Two for the HGTV Crayola Challenge

I knew I was doing Bonnie's HGTV Challenge quilt back in December, but I found out a couple weeks ago that a woman local to me was also making one and wanted me to do the quilting. It's pretty bright. OK, it's blindingly fluorescent! But I do just love these colors together. Here's how it works. HGTV sends each participant a crayon of random color. You get to select one other fabric color to add to it, and it must match to a Crayola color. She was given the aqua, and chose to add the grass green to it. She initially wanted just an overall stipple since it is a donation quilt. But thankfully I talked her into something more creative. This is the continuous pattern I devised for her. The fabrics hace swirls and leaves, so I copied these motifs to the quilting.
My CC got better with practice. It was a little harder since the strips and the sashings were slightly different sizes. Overall, though, I think it worked ok. I love the two borders; kind of simple, but nice. And who doesn't like leaves and tendril swirls??

The owner was very pleased with it, and agreed it was SO much better than stippling. She even showed it to people at 3 different quilt shops that she visited that afternoon after picking it up. I always appreciate the free advertising. Can't beat that. Plus, she left me another quilt to do for her.

Here is Bonnie's quilt. She was given the sea foam green crayon, and chose to pair it with chocolate brown. My photo definitely washes out the green a bit, but it's a nice pairing. The pattern is simple and leaves plenty of room for quilting...a pleasant and a daunting thing. Her quilt is considerably larger than I was expecting. It only needed to be 54"x70", which is what I thought I'd be quilting - a very manageable task for a couple of days. Afterall, these must be delivered by Feb 1. Yes, 10 days from now. The quilt arrived 4 days ago and is 68"x86"! Yikes-

As many of you know, I am furociously trying to practice feathers everywhere. And I mean EVERYWHERE. I chose to do much of the quilting monochromatically, brown on brown and green on green. But I wanted a little bit of crossover to give the quilt a softer look. The whoppingly wide outer border is definitely done in green, to help hide my oopses with the feathers. In hindsight, they are pretty good. I love the look of the twirly-whirly feathering. It's the darn corner tear drops that are the hard part. Message to self...get some teardrop templates!!!

The color crossover is shown below. As I CC'd the diagonally running squares, I also did pairs of swirls in the green on the brown. Similarly, as I feathered the 24 8" brown squares, I did a pair of leaves in the brown thread on the green fabric. There's also a row of vining leaves for the brown inner border.

Though I may have done a fair bit of cursing about various issues with this quilt, I am happy with how it turned out and hope that the recipient is too.

Be sure to look up the HGTV Crayola Challenge online and see how you can buy a raffle ticket too. You might win one of these quilts, and your proceeds will go to support the Ronald MacDonald House.

Think Spring

It was a frigid 1F this morning. Today seems a bit late, but then rather appropriately cold day to show the table runner (17"x44") I made for my mother-in-law for Christmas. It was from a Moda pack of charm squares Lisa gave me last summer. I had originally wanted to do something for myself with them. I really love the butterflies and tulips, but it was crunch time in December and I really needed a Christmas present too.
The quilting is overly simple, almost insultingly so. I should have done it on the longarm, but wanted to use the varaigated King Tut thread I had, and had never tried this on the longarm. Blah, blah, blah, long story, I opted to simply stipple it on the domestic machine. Only a good quilter would know what it could have been.

Not sure if my feeble embroidery shows, but under the birdies (which my MIL loves to watch), it reads "Think Spring".

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I have had a steady stream of quilts to finish up in late December and this month. I did this one, despite not having a good picture of it. The T-shirt quilts are challenging, kind of like quilting a slinky. Once you get it pinned to the leader, it just pulls back in. I wanted to scream ! Takes a bit of TLC to get to lay flat and square. On the plus side, I did not have to do anything complicated for the quilting so it did quilt reasonably fast.

The rest of these are quilts I have done for other people. The brown one was tedius, and made per the customer's request. I tried my darndest to talk her out of parallel stripes, but she didn't want to budge. They weren't easy. I'm not sure what is up with the raw edge "bits" down that stripe, but I think they are supposed to get scruffy when it is washed. It does have an interesting texture :-)

Here's a fun child's kaleidoscope quilt all in jungle animals. It quilted up cute with the gold thread and the swirls. The backing is purple so the quilting shows nicely.

And another quilt belonging to the lady who owns the brown stripes quilt...She requested this swirling cloud all-over pattern that I freehand. It is in a variagated rainbow thread.

My week has been crazy. My class started Monday. It always takes a couple weeks to get the students engaged and really working, but my schedule has resumed. No more lazy holiday mornings. I started an online class running for the next 3 weeks "Quilt Wisperer" taught by Carla Barrett aka Feathered Fibers. It'll be humbling I am certain, but I hope to look at quilts and how I may quilt them differently. If you look at some of her quilts, you'll drool for sure though!

I have also made up a sample of some things I can quilt for a local quilt shop. They won't refer me to clients until they see this. Nothing like buying and "wasting" 8 yards of fabric just to impress/show one person! OK, sarcasm aside, it was a pain to squeeze this into the current schedule, but it will come in handy to show clients what the many patterns can look like on ugly tan fabric. To better show what I am up to as a longarmer, I have also pieced some swap blocks into a top and have quilted away at this for the last 2 days. It has different quilting for each block, and pretty sashings and a feathery border. I will show this to the shop too (when it is off the frame!!). That is tomorrow's task: finish it. Then I have 2 Crayola Challenge quilts to quilt, one which I have, and one which is due to arrive Friday. Can you say "They both must be done by next week"??? Yikes!

Time to run and do kid pick up, dinner, and all that other yucky stuff which fills my days.

Some Sampler Fun

Before Christmas, I had the pleasure of quilting a couple more of Adrienne's quilts. She's already sent me two wonderful quilts, one of which was a fabulous sampler, and now she's sent two more. She must do many block swaps or bees to get such a fantastic variety of blocks. I took pictures of several just to give myself a nice reference of interesting 12" blocks. She only wanted an all-over quilting, so I didn't get to practice any super creative quilting, but I still think that the quilts came out pretty.
The blues and white reminded me of clouds in the sky on a sunny day, so that's what I decided to do - it is a swirly-cloudlike allover quilting.

It is not very dense so it does have a fluffier appearance.

The second quilt is in one of my favorite colors - Purples!! It is quite large and has some interesting designs too.

This is quilted in a medium lavendar thread and another all-over design that has loose feathery leaves, swirls and echo quilting. It is more dense than the blue quilt, and will definitely pucker nicely when washed.

I wasn't sure if I'd like the look of the purple thread on the many white areas, but I stuck to my 1st instinct which was to match the thread to the sashings. I think that this was a good decision.

I have 2 samplers, identical in fact, right now to quilt as soon as that darn brown thread arrives. Not sure if these owners want more than a basic Popcorn panto though...

On a different note, I was told today that this lowly blog will be featured on www.WeAllSew.com next week. So, hop on over there and see what Erika has going on, and maybe by next week I will have more fetching things to look at. Some things I have yet to show include a sweet spring table runner made for my mother-in-law for Christmas, a gorgeous batik quilt I finished, and the tales of quilting my first customer T-shirt quilt! Stay tuned. Stay warm. And stay quilting :-)

And for the charitable among us, I must make mention of HGTV's Crayola Challenge. Quilts are being made in 2 pre-assigned crayola colors and are being raffled off in Feb. The proceeds (I believe) go to the Ronald MacDonald house. Anyhow, Bingo Bonnie is making one of these and I will be quilting it for her. I will post more about this in the coming weeks, but donating to this event is of interest to you, I urge you to follow it directly. Last year's quilts were fantastic. I only wish I had known about this in the summer to be making my own quilt!