Trellis

Continuing my trend last year of quilting the "pedestal" quilt tops, the ones I really love and want to finish, I decided to start the year with Trellis. Trellis was one of two quilt tops that came out of my #100Days100Blocks2018 challenge ... and wow, I just realized that means it's more than 6 years old. Sometimes I can't really feel time passing, until I suddenly realize children I haven't seen for awhile are all grown up, or a quilt top I felt like I only worked on not that long ago is actually 6 years old.

But never mind the nostalgia train. I was very happy when I pulled out Trellis out of the pile and realized it looked as beautiful as I remembered. (Sometimes a quilt top is a lot less pretty than I remembered!) The pattern is by Tula Pink, and the fabric by Elizabeth Hartman. Since it is a sampler block quilt, the only parts tying it together is the frames, so I quilted those all the same: with simple lines.

The background calls for some dense swirls so that they recede into the space. The focal point of this quilt is after all the lovely and different quilt blocks.

The fun part of this quilt is really figuring out what to quilt for each block. I didn't do much advanced planning, and just quilted it with whatever I felt like at the time. I picked a few basic staples that always look good on busier fabric, and they are geometric designs, straight lines, feathers, continuous curves, and a few linear designs that look good on longer strips.

I usually plan every detail of the quilting out before I start, so doing this sort of spontaneously is a nice change. Even though each block is different, using just a few consistent designs and using the same design on the frames ties things together nicely.

I'm so glad I started the year off with such a rainbow beauty! I have a lot of plans for 2025 (not quilting related) so I don't think I can finish as many this year, but we'll see how many I manage.

Nova

When I was planning my quilting lineup this year, I know I wanted to include at least one ultra-special quilt in this lineup. By ultra-special, I mean quilts that have been elevated to pedestal status in my queue, to the point that I'm afraid to finish it. Usually it means quilts that have special fabrics, or took forever to make, or had a great deal of handwork.

Nova, designed by Tula Pink, is all of the above. It is an English paper-piecing pattern using Alison Glass fabrics that I fussy cut, and it took me about forever to make. I actually wrote 2 posts about the making-of, here and here.

How in the world do I go about quilting a quilt like this? Well, as it turns out, this quilt is already so beautiful on its own due to the fabrics and the pattern that there's not much I have to do. I just have to enhance it a little bit, and that I can do.

I quilted the background with some big swirls, leaves, and pebbles.

I kept the quilting in the star pretty simple, with just some geometric dot-to-dot designs to enhance the piecing. The hardest part about this quilt is actually keeping all the quilting facing the correct direction, so that whether they're pointing inward or outward, they're all pointing in the exact right direction. I kept a design diagram with me at all times to refer to, as otherwise I'd get easily confused when my face is a few inches from the quilting.

Nova is so special so it also deserves a special backing, so I used some of my out of print Tula Pink Freefall backing. It hurt a little to use it, but I'm also glad it has found a worthy quilt top to pair itself with.

I'm so glad I finally finished Nova! It is such a gorgeous quilt and I know I'll keep it forever.

Metal Skulls

I've been working on the schedule of finishing one quilt on the longarm a month, and fingers-crossed, I think I might make it this year! Since it's October, I figured it's time to bring out and finish my Metal Skulls quilt.

The pattern I used is Sugar Skulls by Tula Pink, and I actually first made this quilt top with Tula's purple fabrics similar to the pattern quilt, but I loved the piecing so much that I decided to make it again, so this metallic version, using Luster by Zen Chic, is actually my second quilt top with this pattern.

I filled the background with dense swirls, with an outer layer of irregularly shaped geometric echoes.

For the skull blocks, I did some very basic quilting that just echoes the shape a bit on the inside, but I wanted to add some details to the skulls to give them personalities.

Just like the first skull quilt I made, Bone & Chain , I had their eyes roaming all over the place, with a few that are actually dead ... and one that's just pretending to be dead. I also quilted their noses a little different each time for some added fun factor.

I enjoyed making this little quilt so much! It was so fun both to piece and to quilt ... but the piecing was definitely the best part, and I don't say that very often.

Ghost Blossoms

It's been an absolutely crazy year, hasn't it? I knew that this quilt would be my last finish of the year, and I thought ... what should I pick? I have a wide variety of choices, from more muted palettes to explosions of rainbows. But I think a bright rainbow is what hits the spot for this time of the year.

Ghost Blossoms is designed by Tula Pink from the book Quilt with Tula and Angela, and for the fabrics I chose 16 prints from my Alison Glass stash. They don't all belong to the same line so there's a level of scrappiness, but it's still all Alison Glass so the color has a coherence. I don't know what is it about Alison Glass rainbows, but they have such a glow to them!

I don't like to obscure prints with a lot of heavy quilting, so I quilted dot-to-dot geometric designs in the blossoms.

The white background, however, is calling for a lot of elegant swirls!

But I didn't want to do that for every space, so every other row, I quilted a slightly different design in the background ghost blossom.

I think this quilt top is quite old. I'm not even sure when I made it, but it was at least 3 years ago. I'm sure glad I pulled it out for the final finish of the year. I'm totally in love with this quilt, and this is a great quilt to close out this insane year!

Color Pop

Once upon a time I bought a Tula Pink jelly roll, expecting it to be full of pom poms & stripes. I had a project all planned for it, but when I opened it up, gasp, it was not what I expected! Instead of being all pom poms & stripes, it also had some solids, and the fabric distribution was wrong for what I wanted to make.

But you know how jelly rolls are ... once opened up, they can never go back to that pristine, pretty condition. Once opened up, it's a mess and is demanding to be used instantly. But I couldn't figure out a way to use it up. Imagine my delight when just a few weeks later, Cluck Cluck Sew launched a new pattern ... Color Pop, that uses exactly the jelly roll I had!

Of course I bought the pattern the day it came out, and I really enjoyed putting together this quilt top. It was so easy, so colorful, and so fun. That was more than a year ago, and I finally pulled out Color Pop to quilt. After Santorini which was crazy and intense, I wanted something more relaxed.

I kept the quilting fairly simple on this quilt, as I didn't want the quilting to overwhelm all the gorgeous prints. The low-volume background fabrics in particular, I really really love. They just seem to shimmer.

I filled the background frames with straight lines and feathers, and alternated it between each block for more interest. I love to quilt feathers, but they're not right for every quilt. Here, they felt right at home.

For all the fun prints, I did my usual dot-to-dot geometric designs. They're quick and fun and are a nice contrast to the feathers and flowers.

This is one of the happiest quilts I've ever done. I had some coordinating Tula Pink green / gold yardage in my stash so I used that for a fun and stripey binding. I love the way it turned out, and this was a very low-stress, easy going quilt. It's exactly what I need in between more intense quilts. I had a smile on my face almost the whole time I was working on this quilt. It's just so bright. So fun. So ... pop!

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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.

An Evening with Tula

It's not often that I get to be in the same room as a quilting legend. I found out just a few days ago that Tula Pink was visiting my local quilt shop for a lecture and presentation, so of course I booked a ticket right away!

I've very rarely walked into a room and been totally overwhelmed. But seeing Tula's quilts hanging in that room, with all of Angela Walters's amazing quilting, was quite an emotional experience. I've seen almost all of these quilts on social media, but to see them in person, I was totally awed. Speechless. Stunned. All those words.

And in my amazement, I only managed to grab one photo. Seriously, what was I thinking? Right, I was too busy being awed.

I never really understood that much about fabric production. To me, I just take it for granted that somebody designed it, it shows up at the quilt shop and I take it home. But to hear Tula talk about the whole process was absolutely fascinating. There are a lot of fabric designers I like, but watching Tula explain how she works, I really feel like she's on a whole other level. The stories, the presentation, the hidden surprises! I own many of those fabrics and even worked with them and I didn't notice those hidden easter eggs.

I had another engagement after the lecture so I couldn't stay long enough for a photo op with Tula, but I did bring one of my favorite books for her to sign: Quilt with Tula and Angela.

Now that I've got both Angela and Tula's autograph on this book, it is officially my favorite quilting book!

Hex on the Beach ~ One Year Later

Never again. Never again. I kept saying this to my husband as I painstakingly stitched together hexagon after hexagon, in what is a 1000 hexagon quilt. Each time, he reminded me that I said this after my last English Paper Piecing project, and the one before that, and the one before that ...

I fell in love with Hex on the Beach by Tula Pink when I saw pictures of it surface at Quilt Market a year ago. Throughout the past year, this became my road trip project, my quilt guild project, and my waiting room project. It was super portable, and I just loved having something to do with my hands during those times when I can't be at my machine. This is perhaps why I love EPP.

It was during the final assembly process that I really started to burn out. It would have been good for me to work on something else alongside this project, but for some reason I just couldn't divide myself. And so, I put every other project on hold and after many many weeks of stitching hexagon after hexagon and waking up every morning with my thumb joints in pain, it's finally, finally pieced.

I absolutely love it. Tula Pink's solids & pom poms is one of my favorite fabric collection from last year, so I think this quilt which features all the colors so brilliantly laid out is just stunning. But that being said, I'm still not entirely sure it was worth the effort and the injured thumb joints and all the times I pricked my fingers ...

But it's a lovely quilt top, and I'm sure it'll be lovelier still when I finally get around to quilting it, which at the rate I'm going, means possibly never. But I've come to terms with the fact that I might never get around to quilting all my quilts.

And ... surprise surprise, I already have my next English Paper Piecing quilt all lined up. But I probably won't start it for quite awhile. For the next few months, it's going to be all about machine piecing and machine quilting (with a few accessory projects thrown in), and I'm so glad!

An All Stars Assembly

I really enjoy the slow pace and different flow of English Paper Piecing projects, but if I thought Supernova was time-consuming, it was nothing compared to All Stars. I started actively working on this quilt top in June of last year, and I think no less than 200 hours went into it.

The most challenging part of this quilt is actually the fabric selection, which I did back in May. I resisted the urge to go with a kit (which is crazy expensive anyway), and instead painstakingly picked out my own fabrics (but still all Tula Pink), and allowing the rainbow of colors to wash from the top to the bottom. It took a great deal of planning and a great deal of fussy cutting, because I really wanted the colors in a bloom to relate to each other. I'm really pleased with the final look, even though in another medium I would have deemed this far too insane. But ... somehow I like it as a quilt.

This is by far the largest English Paper Piecing project I've ever worked on, and even though making the individual blooms was fun, assembling at the end was pretty tedious.

Part of the reason the final assembly was so tedious was because I don't like to take the paper pieces out until after the whole thing is assembled. I like how much structure and sturdiness the card stock gives it, and I like to keep that for as long as possible. I have this fear that the quilt would otherwise wrinkle and distort while I'm assembling it, or worse, that I step on it and rip it.

But it's finally done, and now it's ready for quilting ... hopefully sometime this year.

#100Days100Blocks2018: Cityscape

Cityscape is the 2nd of my #100Days100Blocks2018 quilt tops, using the Skyline layout. I've always had a thing for skylines, so naturally I was very attracted to this layout.

While I love black and white and gray and would have no problem making a quilt with just those colors, I absolutely love the pops of neon in this quilt. I had just enough for one "colored" floor for each building, so I placed it in the floor below the penthouse unit for each building.

I ended up using all but 2 of the blocks I sewed for this top. I had to grit my teeth a bit through the assembly process because it really wasn't very fun. But ... assembly rarely is!

I now have two beautiful tops from the #100Days100Blocks2018 challenge. I'm not sure which one I love more, Trellis, or this one!

#100Days100Blocks2018: Trellis

The first quilt top I got from the #100Days100Blocks2018 challenge is complete. Trellis is the layout I used for this one because I love the graphic, high-contrast look of the frames with the colorful blocks.

This quilt required some advanced planning, as I knew I wanted a rainbow effect that washes diagonally, and the colorways in Pacific allowed me to do that. I drew a color chart in advance so I knew how many of each type to make. Once I finally finished the blocks, I laid them out on the design wall.

Once the layout was complete, it was time to make the sashing strips and to assemble everything. While I liked the rainbow look by itself, once the graphic sashing frames came on, it became so much more beautiful.

It took me a few days to assemble this, and once it was finished, I was so incredibly happy with how it looks!

I'm not sure when I'll get to quilting this, but just finishing this top is good enough for me, for now!

#100Days100Blocks2018 Blocks 64 - 70

Finally, finally we're at this point. This is my last week of #100Days100Blocks2018, and it's been a long journey. I always knew I was going to make it here barring unforeseen circumstances, but I didn't realize it'd be so much dragging my feet. I blame myself really, I got the idea to do 2 quilts, doing 1 would have been less mentally exhausting. But now that I'm done with the blocks ... I look forward to assembling them!

#64:

After block #64, the rest of the blocks will only be completed with the black/white colorway. That's because the quilt layout I'm planning for the Pacific colorway is Trellis which only has 64 blocks.

#65 + #66:

#67 + #68:

#69 + #70:

At this point, I'm so excited to put these quilt tops together!