Quilters are amazing people…

Posted in Finished Quilts by wombatquilts

This week I was reminded just how wonderfully generous quilters are… I was gathering quilts to take to Project Linus and it hit me just how many people help make these quilts happen. Here is a selection of this months donations, starting with my finished Gnome stars quilt….

I made this top a couple of weeks ago and finally got around to quilting it this week. Quilting the flannel top and flannel back was an interesting process…. the flannel did not move through the machine as smoothly as standard quilting cotton… it took a little persuading.

But it is so soft and cuddly and worth the extra effort. My big lesson with this quilt is do NOT bind in flannel. I thought I would do flannel all the way but the extra thickness of flannel makes binding in it bulky and unruly. Next time quilting cotton binding all the way!

The next quilt was made at one of the PMQG monthly Charity Sew Days. Once a month we take over the main sewing classroom at a local quilt store, Modern Domestic and sew and talk and have fun. In March we made this…

We took a stack of fabric kindly donated by Sam Hunter…Tina Given’s “Haven” line…added a couple of blenders and spent the day making disappearing nine patch blocks.

This quilt is destined to go to a local Foster kid who was graduating out of the system, so we wanted something a little grown up and a decent size.

One of our fabulous guild members, Betty took the scraps left over from making blocks and made the most amazing back for this quilt.

And one of our talented long arm quilters, Kazumi Peterson weaved her magic to put it all together…. with Cris Pera doing the final step of binding. It is truly a group effort.

Kazumi also donated this beautiful quilt to Project Linus this month….

Her reasoning for donating this beauty was that the fabric was part of a Guild challenge and so it seemed appropriate that it would be part of the Guild charity quilt donations.

I am sure a lot of you recognize the fabric….and I love what Kazumi did with it. (If you want to see what I did with it check out this post).

I had to throw in a close up of Kazumi’s quilting…I love it so much. She really does beautiful work and I am not at all jealous of her quilting talent (okay maybe just a little jealous!).

The final quilt I am going to share started as a donated UFO quilt top.

Elsa, our Guild president this year, donated the top she made out of charms she got in a swap…

…and once again one of our fabulous PMQG quilters, Gail Weiss weaved her magic, this time free motion style.

All these quilts are destined to go out into the world and wrap someone in love..and none of it could have been possible without Sam, Elsa, Betty, Wendy, Kazumi, Cris, Dawn, Penny, Juline, Elisa, Anne, Suzanne, Pam, Jo, MaryAnn, Michelle, Gail, Rachel, Angie, Kathryn, Joy, Nancy, Jolene, Lisa, Lupine, Meredith, Meredith’s mum and all the members of the PMQG who give of their time, talent and fabric stash. Thank you.

26May2015

A flurry of butterflies….

Yesterday was a public holiday here in the US and I fully embraced the good weather and took the day off…. so no paper piecing Monday this week. Instead I wanted to share one of the paper piecing projects I have been working on for the last week or so…

I have been making butterfly blocks using Lizzy House fabric and tone-on-tone white scraps. My obsession with making these blocks took seed when Lizzy’s new fabric line, Natural Histories came out and included this wonderful print…I had purchased a fabulous butterfly pattern a year or so ago from Juliet at Tartan Kiwi so I went to work making blocks. The pattern, if you are interested, is only $2.50 and can be bought HERE.

The pattern is for a 5 inch butterfly and it takes four parts to make one block….

The more of these I have made the quicker the process has become. There are some small bits to the pattern but nothing to complex… and I love the end result.

For my butterfly collection I also enlarged the pattern a little. The yellow butterfly above is the 5 inch block and the green butterfly is what I got when I enlarged the pattern to take up the whole of a 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper.

My finished butterfly collection will have both block sizes and a fun array of colours. I am using just Lizzy House fabric and trying not to repeat any fabric…and I love how they all look.

22May2015

Fully embracing Mini Quilts

Posted in Finished Quilts by wombatquilts

If you are not on Instagram you probably are not aware of the flurry of mini quilt swaps that have been happening over the last year or so. Hundreds and hundreds of mini quilts have been made a swapped all over the world and people’s homes now have walls adorned in beautiful little quilts. After resisting for nearly a year, in February I finally signed up for my first mini quilt swap – the Cotton and Steel mini quilt swap.

I shared my first quilt for this swap a couple of months ago, including the paper piecing pattern I used for this quilt on my original post…….

I liked it but I was not exactly what I wanted. So I went back to the drawing board and came up with this beauty…

I loved making this 15 inch square sampler and shrinking all these quilt blocks down to 3 inches was fun. Nearly all these blocks were paper pieced as I find it is the easiest way for me to get accuracy at this small size.

I really loved putting this quilt together…and even found some prints I could fussy cut at this small size!

So with my Cotton and Steel mini done I felt the need to sign up for another mini swap… this time the Lizzy House mini quilt swap. Now Lizzy House is my favorite designer… I love her prints. As so many of my quilts end up going to kids charities Lizzy Houses fun, modern novelty prints were an instant hit with me.

So what do you do when you have a huge collection of fabulous Lizzy House prints… you make hexagons of course…

So this is my Lizzy House mini work in progress. The day I signed up for the swap I started making hexagons and once I had them all I had a blast arranging and re-arranging them until I had a layout I was happy with.

This quilt has been so much fun to make…though a little tough on my hands as there has been a lot of hand sewing…

I started making this mini before I had my partner details (yes I was that excited!). After you sign up you get assigned a partner, you get sent a list of likes and dislikes and you can stalk them on Instagram so you can make something appropriate for them. So as much as I love these hexagons, I was not sure it was totally up my partners alley… so I made another mini…

..which is much more her style. This quilt is uses four different New York beauty patterns… and I love the unity of the similar shapes of the New York Beauty block combined with the disconnect of the different patterns pieces.

I am sure my partner will love which ever mini I end up sending. I have a couple more weeks before the quilts have to be sent and there is a chance I will change my mind again and make something else. This is the joy of mini quilts…they are so quick and easy to make.

So I can now say I am a mini quilt addict, though I have controlled myself this month and not signed up for any more swaps…yet.

18May2015

The last green star….

Posted in Paper Piecing Monday by wombatquilts

Welcome to Paper Piecing Monday….the final edition of the Green Star series…

$fractured star$ There is no rhyme or reason for my colour placement on this star… I just had fun and put scraps where ever they fitted. Some how it seemed the thing to do with this the 20th star in the series. Yep you read that right, I made 20 green stars and shared 20 patterns.

I had a change of heart this week about how I wanted to layout of the stars in the final quilt, and so do not want to share anything yet. I hope to play some more this week and have a WIP (work in progress) shot for you next week.

The last 8 inch star pattern can be found here…fractured star pattern.

Do not fret, paper piecing Monday will be back next week, but with something NON star related.

15May2015

A modern baby quilt…

Posted in Finished Quilts by wombatquilts

This week I finished the binding on my Paper Piecing Monday baby quilt. I am so thrilled with how this quilt turned out…and how easy it was to make.

As you can see the quilt used just four of my paper piecing Snowball patterns, and they really are the stars of the show. My favorite block is definitely this one…

But you can find the free paper piecing pattern for all the blocks under the “Free Paper Piecing Patterns” tab if you want to make your own version.

To build out the quilt I cut a bunch of 6 1/2 square blocks from my black and white stash. The blocks were just the perfect size so I could play with layout and see how I wanted the quilt to flow.

I originally started with the pink blocks running down the side of the quilt, but after some procrastination went for the layout I have now – one row below the paper pieced blocks and 5 above.

I had some serious fun fussy cutting… this block in particular seemed so appropriate for a baby quilt…

The quilt could easily have been made longer by adding another row or two of black and white blocks but I liked the square format.

For the quilting I ran straight lines down the quilt and then sewed intersecting vertical lines thru the paper pieced squares.

For the back I used some fun pink number fabric and some black and white dots. Nothing too fancy. The binding was of course scrappy pink solids!

This quilt is destined for an exciting life when my friends baby is born. They are an amazing couple that lead a slightly unconventional life. A traditional baby quilt was not going to do…