Not Your Grandmother's Flower Garden

Remember my farmer's market hexies?  You can see where I started them here a year ago, and a little more progress here.  I've been working on them off and on since then.  When the Quilt Guild of Dallas announced that their show theme for 2013 was "Edible," a couple of people said I should enter with the hexie quilt.  I plugged away with that in mind and was at this stage when I decided to enter the show in late February.

I kept saying, "I'm almost done," but I wasn't!  With the March 6 deadline looming, I stitched more.  I took it to QuiltCon with me and stitched in the hotel room.  I stitched at night while watching TV.  Late on Friday, March 1, I stitched the last corner medallion in place and thought I was ready for the borders.  But it needed one more outer border of red hexies, so I plunged ahead.  It took me all day Saturday until about 2 a.m. Sunday morning to finish that hexie border.

I had planned to border it in red but while I was at QuiltCon I realized I wouldn't have enough, so I searched for and found a nice avocado green and a nifty diagonal stripe for a border.  I got the borders sewed on on Sunday and pieced the back.  Two days to go until it absolutely had to be done and it still needed to be quilted.  So I took off work on Monday and Tuesday to quilt and bind it.  I sewed on the label and hanging sleeve at small group Tuesday evening.  I finished it just in time to take it to the Dallas Market Hall on Wednesday morning.  Whew!

Thursday was preview night.  I decided to go see the quilts in relative peace, even though I plan to also go on Sunday with some friends.  When I finally found my quilt, what did I see but a ribbon!  My last minute quilt had won an Honorable Mention in the Show Chair's Theme category!!  Not bad for my first ever quilt show!

 

 Not Your Grandmother's Flower Garden

70"x72"

Christmas ... a little late!

A week after Christmas we spent the weekend with Mr. T's sister's family at two cabins at Lake D'Arbonne in northern Louisiana.  The cabins were spacious, with each having beds for 8, plenty of room for the 16 of us.  The weather was beautiful, firewood plenty, and the company great.  We shared cooking duties between the two kitchens, including a big holiday dinner.

We each had  to provide a Christmas gift for 2 other people.  My quilter niece and I had each other, so we bought each other fat quarter bundles and other quilty goodies.  Mr. T had his sister, my sis-in-law.  I had already started a quilt for her before we knew we were getting names, so I made it for him to give her.

I used charm packs of Ambrosia by Kathy Davis for Free Spirit.  At first I used only the charm packs in the squares, but it was WAY too busy, even for me.  So I unsewed several blocks and added in some solids to break up the busyness.  I was happy with the result and my SIL loved it.

A Finish

In a happy coincidence a couple of months ago, I fell in love with a pattern called Simply Woven by SewCraftyJess posted on the Moda Bake Shop.  The same day I snagged two jelly rolls of Chicopee by Denyse Schmidt on sale from Craftsy.  That combined with some Eggshell Bella solid and I was all set to make a new quilt.

The DMQG retreat was a couple of weeks later at the Compass Centre in Mt. Calm, Texas, so I took everything with me and started on my version of Simply Woven.  The first problem I encountered was that my jelly rolls did not have as many strips as the pattern called for.  Luckily, there is a shop in the Compass Center that had some near-solids in coordinating colors so I bought enough to make up the difference.  Once everything was cut, I started piecing.  It's not a hard pattern but it takes FOREVER!  I worked on it for two complete days and finally finished the top (I thought) on Sunday morning.  I hadn't paid any attention to the size of the finished quilt, which was 72"x96", about twin sized. I don't have any twin beds, so when I got home, I took out one row, made one more block, and sewed it back together so it measures 84"x84".  I like the square size much better, and it will fit over my queen sized bed.

I quilted it this weekend and used all the left-over strips for the binding.  I'm really pleased with it!

Aloha

No, I'm not in Hawaii, although I wish I were.  We spent 2 weeks there last year just before Christmas, a few days in Honolulu and the rest in a condo on the beach in Maui.  It was a wonderful vacation.  We lived in Hawaii many years ago when Mr. T was in the Navy, and have been back several times on vacation or business.  I've come to dislike Honolulu for its traffic and crowds and even the North Shore of Oahu is no longer quiet and sleepy.  Maui, on the other hand, was fabulous.  Of all the islands, Kauai is my favorite, although I haven't been back in many, many years.

Our last day in Maui was Christmas Eve, with an afternoon flight back to Dallas that got delayed until quite late.  We had to be out of the condo by noon, so after some last minute sight seeing, we went shopping.  I made the family take me to the Maui Quilt Shop in Kihei before it closed.  It's a wonderful little shop, filled with lots of Hawaiian patterns along with fun and contemporary fabrics.  I picked up a couple of traditional Hawaiian applique patterns -- I might even make them some day.

My real find was a packet of Hawaiian bark cloth charm squares.  Bark cloth is the traditional fabric of aloha shirts.  These were lovely florals in reds, blues, greens, and yellows.  I just had to buy it.

When I got home, I found some white on white cotton with a floral pattern that looked like plumeria, a popular flower used in Hawaiian leis.  I didn't want to cut the charm squares so I decided to just sash them in white.  I started the quilt last spring while on a retreat at Quiltagious Quarters in Celeste, TX.. Several people said it needed cornerstones, so I raided a dark blue batik from another project (still WIP) and used that.  I finished it a couple of months ago and it's now hanging in the DMQG exhibit at my library.

Maui Aloha
58"x58"

Silent Auction

I attend a regional professional meeting every year in October.  For the past several years, there has been a silent auction of donated items to raise money for scholarships.  I never contributed anything, feeling that the $20 or $30 that is usually paid for an item was likely to be less than I'd paid for it in the first place.  But last year I made a lap quilt, about 50" square, a fractured nine-patch made out of leftovers in my stash.  The bidding was intense and the final bid topped $150.  So this year I made another one, again out of my stash.  It was slightly bigger, at about 60" square.  The bidding was not as intense, and the same person won it again this year, for slightly less money.

 I sewed the binding on during the 5-hour drive to Lubbock.  I had to pin the quilt to the wall of my hotel room to take the picture.  Unfortunately, the battery in my camera died and I had to use my phone, so the picture is not the best.

It's always hard to part with a quilt that I like, but I'm consoled that it was for a good cause.

A Gift

I received a charm pack of Juggling Summer by Moda at a DMQG meeting a couple of months ago. 











It sat on my cutting table for awhile, getting moved around but not opened.  I wasn't particularly crazy about the fabric on top, but when I finally opened the pack and saw all the rest of them, I changed my mind.  I love the colors and the patterns really speak to me.  In fact, I liked it so much, I went online to see if I could get some more and discovered that it won't be available until October.  Dang!

I need to make a quilt for a fund-raising silent auction in October, and what better way to raise money than with something that was free in the first place.  So I started looking for patterns that used single charm packs.  After browsing around for awhile, I found Jungle Path by Jessica Kelly at the Moda Bake Shop.  It's a baby quilt, and used a jelly roll too, but I figured I could work around that easily enough.

I decided to use a light gray for the thin sashing and solids for the block borders.  I used all the boldly printed charms along with enough of the subtle ones to make 25 blocks.  I didn't cut down the charm squares as the pattern says to do, leaving them at 5", and ended up with 10.5" finished blocks.  I haven't sashed them yet, but I put them up on my design wall to see what they look like together.

 

There will be 1" light gray sashing between each block and row.  I'm really happy with how it's turning out.  Now I'm thinking that I may just have to keep it and make something else for the silent auction!

An Amish experiment

It is my tradition to make a quilt for every person on my staff who retires.  I will usually ask them what colors they like, then create a quilt of my own design.  Laura, who is retiring this month after more than 30 years of service, went a step further and sent me a picture of an Amish quilt and said that was the style she wanted.  It was a very traditional "square in a square" pattern that is usually associated with Amish quilts.  I did some research on different styles, but ended up returning to the simple design.

I bought several fat quarters of Kona solids and started piecing.  (How nice to have access to so many beautiful solids these days!)  I had to get a full half-yard for the outside border and more for the back, but the fabric requirements were really minimal.  As I was piecing, all I could think of was how I was going to quilt all this wide-open space!  My standard stipple/meander was not appropriate for the Amish style.  It needed feathers and grids.  I have a longarm, but I'm not very experienced with can't yet do feathers and straight lines, and a gift is not the place to experiment!  So I marked the quilt with a stencil for the center and surrounding triangles and a ruler for the grid lines everywhere else.  Then I spent hours on my Janome quilting all those lines.

After I bound it last night, I tried to get off the marker lines.  They were supposed to come off with water, but they didn't very well.  I ended up nearly soaking the quilt and had to put it in the dryer (did I tell you her party is today?) so it would be dry.  I hadn't prewashed the fabric, so the beautiful, smooth quilt is now wrinkly -- and some of the marks are still there.  Aaarrggghhh! 

But it's done and ready to give to Laura.  I hope she likes it.

Laura's retirement quilt, 40"x40"