a friday finish and some friendship blocks

Hi there! While many are catching up on sleep or tearing down their holiday decor, we're headed up to my gram's house for more Christmas festivities. I'm without a hand project for the car ride so I thought I'd blog instead.

First up, a finished quilt that was gifted to my in-laws for Christmas. Since I came into their lives nearly two years ago they've rarely seen me without fabric between my fingers. It's a common topic for teasing, I often hear things like "we always see you sewing, but where are all the quilts?" So last July I whipped up this quilt top according to Jeni Baker's Modern Plus tutorial, found at incolororder.com. I cut all the squares and determined a layout at home and then packed it up along with the featherweight and pieced it on the patio table with my husband's family all right there, none the wiser. 

It sat folded in a corner until a week ago when I decided it was crunch time! I pieced the back using the four yards of diagonal plaid from Michael Miller (bought on sale specifically for this purpose) and a little stripe of texty Sweetwater for a bit of flair. 

I free motion quilted it with a squiggly design on my mom's 1981 Riccar. The binding is a Denyse Schmidt print from one of her earlier DS Quilts lines at Joann's. I glue basted the binding, if you haven't tried it I highly recommend doing so! Sharon Schambers has a great YouTube video on it.

It was fun watching them open it up, I could tell they really love it! I even caught my MIL snapping photos of it in different positions on the couch. The best thing is I'll get to see it often as we visit my in-laws at least once a month. Yay! 

Ok now for my latest friendship x and plus swap blocks! Elizabeth and I are having so much fun with these and may even up our monthly goal of eight to something like ten or twelve! 

The scrappy look is really working for us so far! I'm really excited to eventually have a big quilt with such little pieces in it. And such a variety of fabrics. Love! 

Anyone can join in on the fun, just find a buddy, start swapping x and plus blocks, add photos to the flicker group and Instagram hashtag #friendshipxandplusswap and blog about your progress on the last Friday of every month!

Ok, about to lose cell signal, we're almost to gram's house out in the Iowan boonies! Hoping you all had a lovely Christmas and a wonderful weekend to follow. 

x and + friendship swap

Elizabeth of opquilt and I have been x and +ing along and I have to say I'm so pleased with how our "anything goes" scrappy approach is looking so far. Only five of these are my work, the others are from Elizabeth. She's making me look bad! 

These blocks aren't the quickest for me to put together but they certainly are fun. The key is to have a bunch of pieces all cut up and ready to go for when there's time to sew. That was my plan for the KCMQG sew day I went to a couple weeks ago, but instead I spent most of my time pressing and cutting! 

 

I borrowed a presser foot from the woman sitting behind me, also sewing x and + blocks on her featherweight. Turned out to be Carla of lollyquiltz! Go figure. I had no idea she was in the KC area. She and Susan of patchworknplay started the swap and it was so much fun working on the blocks with her. 

Right now Jon and I are in Phoenix, visiting my sister and her family. We packed light but I managed to bring a bazillion precut x and plus pieces just in case. Turns out there has been time to sew on my sister's machine, so my nieces and I have already made 12  blocks. Addie is keeping one to hang on her bedroom wall. It is so much fun to "corrupt" a future generation of quilters!

Hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving yesterday (if you're in the states) and a great weekend coming up.

new windows, new cat, and other random stuff

After a full Saturday of sewing with the KCMQG, I spent Sunday "supervising" Jon and my Dad as they replaced the 100 year old windows in our little cottage style home. While charming from a distance, these old windows were in really rough shape. 

Most of them had rotten sills, cracked panes, and/or missing glazing. Several were painted shut and all the iron weights had been cut loose years ago. We uncovered many wasps nests and cobwebs. I'll miss their character but not the cold drafts and inability to open without fear of them breaking apart and falling out.

We had my sewing room turned upside down for the windows, so I took the opportunity to recover my pressing mat with some heavy, natural linen. I'd been wanting to do it for a while since the old muslin layer was looking pretty gross. I was too lazy to go the fitted sheet or drawstring route, and opted to simply staple the new fabric over the top of the old. I'm regretting that decision now. Next time around I'll remove the staples, wash the linen and sew on some elastic to make future washings much easier.

Since we were moving the desk around too, I finally dug out the plastic "risers" I bought long ago to raise it up for a more comfortable cutting surface. Now if I can only find an extra one for the odd fifth leg out front and center. I suppose the pressing board could use a lift, too.

Who thinks I should cut up this old, tattered quilt to make a couple curtain panels? I pinned it there as a temporary solution until we replace the blinds, but now I'm totally digging it. Looks super cool from outside at night, too. Yep, I think I'll do that.

Yesterday I stayed home sick from work. I didn't even feel good enough to sew, can you believe that? I attempted to but  my nose was dripping uncontrollably and making a mess of things. I spent most of the day cuddled up with Hank, Lucy and our newest fur baby, nicknamed "Black Cat" until we come up with something better.

She was an unwanted warehouse kitty at my work for several months, evading capture and only seen by those who came and went earliest and latest. I thought she was a tall tale until I spotted her late afternoon last Thursday, back by a high rise of pallets and some giant bags of dirt. After doing the "here kitty kitty" thing for a minute I managed to get her to come to me. We made friends and I took her home, fully intending to pawn her off on someone else as soon as I got the chance. 

I'll blame Jon for getting too attached. She's mega cute and super friendly. Hank can't stand her but has slowly been coming around. Lucy gets whacked every now and again for being overly playful but she's starting to figure it out. We had her spayed, de-wormed, and shot up, so she's part of the family now.

I went to work this morning but left early to hit the urgent care clinic. I'll nip my sinus infection in the butt this time instead of suffering for a week or two before finally giving in. The neti pot can only do so much before powerful antibiotics have to get involved. 

Now I'm home, resting. If I can't manage a nap I may just stuff some cotton up my nose and head to the sewing room. Pressing, cutting, and stitching fabric isn't that strenuous, right? It's relaxing, even. Maybe I'll make some more of these Jacob's Ladder blocks. 

Can you spot where I goofed? First one to point it out wins a prize! I'll finish the rest of the blocks before bothering to correct it. Or maybe I'll leave it. Adds a little character, perhaps.

Linking up with Cindy today (although she hasn't posted it yet). No one does random quite like she does! 

If you missed my quilted seat cushion tutorial yesterday on Ellison Lane, you can see it here. There's still time to enter the giveaway.

Holiday Hostess Series - Quilted Seat Cover Tutorial (and giveaway!)

My Quilted Seat cushion Tutorial has posted over at Ellison Lane today. I would love it if you would go check it out and let me know what you think!

And don't forget to enter the giveaway for a chance to win awesome prizes from the wonderful sponsors below.

Friendship x and + swap

Hey there!

Suz and Carla came up with the nifty idea to do a friendship block swap. You pick a pal, make matching sets of the famous x and + blocks each month and swap out so you both end up with one of each. Love it!

You can read more about it on they're blogs, here and here.


Elizabeth and I decided we'd try for eight blocks a month, four to keep and four to send. We're going the scrappy route, which is great since I'd already been cutting away at my ever growing scrap bin, trying to create more usable pieces for future projects. Add this to the list! The goal is to blog about your blocks on the last Friday of the month, but as you can see I've barely started.

If you want to play along, there's a Flickr group and plenty of + and x block inspiration all over the web. Grab a pal and join the fun!

Have a good weekend,

Krista :D

sunday stash

What do you do when your local quilt shop is closing and has everything 45% off? You go a little overboard when your husband isn't looking. Don't worry, he watched me carry the giant bag into the house. But by then all he could do was give me those "you're out of control" eyes and crack a smile. 

The good thing about my LQS (well, the bad thing before, but good thing now!) is that all of the fabric is relatively old. Meaning full price on most of the bolts was 9 dollars or less. I picked up some American Jane Punctuation and Building Blocks yardage, some of my favorite browns, a few books and several spools of King Tut variegated thread.

After posting that doggy print to IG, several people wanted some so I went back and came home with another big bag, this time stuffed with an assortment of black and white and 1930's prints. UGH. The thing about it was you had to buy at least 2 yards to get the discount. My pal Gina, the cutting lady, offered to sub cut the black and whites into 1 yard + 4 fat quarter increments, which rocked. I'm hopeful that some IG peeps might want to take the excess off my hands!

Speaking of a good deal, Fat Quarter Shop's 50% off section is a friend to me. I get email updates and hop over to see what's new there relatively often. I don't always fall for it, but a couple weeks ago they added Lecien's Tiny Prints collection and I jumped. I actually ordered all 18 prints, but only 12 are pictured here because these are the ones making it into a new quilt! But more on that later.

You know what they say about light ice cream... If it's half the calories you can eat twice as much, right? Surely I can apply that logic to fabric.

Oh! And I'm linking up for Sunday Stash over at Finding Fifth. Eek, j/k! This week it's over at Hot Pink Quilts.

Happy Sunday :D

a quilt for my mother

on a fence at my parents' place, May 2013

The first quilt I ever made was for my niece's first birthday in Jan 2011, using Bonnie and Camille's Bliss collection. My mom loved the fabrics and wanted a quilt of her own. I was brand new to the online quilting scene but had read somewhere that once fabric was printed and sold that was it, gone forever.

my first niece on her first birthday with my first quilt, Feb 2011

So, with the intent of making her a quilt for mother's day, I immediately went back to my local quilt shop (which is now closing, btw) and bought five charm packs, a jelly roll and three yards of the cheater print, all that was left of the Bliss fabric they had in stock. That was two and a half years ago.

bliss stash, Feb 2011

Fast forward about six months and some lovely blogger ladies (Jennifer and Sarah) were hosting their Across the Sea quilt along and I mistakenly thought it was a Greek Cross block pattern. I jumped on board and cut into my bliss stash, this time intending to finish a quilt for my mother by Christmas. I had a digital mock-up I made in paint and new-found ambition.

original mock-up, Aug 2011

I got all the half square triangle and half-square rectangle segments pieced before realizing that the quilt I was making didn't fit with the QAL at all. Talk about embarrassing! I'd been posting pictures on the flickr page and I'm sure everyone was thinking "who is this chick and what the heck is she doing?!"

on the design wall, Nov 2012

I also noticed that the fabric I'd used as a background was basically blending together with many of the lighter fabrics in the Bliss collection, which felt like a mistake on my part. My mom then mentioned that the quilt I'd made for my niece had a lot of brown in it, which was the main thing she liked about it. I'd pulled all the browns since there weren't enough of them to really work with my design. This is when I stalled out and let things sit for a while.

on a fence at my parents' place, May 2013

Christmas and her birthday came and went. I briefly pulled it out again to work on for Mother's Day but didn't get far. Then I met my husband, so I didn't get a whole lot of quilting done for a minute. Fast forward to November of 2012, I was feeling like a major loser for not getting any sewing things done to give as Christmas gifts. Jon suggested we finish up the Bliss quilt for my mom. WE? This man spent a whole evening arranging nine-patch segments oh so perfectly given my strict specifications. I would sew, he would press. Talk about love!

on the design wall, Nov 2012

I made the executive decision that my original plan for 30 blocks just wasn't going to happen. I stole some of the HST units from said unmade blocks to construct a border, and would have added another border using background fabric but there wasn't enough of it left. I think the quilt would have looked awesome if the design were floating, but I had the opportunity to quilt it on my aunt's mother's longarm while visiting family over Thanksgiving, so there just wasn't time to order more.

on the longarm, Nov 2012

Oh, and I added some brown! For two reasons, really. My mom wanted more brown, and I think the quilt needed some blocks that "pop" out of the design, since several of the others seem to fade in and out. I grew to love that about the others once I added the brown focus blocks. It gives kind of a modern vibe to a traditional quilt. I also used a brown thrifted bed sheet for the backing and the same fabrics as those added brown blocks to construct a scrappy binding.

swirly quilting, brown stripe backing, scrappy binding, May 2013

Christmas crept up on me and I had to gift-wrap the quilt sans binding, but I did manage to sew the last hand-stitch to finish it while sitting in the car on the side of the road with a flat tire in subzero weather on the last night of the year. Just in time to hand it back to her twelve hours later on her birthday. She's a New Years baby!

mom on her birthday, Jan 2013

Quilt stats:

Name: Bliss Cross Quilt (clever, I know!)

Size: 56" by 68" finished
Focus fabric: Bliss by Bonnie and Camille for Moda
Background fabric: Faded bouquet by Meg Hawkey for Lecien
Batting: 100% cotton low loft
Binding machine sewn to front, hand sewn to back
Pieced and long arm quilted by me

It took just over a year to make and just under a year to finally blog about, but it's FINISHED! So I'm celebrating by linking up with Finish it Up Friday over at Crazy Mom Quilts to celebrate :D

Note: I accidentally hit "publish" instead of "preview" when I wasn't quite done yet, so apologies to those email subscribers who got the in-progress version first. Oops!