it can be learned".

Thank you Angela for getting my creative juices flowing! And thank you Philly MQG for hosting such a great event!

Hourglass Quilt Finish

I have my first quilt finish for the year. Technically it's a 2012 finish, but I'm counting it for this year. I started this scrappy quilt last year when Rachel started her Scrap Attack Quilt Along. Once I started it I knew I wasn't going to finish it in time for her deadline, but instead it became my leader and ender project. It was a great way to do something like this, I probably would have died of boredom otherwise! So here's the finished product:

All of those hourglasses are 3" square. And there are 480 of them!! I just kept making them until I thought I had a substantial enough pile.

Evan can not resist this quilt. Every time I put it down he has to crawl all over it. Note the baby toes at the top of this photo! Most of my shots looked like this.

 My good friend Denise has been teaching me how to use her longarm. So I thought this would be the perfect project to try to long-arm myself. She generously let me use her machine for the afternoon and I ran a pantograph over it. I love how it came out! Now I need to scheme to get myself one now! I had a hard time getting a good photograph of the quilting because of the busy pattern. This was probably where you can see it best. I should have taken pictures before washing.

It was a pretty dense swirly plume pattern. I wanted something dense with all those seams. Here's the rest of the back. Just a collection of fabric I had around that was all kind of low volume so it wouldn't show through. No real plan there.

One of the things I love most about this quilt is that it is totally made of scraps. Sitting under it is fun for me because I can look at all the fabrics and remember the projects (usually gifts) that were made from those fabrics.

And finally, I just have to share this video. When I got the quilt out of the dryer, I laid it out so I could see it all. Evan went bananas and did this for about 5 minutes straight. The video is only about a minute though. This is just what a quilter wants to see their kids do!  :)

Quilt stats:

Size: 68"x57"

Pattern: Hourglass

Fabrics:  stash

Quilted by: Myself

Finished:12/20/12