Tag Archives: Project QUILTING

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I'm happy to be participating in the fourth week of Project QUILTING. (You can find me at #110 if you'd like to vote for my project.) This week's theme is Brighter the Better. We were asked to crank up the saturation in our projects. Let me just say, my stash was made for this challenge. My initial pull of bright, vibrant fabrics resulted in a variety of bold stripes.

I was inspired on the morning of Valentine's Day by the heart blocks being posted on Instagram. I decided to go with fully saturated hearts for my project and chose one of my stripes to inspire the color palette.

I settled on the 5" finished size of the Simple Heart Block by Cluck Cluck Sew. I had a limited amount of the striped fabric and this size seemed to maximize the number of blocks I could create – seven. I cut a variety of background fabrics for these striped hearts. Then I went on to make additional pairings for more heart blocks. I decided early on I would include some square blocks interspersed with the heart blocks. In the end, I stopped sewing heart blocks when I got tired of making them. ;-) Inadvertently, I sewed 14 heart blocks on February 14th.

The next morning I filled in the remaining spots with squares and began work on a final layout. I could have spent days rearranging blocks on the design wall. I didn't want like fabrics to touch on an edge (corners were okay) and I wanted hearts (and more specifically striped hearts) in each row and column, and I wanted some balance.

I added the grey border so I wouldn't lose my points when I added my binding. I machine bind and it's not a perfect 1/4". I should probably do some work to figure out how to plan that my machine binding land in the right place by adding a little space around the quilt top when I trim it after quilting.

I thought I would walking food quilt crosshatch spaced 1 1/2", but when I started my quilting after 10pm last night I decided on 2 1/4". Two hours of quilting later, I finished that step at 12:40am. After I slept, my 4 year old daughter supervised my work attach the binding and then helped with my photo shoot. ;-) I had planned to bind it in grey to match the border, but decided in the vein of "Brighter the Better" I would use one of my blue fabrics. I had the perfect amount of this print! The backing fabric (also from my stash) was purchased a while ago to back a project that I recently gave away (in WIP status). I thought it was the perfect combination for this quilt.

My quilt finished at 34" x 34" which I think means it's the perfect size to go to a NICU.

I'm linking up to Persimmon Dreams for the Project QUILTING Brighter the Better Challenge and to TGIFF at A Quarter Inch from the Edge.

Thanks for visiting! Voting for Project QUILTING is open! You get to vote for your ten favorite projects. Mine is #110. Voting has ended. :-)

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This week our challenge was to create a project inspired by a pattern or texture found "in the wild." True to form, it took me a few days before I started paying attention for inspiration. After snapping a few pictures while I was out, I became fixated on my son's plastic faceted gems. I chose to focus on this one.

I loved the geometry of it, and the dart shape you can see in the reflection above.

My initial sketch included the edges around the perimeter, but I edited those out in favor of a more simple design. My finished quilt is 24" x 24".

Here are a few close up shots of the quilting. My pink quilting motifs came from Angela Walters' Shape by Shape books and were stitched with coordinating 50wt Aurifil thread.

 

I'm linking up to Project Quilting 8.3.

Project QUILTING online voting will begin Sunday 2/5 around 11am PST.  There are over 75 projects linked up so far. (Mine is #78.)

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I've admired Project QUILTING for many seasons. Last year I even planned to participate, but for whatever reason that didn't happen. Project QUILTING is a series of one week quilt challenges. That's not a lot of time to make a quilt from conception to finish! January 1 kicked off the new season and I made sure to keep my schedule clear enough that I'd be able to participate. I didn't think it would come down to finishing it in the last hour and posting to the blog in the last fifteen minutes of the challenge! The good news is that when you're reading this, you can probably already click over for voting on the challenge. (You get 10 votes; cast them by clicking on the heart you see at the top right of each quilt pic. Mine is #140.) (Voting has closed.) There are so many great interpretations (142 of them!) of the theme!

This week's challenge was "Eight is Great!" There are so many great things that involve the number eight. The prompt mentioned a bunch of interesting ones: octopus, stop sign, magic eight ball, math, music... I started with sketches that involved music and roman numerals, and eventually thought of the repeating 8 8 8. This is season 8 of the challenge. The theme for this week's challenge is 8. And the quilt was due on the 8th. The image of three repeating eights screamed slot machine and my design was born.

I initially sketched my design to also finish at 8" x 8", but in the end I wanted to see more of my colorful background fabric. I love that it makes me think of the light show on Fremont Street in Vegas. I also initially planned to piece the slot machine and only after calculating the sizes to cut all my pieces did I decide to use fusible appliqué instead.

Here's my initial fabric pull. I later added the fabrics for the letters and numbers. You can see the fabric I fussy cut for my coins.

The mini quilt finished at about 10" x 18". This is the second time I've done a faced binding. I used the faced binding tutorial that my friend Mel recommended. Such a great, quick finish for a little challenge quilt.

 

Thanks for visiting! I'm linking up to Project QUILTING 8.1.

 

This month marks my blog's third anniversary and the addition of a twice monthly newsletter dedicated to color and design inspiration for quilting! Click above to stay in touch and receive modern and contemporary inspiration direct to your inbox! The first edition will be out by the end of the month.