Blogger's Quilt Festival 2018 {30 Pearls Quilt}

It's a good week to be a quilter -- it's time for the Blogger's Quilt Festival, hosted by Amy's Creative Side!

For this year's edition of the festival, I decided to enter my 30 Pearls quilt.

This quilt is my own original design and was my Island Batik Ambassador project for June, which was our "modern" themed month.

When I was thinking about designing this quilt, I took my inspiration from the fact that I was coming up on my 30th birthday. I decided that I wanted something with 30 simple blocks and it seemed the natural choice to do drunkard's path blocks since my birthstone is pearl.

This was my original design that I mocked up using a few of the fabrics I planned to use. The fabrics for this came from Island Batik's Sunflower Serenade line and used only the pink, red, and purple fabrics.

 I used a set of drunkard's path templates I had from a previous project and the blocks and quilt top came together with ease.

The backing is an extreme contrast from the front -- it's lime green with slice and insert strips of rainbow fabrics added to make the backing big enough.

For the quilting, I quilted pebbles in white Aurifil in each of the white pearls. For each of the print arches or squares, I used a different free motion quilting motif inspired by Leah Day's quilting design gallery. I used 56 different free motion fillers and used five different colors of pink, red, purple, and orange thread.

This quilt now hangs above my sewing machine in my little corner of our guest room. 

This quilt is not larger (42 inches square) but I see it as something I am hugely proud of with how much I worked on the free motion quilting. 

Thanks for visiting me -- and go to visit all of the other lovely bloggers too! 

Previous posts on this quilt:
Introduction Post
Quilt Top Post
Finished Quilt Post

Blogger's Quilt Festival 2017 {Entry #2: Mystical Mermaid}

I am so excited that the Blogger's Quilt Festival is BACK and back in its original form! Please visit Amy's Creative Side to see all of the entries (all in one place!)

For my second entry, I decided to share my Mystical Mermaid quilt. This year I am an Island Batik Ambassador and this project was made as one of my monthly themed projects. April was our month for an applique project and I decided on making a baby quilt with a mermaid outline for a coworker's new baby.

I decided on using our Ready, Set, Soar! pattern and to create my own mermaid applique pattern from clip art. (Details here!) The base fabrics were ones that I chose that fit my "under the sea" theme -- including some prints with shells!

For the machine applique, I used a small blanket stitch around my mermaid. I will say that this is the most detailed machine applique project I have done to date -- I have done quite a bit of machine applique in other projects but I really had to slow down and adjust my piece more frequently than in the past due to all of the detail in the mermaid. I think a smaller stitch length helped maintain the level of detail, but it did take much more time. The result is beautiful, so I will say it was time well invested!

For the backing I used a batik from my stash that is mainly navy with rainbow accents. I quilted this all in one day -- the off-white section is a bubble meander, and the stripe sections are a clamshell, or really, mermaid tail scales! For the quilting, I did the off white section first, and then did the clamshell quilting.

I bound this with the same navy + rainbow batik as the backing! Hello, Ariel!

This picture shows off both the clamshell quilting (which is far from perfect) and the backing. The backing is a little more "rainbow" than the main fabrics of the quilt, but the mainly dark backing is what I wanted for this quilt.

Another close up of my clamshell quilting -- I used the strip seams as my guides and marked lines perpendicular to keep my clams a consistent height.

#gratuitousbindingshot

My Disney-loving coworker absolutely loved the quilt for her little girl! I am anxiously waiting for a picture of the new Little Miss with her quilt!

Quilt Stats:
Pattern: Ready, Set, Soar! by HBD Designs
Size: 40 x 50 inches (slightly longer than the original pattern)
Fabrics: Various Island Batik fabrics for quilt top, Kona Navy for Mermaid
Quilting: meander around mermaid, clamshells in striped sections
Techniques: Machine applique, fusible applique, free motion quilting
Started: February 2017
Finished: April 2017

Thanks for stopping by and reading about my quilts! Don't forget to visit the Blogger's Quilt Festival for all of the lovely quilts! You can visit my first entry here!

Blogger's Quilt Festival 2017 {Entry #1: Clover Sunshine Sampler}

I am so excited that the Blogger's Quilt Festival is BACK and back in its original form! Please visit Amy's Creative Side to see all of the entries (all in one place!)

For my first entry, I decided to share my Clover Sunshine Sampler quilt. This was sitting as a WIP on a shelf for a very, very long time and I finally buckled down and got it quilted in June of this year.

As indicated by the name, all of the prints used in this quilt are from a fat eighth bundle of Alison Glass's Clover Sunshine line. Most of the blocks used in this quilt were featured as tutorials on my blog during a quilt along in Summer 2014. 

You can read a little bit about my process of starting to quilt this quilt here, and quilting this baby in the way that I envisioned took a lot of patience and quilt wrangling. The further I moved out from the center, the easier and easier quilting this quilt became as far as moving the quilt. It is about 70 inches square -- so a rather large throw -- so working on the center blocks was rather difficult. Finally getting to the edges was cause for celebration!

I didn't count the rings or sew my spirals to a particular width or size -- I mostly just kept continuing the spiral until it filled in the "nooks" left by my previous spirals. The spirals don't equally overlap because the blocks are not perfectly arrayed in the quilt. I also had to add in a few "tiny spirals" along the edges to fill in some open spaces as well, as you can see in the pictures above and below. This quilt had the most threads to bury of any quilt I have quilted to date.

Here's a picture of the backing (major kudos to Park Ranger Husband for being willing to put shoes on to help me take these pictures):

My diagonal strips all go in the same direction and almost nearly match at the seams! It has a beautiful texture. I added in the pink half yard of Summersault from my stash since my quilt math was ever so slightly off on the small side when I ordered my backing fabric. Whoops.

For the binding, I had just enough of my white backing fabric! It has a different sort of look having a lighter binding with a slightly darker quilt. I sewed the binding by machine to the front and hand stitched it to the backing.

Quilt Stats:
Name: Clover Sunshine Sampler (click here for more posts)
Fabrics: Clover Sunshine by Alison Glass, Champagne Kona used for background
Size: 70 inches square
Quilting: One extra large spiral per block, overlapping (with a few extra arches near the edges!)
Started: Spring 2014
Finished: June 2017

Thanks for stopping by and reading about my quilts! Don't forget to visit the Blogger's Quilt Festival for all of the lovely quilts! You can visit my second entry here!

Candy Shop {Large Quilt -- Blogger's Quilt Festival 2016}

It's that time of the year again!

I'm excited to share my entry into the large quilt category for the 2016 Blogger's Quilt Festival -- Candy Shop!

This quilt might look familiar because it was featured on Moda Bake Shop this summer! You can still get the free tutorial there.

When I started designing this quilt, I was thinking a lot about using blocks in a quilt that weren't square and putting blocks in columns offset rather than putting things into a grid. I started playing around with different log cabin blocks to see if I could get them to "swirl" and Candy Shop was born!

I quilted this quilt with a directional layered meander that reminds me of waves. Something simple as not to distract from how adorable this quilt is.

This quilt uses the Wing and Leaf line from Moda and I used an icy blue background so that the white fabrics would pop! I'm a firm believer that orange is an under-used and under-appreciated color, and that's why I picked the orange feather print for my backing. :)

This quilt is a rather large throw at 68 x 78. It is currently at the Frederick County Fair and I will be going tonight to see if it has won any ribbons!

Quilt Stats

Name: Candy Shop

Fabric: Wing and Leaf Jelly Roll, Moda Bella Frost Solid

Size 68x78 inches

Quilting: layered directional meander in white thread

Check out all of the other quilts in the large category here, and the rest of the Blogger's Quilt Festival here!

Blogger's Quilt Festival: Original Design Category Frame of Mind

I'm excited to enter my Frame of Mind Quilt as my entry into the Fall 2015 Blogger's Quilt Festival!

This quilt is very special to me because it was my first pattern for Moda Bake Shop and it is the largest quilt that I have quilted on my machine to date!

The quilt blocks are all the same pattern, but put together two different ways to get the puzzle/maze effect between the white background and the main fabrics.

For the quilting, I did a chrysanthemum type motif where the center of each flower started with a swirl, and then I quilted layers of petals around the swirl. In the top picture, it almost looks like large pebbles but in the closer up pictures below, you can pick out the flowers.

 

For those of you visiting for the first time, I do actually have a "little bunny" named Clara that is my quilt inspector. She was heavily involved in the making of this quilt. We luckily did not have a repeat of the incident where she tried to steal a charm square out of my scrap bin.

This was a whirlwind of a quilt start to finish but I couldn't be happier with it and every time I use it, it cheers me up!

(Thanks to my mom for helping me take a lot of these pictures!)

Stats:
Name: Frame of Mind
Pattern: Frame of Mind (by me!) on Moda Bake Shop
Block Size: 12.5" finished
Quilt Size: 75 inches square
Fabrics Used: Good Karma by  Stephanie Ryan
Quilting: Chrysanthemums done on home machine
BQF Category: Original Design

Thanks so much for visiting and don't forget to check out all of the other quilts in the Blogger's Quilt Festival!

Lazy Sundays Quilt -- Blogger's Quilt Festival

I really need to keep better track of my projects' statuses because this baby has been sitting quilted for months in our apartment and it only needed the binding put on it! Embarassing! Based on the last time I posted about this quilt, it looks like I finished the quilt last January, sent it to the long arm quilter with my mom one of the times she visited in May or June last year, and she brought it back to me when she came in November for Thanksgiving and has been sitting in my sewing space just waiting for me since then. Alison, get your life together!

I'm also sharing this quilt as a part of the spring Blogger's Quilt Festival in the Large Quilt Category!

Anyways, while my mom was here visiting, I was able to get this baby bound and put on our bed! Without further ado...

This quilt came from one of Bonnie Hunter's mystery quilts in Quiltmaker magazine with some modifications. This was a twin sized pattern and I added extra wide borders on two sides to make it more square for a queen sized bed. Here are all of the previous posts on this quilt.

100% of the fabric used for piecing the blocks came from my stash! The periwinkle print is Basic Grey but I couldn't tell you the line, the pink print is from the Somersault line, and the peach background is from the City Girl line. The rest I have no idea! Everything was pulled to work with the periwinkle print which I had three yards of!

The binding is a smaller scale flora Moda print (don't know the line off the top of my head) that I had originally bought as a backing for another quilt but wasn't big enough for that project. This is the first large quilt that I've bound completely by machine! The last large quilt I finished was my argyle quilt, but I hand finished the binding for that one.

The quilting is a scroll-type pantograph design that is called "fleur de lis" -- to me it doesn't look like a fleur de lis but whatever. It looks like curly clouds to me. The backing is extra wide off white backing fabric and hopefully you can see the quilting a little clearer on the back than on the front.

This quilt has already taken up residence on my bed! It's a good feeling to make a "stash quilt" where the only things specifically purchased for this project were the batting and the backing!

Stats:
Name: Lazy Sunday
Size: 95 inches square
Fabrics: noted above, all from my stash other than the backing
Quilting: pantograph fleur de lis
Started: August 2013
Finished: May 2015
Category: Large Quilts

Linking up with Crazy Mom Quilts for Finish it up Friday! Don't forget to enter the Burlap Brights giveaway here!

PS. Please check out the QAL that I am currently hosting -- making a mystery row quilt!