100 Modern Quilt Blocks--Month 4

I guess I shouldn't be surprised by now, when I see things like this in my fabric package from Along Came Quilting's Block of the Month....

Yep, the fabric was staring at me...at least he's a great colour :0

 And there was this great Trivial Pursuit fabric...I've spent many hours playing that game

 Bird sand more birds.

I've resigned myself, this will be a "spy the critters" quilt.  I must quit fighting it and give in.

This block doesn't actually have birds, but it does have peacock feathers.

 I was careful with the orientation of my cuts in for the block below, so the lines would all be parallel, but didn't actually try to line them up...I don't think I could have done as well if I had tried

 These stripes I did make sure it was cut at the right angle...again, they lined up on their own.

 It's a good thing I'd resigned myself to having critters in this quilt, because a day or so later I read an article about Tula Pink and her fabric lines...and she's well known for the critters in her fabrics, so if this is a quilt from Tula Pink's book...I guess there's not point in fighting the critters :)

Yellow Brick Roads

Here's two more Yellow Brick Roads for the church.  This first one is in lovely rich colors.  The border has directional triangles on it, and the border was pieced such that the triangles circle around the quilt.

I wanted to reflect those triangles in the quilting, so the border has directional triangles.

 And the center has a free-flowing fern meander.

 The 2nd quilt got freeflowing echoed flowers

 Its a very bright and cheerful quilt.  I took the inspiration for quilting from the borders for this quilt as well.

When I can, I like to quilt two of these quilts at once...at 50" wide, they fit perfectly on a 108" piece of backing, and one one piece of batting....you can see in the next few photos how I quilt one, and then line up the 2nd quilt 1/2" below and continue. 

It's easy to see the transition from triangles to flowers on the backing...

 and in the photo below in the top right corner you can see a slight white gap, and then the borders of the triangle quilt

Tea Time in Bali #6-Ethel's Brown Sugar

Ethel's Tea Time in Bali uses the Brown Sugar balipop.  Aren't the colors wonderful?

and an unquilted photo

I knew as soon as I saw this top that I was going to use Glide Aquamarine thread on it, then the next question was what to quilt.

I took inspiration from the florals in the fabrics of the quilt and in the borders...and quilted a variety of freehand flowers

 I love the borders on this quilt.  When I see the triple border, I often ask if Kim at Along Came Quilting helped with the border selection...the answer is usually yes :)  Kim does such a great job of pulling fabrics, and she loves borders.  Three borders is a lot of work, but it looks so great.

the Forever Quilt

It's finally finished!

And it took forever, so that's one of the reasons that this quilt is named "the Forever Quilt".  I pieced in May/June, started the quilting in October, continued in November...and the pulled it off the frame, and just got it finished now in February.


This quilt is from a Craftsy class, Machine Quilting with Templates, taught by Kim Brunner.  I highly recommend this class, and any class you can get from Kim Brunner.  She's a fantastic teacher.  The quilt pattern is from alyciaquilts, she does marvelous work with Quilts of Valor.
You may remember this quilt from a few earlier blogposts...first seen here and then more on my design choices.


So, after being disappointed in November with how adding the bubbles background competed with the 1/4" lines of the stars, I pondered for a while, and decided I wasn't picking anything out, as this is a "learning" quilt.  I knew the issue was scale, so I went back and basically meandered/scribbled near the star lines to fix that. 

Hooray, it worked.  the stars are defined again!

And so I continued, this time doing a tight meander near the stars before adding bubbles.

And then, because it's a learning quilt, I wanted to learn/improve different background fills, so I had fun in the different areas (and once again wished I had made a slightly different design choice, by bubbling in a smaller area, but that's just another lesson learned)

McTavishing... I added a row of tiny bubbles around the star rays in all of these background areas, again to make sure that those 1/4" lines were defined.

 

Worms

 Curls

Spirals

 

 Bubbles

 Mussels--from Renae Haddadin--it was nice to have her new book to remind me of the designs learned in a class from Renae in 2011.

and E's and 3's

 And in the right lighting, even the border work shows!  (lesson:  to much work for a busy border print)

 I've always been thrilled with the diamonds in the green  border.

 The quilting shrunk the quilt by 2" in width and 2" in length.  So it is now 56"x78".  Quilters Dream wool batt.  SoFine thread, 15 bobbins.

 

And in the end, I am THRILLED with how it turned out.  

And I've even got the quilting showing on the back now too...I'm not sure why I picked this backing, well, I do know why...because of color, but I usually choose a much plainer backing and the quilting would have showed so much more...

I call this my forever quilt, because it took me 'forever' and because it's going to live with someone who has been a friend forever....and then I read of a show quilt, where the maker spent just about as much time just on the binding as I spent on the quilting of this quilt...I'm pretty sure I don't have the patience for show quilting, LOL.


And speaking of binding, and in keeping with the learning theme of this quilt,  I used a 'new to me' binding technique, the blog I saw it on called it "Susie's Magic Binding"

I usually use Ricky Tim's piped binding, or a traditional double-fold binding that is handsewn to the back.  Susie's Magic Binding, like the Ricky Tim's method, allows for the binding to be sewn entirely by machine, but uses less fabric than the Ricky Tims and the method is faster.  I'll have to use this method a few more times before I can say for sure which I like best,  but I certainly liked this.  Binding was probably the fastest part about this quilt :)  A few hours, from start to finish.