Giveaway Winner

The winner of the triangle mug rug was #104, Sasha.
I'll be emailing her shortly and will send out the goodies in a couple days.

Thanks everyone for stopping by and entering the giveaway!

I hope you're having a good weekend and that you can do something fun if it's a holiday weekend for you. We went on a quick camping trip yesterday... it was fun but the night was cold and I'm so happy to sleep in my own bed again tonight.

Giveaway Day!

Good morning! It is wet, chilly, and gray here today. I'm hoping for a little bit of sun later in the week. I decided to make a little mug rug/mini quilt for the Sew, Mama, Sew giveaway. It's not quilted and bound yet, but it will be by the time I send it. I used some of the leftover triangle squares from the supernova quilt I'm working on:

 

I will include a few notions from my stash for the winner, too. :) And the giveaway is open to everyone--I'll ship internationally if needed.

To win, please leave a comment telling me one thing you're planning or otherwise looking forward to this summer. Make sure you aren't a no-reply blogger; if you're not sure what that is then include your email address in your comment. If I can't contact you, you can't win! The giveaway will be open until May 25 at 5 p.m. Pacific time.

Thanks for stopping by and don't miss all the wonderful giveaways over at Sew, Mama, Sew!

One more thing--if you're new to my site, I invite you to look around a little bit; I've written several quilting and other sewing tutorials that you can find linked up in the menu bar... or just click here for the tutorial list. Have a great day!

Spring Promise Quilt

Hi friends! I'm happy to share another new quilt I made for this spring's Blogger's Quilt Festival.

It was made using the Spring Promise fabric collection by Ana Davis, for Blend Fabrics. The free PDF pattern (designed by Mary Kay Davis) for this project is located here.  This quilt will be part of Blend's display at Quilt Market; I'll be looking for it in pictures on twitter and the blogs. (And yes, I am bummed even more than normal this weekend that we moved away from Kansas City last fall.)

Here's a close up of the quilting:

 

I did S-waves in the turquoise border and loops in the pink border. The outer border is quilted with regular stippling and I did a new-to-me sort of flame-like meander in the main body of the quilt. It is hard to see in this photo... I have one more picture of the quilting on the back side:

It's still kind of hard to see. It was pretty quick to do though and fun to try something new! I will definitely do this style of quilting again and next time I will get better pictures. :)

If you're new to my blog, I hope you look around for a little bit. I have made a bunch of tutorials for quilting (basting, binding, free motion quilting) and for some other projects too; check out the "free tutorials" link at the top of the blog. Or click here. :)

Don't forget to stop by Amy's Creative Side and see all the quilts people are sharing in the Blogger's Quilt Festival! Thanks Amy, for all your hard work!!

My supernova quilt blocks and some other stuff

I've been planning out this quilt (mostly in my head) since February. Life has been busy though.... I finally got the Kona coal background fabric and some more bright-ish fabrics at the end of last week and here's what I've done so far:

The tutorial for this project is located here: Supernova Quilt-Along by Freshly Pieced

It's very clearly explained and I've enjoyed making these four blocks. The main thing I do differently is I can't bear to cut the whole thing out and then sew. I did the first two blocks one at a time, and then cut and pieced #3 and 4 together. (I also don't press my seams open, to the side works fine for me.) They go together pretty quickly, too.

I am still figuring out the fabrics for the next group of blocks and plan on making two more today. 

I also decided to start making some more granny square blocks, for myself this time. I got three done while I was waiting for the supernova fabric to arrive:

 

Fun, huh? I have a bunch more 2.5" squares cut out for this, but I'm cutting them one color at a time. Still need to get to red and purple and gray.And regular blue.

Also I wanted to share one more thing. Back at the beginning of the year when I did the Focus on Free Motion Quilting series of blog posts, I had my friend Elizabeth (who blogs at Such and Sew and Sew) as one of my guest posters. After her blog post here, she created a tutorial for her free-motion quilted swirls and I wanted to share that with you guys, if you haven't already seen it. The free motion quilted swirl tutorial is here and Elizabeth's other tutorials can be found here. Thanks again, Elizabeth! and my apologies for not linking up to this earlier. 

Now I've got to go look at fabric and get ready to sew!

Scrap blocks

I had fun making a few pink and green scrap blocks this afternoon. I have about 30 of them now. :)

doing good (stitches)

A while back I signed up with the do. Good Stitches {a Charity Bee} group on flickr. If you haven't heard of this group before, it's a large group of quilters that make quilts for various charities. A couple weeks later I got the email that a new circle was being formed (we're called the Believe circle), and I am one of the quilters for the group. April was our first month and (at the very last minute) I made these two Octagonal Orb blocks:

Here's the tutorial for making these blocks.

I got to choose the block for May, and I have had my eye on the granny square block for a while. I think it's such a cheerful block and I'm excited to see all the blocks our group makes! I sewed mine up this afternoon and I think I'll be making more of these soon, too.