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Saturday, August 31, 2013

What I'm working on today - a sneak peek

I got a special request from one of favorite people to see this secret collaborative project that I'm working on. My honey
  
:)  is helping me create a special quilt for one of his friends.

This is a picture of pieces of it stuck to my design wall. He picked the design, helped me with the placement of the stars and is drawing up a really cool design for the quilting. I'm sewing on some of the stars this morning and then I'm off to a class on machine quilting on your home sewing machine.

Even though I have a longarm, I want to get comfortable with quilting on my regular machine for small projects. Quilting on a longarm is very different that quilting on a sewing machine & I'm much better on my longarm.

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Eye Candy & Encouragement

Isn't this a great quilt! I love the pink and orange batik on the back. The front has 2 long pink ruffles.


This is one of the first quilts I made and I quilted it for beautiful Hailey on my regular sewing machine. It didn't take long to decide I needed a longarm. I call it "Grammy, let's be butterflies."  I quilted it with loops and flowers and a swirled vine. It just makes me think of Hailey and smile. Even when she was little (she's a big first grader now), we would play and climb trees and have tea parties.

Hopefully as we look at my projects over the past 4 years, you'll see that my quilting has gotten better and you will be encouraged to persevere!

First Quilt on the Longarm

I find it hard to practice on muslin. I have no real direction and it's so different than quilting on an actual quilt top. So after a few muslin practice runs when I first got my longarm quilting machine, I quilted this really cute panel:

I call it "Is there something to do?" cause at the time my granddaughter was only 3 and that's what she would say whenever she came over. LOL.

Here's a closeup of some of the quilting:

I did wavy lines in the picture area, some very sad hooks in the frame around the picture and a triangle shape in the sashing. Wow, that's some wonky, jaggedy quilting. But I'm still proud of it. For a baby quilt, it's cute and the texture of the quilting is nice when you don't look too close.  :)  That's it for tonight.

Monday, August 26, 2013

First Free Motion Quilt on the Longarm Machine


This is the third quilt that I quilted on my longarm machine, way back in 2010. I know it's the 3rd because I actually keep a list. Because I work full time, I was getting frustrated with my lack of accomplishment so I started a list. The list is kinda long now, but lately I've been distracted with my embroidery machine (we'll save that topic for a later blog). 

Anywho, the quilting on this was all done freehand. I had to figure out how to move from one area to the next without a lot of stops and starts. I have a big piece of plexiglass that I draw on with a dry erase marker. I can put the plexi right on top of the quilt and draw designs to see how they'll look on the quilt and to figure out how to move from each design. I put colored tape around the edges of the plexiglass so I don't slip and draw on the quilt top - that would be a bad thing :(

The quilting isn't that great, but I figure you have to start somewhere; and I get better with each one. I used yellow variegated thread and the backing fabric is black with tiny white dots, like stars.

Star Light, Star Bright
 
I recently sent it to Quilts Beyond Borders, quiltsbeyondborders.wordpress.com to find a wonderful new home. Let me know if you have any questions about the quilting.

Sunday, August 25, 2013

what I did this weekend

A couple quick pillowcases with some cool Halloween fabric. A special person said she loved the skull fabric I was using to make a hotpad so I got some more today.  The bones on the other one glow in the dark. How neat is that?!

Sneak Peek

I promised a sneak peek at the 2 quilts I'm working on for QBB, quiltsbeyondborders.wordpress.com to take the place of the twin quilts that they're auctioning at the Houston Quilt Festival.

I'm a sucker for Halloween fabrics and have quite a few focal fabrics. So what if I do long wide strips of all the accents with some eye-popping color combination skinny strips between them... ah ha!


This one's ready to go on the longarm and get quilted.

For number 2, I discovered Marianne Haak's blog: thequiltingedge.com  Her work is fantastic and she uses a technique of doing quilt as you go. She mentions Sharon Pederson's book More Reversible Quilts so I got the book and #2 is my experiment with quilt as you go in Halloween fabrics.

The purple with the green dots will be the sashing between the blocks.


 

Saturday, August 24, 2013

Cool news about the twin quilts!

I sent the twin quilts to Quilts Beyond Borders, http://quiltsbeyondborders.wordpress.com/ and they asked if they could auction them to raise money for their charity.
 
 
They'll be on display at their booth at the Houston International Quilt Festival (Oct 31 - Nov 3). That's so exciting! If you're at the show, please check them out and take some time to learn about QBB.
 
I did plan on them going to kids so, of course, I'm working on 2 more quilts to take their place. Stay tuned for some sneak peeks of the works in progress.