Updates

This week I got to test a pattern for Darcy Stewart Hunter from Darcydoodlequilts in Canada.  We belong to the same FB group called Quilt Pattern Designers.  She asked for some volunteers so I raised my hands.  :-)  

It's a small wall hanging art quilt and here is the picture of the finished piece.

"Autumn at the Lake". 

It's a really fun quilt to make and I had a great time.  Darcy has an etsy shop at : www.darcydoodlequilts.etsy.com.  She has quite a collection of her wonderful one-of-a-kind works.

Remember the Valley MQG's charity quilt that's hung at QuiltCon?  We donated it to the Special Olympics, through our local quilt shop.  The owner of the shop posted this on FB. 

I'm so glad that the quilt is being used for a very good cause.  We are getting ready for our trip at the end of the month.  I probably will not post anything here because I will not be sewing, therefore I won't have any new project to show.  I'm sure I'll post pictures of our trip on Instagram.


Have a wonderful sewing time!!!!




Link to:
Midweek Makers@QuiltFabrication

Are we having fun?

Time does fly when you're having fun!!!   So many projects to work on, so many things happened in the past couple months.  Here is the recap.

The first on the list is a house warming gift for a dear friend.  It's a wall hanging quilt, and I must say, I'm still agonizing on how to quilt it.

I'm thinking that I will make at least two pieces and let him choose the one he likes.  I haven't got the second one down quite the way I like it.  As usual, more tweaking to do!!

The next project is my new design.  This was originally designed for a challenge at the VMQG.  You can read about it here.

The block at the bottom in the above picture is the one I made for the challenge.  I'm trying to decide whether to set them on point or just go across the row as shown below. 

The block is 15" square, so I don't need a whole lot of blocks to make a good size quilt.  I think on point setting makes the blocks look more interesting, right?

In between these projects, I also worked on writing a pattern for the Make Modern magazine which will be published in January 2020. When the time comes, I will reveal everything here.  

Writing a pattern is no easy task, even for a very simple quilt!!  I found making quilt diagrams are the most challenging part.  Luckily I have a friend who graciously volunteered to help me.  She used the Illustrations program to make all the diagrams.  They came out so perfect and beautiful.  Thank you so much, Ruth!!  I'm done with the draft and sent everything to them a few days ago.  I'm ahead of the schedule because I will be traveling abroad with my family in October and will have couple weeks before the deadline on Nov. 15th when I get back.  I just want to be safe and hopefully finalize everything by the end of Sept.  People at the magazine are so nice and understanding.  Thanks a bunch, Kristy.

We are going back to Thailand and I'm so excited.   It will be a lot of fun to see everyone back home again.  Even though it's hot and humid there, I can't wait!!

I haven't got any ideas for a quilt for submission to QuiltCon and the dead line is quickly approaching.  With the traveling, I'm not sure I'll have enough time.  What to do, what to make?????  I have to think about it more.....

Last but not least, on July 15, I was delighted to get this from the AQS QuiltWeek.

So last week, I got my quilt ready, just the way they want, and shipped it.  I hope the quilt safely got to where it's supposed to be.  I always get worried, almost the same way when I send my children off to a field trip, a summer camp, etc....

I hope you all have a great day and do something fun.............




Link to:
Midweek Makers@QuiltFabrication, Can I get a Whoop Whoop, Frombolttobeauty, TGIF Friday, and Finished {or Not!} Friday

Commitments

Hello Everyone,

It's been awhile and I'm excited to share good news with you all.  Some of you may know that I was co-chair on the MQG Charity Quilt challenge last year for our Valley MQG.  Many hands were involved on this project.  We all were very happy that our charity quilt was beautifully finished and hung in Nashville.  Since I got all the blocks that our guild members made, I set out to use them up by making both a lap size and a baby size charity quilt for our Philanthropy group which I wrote about them here.  With a happy dance and a big smile on my face, I'm very happy to say that the quilts are finally DONE.

I used a Juki TL-98E to quilt this project because my Janome 6500 was in the shop.  I wanted to get the quilts done in time for our local quilt show in May, but then I got really sick in March.  I resumed working on the quilt after I got well but the quilting didn't come out right as shown in the picture below.  The real quilt looked worse than what is shown in the picture here. A friend suggested using steam but the ripples wouldn't go away.  The small area at the bottom right wasn't so bad but the whole thing looked terrible to me.

I picked out all the quilting lines. Yes, all of them!  I brought the quilt to our March guild meeting to find answers to the problem I had.  One of the ladies in the guild gracefully volunteered to finish it for me, which I was very thankful.  She used her long-arm machine and followed the same theme with circle motifs all over but then she had to have a shoulder replacement surgery.  I got the quilt back on the last week of April.  I stared at it on my design wall for a long time and tried to decide how I was going to finish it.  I didn't want to do circles again, fearing that I would have the same problem.  I saw that all the circles were on the right side of the quilt so I decided to do some wavy line and straight line quilting on the colored blocks and straight line quilting on the background as in the pictures below.  This time around, I used my Janome 6500 to do the quilting. 

 

Details shots of the quilting.
 

When I was done with the big quilt, I worked on the baby quilt right away.  I decided to conquer my fear and did circle quilting on it.  It's a smaller piece, and with my Janome 6500, the quilting came out perfect.

After the quilting was done, I did machine binding on both quilts to speed up the process.  I'm very pleased with the way the corners turned out as shown in the picture below.  I found excellent tips on machine binding at Julie Cefalu's blog called thecraftyquilter.com.  I want to give a shout out to Julie and thank her for all she has done for the quilting community.  Check out her blog, if you haven't already, for more helpful tips and techniques.  There are a lot of things going on at her website.  The instructions were very clear and straight forward which I followed except that I used left over 3" strips as binding.  I sewed 3/8" seam allowance on the back in order to have a wider finish at the front.

Now that my commitments are done, I can move on to other projects.  I have a few patterns in mind that I want to make.  I'm crossing my fingers and hope for the best that they will come out good......


Have a great quilty time everyone!!!






Link to Sew fresh quilts: letsbeesocial,  Midweek Makers@QuiltFabrication
Also link to Can I get a Whoop Whoop and Finished {or Not!} Friday