Sunday, December 26, 2021

Best of 2021

It's the end of another year, and once again it's time to join the Best of linky party that Cheryl Brickey at Meadow Mist Designs hosts every year. I admit that I look forward to writing this post every year!

This year I really focused on finishing quilts over piecing quilt tops, and not only that, but finishing quilt tops that I particularly love. It's hard for me to finish my favorites, because it means the infinite potential is gone, but I also know there's really no use for a shelf full of quilt tops I can't use. So, I made it a point to finish quite a few of my favorites, and I will hopefully continue that trend for 2022 as well.

Most Challenging: Bohemian Spark

Bohemian Spark was a real challenge both to piece and to quilt! It was entirely paper-pieced, but the pieces are huge and the edges are biased, and assembly was a pain. Quilting this was also very challenging due to the long lines and figuring out an efficient quilt path. I love the finished product though!

Most Fun: Glass Candies

Glass Candies was such a fun quilt to make due to the fact that the entire quilt is made up of half-square triangles (which are my favorite thing), the fabric (Ombre Confetti) was so bright and colorful, and the quilting was very fun and easy.

Most Surprising: City Tiles

I went into the quilting design of City Tiles with the idea of making it look very different from what I usually do. I decided to experiment with large unquilted areas adjacent to dense matchstick quilting, and the effect turned out much better than I expected.

Most Inspired: Winterfresh

Most of the time when I make a quilt, I either use a kit or a fat quarter bundle. Winterfresh was an exception because I picked yardage from my stash that were all from different collections, and I'm in love with the vibe of this quilt, which has a minty, fresh, snowy feel.

Favorite Quilt: Spectrum

Finally, my favorite quilt of the year is still Spectrum which I made at the beginning of the year. The piecing was very easy and the quilting was much simpler than what I usually do, but I just love how the fabric glows. It's perhaps no coincidence that Observatory by Alison Glass, the fabric collection here, is one of my favorite fabric collections ever.

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I spent less time quilting this year and more time on my other pursuits, and I expect that to continue next year also. However, I feel much less stressed or pressured when I'm quilting now, and that allows me to enjoy it much more.

Be sure to head over to the linky party to check out everybody else's posts. Have a great New Year and I'll see you all next year!

Thursday, December 2, 2021

Cross Tile

In a way, I find that I'm forever playing the matchmaking game in my quilting room. I have a lot of patterns ... and I have a lot of fabric bundles. Finding the right pattern to go with the right fabric is a fun yet stressful experience, because besides taking into account whether the fabric looks right for the pattern, I also prefer to make matches where a majority of the bundle is used up.

When I saw Cross Tile (designed by Quilty Love), I immediately knew which fabric collection to go with it: Matchmade by Art Gallery Fabrics. Matchmade is collection of near-solids, and I particularly like that it's not a typical rainbow palette.

This quilt was really easy to piece, but certainly not boring. When I'm working with a fabric collection I like a lot, it really makes piecing even more enjoyable.

I didn't want to stress about the quilting, so I designed a pretty simple block-style quilt. The foreground is a dot-to-dot design because I don't want to quilt too heavily over AGF fabrics. I really love coming up with dot-to-dot designs, because it feels like I'm solving a puzzle.

In the background I quilted swirls and pebbles, but I decided to add one little element that I think made a big difference: unquilted space. The unquilted areas instantly add some punch and also broke up the background nicely into blocks.

I had planned to finish 18 quilts this year, and at first I was on track, but then ... life happened. However, I'm still very pleased with the 14 quilts that I did manage to finish this year, because I finished some quilts that I had once been reluctant to do because they were too precious, and that's definitely progress!