Saturday, March 27, 2010

My 1 year12quilts month! Woohoo!

This quilt was my inspiration. I fell in love with it the moment I saw it. A huge thumbs up to this quilting bee and especially to ritapizza for her fantastic finish!

I also happened to have a few layer cakes of Tula Pink's Neptune line hanging around just waiting to be used and I thought this would be the perfect opportunity. I'm sending each participant 7 layer cake pieces along with a 2 1/4" strip WOF.

I spent some time on Flickr looking for quilt blocks reminiscent of the sea and found quite a few. Snail's Trail looks a lot like waves to me. Marinier's Compass, Storm at Sea, Geese in the Pond. I could go on and on.

Just look at this gorgeous Storm at Sea by quiltedoma...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/27027073@N04/4103894530/

In a nutshell, my "guidelines" are:

1. Be inspired by the sea.

2. Use the Neptune fabric only (if you must add one fabric to make your vision complete, use a solid-ish white)

3. 12 1/2" Pieced blocks- no applique this time

4. One or two blocks, whatever works :)

5. Know right now that I will probably be thrilled with your idea and execution, so relax and have fun!!!!

I really can't wait to see what the group comes up with!

Monday, March 8, 2010

On my Sewing Room Floor


Well, it WAS on my sewing room floor. I had the first two rows sewn together and got called away from the the project and although I meant to finish up this weekend, unexpected company came and there went the weekend plans! Did I mention that we have a 7 month old lab puppy AND a 5 year old little boy, both of whom felt it was their duty in life to mess up the carefully laid out blocks. *sigh* So, I picked them up, all out of order, and put them back in the UFO pile. I WILL get to it soon! I plan to make this a quilt for my daughters double bed. I'll wing the borders as I go, so who knows what the finished product will look like :) I promise I'll share, though!

Thursday, March 4, 2010

A pair of doll quilts

First up is my doll quilt for DQS8. Based on my larger sized MerryGoRound quilt. I used a 1 1/4" strips this time. The trickiest part of this was definitely the binding. I *almost* cut the edges off straight so I wouldn't have to mess with all those corners, but I just knew I wanted to show off the hexagon shape, so I went ahead and did the hard thing :) As it turns out, it's my least favorite part of the little quilt, but at this point, I'm not re-doing it!


Next is the doll quilt for my Sewingmamas partner. It was really a winter themed doll quilt swap, but I just loved the color scheme of my first mini, so I stuck with that. Besides, my partner mentioned that her daughters play room was decorated in these colors. I was completely inspried by Oh, Fransson's baby sized quilt. Ack,my colors are kind of washed out. Oh well, it's already packaged up!


Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Quilting Bee Blocks For February



Rene had a great concept this month. Improv crosses, red on white. I was excited to start, but I was stumped for so long on what I wanted to do. The day I SHOULD have had the blocks in the mail, I sat down with my trusty graph paper and sketched out some ideas. As soon as I put pencil to paper, I began to trust the whole process. I suppose the whole idea of improv is to just start sewing, but that worries me a little :) I felt better when I could see where I was going.