FITF: Film in the Fridge | modern quilts, clothing, fabric, and photos

couture angles

Posted on November 6, 2012

Yay, solids! I don’t often make quilts out of just solids – somehow even when I intend to just use solids, those prints sneak their way in the mix – but this quilt reminds me that all solids can be quite fun!

This one is made up of all my favorite Michael Miller Cotton Couture colors. I’ve been using a lot of these solids lately, and I really love them. There are some great colors (though I wish there were more!) and the feel is really nice – so smooth and soft. I selected a number of colors and then randomly paired them to make up these half square triangles.

On the back I used a neutral along with a colorful strip of many of the colors from the front.

I wasn’t sure how to quilt it, so this one sat for a while, all sandwiched and ready. I considered some straight lines, or maybe some angular free motion quilting, but in the end found my inspiration once again from Angela Walters. Near the end of her book she shows how you can quilt simple arcs to fill irregularly sized blocks, but I thought it might be fun to see if I could quilt it as an allover continuous design, making a series of large flowers.

Due to the size of my blocks, each flower is quilted over four half square triangle units, so it definitely ended up being a large scale quilting design. I like it on this quilt, since it also keeps it nice and soft without too much quilting, but I think next time I’d definitely want to go with a smaller grid, and consequently smaller flowers.

So I’m thinking this will become my couch quilt for the winter. Now that it’s dark so early, I really need some nice happy colors to keep me sane through another long Vermont winter!

a traveling quilt update

Posted on November 2, 2012

It’s fun to take a little break from my projects to work on the latest traveling quilt to arrive at my doorstep! This month I had Heather‘s quilt, and it’s one that I’ve loved from the start! She chose to use these great prints from Cloud 9’s Miscellany line, paired with lots of great neutrals, and she made up the pretty herringbone block you see in the upper right corner.

So many great additions have been made, and for a while I just left this up on my design wall as art. I wasn’t in a huge hurry to have it leave my house, but ultimately I thought I should stop holding it hostage and pass it along to its next stop. I added the section on the left – showcasing a few of the prints in those wedges, along with some more patchwork neutrals in between. And then at the end I decided to add a narrow border in cream along the side and bottom to give a little separation for all that patchwork. I hope you like it, Heather!

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Also, I want to give a big welcome to my newest sponsor, The Intrepid Thread! Julie carries all the great new collections by your favorites, such as Melody Miller, Heather Ross, Anna Maria Horner, and so many others!

The Intrepid Thread is a family owned and operated business run by owner, Julie Dueck. I particularly love how quickly orders are shipped, and how carefully and nicely they’re packaged! Oh, and Julie can fit up to 9 yards of quilting weight cotton in a Flat Rate Envelope, which always makes me happy!

Julie just arrived home from quilt market and I noticed that she’s holding a pretty sweet giveaway for a bundle of Lizzy House’s upcoming collection. The giveaway ends tonight, so if you haven’t already, head on over here to add your name! I know that I’d love to get my hands on these fabrics before they’re actually available!

Posted in Fabric, Posts about Quilts, Quilt Blocks | Tagged cloud 9, improv, miscellany, traveling quilt | 8 Comments

Fall is in the air – a cross quilt

Posted on October 29, 2012

It was a bit of a race to get this quilt finished, as I wanted to include some beautiful fall leaves in my finished quilt photos. I’m pleased to say I won – while most leaves in our area had already fallen, I managed to find a little section of woods that still had some nice foliage!

This quilt was made out of the stack of fabrics I pulled here, and as I said before, while that stack originally read spring-like to me, once I made it up into this quilt it really ended up having a nice fall feel to it.

To add to that fall feel, I decided to quilt this leaf pattern, which is a little twist on Elizabeth’s Dogwood quilting pattern – a definite favorite of mine (yes, I may have mentioned that a time or two!). Anyway, I love the way she uses a grid for the quilting and started thinking about how I could use the grid to come up with a pattern to quilt leaves with a continuous quilting line. I did several drawings before I came up with this one, and I’m so pleased with it. I intended to draw out an example of how I quilted it, but didn’t get it done in time for this post. So perhaps you’ll see that as an upcoming post!

I guess I failed to get a full shot of the backing, but it’s mostly this brown/tan solid, with a pieced strip along the middle. I love seeing all the quilting on the mostly solid backing, and I hope you can get a sense of that, despite the late afternoon autumn lighting in the photo above.

I debated a bit on the binding – the obvious choice would have been one of the solids I used on the front, but I wanted the binding to stand out, so auditioned a few different solids, including a few shades of pink/purple. One almost got my vote, but in the end I felt this gold color (cotton couture cinnamon) really added an extra shot of a fall color to this quilt.