Honorable Mention at Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival!

 Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival

Conversations

Wow! I won an Honorable Mention for my quilt, Conversations, at Visuals #3 National Quilt Competition! I entered in the Mid-Century Modern Quilt category. I am a little in shock because the Mancuso Brothers quilt festivals are very competitive and I didn't think my quilts would do well there. It is so funny because I always love my quilts A LOT, but the judges do not always agree with me.  So, a very humble and special thank you to Sue Nickels and Marjan Kluepfel (the judges)! The online show is from Feb 24 to Feb 27.  

I also have three other quilts in this festival. The next one was also in the Mid-Century Modern Quilt Category.

Let Your Hair Down

And the next two were in the Full Size Innovative category:

Turn the Dial

Seeds

I have taken a few minutes to check out the other quilts and they are stunning! And they made the images really large, easy to see, and easy to scroll through with the arrow keys on my keyboard.  I am grateful for the close-ups, but mostly the big images look really good. A nice platform for viewing quilts if you can't be there in person!

I would also like to give a big thank you to the show's sponsors: the Hampton Convention and Visitors Bureau, BERNINA of America, A Different Touch, Cottonwood Quilt Shop, Cherrywood Hand Dyed Fabrics, Zappy Dots and The Grace Company. 

Caterpillars, Part 3

Caterpillars, Part 3

project

This little caterpillar does not have any humps or blobs at all.  It is mostly just stripes.  Modeled after a real life caterpillar, I am in love with the colors and simplicity.  As seen above, I have selected all the yellow solids I have and threw in some white as well.  I cut many, many strips, and then randomly selected them for each section. I stitched them together, and I know that I keep saying this... but I am in awe of how much fabric it takes to make such a small section! It was easier to keep it all parallel by sewing every group of 2 strips together first.  Then I joined strips of two's together to make a block of 4.  Then I checked those against a ruler and trimmed if necessary. And then repeated until the entire block was built up to the correct size. When working with so many tiny strips, it is easy for a small mistake to get multiplied and eventually make everything wonky.  And, I seriously love wonky, but it was not what I wanted for this project. 

Once I had a long strip of yellows, I cut it in half (as seen above), and inserted a 1/2" black stripe down the middle.  I added black and white wide strips above and below.  The actual panel looks more like this, though this is still just a detail section of the overall panel:

I am loving the bold use of color and wide stripes with the narrow ones!  Great contrast! One more caterpillar to go! 

Rainbow Rings - quilt swap

Rainbow Rings

24" x 24"

To celebrate the opening of QuiltCon Together, I decided to post about my Make a Mini Make a Friend quilt.

This is a quilt swap with the Modern Quilt Guild.  After you sign up, you are paired with someone else who is participating.  We get introduced to each other via email, and then make a mini quilt for each other that are eventually sent through snail mail.  This is my first time participating and it was fun!  I was also grateful that my normal break neck pace had slowed down enough to have an opening in my normally very full schedule. 

First, my swap partner did not have any requests at all.  This made it really hard for me.  I already struggle with decision making.  I was worried that I wasn't going to come up with any ideas at all. Luckily for me, she had an Instagram account, so I was able to look at her previous posts.  Brilliant!!  It didn't take long, and then I was well on my way.  The only thing I found hard was keeping this a secret!  She wasn't supposed to see it until it was mailed to her.  We were allowed to post shots of details that did not give it away, and that was good enough! 

Another thing I really liked about this project was an opportunity to explore an idea I had.  I had previously made a double wedding ring quilt, but since then I have had a number of other ideas, but hadn't yet had time to pursue them.  This one was perfect because it also incorporated the idea of transparency in the overlapping colors.  

Using my copic markers, I sketched my idea.  I loved the idea of starting with the markers, because I could overlap the colors and see the transparencies.

It also took me a while to find colors that would work and appear to be the in-between colors.  

Then I drew the pattern full scale and cut out the rest of the pieces.  For this to work, I needed to keep track of the placement of all the blocks because none of them were interchangeable.

I started piecing the smallest squares first to make the corners of the DWR. 

These were quick and easy! The curves were a bit stretchier, but doable.  It went together really quick, which was very satisfying! 

Basting:

I decided to hand quilt the colorful rings because I love the texture of hand quilting so much!

I finished it up with some black echo quilting and fine line quilting in the melons (the black and white striped inner section of the rings).  Then I sent it to my swap partner.  I was surprisingly anxious... waiting to hear if it arrived and if she liked it or not.  After a few days I saw her post on Instagram.  It warmed my heart to see that she liked it!  That's the best part of this project is how I felt.  The act of giving warms the heart!

And, within a day or two my quilt from Julie arrived!

I love it so much!  First, I LOVE hummingbirds! They symbolize joy for me.  And I have used them in my work before. Perhaps you remember from this quilt? Also, I love the bright aqua/turquoise colors she selected for my hummer.  It is PERFECT for me!  I also love the background fabric and the backing fabric because both had hummingbirds on them! A nice repetition of pattern.  Last, I love the precision of the paper pieced pattern.  I am not a paper piecer.  This is not something I would normally have, but I am so grateful that Julie can do this (and she does it VERY WELL!!).  It is so beautiful.  The pattern is called Sugar Baby and is from Nicole at Lillyella Stitchery. 

Caterpillars part 2

Caterpillars part 2

project

The part where my humps turn into blobs...

The triangles are new for me.  I couldn't decide if I wanted them looking like arrows, OR rather scattered like above.  (yeah, you guessed which one I picked!)

Also, I had reservations about working with these equilateral triangles, because some of those sides are going to be kind of stretchy.  So I watched this tutorial first by Mathew Boudreaux (aka Mister Domestic). It was super helpful! I found the triangles easy to cut, easy to stitch, however, stitching the rows together was more difficult.

After I pieced enough of them together, I used a freezer paper template to cut out the shape I wanted from both the triangle section and the background piece, then pinned and stitched.

This first one is more hump than blob, but the shapes morphed as I continued to work.  You can see some of the variations below.  Then I stitched the blocks together, added some green, lime green, and more black stripes.  Here is the beginning of this panel!

I love this!  The colors actually appear more congruent in real life than this photo.  Color management and photography continues to be my nemesis!! But the shapes, the shapes are so good.  Can you guess which caterpillar this pattern comes from?

Two more panels after this one, stay tuned! Hope you are having some lovely creative time!

Caterpillars part 1

Caterpillars part 1

project

The first panel started with cutting up little blue squares, which are so incredibly appealing to me.

Then I paired them up and made some half square triangles.

Then, I repeated to make quarter square triangles.

I struggle a bit with accuracy, so I always make them a bit bigger and trim them to their little square shapes:

Next, I selected a random layout and stitched the blocks together.

I didn't get very far when suddenly I had an idea....and it involved curves....and I wasn't really sure how feasible it was because of all the seams I would be cutting through and stitching....so I had to try. I used freezer paper to draw the curve and then pressed it to the fabric, adding a 1/4" seam allowance when I cut.

It's a bit squirrelly to stitch, but definitely doable! 

I LOVE this little blue hump, so I made some more, and then some more, and then decided to add some stripes to go with them.

And then some more...

I eventually realized that this pattern was very very similar to a favorite caterpillar of mine, the swallowtail, but a different color palette....and a bit abstracted.  That's when I decide to make these long pieced giant blocks to resemble the patterns on caterpillars.  It was odd that I started by cutting blocks, and then serendipitously ended up with this, but the subconscious works in mysterious ways. I realized how much this quilt is about my life right now. Stayed tuned! There will be a total of 4 of these panels! All bright and graphic and wonderful!