Finally!

My Robert Kaufman No Prints Allowed quilt - Five Frames.

I am pretty happy with the way this quilt turned out.  Working with so many colors is challenging for me.  I wanted to avoid a rainbow look if I could and I tried piecing the colors randomly, but it just didn't work.  So, I divided them into light, medium and dark and went from there.  Another departure for me is the Amethyst background.  You all know how much I love grey, but I really wanted to use a different color this time.  I tried four or five and the amethyst really set off the colors of the charm pack the best.  The binding is Bright Peri.

Putting this quilt together was quite a puzzle!  I figured out what size many of the pieces needed to be and had to replace a few due to miscalculations.   The actual sewing required many partial seams, but it all worked out in the end.

It isn't easy to see in this photo, but I quilted concentric squares inside the four squares about one inch apart.  Inside the large rectangular frame, the quilting lines are straight horizontal lines about 1 1/4" apart.  Outside the this frame, I continued the straight line theme, but at a 45 degree angle.

Anna and Emily took photos of all the quilts from our meeting last night.  They will be posted on the AAMQG Flickr group.  We are supposed to vote for our two favorite and I'll have quite a time making a choice!

Off now to finish a small retirement gift for my boss at my non-quilting job.  For those of you in the US, have a great long weekend and I hope you get to include some sewing!

Quilting away...

on my No Prints Allowed challenge.

I really shouldn't say this out loud, but I think I might get the quilting finished today.  If so, that should avoid the last minute Wednesday binding scenario!

I bought the binding fabric yesterday.  I already had some that I planned to use, but wasn't excited about.  Even though part of my brain said it was the right binding, the other part was telling me it wasn't.  As I was quilting, I had an idea to go in a different direction so I went and got the fabric.  I am SO happy that one of my LQS's, Ann Arbor Sewing Center, recently started carrying the full line of Kona cotton solids.  I have a color card, so it was just wonderful to make a decision about which color I wanted and then go and get it.  I was home with the fabric in less than an hour.  Of course, sometimes they are out of a certain color, but it is better than having to deal with the mail when you are working toward a deadline.

I also heard recently that the shop where the Brighton Modern Quilters meet, Creative Quilt Kits, is adding all the Kona cotton solids too!  Even better!  Brighton isn't as close to me, but it is so great to know they are there.  The Brighton Modern Quilters are meeting tomorrow so I'll get to see how they are displaying the solids.

Do any of your LQS's carry solids or do you order online?

A Mid Mod Bee block!

I won't tell you what month this block for the Mid Mod Bee was due - it is too embarrassing.  All I can say is that Robin has been very patient.  Robin's inspiration phrase was "Mondrian's nephew was a beatnik."  She wanted blocks in Mondrian's block style but a little more organic.

You all know that improv is not my strong suit, but I promise this block is not all right angles!  Knowing that Robin likes to free cut her pieces, I even made some of the cuts without a ruler.  I did make a drawing before I started cutting, but then I cut the pieces larger than they needed to be to allow for some adjusting of the angles.

Robin sent a beautiful selection of shot cottons for her block.  I have never worked with shot cottons before and was surprised at how lightweight they are.  I am imagining a very light summer quilt made with shot cottons on front and back and flannel as batting.

By the way, I did get the Robert Kaufman challenge quilt basted on Monday night and am ready to quilt!

A Pieced Back

I'll admit that I usually don't bother to piece nice backs for my quilts.  More often than not I use one fabric that goes fairly well with the front and call it done.  This time, however, I felt like my Robert Kaufman No Prints Allowed challenge quilt just needed a pieced back.

It still is not a very complicated pieced back and didn't take too much time.  It was fun to piece all the scraps left over from the front into one long strip.  I did this completely randomly.  When I piece things for the front of a quilt, even if I say I'm doing it randomly, there is usually a little bit of selection going on.  I just can't help myself!  For this back, though, I just picked up whichever scrap came to hand.  I still have a strip about one yard long left.

I don't know if you can see that little strip of purple at the lower middle left edge where the wind blew the quilt.  I'm interested to see if any of that bit makes it into the quilt or if it gets cut off after the quilting.  I generally make my backs about 6" longer and wider than the quilt top, so it will depend on how things get lined up.

I had hoped to get this quilt basted by now, but decided not to stress over sewing this weekend and try to relax a little.  I'll be working at my non-quilting job tomorrow, so I'm planning on basting tomorrow night.  The quilt is due at the Ann Arbor MQG meeting on Wednesday night, June 29.  Knowing me, I'll be sewing binding an hour before the meeting.  I seem to chronically try to fit more things in than there is time for.  I'm sure none of you ever do that :)  Hope you all had a great weekend!

I needed batting so...

Of course, I had to go to a quilt shop!  I have used Quilter's Dream Cotton batting in the "Select" weight for many of my quilts.  Last year, however, I got a good deal on several pieces of another brand so I gave it a try.  I wouldn't say I don't like it, but I'm feeling like I still like Quilter's Dream better.

A friend of mine (Sue) works at a quilt shop about 30 minutes away from me and they carry Quilter's Dream.  Since I didn't make my plans in advance I didn't know if Sue was working today, but I drove on over to The Material Girls in Dearborn anyway.  Sue wasn't there, but the owner, Barb, had the batting in the "Request" weight, so I decided to go with that.

Naturally, since I was there, I needed to check out the fabric selection :)  The cream print is "Kangaroo Fan" by Nambooka (M&S Textiles, Australia), the next three are Lonni Rossi for Andover Fabrics and the black is "Authentic" by Sweetwater for Moda.  I've been in a grey and mustard mood and how could I pass up that Authentic with text!

Now to figure out the back of my Robert Kaufman No Prints Allowed quilt.  Do you like to make pieced backs, think you should make pieced backs or just use whatever one fabric you have enough of?

Robert Kaufman No Prints Allowed Challenge

I'm working hard on my Robert Kaufman No Prints Allowed challenge for the Ann Arbor Modern Quilt Guild.  Using solids isn't hard for me as I do that a lot.  The most challenging thing for me is using so many colors.  I often work in a more limited color palette, but the solid charm packs have a wide variety of colors.  I am working with the "Dusty" charm pack.

One of the rules we agreed on as part of the AAMQG challenge was that we need to use at least 30 of the 40 plus charms in the pack.  I was happy about that as I thought I could leave out some of the charms to limit the color palette.  However, the design I decided on will require me to use all the charms.

The other issue I've had is my desire to avoid a rainbow look.  While I like many of the quilts with the charms arranged this way, I wanted to avoid it myself and planned to place the colors more randomly.  However, random placement did not work at all with the rest of the quilt design and I ended up with something closer to a rainbow layout than I had envisioned.

This is one of the most wonderful parts of quilt designing!  The process of adjusting your ideas as you go along is so totally absorbing.  I love it when I am so focused on my process that I look up and discover that several hours have gone by without me being aware of it.

The next challenge for me was to figure out how to put together what I had designed!  I had drawn it out and made some initial plans, but it ended up being more like putting together a jigsaw puzzle and involved quite a  few partial seams.

I'm focusing on the border areas today and hope to finish the top in the next day or two.  Our quilts are due on June 29 so that should leave me enough time to decide on the quilting and finish the quilt.

Have you participated in any challenges lately - either as part of a group or ones you set yourself?

Meet Madeline

You know how I love black and white!  For my twin sized version of Spell It Out I used black and white prints with one fat quarter of pink and one fat quarter of orange.  I think this is a quilt that would take a girl from grade school to high school.

I had so much fun choosing a name to add to this quilt!  I didn't really want to use either of my daughter's names, so I browsed websites with popular baby girl names.  Madeline instantly reminded me of many happy times reading the Madeline books to my girls.  The color scheme of the quilt doesn't match the colors of the books, but I decided to use it anyway because it makes me smile.  The random arrangement of half square triangles continues to make me smile too.

I hope your weekend gives YOU lots of reasons to smile!

Not even on my list!

Oh my goodness have things been crazy around here!  With my daughter and my niece graduating, my Mother's birthday and the usual end of the school year activities, it has been nuts!  Lots of fun and wonderful people, but frenzied.  My sewing "To Do" list is growing longer by the day and has been largely ignored for the past two weeks.

So what do I do in the middle of all this craziness?  I end up making a new ironing board cover :)  Not even on the list!  The small hole in the middle of my old one had become a large hole and it was time to replace it.  So I threw it out and bought a new one at JoAnn (50% off!).  It doesn't fit.  Those of you who have purchased new ironing boards in the past few years may have noticed that the standard ones have gotten thinner - now 13" instead of 15".  So I bought a "deluxe" model that is 15" wide.  It has the iron stand on the end.  The problem - it is only 51" long, not the standard 54".  The bigger problem - JoAnn and Bed, Bath and Beyond (where I bought the ironing board) don't carry a replacement cover in this size.  The standard ones are too long and the iron stand on the end of the board prevents tightening them enough to fit smoothly.

So, inspired by Yahaira, I decided I'd just have to make my own.  I made mine very simple.  I flipped the ironing board upside down and traced the outline on a piece of batting.  Then I cut out along the traced edge and placed the batting on top of the orange fabric (how I wished I could have ironed it first :)).  I marked a line about 2 1/4" outside the batting edge.  Then I made a 1/2" wide casing, put some cording through it and put it all on the board.  It seems to be working fine so far.  It only took me about an hour - probably less time than it took to buy two covers at two different stores and return them :).

(The fabric squares on my design wall behind the ironing board are for the Ann Arbor Modern Quilt Guild Robert Kaufman No Prints Allowed challenge - my highest priority sewing as it is due June 29.)

Spell It Out

Spell It Out to the ones you care about!

I love text in quilts!  I've had the idea for this quilt for a while now and when I received a commission from a local organization for a baby quilt and I knew exactly which one to make.

I love the blues and greens with the white background - so cool and summery!

I can think of so many great color combinations for this quilt.  I made another version that I'll show you early next week (as soon as I get a good photo).

This quilt is my newest pattern and is available in 5 sizes.  The quilt pictured is the crib size - other sizes are a smaller baby quilt, throw, twin and full/queen.  Spell It Out is available in either hard copy or PDF formats in my Etsy shop.