Broken Star Quilt

When I first got into quilting, I pointed at a pattern and said, "this will be my very first bed-sized quilt!"  And then I proceeded to make 4 other quilts, none of which remotely resembled that first pattern. Well the times are a changin' because I've started working on my first broken star quilt!  I got some really nice batiks in my favorite colors and spent the weekend cutting, sewing, and avoiding ironing.  Because of the color combinations I could make it an untraditional broken star:

Or very traditional:

I'm leaning toward the untraditional version with the bursting wheel in the traditional format.  I really love how the dark blue emphasizes the multi-pink/purple in the center of the star and sends it shooting to the far reaches of the quilt.  Still a lot more work to be done here and I definitely need to get a better cream color for the background. But that comes after I finish piecing the diamonds on the bias!

Baby Quilt

Moving to a new city and joining an informal quilt guild has really upped my sewing game!  One of my coworkers is going on maternity leave and the sewers in the office are putting together a baby quilt!  It's going to be sooo cute for the lil' babe!  The parameters of the quilt 1) Gender neutral-it's a mystery baby! 2) Lots of color 3) Usable and machine washable.  These are all things I can handle!  So I'm going to put you out of your misery and do finished pictures first:

Now the backstory... I've been delegated the second phase of the project: sew the blocks together, make the backing, quilt it together and put on the binding.  And I've been given the blocks, which ranged from 5.5" to 8 inches once I squared them up.  Not exactly ideal since I needed 7" blocks...

So I picked out some "matching" fabric from my stash and expanded the blocks, making replacement blocks for the unsavable ones.  This star is made up of Lincoln log blocks and the triangles are made by the "stack and whack" method.  A couple of borders later the top was pieced and you couldn't tell the replacement fabrics from 3 feet away, acceptable.

The backing was fun and simple, more fabrics from my stash: one playful and one a nice batik.

I really enjoyed (and stressed) over how to quilt this little blanket. I've never even quilted a pot holder together!  And I'm no good at free motion quilting on my little Bernina.  So I stitched in the ditch with hopefully unnoticeable colors.  One binding later and it was time to wrap up my first baby blanket!

Scrap Quilting

Calling it a "scrap quilt" might be a little misleading because after my first hand dyed quilt, I had enough fabric left over to make 4 more queen+ quilts.  This quilt pattern is another one out of my imagination.  It was inspired by a layout on my digital scrapbook website and progressed from there. Being a night owl, I don't think I ever worked on this before 10pm, which means there were a number of long nights but now its finished!  I'll post again with a close up on the quilting, which transformed this quilt from good to freaking fantastic.

Queen of Tie Dye... get it? It's a pun since it's a queen sized quilt!

This is the draft, the in progress, the -nothing-is-sewn Queen sized quilt.  The white spaces will eventually be single-colored strips of fabric which will be colored to match the surrounding square.  The question is what blocks need to be moved or switched to create the perfect quilt layout?

The little image is for a general overview and the big image is for the nitty gritty look over.

A Burst of Color

My latest project is going to be a burst of color!  A queen sized quilt made out of the leftover hand dyed fabrics and a couple of store bought colors to splice between my own dyed ones.  This entire project was conceived when I went on a family quilting getaway and didn't have a project to work on.  Sure I had some fabric, but what to do with what I have?  Eventually I really want to make a Broken Star Quilt out of Batiks, but since I had only one weekend and no pre-washed batiks means that will be put on hold... for now.  Luckily the first night I found a quilt book and bought it.  It had this pattern in it: 6" squares in a crosshatch pattern with a border of circles within squares.  Since I have so much hand-dyed fabrics leftover I just started cutting up the blocks and soon enough I will have enough to make my quilt! 
 

Bringing in the New with the Old

As you can probably tell, I'm new to blogger but not new to blogging.  I recently had to revamp my other blogs to clear up some space and regroup.  Thus this little regular-quadrilateral of the internet was born.  And through this rehash I found some pictures of past projects that are pretty dear to me: the first quilt that I made.  Now usually I would say that was years ago!  It doesn't deserve a post now and it would be too much effort to back date it or anything like that.  However just yesterday I fielded a call from a family friend asking, "Hey do you know anyone who would be willing to make a surprise t-shirt quilt for my son?"  Unfortunately, I had to say "no" because I have way to much work to be making a quilt, especially at my little flat.  But it got me thinking of the summer of 2008.

When my brother moved out of the house a few years ago, I decided to make him his own little bit of home to bring back with him.  So, over the summer I went to my Grandmother's place and I made him a t-shirt quilt in 3 weeks flat.  Luckily my mom basically refuses to through anything out especially things like t-shirts, which means I had a ready stash to chose from when I set down to make the quilt!  Now the trick with a t-shirt quilt is that you have to put interfacing on the back of each t-shirt block in order to stabilize it... otherwise it will be practically impossible to quilt and your quilter *will* murder you with a rusty needle to the jugular vein.  Don't Bleed on the Fabric!  I made them 15.5in blocks including seam allowance, which seemed to work out fine.  And for those blocks who needed a little extra to get to the full 15" we always have leftover fabric from those wild beach pants my grandmother made for us when we were kids.  Anyhow Long story short this is a picture of the quilt when its still on the design wall awaiting finalization.

Also that little banner of animal paws running up the right hand side of the quilt will actually be turned into a header.  I couldn't bear to turn this paw-print t-shirt into just another 15" square... I mean how could you they covered the shirt: front, back, sleeves, and collar.  I couldn't choose where to cut!  So I cut them all out individually and used every single one-there were a lot!  I machine appliqued them down on the borders and sashing with a little Heat'n Bond and zigzag stitched clear thread.  However, I believe this is a picture pre zig or zag but let me tell you that was a lot of work!

Busy, Busy, Busy

Wow, I guess I've neglected my blog quite a bit but things around here have picked up their pace and I am once again an overworked English major!  That being said everyone needs time to relax and zone-out on some lovely sci-fi (not syfy) while crocheting like a mad lady... yes, everyone does this *nod*  So mainly I've been working on my super secret afghan project thing.  And hopefully my brother won't find my blog like my sister did... I mean really why would you search for my blog?  Oh yeah, I'm amazing!  ^_^  Anyhow I have all the ocean pieces for around my main island done and I'm working on single crocheting them together.  Actually now that I'm thinking about it maybe I should just chain stitch them together... if it works there would be a less visible joining and it would put more emphasis on the raised roads.

However, I might have to take a break from my afghan for a while since I'm going to go to my first craft swap on Friday and I need something to trade!  I'm thinking Pokemon balls will be pretty easy to make and in high demand among my friends, lets see what kind of time I have for them!

EXCITING NEWS:  Last weekend I went on a Quilter's Getaway with just about every female in my immediate family.  Lets just say there were two sisters from three generations of my family there!  But we pulled together and whipped up 10 Dalekette skirts that are adorable!  I still have a bunch of work left on them though; we need to iron them, top stitch around the bottom hem (optional), put in the elastic, sew the casing closed, get some interfacing, iron panels of interfacing to the skirts, cut the playpen balls in half, poke holes in them, spray-paint the semi-hemispheres, and attach them to the skirts.  Luckily Eri has an iron and we know people with sewing machines.  I also need to straighten out the cummerbund situation at home, cut and sew the headbands, attach the lights to the headbands, collect money, and hope it will all look good once it comes together.  Oh FYI we added another member so now the entire officer board of the Doctor Who Fan Club will be Dalekettes for Halloween!  YAY!  So super exciting things are in the works but now I have to go do homework and not take pictures of fun, crafty things!  :(

Purple Haze

Instead of finishing in late August, as was planed, I completed my quilt by December.  Yet it took until the weekend the last weekend in May to finally see the final product, entitled "Purple Haze" (Jimi Hendrix will just have to deal with the repetition) My pieced top and tie-dyed backing had voyaged to my Grandmother's house and her favorite quilting store, the Ivy Thimble, to be sewed together and have the binding attached.  It was funny showing off my artistic quilt to the fabric store ladies because I was one of the youngest quilters they had seen!  In the end my masterpiece, a 90" x 60" quilt ready to fit an extra long twin bed!

Color Explosion!

I started planning my quilt July 2009 with the hope that it would be done by early fall when I could really start to appreciate it. I planned my very own single bed sized quilt based on Ricky Tim's Convergence Quilting book.  Tie-dying my own fabric as well as cutting and sewing all of the pieces proved to be a worthy challenge for a few months' time.