Fabric Friday Week 37: September 29

September has been brutal in our house. It's still back to school time, with everyone getting back into rhythm with all the activities, and we have birthday week at our house, with 3 of our kids' birthdays plus mine. I turned 40 this month! Spoiler, it sucked. But it's okay, we will celebrate eventually with a trip to Italy, so I'll survive. 

Amid all the craziness, I got to go to Garden of Quilts at Thanksgiving Point here in Utah with a friend. We went last year and really enjoyed it so we made sure to go again. Truthfully, I'm suffering from tendonitis in my hips right now, so the walking all over the gardens was pretty tiring. But there were loads of beautiful quilts, including a version of All the Good that I liked better than mine. It made me want to try it again! 

We ended our visit with a stop at the vendor marketplace and I didn't buy a lot, but I did buy a fat quarter bundle from a shop I discovered last year, the Cotton Bolt I think. She is so talented with color and creates stunning bundles! I bought one last year I still haven't used...whoops. And I had to buy another one this year. I also picked up some other remnants and fat quarters that she had discounted, and realized when I got home that they work super well with the bundle I picked, and then I pulled some additional prints from my stash, and well, I have a fabric friday bundle! I love it and want to cut into it if I could just figure out what to do. I thought about a clamshell quilt, but a few of the cuts aren't quite wide enough for my clammy ruler. So maybe an orange peel? Hmm...

Scrappy Chain

I got my Irish chain quilt bound a couple weeks ago and am just now getting around to blogging about it. I did take a bit of time to decide what to bind it with; at first I thought I should use an aqua fabric, and so I decided to pick up a solid because I don't love using prints on bindings (it feels like a waste, same thing with backings...) but in the end, I went with a low volume. I really like the stripe as a binding, and I like that it doesn't stand out the same way a darker binding would. So often I treat them as focal frames, and I think sometimes a quilt doesn't need that. 

My binding is still a tad wavy and I'm getting frustrated by this. The backing is regular quilting cotton, a cut I received from a friend who was destashing. I thought the wavy borders might be due to the minky I typically go for, but this is not minky. It's also not quite as bad as normal...still, I'd like to figure out what I'm doing wrong. 

Fabric Friday Week 36: September 22

This week I have another color palette I'm considering for another Hexibore. I am such a sucker for blue that I couldn't resist trying one that focused more on blues. I am not sure this one works quite as well as the bright one from last week, so I will probably keep working on it. I saw one online that reminded me of a sego lily with a beautiful white/light gray blossom and I think that's kinda the feel I was going for, but I don't think it's quite successful for that. I do like the bundle and think it would make a great quilt, maybe I'll experiment instead with the oval shapes and see if I can come up with a different design to use these colors. 

First EPP finish

I have finally finished my English Paper Pieced Medallion quilt! I started this while pregnant with my twins, so 2016. I was too nauseous to sit at my sewing machine, and wanted to get baby quilts made before they arrived, but this project fizzled and I was able to get back at my machine in time to make them both quilts. I couldn't figure out how to get it squared off so it sat. I finally pulled it out when I was cleaning out some drawers and decided to just do it. I had enough of the red fabric to appliqué it on to the top and then added some borders to make it larger. It ended up REALLY large, but I think it worked out well. I do wish that I had trimmed the fabric from behind the EPP because the print shows through the low volume fabrics now that it's quilted. But I was worried about the messy back for the quilter, and figured it would help it be a bit more stable. 

Overall I'm happy with it! I had this blue in my stash and just enough for the binding. I think I had an extra 24" of binding that I cut off. And I used every bit of the fabric I had, even a scrap that wasn't the full WOF. I backed it with a Ruby Star wide backing in sateen that I found on clearance at Backside Fabrics, the colors work well because it's an aqua background with a green and cream floral print. 

Fabric Friday Week 35: September 15

I fell in love with Papper Saxsten's Hexibore quilt when it popped in my feed and signed up for her online class since she doesn't sell the pattern as a standalone. But I had a terrible time deciding on which version to make! Luckily she included the original pattern with the updated pattern the class was on, and I knew I'd have to make multiple. First, I made a four petal version and my colors, sadly, ended up remarkably like Jenny's. It was unintentional, but I'm sure influenced by the images I'd seen. Now I want to make a six petal version, which was the original, and I'm trying to pick new colors. I've been influenced by the palettes other people have used, of course, but I've tried to be inspired and not copy. One was a very floral feel, and I loved that it used soft pastels. Without looking at the image to mimic it, I pulled color chips off my board and this is what I came up with. I believe, if I remember correctly, the original used the small baby size, so one less round of petals and a slightly different center shape, so mine is different, but I bet it's pretty close. It was so pretty, what can I say? I like that the colors I've pulled are light and bright but not too pastely. They're more style, slightly leaning into autumn color schemes. 

In my defense, I'm pretty sure I added the aqua and the green. I think the original used a great gray for the outside. This feels very candy colored to me, and reminds me a bit of Katrina Berg, a local artist. It seems like a color palette she would appreciate. 

A Second Library Dress

I had picked out some Kona colors for an upcoming project and chose to order them through Hawthorne Supply Co, and whenever I order fabric online, I always look through the sale pages as well. Especially this time, because I needed some new pajama pants and prefer to make pajama pants out of less expensive fabric...I found some good ones, and I found a print that I thought my second daughter would really love. It has horses on it, and she's a bit obsessed with horses. She takes horse lessons and just loves them. Wants to have some when she's older. So, I thought she'd like a dress out of this fabric, but I asked her first, because I have made clothes for them without checking and sometimes they don't get worn. I didn't want to invest my time and money in a project if she wasn't going to like it. Luckily she did, and I thought it would be cute in the Library dress pattern by Oliver and S. She was a tad hesitant because she wanted a maxi length dress, but I just don't see a quilting cotton working well in a longer style like that, and I didn't have any patterns that were longline that. I went with the Library dress, and found a scrap big enough for the waistband in my drawer that she also approved, and got to work. 

I opted to leave off the collar because the print feels busy, and I'm glad I did. It made it go a bit faster but it also gives it a cleaner look. I added 5" to the bottom and probably should have added more. But she'll grow out of it, unfortunately, before that becomes a real issue, even though she wishes it were a tad longer. I made a 12, she's just almost 11 years old, and by measurements it should be a good fit, but it's a tad snug across her shoulders. Not uncomfortably so, yet, but she is growing. I'm also glad that lining up the print worked pretty well. I got it well centered for the front skirt and the bodice worked out as a happy accident. I was careful to make sure it was straight, but otherwise, the way it lined up looks good by chance. No picture of the back, but I had just enough buttons in my jar that worked well. The top button is actually different, it's about the same size, and about the same color, close enough you wouldn't notice if you didn't know to look. And I think they work well. 

She loves it, and I'm so glad. I hope she feels loved--so often when I make things, everyone gets one/something. But this time around she's the only one that got a dress, and she didn't even have to ask for it. 

Fabric Friday Week 34: September 8

It has been a month since I posted and I can't believe it. We had the chaos of back to school and back to activities, and we've had some medical issues with one of our daughters that took a lot of attention and various doctor visits in various cities. It's nothing horribly serious but does require attention. Not to mention emotional investment on my end. 

Even with all that and my lack of blogging, I have been sewing... a bit. Not quite as much as I'd like, but I have been sewing and I'll post some of what I've worked on in the next little bit. Hopefully. :-)

I did pull a fabric bundle out a couple of weeks ago, and just didn't get around to posting. Sigh. Life. Medical stuff. School. Sigh.

This bundle feels back to school to me, in the school spirit sense, I guess. I picture Varsity jackets and football games. And it was inspired by this print, which I impulse purchased off of Hawthorne Threads when I bought fabric for a quilt project I'm just getting started on. 

These arches kind of have a retro vibe to me, so maybe that's why it feels very varsity/football season to me? Anyone else have that retro vibe with back to school/school spirit stuff?

You know what's kind of funny is that that has positive associations for me, even though I hated high school. I struggled so much socially, but athletics and football season have happy memories for me. Even though football season is very social...I dunno, I can't really explain it. I did play varsity volleyball throughout high school, so that was certainly a driving force in school spirit, and maybe football season is really an extended opening social for high school each year and each year I started out with optimism that maybe I'd fit in this year? Maybe things would work out and people would want to be my friend this time around? Who knows. I'm glad to be out of high school. Obviously. :-)