Here is the quilt I’m currently working on and will be showing you step by step how to make.  I don’t have a name for it yet, but it will be a quilt for a baby boy eventually.

A little background: several months ago before I had my youngest son, I was readying his [...]]]>

Here is the quilt I’m currently working on and will be showing you step by step how to make.  I don’t have a name for it yet, but it will be a quilt for a baby boy eventually.

A little background: several months ago before I had my youngest son, I was readying his nursery room and realized that the baby stuff could not co-exist in the same small room with the sewing stuff.  The baby stuff won out and all of my sewing stuff went into a closet at my in-laws’ house, packed away by my husband.

As I was preparing to test the sewing machine I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I realized that I didn’t have any scrap fabric with which to sew.  I made a mad dash out to my in-laws’ house to retrieve some basic sewing supplies.  I was rushing around because my infant son would need to eat soon… I was on borrowed time.  I opened the closet and saw all my sewing stuff haphazardly placed.  There were storage containers against one of the walls, but in order to reach them I would first need to move a chair, design wall, sewing machine cabinet, and tv out of the way.

I reached the bins of stored fabric and started pulling out various yardages of various fabrics here and there.  I’d forgotten what exactly I had and where it’d been placed, so I just made my way through two of the bins and gave up trying to reach the rest.

The next day I came up with a plan to make a small quilt while checking out the machine.  I wanted the quilt to be very simple to piece, but also to incorporate all the fabrics I quickly threw together.

The quilt pictured is a one-block quilt: a repeated snowball block.  It’s very easy to construct.

First, with the background fabric (light sage green floral print), cut 4 strips 9 1/2” wide.

Sub-cut each of the four 9 1/2” wide strips into four – 9 1/2” squares, yielding 16 total 9 1/2” squares.

Next, cut a total of 8 strips 3 1/2” wide from contrasting fabric yardage.  These will result in the darker colored triangles arranged to form larger diamond shapes across the quilt top.

Sub-cut each full length strip into 3 1/2” squares.  Each strip will yield eight 3 1/2” squares for a grand total of 64 – 3 1/2” squares in various fabrics.

On the back side of each 3 1/2” squares, draw a diagonal line from corner to corner, as shown here:

We’re ready to sew already!

Align a small square (right-sides of the fabrics together) to any corner of the larger 9 1/2” square, making sure outer edges are aligned and that the diagonal line is not positioned into the corner.  Look closely at the above photo to see the diagonal line mark, notice it’s direction.

Next, you will sew on the drawn line, just as shown in the photo above.  Chain piece to do the same to all 16 of the large squares.  Here’s my nice little stack:

Next step: trim the excess fabric.  I positioned my rotary ruler 1/4” from the sewn line on the side of the line closest to the outer edges.

And then cut!

Set the seam by placing the iron on top of the seam.

Open the seam and press it, like this:

Ta-da!  Now start that process over again with another fabric square in another corner.  Basically, you’ll eventually “replace” all of the corners on the large square with a contrasting fabric.

Sew along the drawn line again… then chop off the excess fabric leaving a 1/4” seam allowance.

And press open.

You’re not done, so get going with the other corners… then you can stop.

Once all of your new corners are on, you’ve got your completed snowball block.

I then arranged the 16 blocks of the floor, making sure that none of the same color of contrasting fabric triangles were directly next to each other.

And that’s it!

The blocks shown above are not sewn into a quilt top yet.  It’ll look a little better once it’s all sewn together.  It’ll look even better still when it’s quilted.

Easy enough?  Send a comment if you have a question – I’d love to help!

It’s not a sewing room, but it’ll do.

I recently helped a friend find a used sewing machine to get her started in the hobby of sewing & quilting.  And being a friend, I wanted to make sure the machine was in good working order before we went through with the sale.  [...]]]>

It’s not a sewing room, but it’ll do.

I recently helped a friend find a used sewing machine to get her started in the hobby of sewing & quilting.  And being a friend, I wanted to make sure the machine was in good working order before we went through with the sale.  And how could I be sure the machine was in good working order without testing it?  Never mind my scratching that sewing itch that had been lurking beneath the surface for months now.  No, no, it was in the name of friendship and for the sake of starting another young woman on the path of finding lifelong enjoyment in sewing.  I’m pretty much a saint.

I did what I had to do: I set up shop on the good old kitchen table.  And wouldn’t you know it?  It worked beautifully!

In the coming days I plan to post instructions for the project I started, but here are a few previews for now.  If you are a beginning sewer, this project in particular would be a great intro into quilt piecing, so join in and follow along!

Here’s a hint: it’s a baby quilt and it can be cut and pieced within a matter of hours.  And that’s including interruptions by babies, preschoolers, and husbands!  I should know.

More to come…

I washed up my fabric [...]]]> After finishing the Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt, I treated myself to a new project.  Now, this new project was one I had been looking forward to making for quite some time.  In fact, I used the promise of starting a new project as motivation for finishing the large previous project.

I washed up my fabric as I always do (described here in a previous post), prepped it and began cutting 2” strips.  Lots and lots of yummy looking strips.

Bright colors!

I sewed a bunch of these strips together in various arrangements and sub-cut the strip sets.

And this is what I got.

A sea of glorious colors!  Don’t you love fabric?  I sure do.

And then I sewed the sub-cut strips together to get my first blocks.

Does it look like anything yet?

Here’s a hint: this stack of identical blocks is only half of the story.  I guess if I would have taken more time and more photos, I could have shown you the alternate blocks.

But I was just too excited to get this quilt top together, so there are no pictures of those alternate blocks, but here is the Electric Quilt rendering.

There, now can you tell what this quilt is going to be?  Don’t let the non-traditional color palette fool you, this is a very, very traditional quilt pattern.  Any ideas?

More tomorrow.

:)

My customer wanted a custom quilt to give to her brother and new sister-in-law as a wedding gift.  The family just loves their dogs and my customer wanted to include pictures of the dogs belonging to her, her brother and her sister-in-law.   She liked the look and style of [...]]]> Here’s a fun one for you:

My customer wanted a custom quilt to give to her brother and new sister-in-law as a wedding gift.  The family just loves their dogs and my customer wanted to include pictures of the dogs belonging to her, her brother and her sister-in-law.   She liked the look and style of my Lovebirds (Circle gets the Square) quilt so this is a take on that concept.

The polka dot and floral print are Amy Butler fabrics from the Lotus line.  There will be a large black border sewn around what you see here.  I plan to free-motion quilt the top using an all-over meander.

I found this design in the book Infinite Feathers by Anita [...]]]> Here’s an update on the blocks I posted last week.  I have half of the quilting done on this project.  I knew the cream fabric would be a great opportunity for fancy quilting – and lucky me – my customer gave me free reign!

I found this design in the book Infinite Feathers by Anita Shackelford – which is a wonderful book, by the way.  I knew this design would be great for this quilt as soon as I saw it – I just had to enlarge it about 400% on my scanner first in order for the design to fit the space.  I then made a template out of mylar template plastic and traced around the template onto the quilt using a blue wash-out pen.  Later, I freehand drew the individual feathers into the outline of the shape on the quilt.  A lot of extra time and work, but I think it was worth it. 

I’ve begun to quilt the blue "logs" by stippling in a matching thread (you can kind of see in the last photo above – the areas without safety pins are quilted).  The thread matches really well to the fabric so it’s not noticeable which is good because I didn’t want to distract from the fabric.  I also plan to micro-stipple around each feathered motif so it really stands out.

The final (finished) pictures will be up soon – I need to get this one done and out the door!  And then on to my next 2 quilts that need to be done ASAP.

The quilt in the following pictures is the one I made for my nephew Jackson, he was born in February [...]]]> One tricky thing about choosing fabrics and using them in a quilt is working with value.  Not color, mind you, but the saturation of color making value light, medium, dark, and every range in between.

The quilt in the following pictures is the one I made for my nephew Jackson, he was born in February of this year.

The soft colors I’d chosen in this palette presented special challenges because the differences in value were difficult to detect and I started with over 30 fabrics.

Since this quilt is made of only one repeating block, the Square in a Square block, I laid out my color combinations for each block before sewing any blocks together.  My goal was to get an arrangement of one darker center square surrounded by a lighter square and the next block to have the opposite value composition: a lighter center square surrounded by a darker outer square. 

This is one great example of why a design wall is so handy!

The next pictures show the same arrangement of fabric, only the color saturation was removed from the picture on the right leaving only the value (to accomplish this using photo software, use either a black & white button or  adjust the color saturation to 0). 

Overall, it’s not terrible, but looking from one block to the next, I found a few problematic blocks (in my opinion, after all, this all comes down to preference).   I’ve circled a few blocks to examine further, although I ended up changing more than just these three in the final arrangement. 

Take a look at the first circled block closest to the top.  When referring to the color picture, you can easily see the difference in color between the green and yellow, but when looking at value only, there is no contrast. 

Next, the block circled in the middle of the quilt when looking at the black and white version looks great as far as contrast between values goes.  But look at the color photo, the "dark" yellow blends almost indiscriminately with its light-in-value neighbors.  I decided I didn’t like that tricky yellow and decided against using it in this quilt.

Lastly, the block circled in the last row of the quilt was a bad combination of fabrics.  In the black and white photo, it doesn’t even appear there are two different fabrics, and the color photo isn’t much better.

Back to the drawing board – er, design wall. 

I removed some fabrics that I was having a hard time pairing and rearranged blocks to give an even placement of darks throughout the quilt.  Here is a picture of the finished quilt, in color and in black and white.  To me, it looks much better than the arrangement above. 

By alternating the position of the values from block to block, there is a secondary design that emerges: large light and dark stars as I’ve outlined in red above.

When there is no amount of squinting you can do to distinguish which fabric is darker, when the green or red plastic viewfinders aren’t cutting it, when you can’t get to a copy machine to make a black and white copy to determine value, try taking a photo with your digital camera, upload it and remove the color.  The results should be clear.