Tag Archives: finished quilt

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Curated Quilts is a new quarterly quilt journal, created by Amy Ellis and Christine Ricks, which features beautiful images of modern quilts and articles about artists, their work, and the quilting community. Each issue has a call for mini quilt submissions with a theme and color palette. The theme for issue three is minimal and the palette appealed to me. We were asked to use only a subset of: light grey, leaf green, grey, orchid pink, blue grey, black.

I started by pulling all the solids from my stash that fit these requirements. I didn't have any blue grey and ended up editing out the greys. My mini has Kona Cerise, Peapod, and Black. I brought in the grey with my quilting (Aurifil #2605). I also pieced the entire quilt with black (Aurifil #2692) thread since every seam had black fabric. My mini finished at approximately 13.5" square.

One of my goals for the year is to design with letters of the alphabet. I thought this challenge was the perfect opportunity to choose a letter and use it in my minimal design. I quickly landed on the letter i. Often I piece a quilt top and then I consider quilting option. For this project I considered my plan for quilting from the beginning, choosing to quilt the entire black background with 1/8" matchstick quilting so the vibrant letter i's stand out. This might be the first time I've been set on the quilting motif before taking a single stitch.

I began my quilting by stitching in the ditch on my vertical seams, then used a guide to quilt vertical lines every one inch.

I continued stitching between each line of quilting. This photo shows how I eyeballed the center of each section... those are 1/2 inch sections on the right, 1/4 inch in the middle, and 1/8 inch on the left.

My goal was 1/8 inch spacing. Here's the super closeup. :-)

The tricky part was starting and stopping around the pink and green pieces. Tons of threads to bury! In the end, all that work was totally worth it!

I chose a faced binding so the quilting and the pink pieces would go right to the edge. I use this technique for my faced binding, though I press the folded edge before attaching it to the quilt. ;-)

Thanks for visiting! It's been so fun to see what other have created for this challenge. Check them all out on the CQ call for entries. I've also linked up to Needle and Thread Thursday.

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Welcome!

I'm so excited to be here for the Dot Crazy Blog Hop with Benartex. These vibrant, cheerful designs by Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr were so fun to work with. I had a hard time narrowing down the palette since I loved all the prints! I decided to feature the Fun & Games print in blue so I could fussy cut for a kaleidoscope effect. Check out Weeks and Bill's fussy cutting video tutorial.

My table runner is made of three blocks and finished at about 10" x 30". It is quilted with 50 wt Aurifil #2600 (Dove) and features Small Dot in yellow, Jax in blue, Maze in purple, and Fun & Games in blue, all from the Dot Crazy line.

 

 

Here's a peek of the Fun & Games prints that I fussy cut for my block's centers. You could get quite a variety of centers from this one print.

 

BLOCK TUTORIAL

My 10" finished blocks are made from four identical sections. Here's how to create your own!

Fussy cut four 3 1/2" identical squares. (You'll only see about half of the print in the finished block.) Note: These squares are not cut on grain. You'll have bias edges on these squares, so take care to not stretch the fabric as you sew. New to fussy cutting? There are great tips for how to mark your ruler to help with precision in Weeks and Bill's video.

For each section of the block you'll need (1) fussy cut 3 1/2" square, (1) 4 1/2" square of background (yellow), and (2) 1 1/2" x 4 1/2" rectangles of a contrasting value/color (blue and purple). Remember, you'll need four of these sets for one finished 10" block.

Sew 1 1/2" x 4 1/2" rectangle to 4 1/2" x 4 1/2" background square. Press seams open.

Sew second 1 1/2" x 4 1/2" rectangle to unit as shown. Press seams open.

On the wrong side, mark 2" from the edge of each 1 1/2" rectangle.

Using a ruler, mark a line connecting these two dots. (Top edge of ruler shown.)

Align unit from above with fussy cut square, right sides together so edges line up as shown. Corners of fussy cut square should touch dots from previous step.

Flip over this fabrics, your marked line is your sew line. Sew on this line. Then trim 1/4" from sewn line and press seams open.

Tada! Here's the first of four sections for your block. Paying attention to placement of each fabric, make 4 identical sections. These should measure 5 1/2" square.

Putting four identical units together will create a kaleidoscopic center to your block!

 

GIVEAWAY (US addresses only) - GIVEAWAY HAS ENDED

For your chance to win a fat quarter bundle of Dot Crazy fabrics, leave any comment below. Newsletter subscribers can leave a second comment for a bonus entry. (Not a subscriber yet? Subscribe in the purple bar at the top of my blog, click to confirm your subscription in the email that comes to you, and leave a comment on this post telling me you're a new subscriber.) Entry deadline is 11:59pm EST on Tuesday, December 26. I will email the randomly selected winner and they will have 48 hours to reply with their (US) shipping address or I will select a new winner. EDIT: Angela J Short is our winner! :-)

Be sure to visit the other stops on the Dot Crazy Blog Hop:

Dot Crazy Intro and Interview @ Sew in Love with Fabric

Technique Tuesday Fussy Cutting Tutorial @ Sew in Love with Fabric

Dots Squares @ Love to Color My World

 

Thank you for visiting!

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The MQG Michael Miller fabric challenge for QuiltCon 2018 featured the Our Yard collection by Sarah Campbell. I love peacocks and knew from the beginning that I wanted to feature the peacock from the animal print.

I’ve been playing with Planned Improv and chose my All About Angles technique for this project, adding in fussy cutting to feature the animals. I visited Golden State Quilting, my LQS, to choose solids to coordinate with the line. I settled on Stone, Charcoal, Seafoam, Girl, and Watermelon, in addition to the Gold included in the challenge pack. Here's a peek at my design wall in the middle of my process.

I settled on a long, narrow layout for my quilt. It solved the problem I was having with the distribution of the animals and I liked how my eye traveled over the quilt.

For the quilting, I chose three motifs that each had horizontal movement and switched between the three for each row. On the animal prints I combined that row's motif with outline quilting around the feature animals and other elements. I enjoyed the challenge of free motion quilting around the animals as well as working with a palette outside of my norm. It's quilted with Aurifil Beige (#5010) in 50 wt. I liked that the beige had a nice contrast without being too dramatic. I think I need to invest in more neutral colored thread.

I love a striped binding and was happy use the stripe from the challenge pack for my binding. I got some help from my friend Mel for how to baste my binding with Elmer's glue. It was a hot mess last time I tried, but this time it worked out so well! Then no binding clips needed to hand stitch it.

 

All About Angles and Animals finished at 16" x 40.5". It was one of my two submissions for consideration to hang at QuiltCon 2018 in Pasadena, CA. Notifications are due out by the end of the month.

 

Coming in 2018!!

I will begin teaching my All About Angles workshop in 2018. This 6-hour workshop includes cutting techniques to build sections featuring complementary angles with no measuring and no math. Students bring a selection of solids, batiks or hand-dyed fabrics and leave with a  completed slab (larger than you see below) suitable for finishing as a mini quilt or building upon for a larger project.

 

I've linked up to the 2017 Q4 Finish Along link up. See my whole Q4 list here.

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