Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Starting a New Project

I've begun working on a new project, a quilt for my parents.  They wanted a quilt for the stairway leading to the second floor of their beach house.  We picked out some colors together and I decided on a Storm at Sea pattern since it fits nicely with a beach house.

I found a blank template online and colored it in with the colors we were thinking of.  We had already decided on the Origins line by Basic Grey for the quilt, I just needed to figure out the pattern.

I also found some free paper piecing templates online, so I printed those out to use for this as well.  If you've read this blog at all you probably know that I really love paper piecing.  I love the perfect points that you get with paper piecing.
I've started to do some cutting but haven't finished.  I needed to order more fabric online since I couldn't find it near me anymore, so that delayed be a bit.
I haven't started a new larger quilt in a while, so it's been fun to get into another project, although I'm still working on trying to finish a bunch of other projects.  Oh well, the life of a quilter I guess - start three projects, finish one.  Right?

I likely won't have a ton of time to do much quilting over the next three weeks.  I've got a bunch of stuff going on for work including my company's customer user conference in Las Vegas in a few weeks, so I'll be leaving the DH behind to head out there.  I'll have to see if I can bring a hand sewing project with me.  We've got family in town from GA as well starting this weekend.  I hope to really pick up on my quilting again come mid-May.  

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Adding Crystals

While at MQX last weekend I got some supplies to add crystals to quilts.  I decided to add some to my Moonlit Sky quilt.  (Yes, that's the name I have decided on.)
Sure, my crystals aren't in a perfectly straight line, but I really like how this is coming together.  Because there's just some straight line quilting on the stars, I feel like the lines of crystals really enhance the simple quilting and the stars themselves. 

In this light green section I decided that less is more here.  I want to showcase the amazing quilting first and foremost.  The crystals are really here to enhance the quilt.  

I still have a lot of crystals to add, and I have to order more since I completely underestimated the number of crystals I would need.  You would think a package of 144 crystals would go a long way but it really doesn't. 
I like that from far away you really can't tell that there are crystals.  You can tell they're there from the sparkle and the faint appearance of a line. In this picture there are crystals in the purple, the blue stars and the green.

Friday, April 22, 2011

Um, I think I have a problem...

Yeah, so I think I have a problem...
This has become my stash of Kate Spain's Central Park.  This doesn't include my fat quarter bundle of the entire line.  The minimum cut of fabric is 2 yards above which would mean that this photo has over 20 yards of fabric.  EEK!!!

Here's my real confession - I don't even know what I'm going to do with this fabric.  I just love it so much that I must hoard it.

I think this comes from my love of Full Moon Forest and the fact that I discovered it after it was out of print.  Now, I'm constantly searching for some FMF at a reasonable price, kicking myself that I didn't stock up when it first came out.  On another note - I saw a half yard of FMF for $25 on Etsy last week.  That's $50 a yard!!!  I don't think I'll ever reach a point where I'd pay $50 a yard for some simple cotton quilting fabric.  That's just crazy people.


Thursday, April 21, 2011

Mug Rug is Finished

and it's hanging up in my quilting room on the side of my storage unit.  I just couldn't bring myself to actually use it as a mug rug. 
I love it.  The only thing I would change would be the quilting in the purple.  I was going for a different look but when I got going I just didn't have the space to do it in such a tiny area and the looping sippling just kinda came out.  I thought about redoing it, but I decided against that since there were two layers of fusible web in that layer and I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to hide the holes.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

MQX East 2011 Cont.

Here are some more photos of some of the amazing quilts at MQX East 2011.  Warning, this is a photo heavy post...


There were so many other quilts that were also just amazing.  If you ever get a chance to go I would highly recommend it. 

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

MQX East 2011

On Saturday KK and I went to the MQX East Show in Providence RI.  As always the quilts on display were absolutely AMAZING.  I noticed several trends this year including, a lot of images turned into quilts, cat quilts (some of these were images turned into quilts), more orange in the quilts, crystals were still popular (which I love), embroidery was big on a lot of quilts, and some people have machine quilting skills that I can only dream of having a fraction of their talent.

I'll post some photos from the show in a couple of different posts since they will be photo heavy.  This post will focus on some of my favorite quilts from the show.
This quilt won best of show.  The quilting was amazing.  I wouldn't call it my favorite quilt of the show but it was nonetheless stunning to look at.
I think this quilt was my favorite.  Can you believe that this is actually a whole cloth quilt?
Here's a closeup.
I thought this quilt was really cute.  It's so fun. 
I love both the quilting and the colors of this quilt.  The color is a bit off in the photo.  The purple was actually more of a pure purple than pink-ish.
Generally this is something that I normally wouldn't like, but the purple feathers really popped and caught my eye. 
I love the colors used here.  They really pop.
This quilt was absolutely stunning.  While the colors are totally not me, the attention to detail, the quilting, just everything was absolutely stunning. 
See those little squares?  They're 1" square and pieced.  Crazy!
See... unbelievable!

More photos to come tomorrow...

Monday, April 18, 2011

Snow Dyeing

About a month ago I did some snow dyeing with what snow we had left. I had always wanted to try it so I figured it was now or next winter. I decided now was the better option.

The main thing that I wanted to dye was a bunch of yardage of a light blue fabric that would look like the sky. I have this Idea to use a bunch of my hand dyed fabrics to create some bright paper pieced stars with the sky background. But in order to do this, I needed some light blue fabric.

I think this ended up being about 5 yards total.

Then, using some mesh screens that my wonderful DH built me I mixed up some dyes and did some random snow dyeing.  I really had no rhyme or reason behind these fabrics other than I just wanted to try snow dyeing. 

Overall I loved doing the snow dyeing.  I did think the colors would appear brighter than they were.  Perhaps if I left them to sit longer than the 1-2 hours I would have gotten some brighter colors.  Regardless, I still really liked the way they call came out.  It's something that I will certainly do again. 

I really enjoy dyeing fabrics.  I'll certainly continue to do more during the summer. 

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

My First Mug Rug

Last month at our NEMQG meeting we learned a new binding technique.  To help us practice we were all asked to bring a mug rug to bind.  I've been admiring all of the mug rugs I've been seeing out in the blogosphere and Flickr but never really decided to make one, until now.

For this, I finally cut into my stash of hand dyed fabrics.  I've been saving them for a special project, but I had won some fat 16th hand dyed fabrics a while ago and I decided that this was the perfect use for them. 
I cut the purple and orange fabrics in some wavy lines and cut them in half.  I had ironed on some Wonder Under on before cutting and had removed the paper backing.  I was trying this method after seeing Frieda Anderson show this method since she claims she never gets the stray pieces of fabric when cutting this way.  I then ironed the orange and purple fabrics together on the paper backing I had removed before trimming and ironing it onto the green fabric. 

This whole mug rug was an improv project that I experimented with as I went along.  After attaching the purple and orange piece to the green I then cut that down into a wavy piece.

I used my 18mm rotary cutter for this because I had more control and could make the wavy edges better than I could with your standard 45mm rotary cutter.  I would highly recommend that you invest in a small rotary cutter for projects like this.

Once I added the Green I felt like there was still something missing, so I found a nice, bright yellow fabric and placed the piece on top of that.  It really popped and I decided to go with it.
Voila!  At this point I did some quick quilting to get the mug rug ready for the meeting.  I don't have any pictures of that right now, but I'll show some soon.  I just need to get my camera out.  I'm in the middle of hand sewing the binding down to the back, which shouldn't take too long. 

I'm probably going to hang this in my sewing room on the side of my new bookshelf instead of using it as an actual mug rug.  It took a lot for me to cut into my hand dyed stash, and I just can't bring myself to put food or drinks on it.  Maybe some day, but not now.