Flight Path

My latest quilt finish is Flight Path, a pattern from Alison Glass. For the fabric, I picked Alison Glass fabrics from the HandCrafted collections to give all the geese a glowing, jewel-like look.

I used to have a lot of trouble with flying geese, and they always seem to come out undersized. In this quilt however, I think I finally got comfortable with them. Apparently, the trick to perfect flying geese is the same as for perfect half-square triangles ... make them bigger and trim them down!

For the bright geese, I used dot-to-dot designs. It does double duty as quilting them and holding them down, but not overwhelming the fabrics.

I filled the backgrounds very, very densely. One of the sections is a matchstick quilting design. This is my first time using the matchstick design, and I quite like the way it looks.

Even though pebbling was my favorite design when I first started free-motion quilting, I got sick of them and haven't used it by itself for quite awhile. But here they are, and there's no denying that the texture of pebbles feels great under my fingers.

As much as I enjoy the front of the quilt, I like the back even better. I love using solid backing as not only is it cheaper than printed backing, it provides a wholecloth experience!

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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

Mugrugs & Coasters

Mugrugs were actually the first quilting-related projects that I was attracted to. (At the time, I didn't like the look of patchwork quilts. I know, I know.)

So when I have a lot of flippy corners or triangle cutoffs, I end up with a slew of half-square triangles that I just have to make into mugrugs. Luckily there are so many ways to arrange half-square triangles!

The first one came out of my Night & Day quilts, the Day version. I really like how bright and cheery it looks! Another reason I like mugrugs is that they give me an opportunity to do walking foot quilting. One of the things I hate most about my sewing machine is that the presser foot pressure is not adjustable, and it presses down too hard, which causes a lot of distortions and tucks if I try to do walking foot quilting on an actual quilt. But at least on a mugrug, it's small enough that it's not noticeable.

My second mugrug uses a black-white striped fabric. I thought these striped fabrics are really cool and they create an interesting effect because it looks like I pieced when I didn't. I had a lot of fun doing all kinds of arrangements before finally deciding on this look.

But I actually had some extra HSTs leftover, so I made them into matching coasters. I wasn't about to bind the coasters in the normal double-fold French binding though, as that would have made me cry. Instead, I just did a turned edge finish. It doesn't look as tidy as a bound edge, but serves the purpose just as well!

These were quick and satisfying one-day projects, which is perfect because it's Thanksgiving weekend and I've got meals to enjoy and fabric to buy!

Waterfall

Several months ago I revealed the Waterfall Runner which I mentioned used cut-off corners from a different quilt. Well, I finally quilted the original quilt from which the pieces of the runner came from.

The pattern is called Peak designed by Modern Handcraft, and for the fabric I used an ombre bundle from Craftsy that uses blues, greens, and yellows. While I love blues and greens together, the yellow is what really adds sparkle to this quilt.

I knew what I wanted to do with this quilt as soon as I loaded it on the frame, and I pretty much stuck to my plan. I knew that I wanted to use a variety of linear designs in the rectangular strips, and I threw almost everything I knew on there. When it comes to quilting designs, I always believe more is more. But I also quilted a lot of strips with just straight lines to give the eye a place to rest.

In the white triangles, I tied everything together with the same design: a tight swirl. These are my favorite swirls right now to do, as not only are they elegant looking, but they're very quick to do.

Even though it's no longer summer, this quilt is like a slice of summer to me!

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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.

Night & Day

I've found myself into house quilts lately, so when I saw the Suburbs quilt (by Cluck Cluck Sew) colored in Tula Pink's De La Luna colorway, I was instantly attracted.

I got to sewing it as soon as the fabric arrived, and I really enjoyed putting these houses together!

The more I looked at it though, the more a narrative began to form in my head. I started imagining a little village that looks sweet and idyllic during the day, but when the sun goes down, activity within the houses brew up and the real nature of the residents are revealed. These houses are actually haunted! (The version using De La Luna is the haunted version, of course.)

But I needed to make a day version. I went searching in my stash for sweet, cheerful looking fabrics, and I decided to use a collection from Simone Bradford called On Your Mark. I saw Simone present this debut collection at QuiltCon in February of this year, and I fell in love with it. I tracked her down after the presentation to get details on where I could get my hands on it, and as soon as it was available, you can bet I jumped on it!

And this is my day version. The colors are the right amount of bright and cheerful but I had to add in a few black houses for the edgier residents.

Here they are side-by-side. I love them both!

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.

Lantern Lane ~ A Love Affair with Paper Piecing

Since the beginning of my quilting journey, I've loved foundation paper piecing. I learned the technique very early on, and because I was told by the instructor that it was easy and forgiving, I believed her. Since then, I've always seen it as the gateway to perfect points intricate piecing.

And so, when I saw Lantern Lane by Sassafras Lane, I knew I had to make it. I could see the inspiration of Chinese lanterns so clearly, and I also immediately knew what I wanted to use for the fabric: a collection from Connecting Threads called Captiva. It consists of blues, yellows, grays, and I've been saving it for a while waiting for the perfect pattern, and this was it!

I usually take the time to pre-perforate the paper, but this time it would have taken far too long. So I dug out my tracing wheel from my brief stint as a garment sewer to perforate it. It worked really well, except it left some marks on my cutting mat that doesn't seam to "heal". It didn't seem to affect the cutting mat's function, at least.

And here are the blocks, so perfect! Originally I was very worried about having to match so many points, but this pattern was brilliant in the way it's assembled and pressed, so that everything seam locks together perfectly with little effort.

Here's a little sample of the rows I assembled so far. The whole quilt will have 49 blocks, but I'm so loving how it looks so far!

Tangerine Dreams

I have gotten into the habit of putting quilt tops away after I'm done with them and not taking them out to quilt until at least several months have passed. I call it marinating, and somewhere, somehow, I hope that ideas can come to me for how to quilt it as I'm happily doing something else. Another benefit of marinating is that once the quilt top isn't so fresh, I will have become detached and hence less afraid to mess it up during quilting.

And that's exactly what happened for Tangerine Dreams. I pieced this top several months ago, and since this is a quilt of my own design (using the dynamically generated pattern Haphazard) I felt extra pressure to make the quilting really good. But last week, while idly browsing through some photos in my library, I suddenly got a vision in my head of how I wanted the quilting to go. So, it finally got quilted!

I wanted to try something on this quilt that I never tried before: lots and lots of straight lines. However, I wanted them to run in different directions, so in the orange spaces, I quilted straight lines running in horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines that run parallel to one of the seams.

In the gray / white spaces, I started introducing curvier designs, and I did a lot of feathers and continuous flowers. I also added one design that is a pretty new one for me, but which I really have fallen in love with: wavy lines.

And last but not least, in all the big open white spaces I did a feathery swirl. It's my first time trying this design as well, and I'm happy that it seemed to turn out well!

My mom asked for my first Haphazard quilt and took it to Shanghai with her. I've been wanting one of my own since, and now I have one. This one I'm keeping! It totally goes with my decor, doesn't it?

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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, Powered by Quilting, and The Devoted Quilter.