Quilt Finish - Elephant Pillow Quilt

Whew!  I'm glad to be finished with my Elephant Pillow Quilt.  It all started with a pillow I bought to put on the slipper chair in my sewing room.  The pillow went great with the coral chair, but since it sits in a sunny window and I didn't want the chair to fade, I made a quilt to cover the upholstery.  I'd rather sacrifice a quilt than the chair.

This is the elephant side of the quilt, with fused applique elephants. 

Here is is, draped over the chair.  The elephant says "Put the pillow right here!"

Like so.

The elephant side has the label.

This is the patchwork side, the first side I made.  It's what I initially considered the front, until the elephant side came to be and then I stopped calling them front and back.  I like both of them equally.

These are my three favorite fabrics.  The upper left is flannel.  The lower right is what the fused elephants are made from.  The peacock fabric is my absolute favorite.  I have another peacock fabric that I'll be using in a quilt after my next project, an apron.

Here's the patchwork side with the pillow, and a coordinating rug.  This is the side I'm going with for now.

From the Vault - Illusory On-Point Quilt

I made this quilt six years ago, in February of 2010.  It's approximately 48" across and 57" tall.

I had finished my shopping at JoAnn Fabrics, and was browsing magazines on the way to the checkout lane.  I found this quilt, in these colors, in a Fons and Porter magazine.  I immediately wheeled my cart around and went back and bought my own version of the black/white, pink, and green fabrics.  

It looks like an on-point setting, but it isn't - it's made of rows of 9.5" square blocks.  

I drew in these white lines to delineate four blocks from the upper left corner of the quilt.

In the upper right and lower left, you see that the blocks were made with a large square of black/white polka dot fabric, with triangles in two corners.  The remaining two blocks were made similarly, but with four triangles.

I remember this quilt requiring a lot of focus so I wouldn't mess up the placement.  And I remember that there was a lot of waste from the triangles, which were made from squares that got sewn on the diagonal, then flipped back and trimmed.

I like the peace symbols on the green fabric, and the busyness of the light black/white fabric.  It almost looks like more piecing is going on there.

For quilting, I did diagonal lines of green thread in one direction, and pink in the other.

I remember that the pattern called for giant black rick rack, but I didn't do that.

The back is too horrendous to show.  I used up fat quarters of really old black, green, and pink fabrics that I didn't like at all.  And let me emphazise AT ALL.  Nowadays I use something that ugly just to practice quilting on.

Quilt Finish - Wonder Bird

I finished my wool bird applique last week, but couldn't make a label because I couldn't think of a name.  

I asked my husband what he thought I should name it and he said Wonder Bird.  Knowing my struggle, he gave me the perfect name, because I'd been wondering what kind of bird it was.

I don't usually like a cotton border on a wool project, but this Kim Schaefer fabric was just perfect.

The pattern is "Birds and Berries" by Angela Lawrence.  The pattern is for a wool pillow, but I wanted a little quilt instead.

I've already talked about all the steps along the way, so I don't have much to say about it now.

This photograph shows the variety of embroidery I did, along with the straight-stitch hand quilting.

The legs are a little puny and spiky, but wool legs would have been too fat.

The back.

The label, with a fussy-cut bird wondering about something.

Quilt Finish - Froga

This morning I finished my Froga quilt. 

It's named Froga because the focal point is a frog doing yoga.  It's a small quilt, 21" x 23", that I made as part of my Miniature Quilt Club.  I took my inspiration from Cathy Gaubert's Ticker Tape Quilt, from her book "Pretty in Patchwork: Doll Quilts".

It was FUN to make.  Everything except the frog and the word "Simplicity" is from my scrap bags.  I want to make another quilt in this style, as soon as I find interesting focal fabric.  That will be high on my shopping list at the International Quilt Show in April.

I fussy cut some of the scraps to play up the yoga theme.  The layer of flowers above the frog buffers the enthusiastic duck drumming.  I had a smidgen of recycling-themed fabric left - that's the "Save Energy" square to the right of the duck.

The directions called for using a glue stick or other adhesive to attach the scraps to the background.  I didn't want a glue stick gumming up my sewing machine innards, nor did I want the stiffness of fusible web.  So I used stickpins as my basting.

When I made my sandwich, I put safety pins only on the white fabric, then removed whatever pin (stick or safety) was in my way as I did the vertical rows of quilting.  Some of the rows aren't the straightest, but I was trying to hit all the edges since the fabric is raw edge and I didn't want too big a hunk flapping out there on the edges.

Butterflies and hearts and flowers are fussy cut to fit in with a mindful frog...

... but other scraps were chosen purely for their color.

I did a different kind of binding than I usually do.  My usual is a continuous binding, where I piece the strips together with a 45 degree cut on each end.  Then after stitching the binding to the quilt, I have to deal with seaming together the two open ends.  Yuk.

Today I was in a hurry since I wanted to take this quilt for show and tell at my Modern Quilt Club this morning.  And I only had 90 minutes to bind it, make a sleeve and label, and attach said sleeve and label.

So I did NOT do continuous binding.  I bound one edge at a time.  First I did the sides and left a raw edge at the top and bottom.  Then when I sewed the top and bottom bindings on, I folded under the ends and it made a nice neat edge to encase the raw edges from the side bindings.  

I'm going to use this method on all my miniature quilts - so much faster.  And I'm really into machine stitching my binding, instead of hand stitching it.

On the back you get a better look at the frog yoga.  I only had 1/2 yard, so that's why I pieced the green/black/white floral onto the upper edge.  Then I used that same fabric for the sleeve.

The label.

And a pig doing savasana.  

Hey - aren't your eyes supposed to be closed during this pose?!?

Quilt Finish - Paint Quilt

Last night I finished my Paint Quilt.  I couldn't focus properly on my new Froga Quilt with a UFO hovering over me.

I like painting, and now I have a paint-themed quilt.

The quilt is 48" x 48".  The pattern is Square City from the book Easy Weekend Quilts.

The borders around the blocks are approximately the width of a paint-stirring stick.

Most of the fabric is from Carrie Bloomston's Paint Collection.

My favorite one is these paint swatches, done to look like watercolor dabs.  Mixed in with the colors are symbols, text, and bar codes.

This is the only large block not from the Paint Collection.  I was originally going to use a mixture of paint, sewing, and floral fabrics, but that was too busy.  I kept the sewing and florals in the borders, though.  A little busy is OK.

The binding is the same fabric as the centers of the Courthouse Step blocks.  It's also by Carrie, but from a different collection.  Don't ask me which one, because I've misplaced the selvage.

You can sort of see the quilting I did - Atomic Squares, which I learned from Angela Walters' book Free Motion Quilting.

The back. 

The center panel of the back was pieced to look like a paint brush.

The bristle portion of the brush also acts as my quilt label.

I suppose this is one use for a paint quilt.

But I'm either going to hang it on the wall or give it to our dog.  He likes to snuggle under quilts.