Fabric Friday Week 39: Oct 20

I took last week off, but I'm back with another attempt. This is very similar to the last group. I'm not going to give up. I don't think I'm there yet. This time, I tried Moda colors. Years ago, I bought a Moda Match Maker block of fabric swatches. I don't use it often enough, probably because the few times I've tried, I end up turning back to my Kona chips. But the Moda swatches are larger and they're nice to use. I think this group is nice, too. Maybe in the end, I'll end up with some Moda colors and some Konas. We'll see!

Naturally, after I uploaded this picture, I realized that I didn't line up the fabric swatches with the lines on the rug. I was hasty, and I was playing with these on the rug so I just quickly took a picture. Oops!

Fabric Friday Week 38: October 6

I'm still trying to nail down group of colors for a bright, floral Hexibore. This week, I worked on incorporating peach, wondering if I needed peach to work the coral angle. I'm not sure I'm there yet. But I'm not giving up!

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.