Comma Again?

I have my favorite fabric designers, and Brigitte Heitland of Zen Chic is in my top ten. Her line Comma is so simple, yet so striking. I came by a layer cake of this line and found a pattern on the Moda Bakeshop. It’s designed for use with a layer cake fabric bundle, but you you can use yardage just as easily. Beginners, don’t fear, this is a very simple quilt. I did add more blocks to make the quilt a little larger than the pattern specified, but it is even easier that the ubiquitous Yellow Brick Road pattern. It’s available free here.
I am having fun with piece backs these days.

Since the quilt design was simple, I decided to experiment with an all over quilting design that was a new design for me, Pebbling. It’s not perfect, but I did have fun doing it. What I especially liked was using Isacord 40 weight polyester thread. This is the thread Leah Day recommends, and it is available in many local quilt shops and online. I’ve been using Superior Thread for a long time, but this last quilt has made me a convert.

Zen Chic Comma Baby Quilt

To anyone who is not a fabric enthusiast, that title means nothing, but Brigitte Heitland is the designer whose company is named Zen Chic. She has designed several commercial fabric lines, and one of my favorites is Comma. One of the projects Brigitte featured on her designer page is this one by Emmaline.



I liked the mustard and grey fabric selections and decided to make a similar one. Here’s my version.





Fabric : Comma from Zen Chic, back is also from the Comma line, Nigella.

Construction: Cotton batting and Signature cotton thread

Size: 38” x 59”  The blocks are about 6” square

Quilting Design: straight line quilting 1/2” apart

Now a word about my walking foot. I do most of my quilting with a Juki TL98E which I have had for about eight years. I like everything about this machine except the design of the presser feet. I have changed or adapted each of the feet that came with it.  The walking foot has no guide bar for aligning your stitches. I've searched at quilt shows, talked to sales reps, and a walking foot with a guide bar does not exist for this machine. 

Here’s what I finally rigged up.



I taped a guide bar from another machine to the Juki foot. Really now, Is that the best Juki can do?

Canning Tomato Catsup

Gather ripe tomatoes and canning equipment, and call some friends to come over.



Wash and prep the tomatoes



Grind the onions and tomatoes



Wait for the catsup to cook



Fill the jars and load the canner



25 pounds of Roma tomatoes made 3 batches yielding 36 half pint jars. Yum!

Here’s the ancient recipe card, written when people still measured in pecks.

Japanese One Yard

I purchased one yard of this Japanese fabric over 10 years ago. I only had one yard and I wanted to use as much of the fabric as I could. It was one of those “just can’t cut it fabrics.” So I designed a pattern that would use the fabric as the focus but extend the size of the quilt. It now measures 45” x 58”.

I had fun with the quilting

and also with the back

The two inch squares were cut from my stash and scrap basket. I especially liked the purple fabric. It’s a Clothworks fabric by Julie Creus of La Todera. You can click on her name to find out about the fabric line. Fantastic blenders. I have them all!
Backing is Robert Kaufman from the Quilter’s Linen line. Batting is Hobbs washable wool, thread is Superior Bottom line, green fabric is pistachio from the Moda Bella basics line.
I have another yard of similar fabric in red, I’ll make another one and photograph stepouts and write a tutorial. Every quilter has at least one yard of too beautiful to cut fabric in their stash.

Ticker Tape Quilt

After seeing this quilt technique in Sunday Morning Quilts and Amy Gibson’s blog I knew I had to make one.

The quilt measures 18”x 40”. Ticker tape fabrics are from Moda’s A Stitch in Color and Simple Marks Summer lines. Both are from the talented designer Malka Dubrowsky. The background fabric is Dictionary Pages from the Mama Said Sew line. I used cotton batting. I first tried using my walking foot, but changed to my free motion foot for better visibility and less turning. The pieces are small, and I can do better stitching, but this was really the look I was after. I also left the selvage edges on a few pieces. It is a thready quilt, it will fray even more, but it’s a wall hanging and won’t get the wear a lap quilt would.

My inspiration was a quilt from Sunday Morning Quilts and this quilt from Amy Gibson’s blog.

I had fun making this even if I did sew through my fingernail twice and experienced having the needle graze my finger another time. Living dangerously…

A peek at Barcelona, the new fabric line from Zen Chic

About a month ago, I won this fabric, Barcelona, Zen Chic’s new line from Moda. It won’t be in stores for another few weeks, but I was lucky enough to have my name drawn in her give-a-way.

It was probably about the equivalent of a jelly roll. I wanted to make a throw sized quilt, so I added some fabrics from my stash and a few solids. Additional fabrics are from the Zen Chic Comma line, Pearl Bracelets from Andover and the Architextures line from Robert Kaufman. The sashing and border are Kona Ash.

I just had a taste of this fabulous fabric line, and I love it.

Journey of 2,352 squares completed

It’s done, the piecing,  the quilting, the binding. I started this quilt in March, and last week I stitched the binding. I chose the swirling waters motif for the quilting. It’s my new favorite all over quilting design.


I used wool batting and Superior Magnifico Poly thread.

Finished Sampler Quilt

Ta Da! I have finished the Craftsy 2012 Block of the Month Sampler. The top was finished a month ago, and I enrolled in Leah Day’s Free Motion Quilting a sampler class and did the free motion quilting for it.  I used fabrics from Malka Dubrawsky’s Stitch in Color and Simple Marks lines, and chose the steel grey from those lines for the background fabric.

My favorite blocks? Unexpectedly the Dresden Plate block in the bottom right corner and the Dresden Wheel block on the fourth row. I had eschewed learning to make those blocks because I perceived them as too traditional, but the instructor Amy Gibson put a modern spin on the blocks. I also unexpectedly enjoyed the English paper pieced hexagons for the same reason. They are so much more than Grandmother’s Flower Garden.

My least favorite? The paper pieced blocks, second row, second block and third row first block. It’s not that I dislike the finished product, but the process is frustrating for me. My brain just doesn't get paper piecing.

here’s the back and some close up shots of the quilting
 


I still have a lot of Malka’s fabric left, so I decided to make another quilt using off-white as the background color. Here’s the start. For this quilt I’m just choosing the blocks I like…no paper piecing.

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Quilt Slabs for Canada

Cheryl Arkison, one of the co-authors of Sunday Morning Quilts  from Southern Calgary has put out the call to her quilty friends asking them to make a color slab for her scrappy style of quilting. Her area has experienced terrible flooding. Clicking here  will take you to her blog with details about the project.
I’ve got a lot of other things I could be doing, but I dug through my scrap bin and made two this morning. It is a highly addictive activity, and has motivated me to sort my scraps by color.

Catching Up

Summer travel has begun, and we just returned from eleven days on the road. Amidst all the mail was a package for me from Brigitte of Zen Chic for Moda. I qualified for a chance to win it by liking her Facebook page and I was selected as a winner of a scrap bag from her new line, Barcelona.

I’m going to have some fun with this just as soon as I finish the quilting my current project.

Thanks Brigitte, the collection is fabulous. I will not be able to stop with just a taste of this beautiful fabric.

Wrapped in Love

Our quilting group at church has finished a season of quilting. Since January 2013, we have made over 60 quilts for infants and hospice patients.
Earlier in the month we dedicated the quilts during a Sunday morning worship service. We placed the quilts on each pew and encouraged people to touch and enjoy them.  This photo was taken prior to the service.

Then we had the fun of delivering them. We made a trip to the neo-natal unit at the hospital where we met with the staff and had a tour of the unit. Each baby has a quilt on their isolette and they get to take it home with them.  A few days after we made our delivery, this photo appeared in our local paper showing one of our quilts in use.

On our last day before we broke for the summer we delivered nine bed sized quilts to one of the hospice units in our area.

Long Arm Quilting

I've played with long arm machines at shows, quilted a row or two on a friend’s machine, but I've never done an entire quilt from start to finish on a long arm. All of my quilts to date have been done on a domestic machine. This past week I rented long arm time at two different shops and finished two quilts for our church’s Hospice project. I did one on a Baby Lock long arm and another on a Gammill. I came home from the first experience knowing that I could learn it, and came home from the second experience planning my next trip. Here’s a sample of my effort. The stitching is not visible on the busy front, but you can get an idea of what I was trying to do by looking at the back. I don’t think I will ever be as controlled with the long arm as I am with my domestic machines, but it was fun, and taking home a finished project after a few hours was thrilling.

The quilt had been washed when I took the photos, and this photo is a close up of one section of the quilt. I didn't have a specific plan for quilting, I just wanted to practice on motifs I currently use.

Guest room renewal

The quilt is finished, and today I made pillowcases to go with it. Thanks to Bloomerie Fabrics for helping me find the raked sand fabric and the dragonfly fabric for the back of the quilt that has been discontinued.  I made the pillowcases from the APQ 1,000,000 pillowcase challenge. I used the roll it up pattern with French seams. It is truly a simple pattern.
 

Good Fortune Quilt

On a whim I purchased a jelly roll of Kate Spain’s Good Fortune fabric on sale at my local quilt shop. I had no plan, but then saw this pattern on Moda Bake Shop and decided to make it up. I had extra yardage from another project, so I had enough fabric.

I’ve been taking Leah Day’s Free Motion Filler class on Craftsy, so I decided to do an allover design of her swirling water pattern.


Although the stitching is not quilt show perfect, it’s good enough. It was a fun design to quilt, and I didn’t get tired of repeating the design.
Here’s what I used
Juki TL98E mid arm machine set in a table
Hobbs wool batting this is the batting I use for all the quilts I keep for myself. Many people think hot and itchy when they think of wool, but it is a beautiful quilt batt with gorgeous loft and drape. It is very comfortable,  washes well and I even dry it in the dryer until damp dry. What’s not to like? the price…
Superior Magnifico 40 wt. polyester thread This is a new thread for Superior and it is fantastic. It comes in a wide range of colors. I purchased a color card so I can get a good match. I used the sky blue thread for this quilt. The needle tension needs to be set between 3.0 and 4.0. 
Organ 90 topstitch needle Every sewing machine has a favorite needle. My Juki will not sew with anything but an Organ needle, and the quilting process works best with a topstitch needle.

Accepted!

The sanctuary quilt and the funeral pall were both accepted in the Sacred Threads Quilt show. I am beyond thrilled, and am so happy for those who worked so hard to bring these projects to life.
The show is in Herndon, VA, a suburb of Washington DC, July 10-28. It’s an opportunity for quilters who create quilts with sacred themes to share their work as well as the inspiration behind it. This quote from the Sacred Threads website gives the story behind the show.
“In 1999 a small group of women gathered together with a vision of a "new" type of quilt exhibit. At that time topics such as spirituality and inspiration were not always understood or welcomed at traditional quilt shows, and all-medium liturgical art exhibits generally featured few if any quilts. There was no "safe" or welcoming venue for quilters who saw their works as a connection to the sacred and/or as an expression of their own spiritual journey. Often the meaning behind these works was missed or misunderstood because the artist did not have the opportunity to share their sources of inspiration with the viewer. The show does not emphasize any particular religion or theology but conveys the spirituality, healing and inspirational messages that transcend all people.
For the exhibit, quilts are divided into categories based on theme. These are Expressions of Joy, Spirituality, Inspiration, Grief, Healing and Peace/Brotherhood.  The artwork themes provide thought-provoking insights, encouragement, inspiration and healing responses to grief and human hardships. It has attracted a wide array of visitors and has proved appropriate for all ages from young teens to seniors. The exhibit is a positive influence on the human spirit, giving joy as well as addressing concerns of the soul and mind.”
The sanctuary quilt was submitted in the category Peace/Brotherhood, and the funeral pall was submitted in the category Grief.


I am beyond thrilled, and am so happy for those who worked so hard to bring these projects to life.

The Journey Continues

Remember this?















The top is completed!

It measures 64X86. I do not plan to add borders, and at this point, I’m letting it rest while I think about how to quilt it.
Cross hatch is always an easy safe choice
a more complex variation of cross hatching is orange peel

Swirling waters is a design that is new to me, but I like the way it looks. It’s going to take some practice before I put it on a whole quilt.

Spirals is a design I’m accustomed to doing

Its a busy quilt, and I don’t want to overquilt it. I’m leaning toward orange peel. Any suggestions?
I’m using wool batting, so whatever design I choose will definitely puff.

New York Times Haiku

I have a new favorite blog, the New York Times Haiku.  The NY Times developed an algorithm that scans the front page articles for syllables. Then those syllables are presented by the algorithm as a haiku. Human editors select the best one for the daily blog.

And another