Friday, March 23, 2012

Comics quilt

For my March "Empty-the-UFO-bin" project, I picked the comics tumblers that I put together sometime last year. I found this comic-book fabric in a scrap pile somewhere and thought it was fantastic. I pulled a whole bunch of rather ugly-ish coordinating fabrics to make the contrasting tumblers, and used a country blue (my least favorite color) as the border. I did very simple quilting on this one - just echoing all of the seams 1/4" on both sides - so it only took two afternoons to get the whole thing done. I was lucky to find a yard of the border fabric still in the remnant pile at my favorite LQS, so the binding actually matches the front. The back is lots of fun - Monopoly cards on a hot pink background. 65 x 72 inches.


Thursday, March 22, 2012

Finished group quilt (top)

The ladies of Newington Schoolhouse Quilters met one final time to finish what has turned out to be a spectacular group quilt. The top is ready, and we will now be contacting long-arm quilters. Thanks to Anna, Ginger, Jean, Jeannie, Joan, and Deb for all of their hard work today, and to Linda for piecing that gigantic back.

Monday, March 12, 2012

Craftsy blocks for March

I made the March blocks for the Craftsy block of the month yesterday. I found that I wasn't a big fan of the tedious process of making these string-pieced blocks (I think I've spoiled myself recently with too many quick-assembly designs), but I do like the outcome. The batiks in the spiderweb block are tiny strings left over from a wallhanging I made when I first started quilting. Glad I kept them - they look great contrasting with Tangerine Tango!

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Preemie quilts and free-motion practice

Since I don't have enough pinks to make a noodle quilt this month, I decided to make a few "quilties" for the local hospital - these are teeny little quilts (18 x 24") used for preemies in the NICU. I'll probably do a few more of these, since they only take about an hour each. Depends how much batting I have around.

I'm also still working on my free motion skills. I did a spiral flower suggested in this month's FMQ tutorial on the 21" square that I made for the rainbow scrap challenge. It's not perfect, but I think it's a cheerful design:

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

What's on my desk

Working on the scrappy brick quilt. I love this look.




Scrap Happy Weekend

March's rainbow scrap challenge color is PINK, which, as it turns out, I do not have in large amounts. I don't think I'll be making a pink noodle quilt this month, both because I don't have enough pink fabrics and because I'll be doing some actual work so my quilting time will be much more restricted over the next few months. I did manage to put together the pink dresden plate and 3" squares last weekend:
I also got my scrappy placemat together. This month I used tiny (1.5 x 3") bricks (which I'm also in the process of making a huge quilt). I had a piece of batting right next to my desk, so I used this as an opportunity to work on this month's free-motion quilting challenge. I picked a puffy clouds motif from a book that I won as a door prize at Sew Inspired last summer. I love how pretty this motif looks:

The back view really shows off the quilting: