Stitching in the Barn

 Pieced Lucky Charm. Video here: Jaybird quilts All pieced together and I even started the next one!     My intersections are amazingly good! I'm so happy with it!

 #Journey2Nebula Seaside place mat top complete! Piecing video here. Please excuse the old pressing mat :) Took about 3 hrs total. Front:   My points came out great! Back:   Fabric inspiration from my stash that will become my backing.

 Stash pictures for #FQSScrappySeptember I want to make Moda Block Heads 3 #33 as a pillow like at the link.  

I've had these rulers for ages and now I get to use them. I'm doing the #Journey2Nebula quilt along. Click this link for the first video . And more info on the blog here . Bought a half jelly roll. Compared it against some stash fabric. Very bright for me but I like it! I chose 5 colors and the darker green. Cut for a Seaside place mat.  

  I received an extra large Stripology ruler for my birthday this year. I had received the Hex N More ruler for the previous Christmas. Both from my MIL. My husband had bought me the fat eighth stack at a craft show many years ago. It's Good Fortune by Kate Spain for Moda. They all came together for the start of an extra large hexagon quilt. Love these rulers! Lovely large stack of hexagons. I got 2 from every fat eighth. Great pile of scraps. I need to find a solid to calm down and unify these wonderful large scale prints. Happy quilting!  

I've finally "finished" quilting the middle of my jelly roll quilt! These are the left, center and right of the last row I quilted. There's still a bit of a gap that I might go back and fill in. Doing the loops in the bottom picture was one of my favorite parts. The center picture shows my ugly starts and stops but it was quick and easy without having to bury threads. The line is the inside of the 1st border and I quilted the outside one too, I just don't have a picture.  I'm stumped a bit on the outer border quilting but I'm sure I'll figure it out by this weekend. I'm a slow quilter but I hope to have this done withing 2 weeks. I think I'm going to end up naming this one "Done is Better Than Perfect" because it's far from perfect! Happy Sewing!

We, my MIL, daughter and I, worked on our crazy quilt blocks all through 2015. These are our first crazy quilt blocks pieced! I used the method where you randomly cut a 5 sided polygon, place it on a piece of muslin and randomly add strips around it.

I bought these 2.5 inch Urban Odyssey strips from Connecting Threads and sewed them into a quick quilt ages ago. It's like the Jelly Roll Race 2 quilt from MSQC . I used 2 jelly roll packs because they had less than 40 strips but I can't remember how many there were. I pulled out the brown colorway strips and used them for the inner border and the little squares. To use two of the same prints, I sewed them short ends together with a square between to break them up a bit. if you sew them like individual strips, they can fall in weird places in the quilt and sew together in distracting ways. I love how the brown squares are scattered like confetti.

(I forgot how to use Blogger. I set a time for my posts to be published but I still saved them as drafts by accident. There are now 2 other new posts older than this one uploaded today but dated earlier.) Now that the tea set quilts were done, me & my daughter convinced my MIL to do a crazy quilt. She wasn't too crazy about it but she went along with it. We know how much she loves embellishing and know that she will have a lot of fun with this quilt. We went to the quilt store and she let my daughter pick out the fabrics for it. She chose a green to aqua color scheme with a few browns thrown in for neutrals. The lady cutting our fabric was as impressed as we were with how beautiful it was. Here's a  picture after she folded it up all nice for us. the thread spools are a couple from Connecting Threads that I had in my stash.   We couldn't wait to get started but we had to because my MIL was flying back home. It was so hard to not touch that scrumptious fabric...

I got my hearts trimmed and fused down. The picture's not great but I waned to document my progress. I hope to stitch down the applique's tomorrow and layer it for quilting. The first post for this project, with the links for how to make the hearts, is here . Linking up with: Can I get a whoop whoop??

Today, I've been working on the woven hearts I started on yesterday's post . I cut out my fusible web and laid them on the pink fabric to see in what order I wanted them.

I had planned to post about another project I had started this weekend but then Monday happened.  I love Linky Parties. I love seeing what others are creating or have in the past. You're most likely reading this blog because you found me on one. On one of them I saw a picture of some cute woven hearts and had to click on the link. Vera's post is titled "Mug Rug Detour" and she detoured me from my project.  Her mug rugs were darling so I clicked the link to see how she made the hearts . When I saw how she wove together the hearts she used, I was intrigued. Then she had another link at the bottom to go to a page with different ways to cut the fabric to weave some amazing hearts! The first page was a standard 9-patch and I left. I came back later and noticed there were more pages. On the second page I found a picture of an angel woven from strips! It just blew my mind! There are 27 different patterns you can weave, some of them are incredible. It opened my eyes t...

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'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 ...

I sent out my fabric postcards last week for the swap. I made two more for a total of three so I should get three back. I used these postcards to try out a no mark method of sewing hexagons together that Jacquie over at Tallgrass Prairie Studio posted. It made sewing hexagons super simple and fast. I started with my Bits & Bobbins scraps and cut some hexagons with the small hex template from Marti Michell. I used set H template 52a which makes a 1.5 inch finished hexagon.  First I sewed a strip of them straight across. This actually already has two strips pieced together and I'm in the middle of the third but the idea is the same. The previous stitching lines make the 1/4 inch from the end marks, as long as they are accurate. You're basically stitching the seams in order starting on the side touching the previous piecing on the top or left then to the next counter-clockwise until it's attached. Above, the light blu...

Last year I was participating in a BOM over at Live Journal. Of course, this is hard to keep up with when you're taking a quilting hiatus. Taking the time cutting out all the pieces at once and kitting them helped finish them much faster since I could just sew up a couple of seams when I had a chance. Last weekend I finished sewing the last two blocks! The other one I forgot to get an individual picture of but it's the upper right Mardi Gras colored block in the group. These are big 16.5 inch blocks. I've finally taken them down off my design wall after being up there for about a year. This isn't their final setting. I think I'm going to add a 2 inch white border around each block and them finish them as a quilt-as-you-go project during the summer. It should finish about 60" X 80". Finally, another step closer to being done but it's going on the back burner for now.

I went to my mailbox and found my prize waiting for me, to my surprise. I never got an email or anything but I'm not complaining. Connecting Threads sent me the Fauna collection of thread. This collection and several spools from it were on my wishlist. How can you pass up thread with names like Milk Chocolate and Latte. They are scrumptious in person and I'm thinking up coffee or cocoa ideas for a mini quilt to try them out. The light colored ones are needed for piecing. They're the perfect shade to blend in to many colors. I do have a small wallhanging that I wanted to put more quilting on that these colors would go perfectly with so that's probably going to be the first thing I do with these threads. I also need to go pick up a new tackle box to keep them in since the last one I bought was filled immediately from my last order of thread from Connecting Threads . I've also joined their site and Perfect Points Quilt a Long.   The first official Q...