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It was a long week...

My mother-in-law came to visit last week during Spring Break. It was fun. We had a quilt project me, her and my daughter were in the middle of before she visited. It was great for National Quilting Day. It was like we celebrated all week. We completed them, well mostly. I still need to attach the binding on my daughter's quilt. It was a kit we picked up a while ago called Misty Pines by Jeri Kelly. It finishes at 7.75 inches by 21.25 inches. It came with a paper pieced center and all the fabrics to finish it except batting. We bought three to work on them together. It was my daughter and MIL's first quilt. It was a great idea to buy a complete kit for their first project because we didn't have to spend the extra time debating over choosing fabric and some of the pieces were already cut to size so we could get right to working on them. They came out great.

Here's mine:


And my daughter's:


The kit didn't include a binding so we went out to buy some since my MIL wanted to finish it that way. I think she just really wanted to know how to put on bindings. We chose two coordinating fabrics and we each finished ours differently, mine has a dark brown binding and my daughter's has a green binding. My MIL chose to add a second border in the green and green binding but I didn't get a picture of hers. I like how they were all the same but we each put our individual stamp on it.

The only problem with the pattern was a lack of detailed instructions. I hadn't really done applique before, except for the Maneki Neko, and didn't realize that the dark green was going to shadow under the light cream. The pattern should have warned about this and suggest using interfacing in between to mask it. or to put the dark green over the cream. Besides that, we had fun and my two students learned a lot. I finished mine but I'm going to free motion quilt it later. I don't recommend these patterns for beginners unless they are making them with someone more experienced.

We also used two different fusible for the appliques. We used Heat and Bond Lite and Lite Steam a Seam 2. I much prefer the Lite Steam a Seam 2. It went on very thin. It was slightly tacky on the back which made laying the scroll part over the join of the two pieces easier to get exact. It also secured the edges of the applique much better.

The Dallas Quilt Show was at the beginning of our week and we picked out our next project to work on together. Cynthia England was at the show demonstrating her technique Picture Piecing. It's a little like paper piecing except you don't sew through the papers but use them as templates for piecing. She has videos of her techniques on her website England Designs along with a tutorial and free practice patterns. The technique looks very forgiving. My MIL then bought more patterns online for us to work on after the next one. The quilts are beautiful and picture like. I can't wait to get started. I'll probably do the tutorial soon so I can work out the kinks before starting on our kits and guiding the others. I have more to post but this is quite long enough. I'll post again soon.

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The quilt with two names

I've known about this quilt forever. I originally read about it on the Quilting Board way before I'd seen the Jelly Roll Race or the 1600 inch quilt. You can find the original post here: http://www.quiltingboard.com/tutorials-f10/super-fast-jelly-roll-quilt-t44258.html   I recommend you wade through it because there are a lot of nice examples. On page 7 is a picture tutorial and somewhere in there is a discussion of making different sizes and using different widths. She used to have a PDF printout for free but you could just print the first page.  Anyways, I used my JoAnn's, 20 strip jelly roll to try this out.  I wanted to also separate the strips by piecing squares in between them. I really like that look for this quilt so I chose a crazy scrap I had laying around and cut twenty 2 1/2 inch squares. The jelly roll had only ten different fabrics, 2 strips of each, so I pieced squares on one end of each strip. I should clarify, you need to piece strips of