Quilt Back and Basting

Thank you everyone for the kind words about my quilt top. I've had amazing feedback :) I took all of the strips that were left over from the top...

and sewed them together to make this pretty strip to go on the back.

Then I was ready to baste that sucker! This is the setup I had going on.

I clamped it down onto the dining room table and pinned away! It only took about an hour to get the whole thing done with my mom helping me. Now it's ready to be quilted!

Since I'm approaching the end of this project, I'm thinking about joining the Garden Fence Quilt Along with McIntyre Girl.


I've been wanting to make this quilt anyway, and the timing is perfect! I have this Santorini Layer Cake by Lila Tueller plus some leftovers from my first quilt that I think would be perfect.

It just looks like a garden, doesn't it?

Hollow Blocks Quilt Top

I finished the quilt top! Yay! I got outside and took a couple of pictures just before it started to rain.

It's queen sized - 90" x 96" (theoretically). It took one Kona classics jelly roll, one Kona brights jelly roll, and 6 yards of Kona natural. That should be approximately 80 different colors! I also used a little bit of orange dots from Summer SOng bu Riley Blake. I did a decorative stitch in orange thread to match the back which is going to be orange with a strip of the remaining color scraps. The binding is going to be more strips from the jelly rolls which I had set aside.

I was inspired by this quilt which is based off of this pattern. I made my own paper piecing pattern which you can get here.

And since it's Wednesday, I thought I'd add this to WIP Wednesday at Freshly Pieced! This is my first time, so I hope I'm doing it right!

My First Swap

On a whim, I signed up for the Rainbow Charm Swap at Ellison Lane Quilts. I've never done a swap before, but it is so fun! There are 56 members, we each get assigned one of eight colors, and you have to buy one yard of two different patterns in your color. Then you cut each one into 56 charms, mail them on over, and get back 112 lovely charms in all shades of the rainbow! We have a Flickr group, and you're supposed to post your fabric picks on there so there are no duplicates. It is so exciting see what everyone else picked and what I'm going to be getting! My color was red. I had great ideas of what to get for every color except red. It's not a color I usually go for. I'm not even sure I have a single piece of red fabric. I played around with the color grid at Hawthorne Threads, and came up with these...

Manufacturer: Robert Kaufman
Designer: Robert Kaufman House Designer
Collection: Metro Living
Print Name: Tiles in Garnet

Manufacturer: Cloud 9
Designer: Heather Moore
Collection: Cut Out & Keep
Print Name: Free as a Bird in Crimson

Fabric Friday

40% off Summersault by Erin McMorris? Yes, please! This has been one of my favorite lines for a while now, so when that sale came up, how could I resist? I got a half yard of each of the green and blue prints. Most of the prints are bigger than I was expecting. It always amazes me how beautiful fabric is in person when I'm used to looking at it on the internet!

I'm getting closer and closer to being done with my quilt top. It should be finished this weekend!

Almost Done

I wanted to show y'all the decorative stitch I decided on.

It's not as pretty as the one I showed last time, but I still like it. I couldn't get the other one to look even. I think the scalloped border adds a little fun to a quilt full of squares and rectangles. I am really close to having all of the pieces for the top done. I think I'll have a finished quilt top to show you in the next couple of days. And for the back...

Orange!! The jelly rolls didn't have much orange in them, and I already used some of the orange polka dot fabric, so I figured I would just go with it! I'm going to incorporate a row of color strips into it too.

I've been looking for more vintage sheets, and all I've been able to find is this one pillowcase.

I love the pink flowers in the bottom right corner of the picture!

It's Just Fabric!

I'm the kind of person that likes to save things. I don't know why, but if I get something I really like, I almost feel afraid to use it. I was thinking about my hollow blocks quilt, and I thought that some little pieces of orange dot fabric would look so cute randomly placed around the quilt. I had the perfect piece of fabric, but no! It goes with THAT line of fabric. What if I need it later? Then I told myself that it was just fabric, and if I want to, I should just use it! So I did...

I like it! I think it gives your eyes somewhere to go. I'm especially excited to put a couple of little pieces into the binding. I feel like I've made a major breakthrough today :) Guess we'll have to see if I can make myself do something with the Kate Spain Central Park fabric that I've been hoarding...

Also, I'm planning on adding a decorative stitch along the edge of these strips in the natural part. I started to today with rainbow variegated thread (another one of those things I was saving), but I thought it looked too busy, so I took it out. Plus it was a lot harder to control than on my test piece yesterday. Now I'm thinking of doing it in whatever solid color I choose to do the back in.

In other dot news, I got the Denyse Schmidt blue dots fabric today that I ordered from Etsy for a VERY reasonable price (cheaper than I would have been able to order it from Joann's website)! I really, really wanted this one to go with the others I bought last weekend.

Hollow Blocks + Strips

So I've been putting together all of those hollow blocks (as I've come to call them). Today I made one set of strips to go in between the blocks. I love the way it turned out! There are going to be five of these total. I wish I would have made these wider with maybe only one row of blocks. I think I would have liked more color and less of the Kona natural. That's ok though! I'm going to use every last bit of color from two jelly rolls.

Not bad for my first attempt at free handed piecing. Everything seems all nice and straight. One thing about the jelly rolls that I'm not too crazy about is they have way more blues and greens than any other color. There is probably more blue than all of the other colors put together. They need more pink, purple, and orange! It's been really hard to arrange the colors to look random without a ton of blues and greens all bunched together.

DS Fabric

Hmm, what is this?

Yes, my very own Denyse Schmidt fabric! Or just a really nice place to sit according to Ziggy :)

I realize there's probably tons of pictures of this fabric out there, but I bet none of them have a cute little chinchilla sitting on top :) I drove an hour away to Beaumont, Texas to go to my nearest Joann Fabrics and was so pleased to see that they had so many of the prints! I got 7 (all of the green prints they had), and I left probably about another 7 behind (mostly the red and dark blue ones). I got them for $6.99 a yard plus an extra 10% off my total purchase. The only print they didn't have that I really wanted to get was the blue dots print.

I've also been working on free motion quilting the fabric I picked out for one of my Simplicity patterns. I'm just following the design of the print. I thought this would be a little different than the typical diagonal quilting. Plus I think I can save fabric if I'm not having to worry about keeping the quilting in all the same direction. I'm thinking that I am going to have to use different color threads because I'm not liking how the white is standing out on the orange and green.

Happy 4th of July!