Pink Elephant Quilt

Last summer I was contacted to do my first ever "commission" quilt.  I was very excited about it and got right to work.  My guidelines were that the quilt had to be a certain finished size, and should include pink, white, gray, navy, and elephants.

I sent my client several mockups of designs that I came up with, including these 6 (made with EQ6 software):

She chose the third one and I added the elephant to the design like this:

The hardest part of making this whole quilt was choosing the fabrics from what I found online!  It is so hard to match colors between fabric lines and manufacturers and I ended up dissing a couple of the fabrics that I ordered online.

Here is the final fabric pull:

Once the design was finalized and the fabrics were chosen, the easy part was the sewing!

I backed the quilt with Minky at the request of my client and I used spray basting to keep it from slipping while quilting.  I quilted straight lines 1/4" from each seam in the quilt.  I actually appliqued the elephant after I did the quilting because I wanted to see all the straight lines on the back of the quilt.

Here is the finished product, it ended up super cute!

Wonky Irish Chain

In 2015, I participated in a QAL with Melissa at Happy Quilting.  Then I got her book about Irish Chain Quilts for Christmas that year and I decided to make one of the quilts in her book, the Wonky Irish Chain Quilt.

I chose the Wonky Irish Chain because I wanted to use up some of my rainbow scraps and I had a fun backing that I thought would go well with the quilt.  Spoiler alert: I used up almost no scraps and the backing ended up not matching!  Oh well!

For some reason, I have no pictures of the process of making this quilt?  So just enjoyed the finished pics!

Music Quilt

For the past couple years, my sister has come to visit me in November so that we can attend the International Quilt Show together in Houston, TX.  During her visits, we tend to do a lot of sewing too!  This year my mom came for the first time and it was great to be able to show her the quilt show too.

After the quilt show, we sewed two quilts.  The first quilt that we sewed was a music quilt for our Aunt.  Last year we sewed a 4th of July quilt for one of our Aunts, and we knew at that time that this year we would be making a quilt for a different Aunt.

My sister and I started planning this quilt in September.  We had decided on a foundation quilt with diagonal stripes of music fabric.  The music fabric that we chose was all black, white, and gray.

Here are the first four blocks that I sewed:

We had decided on a 9" block with a 6 block x 6 block layout and a border to make a nice couch cuddle size quilt. 

I quickly sewed up my 18 blocks:

After sewing my half of the quilt, I realized that I used very close to half of the fabric that we had purchased.  I carefully cut the rest of the fabric into strips and gave it to my sister (with strict instructions) when I saw her in October.  Her job was to finish her 18 blocks so that when we got together in November we could assemble the quilt.

After the quilt festival, my sister laid all the blocks out on my design wall and worked on organizing them so that the same fabrics weren't too close to one another (not an easy job, but she is so good at laying things out like this!).  I sewed up the rows and our mom was in charge of ironing.  We were lucky to finish the quilt top quickly and I quilted it while they were still in Houston.  The quilt then went home with my sister so that she could finish the binding.

We gifted it to our Aunt at Thanksgiving and she loved it :)

Fabric Moratorium!

I am posting this to announce that I am going on a self-imposed fabric moratorium.  Looking around my sewing room, I have a ton of fabric (though much less than many others!) and I need to work on using it up instead of buying new.

This is an old picture (the amount of fabric has increased since then), but you can see where I keep it, in those plastic boxes on my bookshelves.

I am hoping to make it through the end of March, with my stretch goal being the end of April, without buying any new fabric.  Other sewing items, like zippers, interfacing, etc are allowed.  I am still undecided on batting- I am going to try to combine together all my batting scraps to make Frankenbatting as I need it and see how it goes.  I am going to try to use only the thread that I have and reduce my thread collection as well.

My goals for doing this fabric moratorium are:
1. Reduce my fabric stash
2. Force me to be more creative by using what I have
3. Stop spending time and energy looking at all the "newest" and "best" fabrics out there
4. Save money that would be spent on fabric that just sits on my shelves
5. Stop "saving" my favorite fabrics for "someday" projects

Wish me luck!!

Alison Glass Challenge

Last fall I participated in the Alison Glass charm swap hosted by Quilting Jetgirl.  I ended up with a Charm Pack full of a rainbow of Alison Glass fabrics and no idea what to do with it! 

Around Christmas I got it in my head that I wanted to use equilateral triangles from the charm squares.  So, I ordered myself an equilateral triangle ruler from Amazon Prime so that it would be ready at home for me when I got back from my Christmas travel.

I started by cutting out equilateral triangles from the charm squares and arranging them on my design wall.  I originally wanted them in rainbow order but quickly changed my mind to put the colors randomly on the wall.

My first design failed because I didn't have enough triangles:

So I settled on this instead:

When I sewed it up, it got so much smaller! In the picture below, the top half is sewn up in rows:

I felt bad about all the scraps from cutting out the triangles, so I kind of turned this into a "no waste" challenge and I sewed the scraps into rectangles to use as a border:

It didn't feel right like that so I added corners and the triangles at the end of the rectangle rows (there weren't enough of the right size scraps to continue the rectangles all the way around the border).

I was ready to sew it up as a square quilt but then my quilt talked to me (weird, I know) and told me that it wanted to be rotated 90 degrees and turned into a rectangle quilt!  Who was I to argue with what the quilt wanted?

I decided on a navy blue backing:

But there wasn't quite enough of the navy, so I added the rest of the scraps from cutting the triangles and a piece of dark pink:

My first thought was just to quilt this quilt in a spiral so that I could be done with it, but the quilt spoke to me again and told me that it wanted all the triangles quilted in a special way.  I turned to my Angela Walters' books for "Shape by Shape" quilting for inspiration and this is what I came up with:

Looking at the back side:

Now for the white background... I was going to stipple it because I am super fast at doing that, but the quilt told me it wanted pebbles!  I have never quilted pebbles on a quilt before but I figured that I would just go for it! 

I love the look of the pebbles!

Here is the completed quilt: (the completed size is 36" x 41")

This ended up being such a fun challenge!  I love the end quilt and I had so much fun during the creative process.  This definitely stretched my quilting skills (which is one of my goals) and I love the way that the final quilting looks.

Thanks to Quilting Jetgirl for hosting the Alison Glass challenge and therefore encouraging me to find a way to use my charm squares!

Year in Review and Planning for 2017

I have this problem about not blogging in November and December every year!  I think that the issue is that I am busy making gifts and I don't want to post them online for the recipient to see, as well as being busy with the whole holiday season.

Anyway, now I am back and ready to make some quilty goals for 2017, but first let's see how I did with last year's goals.

Goals for 2016:
1. Go see my two quilts hanging at Quiltcon (!) in Pasadena and enjoy the workshops and lectures I am attending with my sister
This was so fun!  I blogged about it here, here, and here.

2. Enter quilts in shows and not worry about rejections
I entered 5 quilts in shows, they all got rejected, and that's ok :)

3. Learn how to write patterns more professionally and apply it to new patterns
Hmm, still need to work on this one

4. Sell some patterns!
See above

5. Grow my Etsy store
I made a couple hundred dollars from my Etsy store this year and am considering that a success

6. Grow my blog following 
Still working on this

7. Blog more! 
See above

8. Quilt!!!
Done!

Goals for 2017:
1. Participate in Alison Glass link up at Quilting Jetgirl with my Alison Glass charm swap fabrics
2. Finish quilting my Summer Solstice QAL quilt
3. Work more on patterns, writing them more professionally and trying to sell them
4. Continue to sell in my Etsy store
5. Try out improvisational piecing and make a quilt out of it (I have been wanting to do this for a while)
6. Continue to grow my piecing and quilting skills
7. Try to write some tutorials to grow traffic to my blog
8. Have fun and enjoy sewing :)

I am linking up with the Quilting Jetgirl 2017 Planning Party!

Summer Solstice QAL- Finished Quilt Top!!

I finished my quilt top for the Summer Solstice QAL!

I am making the one block 48" quilt.  If you remember, I started off with this beautiful piece of blue gradient fabric...

Then I cut all my pieces very carefully to make the gradient work from the center of the block out to the edges...

Last week my block looked like this....

This week I added the white border and then I added an extra gradient border (both to use up the rest of the gradient fabric and also because I thought it would look awesome).  I ended up with a 4" border of the gradient fabric.  I tried a skinnier border first but my sister told me it would look better wider (thanks Christina!).  Without further ado, here is the finished quilt top...

I love it with the extra border!!!!!  The final size is about 56" square.  Unfortunately I am not going to get it quilted up by this Thursday.  I had originally bought Kona Pacific for the backing but upon further inspection, the Pacific isn't quite the right color and I need to get a different blue.  Plus, I did some calculations and I don't seem to have enough backing fabric for the quilt top and binding now that I added the extra border.  Hopefully in the next week or two I will get the right backing and I can start quilting it!

Thanks again to Melissa for holding such a fun QAL!  I can't wait to see everyone's finished quilt tops!