Daisy Chain QAL {Progress Link Up}

Update 8/11/2020 -- This pattern is now available in our Etsy and Payhip shops. Please visit one of those sites to purchase the full pattern.

Are you excited to show off where you are so far with your Daisy Chain quilt?

Here's a collage of my units thus far for my twin-sized version in Island Batik fabrics:

Link up your blog posts or Instagram pictures below!

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Next week (not two weeks from now, NEXT week!) will be our first week of quilt top construction! You might have figured it out already, but maybe not!

Schedule
Fabric Requirements - February 4th
Cutting - February 18th
Block Units- March 4th
Block Units - March 18th
Block Units - April 1st
Block Units - April 15th
Catch up week link up - April 29th <--- That's today!
Top Construction Part 1 - May 6th
Top Construction Part 2 - May 20th
Link up/giveaways/quilt parade starts: June 3rd
Link up/giveaways/quilt parade ends: June 17th

Pink Stars {Ready, Set, Go! Challenge Quilt}

My black and white and pink all over baby quilt is now finished!

After the top was together, I decided at the last minute that I wanted to use some of the solid grey batik fabric as my backing instead of my normal flannel-for-baby-quilts MO. As an Island Batik Ambassador, I am provided with samples of various lines of Island Batik fabrics and Aurifil thread to use and share with you!

For the quilting, I use the same paisley floral motif that I recently used for my Bear Tracks baby quilt. I used white Aurifil thread and tried to keep my individual "flowers" about the size of an index card so that the quilting wouldn't be too dense.

I used black solid batik for the binding and used black thread to machine bind the quilt.

Now my challenge assignment is complete! Thank you as always to Island Batik for choosing me as ambassador and a really big thank you to Accuquilt for letting us play with your super fun machines! I will admit that I was skeptical of how much I would like using the Go! cutter and I really loving using it.

Quilt Stats:
Name: Pink Stars
Pattern: self-designed, based on classic quilt blocks
Size: 40" square
Fabrics: Island Batik basics and blenders
Quilting: paisley flowers in white Aurifil
Started: March 2019
Finished: April 2019

Sharing at Oh Scrap, Let's Bee Social, Wednesday Wait Loss, and Needle and Thread Thursday!

Come See Me LIVE! {Trunk Show + Classes}

I am over-the-moon excited to share that I (with help from my mom and sister, of course!) will be presenting Honey, Bunny, and Doll's *first ever* trunk show at this weekend's Friendship Star Quilters Fiber Arts and Quilt Show! This biannual show takes place at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds in Gaithersburg, MD and I will be presenting at noon on Saturday, April 27th!

I will be presenting a large trunk show of quilts featuring our Honey, Bunny, and Doll collection of patterns. Come see the original versions of many of our quilt patterns in person! (And bring a canned good to the show to get $1 off your entry fee!)

A huge, gigantic thank you to Capital Quilts in Gaithersburg, MD for sponsoring the trunk show! They will also be carrying some of our most popular patterns in their booth at the show, including some patterns that are in print form for the first time!

This is a fun lead-up to another fun announcement: I'm going to be teaching a class on our Ready, Set, Soar! pattern at Capital Quilts in August!

All of this is very exciting and a tiny bit overwhelming! If you are local, please consider coming out and checking out the quilt show and my talk! I would LOVE to meet my followers and fans in real life!

Come out, bring your friends, and pet these quilts in PERSON!

Radiant Jewel {Quilt Top}

My mom, sister, and I are doing our own "UFO of the month" challenge and this month's UFO is my Radiant Jewel quilt. I started this quilt in August of last year when I went to "Quilt Camp" and when I had last posted about this quilt in October, I had just finished all of the blocks for the center of the quilt.

I was very excited to pull this one back out and start working on putting the top together. I finally laid out all of the blocks for the quilt.

I had to make sure all of the four patches in the star blocks were arranged the same way AND to make sure that there wasn't too much of the same color touching itself in the intersections of the four patches and HSTs at the block corners. (There's one turned star in the picture above that I caught before I sewed the top together -- can you find it?)

For this quilt top, I used the webbing technique to put together the center of the quilt.

First, the blocks were sewn into rows and the rows were chained together.

I pressed towards my star blocks throughout to aid in nesting and block matching as I put the rows together. (So many pins!)

The pieced border has two different units -- the double four patches and then the four patch/HST units. I had made most of the small pieced four patches when I had made the star blocks, which also has four of the small four patch units, but I found that I needed to make a few extra. I also needed to make the HSTs for these block units as well; I used my Accuquilt to cut the background fabrics for these units.

Now this top is really finished!

While I'm a little disappointed that I didn't have enough fabrics to enlarge this quilt to a square (there would have likely been enough solids, but not enough of the prints in the kit) I do very much love this quilt!

I hope you and yours had a happy Easter!

Sharing at Let's Bee Social, Wednesday Wait Loss, and Needle and Thread Thursday!

Ready, Set, Go! {Last blocks and Quilt Top}

I've managed to finish up all 25 blocks for my Island Batik Ambassador challenge for this month!

For the last blocks, I needed to mix in a few more black fabrics, but I ended up using only two different pink fabrics for my blocks.

Here are the last of the blocks:

In the process of making all of the blocks, I made sure to press my blocks such that it would be very, very easy to nest seams in the blocks as I put the quilt top together.

Now my quilt is a lovely 40 inches square (as specified by our challenge requirements!) and ready to be quilted!

Getting some backing fabric for this quilt is on my next item of business and I have pink fabric set aside for binding too!

In keeping with the "pink" theme of this post, I also wanted to share a picture of the very lovely cherry tree in the front yard of our new house, all abloom:

Who says you have to go to DC to see good cherry blossoms?!? I don't think my tree is same varietal as the Japanese cherry trees in DC, but my tree was extremely lovely until a stupid rainstorm knocked off a good portion of the petals and I was happy that I took this picture the day before the rain moved in.

Happy Easter to all, I am going to be hosting a small troupe at our house on Sunday which will be a good mish-mash of our local friends and coworkers.

QST Factory {Scrappy Sewing}

Being sort-of caught up with my sewing commitments (but alas, way behind on my WIP/UFO progress), I had a little time to work on my Jingle Bell Square units and blocks. I shared about the start of this quilt a few weeks ago.

With each block requiring five QST units, I seem to have become a QST factory. I find that it's easiest to make a small batch of red blocks and then make a small batch of green blocks. One thing that I think I neglected to mention (but is easily seen in the finished quilt) is that when I am making the large QSTs, I'm saving half of them for the border.

I've been using my Accuquilt cutter to cut the parts for the center QST units, but I've been rotary cutting the rest of the block parts. It does take a while to trim down the small QSTs but I haven't had too many turn out wonky just yet.

For some reason, it makes the most sense in my mind to make sets of three blocks at a time. Three red finished blocks, three green finished blocks.

Now I have a total of 12 blocks (6 from previous, and 6 from this last week) -- this means I'm a hair under a quarter of the way done with my blocks!

In an effort to cull my thread collection slightly, I've been trying to use colored thread when I can in a lot of my projects. I have my spool of red and spool of dark green Aurifil at the ready for working on these blocks. I have been using a neutral color like cream, grey, or white in the bobbin so that I don't have to change the top thread AND the bobbin.

I'm temporarily at a stopping point with this quilt. I need to dig through some scrap piles and find a few additional "light" fabrics to mix in for my large QST units. I may have exhausted my supply of neutral Christmas and holiday fabrics already, but that's totally okay.

Sharing at Wait Loss Wednesday Let's Bee Social, and Needle and Thread Thursday! Also Oh Scrap!

Daisy Chain QAL {Unit D}

Update 8/11/2020 -- This pattern is now available in our Etsy and Payhip shops. Please visit one of those sites to purchase the full pattern.

Are you still stumped by what we've made thus far? Fair warning -- today's clue will probably confuse you more!

This week we are back to making four patches -- sort of. This week we are going to use our strips to make strip sets of 4 fabrics and cross cut them into linear four patches.

Here are the linear four patches from my baby sized quilt; I used the strip pieced stub left from Unit B and some of my shorter strips to make two different versions for variety. You can choose to make these all the same or all different -- do what works best with your fabrics! 

I used the scraps left from Unit B combined with two (2) full WOF strips from the strip pack to make the rest of the necessary linear four patches.

Here's my "two new" WOF strips added to the leftovers from one of my strip sets from Unit B.

I cut as many as I could cut from this 4-wide section and repeated with more Unit B scraps. I had a total of 5 different "patterns" of linear four patches for my twin sized quilt.

If you want to add additional variety to the quilt, you can add your background rectangle to either side of your linear four patch.

If you're planning to just use two or few fabrics for your linear four patches (or are using just a single strip set for the baby quilt) I would highly suggest using the above suggestion and making mirror image border chunks by adding the background rectangles to half of the linear four patches on one side and half on the other side.

Let's check in with some of our blogger guinea pigs -- I mean -- test sewers:

-- Stephanie's Halloween themed quilt is going to be adorable!
-- Christina has very scrappy units!
-- Gene is having fun making "planned random" units.
-- Kate is continuing to use her scrappy tan fabrics.
-- Gail is all caught up and trying to solve the mystery.

Please note that the schedule for the next few weeks is slightly different! In two weeks, on April 29th, we will have a link up to show off where we all are with our block units. The following week on May 6th will be our first top construction week. 

Schedule

Fabric Requirements - February 4th

Cutting - February 18th

Block Units- March 4th

Block Units - March 18th

Block Units - April 1st

Block Units - April 15th <--- That's today!

Catch up week link up - April 29th

Top Construction Part 1 - May 6th

Top Construction Part 2 - May 20th

Link up/giveaways/quilt parade starts: June 3rd

Link up/giveaways/quilt parade ends: June 17th

Drift Away {Finished Quilt}

Hip hip hooray -- an actual finish -- and one that I can cross off my embarrassingly long WIP list!

I started this quilt in June of last year and used Melissa Corry's Drift Away pattern. The intention was to cull some of my green, aqua, and blue scrap fabrics, many of which were leftover backing fabrics and medium-sized chunks of fabrics leftover from other quilts. This quilt did make a dent in my scraps and small cuts and as such, is full of favorite fabrics!

I had this quilt pantograph quilted in a simple loop-de-loop pattern, so that it stays a snuggly bed quilt. The quilting is done with black thread, which is extremely contrasting from the aqua dot backing, but black ultimately was the best choice for the front of the quilt.

I used the leftover backing fabric to bind this quilt by machine -- I only needed four binding strips since it was extra wide backing! I also had the perfect color of Aurifil to use for the top stitching too.

This quilt is earmarked as a gift for one of the many weddings that are tentatively on our calendar for later this year. That is, unless my husband decides we need to keep it. It *does* match our bedroom.

Quilt Stats:
Name: Scrappy Drift Away
Pattern: Drift Away by Melissa Corry, with borders added
Fabrics: Scraps for piecing, black Kona solid, and an older Cotton + Steel print for the border
Size: 90" square
Quilting: pantographed loops
Future: to be determined
Started: June 2018
Finished: April 2019

Sharing at Brag about your Beauties and Favorite Monthly Finish!

Ready, Set, Go! {More Blocks}

I've been working on some alternate blocks for my Ready, Set, Go! baby quilt challenge. I'm working on the "Mosaic" blocks this time around -- with a slightly modified color arrangement. 

Like before, the cutting for these blocks using the Accuquilt GO! cutter was fast! I like to keep the pieces stacked together in pairs and sets of four -- it makes it easier to keep track of the right side and wrong side of the batik fabrics.

For the Mosaic blocks, I'm using the pink Check it Out print and the black for these blocks is a snakeskin print! 

I made the flying geese first, then the square in a square blocks, and finally the half-square triangles.

One of my biggest struggles is making flying geese. I do better with the four-at-a-time method than the stitch and flip method, but I still sometimes have geese that end up a little wonky or have to make larger geese and trim them all down. All of my flying geese units made with the Accuquilt-cut units turned out nearly perfectly sized without having to trim. There will definitely be times where I'll choose this method over other flying geese methods going forward.

Bippity boppity boo -- eight perfect Mosaic blocks!

I interspersed these blocks with my previously made Depression blocks to see what my quilt will look like! I'm not planning to add sashing -- and I picked these blocks specifically for the secondary designs they create when paired -- can you see the broken dishes blocks that will appear in the intersections?

Now I have 14 finished blocks, and only 11 more to make! I'll need to make 6 additional Depression blocks and 5 additional Mosaic blocks. I have a few more black fabrics that will be mixed into my upcoming blocks but I believe I have enough of these two pink fabrics that I won't need to add in the third pink fabric that I set aside as a back up!

Sharing at Let's Bee Social!

Blocks and Bricks Quilt Top {Charity Sewing}

The second of my charity quilt tops is now finished. I showed off the first top made with the Jungle Cruise line a few weeks ago, and this quilt is made from the Bazaar line from Island Batik. All of these fabrics were given to me by Island Batik previously for blog hop projects and I cut all of the scraps for these charity quilts.

From these scraps, I cut 10.5" squares, 5.5" squares, and 10.5" x 5.5" rectangles, which was the most efficient use of the fabric I had leftover making my Dashing to the Chapel quilt. I pieced the small squares and rectangles together to make 10.5" squares. Here are the piles of squares and blocks stacked up prior to sewing the quilt top together.

I randomly placed the pieced blocks among the large squares.

I had another half yard of the same or similar peach that I used for the squares and rectangles, and so I decided to cut it into 2.25" strips and added a small border all the way around the quilt. The finished size of the quilt is now about 64" x 84".

Being able to make one twin-ish sized quilt AND one full-ish sized quilt out of leftover fabrics is a pretty great accomplishment! Just doing simple piecing for both was fun and fast -- a quick finish is so rewarding! I have a few backing cuts in my stash that I will need to pair with these two tops, but otherwise these are ready to be sent off for quilting!

If you haven't yet sent off a quilt top or quilt to support the Carolina Hurricane Quilt Project, please consider doing so! Thank you to Island Batik for being so generous to us ambassadors that I've been able to make two quilt tops so far for this project. I also used thread given to us from Aurifil over the last three Ambassador years to do all of the piecing for these quilts -- I used hot pink and gold thread to piece this top!

Sharing at Oh Scrap!

Ready, Set, Go! Challenge with Accuquilt and Island Batik {Baby Quilt Beginnings}

Being an Island Batik Ambassador for the last three years has been an amazing experience with some pretty nice perks (Fabric! Thread! Batting! Connections with new quilters!) and this year Accuquilt has graciously given us a Go! Fabric cutter starter kit (not an affiliate link). So this month, our challenge is to use our cutters and dies to make a baby quilt! 

One of my fellow Ambassadors, Connie, already posted her finished quilt, but her post has a great photo line up of all that came in our starter kits from Accuquilt.

Asking me to make a baby quilt is hardly an imposition for me, since I am *always* making baby quilts. Besides being useful, it's a great way to test out blocks and techniques on a smaller scale.

Since I already have two finished boy quilts ready for gifting, I decided I would make a more girly quilt for this challenge. This is the first time in a while where I don't have a list of baby quilts that I need to make or send -- and now that I've said/written this, it probably means that I'll hear about 3-6 imminent arrivals.

For my fabrics for this challenge, I decided to go with pink, black, and white. My white is the same sprinkles print that I used last month. The black prints are various black and grey prints pulled from my stash builder rolls. I have two different hot pink fabrics pulled -- a paisley print left from my Dashing to the Chapel quilt and some pink from the Check It Out collection.

One of the cool things that came with the starter set from Accuquilt is a Quilt In A Day book from Eleanor Burns, which features lots of classic quilt blocks and the dies you need for each one. I decided to pick two blocks from this book to make a two block quilt -- the blocks I picked are called Depression and Mosaic.

I actually started working on this in March -- I cut the pieces and parts for six Depression blocks to use as leader and ender sewing. This block uses the 4, 5, and 6 dies from the 8" Qube set to make the half square triangles, flying geese, and square in a square units.

I focused on doing each type of unit from start to finish for all six blocks instead of making just one block at a time.

Now I have six blocks completed out of a goal of 25 blocks.

Cutting has long been a favorite part of the quilting process for me, so I don't know if I could give traditional cutting up entirely, but I will say that so far, I really enjoy using the Go! Cutter for specific projects and sizes and that I need to play around more with the dies that I do have!