Vintage Reimagined {March IBA Challenge}

This month's Island Batik Ambassador theme is "Vintage Reimagined"!

Our task this month is to take inspiration from a vintage quilt to create something new! Last year, for this theme, I created this baby quilt inspired by a quilt at the Antietam Battlefield museum.

This year, I'm taking my inspiration from another quilt from a battlefield -- this time from Gettysburg! This quilt is in the collection at Gettysburg, but isn't typically out for display.

About this quilt, from the Gettysburg National Military Park collection:

"This thin top layer of a Civil War-era cotton quilt was given to young Helen Mills of Gettysburg by a Union soldier during the pursuit of General Lee’s army on July 5 or 6, 1863. Helen lived on a farm on the Taneytown Road south of Gettysburg. Citizens of Gettysburg and the surrounding community were literally inundated not only with the wounded after the battle, but the numerous articles of war that came with and were left by two massive armies."

Since I now live in Gettysburg, I thought this quilt was an excellent inspiration for this challenge. I decided to simplify the color scheme to white, blue, yellow, and orange. I really love this aqua-blue batik -- it reminds me of free motion quilting designs! As an Island Batik Ambassador, I am provided with samples of various lines of Island Batik fabrics to use and share with you!

The original quilt is made up of pinwheel blocks that alternate with a striped blue-and-white fabric, except on the right edge where it looks like they ran out of the striped fabric! Since I don't have any batik fabrics with a similar large stripe, I am going to make rail fence blocks with the white and blue fabrics to alternate with my yellow and orange pinwheel blocks.

While I've never seen this quilt in person, my estimation is that the blocks are somewhere between 4" and 6" finished in this quilt. I'm going to be making bigger blocks that are 8" finished for my quilt, so that I can use 2.5" strips for my rail fence "stripes" and 5" squares for my pinwheel HSTs.

With a half yard of the blue fabric, I should be able to make a 40" square baby quilt. If I'm able to squeeze out an extra block or two from my strip sets, I could enlarge the quilt to 40" by 48", but the goal is 40" square, which is my favorite size for baby quilts.

My next step is making my "striped fabric" strip sets and making half-square triangles for my pinwheel blocks!

Happy Wednesday! Sharing at Let's Bee Social and NTT!

Our Wedding Quilt -- One Year Late

In getting ready to post about Amanda and Mike's wedding quilt, I realized that I had never shared the quilt that Park Ranger Husband and I received as a wedding present made by my mom. I figured today was as good as any since it is our one year anniversary!

The backstory on this one isn't quite as elaborate because my mom was the only one involved in making this quilt rather than three of us. She did tell me that even before we got engaged she had decided that she wanted to make us a quilt for our wedding and that it should be a Civil War style quilt with Civil War fabrics because Park Ranger Husband is a Civil War historian.

(PS. I am SO happy I found this picture, because the other one I found was me holding it up with wet hair. Ew.)

The pattern for this quilt actually has some sort of floral motif in the center, but my mom decided to put a monogram there instead.

There are two of each little block (one on the outer ring and one in one of the inner rings) and every one is different! The entire quilt is hand quilted (you can see the cross hatch quilting in the medallion center) and my mom had to wait until after I came home for my cousin's wedding to put up the quilting frame to do the hand quilting. She had about 5 weeks to get the whole thing done and my dad says she disappeared every night to work on it.

So happy anniversary to us (we are going to VA to learn history and drink wine for three days! YAY!) and happy quilting to you!

Don't forget to sign up to participate in the Stash Bee for 2015!!

Finished Civil War Quilt

After starting this quilt in December 2011 (yes, really it was that long ago!) I am so happy to say that this baby is DONE!

Here is the back that I trimmed all of the leftover threads from. I missed a few and had to do a couple outside before taking the pictures while my neighbors were out walking their dogs.

Close up of the quilting....

Closer up view of the quilting...

This quilt, as many know, is a gift to my fiance who is a seasonal park ranger with the National Parks Service at Antietam and Gettysburg. Except that now that we're getting married in 4 months (4 MONTHS!) I am just going to hang onto it and use it myself because he doesn't have room to store it right now. He can use it when he comes to visit.

Linking up with A Lovely Year of Finishes for May and Crazy Mom Quilts!!

WIP Wednesday: I'm still here!

So where exactly did the last two weeks go? Between a big presentation for school and a whirlwind trip to Georgia for a college friend's wedding, I got pretty close to zero sewing done.

I did finally finish the hand quilting on Park Ranger Fiance's Civil War quilt! And I'm halfway done with sewing the binding on!

I decided to go with bias binding for this queen sized monstrosity so I got that all made up last night before I went to bed. Of course I didn't have enough fabric to make continuous bias binding from just one square, so I made two squares as big as I could and made two sections of bias binding that I sewed together.

In looking at how much is left after I sewed the second corner, I might be cutting it REALLY close. Yikes. I have a little bit of this fabric left, but not enough to really make more bias out of, so prayers for not running out of binding on this one would be appreciated.

Sharing at Freshly Pieced!

May Lovely Year Of Finishes Goal

This month, I am really going to finish Park Ranger Fiance's Civil War quilt.

I have almost all of the hand quilting of the blocks done and then just have to do the outer border in some simple fashion.

I. Will. Get. It. Done.

Also because now that we're engaged its going to be MY quilt too, as of October 12th. :)

Linking up with A Lovely Year of Finishes!

Seriously, I'm still here.

Remember me? I'm still living in my black hole of hand quilting, people. Blerg.

I have one and three quarter rows left to go. The goal of finishing this one by the end of January...maybe not gonna happen. Unless I don't do any borders and don't sleep or go to work the next two days. 

I now totally understand old fashioned quilting bees.

One slight distraction was Park Ranger Boyfriend being in town to take me to see Miranda Lambert and Dierks Bentley in concert and going to Valley Forge this weekend. No sewing, but an amazing time was had by all. Here I am at the Valley Forge visitor center:

Hope you're doing better with your goals than me!

UPDATE: Guess what! I won a copy of Modern Quilts From The Blogging Universe from Twin Fibers!

That makes my day so awesome! Now, to hand quilt!

Hand Quilting Black Hole

I am currently living in what I will call "the hand quilting black hole."

I picked hand quilting and finishing Park Ranger Boyfriend's Civil War quilt as my January goal for the Lovely Year of Finishes and that might have been a wee bit over ambitious. Blerg.

So that's basically all that I've been working on the last week or so.

Thus far the quilting is done for three and a half rows of the blocks in the center.

The quilting is going well....just very, very slowly.

Check out what everyone else has been working on at WIP Wednesday and the Lovely Year of Finishes mid-month check in!

Lovely Year of Finishes: January Goal

Shanna of Fiber of All Sorts and Melissa of Sew Bittersweet Designs are hosting "A Lovely Year of Finishes" as a way to take those WIPs to finished projects in bite sized chunks -- one project per month! I'm at the WIP stage for too many projects for a girl in grad school. Find out more about this event here!

My January finish goal is to finish Park Ranger Boyfriend's Civil War Quilt.

This one is currently in the "hand quilting" stage. I'm just hand quilting the sashings and borders (or that's the current plan...) and I have 1.5 of 8 rows finished. I had really wanted to get this one done for Christmas but that did NOT happen. (I'll update the pictures once I get my camera cord back!)

This is kind of an ambitious goal, but I really want to get this one done! I also have to figure out how I want to do the borders, but that's a concern for another day!

Linking up for January and check out what everyone else is up to!

WIP Wednesday: More Slow Progress

With Park Ranger Boyfriend here last week and my parents here this past weekend, not a whole lot of sewing has gotten done with the exception of a significant amount of hand quilting on Park Ranger Boyfriend's Civil War quilt. Almost a whole row across is done!

7 more rows and the borders to go...

I've also been working on a test pattern for a friend...don't want to give it away, but here is some of my progress so far:

And finally, I'm on the search for some wood grain fabric to finish up the Harry Potter quilt for my sister. If anyone could help point me in the right direction that would be fantastical!

Don't forget to enter to win my Quilting Gallery blog hop giveaway!

Linking up with:

 

WIP Wednesday: Stitch by Stitch

I have not been very productive as of late, which is rather depressing. I did hem a pair of pants for a lab mate, but even that was done somewhat jank-ily.

The one thing that I have been working on (finally!) is the hand quilting on Park Ranger Boyfriend's Civil War quilt. It's going slowly, because there really isn't another way to hand quilt, is there? Maybe its just me?

Either way, slow progress is better than zero progress. I made up this handy dandy little picture-tracker-thingy in MS Powerpoint to show what I've gotten done. I'm very proud of myself. Until I realize how little I have done at this point. Yikes.

And in other news, less than one week until I get to go to see Park Ranger Boyfriend and from there GO HOME!!! Hoooooooooray. This girl needs a break.

Linking up with WIP Wednesday at Freshly Pieced!

Just Keep Stitching

On Friday I received the fabric that I won from The Quilting Lodge and now I can't wait to find a pattern to use it with!

Yesterday, after feeling icky and watching Scrubs all afternoon, I took the plunge and started the hand quilting on Park Ranger Boyfriend's Civil War quilt:

I'm going to try to stitch on it at least a half hour every day so I can actually get it done before Christmas!

Here's to a few more hours of weekend left!

WIP Wednesday: Layering

I decided that I am going to use the Olympic Rail Fence quilt top from over the summer for my friend's new little guy. I pieced together some lovely fluffy batting for this one and am going to be looking for some green and white flannel for the backing.

Since that project is on hold until I get to JoAnn, I decided that I should also layer the Civil War Quilt so that Park Ranger Boyfriend eventually gets this quilt before he decides that he wants to study youth culture in the late 1970s instead. (Which won't happen, but I digress)

In doing so, I realized that while my living room is juuuuust big enough to layer and baste a queen sized quilt, it is difficult to do so alone.

Here is my pile of batting where I almost gave up:

Then my dirty dishes and my laptop got used to their full potential:

And finally, I unfolded the quilt ever so carefully.

I was really happy to have this extra batting chillin' in my closet. I didn't even realize how BIG this quilt was until I realized that it covers a LOT more of the queen size batting than I ever thought it would.

Now I need to add off-white hand quilting thread to my shopping list too.

Check out what everyone is up to today at WIP Wednesday:

 

Conquering the Rebels

Well, no actual rebels were conquered this weekend, but I did finish putting together the top of Park Ranger Boyfriend's Civil War Quilt.

The blue sashing and border fabrics are all from Barbara Brackman's 1862 Battle Hymn line, and the cream and red floral sprig print on the inner border is from an older Civil War collection not by Barbara Brackman that I temporarily borrowed from my mom's stash.

So now this baby needs quilted and bound. I am very inclined to hand quilt it but let's remember that my first quilt still isn't finished 8 years later because the hand quilting isn't done. But I really like (love) Park Ranger Boyfriend, so we might do it anyways. He very nicely asked if it would be done by the time he is done working at the park for the season and back at home working on a book for the winter. I can totally picture him reading history books over the winter with this thing.

Have you ever undertaken a time-consuming/difficult project for someone you love???

What You See

I've been working on putting together my Civil War quilt blocks into rows now that I have my sashing fabric (again!). As of last night I had gotten four rows done...four rows to go!

And as I was sewing my eyes went from this:

...to this.

And I had to have a laugh about it.

Happy Friday!

WIP Wednesday: Back in Gear

Over the weekend, I got the yard of fabric that I needed to finish the sashings for Park Ranger Boyfriend's Civil War quilt. Last night I sewed all of the sashing pieces onto the blocks except for the the left edge. Tonight I'm going to start working on the last part of the sashing and sewing things into rows.

I also got another New York Beauty block done on Monday:

I also took MAJOR advantage of the $3.95 cotton sale at Fabric.com and ordered some more peaches, brown, and teal to match the colors in my New York Beauty blocks. And some other things too, of course.

What are your WIPs today?

Civil War Blocks 50-53

50. Grapes of Wrath

I like the ones that have purple in the a lot.

51. New York

52. Christmas Star

53. Union Shield

...and here are all of the blocks!

I need to make a few more to get to a "square" or "rectangular" quilt top and then I need to figure out how to sash this thing. But it's a good feeling to have all of this done and to have bought very little fabric for this project! Hooray!

Happy Saturday!