On a mission…

Posted in Finished Quilts, Project Linus by wombatquilts

Now that I am getting back to full health I feel like I have so much to catch up on…and first thing on my To Do list is to clear some of my WIPs out of the house. The main impetuous for the clear out is the fact that you can not currently access our spare bedroom because of the pile of batting, quilts and fabric…our spare bedroom is Charity Quilt central! I have a wonderfully patient and understanding husband who is somewhat blind to fabric piles and quilting mess, but even he has started commenting.

So as we head to Thanksgiving I will be sharing mine and PMQG’s most recent quilt finishes before they head out to their respective charities. To start proceedings I give you this wonderful little quilt…

This quilt was made, along with a larger version, at one of the Portland Modern Quilt Guild Charity Sew days. This was a fun day where I bought a huge box of blue scraps, a smattering of white and grey scraps and we all made log cabins.

Somewhere in the process a touch of orange was added, at the insistence of one of our amazing Guild Members Juline, and viola you have magic.

The orange really makes the quilt sing. All the improv log cabin blocks are trimmed to 12 inches finished and this four by four version of the quilt is headed to Project Linus. The larger version of this quilt (six by seven blocks) is currently out with one of our talented long-armers.

When pulling blocks for this smaller version of the quilt I made sure to get some great novelty prints in the mix.

This was such a fun and easy project to do with the group, as once again there is no right or wrong, just playing with colour. The quilt is backed with a darling Laura Ashley fabric that seemed appropriate and bound with some navy batik fabric which was kindly donated to the Guild by Hoffman fabrics.

quilt back

Thanksgiving does seem like the perfect time to share some of the amazing quilts that our Guild has made to help our community. I am so very thankful to everyone who helps out with this program.

3Sep2015

A fabulous little Bee Block

Posted in Quilt patterns, Quilts by wombatquilts

It has been a while since I posted any of the Do Good Stitches quilt blocks I have been making. Every month I make blocks as part of this charity Bee and I love it. I look forward to the first of the month when the new pattern is put up on our Flickr Group and I always eagerly make the blocks. I love being challenged to make things that I would not usually make in colour schemes I may not necessarily think to put together.

Twice a year I get to be the Queen and set the block and in June I choose this block and colour scheme for my month….

The block is from a free pattern by Clover and Violet which they originally put up as part of a Christmas quilt they were making. The colour tweaks I made changed how the finished block looks and made for a striking quilt top…

I love how the yellow strings make a grid pattern and the stars just pop. Each of my fellow Do Good Bee members made two blocks, so there is so much variety in the stars, which I LOVE.

One of my favorite bits about being Queen Bee is getting to see all the blocks as they come in and ohh and ahh over the fabric used (I may have a bit of stash envy!).

When these blocks came in I absolutely fell in love with the Barbar fabric one of my fellow quilters used…

I have not seen this fabric before and am now obsessed with getting my hands on some. It is so fabulous. This quilt top is now awaiting quilting and binding and then it will go out into the world to Do Good! I am Queen again in November and I have already started planning what block I am going to set.

1Aug2015

Modern Sampler Quilt

Posted in Finished Quilts by wombatquilts

Today I wanted to share with you another one of the beautiful quilts members of my Quilt Guild made for our charity program.

This amazing Modern Sampler quilt was pieced using blocks that members of the Guild made a couple of years ago as part of our BOM program. One of our members, Michelle took a bag of blocks and whipped up this amazing top… using fun strips of solid colours to make the different sized blocks work.

I love the colour way… that purple and aqua in particular make me very happy.

Another of our fabulous members, Colleen Barnhardt of The Quilted Thistle then took the top and wove her magic all over it. Colleen has only been quilting on a long arm for under a year which is so hard to believe because she is so AMAZING!

She quilted the most fabulous array of patterns over the different blocks…

The quilting adds so much to this quilt…. and my photos do not do it justice…

And all around the border of the quilt, Colleen added a geometric pattern in variegated cotton that just adds the most perfect border and bought the quilt together.

Yesterday I dropped off this quilt, and 11 others (including Wonky Trees) to Camp Erin, a local camp for kids who dealing with the death of someone close to them. I am so proud that our Guild does such great work for such good causes.

24Jul2015

A low volume scrap vortex…

Posted in Finished Quilts by wombatquilts

This week I finished up my scrap vortex quilt… I actually started this quilt a couple of weeks ago in a bid to use some of my low volume scraps and after I found the wonderful QAL at Crazy Mom Quilts.

Amanda Jean leads the Scrap Vortex Quilt Along and does a great job of taking you through, step by step, making these blocks.. and makes dealing with all your scraps easy and manageable.

You start by sewing similar size scraps together and then sew those bits together and before you know it you have a quilt block.

For my quilt I trimmed my blocks to 12 1/2 unfinished.

It was so much fun putting this together. I was surprised by how many fun novelty prints I had that were low volume.

When I was selecting scraps for this project I chose only fabrics that had a white/cream background with a print on top of that back ground. There are probably five or six scraps that were pastel (a soft light colour fabric with a little white in it) but I wanted to predominantly white/creams.

You can see an example of one of those prints in the photo above… there are three little blocks that are a soft background with a white print. It seems like such a little thing, but the fabric reads differently than those around it…it reads darker and more solid than the print would suggest.

So if you are doing a low volume quilt, audition your fabrics carefully and if you can, use the camera on your phone to take a photo of the fabric and turn it into a greyscale image to see how the fabric actually reads.

For the back of the quilt I used bigger scraps and my left over bits and pieces to make an extra large block…with more novelty goodness in it… including my favorite bit…

Yep I managed to squeek in a koala bear…

For the binding I used the left overs from last weeks quilt….solid Kona pastels.

This quilt is headed to Project Linus for some kid to love and treasure…

Quilt Details:

Pattern: Scrap Vortex by Crazy Mom Quilts
Fabric: Various low volume Scraps
Finished Size: 48 x 48 inches

17Jul2015

Round and Round….

Posted in Finished Quilts by wombatquilts

It has been a busy, crazy couple of weeks for me…which can all be summed up by the fact that all the photos I have taken of my quilts and things I have been doing were on a SD card which got corrupted. I had photos of my quilt at Sisters Outdoor quilt show…photos of my works in progress and photos of the Kids quilt class I taught last week. All gone.

After lots of tears and maybe a tantrum or two I dusted myself off and decided to let it go… so instead of sharing my recent adventures I am going to share one of my most recent quilt finish…

This week I finally finished my Portland Modern Quilt Guild medallion quilt. Now to t be honest with you I did not do all the borders that I was meant too… partly because I wanted this quilt to be baby size and partly because I got bored with the pastel colour scheme!

If you are interested in the pattern and process you can check out my earlier post about the quilt…which includes links to the free patterns we used.

To finish off my quilt I decided to do my first lot of circular quilting… using the walking foot on my new Bernina 550. I thought that circular quilting would be perfect with this quilt so I started in the center of the quilt and worked my way out.

Now if I am honest with you the center quilting was a little tricky. I took the above photo so you could see just how wonky I was at the start… I did end up unpicking quite a few of my stitches as they were so off kilter and I went back into the center using free motioning quilting (no walking foot) to get the center right.

Once I got past the tricky center it was really fun to just keep going round and round and round and round…. it was easy to move my small baby quilt to get a nice rhythm going. I know there is going to be more circular quilting in my future… I love how the quilt looks and feels with this type of quilting…

To finish it all off I used a selection of Kona pastel solid scraps to make the binding and hand bound the quilt…. and I was done. As I was putting the last stitches on the binding the wonderful postman dropped off this for me…

I kid you not, I took delivery of this book just moments after finishing my Medallion and I am now inspired to make another one…. this time not in pastel and this time maybe a little more modern.

Quilt Details:

Pattern: PMQG Medallion QAL
Fabric: Pastel and low volume scraps
Finished Size: 40 x 40 inches