2013 Show and Tell

Happy New Year!  Another year finished, and it is time for the annual "what did you make this year?" show and tell.

This year, I didn't do a lot of quilting.  I was busy working on remodeling a "handyman special" property, which was quite a challenge since it required me to learn how to be a handyman.

I did manage to make a few small quilts though.

The snowbird quilt was the most recent finish.

The red and white one was made at the same time as the snowbird.

In September, I finished some simple curtains for my bedroom and the guest room.  The photo shows the guest room curtains.  I've read about the trick of having big curtains to make the windows look bigger, but my walls are really small, and big windows like that would dwarf the room and make it look smaller.   I got new curtain rods after this photo was taken.  The willow is a stencil on the walls that were made by the person who lived here before me.

Tulip Pillow made at Viking Sewing Event

I made this pillow cover at a class at Joann's in the summer.

I finished Blushing Bride in January. I am still debating whether to add some more embroidery to it.

There are a couple of quilts that I have been working on recently. The end of the year trunk show really serves as a motivator.  I didn't finish these in 2013, but they are well on the way.

This is another red and white quilt so I can have a collection. It doesn't have a name yet. When this is finished, I will have two red and white quilts!   It started out as a copy of a quilt I found on Pinterest, but I lost the pin amongst my millions I have on the board, and decided to wing it on my own. So many choices! Should I add sashing? Border? Red or white? They all changed the look of the quilt, and were all perfectly acceptable choices. In the end, I decided to not to add a sashing or a border and leave it as is.

I think that the main difference between my quilt and the one I found was that the original quilt is bigger, and my white triangles are proportionately bigger. They are small, and I was afraid they would all get lost in the seam allowance.  This makes it look completely different from the original, but it looks okay and I decided to keep going with it.  I could always make another one that looks closer to the original. I am going to add at least one more row of echo quilting before binding it.  I decided that I'd rather not skip the extra row of quilting just to have another finish in 2013.

This is the Daisy quilt I am making from a kit. It is all put together and sandwiched.  It needs quilting.  I was going to free motion quilt the red and white one so I could test out that feature on my new machine, but I wound up doing straight line quilting on it to keep it simple.

I hope you have enjoyed my 2013 Show and Tell.  I hope you have a wonderful New Year, full of happy memories, good health, peace and relaxation, a large circle of loved ones, lots of money and even more time to do the things you want to do!

Snowbird Quilt Reveal

I had so much fun making the Infinity quilt, I went straight into making another quilt.  I was looking for something that would use the same fabric as the Infinity quilt. This time, I found a free pattern from the Quilter's Newsletter website. It's called Textured Tweety's Snowflake and is designed by Wendy Butler Burns. It looked like a quick and simple quilt that would look great with the Infinity quilt, and use some of its scraps, even though it did require a dig through the scrap bin for other fabric.

I already had a snowflake on the fusible from a coaster I made using a Patrick Lose pattern, so I used that instead of the one in the Quilter's Newsletter pattern. I used a decorative stitch to quilt it.  I love that it looks like ice crystals, and that it is easy to add since sewing over ice crystals still looks like ice crystals. I really like the border fabric - it is so versatile. It can be used to represent sky or water or ice. The tan background was probably made to represent coffee, but it also has a snowlike quality to it. 

The bird is secured / quilted with a feather stitch and the branch is stitched with a snowflake / asterisk stitch.  The wing is a rose fabric but you can't tell that it is a rose.  Just a little hidden promise of spring and summer.  The border uses a stitch that looks like bird feet (claws) but you can't see it much in the busy fabric. 

I printed the pattern landscape instead of portrait so I lost the branch pattern and decided to cut my own freeform. Surely I can do a branch.  It looks like an alligator to me, or is that a crocodile?  I like the motif quilting stitches in the pattern.  Now that I have a reverse button that works and a fix button which secures the stitches, I can do motifs again.

Here's what it looks like on the bulletin board. The Snowbird Quilt shares the red and white fabrics from the Infinity quilt. The red from the bird, the tan background and the blue border probably also share fabric with other quilts, but unfortunately I can't remember where they were used.  I know I've planned on using them for many different projects, but I'm not sure I actually did use them anywhere else.

The back uses some shiny snowflake fabric.  I had leftover fused fabric, and cut out another bird for the back that is being used for the label. The beak is more of that rose fabric.  The back is pretty enough to be used as a front too.  This quilt was a lot of fun to make.

And the snowbird really did bring snow with her. Once I finished the quilt, I went for a walk, and lo and behold it was snowing - a hard cold snow.  This is today's snow - it is a bit more substantial and softer.