Happy Friday! Hope your week has been a good one.  I’ve been working hard helping my friend move Montgomery Quilt Company to it’s new location! So far I’ve only been trusted with the painting – and after seeing how well I’ve done with that, I can see why!  hahaha. The new store is about twice as big as the old one so I’m excited to see all of the new fabrics.

There will be an open house on Tuesday, February 13 to celebrate the move! Come check it out at 301 Prairie St in Montgomery TX, starting at 10. There will be a huge sale, a make ‘n take activity, refreshments, and lots of socialization. I can’t wait!

Since I’ve been working hard, I’m in the mood for an easy quilt pattern. I found the perfect one from Andover Fabric. Meet Hothouse Flowers. It’s fat quarter friendly and is a great 76×76 size.

I love that it is fat quarter friendly and the pieces are pretty large – sometimes I get a fat quarter and really struggle to cut it up because I love the fabric in it’s large size. The construction of this quilt is columns of flying geese with a sliver of sashing along the long side. If you wished to make the quilt larger, you would merely increase the size of the geese (you are only limited by the size of your fat quarter).

Whip this quilt up and brighten up someone’s dreary February (or your own!)

Hothouse Flowers

Have a great weekend!
Becky

Yet another week has just flown by! I’ve been working on a bunch of different quilting projects, plus a couple of life projects too.

For quilting projects, I’m in the middle of the Southern Stars quilt pattern by She Quilts A Lot. As you can see, it’s a cute and fairly straightforward pattern. If only there weren’t 288 stitch and flips to make for the little stars!!!

I’m also trying out Anna Graham’s Maker Tote. I’ve made quite a few of her other bags and loved them all, so I’m anticipating that this will be as enjoyable as the other projects. Right now I’ve picked out fabric for a couple of totes and am waiting on my separating zippers to arrive. I’ve never sewed with a separating zipper before but don’t anticipate any issues. In March, I’ll be leading a class on this project, so if you’ve ever wanted to get into bag making but are intimidated by the zippers, handles, and hardware this is a great opportunity to learn those skills. There’s a huge variety of bag and totes (even free patterns) out there and once you are confident about the fundamentals, you can make any bag.

This week’s free pattern is a beauty from Ella Blue. If you’re not familiar with this fabric line, it’s a family-owned business out of Australia and the fabrics are printed in Japan. I love their basics, but don’t see the fabric very often here.

As you can see, there’s nothing terribly complicated about this pattern – it’s pairs of HSTs arranged in a chevron-style pattern. The quilt finishes at 60×60″, but if you wanted something larger, you could make your HSTs larger than the called-for 6.5″. The pattern is 10×10 HSTs – so 100 total. Nothing too traumatic and totally doable if you’re whipping up a quilt on short notice. However, the impact of this baby is impressive and I also love the potential for using SCRAPS, although it would take some careful planning to get the rainbow effect.

Firecracker

Have a great weekend!

Becky

In the continuing spirit of the upcoming holiday, I thought I’d post another Valentine’s quilt. This quilt was brought to my attention by Nicolette, who writes on the blog Dutch Comfort. How sweet is this? If you’ve never checked out her blog, you should definitely head on over. She’s got lots of great work!

This pattern is a free one by Cloud 9 Fabrics and is called Sweethearts. It is a generous 48×60″ and is fat quarter friendly – hurray!!!

The construction method is not terribly complicated – you start with a rectangle of color and use a stitch and flip method to take slices off the corners to create each half of the heart. This is very conducive to chain piecing and is definitely a weekend quilt. You could also easily upsize the colored rectangles to get larger hearts and/or increase the number of hearts per row or the number of rows to get a larger quilt.

A handmade quilt definitely tells someone how you feel about them – but in case that wasn’t enough, a heart motif should definitely get the message across!

Sweethearts-Quilt

Have a great weekend!

Becky

After a 5 day weekend due to snow (ice) days, Friday has arrived very quickly! Not that I’m complaining – it’s always nice to be pleasantly surprised by a weekend.

This week’s free pattern is from Art Gallery Fabric.

 

It’s called Acoustic and features AGF’s Raise the Volume fabric line. I particularly like the Measured Tempo and Waves of Echo fabrics. What I’m not a huge fan of are the Y-seams that come with this pattern. I’d probably take the plunge and do it with English Paper Piecing in order to make sure that I got those beautiful corners correctly nestled. However, part of the quilting journey has to be about trying something new and stretching boundaries, and this quilt isn’t outrageously large or complicated – so maybe I should try the new technique!

Acoustic_instructions

Have a great weekend!

Becky

 

 

One more weekend to go until Christmas! Are you in a sewing frenzy or sitting back and enjoying the approaching holiday? I began and finished my only Christmas sewing project today – a pillowcase for my youngest. We went to the craziest fabric shop this summer – SR Harris near Minneapolis – and each of the kids picked out fabrics for me to sew into a project for them. I made two fleece blankets right away and stalled for months on the pillowcase.  It’s nice to have another project off the to-do list!

With one project off my list, of course Friday rolls around and adds another! Kona released a bunch of new patterns to go with their 2018 Color of the Year – Tiger Lily. This pattern is called The Giant Pineapple and the finished quilt measures 52″x52″. That’s pretty big for a pineapple! I’ve only made this block for one quilt previously, and they were about 3″ finished – and paper pieced – so this is a very different construction experience.

It might be complicated to trim each round, and with only one diagram in the instructions there will definitely be a little trial and error in the process. But you’ll be left with a bold, beautiful, usefully sized quilt. If you do your own quilting, using a solid palate like this provides an opportunity to go wild!

TheGiantPineapple

Happy Holidays!

Becky

 

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Today’s Free Pattern Friday is actually one of my own inventions. It started innocently enough – I thought I’d be able to whip it up in no time and have something to blog about and show off in a day or two. As always, reality is more complex but I had fun and learned a few things along the way.

I started out with a general plan for making paper snowflakes out of fabric. I was worried about fraying and how to appliqué them onto the background but thought that I could solve that problem by using Steam A Seam 2 Lite. Solving the issues that came up with this step was the largest contributor to the complexity of this quilt!

It turns out that I had only ever folded my paper snowflakes in quarters. This worked when I was a child, but did not quite achieve the intricate snowflakes that I was trying to achieve in this project. As a result, I had to find the best instructions for creating a 6 point paper snowflake. My favorite was at Instructables. The most complicated part of the process is the final folding of the triangle into thirds, but there are photos that should get you through this step without too much drama.

After my first attempt, it was clear that the Steam A Seam 2 Lite wasn’t going to work at all. The paper backing was just one too many layers when all of the folds were taken into account. I ended up choosing Shape Flex 101 because I did need some fray protection and an additional layer to keep the background of the quilt from showing through the snowflake.  It was also clear that I needed to add basting stitches to the snowflake as I was folding it in order to keep the layers from shifting as I was cutting out the design. I added the basting stitches at the second triangle and tri-fold stages.

There are so many different patterns for snowflakes on Pinterest to choose from that I won’t provide you with any links. You can also create your own design. I found that it was very difficult to cut too many curves and impossible to make cuts that didn’t originate at one of the edges. Sharp scissors of several different sizes are an absolute must!!

The background for your masterpiece can be as difficult or simple as you wish to make it. I was shooting for 40″x60″, but due to what my husband says is a love affair with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (which I think means that I jump into cutting fabric without much planning), I ended up with a somewhat smaller quilt.

I knew that I wanted to use Bonnie & Camille’s red stripe fabric from the Good Life. Isn’t it beautiful?

Unfortunately it’s not on the bias, which is what I really wanted. I thought it would be easy to create a bias stripe background but after some thinking and lots of ripping, I ended up with two different shaped backgrounds that were essentially the same size! So, I laughed and continued onward.

After I had created my background and perfected my snowflake technique, everything went together quite quickly, Since I had used SF 101 instead of a double sided fusible material, I did need to use fabric glue to baste the snowflakes to the background and then used a VERY tight meander to quilt the whole quilt. The backing is a comfy red dot flannel and the binding matches the snowflakes.

In summary, the quilt instructions are:

Create a background of approximately 40″x60″

– if you like the red stripe but not creating your own bias, you can try this fabric to achieve the same look without the drama

Create three white snowflakes

– my starting squares were 20″, 15″, and 13″

– back your white fabric with Shape Flex 101 or similar fusible material

– make sure you baste your folded triangle before cutting out the snowflake pattern

Glue baste snowflakes onto background

Quilt thoroughly 

– this is the only thing that will keep your snowflake attached after it goes through the wash, so do a good job

Bind

Enjoy

I hope you have a wonderful weekend!

Becky

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