Friday, August 23, 2013

Finish it up Friday with some Scrap Love


Have you ever bought a group of fabrics that you just love?  Fabric you love so much, that when you start cutting it up for a pattern, you save just about every square inch of the scraps?  Fabric that you keep all together, scraps, strips, small and large pieces, long after the original project is done?  Yeah, me too.  These two hearts were created out of such scraps.  Every member of my Guild is making a 12 inch block for a huge Quilts of Valor project.  I figured I would make a Star of Hope block and use fabrics that I had used to make a Quilt of Valor from last year.  Once I took out the fabrics, there were only a few large pieces of fabric and those were the lighter fabrics.  I didn't have enough of one blue or one red to make the Star of Hope block.
Naturally, I had the fabrics spread out and I had a handful of squares and rectangles which I had set down on lighter fabric and they looked very nice so I started playing with them and this is what I came up with!   I liked the first one so much that I made another one for me and used  2 1/4" blocks to go around.  I sewed a 1 1/2" strip of dark blue all around and quilted it with the regular sewing machine, not only was I in too much of a hurry to do a regular binding, but I am trying to conserve the dark blue as I don't have much left.  The blocks were 2 1/4 instead of 2 1/2 because that was the size of strips that were left over from the original project.  It was fun to make and gave me a lot of ideas for other scraps that I love!   I would love to do an entire quilt like this and I just might!  Happy Quilting!!

Sunday, August 18, 2013

Chevron Love

 We are expecting a new little girl in the family this fall, so I was very  excited to make her a quilt!  I wanted to try zig zags with white and I had pinned some choices on pinterest. My niece chose one very similar to this one.  More chevron than zig zag and I love the mixture of different fabrics in each row.  I was so happy to find everything I needed at my local QS,  Nancy's Calicos!  I pulled the colors from many different lines of fabric, Nancy's Calico  recently added a modern quilt section, and all of the fabrics came from that section.  The link on pinterest didn't offer any information about the quilt, who designed it or where to get the pattern.  So I figured it out the best I could, I think I made my blocks (accidentally) 1/2" smaller than the quilt on pinterest, but it still turned out a nice size.    I also made 14 burp cloths from the same fabric using dimensions that my niece sent me.  She had wanted me to use towels as the        

backing, but I couldn't find any in the right color or that didn't pull easily.  I used very soft and fluffy fabrics from JoAnnes.  My long arm  finally returned repaired after  9 1/2 weeks, so I was a bit rusty quilting, especially the straight lines.  All in all, I like the designs of the quilting and overall, I LOVE the quilt!  Happy Quilting!!