Quilt Bee update -- July and August

For some reason all my photos always appear in reverse order in Blogger. Sometimes I can wrap my head around it, sometimes I can't. Oh well. In reverse order, here are the blocks I've made lately:

In the International Stash Busting Bee, 2nd Ave Studios sent us the centre scraps,and asked us to make scrappy stars. Here are my two, one pink:
And one blue:

And in July, Shannon asked us to make a block for a hunting lodge quilt. She supplied the bear and the forest pieces. I didn't have much fabric that worked well with this theme, but this was what I came up with:

In the Threads Together Quilting bee we were asked to make wonky log cabins for August. I loved this fabric, it was so bright and fun. I made one slightly more traditional block:

And one a little more funky one:

In July we were asked to make wonky strips with these solids. I made this one at home, while I was listening to an interview with John Cleese.

And this one on my sister in law's sewing machine in Winnipeg, so it was a bit simpler as I didn't have all my supplies with me.

And this was my other July Stash Busting bee block. Lish had asked for stars of pinwheels. I was going to make something more complicated, but then I ran out of time, so I made this simple, but still hopefully striking block. Lish sent the little birds, and the rest was leftovers from my dad's 70th birthday quilt. The pattern said it was a 12" block, and I assumed that was the finished measurement - that is was actually 12.5, but it was a 12" block, so I added the border to round it out.

What have I been stitching up?

I'm glad you asked!
First, my June Threads Together blocks are done, but not sent yet. Alison asked us to make cross blocks, with as many or few crosses as we wanted. She sent a fun collection of reds and some tone on tone whites and solid white to work with.


Next my Craft Hope quilt. You will remember I was making a quilt to send to an orphanage in India. This is the quilt I'm working on for that. It just needs the binding wrapped around from the back to the front and attached and its ready to go, which is good because it needs to be in Texas in 11 days. I used lots of big, elaborate prints, which sort of reminded me of Indian sari fabric. And since I have two boys, I decided to make something pretty and girly, but hopefully something that won't show dirt too badly.



I really liked the simple design I used for the Craft Hope quilt. So much so that I've decided to use the same design for a quilt for my friend Lisa's baby that is due around the same time as mine. I started one really crazy, complicated quilt in all reds and black and white polka dots and dark blues. Then I remembered that Lisa likes more muted colours than I do, and that I wanted to finish the quilt before she goes back to Bogata in Sept, so I decided to cut into my Heather Ross stash instead to make something soft, sweet and simple. For you other fabric junkies out there, I picked up 2m of green West Hill horses for the back.


I also have three blocks to work on for my two quilting bees. The blue and grey solids are for July for Threads Together, the tone-on-tones are for Lish for the Stash Busting Bee, and the forest animals are for Shannon, who is making a hunting lodge quilt for her nefew. I need to have these all finished before I go on holidays in a week, so after art camp is done, you can know that as well as packing and cleaning, I'll be stitching up a storm.

And this is a sneak peek at something I'm working on now and then when I get the chance -- a quilt for me. These are my Pop Garden scraps from this picnic quilt where I used up almost my whole stash of these fabrics. I've added some of my favorite browns, as well as some fantastic greens I've been generously given in assorted swaps. I made the first block when I was doing a test block for this star block . I'm making 15 more, and then I'll figure out what to do with them once they're done. This one is just to pull out and work on when I don't have anything else with a deadline to sew. Although I might like to finish it in time for the new baby, since I tend to do a lot of couch snuggling and nursing with new babies while everyone older plays around us.


I was being pretty disciplined about doing one major quilting project at a time, but I've found that with the boys at the stages they're at, there are only certain parts of a quilt I can do during the day when they are awake. So if I'm at a spot that requires some thought and concentration and possibly math or a lot of ironing, I can't do it when they're awake. So if I have several projects going, there's always something I can mess around with at any given moment. Hopefully this isn't the beginning of the end of sanity.

Threads Together Update

I realized I haven't actually shown you guys any of my quilt blocks so far. I finally finished the infernal triangles, and they look pretty good and will hopefully stay together. Then I did my May blocks and sent them out. Ironically, I picked up the fabric for my June blocks (not finished yet) the day after I sent out the other two sets. So here goes:

These were the blocks for March. We got some beautiful Kaffe Fasset fabrics to play with. One block is improvised, and the other is a block from the "New Orleans Star Quilt" in Kaleidoscope of Quilts:




These are Betty's triangle blocks. The odd little bits of yellow peeking out of the edges are some gray martini dots I had drifting around. The grey matched with the grey background fabric I recived, so I used mostly tiny pieces of it to fill in the gaps:




This was the fabric Cris sent us for May. She said she wanted something fun, so I tried to comply. Again, I did one improvised log cabin-y block and one from a pattern found online (although I modified it -- first on purpose to use five fabrics instead of 3, and then by accident because I can't ever keep track of what's supposed to go where:




So there you go. I still don't have my digital camera. I actually used our film camera, and got a photo cd with my prints. Handy, eh? If I can learn to wait 5 days (ha!) I can even get the film processed for .99 cents. Remember when One Hour Photo finishing was a luxury, and we expected to wait 5 days for photos once we had finally finished a roll of film and taken it in to be developed at the photo shop?

Disaster Strikes!

Its late (for me) so I'm feeling a little melodramatic, I admit.

But seriously. What do you do when you make a total mess of someone else's quilt? In my Threads Together quilting bee, betty ninja asked us to paper piece her some triangle blocks. After my first batch of fabric got lost in the mail, I finally received my second batch. Completely overestimating my abilities to paper piece precisely, I decided to do some of these . The finished blocks on the twiddletails quilt are 6", so I thought I would just do four for each 12" block and it would be all good. But I didn't quite have enough background fabric unless I cut really, really closely.

So I cut really closely. Too closely. And now I have 16 finished rows of triangles that are slightly wonky, have a very scant 1/4 of an inch seam allowances and aren't going to make 12" blocks, because there's just not enough fabric left on the edges for proper seam allowances. Blech. The secret perfectionist in me is doing its best impression of "The Scream". The rest of me is madly scrambling to fix the blocks so they'll be usable and look okay when they are finished, with only four very thin triangles of background fabric to patch them together with.

On the other hand, the points are brilliant. I think I only cut off 3 points out of 48 triangles. There is that about paper piecing, it certainly is precise.

I think its time for me to go to bed and look at this with a fresh perspective in the morning. It can't possibly look worse than it does right now, right? Right?

Threads Together Quilting Bee - February

Here are my blocks for month one of the Threads Together Bee. I was sent four fabrics, and instructions to make 12.5 inch blocks with straight lines (ie no wonkiness) and fussy cutting.

I made a cutting error when I was cutting the fabric for the star block -- thus the two blue points. I had been trying to conserve fabric, so I thought I would cut one five inch strip, then cut down the 4 1/2 inch square out of the top and cut six 2.5 inch squares out of the bottom half of the same strip. But then I went off and broke up a fight between Andrew and Aaron. And when I came back, I thought I was cutting the other set of pieces needed for the block (four 4.5 by 2.5 rectangles) and so I cut the wrong size of strip and didn't have enough fabric left for all the squares. I am so daft some days. But I like the improvised results in the end. I do prefer the first block to the second, partially just becuase I'm not a big fan of pink.

The funny thing about these blocks is that I've borrowed the entire Season Two of Project Runway from my friend, and so as I was making these blocks, my overactive imagination was kicking into play. I was imagining the judges tearing me apart, and me getting eliminated from the quilting bee. Silly, I know. In the end, I was pretty happy with how they worked out, and I hope Jennycakes likes them.

Threads Together Virtual Quilting Bee

For those of you not well versed in the world on online quilting communities, a virtual quilting bee is a clever, fun adventure started by a few ladies on Flikr. Essentially, what happens is that each person picks out some fabric, and thinks of a kind of quilt they would like to make. Then each member takes a turn sending fabric to all the other quilters, and a month (or so) later, they get 8 or 12 or 16 blocks back to piece into a quilt. Each quilter gets to play with 8 or 12 other people's fabric, and in return gets all the blocks made for their own quilt. Cool, eh?

I first caught wind of this when Betty of bettyninja and Jacquie of Tall Grass Prairie Studio , two of my favorite quilt bloggers, joined Common Threads quilting bee , and I thought it was a pretty cool idea.

Well, when Betty mentioned on her blog that she was looking for another virtual quilting bee to join (I think she's in four or five now), I asked if she could let me know if she found one. Fortunately, she did, and she used her quilting cred to get me a spot in it! So I am excited to let you all know that I am now part of the Threads Together Virtual Quilting Bee! The first pack of fabric should be arriving soon (depending on how grumpy the border guards are feeling and whether the weather is good). I'll keep you posted on my progress, and you can also check out our Flikr group for the virtual quilting bee .