I've had several quilt tops in progress for a few weeks - some longer than others, of course, and yesterday, I managed to finish them. I was pretty jazzed to get the tops pieced, to be honest. The down side is that now I have to sandwich them. I really love the piecing and I don't mind the quilting or binding, but the sandwiching is my least favorite part.
Is there a part of the quilt process you're not especially fond of??
I know that sandwiching is a necessary part of the process, but the older I get, the less I like it. Maybe it's the crawling around on the floor. I did see a method to do it on a table top and pin it in sections, using binder clips to hold it taut. I don't have a suitable table, but someday I just may invest in one. Since we put in our hardwood floors in 2007, crawling around on my knees has been anything but comfortable.
This is another quilt top from Camille Roskelly's book
Simplify made from American Jane's
Fairy Tale Friends fabrics by Moda. It uses a charm square pack and a honey bun, along with the sashing. I used a bone sashing on this quilt, although it looks white in the photo. It's a little smaller than my normal quilt, but would be fine for a child.
I love the fabric. It's so bright and fresh, although my photography doesn't do it justice. I bought the charm pack last fall from my daughter's little shop,
Westwood Acres, but it wasn't until I found the honey bun that I knew it was the perfect fit for Camille's pattern, "Square One".
I've had some of Aneela Hoey's Little Apples sitting around here for awhile. I met Aneela at last year's Quilt Market in SLC and it was such a pleasure. I love this fabric. I had a charm pack, a jelly roll, and a fat quarter bundle that I actually won from
Pink Chalk Fabrics and I have been debating what to do with it for months.
I wanted to showcase the fabric, so the pattern had to be something that wouldn't require me cutting this adorable fabric in to teeny little pieces. In the end, I kind of did my own thing. I surrounded each charm square in a length of jelly roll, and then joined 4 of them into a reverse bento-ish square, with the jelly roll to the center. I really liked the blocks when they were finished. I used a narrow yellow (Kona Buttercup to be exact) sashing because the blocks had so much white, and I wanted them to stand out. I tried a border of randomly sized jelly roll pieces for the outer border, but it was just too much. I finally decided that the white was perfect. It's so fresh and clean, it kinda thrills me. (There I go with my brights on white thing again - it doesn't take much to get me excited!)
Those of you who have visited here a time or two know that gray is just not my favorite color, but I rather like it in this line, although it does kind of remind me of winter, rather than summer. Even so, I was pretty pleased with how the top turned out. I'm looking forward to quilting this one.
My final finish yesterday was this little "Sweet Pea" quilt, again from Camille's book. I had a charm pack of Lizzie House's
Outfoxed from
Westwood Acres and a Kona charm pack I got in my swag from Sewing Summit last fall. I was playing with my stash when I noticed how well the colors went together. One of the things I really like about Amanda and Weston's shop is that you can get charms and jelly rolls of fabrics that aren't manufactured that way. Sometimes it's fun to just play with a little bit of something, and not make a big investment. They painstakingly cut them and make them available for sale. It's like having them do most of the work. I love it! I'm not sure you can get
Outfoxed charms anywhere else.
Some of the prints in this line are just so cute. I love the foxes and the hedgehogs! There are only something like 25 pieces in Outfoxed, so I needed a pattern that mixed them up pretty well. The way the charms are sliced and switched in "Sweet Pea" was perfect. Some of the blocks used two solids, and some of the blocks had solids mixed in with the
Outfoxed charms . I wanted the Outfoxed fabric for the border, and had a difficult time finding yardage of the Outfoxed print in the brown "Outsmarted" color. I finally found it and placed my earlier this week, and it arrived in yesterday's mail. Perfect timing, don't you think?
I love the little bow on this one. I bought some brown polka dot ribbon, but it was way too busy, so in the end, I settled for the orange.
The Sweet Pea pattern calls for scalloped borders, but you don't cut the scallops until you finish the quilting. And I neglected to enlarge the pattern 133%, so I'm going to have to make a run to Kinko's - but not today.
Guess I'd better get busy. I think I'll go put on a movie and lay these babies out on the floor and get started with the sandwiching. Once that's done, I'm home free.
Happy quilting!
