Lots of UFOs/Projects

As you know, we're in the middle of moving into our new house. Our official move date is the 20th, but we're slowly moving things over to our new house everytime we go over to clean. We're painting this weekend and installing a water heater so that we can just unpack and enjoy the new house once we get there.

Because I haven't been able to quilt much with all of my stuff packed up and split between the two places, I've really had the itch to quilt. I decided to put together a list of all of my UFOs and planned quilts. Here it is:

Planned Quilts:

• Blooming 9-Patch Wedding Quilt for my cousin and his to-be-wife (they're getting married next May, so I want to start working on this now for when they have their shower.)
• Fire & Ice Quilt for my class at the Lowell Quilt Festival with Carol Doak
• Swanky Irish Chain Quilt - I got this honey bun on clearance and want to make the Irish Chain quilt pictured on the Moda Bake Shop blog

UFOs:

• One Block Wonder (Bright Floral) - needs quilting and binding
• One Block Wonder (Feathers) - needs to be layed out, finished being pieced, quilted, and bound
• Blue Flower Scrap Quilt - is alreayd layered and pinned for quilting then binding
• Paper Pieced Poppy Quilt - needs quilting and binding
• Carol Doak BOM - need to do the April, May, and June BOM to catch back up
• Bento Box - needs to be quilting and bound
• First Machine Quilted Top - needs quilting and binding
• Autum Quilt - Needs quilting and binding
• Bold Block Quilt - needs quilting and binding
• My first quilt - needs finishing somehow...
• Pink/Purple Jelly Roll Braid Quilt - needs quilting and binding
• 4500 celebration block - need to figure out what to add to finish the top, quilt, bind
• Happy Hour Quilt - binding
• My wedding quilt - piece together all the autograph blocks, quilt, bind
• McCalls Mystery Quilt - finish the second block from the first step and do the next one
• Charm Pack Quilt - finish designing and piecing, quilt, bind

I guess I never realized how many quilt tops I had that needed to be quilted and bound. I guess I'm going to be busy once I get everything set up! Yay! I can't wait to have some finishes.

Review: The Quilt Pattern Shoppe

Recently, I've had several suggestions to blog about some of my favorite products/stores quilting related since all of my quilting stuff is packed up for our move. (We closed on our new house on Monday... YAY!!!) Shortly after, I received a request from The Quilt Pattern Shoppe to do a review of their store on my blog. In full disclosure, I have been asked to write this, but the opinions are mine, and only mine. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this store as well.

The concept for The Quilt Pattern Shoppe is the immediate availability of quilting patterns via download instead of waiting for your pattern to ship and arrive at your door like when you typically order a pattern online. You also don't need to go to the store. I guess you could call this a "green pattern" since the only traveling this pattern does is through the busy cyber-highway.

With over 200 patterns, I was quite interested in seeing all of the patterns available. When I was searching through the website, I was interested to see what kind of patterns were available. I have been into exploring a lot of the pre-cut packages out there lately, so I searched for those first. I could search by charm pack, jelly roll, etc. which they classify under "technique." I wouldn't have thought to classify them that way, but that's where they were. I was a little disappointed in the lack of variety of quilts for pre-cuts.

One of the things that I liked was that for SOME of the patterns, it listed the required materials so that I could see if I had all of the necessary materials to make the quilt. I disliked that not all of the patterns had this. I imagine that I would use this type of service when I'm looking for a new project, at home, using the fabric from my stash. If they could add the fabric requirements to all of the patterns so that they're viewable prior to purchasing, I think many of the patterns would me much more useful and marketable. When purchasing a pattern in a store, I always have the ability to know the fabric requirements before I purchase the pattern.

Some of the things I liked about The Quilt Pattern Shoppe:

• download for immediate use
• "green" because no travel is required by you or a shipping company. You could even keep it on your computer and reference it from there (unless you need an applique template I guess) if you really wanted to be "green."
• See the amount of fabric required for some patterns.
• Several free patterns - who doesn't love a free pattern?
• Over 200+ patterns, which is more variety than a lot of small quilt stores.
• They have a blog. I actually really enjoy reading blogs from a store/manufacturer of quilting merchandise to get a different view than from a quilter's point-of-view (although they almost always are quilters anyway)
• They have promotions occasionally. Who doesn't love a sale?
• They easily tell pattern producers how to submit their patterns for sale at the store. As someone who has contemplated making their own patterns, I found this very interesting and helpful.

Some of the things that could be improved upon:

• Not all patterns list the required materials like I mentioned before.
• Their classification and search could use some improvement.
• There seems to be a lot of applique and BOM patterns and not as many pieced patterns. I would have liked to have seen more pieced patterns, as I'm not big into applique and I'm already doing several BOMs right now.
• You have to log-in to see reviews of the patterns. Every time I'd log in to read a review, I'd try and read it and it would tell me to log in. I work for a technology company and I'm very tech savvy, and I couldn't figure out how to stay logged in to read the reviews.
• The website seems very basic, and could use some "modernizing" to feel less 1995 and more 2009.

All in all, The Quilt Pattern Shoppe offers a unique service of instantly downloadable quilt patterns. If you're bored one night and are looking for a new project, check The Quilt Pattern Shoppe out for an instantly downloadable quilt pattern that you can begin right then and there.

We're in the process of moving from our apartment to our house, and wont' have Internet hooked up until the 21st at the earliest, so I'm probably only going to be able to blog during my breaks at work. Happy Quilting.

My First Paper Pieced Quilt

Here's a picture of my first paper pieced quilt.  It's probably one of my favorite if not my absolute favorite quilt that I've made.  The blocks are from Carol Doak's 50 Fabulous Paper-Pieced Stars.  I took a class about 3-4 years ago at Quilter's Way in Concord, MA in learning how to paper piece.  We were only supposed to make one block, but I absolutely loved the colors and the block, so I made another 8 stars.  This was the first color combo that I made in the class.  You can see a close up of the border fabric, which was the inspiration for the colors that I used.  
After loving how everything was turning out, I made a block in this color combo. Two blocks turned into 3, then 4, then 5... I just couldn't stop I was loving how everything came out.  

Enjoy...

My Second First Quilt

I made this quilt about 5 years after I made my first quilt.  Why is this my second first quilt? Because this was the first time I made a quilt top using a sewing machine and it was the first quilt I had made in about 5+ years and really got me back into quilting.  (Bentley just had to be in the picture)

What got me back into quilting, back when I was either a junior or senior in high school, was attending the Lowell Quilt Festival.  I picked up a fat quarter packet and this pattern and decided to give it a go.  This time, I did have a rotary mat and cutter, but I didn't know to use the ruler to measure and instead I used the lines on the mat.  I had never read any how-to quilt books or taken a class.  Considering that, I think it came out OK.  I think the placement of the fabrics and blocks was what impressed me the most after taking this out of a bag after several years.  Not had, eh?

With all that being said, there are quite a few errors.  Seams don't match up well and it doesn't really lay flat.  Oh well.  It's still fun to look back at where I started and see how far I've come.  

My first Quilt

So years ago, when I was in junior high, I began this quilt top.  I would carry it with me and do some of it as I would wait for my sister to be done with her gymnastics practice, which was 4-6 times a week (she was really good).  I'd carry around a bunch of fabric in a plastic storage container and sew it by hand.  I had no idea what I was doing back then, but it was the gateway to my quilting passion, even though it took a little while after making this one to get going again.

I used to cut out the fabric using some scissors and a piece of paper cut to a specific size as a template.  It was in no way accurate looking back at it now.  To make the triangles, I'd fold the square of fabric from corner to corner and cut down the diagonal.  Again, not really accurate.  

I had no idea about fabric choices, color values, etc.  Man if I knew then what I know now...  There's a reason it's still a quilt top and not a finished quilt.  I wouldn't know how I'd even quilt it now.    

In this one, I didn't cut of the selvage and you can still see the holes.

And pretty much no corners match up...