Quilt Reveal!

So, I'm a thief.  First time I can remember stealing anything.  And let me tell you, I was soooo soooo nervous.  And then to try and fit it into my luggage to go on the plane... that was no small feat.

Let me back-up.

I like to quilt.  Probably not as much as my mother-in-law does though.  She has an awesome machine quilting set-up in her attic that she let me use to finish up this baby so long ago.  And I've pretty much been working on this next one ever since.

Wait, I need to back-up some more...

So, Jay's mom was showing me her stack of quilts and talking about the techniques behind them and all that interesting stuff and then she came to the last one that still had safety pins in it because the quilting hadn't been finished.  She said it was the only quilt that survived the fire when their house burned down about 10 years ago because it had been sitting in the bottom of a trunk, for some odd years waiting to be finished.  The quilt had to be professionally cleaned to get all the smoke smell out of it, which removed all the pencil markings she had made she she would know where to quilt, and so she never got back to marking it again.  Now, she's more of a machine quilter, and she said her eyes just aren't good enough to see to do hand quilting anymore.

I Immediately thought, I should finish it for her for Christmas!

I had no idea what that thought really entailed...

So, the day we left, I snuck into the pile of quilts, frantically ran it up to my luggage (because I knew if anyone caught me in the act I would never be able to pull off lying about it) and used every muscle in my body to cram it into an already brimming suitcase (with my other quilt in there as well...) until the zipper finally closed.  (Meanwhile, wondering how the inspection people would ever get it back in if they were to search my bag.  which they always do...)

We got home and I first thing went to JoAnn's to pick up a lap loom, kinda like this, and set to work.

I first started on the few flowers whose markings were still visible.  After finishing those three squares, I thought to lay out my work when I noticed how all I had just done looked like the work of a Kindergartener compared to the beautiful quilting Pam had started...

Feeling a bit dejected, I carried on.  and on and on and on.....  I can see how a quilter becomes quickly proficient - even the smallest of quilts naturally lends itself to much practicing.

Most of the squares had only a couple of subtle lines or loops left from the cleaning, and so I would scour the flowers that had already been quilted in other squares (thank goodness there were repeats!) and I would figure out which one it was most likely to be, and then try to draw it on, freehanded.

I worked on it almost every night for a couple of hours until I felt a bit burnt out in October (and feeling like I should be thinking about Halloween costumes...) and took a little break.  Then November started, which is when I start panicking about Christmas presents, and I quickly jumped back on the band-wagon.  Finally I had done everything I could see, but there were very intricate borders that had no markings to go on and there was no way I could free-hand those.  I tried a few techniques, all failures, and decided to wrap it up and get the opinion of a master quilter - hoping I could finish the rest during their week long stay.

Pam was very surprised, it was awesome!!  She says she didn't even notice it was gone! score!!  

There are benefits to living far away... knowing me, I'm sure I would have inadvertently blown the whole thing in casual conversation.  

"you don't feel like something from your house might be missing do you?  just checkin'.  no reason..."

Upon further inspection, Pam realized that I hadn't gone around the handles of all the baskets in the outer 9 squares, and I knew then that there was no way for me to finish while they were in town.  We went to my favorite quilt shop's end of the year sale and picked out a binding fabric (and some more fabric for my next quilt. hehe).

Well, 3 months later, I finally finished the quilting and man, am I relieved!  Here it is!!

I wish it were easier to portray the quilting in the photos, but it's really just not the same as in person.  This quilt definitely has much MUCH more quilting, and much more intricate quilting than anything I've ever done.  I really love the look of hand-quilting. It just feels so much more authentic and true to the art form.  (though don't get me wrong, I now officially understand just how much longer it takes to do it by hand.  I machine quilted my sampler quilt in only a few hours!!)

All the white squares have a flower with about 20 petals on it, and a 1/4" border

Each basket has one of 7 different flower patterns between the handle and the body.

The baskets themselves also have quilting in them.

the back side

And a little something to record a bit of its history.  (This was done on my embroidery machine, very quickly, by comparison!)

Jay had to fly to Boston at the beginning of March, and so he took it with him to hand deliver for me :)  These photos are kind of bad because I finished that tag the night before he left, and I remembered, lying in bed, that I didn't get to take any photos of it yet, so these are not taken with natural lighting, as I prefer to do...

So now you know what else I've been doing, instead of blogging!  There's probably one other major thing taking up my time, that I will hopefully be able to blog about soon.  The time is not quite right yet. :)

Saturday Sampler Quilt

In May I showed off all my completed Alphabet blocks from the Saturday Sampler class at American Quilting, in Orem.  I put the quilt together before our trip to visit Jay's family, so I could use my mother-in-law's awesome machine quilting setup.  It was amazing! I quilted the whole thing in only a few hours!!  I'm really pleased by how it turned out.

There was a finishing kit you could buy at the quilt shop, but I wanted to use different colors so it would blend a bit better in the "theater room" (as we call our TV room, since we don't actually have TV hookups.)

Here's a link to what their completed quilt looks like.  And here is mine!!

I machine embroidered the name of all the blocks on the back, so I would remember.  I didn't do any letters on the front, out of laziness, but I think it's kind of fun to figure it out based on the names (and they are in alphabetical order, so it's pretty easy to figure it out.)

up close to admire the swirly quilting

Here's the room I wanted the quilt to kind of blend in.  As you can see, my gray, yellow and purple does much better than their turquoise, red, and gray.  I was really nervous, because I'm not that great at picking out colors, but I think it turned out really well!!

Yay for completing quilt number 9!

Alphabet Quilt!

I've been taking American Quilting's Saturday Sampler quilting "class", which is basically, you get a couple of quilt block patterns and fabric each month, you can sit in on a 15 minute explanation (which I never did, because I was always in a rush with someone waiting the car for me, usually...) and you must turn in your work the following month on time, or you have to pay $5 to get the next patterns.  I just got my last blocks and couldn't help but hurry and finish them last week!  Our final class is in June and we find out how they are all supposed to fit together!  I'm so curious, because they are all different sizes.  I thought it would be fun to show them all off here, before they are assembled.

This year was called an "alphabet quilt" because we got patterns for each letter of the alphabet.

A is for Album

B is for Bachelor's Puzzle

C is for Chimneys and Cornerstones

D is for Duck and Ducklings

E is for Evening Star

F is for Friendship

G is for Grandma's Choice

H is for Hayes Corner

I is for Illinois

J is for Johnnie Around the Corner

K is for Kansas Star

L is for Log Patch (or Lincoln Logs)

M is for Morning Star

N is for Night & Noon

O is for Octagons

P is for Pineapple (my favorite!)

Q is for Quartered Star

R is for Rambler

S is for Shoofly

T is for Turnstile

U is for Union Square

V is for Virginia Reel

W is for Whirling Whirlwind

X is for X Block

Y is for Yankee Puzzle

Z is for Zigzag

Something this class taught me is how much I value picking out my own fabric.  It was at times annoying to spend so much effort working on something with fabric I never would have picked out myself.  Because of this, I probably won't do another class, but it was great to have an excuse to sit down and sew every month :)

I'm planning to quilt it at Jay's parents' house because his mom just bought a long-arm quilting setup!! wahoo!!  I'll show the final product once it's finished :)

Quilts!

If you remember my crazy nesting post, two of the things I had listed to do before Hazel arrived were to finish her baby quilt and to finish binding The Frog's twin bed quilt.  Well, I did manage to finish both of those- the latter got finished the night before!  Here are the finished pics I never posted!

I made this using this tutorial for the pinwheel sampler quilt, although I changed the sizes of everything so it would be a crib quilt and had to add an additional pinwheel, to make it work for this non-square shape.  I used 1930's reproduction fabrics from a remnants bin at my favorite quilt shop.  I have soo much extra that I think I'll make another baby quilt, for Peach (yeah yeah, it's a bit late...) but a totally different design.

My mother-in-law traded me her old embroidery machine for my Elna, and this is the first quilt I have quilted using that.  It is SO AWESOME!

Look how perfect the quilting is!!!  I am sooo bad at machine quilting and am sooo excited to be able to use this to help me out.

And here is The Frog's twin quilt.  Sorry about the bad lighting, I was just trying to check this off the list before Hazel...  (I was actually unknowingly in labor when I took these photos :D)

My sister-in-law's mother did the quilting on this for me.  It's hard to tell from the picture, but the quilting says "ABC123".

Lately, one of the kids' favorite things to do is watch a slide-show of pictures of themselves on my computer.  Now, Peach loves being in pictures and she's always trying to get in front of the camera (and then wants to see what she looks like right away), sometimes she won't pose long enough for me to get a good shot before she's coming toward me saying, "I want to see Peach!"

First Scrap Quilt!

I often think about quilting and how it's so ironic that I am willing to spend so much on fabulous fabrics when the concept of a quilt was originally invented for thriftiness- to use up old clothing that can no longer be worn.  I guess I just feel that if I'm going to be spending so much time on a project, I want to really love how it turns out, and that's never seemed like it could happen with my scraps in the past.  Well, I just had my 10-year High School reunion last Saturday and I volunteered to donate a baby quilt as a prize, after asking another Colt from my class if she would donate her MAD quilting skills.  (which I mostly planned, with the help of a committee.  Thank goodness it's over... this it the main reason for the blogging hiatus.)  We got together, and with our powers combined, we came up with enough scraps in our stashes to put together a baby quilt.  I was a bit nervous about how it would look, but I think putting the white border tied in the one fabric that I thought stuck out.  It actually turned out really cute, if I do say so myself!

 And look at how AWESOME the quilting looks!  Jo, you ROCK at this!

 She also made a cute patch with the quilt's "history", which I always forget to put on mine...

Quilt for Iris!

So, I wanted to make something for Iris that she could take home to remember us by that would be useful, yet last a long time.  The obvious answer?  A quilt :)

This was a tricky one to design because I wanted it to be fabric that I thought she would choose, but we have pretty opposite styles, and I also wanted to be excited about it and think it looked cute.  

I saw a quilt here that totally inspired me and I knew Iris would love something like this.  Once I saw that, I got to work drawing up something similar and managed to secretly work on it only when Iris was at school for about 2 weeks until the piecing was all done. And miraculously, this is how much black thread I had left:

 My neighbor has an awesome quilting machine setup and she let me use it for this quilt.  It's not a long-arm machine, but a regular sized one, that is meant for quilting, and set up on a large quilting frame.  So basically, you can quilt a whole width of your quilt and about 6-8" of space.  I decided to alternate between a row of hearts and a row of stars since I'd never done this before and I thought it would be good practice.  You can totally tell which row was my first, but I think I pretty quickly got a feel for it and it was SOOOOO much faster and better looking than trying to do it on my machine.

After finishing the binding, I wanted to take pictures.  Unfortunately...

 I guess it looks comfortable?

 So I moved it to a chair in another room, but as soon as I did that...

 So then I moved it back to another room and tried to drape it down from the kids' table.

 I did manage to get in a few shots before...

 I thought maybe folding it up and having it small wouldn't be tempting but...

 I guess it looked like a nice padded seat.

 Anyway, I'm so pleased with how it came out!  It's soo different from any other quilt I've made and it's really fun and looks like Iris to me :)

Believe it or not, before I did this, I quickly whipped out a quilt made of ONLY SCRAPS (which I'm SO proud of) to donate to my 10 year HS reunion prizes.  A fellow classmate owns a long-arm machine quilting business and she said she's quilt and bind it for me.  I wanted to wait and take pictures after it's completely finished, but here's a preview:

:)