Islamic Tile Quilt Top Finished

Islamic Tile Quilt made by Shasta Matova

As I promised you yesterday, I pressed the Islamic Tile quilt so I could show it to you today.  Pressing is not my strong suit, and I obviously need to press it again, but this quilt is made up of a whole bunch of 2 and a half inch squares.  Even those long lines were made with separate squares so they would look more like tiles, and I managed to keep the design looking like the inspiration tiles I saw at the Islamic Center in Toronto.  Now I have to think about how I want to quilt this. It's a fairly big quilt by my standards - bigger than a lap, smaller than a twin bed.

Next up, I wanted to show you a purchase I made from Spoonflower.  Since the fabric is printed on order, it is expensive, but when I think about it as gifts instead of fabric, and you buy them when they are on sale, it somehow manages to fit into the price range. I bought four fat quarters which will be hemmed to become kitchen towels and if I can bear to part with them, I will give them to my family.  The print quality of all of them was very good, so any issues you see has to do with my taking images in the wintertime when it is always dark, and trying to fix the light quickly with photo editing.

The elephant will likely stay with me since I have a collection of elephants around the house.

I was showing my mother these, and she has asked for this one specifically to be hers.  She likes that the design goes over the calendar. I think if I was designing a calendar like this, I would have thought that people would prefer to have the calendar easy to see, but I was wrong.  How often are you really going to look at a date on a towel anyway?  She did ask me why I only got four, and now I see that maybe getting more to share with others would have been a better idea. 

I'll have to think long and hard about which of my relatives will get these two.  They are going to have to be super nice to me between now and gift giving day!

I haven't made my Quilty Project 365 Circle today, but I wanted to share with you a Pinterest board I created for me to save circle ideas. I do hope that people have realized that Pinterest is a great resource and not a place that steals ideas. When I copy an image and put it in my hard drive, I can't remember where I got the image, but when I pin it, I can click on the link to get back to where I found it, to see other details, to remember where I got it, and maybe even ask for permission to use it. Also, on HubPages, I find that a lot of my readers come directly from Pinterest instead of through a search engine.

I have to go make my circle of the day now.

Day 3 of Quilty Project 365

I won't be posting each block every day, but it helps me to remember to take the picture and the thought behind it.  I saw a row of rings that were broken like spokes, and I wanted to recreate it, but this is easier.  The background fabric is also used in A Life of Plenty and the fall fabrics have been used in several different fall quilts, including Dear Jane.  I like them both so I use them sparingly in many quilts.  Today, I am thinking about the love of family and pets, so the x and o are quite appropriate.  I didn't really mean to sew a spiral, I started securing around the circle and didn't want to stop so I kept going into the center. I thought the center of the spiral wouldn't match the center of the x because I wasn't keeping track, and I would have been okay with that, but it centered by itself!

In other quilting news, I have finished my top of the Islamic tile quilt.  I have to press it and then I will show it to you.  Since this is a tile quilt, I thought I should stitch in the ditch only, but that requires too much precision, so my original plan was to quilt a quarter inch away from all the seams, but I think that also is too much precision (and sewing).  I'm now thinking about doing some organic lines instead. I'm not sure if that makes me lazy, or if that more honors the quilting medium, which gives you more options than tiles would.

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Project 365 Day 2

Today's block represents the feeling I get at the start of almost every quilt project.  I debate about the pros and cons of the many options in my head and go back and forth, around and around, until I finally settle and commit to the plan. Sometimes it takes a while to get to the commitment stage.

Yesterday, almost as soon as I posted my block, I looked at some other blogs and came across Amanda Jean's circle quilt It was nice to see what a circle quilt could look like when more circles had been added, but hers isn't a calendar quilt. It uses fabric from particular fabric lines and is so coordinated and so pretty. I was already wondering if I should just make circles instead of going off on tangents with trees and such, and seeing this beautiful circle quilt just made it louder.

Should I keep it simple and use circles only using a template?
What colors will represent what mood?
Should I focus on continually improving my mastery of skills?
Should I do my best?
Should I keep if casual or formal?
Will the background be pieced or whole?
Will the circles all be a certain size and shape or can they vary?
Will I like it in the end?
Should all the blocks be the same size?
What if I don't like the block later?
Should I keep them in chronological order or arrange them in a pleasing manner when I am done?
Should I attach the blocks as I go along or wait until the end?
Can I cut up fabric yardage for these, or do I only have to use scraps?
Should the applique be hand appliqued, turned under, fusible web or can it be free form?


The problem is that there are so many beautiful ways to make this quilt, and they are all right in their own way.  And until it is too late to turn back, I will keep debating until I finally commit to the plan. And I do tend to break the rules once I make them (like my scrap only rule I made up yesterday and broke both yesterday and today) so my commitment is somewhat fickle!

The background fabric was used in my Christmas trees quilt. The black fabric is a whole fat quarter that I received from a swap. I haven't made any black and white quilts. I say this as I look at my improv quilt which has plenty of black and white fabric I could have used, but I don't know where the scraps are for it. I did fuse the applique.

Project 365: Day 1 11/16/2015

This is day 1, block 1 of project 365, where I make a circle block a day to represent my day.  Today's circle is brought to you by the color green, because I painted a picnic table I recently bought.  I had some leftover paint in the garage, and decided to use it instead of buying new paint, and it happens to be green.  I like the green picnic table. I especially like that the weather is cooperating and it was warm and dry enough to paint outside.  Didn't even need a coat. Last year, we had snow.

 Since picnic tables are not round, I decided to make a tree instead.  I put some french knots in it for apples, and I will eat an apple after I finish this post to make an apple tree more appropriate.

It is raw edge, free form, no freezer paper or fusible used.  When I went searching for brown fabric, I decided to use scraps instead of whole fabric, which apparently is a new rule I may or may not use throughout the project.

The cream and the green fabrics are both leftovers of the Islamic tile quilt.  The brown fabric was in the Lansing Leaves leftover bag, but it appeared to be a full fat quarter (don't tell the quilt police!). Maybe it started its life as a half yard fabric.

Quilty Project 365

Audrey at Quiltyfolk is working on a calendar quilt of sorts.  She will be choosing fabric each day, cutting it out into circles and appliqueing them to a standard size background square.  It will be a record of the fabrics she liked and a record of her year.

Since I missed out on the last calendar project, and since I really like circles, I was thinking of joining her. I know I have no business starting a new project, but really how hard can a circle be? Please don't answer that. That is a rhetorical question to which I know I probably won't like the answer. I will be using raw edge and fusible applique to make it easier for myself. I might skip a day or two and wind up having nonconsecutive 365 days. I may wind up having a different number than 365 depending on how big I want my quilt to be as I get further down the line.

I think that I will make my circles more elaborate - some will be cut into spirals and other circle like shapes.  I might even embellish some with beading or embroidery, or applique other things on top of a circle, or use layers of raw edge circles, etc.  Yes, I can dream big at the beginning. I'm sure in the end, I will use a lot of plain round circles too. I think I am going to make mine smaller than hers - 3 1/2" squares finished, so 4 inch unfinished.   I don't want the quilt to get too big.  I think that a layout of something like 17 X 22 squares so 59 1/2" X 77" would be a manageable size. Since a full size mattress is 54 x 74, I think this size would work. I could add some more time to the quilt if I wanted to have more overhang.

This is just an introduction post. I will be making and posting today's circle later.

Come join us if you want. It will be fun.

Pray for Paris

My heart is heavy today because of the terrorism attacks that happened in Paris yesterday. My heart, thoughts and prayers go out to the people who were involved in these atrocities. I pray that the people who died find peace in the afterlife, the people who got hurt have a swift and painless recovery. I pray for the families and loved ones of the people who were care for the people who got hurt. I pray for the firefighters, doctors, police officers, nurses, volunteers and all of the caretakers that serve to bring calm and order to the chaos.I even pray for the people who committed the atrocities, that they learn the errors in their ways, and for their families who now have to deal with the aftermath and potentially being terrorized themselves. 

It sickens me even more to know that they are the acts of ISIS, a terrorism group that uses the word Islamic in its title. Their acts do not represent the faith of Islam and their beliefs are not the beliefs of most of the people who practice the faith.

If you look at the picture of the Islamic tile quilt I am making, the red is a stylized representation of Arabic. It says Mohammed. In the center, in the cream, is a cross.  At first, it bothered me that there was a cross in my Islamic quilt, but I think that it is there to show that we are one.  We worship the same God. I hope that we don't turn this into a war of religion or country or culture, when really it is some fanatics who are to blame.

My Trunk Show

Soma who blogs over at Whims and Fancies is hosting an online quilt truck show called "Trunk Full of Quilts".   It's really a ploy just to see my quilts, and I am happy to indulge her.

Welcome to High Road Quilter, where I, Shasta Matova, make quilts at a slow, incremental pace.  I spend a few minutes almost every day in some sort of quilting activity, and those few minutes add up and then eventually, I have a finished quilt to show on my blog.  To keep the blog (and quilting) from being boring ("Look, I sewed a seam", "Look, I sewed another seam!"), I work on more than one quilt at a time, which slows down the pace to Finished! even more. This trunk show will show that quilts can happen, even a few minutes at a time.

These aren't necessarily my favorite. I just pulled out some pictures of quilts that I may not have shown on my blog for a while.  Here they are, in no particular order:

This is a little quilt I made for my sister.  The center is a panel I found at a quilt store, and I worked around it with ribbons, beads and tassels.  It was a fun quilt to make.  I have since purchased many more beads and ribbons so I can make more without-a-pattern quilts in the future.

This wreath quilt is one of my first applique quilts. It was fun to make.  The cross hatch quilting in the center was recommended by the pattern, but it was difficult to do since I did not want to quilt over the applique.  I've always wanted to make a similar quilt with the cross hatching done before the applique, but haven't done it yet. If you look closely, you will see that I even added embroidery on the leaves.

This quilt was made impulsively following a pattern I found on a blog. It was put together very quickly and was a lot of fun to make.

This is one of my few bed size quilts.  It is one of my favorites.  It is an I-spy quilt inspired by Weeks Ringle.  You are supposed to follow the lines to tell a story.  I changed it up by also making it a maze. You can follow the blank spaces and find your way out. There are two mazes in there - one is shorter than the other one.When I gave it to my niece, she took a toy car along the maze, so it is also a road!  This one was a lot of piecing and organizing, but it was worth it in the end.

This is a fun little quilt I made with my leftovers of my four patch posey quilt.  I used some beads and ribbon on it. This a great quilt concept to cut four identical pieces and switch them around to get mirror images.  I hope to make more of these in the future. I also hope to finish the original quilt that this was a leftover of.  I gave this quilt away.

I gave this denim quilt to my daughter. It is made out of blue jeans - lots and lots of them.  It took a long time to make, but I liked the casual look of the quilt.  It was also stress free because it didn't have to be made perfectly.  Any "mistakes" just went with the mood of the quilt.

This is a little quilt I made as part of the Small Quilts Yahoo group with Kathy Tracey. They have quilt challenges every month, and while I would like to make a quilt a month, my sewing schedule doesn't allow that.

I hope you have enjoyed my little trunk show.  I  hope it gives you a sampling of the kinds of quilts I make.  Most of the quilts pictured are pretty traditional, but I make modern quilts, art quilts, improv quilts, crazy quilts, and any other kind of quilt too.  Please you come back and visit me again. You are welcome anytime!


Here's more details about the Trunk Full of Quilts Show if you want to participate too.  The trunk show link party will start on November 10th and end on November 18th.

All you have to do is write a blog post including photos and a little description of each of your favorite quilted projects (they do not have to be from 2015, but they must be finished projects). Then visit Soma's page and link up.