Aurifil BOM Raffle Quilt

I have another finish to share!  I finished this quilt at the end of March and shipped it right off to a friend for a raffle at her daughters school.  My friend is PTO president and very involved with ALL the aspects of her children's lives so when she asked if I could make a quilt for the school I immediately jumped on it.  If anyone was deserving of such a thing, it's her!

This large quilt was made using my homeless 2014 Aurifil BOM blocks.  I started these in January of last year and unfortunately only made it through to the August block.  They were fun to make but I didn't have the time to finish the rest of the blocks and to be quite honest, they weren't really speaking to me anymore.

The blocks themselves are coral, peach, and orange with low-volume backgrounds.  Because I was on a deadline to finish it up, this quit is made up of a lot of "make-it-work" moments.  I decided to use my hoarded Nanny Bee in coral print by Heather Ross for a bright and fun background, but the blocks got lost in all the red.  So to make it work I added the green borders around each block.  The layout came about  because I only had 8 blocks to work with and I really wanted to make the quilt a more substantial size.  For the backing I used some on-hand extra wide fabric in a rich purple color.  I also bound the quilt using the Cricket Clover print from the same Heather Ross collection. 

I machine stitched the binding down using a blanket stitch on my Janome.  I figured it would make for a more durable quilt in the long run.  For the label I used a piece of some also long hoarded Heather Ross fabric.  I think this one is called Bicycles I Have Loved.  Another bicycle makes an appearance on the front in the block you can see just off to the left in the picture below.  The label is my favorite part of this quilt!

The best part about this quilt is that my friends daughter loved the quilt so much that they ended up taking it home with them from the fundraiser night.  It now happily lives in their living room!

Find me at MQX on Saturday!

Hello blog quilt world!  I just wanted to pop in really quickly and let you know that I'll be at the Machine Quilters Exposition (MQX) tomorrow, Saturday, April 11th, selling raffle tickets (and also volunteering) for the Northern Lights Quilt Guild raffle quilt.  You can read all about our quilt in this prior post.

I'll be back really soon to share some recent finishes and on going projects but for right now I'm all tied up in training new employees at work and final details to get ready for our quilt show next weekend!

If you are going to be at the show please stop into our table in the lobby to support our local quilt guild!  Happy quilting!  Hope to see your shining, smiling faces soon!

finished 2015 NLQG Raffle quilt.  Tickets are 1 for $1 or 6 for $5

Sunday Stash : VT Shop Hop Haul

This weekend I had the chance to visit two semi-local shops as part of the 2015 Vermont Shop Hop with a local friend.  Living in northern new England it can be difficult to find fabrics that appeal to my more modern color pallet and design ascetic.  I usually purchase fabrics online and make it work for the design I have in mind.  I also believe that this is why I naturally gravitate towards a more scrappy look in my quilts.  However I was able to get some great things yesterday.  First some pictures from the our day.

Waterwheel House Quilt Shop had an amazing array of Kaffe Fasset fabric!
Seriously drool worthy.  There is even more on the wall behind me in this picture!

I just loved this quilt in the book Quilt Talk, by Sam  Hunter.

Gracie, the resident guard dog welcoming party at Waterwheel House Quilt Shop,
was so tired from all that shop hopping!  Luckily they provided us
with snacks to keep us going strong!

I was so excited to see this wall of Cotton + Steel fabrics at Country Treasures
Quilt Shop.  They even had some hard to find prints from the first release!

Right next door to Country Treasures we found this gem with my name on it!
(Back up plan if this whole corporate job thing doesn't work out perhaps??)

It was a fun day!  We took back roads to the first shop and had fun admiring all of the country towns along the way.  We also stopped at the Vermont Country Store on our way home and got to taste test all kinds of yummy cheeses and snacks.  Enough of that though.  You want to see what I brought home with me!

 Waterwheel House has the best bundles.  I pickup up this amazing warm spectrum shot cotton bundle for 20% off.  I also bought the book Quilt Talk.  Waterwheel House always sells their books for 25% off.  That price made it worth it for me.  I can't wait to dive in and start some word piecing!

I also found this amazing 100 Piece charm pack of the Denyse Schmidt Moderns Solids.  I can't even begin to describe how soft these solids are.  I started right in on Saturday afternoon when I got home and started making 1" hexis with them.  If I use the whole pack I'll end up with 400 EPP Hexis!  Eeekkk!  I'm thinking about making a modern hexi quilt, using the tutorial from Modern Handcraft.

This Robert Kaufman fabric is part of the Fusions Ombre Collection.  It will be the backing for the commission quilt i'm working on finishing up this week.  I'll have more details to share about that at a later date.

I used up the last of my Heather Ross Nanny Bee fabric last week on a quilt for a good friends school auction.  I was so excited to find more of it at Waterwheel House!  I also got this Kaffe Fasset 1/8 of a yard cut for super cheap.  Loved the colors!

Finally, at Country Treasures I found these great Cotton + Steel fabrics.  They still had the metallic arrows from the Melody Miller Mustang collection on the bolt.  It's been so hard to find I instantly grabbed it when I saw it.  I also found this lovely and rich Cotton Lawn by Alexia Marcelle's Hatbox collection.  I used some of the lawn in my Two Birds, One Stone quilt and was really impressed with how soft and nice to work with it was.  In a moment of luck they gave me a 1/2 yard free because the bolt had been cut in the middle!  Win!  Finally from the August collection by Sarah Watts I found this cute lion print.  I'm going to use it to make fabric baskets for the locker I share with my Mom at  the gym.

Linking up with Sunday Stash.

Two Birds, One Stone | A finished quilt

Warning this is a picture heavy post!

I was very exited when Adrianne and Anne announced the 2015 Pantone Quilt Challenge using this year's color: Marsala.  A lot of people aren't thrilled with the color but I really like how warm and versatile it is.  Just check your fabric stash, I bet you'll find some as a secondary color is quite a few of your fabrics.

official Marsala Swatch

Luckily for me, the announcement of this year's challenge coincided very nicely with the beginning of a design concept for my local quilt guild's yearly challenge.  And I, being the ever practical and logical person that I am, decided to combine them!

I have been sharing sneak pictures of this quilt since I started working on it but because our local challenge is supposed to be blind voting I couldn't share a picture of the finished quilt...  However, we had our presentation of the challenge quilts on Wednesday and our guild meeting and now I can!

Many thanks to my good friend Jenn and her co-worker Jason for holding up my quilt for me in a few of these pictures!

This quilt uses fabrics from a variety of designers, including Cotton + Steel, Kaffe Fasset, Anna Marie Horner, and many others!  The solid I found closest to the official Marsala swatch was American Made Brand in Brick Red.  Not exact, but close enough for me.  The background is a from Carolyn Friedlander's newest collection, Doe.  It's the Ladder Lines print.  I love how this print gives the whole quilt warmth and is less aggressive than a stark white print would have been.

I quilted on the diagonal on my home machine, a Janome Horizon Memory Craft 8900QCP, using my walking foot and a brandless pink-red thread I picked up last year at Vermont Quilt Festival.  I love the pop of color on the backgrounds and how it blends into the prints.  I also really like the texture it gives the back of the quilt, just enough to be structured but still soft and cuddly.

The background is pieced, half with a nameless print I picked up at a clearance sale last spring and half with this adorable animal faces fabric... blanking on the name of it right now.

I used a fun purple/orange/marsala triangle print... again blanking on the name... and leftover scraps of the American Made Brand brick fabric to bind the quilt.

Despite it's size this quilt, when it's done hanging in our local quilt show, will become a couch quilt for my husband and I.  It measures a hefty 84" x 68"!  My husband gets genuinely upset when he can't find a large enough quilt to cuddle with on the couch so I have been given strict instructions not to make anymore lap quilts!  This ought to fit the bill though.

I'm calling this one: "Two Birds, One Stone"

It uses two different birds in the air blocks, two main color-ways, and will be entered into two different challenge quilt competitions.  You can see my previous progress post on this quilt here: Instagram Progress | Challenge Quilt


Linking up with Caroline at Sew Can She for Show off Saturday.