Books quilts and sewing

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Archive for the tag “mini quilt”

30 Jun 2013

New Baby Blanket

Looking through various quilting magazines I searched for my next conquest but didn’t want to tie up my time with a large project. I have several requests for quilts at this point but wanted to get a few quick ones stashed away in case I needed to send one as a gift. I came across this pattern and fell in love with it right away. To be completely honest though, I was looking for a pattern that would include some fabric that I already had. Using up part of the existing stash was definitely a prerequisite for the pattern.

The pattern is only about 40” X 40” which makes this more of a baby blanket size, but took a lot longer to put together than I thought it would.

Let me know what you think!! It will be sent out for quilting soon.

Some of the stages of construction to the finished quilt top.

Posted in Blogs, Daily and tagged beginner, blogging, crafts, Fabric, joann, Joann Fabrics, learning, manage, mini quilt, project, quilt, Quilting, Quilts, Sew, sewing | Leave a comment

11 Sep 2012

4 Comments

Our daughter put us to shame

So it looks like Autumn is coming to Texas finally!! I realise that we may yet have a few more days that the heat makes us uncomfortable, but with this forecast it’s a promising sign that we’ve turned the corner and can start pulling out those quilts soon.

Have to love it when the weather cooperates!!

On an entirely different note, I did over the weekend manage to finish binding the schoolhouse quilt and the Land of Whimsy quilt. Since my daughter was here and will be thru Thursday, we decided to try to complete a mini apiece to hang on the wall as a family project. This started out really great with all of us picking out the pattern that we were to complete and then… Kay started working on a completely different project (more on that project later), I initially was helping our daughter determine fabrics and layout, and finally I realized that both sewing machines would be in use so I opted to finish the bindings of the other quilts.

In the end, only one mini quilt was near completion and almost ready to be bound… our daughter’s mini. We still plan on finishing our minis later on, but will not be doing it as originally thought as a family project. I’m okay with that however, as I was able to spend a lot of time with our daughter discussing quilting and watching her abilities grow.

The other thing I was able to accomplish was to finish my niece’s daughter’s quilt. This is a picture of the backing that I finally decided on and now just need it quilted down.

Posted in Daily and tagged beginner, blogging, crafts, daughter, Fabric, learning, mini quilt, quilt, Quilting, Quilts, Schoolhouse, Sew, sewing, Sewing machine, Viking

08 Aug 2012

7 Comments

Quilt for my niece’s daughter Teagan

The quilt arrived for Jayden who is yet to be born, but that didn’t stop my niece from enjoying it until then. Of course her sister is just as precious to me as she is and I had already bought the fabric to complete her daughters quilt, all I need now is the time.

Here is a look at the material I’ll be using for Teagan’s quilt.

I can hardly wait to get started on her quilt. I’ll be quilting this down myself and of course using a satin binding to finish it off. If only I had enough time to do everything I wanted to do…

Posted in Daily and tagged beginner, blogging, crafts, Fabric, learning, manage, mini quilt, Niece, project, quilt, Quilting, Quilts, Sew, sewing

13 Jul 2012

1 Comment

A Garden Quilt and finished projects

Towards the end of yesterday while I was feeling better I managed to finished binding my “Spools and Dreams” mini quilt.

It looks a little off kilter because of the positioning when I took the picture, but it turned out real nice. All of the edges are straight and that can’t be said for some of the spools in the quilt! I also finished my new Sage Garden quilt and it goes off to the Long Arm today.

Posted in Daily and tagged beginner, crafts, Fabric, hand quilting, learning, mini quilt, project, quilt, Quilting, Quilts

11 Jul 2012

1 Comment

Work in Progress

My new work in progress has been delayed, as I was lucky enough to get the flu over the past two days… yea me!! The pattern is called Arcadia, by Mountainpeak Creations and will be reviewed once the quilt is completely together. I love the whimsical nature of these fabrics. I have to say that I found it difficult determining what pattern to use with these fabrics… they are not your ordinary run-of-the-mill patterns.

After three days of searching, I found one that I thought would work and have made the first panel. Now, I did end up created three squares roughly 11 1/2″ X 11 1/2″ as test squares to find that I needed to sew my seams a little different. The strips needed to be sewn with a scant 1/4″ seam, while the block needed to be sewn with a full 1/4″ seam. That to me is very frustrating to have to remember while sewing. Sewing it any other way and I ended with rectangles instead of squares.

Rather than wasting the fabric I have planned to of course make a throw or a mini with the strips that have already been sewn and just throw in a border to compensate. The queen size pattern I tested, was tested with the first complete panel. As I put it on my bed and looked at it, it is definitely large enough to be used as a queen sized quilt and gave me a preview of the completed quilt. WOW! is what I was thinking as I imaged what it will look like when finished.

Have you ever picked a fabric without regard to actually having a pattern for it? I’ve done this before, but never had such a difficult time as with this one. My biggest issue was that I liked all of the fabrics and didn’t want them to “disappear” into the quilt, but stand out individually. Speak out and let me know struggles that you’ve had!

Posted in Daily, Reviews, Shopping and tagged beginner, blogging, crafts, Fabric, Joann Fabrics, learning, mini quilt, project, quilt, Quilting, Quilts, Review, Sew, sewing

06 Jul 2012

2 Comments

Eat your Vegetables

Work has been very tough on my schedule lately, but I’m back to writing again and have accomplished a lot in the last few days. I’ve wanted to start… okay, I’ve been dying to start a couple of new queen size quilts that I’ve already bought the fabric for. After telling Kay about this, she not so politely said that I really needed to finish my other projects before starting on new ones.

Let’s take stock… I finished my Arbor Lane quilt and even washed it! I needed to deconstruct my “Spools and Dreams” mini and then sew it all back together. I needed to start and finish the hand quilting on the Amish mini quilt and then bind it. I have another Sage Garden quilt that needs to go out to the long arm quilter after I sew the sashing on it and get the backing sewn together. But what I really wanted to do was to start the two new quilts that I had in mind.

My wife’s response was a little like “Eat your vegetables and then you can have desert”. Well, as much as I hated to admit it, she is right. With all of those unfinished projects hanging over my head, I really needed to finish them before I started my new projects. I’m eating my veggies now in anticipation of desert.

Here’s the “Spools and Dreams” mini with the backing fabric I chose…

Posted in Daily and tagged Amish, Batting, beginner, blogging, crafts, Fabric, hand quilting, learning, mini quilt, project, quilt, Quilting, Quilts, Sew, sewing

03 Jul 2012

1 Comment

Your Opinion Matters

Okay, so I took the night off… sort of. I have a couple unfinished projects, or more correctly projects that were started and went horribly wrong so I stopped where I was at. I had finished the nursery blanket but havent cut the batting for it yet. I cut out all the white squares for a beautiful blue and white quilt and they are languishing in the closet right now while we talked about our next weekender quilt.

So last night I watched television while doing nothing. I actually felt a little out-of-place and guilty knowing I could have been hand quilting my Amish mini. Have you ever felt guilty for taking a break? I must admit my mind has been on work a lot lately with quite a few projects on my plate. We also have the 4th of July holiday coming up which I have off and my wife is working.

Send me your encouragement and let me know which project I should finish first:

Re-sew the messed up mini, hand quilt the Amish mini, piece the blue quilt, or start a new “quick quilt”. I’d be really interested to have your opinions.

Posted in Daily and tagged Amish, beginner, blogging, crafts, Fabric, hand quilting, learning, mini quilt, project, quilt, Quilting, Quilts, Sew, sewing, Sewing machine

09 May 2012

Quilt swap II

A word on quilt swaps, or maybe more than just one word… I entered into my second quilt swap three weeks ago and as I previously wrote was determined to make a better showing than the first one I entered. What’s a quilt swap?

There are different kinds at different sites and all have their own unique set of rules. I joined one on Flickr called Little Quilt – Sew, Vote, Swap Group at this site. http://www.flickr.com/groups/sew_vote_swap/
The basics of this site is to make a mini quilt no smaller than 12” x 12” and no larger than 20” x 20” using your best effort. The quilt must be bound and quilted either by machine or hand before entering the quilt in the swap at a pre-determined date. Once that cutoff date is reached, the moderator posts a voting sheet to each quilter where you set your preferences from 1 thru 20. One being the quilt you want to be sent most, two being your second choice and so on…

Not to get too much further into the rules, depending on how many votes your quilt receives determines which of your choices that you’ll receive. During the first quilt swap I ended up literally swapping with the person. You guessed it, as big as the odds are on something like that, the person that was to receive my quilt was the person whose quilt I received as well.

So bring it back to the current or second quilt swap, mine will be traveling outside of the country, but whose quilt do you think I received… You guessed it, the same person who made the last mini quilt in the first swap. You’d think I’d be upset, although I wish I could have received one from another quilter for variety I was happy to receive a beautiful quilt from a true artist. I did send her a quick note saying that she should just send me her next one as well ahead of the swap…

Here is the beautiful quilt that I received on this second swap!!

As for how well my quilt finished, I learned a very valuable lesson throughout all this. It really doesn’t matter because everyone views art differently and when you create something that you’re proud of… You’ve already won.

Have you had any interesting quilt swap experiences?

Posted in Daily, Quilt Swap and tagged mini quilt, quilt, quilt swap, Quilting, sewing | Leave a comment