Hi(bear)nate Quilt Top

The Hi(bear)nate quilt top is a free pattern by Bonnie Christine for Art Gallery Fabrics. It is designed to go with Bonnie Christine's Hello, Bear collection.

In the Making has a made a kit for this quilt, using the colors shown. If you get the kit, I followed the pattern pretty closely, except that I changed some of the fabric choices. There will soon be a handout detailing the changes so you can make this exact quilt if you want. The kit is currently available in the store, and my quilt is there as a sample if you want to see it in person!

Also, be sure you print the pattern to scale! The PDF actually has writing all the way to the edges, so your printer will want to scale it down. This isn't a problem unless you use the triangle cut out pattern. To check, your triangle should be 10 inches tall.

I do strongly recommend getting an acrylic ruler for equilateral triangles though that is at least 10 inches tall. This will make cutting so much easier!

This quilt is much more manageable as a triangle introduction than my Tula Pink Triangle Quilt (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Since these triangles are bigger and there are not as many of them, piecing the top was a lot faster than I thought it would be!

All cut out and ready to go!

I laid out all my pieces by rows, since that made chain piecing easier for me

Tula Pink Flower Market Quilt

My local quilt shop, In the Making, offers a kit to make Tula Pink's Flower Market Quilt from her Eden collection. The pattern is a free one and is in the lookbook for Eden (it can be downloaded here). I naturally went with the amethyst (purple) colorway, but the quilt can be done in tourmaline (pink/orange) or sapphire (blue/green) too.

While there is a fair amount of cutting for this quilt, I think the finished result was totally worth it! I also used a little more fabric than the pattern called for since I fussy cut many of pieces. Another lady didn't fussy cut and had plenty of fabric.

In the Making still had more kits available in the three colorways if you want to make your own! My quilt top is currently still at the store if you want to see it in person. There is also a quilt top in tourmaline colorway to look at.

I have Tula Pink's freefall wide backing in purple to finish with, but I know that won't be for a little while!

1600 Inch Quilt Top / Jelly Roll Race Quilt Top

I have seen pictures of people's 1600 inch quilt tops before, so I decided I wanted to give this try. The 1600 inch quilt, or jelly roll race quilt, is a simple quilt top made from a single jelly roll (set of 40, 2.5" strips of fabric that are WOF long). There are many directions on how to make this online. Mine was done using the 45 degree join with removing 18 inches off of the first strip to offset the seams. You then sew both ends together and cut at the end a total of 5 times. I must say, that first strip you start with (it ends up being approximately 1600 inches long) is very unruly and tangled. I had my husband help me untangle it before I got started!

For my jelly roll, I used one containing Tula Pink's Spring 2016 line, called Chipper. Just looking around online, you can really see how different fabrics will give a completely different result!

This is a great beginner quilt top that produces a good size quilt. My quilt top finished out at 49.5 inches by 67 inches.

Made May 1-2, 2016.

The entire 1600 jelly roll quilt top!

Triangle Quilt - Part 3 finished quilt top

Note this post the third in a series on my triangle quilt project. Click to view Part 1 or Part 2.

I have finished the quilt top of the triangle quilt! I have never done triangles prior to this quilt, so this was truly a learning experience. I must say by the time I was halfway through piecing the rows, my triangle assembly was notably better with few errors. Sadly, this meant my errors in the early rows were now very obvious to me, and I ended up separating and redoing a lot of my early piecing.

I am just so happy to finally have the top pieced! It is now waiting to be assembled, but all my safety pins are currently tied up in other projects. This is probably a good thing since I have two quilts half quilted at home, and I really need to finish those before I start a third. They are just taking a little longer than I thought since I am trying to do free motion quilting on them. Keep a look out for a post on those in future!

I think when this is assembled, I will go with a nice simple straight line quilting method. This is the largest quilt top I have made to date, and I do not think my little sewing machine could do anything besides a straight stitch on a quilt this size.

I have some beautiful Tula Pink Free Fall wide backing in Lipstick for the backing of this quilt. A Tula Pink triangle quilt definitely needs Tula Pink backing!


Some production pictures are below. I hope you enjoy!

Triangles ready to be pressed

Pressing! I usually press to one side, but you could also press your seams open

Piecing at my machine

Checking my row layout

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!