Scrappy trips for Do Good Stitches

Hi friends! I am late to the party but wanted to get my blog post up before the Bloggers' Quilt Festival deadline. Looking back, I realized I've only completed two quilts since the last Quilt Festival in May, so I decided to finally finish up my scrappy trip-along quilt.

 

I made two of the blocks in this quilt and had my friends in the Believe circle of Do Good Stitches make two block each as well. For the color scheme, I asked for red, yellow, blue, a neutral (white, black, tan, off-white), and an obvious dark or light for the center diagonal. 

After I received all the blocks, I laid them on my design floor and sewed them up in that first layout. It's kind of hard to mess up this design. :)

Then, last summer, I took it with me to Utah and quilted it on my mom's longarm. Which was fun... but I ran into a snag because my backing fabric wasn't long enough. It would have been fine for pin-basting and quilting on my domestic machine, but it should have been a few inches longer to work right with a longarm setup. So after we came home, I put it away for a while. But all I had to do to finish quilting the last few inches was sew a small additional piece of fabric to the back, do 5 minutes of quilting, and then it was ready to bind. It feels good to finish up a quilt again!

I quilted it mostly with loops but also tried out a few swirls and other designs too. It was much faster to quilt this way than my normal quilting set up, but also a bit challenging because of the differences.

I really like how it turned out and how gray-day photos sometimes look better than you think they will.

If you want to make a quilt like this, check out the tutorial by Bonny from Quiltville. 

Please visit Amy's site and check out all the other quilts! Thanks, Amy, for all the hard work that goes into hosting Blogger's Quilt Festival for us!

Basting and stitching

One thing I don't think I've shared here yet is the cross stitching I've been doing for the last few months. I subscribed to the Frosted Pumpkin's Woodland Sampler at the end of June, and decided to do their Halloween sampler too. Their patterns are so cute and I've had fun stitching them up. Here's my Halloween sampler so far:

 

I am using a fabric color called "stormy night" and I think it's perfect for this project. I stitched some more of the lacy border today and am ready to start the next square. 

I have a couple of small things pin-basted and ready to quilt, too.

Here's my second HST pillow top:

 

I think I used the darks from this fabric collection better in this design. Still not sure how I will quilt it.

And I made a little pumpkin last week. I copied the idea from Amy at Diary of a Quilter; she posted it on her blog last year and I had put it on my Halloween pinterest page.

It's going to be a little wall hanging. I'm going to the Seattle MQG sew-in tomorrow, maybe I'll do the quilting while I'm there.

We had a family outing to the Halloween store yesterday; my girl got really scared and we decided I'm making her a mermaid costume for Halloween this year. I'll let you know how it goes. 

HSTs and Value

I made this pillow a couple weeks ago with half-square triangles cut from my PB&J layer cake. I was going for a zigzag look but the values in these fabrics didn't really work well for that. I still like the pillow though.

 

So yesterday I decided to try again. This will be another pillow the same size as the first, but hopefully the design I am making with the triangles this time will show up better.

 

And if not, I am learning about value and how it works and how being limited to a fabric line can make a project like this a bit more challenging.

Jan's Quilt

Hello everyone! I hope you are having a good fall. We are adjusting pretty well here to a busier schedule. My 4-year-old is in preschool this year and I'm dealing with different leave and get home times for all 3 kids. Things are good though and everyone is happy to be back in the swing of things.

A while back I finished up and photographed a quilt that I quilted for my friend Jan. This quilt is a true twin size, around 90" x 70", so I had my boys stand up on the rock ledge in our yard to hold up the quilt for photos:

 

(one boy is shorter than the other, we tried to get the quilt even and this is the best we could do)

The quilt top was made a long time ago by the grandmother of one of Jan's good friends. I made a back for it, and then quilted it. Here's the back:

 

I had fun working on this for Jan; we worked together on choosing the main back fabric and then I came up with the creative part of the back with the red strip and log cabin block. I like how it turned out, but I think it would have been better if I had made the log cabin block a few inches larger.