Maze + Vale stripe maze

Photos recovered! This was my second finish of 2017 – another one from January when I was feeling motivated to finish up old quilts (that feeling has since passed, unfortunately!).  This one hasn’t actually been waiting too long to be finished – I made it back in June, according to the previous post about this quilt.

It’s another quilt using my very favorite Maze + Vale prints. They’re hand printed by Leslie Keating in Australia and I keep a very special stash of them. Periodically I like to pull them out and make up a quilt out of them (previous Maze + Vale quilts here, here, and here). This time I pulled the cooler colors – lots of grays, blues, blacks and a few pops of red, and paired them with coordinating solids and a few solid-looking prints.

I made up a bunch of striped blocks of all different sizes and then pieced them together like a puzzle at the end. It’s a little tricky to get them to all come together nicely, but I also find it to be a fun challenge.

I started quilting straight lines diagonally, and was going to do the same in both directions, but ended up doing all the lines in one direction and just a few in the other direction and liking the way it looked.

For the backing I finally used up this long-hoarded piece of lawn, and I love that I finally get to see it in use. I always thought I’d made a top out of it, but never got around to it. I’m glad I stumbled across it while looking for a backing!

I bound it in a few of the blue/black colors of the Add It Up print by Cotton + Steel. I love this print as a binding, and was happy that several of the colors paired so well with the colors in this quilt.

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Also, thanks so much for all the name suggestions for my Kona solids quilt! I appreciate the help, and I’m so glad to hear you’re interested in a quick tutorial. I’m working on putting one together now for you. Stay tuned!

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Posted in Fabric, Finished Quilts, Posts about Quilts, Quilt Blocks, Quilts | Tagged , , , , , | 8 Comments

go big!

I’ve been thinking about this quilt for a long time now, ever since seeing a vintage version at an antique shop a while back. Then I realized that there’s also another similar version in one of my favorite books, Roderick Kiracofe’s Unconventional & Unexpected (here’s a link to an image of the quilt, which is called Mosaic Rose). Despite loving both versions made up with patterned fabrics, I really wanted to see mine in all solids. I finally decided to stop obsessing about it in my mind and just start working on one of my own!

The kind people at Robert Kaufman sent me the 30 (I tried to narrow it down, but just couldn’t!) 1/4 yard cuts of Kona solids that I requested and I immediately set to work.

I’m not sure if there’s a tutorial out there for this particular block – I cut and sewed mine how I thought it made the most sense (and in a way so I didn’t have to individually piece all those little squares!) and the blocks were surprisingly fun to put together. So much so that I very quickly decided that I should go big and make it king sized.

Once I decided to go big, I felt no need to limit my number of solids and very quickly added at least another 30 colors for variety (there are so many Kona solids that it’s hard to limit oneself) . It’s sort of surprising how much fabric you need for a king sized quilt! I had to reorder twice to have enough for my 64 blocks.

I am absolutely in love with the finished quilt top. I definitely will not be quilting this one on my own – it’s big! – but I did attempt to take these photos on my own after a big snowstorm. It involved shoveling paths and standing on ladders and freezing fingers and a wet quilt and in the end you not only can’t see the entire quilt, but you also can’t even really tell that’s snow. Oh well. Better photos to come once it’s finished, hopefully!

Anyone interested in a tutorial? As I said, there very well may be many tutorials out there for this exact block, so let me know if you’ve found one, but if not, I’m happy to show you how I constructed my blocks.

p.s. it also needs a name, so if you have any suggestions I’d love to hear!

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scattered hearts

Another old finish! This is the third for 2017, though only the second that I’ve shown (still have yet to take the time to locate the photos for that second quilt finish, though I will – hopefully soon!). When looking through the closet of quilt tops, I pulled this one immediately, thinking it would be good to have a deadline.

I already had backing selected – Anna Maria Horner’s velveteen in a perfect red/pink color combo – so it was really quite easy to get it sandwiched and ready to quilt. Then, procrastinator that I am, I let it sit on the side of the sewing table while I ignored it and happily went about starting new projects.

This past weekend I realized we were expecting a snow storm and immediately was bummed that I wouldn’t have anything to photograph. I remembered this one, and quickly went to work doing some quick and easy quilting. The crosshatch quilting was pretty quick, and while I originally wanted to do more dense quilting (since there are quite a lot of seams – I was reminded just now when reading my previous post about this quilt that all those seams were due to a cutting/sewing error- oops!). Anyway, I’m not too worried about it, especially since it’s one I’m keeping.

But anyway, I’m sure you’ve seen similar hearts floating around on the internet recently. Allison’s heart pattern makes the perfect heart day quilt, and as a bonus, they’re quick and easy to sew! I made mine out of all my beautiful scraps of Umbrella Prints fabrics, and I love it. I’ve had many of those smaller scraps in my stash for many years, so it’s especially fun to put them all to use in a quilt.

I found the perfect binding in another Umbrella Prints fabric from one of their later lines, and I think it suits the quilt nicely. I even managed to get the binding all hand sewn Saturday night so I could snap a few photos while it snowed!

Happy Valentine’s Day!

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p.s. the velveteen backing makes this quilt heavier than usual, so I used a really low loft batting – Quilters Dream Request

Posted in Fabric, Finished Quilts, Posts about Quilts, Quilts | Tagged , , , , | 21 Comments