Shape Shifter

Sharon Blackmore of Loveshack Quilts posted that she was doing a 1 day mystery quilt in October, which happened to be while my guild was on retreat.  5 of us decided to make the quilt, and we had a lot of fun. 

I tried to pull from my stash, but the fabric directions were to have lights and darks, and my lights kept becoming mediums.  So, I went shopping and found these two fabrics at Addie's.  Grunge Ruby Red and Kona Espresso (a dark dark brown).   By this time I had the initial cutting directions, so I thought I might have those large solid rectangles to have fun with the quilting. 

We are are in progress, lined up in the hotel hallway.   It was ridiculous how much it felt like a race, to get each step done before the next step was released.

And here are our 5 tops completed.   I added a small border to mine after, to fully enclose all the espresso fabric.

And then the real fun began.  I channeled my inner Jodi Robinson, and used designs from her Modern Simplicity book.  It has been my number one modern quilting resource for a long long time, and then about 18 months ago I got to take classes with her!   Great fun.

 Each size of rectangle got it's own design.  The are all freehand, organic designs, but a few of them needed a few registration lines to help with the spacing.

 Once I had decided to buy fabric, I had toyed with the idea of making it a true mystery, and asking a friend to buy fabric for me....to which my DH said "I'll text her and tell her to buy ugly fabric".  I said "you watch out, that will be your quilt"

 And so it is....not the ugly fabric part, but it is his quilt (and I did the fabric shopping) It is our 25th anniversary, and this is my gift to him.  His current couch quilt is I think the 3rd quilt I ever made.  I love the fabrics and pattern still, but it's well worn, very thin, and the quilting is lacking from a different place in my quilting journey--a simple outline of the patches, with dark thread on a very light backing, all sorts of starts and stops and thread snarls. 

Then I added ribbon candy in the red, I tried using the brown thread but wasn't happy, so I changed threads.

 And some hoop-y shapes in the outer borders. 

 a lovely minkee backing shows the quilting beautifully, and will be nice and warm and cozy for my husband to use in front of the TV. 

Stereo

Vicki made this Stereo quilt from a kit she bought at The Sugar Pine Company. 

 Lots of great fabrics in this quilt.   Because it was named Stereo, I thought of these waving lines as sound waves as I was quilting them.  I threw in a few u-turns and pearls here and there for interest.

 and a row of ribbon candy every once in a while also

 Vicki pieced her backing, and it shows the quilting nicely.

Pinwheel

Linda brought me this giant pinwheel quilt and wanted to have some fun with the quilting on the large grey triangles, much as I had done with my Elephant Abstractions and Abilene


I was happy to oblige

 I repeated elements in each quarter, so there would be some constancy across the quilting. 

 I was adding lots of texture in the large triangles, the smaller pinwheels got a very constant texture--u turns in the blue-grey, and herringbones in the print. 

Thanks for letting me play Linda!

Monkey Business

 This is a lap sized quilt of my own that I got to quilt in July (pieced October 2017) and got the binding on in October (still needs to be stitched down on the back).  It was a kit that I received as a gift--I think maybe it was a Keepsake Quilting kit.  

 I had fun piecing it, and had some fun with the quilting too-- a light custom, continuous stitching, with attention to piecing lines. 

 Lots of fun fabrics in this fabric line.

Antelope Canyon

 This is Dana R's Antelope Canyon quilt that she made as a wedding gift for her son and daughter-in-law.   She increased the size of the pieces to make the quilt king sized.

 

The quilting  goal was to emphasize the arcs created by the optical illusion of the piecing.  Also to keep the quilting in the realm of a modern quilt.

 So, to do this I outlined the arcs, and then filled them with randomly spaced u-turns and ribbon candy.  That was fun.   The remainder of the quilt had an E2E design of E's and 3's. 

 The outlining of the arcs is somewhat organic--which suits the modern feel of the quilt.  Dana used lots of neat fabrics of various textures.

 This final photo I lifted from Dana's Instagram, because it was neat to see the whole quilt at once. 

Batting is Quilters Dream wool

Slab Blocks

In 2015-2016, my guild decided we would do a couple of block swaps.  The first one was fake but the second one was a real block swap/lottery.

We made Slab Blocks, which are in Cheryl Arkison's and Amanda Jean Nyberg's
book a Month of Sundays.  Cheryl had shared on her blog the process for making them.  They are basically monochromatic scrap blocks, each block was an entry into the draw.  And we made so many blocks that there were 2 draws for 12 blocks, and I think even a 3rd draw for a smaller set.

I won!    And then the blocks sat and sat....until this summer, when I was working on another scrappy project, and I pulled them out.  I made 4 more blocks, to make a top 60x60.  I played with the layout a bit, and decided I could kind of make these diagonal rows of colors, so that helped me to decide which color blocks I needed to make for my extras.

 And I had quilted a client quilt with this straight-ish randomly spaced lines, and wanted to do one like that again, so I got it quilted right away--and the binding on the front....and then my hands went wonky and I've not gotten the binding hand stitching done, but thought I'd share the quilt anyway, so ignore the binding sticking up every which way.

 Above is the block I made and put in the swap--it was fun to make, and fun to look at, as I used as many scraps from the 100 Modern Quilt blocks quilt as I could. 

 This blue block was one of the extras I made--scraps from so many quilts in there....same with the red one below.  I can start to see the appeal scrap quilts have for quilters. 

 And the backing was fabric I had intended to back my Grandma's quilt with, but didn't actually have enough. 

I used wool batting, so got lovely texture from the quilting.  I will look forward to snuggling under it once I get the binding finished.

Covenants - When Bali Met Sochi

This is the second of this quilt I've quilted.  You can see Vicki's version Here

This one is different because we (Colleen, Vicki and I made these) split the quilt in two, to make wall-hangings for Symons Valley United Church.

It  meant replacing the middle pieces with end pieces, and we made sure they matched, so if the two panels were placed together, it would match.  Vicki also took care with the pieced binding, to have it match one the 'joining' sides. 

 I had a lot of fun with the quilting.  As you can tell from the first photo, I quilted these side by side on the machine, so I could make sure that the quilting flowed from one to the other, just as we oh so carefully (I think it took a full day to get the fabric layout the way we wanted it) made sure the colours flowed.    Here's a photo on the frame, so you can see how that worked on the frame..

 I just love all the fabrics in this quilt.  Along Came Quilting did a great job pulling fabrics for the kit.  I kept going into the classroom and having a look at the progress while Kim M was putting together their store sample, and then once it was complete--we had to have it for the church.  It was Colleen's vision to split it in two.  

 The quilting pattern is from Christina Cameli's book.  Double batting so the texture will show from a distance--wool and 80/20.

Here they are hanging on the foreground walls, adding a nice pop of color to the sanctuary.  photo by Karen

Uncle

This is my Elephant Abstractions quilt, pattern by Violet Craft.

Elephants have long been special in my family, I think because my Dad likes them.  He always used to tell us to watch for elephants when we'd be getting bored on long drives (of which there were many, living on the Canadian Prairies).   One day, in Grande Prairie, he actually did see an elephant out for a walk (the circus was in town).  He came rushing home to get us, so he could tell us to look for elephants, but by the time we were back downtown, the elephant was done his walk and we didn't get to see it on the streets.  

This quilt was fun from start to finish.

First, the fabric selection--I pulled all these fabrics at Along Came Quilting,

  enlisting the help of staff at the store, and of my friend Colleen via texted photos and phone.

Then, the piecing was begun at retreat in October.  I found the wonder clips to be a very useful tool for paper piecing--I could line up the seam lines on both sides of the clip, and thus know I was sewing on the 1/4" on both pieces.

I didn't get it finished at retreat,  but had a good start.

It was here that I could see one problem with my fabric choices--the fabric behind the tusks could have been a little darker--no problem I could fix that with thread!

And then the really fun part began, the quilting!!  I looked at photos of elephants on the interwebs, and then had fun thinking about the quilting texture I wanted to add.  Here's the 'map' I made of the areas I knew how I wanted to quilt.

 I basted it all, so I could roll back and forth freely, and started in on the areas where I knew what I wanted. 

 the threads, most of the tools and inspiration sources

 Once I got the elephant done,  I decided to have lots of fun with the background.... and you can see in this photo below that the quilting helped to differentiate between the tusks and the legs.

 Naming was tough.  Youngest claimed naming rights, but when the time came, she decided it was too much pressure.   I was thinking that this quilt was just Marvelous, and that put me in mind of a beloved Uncle, whom I used to call Uncle M (he having taught me the M stood for Marvelous).  My Dad, though, on one of our long Prairie drives, and probably tired of looking for elephants, thought it a good joke to teach me the word Mediocre, so that quickly put paid the Uncle M nickname. 

 Also, Uncle seems to be a respectful honorific in many cultures, and Elephants, to me, seem to require a respectful honorific....and so, this is Uncle.

and here's a photo of an elephant my Aunt (she of the Uncle M) took, and sent me after I sent her a photo of the completed quilt.