Garden Party Blog Hop - My Block

This month Sewhooked has been hosting a blog hop with a new paper pieced pattern each day.  The theme of all of our blocks is "Garden Party."  To me, when I think of a garden party in the spring, the first thing that comes to mind is tulips.  I also picture a beautiful garden with twinkling lights strung across the trees for ambiance.  As a result, i created this great (well, I think it's great - humor me) tulip block.

The thing I love about this block is that the petals form a star in the middle.  The other great thing is that you can use one of the four quarters of the block and you have a great standalone 5" tulip block.  Versatility!  I love it.

I decided to take it one step further and turn this into a mini quilt.

I did a bunch of straight line quilting around the tulips and the border.  I intentionally spaced the straight lines at varying distances for a different look.  I like the way it came out.  

Here's the quilt on my coffee table for Easter. We hosted Easter dinner, and when I showed off the quilt to my parents, my Dad immediately claimed it for their kitchen.  I always take that as a good sign.

This one shows the quilting really well.

Here's the back.  I used an old print from my stash that I knew I wouldn't use for anything else.  I put two triangles in the upper corner to hold a dowel to hang the mini quilt. This is my favorite way of hanging mini quilts.  All you need to do is fold a square in half on the diagonal and when you machine sew the binding, you sew the hanging triangles right onto the quilt. 


Download the pattern here!  You need to print out four of these to make one 10" block. 

I'd love to see pictures if you make something with this pattern.   

WIP Wednesday: Some Machine Quilting

Right now I'm working on machine quilting my It's a Hoot Twister quilt.

 I got this one basted last night and did about half of the quilting.  I'm hoping to finish the quilting tonight and maybe even make the binding.  Hopefully, by next week, I'll have another finished quilt!

Modern She Made Pillow Complete

This weekend I was determined to finish my Modern She Made Swap item.  Work is going to be very busy, and I will be traveling the week before we need to ship everything out, so I wanted to make sure I finished everything now before things got so crazy.

I finished piecing the top and then machine quilted it before  piecing the pillow together.  The rules for this swap state that you must have a circle somewhere on your quilt.  There are a couple of circles in the scraps of fabrics that I fussy cut so that you could see the full circles.  I also quilted the large grey side of the pillow with half circle echo quilting.

Here is the completed pillow.  I love how it turned out!  I really hope my partner likes it.  If she doesn't, I'd be happy to keep this.

Here's a side view of the back.  I did an envelope closure since I'm not that great with zippers.  The label is hidden under the flap in the back.

WIP Wednesday: Modern She Made Swap Progress

I mentioned before that I signed up for the Modern She Made Swap.  The shipping deadline is towards the end of May, but I know that May will be VERY busy for me, so I want to make sure I'm able to do a good, quality job on my partner's project and am not waiting until the last minute, so I got started making the project this weekend.

I had posted several designs to the Flickr group to get some input and my third idea was the clear winner.

Here's Idea #1, which I posted about recently:

Here's Idea #2, which I sketched out on paper:

And here's Idea #3:

My third idea was the clear winner based on comments in the group, and probably my favorite.

After pulling fabric and playing with colors, this is what I came up with for the log cabin strip:

And this gives you an idea of what the pillow will look like.

I love it!

One small confession - I'm turning this into a pillow cover, but, I've never made one before.  This will be a learning experience.  I'm sure I'll be fine making it, but there's always that element of uncertainty when doing something for the first time.  I've been sewing consistently for the past 10 years, so I'm sure I'll have no problems with it.

MQX 2012

This weekend I didn't get much sewing done.  Part of this is because I spent all of Saturday at MQX admiring so many fantastic quilts.  I got to spend about an hour in my quilting room yesterday working on my Modern She Made Swap project, which I'll share soon. 

I always enjoy going to MQX.   While it's geared more towards the machine quilter, I find it fun to admire the quilts and dream about one day owning a long arm.  I've already told my husband that our next house will have room for one. 

Anyway, I thought I'd share some of the quilt goodness from MQX below.

This quilt won best of show!

Here are some more quilts...

This was a cute mini quilt.

This hummingbird mini is adorable.

I'm not a dog person, but this quilt is cute.

This mini was amazing. 

I loved this quilt.  I probably would have picked a different background personally, but it really worked with this quilt.

There were two quilts with this pattern at the show.

Both were lovely.

My cat, Bentley, totally does this every time I turn on the faucet in the bathroom. 

This was the most modern quilt in the show. It was made using all solids. 

Phew, that's a lot of quilts.  And to think that I only posted SOME of them.