A calendar quilt

This is my latest work in progress, a calendar quilt, one block for every month. This is the december block, i'm not doing them in any particular order, just whatever fabrics i have on hand that will work with the pattern. I found the patterns for these blocks through a craft-a-long on craftster. I dont think that the quilt will be very practical because of all the stitching on the top makes it a little stiff and rough, but i think its going to look great, very rustic and folk art with the rough edge applique and the blanket stitch. The christmas lights and the rope the dog has in its mouth were embroidered on. Everything else was machine appliqued.




Here is my July block, i haven't decided if i'm done with it yet. I think the dog needs a collar, and the house may get a mail box. I'll be posting more of these throughout the week as i make them!

My first quilt show!

I went to the Austin Area Quilt Guild's show today and it was great! I was really amazed at all the quilts, its very inspiring and i can feel ideas for art quilts brewing in my mind. I have a thing for flamingos, i'm not sure why, but this one on the left is gorgeous, so much cooler in person. I need to apologize for my photos, i'm a horrible photographer to begin with but this place had bad lighting too, so sorry guys!







This fish was my favorite quilt at the show, it looked like the head was pieced and all of the scales were small circles of fabrics sewn on. I have a detail shot in my flickr, as well as many more of the quilts i saw at the show.







I love the big crazy dragon guarding the castle, and the jagged edges, just amazing!


This quilt show was just a warmup for november, i'm going to the Houston quilt show with my sister, and I think its one of the biggest shows in the country. I'm very excited to see Heather Bailey's new line of fabric up close and in person, and of course all of the gorgeous quilts!

My messy world

I get very jealous when i read my favorite crafty blogs everyday. Everyone seems to have things so together, with great photos of great project, photographed in their clean, well decorated houses. I wish i led the same life, but mine is messy. I attempted to decorate and gave my craft room a good cleaning and organizing a month ago. But i never quite finished because i wanted to get back to creating things instead of cleaning things. Creating things like the table runner i mentioned in my last post. Now normally when i upload my photos i spend time cropping. Cropping out my messy life, but tonight you can see a little bit of it. You can also see my daily uniform of skirt and flip flops!



The table runner has been basted and a few of the squares have been quilted. I decided to outline quilt each triangle and a square swirl (is that such a thing) on the squares. Anyways if you click the picture you'll have a better idea of what i'm talking about. I really love all of the fabrics from this charm pack although i wish there was a bigger variety of small, medium and large prints, i feel like there is not a lot of print contrast in the runner, although i definitely love the colors. I have a lot of little triangle scraps left over and i think they are going to be a matching pot holder. The last picture is of my favorite square in this project and the quilting.

Pretty in pink, quilt top

So here is what i have come up with for my wonderful fabrics. I was flipping through my denyse schmidt book and got inspired. Alot of the new modern quilts call for a lot of solids in big pieces, while i think it looks really cool, I personally love prints. So this quilt is a departure from the norm for me. I adapted this from the big zig pattern and i really love how the zig zags of prints work with the solid pink and brown. One fat quarter was perfect for one row of zig zag. The finished size of this quilt is going to be 60 inches by 82 inches, twin size.

The quilt is hanging on my wall by the corners which is why there is some weird pulling across the center seam. I think the the zig zags worked with prints, you can definitely see the seam in the close up picture, but i think one everything is quilted it wont be as noticeable. I did my best to try to match up the dots, but i only had a fat quarter and had to work with as little waste as possible.

I pieced the back today, and layed the quilt out and basted everything together. I was going to attempt to quilt it on my home machine but i dont think its going to work. There is a quilt store about 20 minutes away that rents time on their handi quilter long arm, they also offer a class on how to use it. I think thats what i'm going to do for this quilt since i'm just going to follow the same quilting pattern denyse schmidt used in her book. I'll let ya'll know how it works out!

I need help!!

Calling all quilters, i need help. I have a really bad problem with buying fabrics that i love but the dont want to cut up. I'm always afraid that i'm going to ruin the fabric with bad ideas. But i dont like it when my pretty new fabric just sits there staring at me. So now i really need help, i bought these 5 amazing Heather Ross fatquarters from Emerald City Fabric and Craft and i would really like to use them in a quilt.

These fabrics called my name because they represent my favorite color combos, pink and orange and a little bit of brown. The tricycles, which i love, could probably be left out of the quilt design just because they're slightly more childish than the other prints. I really need help findinng a quilt pattern that would show off these wonderful prints but that would make a fairly large quilt, I dont like to make lap quilts. I want something that covers my feet. More yardage of these fabrics can be obtained if the pattern calls for it. I do have a large stash of pinks reds, a few oranges that i could throw into the mix, but since i'm such a huge fan of these prints i dont want to do too much to take away from them.

If anyone has any ideas at all please, please help me out. I really want to use these fabrics!

I joined the Modern Quilt Along over at Dioramarama, so i wanted to show you guys which quilt i picked and what i'm working on. The quilt pattern is called Marquee, and its a really fast and easy to put together quilt. I really love the colors of this quilt in the book, I dont know why i didn't just use them, instead I picked my own, and now i dont know if i like them. So heres a few of the blocks i threw together to see how it was looking.

The main background fabric is a light pink paisley, i think the picture shows it a little more purple than it is. I picked out the pink background first and then decided on brown as an accent.

I picked out a range of browns and tans, and then threw a couple of bright prints with brown accents. I cant decide if i like it yet, but we'll see.

So here's what i've been doing the past few days....

I made the quilt top a few months ago and never got around to quilting it. Its 6 feet by 6 feet and the biggest quilt i've made so far. Heres the backing...

For my next quilt i'm thinking of doing Plain Spoken from the Modern Quilt Workshop by Bill Kerr and Weeks Ringle.