First Day of Spring Break

Today is the first day of Spring Break! We're staying home this week, so it will be a great week to sleep in, hang out with my husband and kids, get a few jobs done around the house, and work on some quilts!

This weekend, my brother-in-law, sister-in-law, and their two boys came to visit. Their older son is the same age as my youngest, and their other son is a year and a half younger. The three boys are inseparable when they're together, which is so much fun to see! We had a nice visit, but I didn't get much quilting done. Since their boys had spring break last week, they had to leave Sunday to get back home. So Sunday afternoon, I worked on my McKenna Ryan 12" X 12" mini-quilt from her "Out & About" series.

Since I had cut all the shapes out last week, I spent the afternoon peeling the backing paper from each little applique piece and placing it where it goes.

For this type of fusible applique project, I use The Applique Pressing Sheet, made of Teflon. I placed the pressing sheet over the diagram. You can just see the black lines showing through in the photo above. Then I place each little applique piece where it goes. Once things are where I want them to be, I press them while still on the pressing sheet. Then I can peel the fused piece off the pressing sheet and place it onto my base fabric.

Here's the whole block, all fused together. Now I just need to pin-baste then free-motion quilt. Since it's only 12" X 12", it's easy to maneuver while I'm quilting. It just takes awhile because you have to quilt around each of the little pieces. But I've made two other blocks in this series, and I like how they turn out, so I think it's worth the time.

I'm linking up to Judy's Patchwork Times for Design Wall Monday.

Happy stitching!

Friday night stitching

My 15-year-old daughter loves fairy tales *almost* as much as I do. Lately, we've been watching some of the different movie versions of Cinderella. A few weeks ago we watched "Ever After" with Drew Barrymore as Cinderella and Anjelica Huston as a really good evil step-mother, and last night we watched "A Cinderella Story" with Hilary Duff. While we watched last night, I worked on a few projects.

First I cut out some of the pieces for my McKenna Ryan mini-quilt. Cutting those little curves and notches got to be a bit mundane, so after a while, I switched over to some hand-sewing.

After working on my black CQJP project a few other nights this week, I wanted a change of color. Plus, I wanted to be able to just mindlessly sew without thinking about what stitch combination to do for each seam. So I pulled out my current Winter Wonderland block and made the snowflakes. When I trace these patterns, I use a very fine red Micron pen (I think it's a 005). That way if a stitch is slightly off the drawn line, it's not obvious like it would be if I traced with a black pen. I don't like to use a washable marking pen for this purpose because those are so thick.

Today is the first Saturday in months that we haven't had to go sit in a school gymnasium for a basketball game or track meet. I love that my boys are involved in sports, but I'm glad for a Saturday at home. I have some laundry going and now I'm off to do a bit of sewing on my Fibonacci quilt.

Happy stitching!

Guild Sew-in

I don't think I mentioned it, but I recently joined a quilt guild...a MODERN quilt guild. Now I know you're thinking, "Ummmm - Jill - your quilts don't exactly fit the modern label." But since I want to try some modern looks, I figure the best way to learn is to join a guild that focuses on modern quilts.

So the guild had a sew-in yesterday. I decided to just bring work I could do by hand. I didn't know what the set-up would be for sewing machines and I don't have any super-long extension cords. Plus, I didn't want to lug my heavy, old, heavy, mechanical, heavy machine there. (Did I mention that my sewing machine is old and heavy due to all the metal inside? No computers in that baby. Maybe one of these years, like after my 11-year-old is graduated from college, I'll get a new machine. LOL)

I had a great time. Of course, I probably did more chatting than sewing, but that's okay. Isn't that one of the points of this type of thing?

The first thing I worked on was my name tag to wear at the guild. I had done some prep work at home: used my light box to trace my name onto solid white fabric, then sewed the four logs of the asymmetrical log cabin onto the center. At the sew-in, I used red embroidery floss to stitch my name. Then I hand sewed the front to the back, with a layer of batting inside to give it some substance. Finally, I stitched a safety pin onto the back.

After I finished the name tag, I started working on my 3rd McKenna Ryan 12" mini quilt from her Out and About series. This one is called Room with a View. After our trip to Yellowstone and Grand Tetons this past summer, I bought two other kits from this series. I realized that the space I want to hang them in is big enough for a third mini-quilt, so I went back to the shop and got this one. The bonus is that each kit was 30% off! I don't think most people would consider this a "modern" quilt, it's more of an art quilt, but it was something I could work on without my machine. I figured if the quilt police kick me out of the guild for not working on something modern enough, then it's probably not a guild I really want to be a member of! As it turned out, there were several people working on projects that might not necessarily fit in the "modern quilt" label.

I traced most of the pieces onto Lite Steam-A-Seam 2, and that's as far as I got. I think this little quilt has a lot more little pieces than the other two did (or maybe my memory is going bad!).

Lots of other quilters are linked up to Judy's to show what they've been working on. Have fun looking at all the eye candy.

Happy stitching!

Knee Deep progress

I've been working on my McKenna Ryan "Out and About" mini-quilts. Each will finish at 12 inches square. I started with this one, Knee Deep. I bought it as a kit, so all fabrics were included. I've enjoyed the process of finding the "perfect" spot on the fabric for each applique element, then fusing it together.

This is my first time making a little quilt with fused, raw-edge applique. It's a fun, different method than I'm used to!

Happy stitching!

Quilt Shop-Hop finds

There's a large quilt shop-hop going around my area of the state...32 shops are participating. If you go to every shop, you can be entered to win a new Bernina! Not that I expect to go to all of them ~ there are other things I need to do this summer!

Thursday my husband and kids were all gone, so I decided to go check out two shops I've never been to (although they're both within 40 minutes of my house). What a mistake that was! I ended up buying more fabric for projects!

I need more projects as much as I need a hole in the back of my head. I'm just hoping to get these done before they are added to the UFO pile cabinet.

When I was with my DH, 3 kids, and another family in Montana and Wyoming last month, I fell in LOVE with the Rocky Mountains. I came home wanting to redecorate my entire house in a mountain-cabin theme. Hubby wasn't gonna go for that expense, though. So when I saw these two different projects, I couldn't resist.

This first is a Santa with woodland creatures panel. I just wish it had a moose. I fell in love with moose after we saw one of these majestic animals up close and personal while hiking in Grand Teton National Park.

Besides the fabric panel, I bought two of its coordinating fabrics, the blue/gray mottled piece and the plaid. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it at the store, besides make a wall hanging. The saleslady was very helpful and gave me some suggestions, so I bought what I thought was a good amount of each fabric.

The funny thing is, last night I sat down to work on this blog post, when our power went out. It turns out the transformer box in front of my neighbor's house caught on fire!!! Not from a storm, but just from so much use these past few days (we've had temps in the low 100's and no rain). Since the power was out for three hours, I had the chance to draft what I think I'll do with this fabric. My goal: to be done by THIS Christmas. If it's not done before I go back to school August 17, it's probably not gonna get done in time, though.





Then at the second store, they were having a sale of 30% off all McKenna Ryan kits. 30%! I love the look of her quilts but have never tried one. This store had two kits from her "Out and About" series that I liked. With this series, you can make a few of the 12 X 12 inch blocks, or you can make the whole series of nine blocks and make them into a larger quilt.

The quilt shop I was at only had a few of the blocks in this series, so I bought two. The one on the left, with the bears, is called "Dinner for Two" and the moose on the right is called "Knee Deep." I already know where I want to hang these when I'm done, and if I can find one or two more from the series, I might buy those as well. (We'll see if any of the other stores in the shop-hop have them.)

I'll keep you posted on how it's going.

And no, I haven't given up on crazy quilting. I'll post more of my progress on that another day.

Since it's so hot outside, stay in and do some quilting. Happy stitching!

"Love" art quilt

I started making this journal-sized (8.5 X 11 inches) art quilt awhile ago. I wanted to make something totally out of my normal comfort zone of traditional quilts and crazy quilts. Last week, my husband cut a dowel for me so I could hang it up in the kitchen.

I loosely based the design on a page of "The Book of Kells", an illuminated manuscript of the four Gospels which was made sometime between the 7th and 10th centuries. I saw a few pages from this awesome book when we were in Ireland in 2008. I was so enamored with the Book of Kells, I bought a souvenir book with lots of photos.

For the background of this little quilt, I used some gold paint on muslin fabric. At this point I layered on batting and quilted straight horizontal lines. Then I layered on a few different red and gold fabrics. The two gold crosses are made from Angelina, with a button in the center of each. The red circle is actually a Bounce dryer sheet that I washed several times then painted with red acrylic paint. I beaded two lines from the red velveteen piece down to the red circle.

The verse is printed on Extravorganza. For the letter "G" I used foil paper in a method described by Deborah Boschert in the February/March 2009 issue of Quilting Arts magazine. To attach the Extravorganza, I simply sewed six beads on, one in each corner and one in the middle of each of the longer sides. I used rubber stamps to write the word "agape" (which means love in Greek).

Here's a close-up of the verse with the foil G:

Happy stitching!