Solstice

I almost couldn't believe it, but apparently I made the quilt top for Solstice more than 5 years ago! It felt like I had made it much more recently than that, so that's kind of crazy.

Solstice is designed by Rebecca Bryan, and this was part of a quilt-along that I joined. I was enamored by the color scheme, which looked like a sunset explosion.

I knew for a long time how I wanted to quilt this, so there was no hesitation once I started, and it was just a matter of actually doing it. I wanted the star in the center to be highlighted by geometric designs and lots of straight-line designs.

The solid background space of course has to be filled by swirls. I didn't want the background to take any attention away from the star in the center.

My opinion has always been that print fabric quilts have the soul in the prints, but solid pattern quilts don't have soul (no matter how beautiful) until the quilting is added. I haven't changed my mind about that, but I'm happy that now the soul has been added to Solstice! I really love it.

Sweet Tooth ~ Is the Piecing Bug Back?

For the last few years, I was in a massive piecing slump. I used to flip through my pattern books, look at Pinterest boards, or stare at my stash, and just get so excited about piecing new quilt tops. But for at least a period of two years, I felt no desire or motivation.

And then, a few weeks ago, a switch flipped, just like that. I suddenly took a look at my Sweet Tooth quilt kit, something I thought was a torture device just a few months ago, and thought, wow, I really want to make this now!

Sweet Tooth is a Block of the Month quilt pattern by Jaybird Quilts, and now that I want to piece again, I'm having such a good time with this quilt! There are 24 of these hex blocks total, 2 colorways for each style, and they're truly enjoyable to put together.

After piecing the blocks, I had to put together all the background pieces. This part took concentration and I had to follow the pattern really carefully, but Jaybird Quilts is an excellent pattern writer, and the instructions were so good and clear.

At the end, a truly impressive looking quilt is finished! It looks complex, and it is, but it really wasn't hard, and I just had to follow the instructions. However, I'm still surprised it came out so well.

I just know this will be so fun to quilt too, when I get around to it (someday)!

Arcade Game

When I first saw Arcade Game by Jaybird Quilts, I thought the quilt was absolutely adorable and definitely had the 3D effect it was going for. I waited to make this until I had a kit though, because I knew color placement was absolutely critical.

Piecing this quilt was very fun because I like any excuse to use a specialty ruler, and Jaybird's rulers are so fun to use! Piecing was easy, and the only part I had to be careful of was to make sure I didn't mess up the color placement, or the effect would be ruined.

Although the quilt had fun jaggedy edges, I wasn't in the mood to use bias binding to finish this, so I chickened out and added black filler triangles to make it a rectangular quilt. Maybe next time!

I had an idea in quilting this to make sure the 3D effect stands out, and I quilted the top "panel" of every cubes the same with echoing lines, but switched up the designs on the sides. It was fun to pick different designs for every block!

Since I only wanted to use a single color of thread, I quilted more densely on lighter colored blocks and less densely on darker colored blocks.

I meant to finish this quilt in October, but I got so busy with other things that I didn't touch the longarm for nearly a month. (I was also very wrapped up in piecing another quilt by Jaybird Quilts, and her quilts are downright addictive.) Once I started this however, it went fairly quickly, and I love the finished quilt!

I rarely take staged photos anymore because ... actually I don't have a good reason. But this quilt demanded to be hung from some railing and taken a photo of! So, I had to follow that call.

Moon Lanterns

I rate all my finished quilt tops from one to five, and Moon Lanterns is an absolute five-star. In fact, it's one of the very few fully-solid quilts to land a five, because I typically prefer prints and near-solids to full-solids. But from the moment I saw this pattern, it carved a special place in my heart.

Moon Lanterns is made entirely of two blocks. I got the pattern from Amy Gibson's The Quilt Block Cookbook. Amy Gibson is literally my first quilting teacher, as I learned how to piece from her via her classes on Craftsy. Unfortunately she doesn't seem to be active in the quilting community right now, but she had written some great books, and this is one of them.

Most of the foreground fabrics consist of some straight line designs. I really love designing these dot-to-dot patterns, as I just start drawing, start connecting dots, and then see where it goes. The destination is sometimes unpredictable, but I've always loved the end result.

I used only 2 fillers in this quilt: pebbles and swirls. I use swirls all the time, but I actually rarely use pebbles by itself, but it felt right for this quilt! To me, there's an Asian / Japanese feel to this quilt.

I probably should have used a printed backing since the front is all solids, but I also really like how much the quilting shows on a solid-backing like this.

***

I've finished 12 quilts this year, possibly the most I've done in a year in a long time. I really hope to continue the momentum next year. I've already got a lot of favorites lined up. No longer am I putting some quilts on a pedestal, if I love it and have an idea of what to do with it, I'm quilting it!

Singularity

It's been quite a few years since The Midnight Quilt Show ended, and to this day I still miss it. It was always a delight watching Angela Walters every week with her beautiful quilting and her humor! I have made quite a few quilts from The Midnight Quilt Show, some of which are on my to-quilt pile still, but my latest finish is Singularity.

Singularity, designed by Jenn Nevitt, is such a great name for this quilt because it does feel like a geometric wonder. It is in fact mesmerizing to look at with the tiny piecing in the center and the way the blocks expand in size outward. The colors are gorgeous together.

I struggled for several years to figure out how to quilt this, trying and scrapping so many designs, but at the end, I decided the quilting isn't important in this quilt, it's the beautiful geometric look of this quilt that matters, so I stuck with a very simple diagonal design that followed the piecing without being overwhelming.

I tried to keep the spacing between the lines half an inch, but I have a pretty strict "mark only when absolutely necessary" policy so for this quilt, I eyeballed everything. Though I know the spacing is far from perfect, somehow when it's all done, it looks pretty good.

In Angela's video of Singularity, there's a running joke about stress-relievement. I did find the quilting process of this quilt to be extremely zen ... to the point of boredom. But at the end of the day, I'm thrilled that I finally finished this, and I have no regrets about choosing a simple pattern to execute. It's truly mesmerizing to look at!

Shimmer

Shimmer is a very old quilt top, so old that I don't know when I made it nor the name of the fabric collection I used. I found the pattern in the book Striped Quilts Made Modern by Lauren Palmer, but I really wanted to use my Hex N More ruler so I did my own version, but the idea is definitely based on the book.

I hadn't seen this quilt top in years, so I was rather surprised when I pulled it out because it was a lot bigger than I thought. The hexagons were also huge compared to how I remembered them! However, I decided to treat this quilt as a sampler of hexagon quilting, and try out a lot of different designs.

I sat down and just kept drawing and drawing until I came up with over 2 dozen designs. However, when I actually started quilting, I found myself making adjustments as some things that sound great on paper just don't work on quilting. I also came up with several spur-of-the-moment designs in the midst of quilting, and I'm pretty happy with how they turned out!

To keep this quilt from taking forever to finish, I mostly picked simpler geometric designs, and occasionally sprinkled in a block where I quilted it a bit more densely.

I really like how this quilt turned out, and it was such a fun exercise to try out all these different designs in solid colors.

Periodicity

Periodicity is a quilt designed by Cheryl Brickey of Meadow Mist Design. The pattern is so graphic and the Kona solids so vibrant, the minute I saw it, I knew I had to make it!

I was quite excited to quilt this because blue background means I can use blue thread. I use a light yellow thread about 90% of the time, so it's very exciting to use another color. Another reason I pulled this quilt out is that I was just dying to use one of my favorite designs that I hadn't done in a long time: the wavy design.

Besides the waves that encompass most of the quilt, I also used a Greek tile design and a ribbon candy.

I didn't want to quilt all over the foreground stripes, so I echoed them minimally and echoed that same effect in the background.

Sometimes a quilt asks to be quilted, and sometimes I just really want to do a design and picked the quilt best suited for it. This is the latter case, and I really love the final look!

***

Linking up with: Meadow Mist Designs

Sedona

Because I promised myself to quilt some of my favorites in the stash this year, I decided to pull out Sedona. Sedona, designed by Sew Kind of Wonderful, is a beautiful black and white quilt featuring some really neat piecing. It is probably the most graphic quilt I've ever made!

The piecing process of Sedona was intricate and difficult, but I managed to get through it because of the great pattern writing and the usage of the specialty ruler. It's also perhaps the first row-by-row quilt I've ever done.

I had auditioned half a dozen different plans to quilt this, but none seemed right for the quilt. Every time I closed my eyes, I imagined this quilt with simple half-inch spaced matchstick quilting. So that's what I ended up doing.

I took a deep breath before committing, but I felt better as soon as I quilted a few lines and knew I wasn't going to second guess myself anymore ... mostly because ripping would take too long!

Quilting this quilt reminds me a bit of making Aztec Sky, which is also a black and white quilt that I did half-inch matchstick quilting on. Except Sedona was a little easier because it's pieced, hence it's straighter and the seam lines help a lot to keep me aligned.

I'm very happy with the end result, and glad that I was able to finish another of my favorites! While I don't think I can achieve my goal of finishing 17 quilts this year (due to a busy summer), I am glad I talked myself into quilting some of my most precious tops.

Atmosphere

The Atmosphere quilt along came along last year at a very unusual time. When it was first announced, the pandemic was barely a blip on my radar. By the time I was making the quilt top for the quilt along, however, things were getting serious. We had just started the lockdowns in my state, and my family was struggling to figure out remote learning. It's hard to imagine that that was almost a year and a half ago!

And now as I'm finishing up this quilt, I can look with a hopeful eye into the future that things might finally be getting back to normal, or normal-ish.

Atmosphere is an all-solids quilt designed by Lee Heinrich consisting of half-square triangles and flying geese, and it is truly spectacular in the array of colors it has! Keeping things organized during piecing time would have been a challenge, but the pattern was so well-written and helped me keep things perfectly organized.

One of the things I particularly love about this quilt is the secondary designs, and I wanted to emphasize that in the quilting. I used a lot of geometric designs and ribbon candies to link the shapes together.

In the more open areas, I used a dense swirl for background. With a matching thread, the swirls add a lot of texture and look so elegant.

I really love all the beautiful colors of this quilt, and it's such a bright and cheerful quilt!

Iridescent

The Midnight Quilt Show with Angela Walters may have been over for more than a year now ... but I'm certainly not done making quilts that were featured in the show. My latest finish is Iridescent, a bright all-solids quilt designed by Slice of Pi Quilts.

Iridescent was so easy and so satisfying to put together because it's just squares and half-square triangles. The color placement would have been very confusing except for the fact that the pattern offered up a helpful chart, so there was no mix-up at all. Sometimes I just don't want to have to think.

But I do enjoy thinking when it comes to figuring out a quilting design. For the quilting, I designed a simple pattern that used a combination of dot-to-dot designs, a pebble and swirl fillers, and all the blocks are connected by a ribbon candy. That gave it a secondary effect which is always fun.

I really enjoy quilting all-solid quilts because I don't have to worry about obscuring prints or figuring out what to do with prints, and in addition, all-solid quilts really show off the quilting!

Some quilts aren't fun to quilt and I just push through it to enjoy the end result, but I truly loved every second of working on Iridescent. Once I figured out the quilting pattern, the execution was incredibly fun and satisfying. The last few weeks have been snowy and dreary here, so these beautiful colors certainly make me happy!