Bloggers Quilt Festival

This quilt features Laura Gunn’s Lantern Bloom fabrics and warm, rich Kona solids. I first fell in love with the Lantern Bloom line because of the jewel tone colors, painterly quality and wonderful design. I chose four fabrics and wanted to find a way to highlight both the large scale designs as well as the small organic prints. Solids seemed like a great choice to show off both. I chose three warm browns in Kona solids – coffee, brown and cinnamon – for most of the blocks but added some pop with thin strips of berry and cyan. After the main blocks were done, everything else followed the same improvisational path. In other words, how much of each fabric did I have left to make borders and a back. I think I pieced almost every bit of these fabrics, wonky as all get out, before all was said and done. The quilting was stippled with a variegated thread that ran from eggplant to rust (a happy find in my thread bin from an earlier project).

Thanks for visiting my blog and enjoy the rest of the festival! Be sure to check out my Sew Fresh business partners’ house quilts for her daughter, they’re drop dead gorgeous!

Thank yous and other randomness

Thank you Amy of Park City Girl for having me as a featured Quilt Festival blogger. Thank you to Vicki at Sew Inspired who nominated me for the feature. Thanks to all of the very kind commenters. I’m trying not to get a swelled head. I’m honored to be a part of this vibrant and wonderfully supportive online quilting community. You’re an amazing group of people. Thank you again.

On to the randomness…

Under the category of “Things you don’t want to hear” – Mom, I glued my butt to the bench.

Under the category of “Food Obsessions” – Buffalo Chicken-anything…. dip, pizza, whatever. I honestly think my body is experiencing a deficiency of hot sauce and stinky cheese. Strange. The second (and healthier) obsession is soup. Must be a winter thing. Excellent choices are Mushroom, Roasted Red Pepper and Potato, Curry Pumpkin and Turkey. I almost never remember about the camera at dinnertime so no tantalizing pictures. Trust me, they’re all yummy.

Under the category of “Teaser” – Here’s a peek at the new art quilt I’m working on.

Have a great weekend. Happy Valentines Day!

Quilters Connecting Quilt

Thanks again Amy, for hosting the Bloggers Quilt Festival!

I’m writing about my Scrappy Squares quilt because it made me feel connected to the online quilting world. I saw this quilt on Flickr and fell in love. It was a match made in heaven because I have a hard time throwing away even the smallest pieces of fabric. Thus my first scrap quilt was born. I made up the pattern myself and it had a few kinks along the way.

Next, Liza from Quiltifications decided to make it in black and white along with her friend Beth doing a brown and teal colorway. Their two quilts are here. Liza worked up the design in EQ and eliminated the annoying y-seam problem that I created for myself.

Then Lisa emailed me and asked about the pattern. Liza was kind enough to pass it on and Lisa made another terrific quilt.

I am so encouraged and inspired by the online quilting community. I’m continually amazed by the support and talent of the people out there. It’s nice when we can connect a little bit more. Thanks to all of you. Now off to the festival for me!

Bloggers Quilt Festival

Amy at Park City Girl has organized an online quilt festival for all those of us who can’t make it to Quilt Market. I can’t wait to visit all the other bloggers.

My quilt story is about my latest, the Blooming Nine Patch featuring some Kaffe Fassett fabrics. Cathy, my machine quilter, had done this pattern and I loved how fluid the design looked, especially since it is so geometric (every cut is a square). It was an interesting contrast between linear pattern and flowing effect. I knew I had to try it. I’ve always been a fan of Kaffe Fassett fabrics and they seemed perfect for the color transitions that the pattern makes. I picked my first fabrics at the Lowell Quilt Festival last year.

The entire quilt consists of small nine patches and squares alternately. For a large queen sized quilt, that’s a lot of rote sewing. Fortunately for me, I began the project on my quilting getaway weekend last fall. I cut as many strips as I could before we left and began with lots of time to sew and great company to do it. It totally relieved the tedium of sewing strips and nine patches endlessly. The second benefit was that I was far enough into the quilt to not let it become a UFO when I returned home. I really wanted to see it done.

The other cool thing about this quilt was seeing how it changed every time I added a new row of color. It’s not exactly what I had envisioned but it’s quite probably better. It was a great learning experience that turned out beautiful. That’s win-win in my book. Thanks for visiting!