Inspiration can come from the strangest places

Posted in Scrap quilts, WIP Wednesday by wombatquilts

I am constantly amazed by what inspires me – where ideas and colour combinations for a quilt come from. This week’s work in progress is a good case in point.

This bright scrap quilt was inspired by my local petrol/gas station logo.

Strange I know, but I was filling the car up one day and realized I really love these two colours together. I promptly came home and pulled some scraps and made up this block.

I originally posted about this flying geese pattern back in April this year. You can find the original post, with a free paper piecing pattern here. A couple of months later and I got the urge to finish this quilt top, so I pulled fabric from my stash as well as from my scrap pile and started work.

Now I have a stack of blocks and I am gradually putting the top together.

My placement is random and fun and I have thrown in a couple of reverse blocks to break things up. It is kind of fun making the arrows go all over the place.

I have also been thinking of making some yellow arrows with yellow background, but I am not sure about it. Any thoughts?

23Aug2013

Another log cabin done and dusted…

Posted in Finished Quilts, Quilts, Scrap quilts by wombatquilts

I managed to get my Blush log cabin quilted and bound this week. I am so thrilled with how this quilt finished up and can not wait to see how it washes.

I quilted Blush using the diagonal lines of the log cabin block as a guide. I love how the how this simple quilting adds extra interest to the log cabin.

I must admit I am looking forward to trying some of the free-motion techniques I learned last week at the PMQG Meet Up, but I have a few weeks before my wrist is up for the challenge. So the next few quilts will involve straight lines in some shape or form and in the meantime I will do my free-motion exercises in my new graph paper note-book. As instructed by Rachel (of 2nd Ave Studios) I will be using pen only for the doodling. No erasing.

I found the perfect fabric piece in my stash for the back of this quilt – the Weekend by Erin Morris fabric worked perfectly with a little bit of pink supporting fabric.

The final touch was a solid binding in Magenta which just bought the whole quilt together.

Now I am just a few stitches away from finishing my Yummy quilt so it is back to the sewing machine.

I am linking up with Crazy Mom Quilts and TGIFF.

21Aug2013

A Yummy work in progress

Posted in WIP Wednesday by wombatquilts

Last weekend I took part in the Pacific Northwest Modern Quilt Guild Meetup – quite a mouthful hey! Guilds from around the Pacific Northwest gathered in Portland to meet, sew and basically have a great time. It was a lot of fun and I meet some amazing quilters. One of the events on Saturday was a charity sew day at Modern Domestic. I spent several glorious hours using an amazing Bernina Sewing machine making these…

As part of the goodie bag for the Meetup there was small packets 2 1/2 squares of Lecien’s “Happy Mochi yumyum” fabric (Monica, the designer of these fun fabrics is a Portland MQG member).

I gathered my packets, hunted down some of the spare packets that were left over and then bribed some more packets from some friends. Finally when I thought I had enough, I went to work.

I paired the fabric with some Kona “Snow” and happily sat chain piecing and ironing for hours. I managed to get 4 blocks of 12 done during my time at the Sew Day, then bought the whole process home to finish.

There is Yumyum all over my work space, which is fine with me. It is such a happy fun fabric and works well in 2 1/2 inch squares.

I am hoping to have the top finished by Friday, so I am off to quilt some more.

19Aug2013

Flying Geese Paper Piecing Monday style

Posted in Paper Piecing Monday, Quilt patterns, Scrap quilts by wombatquilts

This week I am taking a short break from my grey sampler quilt to share a little Bee crazy with you. I was super excited to recently joined a do.good. Stitches circle. I excitedly did the first blocks for my Bee, forgot to photograph them and then sent them to the wrong person. I was off to a flying start with the group!

Then the August block was posted and I must admit I gasped a little. This is why – 3 inch flying geese culminating in a 12 inch block with 96 pieces…

The requested blocks were from Liesel Made’s crazy mini patchwork sampler series. You can find the original post here. As I read the instructions for making the block I thought there had to be a way to make this which was not going to freak me out. My answer was of course PAPER PIECING! Paper piecing was the only way I personally was going to be able to make those precise little triangles.

So I pulled out my graph paper and made a pattern.

In the end these were fun blocks to make. I used up lots of little scraps which always makes me happy and messed with the triangle layout a little. If you want to make this block the paper way, please feel free to use my graph paper pattern – 3 inch Flying Geese pattern.

Next week it will be back to our regularly scheduled program.

16Aug2013

Star String quilt top finished

Posted in Finished Quilts, Quilt patterns, Scrap quilts by wombatquilts

I am so thrilled to have finally finished my star string quilt top… and extra thrilled that it turned out exactly like I pictured it. So without further ado, here she is in all her scrappy wonderfulness…

I must admit my strong feelings about this quilt maybe effected slightly because I designed the quilt block. You can find the free paper piecing pattern and details about my inspirations here on the original post.

I had a lot of fun making this quilt slowly, piece by piece. Using colour pencils and paper I worked out each square in advance.

The central stars are made from lots of little bits from my scrap pile. The black and white fabrics were a little bit of scrap pile and a lot of stash cutting.

I wanted bright colours for the stars and mainly worked with red, yellow, orange, blue, green and purple with a smattering of apricot, fuchsia and citron.

The finished quilt top is 62 inches square – five blocks across five blocks down. This of course meant there was a lot of paper to pull off the back.