Crescent

About 2 years ago, I participated in Christa Watson's Block Chain Quilt Along and made an adorable top using a charm pack of Crescent by Sarah Watts. After taking a long break from quilting this year, I decided it's finally time to finish this quilt.

I really love this quilt because the Crescent fabric is so cute with its owls, yet it's not juvenile at all. The chain link look is very graphic and this pattern is just perfect to show off a charm pack!

Using alternate designs is one of my favorite things to do, because it lessens the workload and keeps things interesting. Here, in the background space I alternated between dot-to-dot geometric designs (very quick to execute) and swirls (not as quick but the texture is so lovely).

I kept the quilting in the focal fabric bare minimal, especially as in this case they are basically like framed photos. A simple geometric frame design makes the fabric stand out while not obscuring the beautiful print.

And of course, I love to show the back of the quilt! For block quilts like this, the back can be as pretty as the front.

I enjoyed using this Crescent charm pack so much that I ended up buying a fat quarter bundle of Crescent ... but as it was the only one I had, I now realize I don't want to cut it up ever! And so that is another one for the fabric museum I've got, aka lovely bundles that I know I will probably never use.

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Linking up with: My Quilt Infatuation.

Circuit

After the holidays last year, I was feeling lethargic and decided to take a break. However, I didn't expect the break to last half a year! To be honest, with everything that's going on in my life and beyond, quilting just isn't at the top of my list at the moment.

But I did recently finish a quilt, a quilt I've been longarming on and off for 5 months. I finished the quilt top for Circuit several years ago, and it's been one of my favorite quilt tops in my stash. The pattern is by Sylvia Schaefer.

I'm very attracted to the sci-fi, cyberpunk style, so that's probably why I love this pattern so much. I also adore the fabrics, which is a mix of chartreuse and black with a lot of metallics thrown in.

For the quilting design, I decided to use a bright green thread with a tiled design, but filling it with echoing straight lines so it emulates the look of circuits.

I wanted the circuits in the foreground to really jump out, so I kept the quilting very simple there, with just some light echoes.

Although I was stuck for a long time on how to quilt this, and then stuck for a long time not wanting to quilt anything at all, I'm very happy with the end product. This is one I hope I'll always have.

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Linking up with: My Quilt Infatuation and Meadow Mist Designs.

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!

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!

Paper Chain

After the ultra-colorful and bright Glass Candies, I wanted to pick a quilt top with more subdued colors for my next finish. I decided on Paper Chain, which is a block-of-the-month quilt that I made last year.

The fabric collection I chose is Breeze by Zen Chic, and the layout is from the Quilt Block Cookbook by Amy Gibson. This quilt really gives me a Japanese vibe!

I have never done free-motion quilting on a sampler quilt before, so this was a bit of a new experience. But at the end of the day, it's not that different from non-sampler quilts, except I have a few more blocks to design.

I tend to not quilt very heavily on foreground fabrics, so I came up with a different design for each block mostly by employing straight lines, curvy lines, and an occasional plume feather. But this was the easy part.

The background was more challenging since there was so much negative space. I decided to try a design that was totally new to me: Angela Walters's paisley feathers. It's an intricate looking design that is actually easier than regular feathers, but incredibly exhausting to do. I had to take my time on this so that I didn't get injured.

I had a lot of fun coming up with a design for each block, and though the background was challenging, I'm very satisfied with the final results.

Glass Candies

Since I've been on a journey lately to finish some of my favorite quilts instead of saving them for later, lately every quilt I've chosen to work on is special. But some are just more special than others.

Glass Candies is one of my all-time favorites. Both the pattern (Dude Ranch) and the fabric (Confetti Ombre) are designed by V & Co. I renamed it Glass Candies because as I was piecing this, I kept thinking of those beautiful Murano glass candies I saw on a trip to Venice.

This quilt is made up of half-square triangles and squares so it was quite easy and lots of fun to put together. The only painful part was assembly as it's assembled on the bias.

I had so much fun coming up with a quilting design for this quilt. I kept things very simple in the foreground (just continuous curves) and went to town in the background, creating geometric secondary designs and complementing them with swirls.

It took me a long time to quilt this, because I was enjoying it so much and wanted to savor the process ... and because it was a lot of quilting. I have the big M-sized bobbin on my longarm, and it still took about 10 bobbins!

I'm thrilled with the end result, as it turned out better than I imagined. This one is a keeper!

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.