City Fusion

City Fusion is a free quilt pattern, originally named Shutters, by Art Gallery Fabrics. AGF created this pattern to promote the City Loft Fusion fabric line, and as soon as I saw the pattern, I fell in love with it. After all, I've never met a striped black / white quilt I didn't love. In order to make sure the stripes are absolutely perfect, I actually used paper piecing to make the striped units.

I enjoyed piecing this quilt a lot because of the beautiful fabrics, but the real fun in this quilt is the quilting.

I split the entire quilt into triangle units, and treated the background as such. At times I quilted them separately, and at times I fused them together. I really loved designing this ahead of time, and I just had to execute it once I got onto the machine.

One concept I had from the beginning of quilting is to extend the striped units to some of the background, and I did some dense back / forth quilting to simulate the stripes. I really love the way that looks!

I kept the quilting a bit simpler in the foreground fabrics so that it doesn't overwhelm the fabric.

This has been another 5-star off my pile of quilt tops, and it's been such a joy to finally work through so many of my favorite quilt tops!

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!

Geode

Without a doubt, Geode is one of my favorite quilt tops in my stash. In fact, it was one that I held onto for a long time, deeming it too-precious-to-finish. But since this is the year that I aim to finish at least a few of my most precious quilt tops, I decided to pull this one out.

The pattern is by Blossom Heart Quilts, and the fabric collection I used is Imprint by Katarina Roccella for Art Gallery Fabrics. Imprint came out in 2015, before I even knew what a quilt was, so I had a hard time getting even a full set. The scarcity effect is no doubt part of why I love this quilt so much!

I incorporated just 3 designs into Geode: piano keys, swirls, and dot-to-dot designs.

Though simple, I love the high amount of contrast between these designs. I don't usually mark, but for piano keys I make an exception, because I love the evenly spaced look.

I'm so happy for finally having the guts to dig out this quilt top to quilt it. I hope it gives me the impetus I need to pull out a few more of these too-precious-to-quilt quilts.

I'm really happy with the quilts I've done so far this year, but since school's out and summer's in full swing, I will be taking a mini-break on quilting. However, I will be participating in the blog hop of Just One Charm Pack Quilts, a new book from Cheryl Brickey of Meadow Mist Designs. The blog hop starts in mid-July, so I will be back then to show the quilt I made from her book!

City Tiles

After a few bright and rainbowy quilts, I definitely felt the need to work on something a bit more graphic. Enter City Tiles. The pattern is by Quilty Love, and the fabrics are all from Art Gallery Fabrics, though different collections.

The combination of fabric and the name of this pattern has a very urban, geometric feel to it, so I wanted to see if I can make the quilting also very urban and geometric.

I decided not to incorporate a single swirl, and instead make the entire quilt with dot-to-dot designs and dense lines. I adore the way those dense lines look especially when placed next to areas I left unquilted.

As usual, I kept the quilting very minimal in the foreground, especially because I'm working with Art Gallery Fabrics. I think anybody who has worked with Art Gallery Fabrics knows this, but the feel of AGF fabrics is just different from anything else I've used. It feels wonderful to the touch, but it's not my favorite to poke a needle through, and this is true during both the piecing and quilting phase.

I set a goal for myself this year to try to finish quilting 18 quilts, and so far I've been able to stay on track. I'm quite excited as some of my favorite quilt tops are on the schedule to be finished this year! We'll see what happens.

Swoon

When I'm about halfway done machine quilting a quilt, I start thinking about what quilt top to quilt next. While I was quilting Color Pop, a slew of candidates came to mind. So I was very surprised that when I went to my rather alarmingly large stash of quilt tops, I pulled out Swoon. It was not even on the candidate list!

But it was calling to me, asking to be quilted, while some of my other quilt tops seem rather reluctant to leave the shelf. Swoon is a pretty new quilt top for me, as it's only several months old, instead of several years old like some. But it was a quilt that I was incredibly unsure about due to my wild fabric choices, so I wanted to finish it to put that uncertainty to rest, one way or another.

I wrestled with two choices for quilting Swoon: treating the negative space as one backdrop and doing a lot of improv style quilting over it, or dividing up the negative space to create secondary spaces and filling them. I chose the latter because it is easier for my mind to process.

The Greek cross-like shapes in between the blocks provided a big backdrop for lots of fun fillers, and I used that space to showcase lots of nature motifs such as leaves and feather swirls.

For all of the other negative spaces, I filled it with feathers and wishbones. I wanted quick and easy designs in those areas that had a predictable flow.

The Swoon blocks themselves were quilted very simply with geometric designs. I almost always do this (Urban Mod was a rare exception), because I've found that straight line designs always look good with prints, while more complex designs can be a bit of a hit or miss. This also allows the fabric to pop forward and take center stage.

After so much uncertainty about this quilt, I'm happy to report that I really, really love the end result! It has such a Mediterranean vibe that goes so well with the nature motifs, and I'm not sure if I like the blocks themselves, or the quilting I did in the negative space more. Either way, I'm super happy with how it turned out!

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Linking up with: My Quilt Infatuation, Confessions of a Fabric Addict, Powered by Quilting, and Meadow Mist Designs.

Swooning Over Swoon

Possibly the most exciting but simultaneously the most stressful part of making a quilt for me is fabric selection. Out of the quilts I've made, if I messed up somewhere, that was almost always where I messed up. That's why I love to buy kits.

But once in awhile, I get an idea to marry a quilt pattern with a fabric collection in my stash, and I get so excited about it that I drop everything else. That happened to me when I envisioned Camille Roskelley's Swoon quilt in Katarina Roccella's Mediterraneo collection.

Mediterraneo features amazing saturated colors and beautiful prints that evoke the ambience of the Mediterranean coast. But I was terrified at the same time, because this could either become one of my favorite quilt tops, or fail spectacularly. There's not much in between.

The first thing I did was choose 3 fabrics for each of the 9 Swoon blocks:

Next began the piecing for the Swoon blocks, and these are some really fun blocks to piece. And after they started coming out one by one, arranging them on the design wall was very exciting. These are really big blocks and I didn't want to move them around a lot, so I took a picture of each block and arranged it using an app until I found a layout I liked:

These quilt blocks vibrate with life and color, and that's what I love about them. Though I hate adding borders and sashing, having more negative space will allow them to breathe much better. Fingers-crossed that this will turn out well!

Love Letters

After the intense quilting I did on Reel Window, I wanted to work on something relatively simple and straightforward: block-based, minimum planning, and no marking is the key. I looked through my frighteningly large stash of quilt tops, and pulled out Love Letters.

Love Letters is based on the pattern Glitter Pen by Cheryl Arkison. Or, more precisely, I think I read in the blurb that the design came from her daughter who was only 6 at the time. (How amazing is that?) It's a black-and-white with a pop of color type of quilt, which I love. For the pops of color, I used the Love Letters fabric collection by AGF Studio.

For the quilting, I decided to play with the geometry of this quilt by doing lots of straight lines, but spice it up with some free-motion quilting. I picked a few curvy favorites from my arsenal (feathers, serpentine lines, ribbon candies, wishbones, swirls) and mixed them up all over the quilt along with the straight lines.

White is undeniably one of the colors that show off quilting the most, but the downside is that it is extremely prone to varicose veins (darker threads on the back of the quilt showing through). I definitely had some issues with that in this quilt, but once off the frame, they become much less noticeable.

One thing I really like about this quilt is that at certain angles (or when I squint) I can only see the beautiful and striking pattern, but when I get to a different angle, the texture on the white fabrics really shows. It reminds me a bit of those billboards where the picture changes at different angles.

This quilt was relatively stress-free and I really like the end result. I was planning on making this quilt for my guest bed, but I love it so much that I've decided to steal it for my own bed!

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Linking up with: My Quilt Infatuation, Busy Hands Quilts, Confessions of a Fabric Addict, Cooking Up Quilts, Powered by Quilting, and Meadow Mist Designs.

Urban Mod

I love a good hunt. When I was browsing through Art Gallery Fabrics (who has a fabulous and inspirational website!) I discovered a collection called Urban Mod that I fell in love with. It had a really great retro look, and I thought the colors and prints were fantastic. Unfortunately, it has been out of print for several years.

I hunted high and low all over the internet and managed to pull together a fat quarter of this print, a half yard of that print, until I had most of the prints in the collection. I paired them with a pattern called Tokyo Terrace by Robin Pickens.

This is one of the easier patterns I've worked on because the pieces are big and there are very few seams to match. However, it's a twin sized quilt so as it grew, it became more unwieldy. I didn't really know how I wanted to quilt it, but I did know I wanted the quilting to look organic and not so planned. I took the inspiration of a brick wall with stone details and plants growing all over it.

There's nothing like a feather to elevate the aesthetics of a quilt, so I quilted giant feathers on there. I love to surround feathers with tiny fillers to really make them pop!

I had a really hard time with the foreground fabrics, though. I decided to try something I've never tried before: quilt along the fabric. The polka dot fabric became bubble wrap, the serpentine fabric got serpentine designs, and the flowery fabric got a flowery meander.

These little square blocks are a sort of resting area for this quilt as they're the only thing not quilted heavily. In fact, I think these little blocks are the best part of the quilt, as it would be rather boring if it was just large panels.

I had lots of fun quilting this quilt, and I like to think that at the end of every quilt I'm X hours better because I spent X hours quilting it, but it's never as true as when I tried so many new designs.

And this is the back of it. I showed more photos of this quilt than I usually do, but it is sort of commensurate with the amount of time I put into this quilt!

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Linking up with: Crazy Mom Quilts, My Quilt Infatuation, Busy Hands Quilts, Confessions of a Fabric Addict, Cooking Up Quilts, Sew Can She, and Powered by Quilting.

Wintergreen Pillow

I first met Tara Curtis of WEFTY a little less than a year ago at Quilt Expo in Madison. The fabric weaving technique she demonstrated were amazing, so I purchased a WEFTY right then and there. But then, it just sat there. I kept meaning to try it, but having to get a foam board and mark it, having to prepare fabric strips, and having to learn the weaving technique all became barriers that I just didn't want to cross.

But when my quilt guild invited Tara to teach her WEFTY needle technique, I jumped at the chance to sign up. I knew that taking a class with her in person was just the ticket to get me started on this really cool technique.

The night before the class, I finally did my fabric pulls and I chose 3 coordinating fabrics from Blithe by Katarina Roccella. It was a wintery collection, yet it didn't feel overly seasonal, which I love.

When I got to class the next day, Tara had us describe how we were feeling. I said I was ecstatic, and I really was. I was so excited to finally learn this technique! WEFTY weaving was incredibly fun and so satisfying. It was magical to watch everything come together, and even though sometimes I made mistakes, they were easily fixable.

I didn't want to steam the foam board so that it would last a bit longer, so instead of ironing the fabric strips to the fusible interfacing beneath, I took a friend's advice and used painter's tape to secure the edges before removing the pins. It worked like a charm! I was faced with a beautiful panel to do anything with, but I decided the panel was the perfect size for a pillow.

Now that I've gotten my first taste of WEFTY weaving, I'm excited to try some more!

Flux

Well ... I'm a happy quilter. I got to play with Katarina Roccella's Avant Garde collection again recently when I picked up a kit to make the fabulous Flux quilt! (It also means that my precious fat quarter bundle of Avant Garde can remain uncut. I hope it stays that way.)

Flux is a very simple quilt, with a single frame surrounding a center square. The graphic effect comes from the arrangement of the blocks and the way the frames thicken toward the center of the quilt.

I treated the quilting of this quilt much like Phases of the Moon, where the frames and sashings are all treated as background space, and the squares are highlighted individually. I really love the way it makes the black sashing strips look like they're made of a patterned fabric, and this way I don't have to change threads.

I treated the quilting of the squares as a medallion, with the center being a special design, and each ring around it having a different geometric design. They contrast nicely with all the curvy, swirly background, and really pop.

It's hard to pick a favorite, but I think I like the outer ring the best! It's a square spiral that is super easy to quilt and draws the eye in, every time.

I used a solid blue fabric for the back, which really shows off the quilting!

I'm very happy with it! Avant Garde is such a beautiful collection, that it's pretty much guaranteed I would love this quilt!

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Link parties joined: Busy Hands Quilts, Powered By Quilting, My Quilt Infatuation, Confessions of a Fabric Addict, Crazy Mom Quilts, Sew Can She, and Cooking Up Quilts.

Lagom

I've been quilting for about a year and 9 months, and in that time I made a ton of lap quilts, and one queen-sized bed quilt for my guest bed. However, my own bed still doesn't have a quilt ... that is, until now!

The reason I waited so long is because it took me 6 months to find the perfect fabric for it, 6 months to find the perfect pattern, and 6 more months of procrastination because I loved the fabric so much I didn't want to cut into it. (And of course, actually making and quilting this took several more months.) The fabric used here is one of my favorite fabric lines ever. It's Lagom by Art Gallery Studio! The pattern I finally decided on is New Waves by Natalia Bonner.

New Waves is a simple log cabin quilt, but I love the color placement that makes the gray travel in bands across the quilt. I absolutely love piecing log cabins! I used to have trouble making the block come out a square (it looked slightly rounded) but then I realized the reason was because I used to cut a long strip, line it up with the cabin, and sew it and then trim the excess. Nowadays, I cut the strips to the right size and then sew it on, and it has made such a difference. (I have no idea why, though!)

For the quilting, I did a variety of linear designs, like ribbon candies, wishbones, feathers, ferns, and square chains. I'm never bored because there's always something different to work on! My favorite design, however, is the dot-to-dot design I did in the outer most band of each block. The way the block is laid out, it creates a fun secondary diamond design! I didn't intend for that when I planned the quilting, so it was a nice surprise.

And if I ever get tired of the front of the quilt, the back seems perfectly functional as a "wholecloth" quilt!

I finally have a quilt for my bed! I love it so much, and Lagom was really the perfect fabric for this project. This is the biggest quilt I've ever completed, at 96" x 96", and I'm really happy with it!

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Linking up with: Crazy Mom Quilts, My Quilt Infatuation, Powered by Quilting, Sew Can She, and Cooking Up Quilts.