Collaborative Baby Quilt for AmyLouWho!

A few months back, I got together with a small group of blogging friends and we decided to collaborate on a baby quilt for our friend, Amy, of AmyLouWho! Today we are all blogging about the project--I'm excited to show you my part, and more excited to finally see pictures of the finished quilt!


First off, Candy from Candied Fabrics dyed several wonderful colors of fabrics. We decided together to go with two shades each of both blues and greens, a brown, and a beautiful mottled pink. Candy sent all the fabric to me, along with fat quarters of the pink fabric to pass along to everyone who was working on the project. I haven't decided what to use mine in yet, but it is lovingly tucked in with my stash and I'm thinking about it!

We decided to use my Simple Squares quilt pattern, and when I received the fabric for the quilt, I cut the fabric for the blocks and sewed up the A blocks.

I sent them off to Rita of Mochi Studios so she could add some cute appliques, and sent the strips for the B blocks to Amy over at Amy's Creative Side. I also put the binding together and pieced the quilt back:

And then, after Rita and Amy got their blocks done, the quilt was taken to Natalia for quilting and binding. Finally it was sent on to Amy, who got it last week. Her baby girl is 3 months old now, and I think that's a great age for getting a new baby quilt!

I had a great time working with Candy, Rita, Amy, and Natalia on this project--please stop by their sites and learn more about this collaborative project!

Challenge Week 1--Finished Circle Quilt

Amy of Amy's Creative Side is full of great ideas! Last week she hosted the first One Thing, One Week Challenge. Once a month, participants can choose one project to focus on for one week and see if they can get it done. I decided to hunker down and finish up the circle quilt for my soon-to-be-born niece. I just finished the last few inches of binding hand-sewing this morning:

Here's the back:

I'm still planning to add a label, but I consider it finished anyway.
Sometimes finishing a big project is a bit like finishing a good book... I'm happy to be done, but a bit sad that it's over, too. Does anyone else ever feel this way?

Spiderweb Blocks for Natalie

Here's another new-to-me block. I had fun making these on Saturday. After I finished them up I realized that the spiderwebs in the finished quilt will be made from four separate blocks... and the way I made mine might not have been the best approach. Oh well. Also, I tried really hard to be precise with the placement of the gray kite shape, and still ended up a bit off when I sewed the two halves together. These are picky blocks!

Natalie asked us to make a little quilt for the Alzheimer's Art Quilt Initiative with the scraps. If we wanted. I didn't have time to do anything fancy, but I pieced this together this afternoon. I kind of like it, and these Hope Valley colors are growing on me.

Quilting My Circle Quilt

Here's the last sewing thing I wanted to share from my vacation:

I finally got to try out my mom's quilting frames, all set up with a cool Juki machine and a stitch regulator. 

I wasn't able to do what I'd envisioned for the circle parts of this quilt with my mom's machine, but I quilted all the background area. It was pretty amazing to see how fast it went and how much different it is to quilt this way compared with using a traditional machine. I had to keep reminding my brain to move the machine the way I wanted the stitches to go, not the opposite. I had some thread breakage issues which were frustrating, but overall I was happy with how it went.

This week, since we've been home from vacation, I started to feel a little anxious and scattered about all the projects I either have started or wish I had started. Amy posted about her new one thing, one week challenge, and that really got me thinking. I decided to focus on finishing up my circle quilt. 

I finished up the quilting this afternoon. I got the binding made the other day and will be doing the machine part of sewing it on today. Here's a close-up of the quilting in the circle:

I thought I was going to quilt it using the loopy flowers technique shared by Elizabeth at Oh, Fransson!, but decided to do a sort of carnation-y spiral to fill up the circles instead. I like it!

editing to add... here is the roundabout quiltalong post from A Commonplace Life that inspired this project. I needed to make smaller blocks for this baby quilt though, and here and here are my previous posts on designing the quilt and making a template for the quarter-circle block. If anyone is interested, I can also post about figuring out the yardage for this type of quilt and how to cut the segments and sew the blocks together. 

And... since I knew I wouldn't be able to quilt all the circles in one go, I gave myself a second focus project this week--charity quilt blocks.

The KC Modern Quilt Guild is working on a bunch of baby quilts for babies at a local hospital NICU. (Actually, the one my girl stayed in after she was born.) I am going to make a whole quilt top using these fabrics, and my goal was to finish 6 of them this week. I've made 2 more since this photo was taken, so I'm taking a break from them for a while. It has been really helpful to have just two things to focus on, knowing that my other projects are all written down in a list, and hanging out in their piles, and they won't go anywhere while I'm finishing other things. I'm looking forward to finishing the binding on the circle quilt so I can mail it off to my sister-in-law and start the quilting on my next finished quilt top!

It's been a while... I'm going to link this over at sew-n-tell Fridays--go see what everyone's been making this week!

Vacation Recap 2--Quilt Show

So, I decided to enter my watercolor quilt in the Annual Quilt Show at the Springville Museum of Art, since we were planning to be in Utah when the show started this year. I've had a couple other quilts in this show in the past, and I was happy to find out that my quilt was accepted into this year's show. I went and looked at the quilts in the show on one of the last busy days before we came home. I took photos of a few quilts that I really liked. I wish I could have been able to get each quilter's name written down but it just wasn't possible--I was wrangling kids and trying to get as good a look at the quilts as I could in the limited time frame I had with kids and behavior.

If you are or will be in the area, this quilt show goes until September 1 and is wonderful. There are lots of quilts (maybe around 80?) and there is a good mix of traditional and more modern/contemporary quilts.

Here's my quilt, up on the wall. I was amazed at how... small it looked in a room full of bigger quilts.

But I was happy to see it there and think it looked good!

Some other quilts from the show:
This one won an award for machine quilting:

I liked the scrappy look of this one (I put it in the box as my favorite)

Beautiful Cathedral Window quilt. I want to make a small one of these some day.

Detail shot:

This was just amazing.

Really cool t-shirt quilt.

I had to take a picture of this quilt because it's made using the same pattern book I used for my niece's Noah's Ark quilt.

I liked the black and white with the colors in this one.

Best in Show.

Signature wedding quilt. Pretty colors!

This was a fun one.

30's double wedding ring quilt.

Another award winner. The kids and nine-patches look like the ones from the book Quilts! Quilts!! Quilts!!! : The Complete Guide to Quiltmaking. The quilting on this was so beautiful, and the kids are all embellished with trims and shiny things. And there are sparkles all over the quilt. I really like the rainbow-y stars in the corners, too.

I have one more quilting-related vacation post to share and then will get back to posting about my current projects and stuff. I am having a bit of a revelation this week, and it's about focus. More on that later!

I'm back!

We just got back last night from 2 1/2 weeks of vacation... we were in Utah visiting family and friends and having a great time! I can't wait to dust off my sewing machine and get going on my long list of projects.

I was composing blog posts in my head on the looonnng drive home... here are some of our July in Utah highlights:

*Hand sewing hexagons on the drive out. (And while we were there, too.) These are for my doll quilt swap quilt. I made a total of 40. So far.

*3 extended family parties... all on July 3. We were able to visit with our grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, and cousins' kids. And actually some great-aunts and uncles too. Lots of family.
*Fireworks (just the home DIY version, we didn't go to the big show this year)
*Eating at Siegfried's in Salt Lake City (aka the German restaurant)
*Seeing all my siblings except for one brother
*Seeing all 11 nieces and nephews on my side
*Going to lunch with my Taylor aunts and cousins and my mom and sisters. Cafe Rio... why can't there be food that good where I live?!
*Visiting a couple of Utah quilt shops--here's what I got at Material Girls in South Jordan:

The top two prints will be perfect for our KC Modern Quilt Guild charity project. The others were just for fun.

*Meeting up with Amy and Natalia. We had a fun picnic at a park... the kids played and we talked and visited for a while. It was fun to meet them both!

I have more pictures to share on my other camera--there will be another vacation update soon!

Stacked Coin Doll Quilt

I thought I'd try out blogging from my phone. I had some time the other day to do the handsewing on the binding. It's going to the birthday girl tomorrow; I hope she likes it!

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