Morris Garden Quilted!

Hip-hip-hooray! 🎉 I managed to get this beauty quilted just in the nick of time—right before the month's close. Binding, however, will wait until after I do my next round of quilt labels. 

It's another really big quilt so it's hard to hold it up to get a good photo.

The quilting shows up better in dim light

This project pushed me into uncharted waters, throwing me design and alignment curveballs. It was a fantastic practice session, letting me flex and explore the alignment tools of my ProStitch long arm computer. What a relief it is to wrap up this quilt—it's been patiently waiting, making it the last 'flimsy' in my pile, urging me to summon the courage to quilt it.

Squirrel!

This week began with the sole intention of diving into my insulated bag project. However, life's little detours led me to a pile of scraps from my recent Rose Lane quilt. Pawing through these beautiful remnants, I spotted a stack of triangles and four long strips of patchwork-look fabric. The creative muse whispered, "Why not craft something fresh with them?"

As luck would have it, I stumbled upon a pattern that seemed tailor-made for my scraps. Titled 'Chocolate Dip' by Lesley Chaisson, this design can be found in her book, "Charmed, I'm Sure: Quilts and More from 5" Squares." Most of my scraps were too small for her design, but with a little tinkering, I resized the blocks to fit. 

With my trusty Cricut by my side, I carved out the beige hexagons, while the remaining pieces were fussy cut from the pile of scraps. Admittedly, I indulged a bit too much time snipping those 2"-squares from the backing remnants. 

After assembling all the pieces, I found myself with a charming but modestly-sized quilt (30" wide). That's too small, so I decided to add another row of half-blocks around the quilt's perimeter. 

I played around with the arrangement of pieces and came up with this creative knotwork layout. I like how it makes my version unique.

I think I'll just do one more time around the perimeter with the small blocks before I add the borders. If I have enough of the grey floral outer border, this is my plan to finish this.

Finishing this flimsy seems like a good Friday Night Sew-In project.

Update: I stayed up insanely late and finished the flimsy.

Linking up with Finished (or Not) Friday

Friday Foto Fun
Peacock Party
Whoop Whoop
Patchwork & Quilts
Oh Scrap!

Insulated Bag, Take 2

After making three zipper units and wasting two zippers, I gave up putting a zipper on my first insulated bag project. I cut everything with the dimensions given in the pattern and they just don't end up the same lengths. So, I decided to cut my losses. I spent an hour or two putting the insulated lining and exterior bags together and added binding around the top edge. It's not my best project, but in this case, done is better.

But, I am still determined to make an insulated bag with a zipper so I decided to try again. I bought a ByAnnie pattern called Every Day Every Way, which is basically a diaper bag. 

Today I quilted up fabric for it. This is some very old Hoffman Fabric called Kaleidoscope and it looks like peacock feathers to me. For the batting, I used Pellon Insul-Fleece and a second layer of Quilter's Dream 70-30 batting. I used 100% cotton Harmony Violets Variegated thread. The manufacturer claims it produces minimal lint; that was not my experience.

I quilted it with the Modern Peacock pantograph from Kim Diamond. It is a really creative pantograph, but OMG it uses a lot of thread. I quilted about a yard and a half of fabric and it used SIX bobbins. 

Now I get to spend a couple hours cutting everything out. I'm hoping this one goes as smoothly as the last two ByAnnie bag projects I've made.

Flapper's Fancy Finished!

Flapper's Fancy is Finished! I actually finished it a couple of weeks ago, but I've been too lazy/distracted to finish my blog post.

I originally designed and pieced this quilt in April 2021. I tried to find blocks in Electric Quilt/Blockbase that aligned along the edges and I think I was pretty successful. I'm quite happy with how it turned out. 

As I previously reported, all the quilt pantographs I used were from Donna Kleinke's Genevieve line. For the extra large blocks, I stitched them out in two pieces, as shown in this Handiquilter video on how to stitch Oversize Blocks. For the sashing, I was fortunate it fit (just barely) in my quilting space and I was able to do the sashing strips without rotating the quilt on-point, so this project actually ended up being easier than anticipated. It really did help that I selected pantographs which came in smaller pieces.

This is basically what I stitched out, though the outer flower border sashing is better aligned on the actual quilt.

This quilt has already been gifted; my brother visited last week, and I sent it off with him to deliver.

But its departure is a little bittersweet because I do really like it so I may dig through and see if I have enough of the Deco Elegance border/medallion fabrics left to make another for myself.

Linking up with:

Finished (or Not) Friday

Friday Foto Fun

Off the Wall Friday

Peacock Party

TGI Finished Friday

Whoop Whoop

August's UFO

I joined our local quilt guild's UFO challenge this year and I've been doing a great job at working my way through my list of 12 UFOs. This month's draw is quilting up the Morris Garden quilt flimsy I finished in Nov 2021. 

I don't have a backing figured out yet, so I'll need to dig around and see if I already have something that will work. I hope so, I hate making backings from smaller pieces.

I've been working on a quilting plan for a couple months and I think I finally mostly have one. I'm still not happy with the outer border, but so far I haven't found a better option in my pantograph library. This border fabric is just so wide that most of the coordinating borders don't look good on it. I might try playing with a multiple border design to see if I can figure out something I like better.

I did edit a pantograph to assemble that funky filler shape.

Tuesday ToDo #76

Sorry, I've been extra flaky about posting blog posts this summer. My motivation to keep moving along on my lists has been flagging. My last todo list was a whole month ago. Oops.

Finish the quilting on the Flapper's Fancy (Deco Elegance) quilt, which needs to be done by the first week of August. ✔️

Create quilt labels for all the quilts.  ✔️

Bind my stack of quilts - six in total.

I've only finished three of them: The Flapper's Fancy, Midnight Mosaic and Comet's Revival. I still need to get new photos of the finished quilts.

Complete my insulated shopping tote, which is this month's UFO.

Yeah, I failed on that too. The inset zipper is giving me fits. I made a new zipper unit and it still didn't fit in the bag right. I was very careful to follow her directions exactly so I'm not sure why I'm having so many problems. In the end, I've decided to finish the current bag without a zipper and try again with one of ByAnnie's zipper bag projects. My last two ByAnnie bags went together perfectly and I had no problems following her directions.

I've ordered her Every Day Every Way Bag pattern and I'll try making it with special insulated batting for my husband to shop with. I'm hoping I'll get started as soon as the pattern arrives.

My list for the upcoming week:

1. Bind Rose Lane
2. Bind Cosmic Cabin
3. Bind Flower Paths
4. Bind Unicorn Panel
5. Quilt the fabrics for the Every Day Every Way Bag (you quilt the fabric and then you cut out the bag).

Linking up with Tuesday ToDo.

Oops, Fabric Binge

This past weekend I went shopping with a friend. We started out at a Quilter's Guild sale and I was really good: I bought rulers, books and a few patterns. My friend dug through a huge scrap bin and pulled out a bunch of purple scraps, and I did buy that for $1. And I bought a couple of larger solid fabric pieces for backings, but otherwise I stayed away from the fabric. Yay me.

Then she brought me to JoAnn Fabrics for their Doorbuster sale. I have to be honest, I don't do much shopping at JoAnn's anymore. I prefer quilt-shop quality fabrics, and I mostly buy from Hancock's Paducah, but I am not morally opposed to buying fabric from JoAnn's quilting section. Most of their fabric is a good value and fabric has gotten very expensive in recent years.

Anyway, I started off pretty well. I followed my friend around and didn't see anything I had to pick up, but then she pulled out this dragon fabric with purple background. OMG, I love dragons and my favorite color is purple so, yes, I had to buy it. (Strangely, the JoAnn receipt and website says it's Dragons and Stars on Navy, but you can pretty clearly see, that is not navy.)

And then it was like the damn broke, I started picking up all the fabrics. I was obviously in the mood for rainbows.

Digi Tile Blender (l) and Bright Swirls (r)

In the end, I bought 38.5 yards. Sigh, it didn't erase all my progress for the year, but I sure did make a dent in it. Oh well.

With this purchase, I'll go ahead and update my Stash Report:

I used nearly 11 yards on the front, back and binding of the Rose Lane quilt.

I used a bit more than 4.5 yards for the backing and binding of the Flapper's Fancy quilt. (Stay tuned for the post that shows the front of it.)

And I quilted up a little panel as a Comfort Quilt gift. It was a total of 2.25 yards for the front, back and binding.

That brings the total for the year to 105 yards used! Subtract out the two purchases of 75.75 and it brings the total to 32.25 yards used for the year. A little disappointing compared to my last report, but it is much better than the past few previous years where I was up hundreds of yards. At least I'm down for the year. =)