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

all solids!

Posted on March 22, 2019

I’ve been a bit obsessed with the making of this quilt lately! It started with my desire to use up some of the scraps that I seem to have bag upon bag of, plus a little inspiration from an old quilting book (I’ll post a photo next time I blog about this one), plus my love of string blocks and foundation piecing. I know it’s not everyone’s favorite, but for me, I find the process of sewing strings to the paper and creating these blocks to be relaxing and mindless.

So mindless, perhaps that I went about blithely sewing these blocks, all the while kind of noticing that the strips weren’t covering the paper in exactly the same way each time, but not caring enough to do anything about it. After making 168 blocks (which should put this in the twin size range, I hope!), I started sewing them together and then realized what I should have realized earlier… being off that tiny bit was causing a big problem in getting the strips to line up when sewn in this manner.

It took some pulling and, ahem, shall we say persuading? to get things to kinda line up (at least lined up enough for my liking!). Consequently the entire top is a bit wonky and distorted, but I’m really hoping that it all works out in the end. Fingers crossed, cause I’m quite in love with this one, and really wouldn’t want to have to take it apart at this point!

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a feather bed quilt

Posted on February 21, 2019

I don’t typically make quilts following patterns. Something to do, perhaps, with my inability to show up prepared? I like to procrastinate, to kind of just hope that things will work out, so reading through a quilt pattern with lists of needed items and all those pieces to cut ahead of time always puts me off. I prefer to hope I’ll have enough fabric rather than measuring, to hope that when I put the pieces together I’ll end up with something I like. Maybe not knowing the outcome keeps it interesting? Or perhaps I secretly enjoy having to improvise when I nearly always end up running out of a key fabric. I have a feeling I could learn a few tricks and shortcuts by following patterns, but being stubborn, I insist on figuring it out on my own (and often taking a convoluted route to get there). Perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned here?

I digress…

Back to this quilt. This is Anna Maria Horner’s free Feather Bed quilt pattern, which I started way back in 2014. I actually enjoyed making this one, despite taking so long to finish it! The feathers come together quite quickly. (I didn’t follow the pattern as it was written though, and ended up wasting a bunch of fabric. Lesson learned)

I was going to tell you that the colors were based on that great Liberty of London floral, but I just now read through my old posts about this quilt and discovered that was not the case. I’m not sure how the color scheme came about then, as these colors are not my usual picks — something I found myself thinking as I was quilting it!

I decided to quilt it with double straight lines on the diagonal. I wish there was a faster way to quilt double straight lines… I love the look, but hate that it takes twice as long!

We went down to the waterfront last weekend to try to get some photos. I didn’t realize that the lake was partially frozen (some years it freezes, sometimes it does not), so I was surprised to see a few people out there skating. I called out to ask how thick the ice was and they replied nonchalantly “oh, about 3 inches”. I don’t know about you, but that just doesn’t seem thick enough for me! (Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t… I just know that I don’t want to take a chance!)

So despite my love of ice photos (here, here and here and here on solid ice), I opted for ‘in front of the ice’ photos for this one. No one wants to fall into ice cold lake water in February.

Get in line! – a Heather Ross quilt

Posted on February 12, 2019

Any Heather Ross fans out there? (Ha! What kind of a question is that?!) If you’ve been reading for a while, you know that I’ve long had a love affair for Heather’s designs. Her Lightning Bugs & other mysteries line was nearly gone when I first started sewing, and I quickly snagged whatever I could find. They still hold a special spot in my heart as being some of the fabrics that initially drew me into quilting (and also into the thrill of chasing down hard to find fabrics!)

Luckily, I didn’t have to chase down these prints for this quilt. The kind people at Windham fabrics were so nice to send me a bundle of Heather’s Kinder line right before it was available and I quickly got to work making something with it (earlier post about this quilt here).

After pulling out my favorites, I noticed how nicely they paired with my favorite prints from Heather’s Briar Rose line so I decided this quilt should be a combination of all my favorites. I just love the colors together, and then the prints themselves… apples and roses and frogs… bumblebees and strawberries and paperdolls.

I decided to back this one in the frog print from the Kinder line, but oops, failed to buy quite enough, so improvised with some left over scraps for one corner. A bit of straight line quilting and this one was done!

I had trouble finding a binding – I couldn’t find a solid that worked, and another print from one of these lines seemed like it would be too busy. I finally found a purple print by Denyse Schmidt in my stash that I think worked well. Plus, Denyse and Heather always seem to go together somehow.

And finally, after carrying this quilt around in the car with me for weeks, Morgan spotted this barn/sugarhouse/store? that appeared closed (nothing worse than people staring while I’m trying to take quilt photos!) on our way to take the kids skiing this past weekend.

Yay! I can finally show it to you. Photographing quilts used to be the easy part, but lately it’s the part that’s holding me up from getting these online. I suppose a backlog of projects is a good problem to have though…