Tag Archives: challenge quilt

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I love my tradition of starting off the year with Project QUILTING. The first challenge of the year is usually my first finished quilt of the year. That's the case today!

This year I'd like to focus on using what I've got and making larger quilts to gift, a minimum size suitable for donation to the local NICU up to probably lap sized for friends to snuggle with. The challenge theme of Mythical Creatures made me think of unicorns first. And I knew I had at least three fabrics with unicorns in my stash. I set out to choose a unicorn fabric and thought I would make a 32" x 32" quilt with sixteen 8" finished squares.

I chose supporting fabrics to coordinate with my feature fabric and started cutting. After I cut the royal blue print I realized I didn't have enough of the oranges and yellows to cut out the amount of squares I would need, so I decided to make HSTs with the orange and yellow fabrics.

Next, I was unhappy with the prospect of cutting my unicorn print into 8" squares. I didn't like the amount of the print that would show. The repeat on the fabric is every 10" horizontally and every 12" vertically. Since I'd already cut up my blue fabric into 8 1/2" square pieces I took that into consideration and decided to cut two 16 1/2" squares from my unicorn print. That would mean four or five unicorns per piece depending on placement and I had enough left of my yard of unicorn fabric to have options for placement when I cut out those pieces. No beheaded unicorns. Huzzah!

I reworked the placement of the blue squares and my yellow and orange HSTs. Once I settled on a layout and cut out my pieces the quilt top went together really quickly. Good thing, because I waited until Saturday to start sewing.

The next hangup was that I *knew* I had a box of remnant binding strips and I wanted to avoid having to make binding from scratch and to use what I've got. But I couldn't find the box. I'm not done moving rooms for my studio, so I had even more places to check for it. Once I finally found it there was a blue stripe that would be great and I had enough of it! Next was the task of finding backing fabric. Most of my stash are half yard cuts or smaller, and once again I wanted to avoid extra work, so I was really trying to avoid piecing the backing. I have about a half dozen cuts of larger amounts of fabric so I went to see if any of it would be suitable for unicorns in a blue, orange, and yellow palette. Lucky day! I had a few yards of Kona Regatta.

On to batting. It's been a minute since I've finished any sizable quilt. I usually keep a package of 100% cotton Quilters Dream Select on hand, but of course I didn't have any. And, you guessed it, I didn't want to piece batting. (I'd do that in general, but I was running out of time so eliminating extra steps is key.) I had a partially used package of Hobbs Cotton Wool Blend. My quilt top is 32 1/2" x 32 1/2" so I was hoping my remnant was big enough to use. Nope. It was about an inch too small in one direction. (I've vowed to check the batting situation before I plan the size for the next challenge.) I think my only option in the house was to cut into a 60" x 60" Hobbs Tuscany 100% Wool batting. So, that's what I've used. I figure I can make three more slightly smaller NICU quilts with this batting, maybe for future PQ challenges this season. I'd love to use up this package of batting. The wool batting gave me a nice puffy quilt.

I have another project on my longarm and this is a small quilt so I decided to quilt it with walking foot quilting. I chose to stick with Aurifil 50wt thread in White (#2024) with Medium Blue (#2735) in the bobbin to blend with the blue backing fabric. When I thought I would be using cotton batting I had planned for minimal quilting, but the package on the wool batting says to quilt every 4". (It's always good to check the package.) I still kept the quilting minimum. First I stitched on either side of each of the three vertical seams. Then I did one line of stitching in the middle of each quadrant.

The quilt is machine bound with Medium Blue thread for the top stitching. After four episodes of Gilmore Girls worth of quilting and binding time I put my last stitch in the binding just before 1:45am. My finished quilt is 32" x 32".

Here's a peek of the backing fabric. Almost the perfect match to my blue print.

Thanks for visiting! I'm linking up on Kim's blog for the Project QUILTING Mythical Creatures challenge. Congratulations to everyone else who participated in the challenge this week. Next challenge drops on January 19th.

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This week our challenge was to take inspiration from the colors of the sky, but exclude or use less than 10% of the usual blue. When I saw the prompt, my first thought was sunset colors. I ended up looking through my sunset photos and chose one from a recent trip to LA where I hung out with my friend Courtney while we walked around Manhattan Beach.

I pulled yellow and orange fabrics and the pile sat on my ironing board for days. I didn’t really have a plan. And I am teaching four days this week so I was kind of busy. This morning I taught the first half of Building an Improv Toolbox, my favorite workshop, and one of the last things we did in class was improv blocks with lines radiating from the corners. I teach tomorrow morning so I knew that if I was going to make something for Project QUILTING this week it had to be today. I decided I would use this improv technique. I really wanted to make a composition that had numerous blocks in it, but I knew that I did not have the time for piecing and quilting and binding a larger project so I went super simple. My mini quilt is one improv quilt block, trimmed to about 7“ x 8“ quilted with batting and then pillowcase bound with a piece of backing fabric. It went together pretty quickly, except for the hand stitching to close the top edge.

There were over 225 participants for the first challenge and at the time I'm writing this there are over 150 submissions this week. Click on over and take a look.

Thanks for visiting! I'm linking up on Kim's blog for the Project QUILTING Sky Colors challenge. Congratulations to everyone else who participated in the challenge this week. Next challenge drops on February 4th.

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I'm so excited for season 15 of Project QUILTING to be underway.

I pieced my improv bird house and then pivoted to people houses for my improv piecing demo at Northern California Quilt Council this past week. Here's what my design wall looked like last weekend.

I cut out nine more houses during my demos that are stacked up waiting to be sewn. I'm excited to get those together and watch the neighborhood on my design wall grow. I finished my bird house into a mini quilt by adding a fused appliqué circle and free motion quilting.

My quilt is approximately 9" x 8" and is finished with a faced binding. Since I didn't have a bird on the front I chose an Alison Glass print with birds and bees for the back.

Thanks for visiting! I'm linking up on Kim's blog for the Project QUILTING Bird House challenge. Congratulations to everyone else who participated in the challenge this week. Next challenge drops on January 21st.