Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Clipper Wind

My long-time friend Judy and her hubby live in North Vancouver.  We stay with them from time to time if we are out that way.  Judy's favourite colour is blue and she has a lot of it in her home.  Greg loves boats.  I've had the marine themed fabric for a few years with them in mind.  Then when I was at the Calgary Creative Stitches show in the fall I spotted the panel of ship drawings.  I thought "perfect - it will go with the fabric I have".  And it does.  Perfectly!  So I dug up a few more darker blue shades - some Tula Pink and some batik and voila!  Enough for a quilt.  


I wanted "simple" but also something that would suggest movement and boating.  I did a bit of Googling and came upon a little HST quilt, which gave me the idea for this one.  The triangles are like sails - they are all "moving" in the same wind direction.  I drafted it in EQ8 and I was off to the boat races!  😎😎


The prints have whales, gulls and tall ships.  I thought of calling the quilt Nantucket, but then that conjures up images of whaling, which is rather grim.  So I did some more Googling - I'm not familiar with boat types other than the well known ones like schooners and tall ships (which I think is a catch all for the tall-masted ships of days gone by).  Then I came upon "clipper" - a speedy schooner type boat.  I also know there are "clipper winds" - so that's what I decided to name my quilt: Clipper Wind.



I will gift this to Judy and Greg the next time we see them.


Mystery Quilt

We are always learning something, right?  Well...  a few years ago I did a "Mystery Quilt" class with a couple of friends.  They'd done a few and "loved" them.  So I thought - just for fun - why not?  Well I did have a fun day with my friends - but never liked the quilt top I ended up with.  It is just not a quilt that I would choose to make.  I used fabric that I actually do like - some Laurel Burch horses in a quilt that - well, I don't like so much.  

I learned that I absolutely need to know what I'm going to be making.  No more "mystery quilts" for me!

As a result of me not liking it so much it's been languishing at the bottom of my "to be quilted" box for a few years.  I figured it was time to get the darn thing finished.  I present to you - my "Mystery Quilt".




Monday, November 5, 2018

Lori's T-shirt Quilt


Lori asked me to make a T-shirt quilt for her 18 year old daughter.  She brought me a couple of bags full of Daughter's T-shirts from when she was a little girl to now.  There were too many to use, but I managed to fit about 50 into the quilt.  There wasn't too much space left over for "fillers"!  I believe it is to be a Christmas gift.











Thursday, November 1, 2018

Mr. Chillingsworth!


Here is Mr. Chillingsworth.  I picked up the panel and a bunch of coordinating fabric back in 2015 when we were on our little road trip visiting some rural Alberta quilt shops.  And I added some "steam punkish" fabric that I have been collecting here and there.  And some bats.  I drafted the pattern but the general idea came from a free online pattern so I can't claim that I designed the quilt.  It's just blocks with 1" black sashing.  But I like it.  I made the top a couple of weeks ago at a retreat with friends, then finished quilting it a couple of days ago. I'm really happy with how it turned out.  I hung it up in the front entry last night for Halloween.


Here he is, locked and loaded on the frame.  As I usually do, I first stitched the ditch around all the blocks.  With this one, I used black Decobob thread.  I also outlined the black on Mr. C and the printed spiderweb.




Now we're into the regular quilting.  I wanted to do something in the black sashing.  I often just leave sashing unquilted when it is this skinny, but here I thought it wold be interesting to use a contrasting colour and do something a bit fancy to give it a steampunk feel (Victorian).  Now that I have ALL the Glide colours, I had plenty to choose from!  I chose "wheat", which was the closest I could find to Mr. C's background.  Then I used a nice little curly design (#89) from Tracy Russel's Freemotion Quilting 101 book.  And I did spider webs in the black cornerstones.  I am super happy with the way it turned out!

From there, I went on to quilt all the blocks.  Because they are all prints, I didn't want to spend a lot of time on them - can you actually see the quilting?  No - just texture.  I used all Glide thread - only a few colours - a couple of greys, black and wheat. Oh - and I did the stripes at the same time as I did the ditching so they are done with Decobob black - just a line down every other black stripe.









Friday, August 31, 2018

Terrace


This is Terrace, a free pattern by Violet Craft on the Robert Kaufman site.  Some members of the Calgary Modern Quilt guild decided to make this quilt to 1) practice sewing curves and 2) to do a group entry into Calgary's 2019 Heritage Park Festival of Quilts.

Oddly, I made this quilt virtually exactly as the pattern - even the colours are virtually the same.  That was because one of our LQS had a very good sale on solids and I figured, why not?  Because it is a modern quilt, I decided to quilt it mostly with rulers to maintain the geometric essence of the quilt.  













Thursday, August 30, 2018

Jazz Hound and Lava Lamp

I usually start off with the finished quilt but in this post wanted to show how I quilted two quilts with one load (for beginner quilters - I know the more experienced quilters will have this well in hand).


I had a piece of wide backing - but it still wouldn't be wide enough for two quilts both about 5' wide so I added another 18" or so on to one end (it's what I had left) - more would have been better so I stitched my leader on to the top end so I could start about an inch down from the top of the backing.  Above is the hounds-tooth quilt finished to the bottom of the quilt.


Instead of taking the finished quilt off the frame, I loaded the second quilt - about an inch below the first quilt.


Then I just kept on quilting until I finished the second quilt and took both quilts off the frame, trimmed, bound (machine bound! something I don't usually do - but for these ones, I didn't want to spend a lot of time - wanted to get them done!) and labeled - done!  Yay!



I started this one as a class demo.  I'm in a UFO finishing frenzy so finished piecing it a few weeks ago and put it in the "to be quilted box".  I grabbed it a few days ago to quilt.  I'm calling it Jazz Hound. 


It's quilted with straight lines spaced at 1/2".  I didn't mark, just used the markings on my ruler.  Horizontal in one set of blocks, vertical in the other - white or coloured depending on the viewing direction.



This is the second quilt - I'm calling it Lava Lamp.  It's a pattern called Whisper by Toby Lischko.  I had a lot of fabric left from the Bethlehem Star quilt I made a couple of weeks ago so wanted to use it up.  This was my attempt at that - but I still have a fair bit of it left!  I'll have to think of something else.  😎


I didn't want to spend a lot of time on this one but I did want the wavy shapes to be emphasized.  I stitched the ditch between the "white" and coloured fabrics.  Then in the "white", I did wavy lines at about 1/2" intervals - maybe a bit more.  Then in the coloured parts I did very large pebbles - sort of like lava lamp bubbles.  😎  Piano key lines in the border.  Nothing measured - I just stitched in the stripes.


For both quilts I used yellow Masterquilter thread by Wonderfil.  I haven't used Masterquilter much because I have tons of Glide but since both of these will be gifted as "utility" quilts, I thought it was a good opportunity to try out this thread.  It runs well in my machine so I would give it a thumbs up.  The thing about Masterquilter is that there is a limited number of colours and it's a matte finish.  Neither of these things is a problem as long as you can find a colour that works and don't mind the matte finish.  I like Glide because it has a shiny finish, but that's just my personal preference.  And there are many more colours to choose from.



Saturday, August 25, 2018

Art Deco Meets Dapper


Another Art Deco quilt.  This one features Moda's Dapper fabric designed by Luke Haynes.  Joe and I went on a little road trip to do some birding (Joe) and explore some country quilt stores (me).  We stopped in at The What Not Shop in Forestberg,  Alberta.  This is one of those charming quilt shops that is in the basement of the owner's home.  June was there and I really enjoyed chatting with her.  Her store is amazing - tons of really great fabrics.  I bought some Tula Pink and this Dapper fabric (and I think one or two others!).  I needed to make another sample for Art Deco and Dapper seemed like a  perfect choice!   June has asked me to teach Art Deco on Sep 29 in her store so if you're in the area and want a fun day - please join us!!!!



It doesn't show in the pix, but the blue is actually metallic so sparkles in the right light.  Obviously this is not the right light!





I've used the same quilting on each of the three Art Deco quilts I've done.  So it is repeatable - the diagram is in the pattern and there is a tutorial with pix on the Art Deco page (tab at top of this page).  However, on this one, I forgot to "frame" the large motifs in the corners.  I noticed this after I had the first quadrant all done but at that point I wasn't going to rip it all out - so, they all went in with no framing.  I like it better with the framing as the motif pops.  Here, not so much, even though I did the motif in a different colour thread (neon blue Fabulux).