Quilts and Books

There's a large university hospital in my town with a well-regarded cancer treatment center. There are all kinds of groups that provide services to patients and their families to help ease their way through the painful realities that come with a diagnosis of cancer. One of those groups provides quilts to cancer patients. This group started out in 2005 by making and giving quilts to breast cancer patients. Last year they expanded the program and now children receiving chemotherapy and thoracic cancer patients each get a quilt. My guild got involved and this spring will donate at least 50 quilts to the program.

Last fall a whole bunch of us received fabric remnants from the kind folks at Connecting Threads. So here's a look at the quilts my QBFFs & I made. First up is QBFF A's. Simple, yet so striking. I love this.


Next up is QBFF T's.  She used a scrappy pattern to create hidden pinwheels. This is fun to look at to see the patterns emerge.
This one is mine:
All three o…

My sister, the QBFFs, and I are doing a "paint chip challenge." We swapped paint chips and each of us has to make a monochromatic quilt using the color of our paint chip. I was the recipient of this lovely green paint chip:

Here are some fabrics I pulled from my stash (OK, I admit it--I did do a little shopping, but just a little!):

I'm thinking one or more of those might have to go. And since white and black are not colors, I may add a little of each for some "pop!"

What to make, what to make...

Actually, I have an idea. Stay tuned!

So, back during the football playoffs I blogged about all of these strips I was sewing together for a Quilts of Valor project my guild was doing. Before yesterday's "Super Sew-In" I had to finish prepping my strips. First, I cut the strip sets into smaller sets 6.5" wide:

Then I had to sew them end-to-end until I had sets that were approx. 10 yards long. Here they are laid out in my upstairs hallway. I'm standing several feet into the guest room and they extend down the hall into the master bedroom, up against the treadmill.

Rolled up like this, they don't look like so much fabric.

The QBFFs and I, along with a helper, formed one of the teams of 4. We had 12 teams working on quilts during yesterday's day-long sewing event sponsored by my guild. Here's our workspace.

And here are the 3 quilt tops we finished yesterday. As a group we were particularly fond of the middle quilt which was harder to make and took quite a bit of coordination between us.



Well hel…

It started with three very disparate fabrics. The QBFFs and I decided to have a challenge. We each picked a fabric and gave a fat quarter piece to the others. My choice was the blue batik with orange highlights. QBFF A. chose the pink. QBFF T. chose the purple. These fabrics were not going to be able to go into something tame and calm.

I've posted pictures of this as a work in progress, but here it is finished, hanging on the wall of the guest room. The next picture is a close-up of the quilting which I did on my Baby Lock mid-arm domestic machine. The pattern is from the July/August issue of Fons & Porter Love of Quilting. I'll be entering this in the June NQA show.


As I was getting the photos ready for this blog post I realized that I never posted the picture of the completed large version of the Christmas Candle.

And here's a bonus picture. This will keep me indoors sewing all weekend :-)

The QBFFs & I decided to participate in an all-day quilting event in February to make a boatload of quilts for the Quilts of Valor project. For homework prior to the big day, we each have to sew a pile of strips into something that will eventually measure 6.5 inches by 10.5 YARDS. Yeah, YARDS. That's a lot of strips. So during today's games I worked on my QOV strips. Here's my mess of strips. Oh look! On the far left there's my library copy of Nalini Singh's Blaze of Memory all ready to read. Only I have to read my monthly TBR book first.

So far I only got about half my cut strips sewn into sets of two. While the pile doesn't look real big, there are over 2 dozen sets of them. I'll be sewing them together into groups of 10, cutting them, and sewing again to get that great big long 10.5 YARDS of strips. It should be fun trying to get a picture of that!

Yesterday during the games I cut strips to make the binding and rod pocket for my stars quilt that I quil…

I'm not sure why exactly, but it turns out I get quite productive late in the football season. I turn on the games, warm up my machine and get to work. I don't really watch the games; I listen, even though I really do care which team wins or loses. I look up if something exciting happens, otherwise I keep my eyes focused on my sewing and my ears tuned to the TV. So this weekend we had approximately 14 hours of NFL playoff games (and I do NOT want to discuss any of the outcomes. I'm quite disgusted). I had this project from one of my QBFF challenges that I've been very anxious to finish. I love how bold and colorful it turned out. It would look nice in my office at work.
This quilt is approximately 42 x 42 inches. I quilted it fairly densely. All-in-all, I'd estimate I spent 9-11 hours quilting it. The sprial/starburst quilting design inside each star is from the book Thread Work Unraveled by Sarah Ann Smith. Nice book.
So here is the quilt in my machine on Saturday d…

We were inspired when some of the mini groups in our guild showed quilts that were based on fabric exchanges. So each of the 3 of us picked out a fabric and passed a fat quarter of it to the other two.
Predictably, I picked a blue. The blue has bits of orange in it. Yes, I was going out on a color limb.
But my QBFFs picked fabrics that were not going to let me get away with something comfortable.
We ended up with this:

So, I took a deep breath and randomly pulled out a whole bunch of brighter/intense fabrics and paired some until I got 5 pairs of fabrics.
Then I made those stars I showed you a few weeks ago.


And here's what I came up with:

I should be working on UFOs. Instead I started a new project recently and made some pretty decent progress today. These are HARD. Irregular angles and bias edges made it hard to piece these accurately. I ripped out numerous seams until I got the hang of how to place the edges together.

I drew a star on an 8" block of freezer paper and cut it apart.


I ironed the freezer paper templates onto two 12" blocks of fabric (stacked together right sides up).


I cut out the star block adding 1/4" seam allowances.


I sewed the blocks together.


Credit where credit is due: This pattern is from the July/Aug. 2007 issue of Fons & Porter Quilting.

I can't show you all the blocks because 1) they aren't done yet, and 2) this is part of the latest challenge my QBFFs & I are doing and they aren't allowed to see it yet. Sometimes they read this blog.