I finished another quilt for the Project Quilting theme of Ombre. I didn't think I had any ombre fabric and was thinking about creating my own, but I was hesitant to dig out so much fabric. I then thought about just skipping this challenge.
But then I remembered that the fabric I stole from the Glitter quilt for the Al-Buraq quilt was an ombre. So I stole some more. I love that I can make this quilt with only two pieces, and it was very quick and easy to make.
I woke up early and turned on the computer to get started on the day. I queued up some videos to watch while I had breakfast, but Zoey reminded me that I needed to get up and make the quilt.
So I made the quilt and was able to finish the quilt before noon, way before the deadline of 1 pm eastern, thinking I had plenty of time to upload the photos and post it on the blog and submit it for the challenge.
So I made my breakfast and started uploading the photos. And watch the videos I had queued up.
Zoey went outside so she couldn't remind me that I needed to submit the entry to the challenge. oops. Missed the challenge deadline because I lost track of time.
The Project Quilting Challenge this week is Mythical Creatures. The first thought that came to my mind was Pegasus, but when I found pictures of a winged horse with a face, I immediately gravitated towards the Al-Buraq. One of my rules for this challenge, since there is only a week to make it, is to not overthink any decisions and to just keep going with the flow. Decision-making takes more time.
So I present to you, Al-Buraq. I love the metallic border that frames my creature and I think for a mythical creature it is a successful project. Looking at this picture right now, the face reminds me of that photo that looks like a beautiful woman and an old woman at the same time. My quilt doesn't have that feature, I don't think, it just reminds me of that. My creature doesn't have an attractive face, but that wasn't a requirement for me. Poor creature has to run against the wind, so there is bound to be some damage from that.
With my just in time inventory, I finished this quilt just in time to post for the Project Quilting Challenge
Al-Buraq Quilt by Shelina Virjee
This quilt fits the requirements of the finished projects in that it has applique, three layers and the edges are finished. Just all of my quilts, though, I reserve the right to come back to do more. And right now, this quilt is calling for more. I do want to add more quilting on it, and maybe some other embellishments like beading.
Ta Da! I finished the Beach Picnic quilt that I made for the June blog hop. Joan from Moose Stash Quilting and Carol from Just Let Me Quilt take turns hosting a year long blog hop. They chose a different theme for each month.
The theme for the June blog hop was For the Birds. The project is simple, and just needs a bird on it.
I made the quilt in June, but I had not finished binding it.
I posted the unfinished project here in June.
Now it is finally finished.
I added a pole with directions to other features on the beach for the picnic goers. I didn't add any words so the beach can have everything the family wants: snorkeling, fishing, boating, boardwalk, shopping, parasailing, sandcastle competitions, art galleries, and of course, bird watching. Whatever they want, it is here on this beach.
It adds a story element to the quilt and explains why the people have abandoned their picnic.
This was a really fun quilt to make and makes me want to make even more beach picnic and seagull quilts.
I posted a video on YouTube showing how I made this quilt.
Here's my finishes chart so far. As you can see, there are a lot more starts than finishes this year, so no new beach quilts for me today. I am hoping to get more progress on unfinished quilts this month.
Take inspiration from the colors of the sky, but exclude or use less than 10% of the usual blue.
I decided to use my Derwent Inktense pencils (affiliate link) to color the sky so I found a relatively plain background. I knew it would need something in the foreground for interest and decided to find a horse pattern to applique on my quilt. I haven't ever used a horse and I am not so sure why I was intimidated by using a horse. Maybe because it is so intricate with skinny legs.
I used a pattern for the horse but I cut the rest of the pieces free form and fused most of the pieces on to the background. Then I colored the sky, which is scary. I should have done the sky first in case there was a problem, but I think it looks fine. I don't know if it is a sky after a storm, or dusk or dawn, but it is pretty and fits the theme. Big sky with enough to keep it interesting.
I secured the applique with a free motion quilting, and I added the wavy lines in the sky. I bound it with the fence fabric. I hope it doesn't feel like a fenced in horse. I put the fence behind the horse so it wouldn't look too contained. There is space for the horse to get to the other side of the fence, and endless space in front where we are standing. I decided to hand stitch the binding.
It looks like a nice calm scene. Here's a quote I found for it.
"There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature - the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter." - Rachel Carson
My quilt was ready on time, but by the time I uploaded the photos and wrote the blog post, it was too late to submit for the challenge. I got distracted while I was waiting for the upload.
I did film the process and will post the Youtube video here after I have finished editing it.
It's my day for the Just Let Me Quilt blog hop challenge. The theme for the week is White Rabbit.
The challenge was:
Make something with white fabrics, rabbits, or white rabbits.
It is a perfect theme, because I was just gifted a pair of embroidered white pants. I had seen a couple of quilts that were animal shapes that were cut out of some embroidered work with batting inside them. I thought about doing just that and having a quilt that was not a rectangle, but I still had house on my mind and wanted to make sure that my rabbit had a home.
I started out with the floral background, but decided to put the rabbit on the green background and add the flowers. It looks like the rabbit is lost in reverie looking at the field of flowers.
I tried machine binding again. I still have yet to master that skill, but I like the shabby chic look to this quilt.
I have made a YouTube video to go with the blog hop. It took a long time to cut down all the footage into a reasonable length video. I still don't know whether it is better to show everything and speed up the footage, show everything in real time and have really long videos, or just chop it up enough so people know what happened and let them imagine the rest. Let me know if you have a preference.
Check out all the really cool bloggers who have been creative!
I made my first quilt of the year for the first Project Quilting challenge. Project Quilting is a challenge that was started years ago by Kim Lapacek of Persimmon Dreams. It is inspired by Project Runway challenges.
Every other week for the first three months of the year, Kim's friend, Tricia Franklin, posts a theme. Quilters then make quilts based on this theme. The quilt cannot be started before the challenge is posted, and must be finished by the deadline, which is only one week later.
Where there is righteousness in the heart, there is beauty in the character. When there is beauty in the character, there is harmony in the home. When there is harmony in the home, there is order in the nation. When there is order in the nation, there is peace in the world.
The challenge this week is to make a quilt inspired by a birdhouse.
I did some cursory searches for some birdhouse patterns, but I was attracted by a quilt that someone had made on Facebook based on a quilt pattern by Cheri Payne. It isn't a birdhouse, but it is a house and does have a bird in it so it works in my book. I really liked the fact that it wasn't a rectangular quilt, and decided to make something like that.
For the rest of the week, I kept finding other birdhouse patterns, and it was hard not to switch plans, but my rule is to go with the first instinct. It keeps me from overthinking things, and in the end, I am so glad I stayed with my plan.
There aren't houses where I live with two chimneys, but there are other architectural features. I am not sure whether this is called a gable, but I will call it that until I learn otherwise.
I made the house, added a door and window. I used a stiffer middle layer instead of batting. I am not sure whether this is Peltex or Timtex, but I am pretty sure I bought it for fabric bowls. Since the quilt wasn't rectangular, I think it needs more support. I thought about a binding, but decided to take it easy on myself and birthed the quilt.
I encountered a lot of obstacles in making this quilt, but I was having so much fun making this quilt so it didn't faze me. I nicked my thumb with a rotary blade. My bobbin ran out of thread, twice, because I used bobbins that weren't full. I didn't get a good camera angle for the ironing station and wound up being in the way and the camera kept focusing on my sweater. Then both of my cameras ran out of battery even though I had charged them to prepare for this videoing quilt for YouTube. (I use one for talking, watching the ironing station and the sewing machine, and the phone camera for overhead shots).
I have beautiful fabrics on the table because I am collecting them for an autobiography quilt, and they really helped me make this wonderful quilt that feels very Indian.
Here is a link to the challenge post so you can see what everyone else made. Mine is #198 so there is lots of inspiration to see.
Here is the YouTube video that shows the entire process from start to finish:
I am continuing to make progress on each of my quilts fifteen minutes a day. It is a lot of fun to pull out the old projects and make some progress on them, but it is hard to put them away when the fifteen minutes is over. I've been really good about staying organized and putting the projects back to make room for the next projects. I think they will be easier to bring them back out again in 2024 to get them finished off.
Here's a quilt I finished.
This quilt was started in September 2019. I wanted to make another fabric collage quilt, so I collaged a bunch of little strips of fabric on some fusible. There is a link here with a mini tutorial. I cut out some animal shapes and even eventually finished a camel and a giraffe quilt out of this one sheet of fused fabric.
This month, I am bringing out each of my old works in process and I quilted the scrappy cat as one of the projects on my Youtube channel, Quilt and Color.
I only did the quilting on the video, but since I was so close to the finish, I added the words and the binding after the video was over. This quilt wasn't on my list of quilts in progress because it was a scrap from the camel quilt, and not technically its own project, but I am counting it anyway. Like I did last time for the giraffe, I will add it with the start date of the camel quilt and the current end date.
Circle Block 280
On another day, I worked on the Quilty 365 quilt. Since I have been showing closeups on this blog, I wanted to make sure I included them here. This one uses the background fabric from the Portraits quilt. The red is from Boundless, the blues are from Seaglass rooftops, the blue on the right and the orange are from Rey and the Death Star.
Circle Block 281
This one uses the red and blue from Rey and the Death Star, the blue from Seaglass Rooftops and the green is from the Olympics quilt.
Circle Block 282
This one uses the green from Olympics, the background snake fabric is from the Portraits quilt, the light green is from the backing of Zou the Elephant.
Circle Block 283
The red fabric is from the binding of Boundless quilt
There are a total of 6 challenges for Project Quilting. Usually at this part of the Project Quilting challenges, I participate in fewer of them, so I didn't know how long they last. I've been doing better this year because I decided to add a challenge to the challenge. Make a quilt you already want to make. That is how I managed the red and white quilt I made last time.
This week, the challenge is to make a quilt that is inspired by a book that I've read. I've been told that twisting the rules is a way to show off my creativity.
The challenge immediately made me think of this elephant. I had watched the Mary Fons video. She had given a link to an Artificial Intelligence website that makes drawings for you. I played with it quite a while and it came up with this drawing of a patchwork elephant. It had five legs, and when I asked it to keep going and complete the drawing, it just added a different elephant made in a different style.
Anyway, making this patchwork elephant is on my list of quilts to make. And I had pink fabric on the table from the pink challenge and I had been using pink fabric for the Dust Off an Old Book blog hop project, so a pink elephant sounded good.
All I had to do was find a book about pink elephants. There were several, but I needed something that as big enough to be a novel and quick to read. Here's the book I found:
It's called Murder of a Pink Elephant by Denise Swanson. I was able to get a digital copy from the library so I could get started reading right away. I spent a lot of time reading it, but then I read the fine print of the quilting challenge, and nowhere did it say I had to actually finish reading the book. I like reading cozy murder mysteries so I will finish it next week. I have a quilt to make.
It turns out that I didn't have a lot of scraps from the Dust Off blog hop because it used pretty much all the jelly roll strips, so I clipped off some fabric before I started piecing the back.
I cut some small scraps and arranged them on a fusible. I made it in three pieces.
I pressed them down and cut out the shapes. It is always so ugly and scary at this point.
I pieced the background from scraps and placed the elephant on them.
Sandwiched and quilted.
Filled in some missing spaces and chose the binding.
I started hand stitching the binding, using a running stitch like I did last time, but for some reason, I had to stitch each stab at a time, so I switched to machine stitching to save time.
I just looked up names for elephants, and found out that the Japanese word for "Elephant" is zou 蔵. I call Zoey, "Zoey Zoo Zoo" sometimes so that sounded like a fun name for this elephant. I present to you, Zou.
2023: 15 Minutes to Stitch Week 7
I worked on Zou this week. I finished the Boundless top and have started piecing the backing.
In September of 2019, I posted a tutorial of how to make some fabric collage animals. I made several different animals for the tutorial. I wasn't sure whether I would make separate quilts or make one big menagerie quilt, so I added it to my list as one quilt. This means that I am breaking each animal off the menagerie quilt as I make a small quilt.
In December, I showed you Stand Tall giraffe. (More on that quilt below).
Today, I have the I've Got Your Back camel. I made the camel to accompany the llama. As I cut out the camel, I realized I had a lot of scrap collage left, so I also cut out other animals, including the giraffe. The giraffe got finished before the camel. That happens a lot here at the High Road. Quilts are finished out of order from their start date.
Just like the giraffe, the camel quilt has words on it, which is then the name of the quilt.
This piece was a sample I made to test out my machine after it came back from the hospital. It was gone for a long time and the repair was pricey so I wanted to make sure it worked right. It does.
I added a button for the eye. It is one of the many buttons on the shirts I used for the Blue Shirts Quilt. I really like this fabric to represent sand.
Update on the Giraffe Quilt
I wanted to show you that I did add a tail on the giraffe before the end of the year. I also made sure he had two back legs.
Stand Tall is now complete.
2023: More Finishes Than Starts
I am going to try to have more finishes than starts again this year. I didn't manage to finish the camel last year, but it helps me get off to a good start this year.
