Quilts and Books

No TBR post this month. I've not been reading as much as usual lately. A number of things have just sucked up my free time. Including this little quilt I made in just under a week back in July. I needed a gift for a co-worker who had quit her job to move to a new city. She went above and beyond last year helping me with a project and I really wanted to do something for her. So I pulled some fabrics in our university's school colors (purple and white) and made this:
Sorry about the lighting. The whites turned out yellow in the quilt and background. I wish I'd gotten better pictures but these will have to do. It's not very big--about 21" x 16". A look at the quilting:
I added a hanging sleeve to the back and it was all done.
My 8th quilt of the year! 

It's been a very productive year in my Quilt Cave. This is the 7th quilt I finished so far in 2015. I should point out that I didn't actually start all of those quilts this year. The one I'm about to show you I started last fall for the baby daughter of a friend. Because my friend N. is a very patient woman, I ended up finishing several projects before finally finishing this one.

When N. announced her pregnancy I was often found salivating over Elizabeth Hartman's modern quilts. So I picked the pattern called Solar Eclipse and chose these bright colors that I hoped would complement the peach and grey of the baby's room.
Don't those bolts look pretty stacked up? I texted the picture to N. who gave the thumbs up and I got to work. Here's the end result.
I quilted simple straight lines horizontally, vertically, and then diagonally. Once again using my favorite Aurifil 40 wt. white thread.  Those blocks are 16", so the quilt is rather large (for a baby qui…

Five years ago I did a paint chip challenge with my sister and the QBFFs. It was so much fun I decided to do it again. As president of my quilt guild this past year I got to issue a quilting challenge to members so I went to Home Depot, picked up a bunch of paint chips and passed them out. (If you're interested, I wrote about it back in October so you can see the rules I passed out with the paint chips.) This is the paint chip that I got: And here is what I made: This quilt is from a pattern called Geometric Gradation that I purchased from Geta Grama, a quilter from Romania. She does the most amazing work. I have two of her other patterns I hope to get to one day.

My quilt is smaller than the original pattern because I only collected 8 blue fabrics in the right shades of blue (that pattern calls for 11 rows). This is a great quilt for snuggling on the couch, although right now it looks pretty awesome hanging on the wall.
I quilted it with white 40-wt. Aurifil thread in an all-ove…

I've actually finished a few things recently. Two of them are lap-sized and all I need to do is get some photos taken so I can post them here soon. I also whipped out this little wall hanging that I gave to my husband yesterday for Father's Day.
This is called Moonlight Moose and it's from a kit by On the Trail Creations that I bought through Keepsake Quilting (they have the BEST catalog). It's pretty small, about 11"x 16". It only took me 4 days to finish, but I worked on it for several long stretches during those 4 days. There's a lot of stitching and I had to keep changing thread colors and presser feet. It was well worth the effort, though.
So here's the finished project: And next, here is an interesting view of the background, raw edges and all, before the applique pieces were added. This is a close-up of the stitching. I used some of my machine's decorative stitches, which is something I rarely get a chance to do.
The raw-edge applique piec…

The quilt on the cover of the fall 2013 issue of Modern Quilts Unlimited was the source of my latest finish. The quilt's designer is Jen Eskridge and she created an interesting pattern that was fun and rather different than anything I've made to date. I gathered up a collection of fabrics that all fell into the same group of colors: brown, gray, black, white, and off white. I made a bunch of circles. Some circles were sewn inside bigger circles, others were scattered to overlap. While I followed the layout above in general, mine comes out looking slightly different. There is less space between the circles, and I think I wound up with more circles than in the original. Still, this was a great, easy-to-follow pattern.
I finished this top almost a year ago and was immediately intimidated by all of the white space I needed to quilt. I wanted to do something creative in the background, but instead I settled on quilting a variety of motifs in the circles themselves and doing a plai…

A couple of years ago I took a class from Teri Henderson Tope on reverse applique. This is a method where the top layer is cut away to reveal the fabric underneath. (Regular applique involves sewing pieces of fabric down to a background.) The class involved making a small floral piece and the applique work was done totally by hand. I only managed to sew a few of the petals of one flower in the class that day, so every now and then I would pick it up and work on it for a little while. When the block was finished I sewed the corner pieces on and decided to hand quilt it. That, too, was something I did little by little. And low and behold, last week I finally finished it.
This first picture is a close-up. Hopefully you can see some of the applique stitching.  And this second picture is the finished quilt. It measures just 17" x 17".
When I first began quilting I hand pieced and hand quilted everything I made. Slowly I transitioned to using my machines for all of my piecing and…

My last finished quilt of the year is a twin-sized quilt that's my version of this quilt by Melissa Corry found on the Moda Bake Shop site. I even used the same fabric, Sphere by Zen Chic. The fun thing about this particular pattern is that the maker needs to put the strips together randomly making it highly unlikely that there are two identical quilts made from this pattern. But since I used the same fabric, mine looks very much like the one Melissa made.
I like the name, "Mister DJ," because it does remind me of the indicators on a music board. It's a very clever design.
This pattern uses two rolls of pre-cut strips. I had to separate the strips into high-volume, low-volume piles and then cut them into sets of varying lengths. The cut sections were then paired and sewn together with a small strip of the green. I wound up with 210 strips. In a pile they looked like this: They had to be pieced together randomly, so in order to ensure that, I jumbled them up into a pi…

Judy Niemeyer is a quilt teacher, pattern designer, fabric designer, and all-around very creative person. She and her family run a company called Quiltworx.com and I highly suggest you click on that link, go to the Products tab and select Patterns to see the wide range of exquisite quilts she has designed. Her stuff has become very popular of late. Her patterns use a unique paper piecing technique that is remarkable for the way it helps you organize all of the pieces you need to make her designs. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, so I took a class in November from my local quilt shop using one of their most basic patterns, called One. It is a long curved leaf sewn to a two-color background. It makes a nice table runner or a nifty wall-hanging.
Here is half of my leaf before it has been trimmed: Here are both halves of my leaf, trimmed, but not sewn together:
Here are a bunch of leaves held by some of my classmates:
Here's my leaf, all finished and quilted:
Close-ups!


I…