Pillows Plus (photo heavy)

As I mentioned in my previous post, Leanne's Bee Sewcial prompt for November was really inspiring to me. In fact, I made another improv bull's eye right away and turned it into a pillow:

For the back, I had an extra quarter circle, so I just added to it until it was the right size, and then made a simple envelope closure:

The quilting was really simple - just done with the walking foot and white thread. Super quick and effective, in my opinion.

I also had occasion to make three more of my improv rainbow gradient pillows.

The first one was for the little boy who bid on the silent auction pillow but didn't win it. His mom arranged a wine for pillow trade and I was very happy to oblige:

I might even love it better than the original! Back view:

Detail shot of the quilting, all done with Aurifil in various shades:

And those pillows being shared on Instagram led to another commission for Christmas by a lovely young lady and friend of my daughter's! She contacted me via her mom's Instagram account to ask me to make two pillow for her dad!

And the second one:

I've committed to a local artisans' fair for next December, and I think these pillows will feature prominently in my inventory!

Serendipity: A Bee Sewcial Swap Mini

Last year at QuiltCon, my Bee Sewcial group and I met up and during our lunch we talked about organizing a swap. Given that our group is a bunch of over-achieving doctors, lawyers, university professors etc., stuff gets DONE. This swap was no exception.

We were to make an approximately 15"x20" mini quilt top featuring one accent colour of our choice paired with a scrappy low-volume background. Then we were to cut it apart into roughly 5" bits, send 10 of them to the other swap participants and keep two for ourselves.

My accent colour was yellow. I started with this piece:

Then chopped it up and ended up with these:

Whenever I'm not sure what project to work on next, I look at my Finish Along List. Well lo and behold, wouldn't you know this mini was on my Q4 Finish Along Goal List so I puzzled it together and pieced it in one day. Amazingly, it only required two small strips of additional low volume fabric to bring the blocks together into a rectangle shape.

Because it is small - about 15"x19", I was able to quilt and bind it the next day:

I call this Serendipity because it surprised me with how easily it came together, and because it makes me so very happy.

My heartfelt thanks to Leanne, Stephanie, Hillary, M-R, Melissa, Marci Anne, Kari, Karen and Debbie for your contributions!

Improv Rainbow Throw Pillow

I had some strip sets left over from Anne's Bee Sewcial assignment, and I needed to make a throw pillow to donate to my daughter's school's fundraiser. Happy happenstance!

I pieced the strips with some chambray-type fabric of which I appear to have purchased a LOT of yardage. (I wonder what I was planning for it? I guess we'll find out eventually!)

I used Thermolam fusible fleece (Pellon TP971F) and quilted with Aurifil thread in various colours - grey in the background area, plus red, orange and yellow in the pieced bits. I just used my walking foot and stitched wavy lines from side to side. I like how the thread colour carries the colour of the pieced strip into the borders.

This is the back, which got the same treatment, but vertically.

My pillow was very well-received and my friend told me that she was engaged in a fierce bidding war for it with a sweet little boy who, according to his mom, loves colour. Mom wants me to make him a pillow as a surprise for Christmas and suggested a trade for some wine - one of the benefits of a school where all of the winemakers send their kids!

Blogger's Quilt Festival 2016 (Original Design): Points East

Points East is my second Blogger's Quilt Festival entry for 2016. I'm entering it in the Original Design category.

I made this to enter into one of the MQG's fabric challenges. MQG members could sign up to receive a half-yard cut of Riley Blake's Sashing Stash print, which contains different motifs that you can fussy cut or strip cut or whatever you'd like.

I began by mulling for quite a while, and finally settled on a design that incorporates a wedge. Here are the beginnings of my experimentation:

When I decided I liked it, I went ahead and pieced the top, keeping in mind that my niece was expecting her second baby later in the summer and that I wanted this quilt to be for her so I kept it at baby size.

Notice at the bottom of this picture that the selvages are still visible. When I piece a quilt using fabric cut WOF (width of fabric, selvage to selvage), I don't tend to trim the selvages off first unless necessary. For instance if the pattern required precise piecing, I'd definitely trim. But in this case, I was putting the top together on the fly and I knew I'd be FMQing it. So, I left the selvages alone and trimmed after quilting.

Speaking of quilting, I quilted it with free-motion designs using my Juki 2010Q, which I love.

Binding was made with the leftover challenge fabric and voilà! A 40" x 50" baby quilt I called Points East because the wedges kind of look like direction arrows.

Thank you so much for stopping by my blog. Feel free to cruise around and take a look at what I've been up to and definitely make sure you visit the Blogger's Quilt Festival to feast your eyes on the beauty of hundreds of quilts!

Blogger's Quilt Festival 2016 (Modern): Dancing in the Moonlight

Hello! I believe the Blogger's Quilt Festival is in its 6th year - amazing! Thank you so much, Amy, for putting it together! This small quilt is the first of my two entries in this Fall's Blogger's Quilt Festival.

Dancing in the Moonlight was pieced improvisationally. I enjoyed leveraging the contrast of the purple against the neutrals to play with the two parts of the quarter-circles. I shared the quilt on social media when I finished it earlier this year for a challenge. Well, I *thought* I'd finished it. 

After looking at it for a while longer, I realized I wanted to add some hand stitching to increase the texture of this quilt. Using Aurifil 12 weight cotton thread in a creamy white colour (2310), I added several lines of stitches about ¼" away from some of the machine quilting lines (done with Aurifil 50 weight in white).

NOW it's finished. 

I'm experimenting with the side of our new house as my new photography spot.

The fabrics are all Northcott Colorworks Solids in the colourway dictated by the original challenge. I totally loved what came from having a restricted palette and a restricted amount of each fabric to work with. I'll have to try that approach again, I think.

I've decided to put this into the Modern category. Go and see the many, many amazing quilts that are being shared as part of the festival at this link: Blogger's Quilt Festival.

Dog Days of Aoife

Each time a friend left our team at work, I offered to make them a little something. Bronwyn got a pouch, Lesley got a mini, and Nicole got a pillow.

Faye requested a small quilt for her fur baby Aoife (an Irish name, pronounced EE-fa).

My mind went right to the charm pack and additional yardage I had of Sherbet Pips, with the adorable little doggies on it. I cut the quilt out before we moved in July and then life happened.

Last week, I went to an open sew day at one of my new LQSs, Cherry Tree Quilts and pieced the top:

It's very quick to do - (40) 5" charms plus (8) 9½" squares of coordinating fabric.

Quilting was very simple too - just diagonal lines. I used a Hera marker to mark the lines.

Very happy with the now-washed, nicely soft and crinkly finished product:

It's about 36" square, and it's bound (by machine) with more Sherbet Pips and a tiny bit of Little Apples.

Bonus pillow made with the leftovers:

Front

Other Front (they're both cute!!)

Again, really simple. 5" squares plus one 9½" square. I think I'll donate it to the school's fundraiser.

**Administrivia note: I am way behind in blogging my work so I hope you're ready for a veritable barrage of blog posts as I catch up.**

Fancy Foxes

Need a quick, fun quilt for a baby or small child? I highly recommend Elizabeth Hartman's Fancy Fox II pattern.

The VMQG had a workshop taught by Jade Stitch Mischief and it gave me the opportunity to piece the quilt top in a day, and then a Quilt By The Bay day retreat hosted my dear Krista Poppyprint resulted in a finished quilt.

I kept the quilting very simple - organic straight lines done with a walking foot but without any marking. I switched up the space between the lines to add a bit of interest. Also because the close-together quilting was taking FOREVER.

   

This one is for my newest nephew, L. His mom, my sister in law, told me they were going with a navy/grey theme in the baby's room so I had a lot of fun choosing fabrics from my stash. There's some William Morris reproduction fabric, some London Calling by Robert Kaufman (Liberty-adjacent pattern), a Moda Essentials print, some Kona solids and a blender (the grey jewels) whose name I've forgotten.

   

 I can't wait to meet him this summer when I see my family - until then, I hope this quilt is a nice virtual hug.

P.S. This pattern, while quick to put together, has a lot of fabric waste as you cut off corner triangles on a couple of large pieces. If you want to save the bits, go ahead and stitch a second line ½" from the first and cut between the stitched lines as in this tutorial by Cluck Cluck Sew. That gives you a pieced HST for use in another project (or the quilt back, perhaps).

P.P.S. Did you notice the glasses? The pattern comes with a template for glasses. I modified it to make the glasses cat's eyes like mine.

A Sunny Mini

A friend and co-worker left our department and I gave her the choice of what handmade item she'd like as a going away gift: a pillow, pouch or mini quilt.

Lesley chose a mini, and I'm so glad she did because I had the perfect design all set to go. Lesley is easily one of the most cheerful, sunny, positive people I know. So something involving a bright sun was a no-brainer option for her gift, which I called "Let Your Light Shine Bright."

It's not very big - maybe 13"x14"? I can't exactly remember. But it began with two improvised "slabs" of fabric - one blue and one yellow. I used a circle ruler to make the inset half-circle. The letters and sun rays were cut out of fabric to which I'd adhered fusible web. I drew the letters freehand (and in mirror image!).

Stitching down the appliqué via freemotion quilting plus some fun designs in the sun was the only quilting I did on the piece.

A cute yellow binding was a nice finish, I think.

Fancy Fox II: Pillow

Every year, I donate something handmade to the silent auction at my friend/former co-worker's ringette team fundraiser. First it was a quilt, then I downsized a bit to pillows (this one, and this one).

I made four Fancy Fox II blocks into a quilt top in a VMQG workshop a few weeks ago, and they were so fast to make, I thought of the pattern right away for this year's Beaver Bash pillow.

This is a 100% stash project. Foxy's face fabric is by Kate and Birdie (Canadian!) for Moda. The line is called Autumn Woods, from a couple years ago. The grey paisley is also Moda - the selvage says Moda Classics. Fancy Fox II is a pattern by Elizabeth Hartman.

It's quilted very sparsely - just an echo around the face and some stippling in the background. Since I used fusible fleece, I wasn't too worried about quilting density.

The pillow cover is about 20" square, and I stuffed it with a 22" pillow form to make it nice and plump.

Modern Stripes

I was the lucky winner of this gorgeous bundle of Cloud 9 Organice Solids at a VMQG meeting last year:

I had this FQ bundle for a long time before the right design came to mind. As much as possible, I kept the different values of the various colours together and pieced them into strip sets of varying sizes:

Friends, I love this quilt. LOVE. IT. The fabrics are so lovely. So soft with a really nice hand. Highly recommended.

It's about 60x72 so I quilted it on the longarm with a clamshell design that goes side to side. I switched it up with a slightly different clamshell when I remembered.

The back is two different Kona Greys (Charcoal and Medium Grey) plus a bit of a leftover strip set that I cross-cut and pieced in a little checkerboard just because. This shows the nice magenta binding to its best advantage. 

It's a Finish Along finish too. This one's staying with me!