To Infinity and Beyond

One of my friends asked me to join in a group project to make quilts for Project Linus. That is a non-profit organization which provides new handmade blankets to children in need. The interesting thing about this project was that the pattern of the quilt was a mystery!

Each of us was given a set of instructions over the course of several weeks. The first was the fabric requirements, including high-level color / pattern suggestions (Fabric A should be dark, B should be medium, etc.).

The next week we got the cutting instructions. So many pieces of Fabric A at 2.5" x 2.5", etc.

The next few weeks, we got the piecing instructions. This is a strip-pieced quilt, so we made 24 columns. But, to keep the mystery, the columns were NOT in the correct order! So as they were sewn, it was fun to move them around to try to make the correct design take shape.

The title of the project, To Infinity and Beyond, should have been a big clue.

The last week's instructions provided the correct placement of the strips. That verified that I had correctly figured out the puzzle. Here it is:

At 48" x 56", this is a pretty large kids quilt!!!!

For the quilting, I first ditched every other column in a matching blue thread. I then outlined the stars and the rocket using the same color. I then ditched around the two dark squares with dark blue thread.

Time for some lucky kid to explore the universe!

Llama Llove

 

Almost 6 1/2 years ago I made Best Friends for the daughter of a colleague.  A few months ago she sent an email saying she was expecting a little boy, and asked if I would be willing to make another quilt for them. Of course!

For the first one, the design and colors were wide open. This time the requirement was pretty specific:    "a llama theme with some teal color in it, only because 1) llamas are likely to be a big part of this little guy's life, as we regularly go to feed the llamas at a nearby farm, and 2) a bit of teal in the quilt would match the comforter on the bed in baby's room".

So the hunt was on!

After an initial search turned up nothing, I went to my favorite site (again!), Counted Quilts. And....there was a pattern for an alpaca quilt!  Alpacas and llamas are the same, right? Um...no.  But they look the same, right? Um....similar.  But if I say it's a llama, no one will know the difference, right?  Hmmmm...

More searching, but nothing that felt right. So I contacted Lisa at Counted Quilts and asked if she would modify the alpaca pattern to be a llama!  She was happy to do so and had it done in one day.  

Then, we found coordinating fabs for the sky (teal-ish?), the hazy mountains in the distance, the grass, and the llama body. All of the others came from the stash. The eyelashes were our extra touch.

Quilting was a mix of free-motion and straight line, in matching colors (variegated on the blanket). 

So now the room is ready as big sister Dalia awaits her new brother.

Bear in the Air

Another in a long line of nephew and niece quilts for my friend Mari. 

This time the requests were: theme > airplane; color > green.

Hmmmmm.....what to do? 

I have made airplane-themed quilts before, so I know that most of the patterns feature paper-pieced jets or biplanes.  Been there; done that. 

So, as I often do, I started my search at Counted Quilts.....and there it was! The cutest bear flying a nice sized airplane! It was easy enough to swap out the purple and yellow in the pattern for two shades of green. We found the same fabric pattern offered in light and dark versions. Perfect! (The light green is also the back and binding.) Then we found a complementary blue for the sky. The rest of the fabs came from the stash. 

The other request was for a monogram. Since airplanes often have names painted on them, it made sense to incorporate the monogram right into the design. 

Four years ago, I made "Sailing Away" for baby Rory (now the big brother!).  I didn't realize, until I started to write this post, that the monogram on that quilt was also integrated into the design! Must be a family trait!!

The quilting is a combination of free-motion, ditch, and design-oriented.

I free-motioned the sky and the clouds in matching threads. Because of course! I also did some free-motion to highlight the bear's ears, around the helmet, and the scarf. 

I did straight-line decorative stitches in the propeller, cowling, and windscreen. 

On the fuselage and wing, I did straight-line stitching, but one goes horizontally and the other vertically. Why? Just to add some interest. 

All of these too were done with matching thread colors.

Finally, I ditched around the windscreen, the body, the wing sections, and the star.  

You can get a better view of all this from the back of the quilt. 

Happy journeys, Hadrian!!!!      

PS. Hadrian and his parents are on assignment in Thailand, so this quilt is being sent to his mom's sister in Washington for forwarding to them. So it may be a while until he actually receives it!

All You Need Is Love

Last fall, a long-time follower asked me to make a quilt for her soon-to-be first grandchild. She and her daughter had nicknamed it their "rainbow baby", so she wanted a quilt to reflect this very special child. 

It had to have hearts in a rainbow of colors. I had previously made a rainbow heart quilt for my sister, in June of 1999 (pre blog and digital photo days, so you'll just have to use your imagination on that one). 

She really wanted BIG hearts, so to get in a rainbow's worth, meant it would be a big quilt. We decided on 4 across and 6 down. At 9" x 9", plus sashing, this ends up being 41" x 61". Quite large for a baby quilt! To add even more color, each heart was made in two halves. It was quite a challenge to go through my stash to find just the right 48 colors, in each shade, to coordinate in each heart and across the row. As it ended up, there is a fabric from my very first quilt (1979!), a fabric from Africa, and a whole host of other favorites.

The background is a light cream color, to make the heart colors stand out even further. 

I decided to reinforce the heart images via the quilting. Often I will use many different colors to blend my quilting in with the color of the fabric on which it is sewn. But this time I decided to just use the same color thread across each row. So in some of the fabrics it does blend in, and in others it is a complement. I ditch quilted around each heart, but considering their size, and the design itself, that just wasn't enough. So I wanted to replicate the heart shape with quilting inside each heart. (You can see this in the photo above.) To do so, I made a cardboard template in the exact shape of the hearts. Then I drew lines on it 1.5" in from each edge, then cut out the center part. I then put double-stick tape on the back, adhered it to each heart one at a time, and carefully stitched using the inner edge as a guide.  Here is how each one looked prior to sewing:

 

To reinforce the heart theme one more time, we found the cutest tiny pink hearts on cream fabric for the backing. Here is a close up of that, which also shows how the rainbow of hearts is clearly visible there too!

You can also see here that the horizontal sashing was quilted using cream-colored thread.

Since the quilt was so large, and the quilting required a lot of turning and manipulation, I decided early on to do so using my "quilt in sections" technique. The large size was also why we decided not to put a border on it. And the binding is done using the facing technique so it is invisible on the front and has the tiny hearts fab on the back.

When it came time to pick a name, it was a pretty obvious choice. Between the miracle baby and the hearts pattern, "All You Need Is Love" was so appropriate. And, as I always do when posting for repeat customers, I wanted to show the reference to the quilt I had made for her in 2011. I looked it up and....whoa:  that one is called "Take Me Out To The Ball Game"!!! Two great quilts for two great songs!

My client also wanted something very special monogrammed onto the quilt. This is out of my league, but luckily she has a cousin who does this sort of thing. So the quilt was sent to Texas, the stitching was added, and then it was forwarded to its home in Eugene, OR.

Here it is with the added words......

...up close......

....and with Baby Sophia!!!!

                                                                    SWEET!!

"Sea Critters" and "Bronto and Rex"

This is the second time I have been asked to make quilts for twins.  This time it is for Leo and Luke. And these are the FOURTH and FIFTH quilts I have made for the same family!!!  The previous ones were Sebastian's Ark,  Go, Chicago!, and Take the "B" Train.  

Mom Jackie was pretty specific in her request. She wanted one to have sea animals, and the other to have dinosaurs.  So we began looking for possible patterns. While doing so I happened to go to my local quilt store and....there on the wall was a sample quilt that had a colorful variety of animals swimming in the sea!!! I snapped a pic, sent it to Jackie and she loved it! It is Elizabeth Hartman's Awesome Ocean pattern.  Actually, the sample I saw in the store was a modified version of the pattern, and then I tweaked it even further to meet Jackie's specifications.  Here is my version:

It is made with the same squares-rectangles sew-and-flip technique that I have used many times. The quilting was ditch around the borders and sashing, and free motion blue waves on the background. There is no quilting on the critters themselves, so they pop out.

The selection of the pattern for the dino quilt was a lot more difficult. Eventually we found this pattern from one of my favorite go-to places, Counted Quilts (because it used the same technique). But even then we had to go around and around. The pattern is actually for 5 dinosaur pillow cases. So the shape of each finished "block" (21" x 28") was an odd one for a standard quilt top. And of course 5 just does not work. 

We looked at different options including: scaling down each dino (but this became problematic as some pieces would be way too tiny to work with), picking 4 of them and having two on the front and two on the back, etc.

We finally decided to just do two of the dinos, so I added in a sashing and borders and it actually came out to be almost the same size as the sea animals quilt!

The quilting in this one is a combination of random straight lines (like in Bronto's volcano and Rex's "scales") and free motion for the skies, the trees, etc.  The thread colors all match the fabric they are on.  You can see this better on the back:

 OK Leo and Luke.....they're all yours!  Have fun.

Circular Spectrum #72

Way back in February.....back before Everything Changed, I started to make a lap quilt for our den. We wanted something that had a neutral background (to match our couch), but also one which had pops of color to provide some interest.  

Looking through the interweb, we found this posting.  As described, that quilt had circles of color fused to background squares and then the quilting went over them to secure them in place. This was appealing as I don't do applique.

However, there were two things that didn't work for us. We liked the idea of the pattern but also wanted something with more actual dimension. So just fusing on the circle fabs was an issue. Also, this was a   mini-quilt (18" x 18"!), where the squares were only 2" finished! Which means the circles were even tinier. To make a lap quilt with these block dimensions would require 672 squares!!!  Plus such eensy dimensional circles would be problematic.

So, we decided to make the background squares 6" finished, and the circles 4".

How to add some dimension?

I started by cutting a 4.5" circle of the colored fabric, AND a 4.5" circle of lightweight non-fusible interfacing. I sewed the interfacing to the right side of the fabric with a 1/4" seam. Part of the interfacing was then carefully cut away:

I then turned the assembly inside out, which resulted in a 4" circle with a nice finished edge. The raw edges were turned under and held in place by the interfacing; since it is so thin, pressing the circle made it disappear!

Next, I cut a template out of card stock; 6" x 6" with a 4" circle in the center. This was laid on a square of the background fabric:

Fabric square

Fabric square with template

I then cut out a 3.5" diameter circle of batting. This was placed inside the circle of the template:

Then, the inverted fabric circle sandwich was placed over the batting:

The three layers (fab, batt, fab) were pinned in place and the template was removed (different fab shown in the picture below): 

I then stitched very close to the edge with a thread color that matched the color of the circle fabric. So in the finished square it is pretty much invisible from more than a foot away (a faux applique?):

The combination of the layer of batting and the stitch-around-the-edge provided both the visual and actual dimensionality that we were looking for

So now that I had the process, we had to lay out the colors. We went from top left to bottom right in the full range of the spectrum. Some of the circle colors are used twice; some just once. There are two colors in the background squares, so those were just alternated

Cut, sew, invert, trim, template, batt, circle, sew. Sew the blocks into rows, sew the rows together.

The quilting is in the ditch of the background squares, both vertically and horizontally, using a thread color to match the darker squares. Again.....mostly invisible.

Just like with my quilt "All Different, Yet All The Same", I felt that a border, or even a binding, would detract from the effect. So I once again went with the "facing binding" technique. See "All Different" for an explanation.

OK....enough suspense. The final product:

Time to cuddle up and relax!!!!!

Panda Dreams

What could be cuter and softer and more serene than a panda sleeping on a moon!!

Made for the granddaughter of friends of ours, this pattern, like several others I have made, comes from CountedQuilts.com. 

What kicks it up a notch is that it has an associated fabric line! Little pandas on clouds, random pandas on white, and a field of stars, all in very soft pastels. 

The only semi-tricky thing about making it was that I had to cut both lengthwise and widthwise for the outer border so that the clouds all faced up. 

The quilting is mostly free-motion....wavy lines in the sky and loopy swirls in the clouds, moon, and corner pieces.  I ditch quilted the edges of the panda and around the three borders. Matching colored threads in each area of course.

And.....as this is the Year of Coronavirus, Wendy suggested that I use the leftover fabric to make masks for the parents!  So here they are:

 

Something for everyone in the family!

And here is baby Eleni (in what appears to be a matching onesie!):

Pandemic - Part 2

I have now sewn over 100 masks!

Here is a sampling of some of the fashion-forward folks you may see wearing them all over the country.

And click here for one of the many articles on how to avoid fogging your glasses while in mask mode.

Stay safe....practice social distancing....be smart...wear a mask...save a life.

                                              

Quilting During A Pandemic

There are already thousands of stories, memes, posts, Tweets, "Top 200 Movies To See" lists, musical parodies, etc., about how people are finding their way through this never-ending Spring of 2020. Even in this very dark time, it is amazing how much incredible creativity is coming forth.

So what is a quilter to do?

I was about 1/3 the way through a quilt for our den, and had one more baby quilt (for a friend's granddaughter) in the queue when things began to get worrisome. We were very early adopters of the stay-at-home policy (easy for introverts like me!). And it looked like the hunker time would last quite a while. So I mentally began to suss out how much time to spend each day working on them to make them last as long as possible, or at least until we were paroled.

Sure, I can order patterns and fabs on-line and have them delivered, but one needs to have a project in waiting to do so.

Then, the word began to spread that there was a serious mask shortage for the medical community. Suddenly, the interwebs were filled with all kinds of DIY masks: with elastic, one-piece, with ties, sewn, glued, even from old bras!

Perfect!!! I have lots of time and a huge stash of fabrics!

I contacted our local hospital and offered to make some for them. They requested that I make a prototype and send it to them and they would let me know; so I did. That was two weeks ago and I have not heard back.

Time went (slowly) on, and then the conversation changed to everyone wearing masks when they go outside. Boom! Just like that I had a dozen orders from family and friends. But, just as with my morsbags, I make and distribute these for free. Oddly, the masks take just about as long to make (40 minutes) as the bags!

Here are some of the ones I have made so far:

Let me know if you would like one. I will try to turn them around as quickly as possible (via mail or no contact delivery).

And...one day....I'll be able to get back to finishing those other quilts.