Today is Giveaway Day!

In case you haven't noticed from the million blog posts out there, today Sew, Mama Sew! is hosting a "Giveaway Day" where just about every blogger out there is linking up their giveaways to a single location.  There's about 300 separate giveaways going on, so hop over there and start exploring some new blogs!

Bloggers Quilt Festival

A few blogs I follow are participating in Amy's Blogger's Quilt Festival so I thought I would join in as well.

Looking through my past quilts brought up a lot of memories!  Each quilt truly has it's own story.  And even though I've been quilting for a long (longer than many people in my new quilt guild!) I am the slow and steady type, so I don't have a massive quilt repertoire.  

I decided to share a quilt that I made in high school, around 2005 or 2006.  This quilt is a modified lone star that was paper pieced.  The pattern was from a book but unfortunately I can't remember the name and the book is at my parents' house. Edit: figured out the book title! Split-Diamond Dazzlers.

This quilt is very special to me because it was the first quilt where I really owned it from start to finish, with minimal help from my mom or others.  Quilts I had made before this were ones that my mom had helped a lot with.  The quilt directly before this one, in my early high school years, I made independently but it was a BOM so I didn't pick the fabrics or do much of the heavy lifting.

For this lone star, I picked the pattern, picked all of the fabrics, did all of the cutting and piecing by myself, and then hand quilted the whole thing.  I learned a bit about colors when making this quilt.  I started out with a lovely pink fabric, accentuated it with purples, then decided to throw in some yellow.  But I really should have looked carefully at the pattern first, because the yellow ended up being really dominant. After I made the star and border, I spent a verrrry long time at the quilt store trying to find a background color to tie the whole thing together and tone the yellow way down.  The blue I ended up was certainly not the firs thing my mind would have gone to for a background, but I think it really worked and makes the main design pop.

Unfortunately this quilt is also back home at my parents' house, so I don't have any good close-ups of the quilting.  But I did echo quilting around every seam in the star, then quilted stars all over the blue background.  Because I lived in Alaska, I put polar fleece on the back for super warmth and increased snuggle factor.  :)

This quilt won honorable mention at the fair.  I guess I must have been 18 when I entered it, because it was my first year not competing in the youth categories (which, let's face it, have much less fierce competition.)  So even getting a ribbon of any kind was nice.

I hope you've enjoyed reading about my quilt.  It holds a special place in my heart and every time I visit my parents I get to see it again and say hello.  :)

Quilting Deadlock

Well quilting my Stairway to Cat Heaven quilt is taking way longer than necessary, mainly because I'm really stuck on how to do it right.  After quilting half the nine patches, it looks odd, so I'm going to go back and quilt the other half.  In the meantime I was quilting the starry sky, but I'm not super psyched about how it looks and I'm trying to come up with alternatives.  Maybe a relatively heavily quilted sky is okay because it will make the cats pop even more.

Right now there are just a bunch of stars in the sky.  Can you even see them? (I need tips on quilt photography if anyone has any...) Even I can't really see them in person, which is frustrating, and one reason I want to do something different.

 I'm not opposed to ripping them out, but I was also thinking I could go back and add some big meandering swirls around them.  In the meantime I'm setting this aside to do my May FMQ challenge and some other small activities.

Quilt Shop Expedition Success

Well instead of trying to finish current projects today I went to the quilt shop to buy supplies for two upcoming classes. And boy did I come back happy!  Here's the long version:

In October I went to PIQF, my first big quilt show.  It was AWESOME and I found a booth selling bundles of fat sixteenth batiks, which were perfect because I needed some small scraps in a few specific colors that I was lacking (green and brown) for my animal alphabet quilt.  I LOVED those fat sixteenths.  Yes, they are small, but they are perfect for applique and after you use a piece you don't have tons of leftovers.  They really met my needs, and after the show I was kicking myself for not buying even more fat sixteenth bundles.  I even searched online for them, but the smallest I could find were fat eighths.

Fast forward to today at the quilt shop.  I am digging around the fat quarter area and I see these bundles of fabric all wrapped up.  I look closer....batik scrap bundles!  EXACTLY what I was looking for back in October! At my very own local quilt shop!  Each bundle contains around 6 batik fabrics in coordinating colors of various sizes, but really most are fat eighth sized.  And the cost of each? $3!  I felt like I was in heaven.

I grabbed about every one of these in sight, then talked myself down and put a few back.  I ended up coming home with eight of these bundles.  Here is my wonderful take, all spread out:

There's barely room for them all on my floor!  I am just so happy.  Each one has a different gorgeous design that's a joy to look at.  I am so happy that I have a new resource when I need scraps for various projects.  Plus, let's be honest, a lot of these pieces are pretty sizable.

Oh, and I also bought supplies for my "cat bag" class.  I am doing the eggplant cat.  I luuurve the purple and green colors!  This one will be really fun, and I will make the cat out of all my new batik scraps. ;)

That's lime green mesh for the bag! A good sturdy tote.

Finally, I've chosen a quilt design!

Here it is!  Doesn't look anything like the designs I was previously testing out, but I'm very happy with it. I had a revelation that I needed to use a design that conformed more closely to the nine-patch instead of looking superimposed on top of it.

Luckily, Eva Larkin gives lots of advice in her book on how to adapt her quilting motifs to your blocks, so following her instructions I played around on photoshop until I came up with this.  You can see my stitching isn't super exact, but I bet I'll be really good at those curves by the end of this quilt.  For now I'm drawing in all of the curves before I stitch them because I don't trust myself to make them symmetric just doing free-form.

Needlepoint Progress

Here she is!  I've done all of the wave stitches and now I get to go back and fill in the spaces between them.  It may not look like much but needlepoint is slow going; that's like 8+ hours of work doing the little blue waves.

Onward!

Still Pondering Quilt Designs

What this title really should be is "Still putting off making a decision!"

Well today I used the April FMQ Challenge method of tracing on tulle to test one design I really loved.

traced onto the tulle

transferred onto the fabric with water soluable marker

Stitched!

 Hmmm...I still love it as a design, but I do worry it involves too many lines, and will decrease the fluffiness of my quilt too much.  I've already decided to only quilt every other square to try to maximize loft.

Also this design is a little imperfect/wobbly looking, but I don't really care, because this quilt is so off-square already that I'm not planning on entering it in any local shows.  It's just so hard to tell how it will come out without stitching it onto the actual quilt!

A note of caution about that tulle technique:  I used a Mr. sketch marker (you know the kind with scents that little kids use?) instead of a sharpie because I don't have any wide-tipped sharpies at home, and it turns out Mr. Sketch markers are water soluable, so a lot of it transferred over to the fabric even after I tried to heat set it.  Whoops!  So, I am definitely bringing home a sharpie from work tomorrow, and when I do the real deal I'm tracing onto a scrap fabric first to make sure the design really has set.

The other design that's "winning" right now is this one:

I'm not quite sure why,  but something about it appeals.  I definitely want something with curves.

While I continue to put off figuring out a solution (let's be honest, I'm probably going to pick one at random and just GO with it!) I've been stitching away on my needlepoint.  Photos coming soon once I reach a benchmark!