Halloween!

In celebration of Halloween, here are some more pictures of my Halloween Quilt. The original post can be found here.

All my pets are black, so they are great instant Halloween decorations!

My kitty, aka the owner of the quilt.

Luna the ghost

USA map quilt

My local quilt shop, In the Making, offered a quilt class making their version of a USA quilt (aka the United Scraps of America quilt). I have always loved maps, so what better thing to do than combine fabrics and maps!

In the Making's pattern cover and my outtake states

All I needed for the first day was 50 scraps of fabric, double sided fusible interfacing, and the pattern. I believe that In the Making will be publishing the pattern soon, and I will add a link for that if/when it happens. Click here for pattern!

Day 1:

The first day was spent tracing all the state shapes onto the interfacing and then fusing each state to a different fabric scrap. We then had to carefully cut out each state.

Day 1 progress

We will complete the quilt top in a second class. As you can see I started out West and I am working my way East. I may replace some states that aren't showing up too well (I'm looking at you Washington!)


Day 2:

In the second class, we finished making all the states. We then arranged them on the base fabric. My base is a light blue Moda grunge fabric. It matched the demo quilt and I really liked how it would represent the oceans but still had some texture to the fabric.

This was also the time we remade any states we didn't like. I redid three of mine and an additional one due to an error in the pattern.

The rough layout before anything was stuck down

Once the states were arranged to our liking, we removed the backing of the interfacing and stuck them down. We then carefully moved the quilt to the iron to seal the whole thing down.

All ironed down!

Being from Georgia, I wanted to highlight this state. I also wanted Alabama to stand out. Since red and black are UGA colors this seemed perfect.

My quilt top is now all finished and awaits the finishing quilting. I have picked the same fabric for the binding as I used for Georgia (I am not sure of the name but it comes from Moda's Gardenvale collection). The backing is going to be Tula Pink's Lotus in tomato from her Eden line (I also used this fabric for Kansas).

If you've made a map quilt, I'd love to see it. Leave me a link to your quilt in the comments :)




Edit: The finished quilt can be viewed here!

Triangle Quilt - Part 2 Layout

On Friday I spent hours arranging my triangles out. It took a long time to get all triangles down and I loved being able to finally see the look of the quilt.

My helper cat

There was a lot of rearranging of triangles to get the final result. My sister and husband were a great help ensuring everything looked good!

The full quilt, not pieced yet

I've put the quilt up for the night to keep the furry ones off of it. Now it's all ready to be pieced together!

All stacked up by rows for the night

I have started piecing the whole quilt together, but I expect this will take a while since one row took me about an hour. I also have a quilt class this week, so that will take up my time. Keep checking back for a post about what's next!

Triangle Quilt - Part 1 Cutting

Since my last quilts, I have wanted to branch out a little and do something more than just a charm pack quilt. I also really didn't want to do another log cabin, so I went in search of ideas!

I started by first looking at the fabric I have on hand. I have a tendency to gravitate to the same types of fabrics (heavy prints) in similar colors (mainly purple). When trying to make a quilt out of this though, the fabrics tend to all be too busy and do not blend well. When I wander through the quilt shop, I will end up picking fabrics like this every time. Thus I struggle a little with matching colors from different lines. I'm sure this will get better with time and practice but for now, the easiest way to combat this is to just pick a fabric line and use what the fabric designer has already match together!

My quilt shop recently received Tula Pink's Eden line. I especially love the lotus print of this line and knew I wanted to do something with it. Since I'm new to quilting, I simply did a google search to see what others had created using Eden. When I saw Jaybird Quilts' Stereo Quilt in Eden I was sold! Not wanting to make things too complicated for myself, I decided to not make the Stereo Quilt, but rather just do a simple triangle quilt. The triangle rulers sold seem easy enough to use and  I love how six triangles together can look like a hexagon.

Thus, I set about making my own triangle pattern with Tula Pink's Eden line in mind (a pink, purple, and green colorway). Since, all my prior quilts have been relatively small, I wanted to do a larger quilt. Since my husband is quite tall, I wanted to keep his height in mind and knew I needed to go a little larger than would be necessary for just myself.

My plan, using 5 inch tall triangles 

While I am working towards this pattern right now, I recognize that my mind may change when I finally lay out all the triangles. Based on the pattern though, I will need the following:

• 128 pink tone triangles 
• 128 purple tone triangles
• 124 green tone triangles
• 56 other tone triangles (I'm planning on blue/yellow)

Hence I set about cutting all these triangles. I used all of Tula Pink's Eden line along with fabrics from her new True Colors line and her out of print lines of Elizabeth, Fox Field, and Acacia. I was able to cut 11 triangles per 5.5 inch row of fabric. 

Cutting the fabric to size. Fabric shown is Acacia Butterfly Wings in Blueberry.

Cutting the triangles to size

I currently have 132 pink, purple, and green triangles cut and 44 blue/yellow ones. I am waiting to cut anything else until I can lay out the whole quilt and see what colors I want to add.

Cut triangles sorted by colorway

Check back next week when I lay out the whole quilt!

Halloween Quilt

My Halloween Quilt came about because I wanted to try a harder quilt, but I didn't want to invest too much time or money experimenting.

I had some Halloween themed fabric in the house. I had prior made a very simple blanket but never liked or used it (it also lacked batting), so I took this apart to get the candy corn and multicolored fabrics. The other Halloween prints were purchased at deep discount at my local Hancock fabrics over the summer of 2015. I then added a black and yellow/orange I had to complete the color collection. I didn’t want to spend too much money on this quilt since it was my first time using a rotary cutter on my own. I knew there would be some mistakes and I would hate to ruin some of my nicer fabrics. I also did not follow a set pattern, rather I just made one on graph paper and adding ¼ inch seam allowance to pieces. The block structures are basic courthouse steps style.

I did my own quilting using straight lines around each square. Had it been a larger quilt, I really would have struggled turning the quilt around in my small home sewing machine.

I love the backing of this quilt. It is Halloween Dogs in Costume from Hancock fabrics. I’m a dog person, so the dogs in costume was right up my alley! The binding is a Halloween Spooky Prints Fabric-Black Cats from JoAnn Fabrics.

This quilt has now become my cat's favorite. I guess its fitting since she's an all black kitty.

Summer Quilting

Welcome to my blog! I started sewing when I was a child and recently have picked it back up again thanks to my local quilt shop. I hope you enjoy seeing my progress and creations!

Simple Baby Quilt

This quilt was my reintroduction to sewing after a bit of time off. My local quilt shop was offering classes over summer, so I took advantage of this opportunity and learned how to properly make a quilt. Prior to this, most of my quilts were not bound but finished by inverting the fabrics. I also tended not to quilt them as much as I should have resulting in fabric shifting.

The class allowed me to the make the quilt top in one session. There was a follow up session to complete the quilt sandwich and binding.

The layout plan for the quilt

This baby quilt was made using one Persimmon by Basic Grey for Moda charm pack and matching binding and backing fabric from the line. I really love how this color palette works together. It was also a one of the few charm packs I saw that was more gender neutral. I am not sure what my plans are for this quilt yet, so I'm just keeping it for myself for now.

My pups, Luna, helping to model