Frequency - Mini Quilt Finish

I have a fun finish to share with you today.  I have been posting bits and pieces of the quilt on Instagram, but I am excited to show you my finished mini quilt I am calling Frequency.

I made this mini quilt for the EZ Triangle challenge for QuiltCon 2016.  The challenge was to use a little triangle ruler (that doubles as a key chain) to make a quilt.  My idea was to create a graphic design using appliqued triangles.  

My first thought was to go with some Kona white as the background but that seemed to be a little flat.  To give the background a little more interest while still preventing it from becoming too busy, I used some Oakshott fabric scraps I had won from Casey York Designs.  The amount of scraps I had determined the size of the finished quilt (about 21" x 16").

To start, I chopped up the scraps into 4" wide by about 3-8" long and sewed them into strips.  I then sewed the strips together at different angles.  My hope was that the angles in the background paired nicely with the triangle applique.

I made the triangles from Kona pepper and used Heat and Bond lite to attach them to the quilt.  I initially thought to make a sun type pattern with the triangles, but when I was not sold on that design I played around with other designs until I settled on this star-like design.

Next was my favorite part, the quilting.  I must admit that I love tiny quilting.  I find that it relaxing and I love the texture it gives the quilt.  Because the quilt was small, it really did not to take me too much time to complete.  

In the background I quilted each row of piecing with different designs, alternating between pebbles, swirls, and paisley patterns.  I used tiny pebbles in the triangles.  To blend in with the background I used a beige Aurifil thread (2310) and used Aurifil black for the triangles.  Fingers crossed this gets into QuiltCon.

Thanks for dropping by! 

Quilt Stats:

• Finished size: 21" x 16"
• Fabrics: Oakshott fabrics and Kona pepper
• Thread: all 50 wt Aurifil.  2021 (cream) for piecing, 2310 (beige) for quilting background, 2692 (black) for triangles

I am linking up to Link a Finish Friday, Whoop Whoop Friday, Thank Goodness Its Finished Friday, Finish It Up Friday, Fabric Frenzy Friday, and Show Off Saturday @ Sew Can She.

Bright Baby Quilt Finish

I have a fun finish to share with you today, I have named it my Bright Baby Quilt (innovative name right?)

I started this quilt in September  before my little roller skating tumble took me away from the sewing machine for a while.

I was making this baby quilt as a present for some of my sister's friends who are expecting a baby at the beginning of January. The couple had struggled for many years with infertility and so my sister wanted to gift them a bright and bold quilt. They are not finding out the sex of the baby so the quilt had to also be gender neutral. 

I used this jellyroll of FreeSpirit bold solid colors and took out a few of the pinks and purples to make the color palette more gender neutral.

I used the Wishes String Quilt pattern by Karen Vail (of Cascade Quilts) available as a free tutorial on the Moda Bake Shop. The pattern is really cool because you sew the jelly roll strips into a tube and then using a special ironing and cutting trick you wind up with blocks with the white strip centered along the diagonal. 

Here is a picture of my almost 15 year old kitty, Abby, modeling the blocks.

I sewed the blocks together and then added a white border to help control and distortion from quilting (because the blocks have all bias edges).

For the quilting, I kept it simple with some straight line echoing of the diamond shapes and then through the middle of the white stripes.

I am linking up to Link a Finish Friday, Whoop Whoop Friday, Thank Goodness Its Finished Friday, Finish It Up Friday, Fabric Frenzy Friday, and Show Off Saturday @ Sew Can She.

Cake Slices in The Quilter's Day Planner

My great quilty friend Stephanie, who blogs over at Late Night Quilter, just released a Day Planner for 2016 that’s specifically designed for quilters! 

It’s a daily planner that will inspire you to achieve your goals, and organize both your personal life and your quilting life.  I am loving the idea of having my to-do lists for my quilting projects, home, and work life all in one place instead of in various calendars online, paper calendars, and post-it notes galore.

Plus the planner has graph paper to sketch out new quilt ideas for when you are sitting in the waiting room for your daughter's dance class (I get a surprising number of quilt ideas in that waiting room :) 

What's Inside:

• Monthly calendars
• Weekly calendars
• Project planning pages
• Swatch saver
• Graph paper
• Free motion quilting practice pages
• Goal-setting prompts
• 8 full quilt patterns from amazing designers (Cheryl Brickey (Meadow Mist Designs), Yvonne Fuchs (Quilting Jetgirl), Amy Garro (13 Spools), Lee Heinrich (Freshly Pieced), Mandy Leins (Mandalei Quilts), Pat Sloan (Pat Sloan), Kitty Wilkin (Night Quilter) and Stephanie (Late Night Quilter)).
• 52 original quilt block designs from awesome quilt bloggers
• Gorgeous artwork pull-outs by the talented Kelsey Boes from Lovely and Enough
• Reference section for quilting calculations and common construction techniques

Did you see the list above?  In addition to all of the calendar and sketching goodness, the Quilt Planner comes with 8 full quilt patterns!  Including one from me :)

I have the huge honor of my new pattern Cake Slices included in the planner (and I am very excited to be able to show you some of my secret sewing I was doing in September).

Cake Slices - A Layer Cake Friendly Lap Quilt

Cake Slices is a layer cake friendly pattern in a lap size.  For my quilt I used Hello Darling by Bonnie and Camille for Moda combined with Kona Navy as the background.  The design is very beginner friendly with few seams to match and uses just 16 layer cake slices to make a whole lap sized quilt!  

Many thanks to Cynthia (who blogs at Quilting is More Fun than Housework) who helped me pick a quilting pattern and thread color.  I tend to prefer thread colors that blend into the fabric (my number one tip for hiding mistakes).  I tried all sorts of thread colors on the quilt, but most looked pretty bad against dark blue background (which is a good portion of surface area of the quilt).  

Cynthia made this quilt back in June using another of Bonnie and Camille's lines with a dark blue background and a dark blue quilting thread.  She advised that as long as the quilting was not too dense, it would look good.  I used an open loop/hook pattern on the quilt with a little larger scale than I normally quilt with and I am super happy with it!  The quilting blends in so well in the background and gives the quilt a nice soft texture.

You can now find Cake Slices in my pattern shop and Etsy:

Meadow Mist Designs Pattern Shop

Cake Slices - digital pattern

Cake Slices - printed pattern

Etsy Shop

Cake Slices - digital pattern

The Quilter's Planner has everything you need to organize your life, plan and track your sewing projects and be inspired to create something beautiful every day! The book is spiral bound so it lays nice and flat, is approximately 8 x 11, made in the USA, and will be shipped in time for the holidays.

Stephanie launched the planner on IndieGoGo on Tuesday to fund the printing of the planner. If you order a planner, you are guaranteed to receive a planner (no worry about the project meeting a funding goal). Stephanie has a wonderful video and more information on her website and IndieGoGo site, please take a minute and check them out :)

 

Here are just a few more images of the planner...

You can now find Cake Slices in my pattern shop and Etsy:

Meadow Mist Designs Pattern Shop

Cake Slices - digital pattern

Cake Slices - printed pattern

Etsy Shop

Cake Slices - digital pattern

Throw Back Thursday

Because no sewing is going on at my house right now, I thought it would be a good day to show one of my before-blogging-days quilts...about 3 years ago.  This was actually my first commissioned quilt made for a friend of my sister using my old Singer sewing machine.

This quilt is a perfect lesson on what not to do in a commission quilt, I think I made every mistake in the book at least once.

First off, it was my first time trying to pull fabrics and colors for a client.  To make it more difficult, the client was all the way over in France.  With the time change and my client being very non-committal on colorways, this process was long and overly drawn out.  I don't know how many hours I spent sending her pictures of sample quilts and quilt mockups to show her different color schemes.

Once we had finally figured out the color scheme (Vintage Modern by Bonnie and Camille for Moda Fabrics), I let her pick basically any pattern she found that she liked.  She selected Open Stars by Cozy Quilt which is a great, but time-consuming pattern.  I had already given her a basic estimate on price before the pattern was selected (yes I was an idiot) and so I kept the price the same even though my hours making the quilt just went up significantly.  In addition, the quilt comes in basically every size except for twin which is what she wanted, but I figured that it would not be too hard to change up the number of blocks to wind up with a twin.

I ordered the pattern (and the ruler) and then had to redo all of the fabric requirements and cutting instructions for a twin (taking more time to do this than I would care to admit).

After finally finishing the quilt top and quilting the quilt using a stipple pattern, I then made a bonus pillow with some of the scraps.

So long story short, when I added up all of my materials and hours spent on the quilt I estimated that I made between $1.50 and $1.75 an hour on this quilt  :(

Looking on the positive side, I can say that I really enjoyed making the quilt, at least I did not make enough mistakes that I actually lost money on the quilt (though I came close), and most importantly I never made this mistake with pricing a commission quilt again!

Another positive was that from making a 100+ flying geese I had tons and tons of tiny half square triangles left over.  I sewed a bunch of them together into a bag for my mother-in-laws birthday.

I am linking (for the first time) to Throwback Thursday @ A Quarter Inch from the Edge

MQG Challenge Quilt Finished

I am excited that today I have a finish to share with you!  Here is my finish (just in time) for the Riley Blake Challenge from the Modern Quilt Guild.  

The rules for the challenge were as follows:

• Make something fantastic that is quilted.
• Make something you’ve never done before.
• Challenge yourself to learn something new.
• Use only Riley Blake Cottage Garden fabrics and coordinating Riley Blake basics and solids.

An equilateral triangle quilt has been on my to-do list forever and after I saw that some of the fabrics had a repeating triangle print, I was sold.  In addition to making a triangle quilt for the first time, this was also the first time I had ever bound a quilt without 90 degree corners.

I figured out how to design a triangle quilt in EQ and started playing with ideas. (Here is my tutorial on how to design triangle quilts using EQ7.)  The quilt actually came together much easier than I thought it would, I was always so afraid of sewing non-square or rectangle pieces, but it turned out that my fear was completely unfounded.  (Here is my in-progress post.)

I knew that for the quilting in the background areas, I wanted to echo the hexagon shape formed by the print fabrics and then fill in the remaining space with a dense back and forth quilting.  I also wanted to mimic the quilting from the print areas in some of the background triangles.

Figuring out the quilting for the print areas was more difficult.  I first started to quilt a star pattern within the print triangles but the quilting was difficult to see and not dense enough compared to the background.  I put out a call for help on Instagram (@MeadowMistDesigns) and got some wonderful suggestions.  I wound up using a ribbon candy design that not only looked good, but took much less time and had less threads to bury than my original plan.

I used Lorna's @ Sew Fresh Quilts tutorial on binding inside corners to figure out how to bind the quilt and while it is far from perfect, it turned out pretty decent.

The quilt finished at about 48" x 48", a perfect size for a new baby.  I have a new niece or nephew due this December and if the baby is a girl, I will be sending this quilt off to her.

Here are just some more pictures, including the pieced back, to celebrate the quilt's finish.
 

I am linking up to Link a Finish Friday, Whoop Whoop Friday, Thank Goodness Its Finished Friday, Finish It Up Friday, Fabric Frenzy Friday, and Show Off Saturday @ Sew Can She.

The MQG challenge quilt was also my July goal for ALYOF. (my goal setting post was here)

MQG QuiltCon Challenge Quilt - Blogger's Quilt Festival

I am happy to have finished my QuiltCon Challenge quilt I am calling "Oh the Places You'll Go" in time for the Biannual Blogger's Quilt Festival.

I decided to take part in The Modern Quilt Guild's QuiltCon Michael Miller Spring Cotton Couture Challenge.  For the Cotton Couture challenge we were sent 7 fat eighths of the spring cotton couture fabrics and had to make a quilt using only Michel Miller solids for the quilt top (but we could use Michael Miller solids or prints for the binding and backing).

For this challenge, I decided to try two new techniques: curved piecing and quilting in a concentric circle.  I kept the size of the quilt small (the quilt wound finished at about the size of a fat quarter) which made the quilt quick and fun to make.

I cut the fat eighths into strips with varying widths from 1" to 1.5" and sewed the strips into blocks using of two alternating colors.  I thought the blocks looked like a wonderful fabric bouquet before ironing :)

I sewed 3-4 blocks together to get rows of stripes.

Next, I cut I used curved piecing to piece the quilt top.  The curved piecing went pretty well, I went very slowly with no pinning and I only had one small place where I had to bring out the seam ripper.  When I saw the groupings of colored stripes it reminded me of one of my favorite Dr. Seuss books, "Oh the Places You'll Go".

With all of the curved piecing I thought that a spiral type of quilting would look good.  As I have already tried spiral quilting, I decided to try concentric circle quilting for the first time.  At first I thought about having one concentric circle across the whole quilt top, but then I decided that I would add multiple concentric circles so I could have the interference patterns between the circles.

I love the texture of the quilting against the curved piecing.

I even made a fun pincushion using some of the quilt top trimmings.

This quilt was a fun learning experience.  Fingers crossed it will get into QuiltCon :)

Quilt Stats:

Fabrics: Spring Cotton Couture by Michael Miller
Pattern: Improv strip piecing and curved piecing
Quilting: Concentric Circles
Batting: Warm & White
Finished Size: 20" x 18"

I am linking up the Amy's Blogger Quilt Festival in the Mini Quilt Division.  My other entry is Vintage Stars and can be found here.

If you have stopped by my blog for the first time from the quilt festival thank you!  You can find some of my finishes, tutorials, and mystery quilt-a-long on the tabs at the top of the page.  I am also on Instagram as MeadowMistDesigns.

I am linking up to Link a Finish Friday, Whoop Whoop Friday, Thank Goodness Its Finished Friday, Finish It Up Friday, Fabric Frenzy Friday,  Sewjo @ My Go Go Life, and Show Off Saturday @ Sew She Can.

Modern Quilt Guild Challenge Quilt Finished

I am very happy to show you my finished MQG Challenge quilt today, Courthouse Petals. The challenge was to create a quilted article using some fat eighths of Petal Pinwheels (and piece of fabric from another line) combined with any other Michael Miller print and/or any solid.

In the beginning, I was trying to design a quilt using only the Petal Pinwheels collection by Michael Miller.  I found this difficult as the value of the prints are all very similar so the quilts I designed in EQ7 all looked really flat.  I decided to add in the Kona Coal which brought depth to the quilt and good contrast to the Petal Pinwheels fabrics (I also purchased additional Petal Pinwheels fabrics for additional yardage and print variation).

My work-in-progress posts on the quilt can be found here and here.

After going through tons and tons of different designs, I settled on taking a classic courthouse block and updating it.  I alternated the prints and the coal creating a strong contrast and geometric shape.  I also varied the width of the different block layers, made the block really large (finishing at about 68" x 68"), and added some very dense quilting.

For the quilting, I wanted to add a lot of texture to the gray areas so I decided on a dense back and forth quilting design in a matching gray thread with lines are a little less than 1/4" apart.  Because there is more than 2 yards of Kona Coal used in the quilt, the dense back and forth quilting took me almost 11 hours.  For the print area, I used an off-white thread to blend in as best as possible and quilted using a small scale meandering pattern.  

This quilt was the first time I had not used Warm & Natural, but used a bamboo batting called Nature-Fil by Fairfield.  I was very pleased with the batting and how soft the quilt still is after all of that tight quilting.  I will be doing a full review on my experiences with the batting once I have a chance to wash the quilt to test it washability.

Here are some more pictures of the finish...

Thanks for taking a look!  This was a very fun challenge to take part in and I have enjoyed seeing everyone's creations.  It is amazing how starting with the same fabrics, quilters came up with such different ideas.

Quilt stats:
Design: Modern variation on a court house block
Fabrics:  Petal Pinwheel by Michael Miller and Kona Coal
Size: 68" x 68"
Quilted: Dense back and forth quilting in the gray areas using Aurifil 1246
               Small scale meandering in the patterned areas using Aurifil 2021
               on my Bernina 710

I am linking up to Link a Finish Friday, Whoop Whoop Friday, Thank Goodness Its Finished Friday, Finish It Up Friday, Fabric Frenzy Friday,  Sewjo @ My Go Go Life, and Show Off Saturday @ Sew She Can.