Thursday, November 25, 2010

Another quilt done! Title: Hearts Together

It's done! Yes, it took way longer than it should. All quilts seem to do that for me. I guess I just have too many other things I want or need to do.


Since the front of the quilt was so plain I decided to jazz it up with an interesting print on the back. 

Yes, the quilting is all done big stitch.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Stencils

I ordered some new quilting stencils.
This is "Simple Flower" Circa 1850. It fits an  8 inches block.
Price is $3.35

Next is "Sunwheel" it comes in both 7" and 9". I can't wait to quilt this design. In fact, I have just redesigned the scrap log cabin blocks quilt I am making. I think now I will made every other block a solid one and use this design for quilting in the plain blocks.
Price is $3.00 and $3.75.

Saturday, November 13, 2010

My next big hexagon quilt.

I have to tell you, when I got done with my Grandmother's Flower Garden hexagon quilt I was at a loss as to what project to have in my traveling hexagon box. Not to mention, what project to work on at home in the evenings watching TV. Well, after a couple of days of sitting around twiddling my thumbs, I decided to dig out an old project and make it work.


What I found, while digging around, were 17 diamond shapes that I had made sometime between the years 1997 and 2002. Each diamond has three small flowers with a solid yellow center. The center flower is surrounded with a white print and a neutral finishes off the diamond. Next question to ask myself was, do I have any of the white fabric? I thought I had but, where! Good news, I found the white, almost a whole bolt of it. Considering it was bought before I opened the shop I have wondered where I got it.

While looking for the diamonds I found a cigar box with precut squares in groups of six for the flowers. It's nice to have a head start with the flowers. Then I started wondering if I still had the soft yellow for the centers. The first thing I found was a small piece that would cut about 100 squares. Not enought! Last night I just happened to glance in the fabric stash cupboards and guess what I saw, yup, a great big hunk of the yellow. One more ingredient ready to go.

 

 Then it was on to the neutrals. My original plan was to have each hexagon using a different neutral. This must have been on my mind when I've gone shop hopping with friends. I found a bunch of  fat quarters in the cupboard, also. Add to that a group of 2-1/2" strips of neutrals from Blank Quilting and the 2-1/2" strips that I received in an exchange with the Mississippi Valley Quilters Guild, that will give me a very good start. In fact, I think I will have enough
.

 So now we come to the design. My original idea was to lay them next to each other. I laid out the 17 finished blocks and said, "No, I didn't like that." Then I laid them out another way, I didn't like that either.


Then I thouht about laying them out and putting a new diamond between them. That appealed to me so I went into my EQ7 and came up with the new idea. 


I like this a lot. The new diamonds will have only two flowers but I will be adding three green leaves. The green will be all the same fabric. The neutral border will be made scrappy using all of the neutrals. This will be a combination of planned and scrappy. Always my favorite. 

This is 1/4 of the quilt. I was too lazy to color a whole quilt!

Saturday, November 6, 2010

Shade Cascade quilt


I decided to show you my current quilting project.

Shade Cascade was a collection from Blank Quiting. I loved it and sold a bunch in the shop. It consisted of four shades of a one color on each bolt. Finally, Blank Quilting told me they were out of the fabric and would not be reprinting it any more. With only a few bolts left, I decided to see what I could come up with using the end of brown bolt. I ended up with a rail fence block. I used the lightest and darkest shades for the outside rails. I used the light-medium shade for the centers of half the blocks and the dark-medium for the other half of the blocks. Then, when I laid them out all the horizontal blocks had the lighter fabric centers and the vertical blocks had the darker fabric centers. What I like best is the larger area in the center of the block for some nice quilting.


A closer look.
Please note: The blue that is showing is the blue water soluable pen I used for marking. It will soon be washed out.
And, of course, I hand quilted it using the "Big Stitch" and Presencia's Size 12 Perle Cotton.


Since I did not have enough of the fabric to make the quilt as long as I wanted. I added a 2nd & 3rd border to the top and bottom. (The white is batting since I have not finished the quilting yet.)