Floral Crackers Fabulous Finish

I was so excited last night when I took deliver of my finished Floral Cracker’s quilt. The fabulous Rachel from 2nd Avenue Studios had used her amazing long arm/free motion quilting skills to complete this project for me.

I meet Rachel through the Portland Modern Quilting Guild and fell in love with her quilts. She does the most amazing wonky scrappy creative quilts. I was a huge fan and when she offered to quilt Floral Crackers for me I was beyond excited. Rachel also makes a lot of charity quilts and also does long arming quilting of charity quilts for the Guild. Basically she is a rock star.

I made the blocks for this quilt months ago using my black and white stash and lots of crazy floral fabrics. i raided my Kaffe Fassett stash, my Amy Butler stash as well as my friend Lisa’s stash. You can find my original post about the block, along with pattern links on how to make it here.

Rachel used a wonderful free motion flower pattern for the quilting. The shape is very “Kaffe” and mirrors several of the fabrics in the quilt.

I struggled to get decent pictures that do the quilt and quilting justice. Why do photos never capture the true beauty of a quilt?

To back the quilt, Rachel went with a gorgeous light orange dot solid. It is the perfect simple accompaniment to the crazy busy front.

Rachel also kindly did the binding for me on this quilt with her new Bernina binding magic thingy…. and I love it almost as much as I love the quilting. As a nod to me she used Kaffe Fassett’s “Aboriginal Dot” fabric.

I know it is kind of cheating but I am counting this as one of my October Project Linus quilts… I did make the top!

FLORAL CRACKER DETAILS:

Technique: Paper Piecing

Finished Block size: 7 inches

Quilt size: 56″ x 70″

11Oct2013

Rainbow I Spy Quilt done and dusted

Posted in Finished Quilts, Project Linus, Scrap quilts by wombatquilts

Week two of October and I have another quilt finished despite some walking foot hiccups and a Briar Rose obsession. This week’s Project Linus finish is a little bit of a cheat – I pulled an old unfinished top out of the cupboard and quilted it up. But it is still a finish and still counts… right?

I made the top for this quilt about 3 years ago and finishing it up was an interesting exercise which showed me how much my piecing has improved. All over this quilt there are seams that just do not align…

A simple square quilt and my edges are squiffy. I am a little embarrassed but pleased to say that I have got better over the years. Plus the small mistakes here and there do not detract from the fun of this quilt.

The colours are bright and the fabric is varied. There is so much to see in this quilt, it is going to make for a wicked game or two of “I Spy”. And it is was so easy to put together, lots of 4 1/2 inch blocks in a graduating colour scale.

The quilting is simple… more straight lines. The backing is also simple, another IKEA fabric (part of a 100% cotton duvet cover).

All finished off with some purple binding.

I know this binding is a little crazy but I was out of solid navy fabric, which is my usual go to binding for a rainbow quilt. But now I have excuse to go shopping. YIPPEE!

7Oct2013

Foxy Paper Piecing Monday

Posted in Paper Piecing Monday by wombatquilts

Okay I could not help myself…I just had to do it…

I decided that my low volume quilt needed a block from No Hat’s In the House fabulous Forest quilt, as a not too subtle nod to the amazing quilt that inspired my low volume sampler. So I bit the bullet and headed over to the Forest QAL and picked one of their FREE paper piecing blocks.

These patterns are crazy good but complex. How complex I hear you ask… well my fox took four colours…

cut into 99 scraps of fabric…

sewn onto 27 separate pattern pieces…

that were then sewing into three sections…

These sections were then sewn together to make one incredible block.

I was so thrilled with how this block turned out and I kept shoving it in my husbands face saying “look how fabulous this is”… “isn’t this block incredible”… “have you ever seen anything so amazing”. He was not as excited as I had hoped about the whole thing. Actually his response was decidedly underwhelming. Going to have to get him to work on that.

He just keeps saying “what does the fox say“….

30Sep2013

Paper Piecing Monday Scapbeelicious style

Posted in Paper Piecing Monday by wombatquilts

This week’s paper piecing Monday is a little different. I recently joined my first quilting Bees – one of them is a do.Good.Stitches circle and the other is a fabulous collection of fellow bloggers who set up “Scrap-bee-licious”. For both Bee’s I was “queen” this month, which means I am choosing the pattern/colour scheme for my fellow quilters.

The Scrap-bee-licious Bee caused me the most consternation as this quilt is not going to charity, but will be staying with me. I have only kept one quilt so far in my quilting history, so I had to think long and hard about what I really wanted. So after much umming and ahhing, hair pulling and mind changing I settled on…

… low volume. A couple of weeks ago Sarah at No Hats in the House posted photos of one of the most amazing quilts I have ever seen. Her “Once Upon a Forest” quilt took my breath away. Inspired the beauty of this quilt, I have asked my fellow Bee members to make me a scrappy low volume paper pieced block or two.

I have not selected a specific pattern to be followed but have asked them to make me any 12 inch paper pieced block they want. There are so many fabulous free paper piecing patterns on-line, including this one (called Circle of Geese) from Pieced by Numbers or Julie at 627handwork’s Block Rockn’ blocks or Quilting on the Squares Compass Collection.

As I discovered with this block there is a method to getting contrast and detail when you are working with low volume. When I pulled fabric for this block I pulled two different type of low volume from my stash:

1. Pastel, soft solid fabrics.

2. Predominantly white fabrics

The importance of the contrast these two different low volume fabric selections give you was highlighted to me when I made the mistake of using two pieces of solid light grey in the background. In the resulting block…

–

..you can see how the grey pearl bracelet in particular distracts/hinders/muddies the circle of geese pattern. A little unpicking and some re-sewing later and the block was just what I wanted. I am now excited to try a paper pieced star or two using these colours and I can not wait to see what my fellow Bee members come up with. This is going to be fun.

27Sep2013

Lost Geese Quilt top finished

Posted in Quilts, Scrap quilts by wombatquilts

This week I managed to get my “Shell logo” inspired flying geese quilt top finished. By the time I had finished laying out this quilt top it had earned the name “Lost Geese”, can you guess why?

Yep is it a little crazy… but kind of fun. Lots of novelty fabric and fun stuff to make the eyes really explore the madness.

I had a lot of fun making the “geese” go all over the place. I love the lack of pattern or rhythm to the piecing (though it frustrated my husband a little). Too really throw things into disarray I added a smattering of yellow triangles on a red background. Chaos rules!

I paper pieced these blocks as I love to have sharp clear triangles in my flying geese and paper piecing is the only way I personally can get that precision. My original post has a paper piecing pattern you can grab if you are interested in trying some geese.

This top has been added to the pile that need basting. I am going to see if I can convince my hubby to help me again this weekend to baste a quilt or two.