Stitching in the Barn

  Finished August 2020. Inspired by Waves by Jenny Doan here . Appliques available as free clip art here . Fabric from my stash.

Inspired by a quilt by Marti Michell from her Craftsy/Bluprint class Machine Quilting in Sections Fabric is Blast Off! by Connecting Threads and stash fabric. 50 inches by 50 inches. Finished January 2020.   Front     Back  

So I was super excited about being done with the quilt and just needing to add the binding. I hadn't done binding in a long time, well over a year, and forgot how wide to cut it. I cut my binding 2 inches. I put the strips together, pressed it and sewed it to the front with a quarter inch seam allowance. I don't hand sew binding on except for maybe my first quilt which was a table runner.  When I turned the binding over to the back it didn't reach past the stitching line! I thought if I glued it down I might be able to stitch it down. I didn't use a fine tip and I was super frustrated gluing down the binding. I even used an iron to speed it up. I am never doing that again and it took forever! I stopped gluing with maybe 25 inches left and just used my wonder clips, which I have plenty of. I started by straight stitching about 10 inches to see if the stitching was catching in the back. It wasn't. I was so close to finishing. Then I remembered, "Babies don...

At some point I bought 2 charm packs of Island Hopping by Connecting Threads that were a group of 16 fabrics and decided to make a baby quilt from the squares. I put both packs on my design wall with the packs split evenly in the middle. I changed the placement for a week until I found one that was balanced and pleasing. Sewed it together and got a couple of fabrics to round it out to a decent size for a baby a long time ago. Meanwhile life happened and this quilt has been intended for 2 babies and will end up for a third being born this week. I'm really happy with it. I quilted it around the beginning of August 2019 with an orange peel motif in the blocks and swags in the first border. I couldn't figure out what to do in the last border that wouldn't be too dense. While I was sick in bed recently, I came across a way to quilt a braid design that was simple, fast and not dense. It worked great! I finished the quilting, trimmed the front and batting, then turned t...

My daughter, MIL & I sew together. The project we chose to do in 2014 was a paper pieced quilt of a tea set. We found the patterns at Piece By Number here: http://piecebynumber.com/grandmas-tea-party-mini-quilt/ MIL was concerned some of the pieces looked small so we enlarged the pot & cup blocks by 150% and changed the setting to only four cups. My daughter is an art major so she helped us pick some coordinating fabric for me & my MIL's quilts, then picked out some others for hers.

I'm forcing myself to make this blog post. It's been a tough week and I don't want to do this but blogging does make me happy so I hope this helps me get back on track. I've finished my quilt, mostly. It could use more quilting but this is as done as it's going to get for now. This was the hardest one to weave and I'm really proud of it. Sorry the picture is a bit blurry, I just couldn't seem to get them all to look sharp today. I stitched around all the red sections with a continuous line when I attached the applique'. Then, after pin basting the quilt together, I stitched through all three layers around the heart on the edge and then a second time using the edge of my presser foot as a guide. I also stitched inside the border.

So I've been feeling better and once again, because I looked several months before, I looked for a quilt to make from some 5" charms, that I bought from Connecting Threads ages ago, at the end of May. I found what I wanted in Christa Quilts! Charming Chevrons Quilt along. It was simple, modern, used charms, and gave a lot of punch for your effort. I bought some Kona black and worked on it on & off for the whole month of June.  I haven't been 100% so I just worked on it for a couple of hours here and there, otherwise I think I could've gotten the top done in 2 weeks. Then, I thought it'd take another month to quilt but I decided to do the minimal amount I felt I could get away with. So now after about 37 hours of work. Here it is, my first quilt in a year+ 55" x 62" I added a 4 inch border in Kona grey. I like thick 1/2 inch bindings because it frames it. My daughter is an artist/art student and helped me arrange the half blocks into a...

I planned to take some time off the internet, about a week, to finish up a quilt I was close to completing. I got a lot of work done on it and then I got sick. I'm not as sick as I was but now I have a headache that is  the worst I've ever had. The light from the monitor is bothering my eyes so I'm just putting this up here quickly and hopefully I'll get back next week. I had this little quilt me, my daughter and my MIL made together but I knew I still wanted more quilting on it and I finally got it finished.  The quilting in the border isn't so great but sometimes you just have to call something done and hang it up. The quilt I'm trying to get finished is this flannel rail fence. It was previously in 4 sections with only 3 rails unquilted. I've finished the quilting, joined the 4 sections together and added the first border. I was literally in the middle of adding the last border, I already had 2 sides down, when I got suddenly sick, ve...

I was sick last weekend when I wanted to finish this quilt so it had to wait until yesterday. It's about 33 inches square and made from a kit by Connecting Threads that I got for Mother's Day last year. It's made exactly as pictured in the directions but I pieced the blocks the way I preferred. I thought about changing it up some. I wanted to put something in the light print squares other than the letters but I couldn't decide what to do. However, once I traced out the letters and put the fusible on the fabric, I noticed the fabric went perfectly with them. In the end, I'm happy I didn't do something off the wall.  Since this is a wall quilt, I free motion quilted it very tightly. I had so much fun doing it and picking out what I wanted to do in each square. I think my favorite are the pinwheel and the spool blocks. Quilting it around Valentines' Day also influenced my design. In the blue corner squares, I used a red variegated thread and did a sti...

I have a Live Journal account where I'm a member of a community that has a fabric postcard swap. I missed out on the first two rounds, because I didn't really sew last year. They recently announced the third round and I'm ready to participate.  This is a no stress swap which means it's been announced that the postcards will be mailed at the end of February. Near the end of February, a post will be made and you sign up and say how many you already have finished. So if I have 3 finished by then, then I can sign up for 3. The host will gather all the snail mail addresses then divide them out, you get the addresses where to send your postcard and mail them by the due date. If you don't have any ready to go, you just don't sign up, therefore no stress.  Fabric postcards are a great way to make small samples of new techniques that are useful. I made this one after they first announced it.

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...

I call it "Welcome Spring" After that awful cold snap we had here in DFW, I think I wanted something really bright and cheerful. It's 22 inches square, thankfully. I don't think I could stomach these two colors together if it was much larger. This is a good representation of the colors. The blocks are each 6 inches finished. It's basically a sample to try out my new Tri-Recs rulers. I free motion quilted it with Connecting Threads' Essentials in Purple.

Finished: The Maneki Neko quilt from Fat Cat Patterns is done! He's hanging on the wall and hopefully welcoming the money into our home ^_^ This was a fun quick project. I learned a lot and he's cute. I didn't do much quilting within his body because I didn't know what type of filler would work and if I could do it well. I followed the lines in the background print for the quilting outside the cat like a 5 year old but I'm still happy with the practice. I quilted scales on the fish and heavily lined the mouth and collar to make the rest of the cat pop out. I would never give this away because of the inexpensive fabrics involved. The fish was made with a higher quality scrap and it fused better and didn't fall apart when I quilted around the edges, unlike the white. Quality is worth the price. Next time I'll try not to skimp. It's 12.5 inches square which I think is a perfect size for me to try new techniques. Modification?: My labyrint...

I finished my son's quilt on Wednesday! I wanted to post a picture today but the weather wasn't cooperating with us. We took it out yesterday to get a picture because it was a beautiful sunny day but the wind kept catching it. Hopefully we'll be able to do it tomorrow when we'll have an extra person to help. Look for a long post on that soon. Meanwhile I've started on a baby quilt for my niece.  Here's what I had a couple of days ago: Two sets of four patches and all the strips pieced.

I made this quilt for my MIL. She loves decorating for Halloween, she's sews also and I knew she would love and appreciate this wall quilt. She showed it to everyone:

that took a long time to complete. These two quilts had been languishing in my UFO (Un-Finished Objects) pile for quite a long time. The reason was because I had the intention of working on them by hand. I really don't have much patience recently to finish them so when my husband bought and fixed my Necchi last year I used it to finish these by machine and get them out of the pile. The first is a labyrinth quilt:

This is the first baby quilt I ever made and it never got delivered:

I don't remember when I made this quilt and I haven't hung it up in a very long while but it was one of my very firsts.  It's a very small purple and red-violet Irish chain quilt. The reason it's a Harry Potter quilt is because I embroidered some symbols familiar in the early Harry Potter books into the open spaces:

This is my first finished quilt. It's buried today in a plastic storage bin somewhere but I do bring it out and hang it on the wall when I feel like it fits the season, though it's not for any specific one. It's my 9/11 quilt but it doesn't have a name. It isn't because I made it in remembrance of the event but it's because I finished sewing on the binding by hand while I was riveted to the horrific scenes in NYC that day. Looking back, maybe I'll call it "Grounded By Quilting" because it helped me stay grounded while watching those news reports.