Holy Quilt Along Batman!

So along with all the list, resolutions, and goals popping up all over the internet for 2012 there are also a ton of new quilt alongs to get those creative juices flowing.  Have you seen them?  Are you looking for something to do?  Do you need a fun project to jump start your 2012 sewing?  I'm not going to claim this to be a comprehensive list because I am sure I have missed some.  If you know of a quilt along I've left out please leave a link in the comments.  I always love to check them out when I can.

Jeni and Megan are hosting this fun little quilt along.  The first post on choosing fabrics went up today.  I am thinking this would be a great opportunity to make a child size quilt to complete the goal of making more quilts to donate.  I love the solid colors she used in the button but I am sure some fun prints would look equally as amazing.

Rachel is also currently hosting a quilt along.  Now this little ditty is more like a support group for scrap addicts.  The goal is to finish a quilt made from scraps by March.  It can even be a project you started a long time ago.  But of course their are tons of new ideas and inspiration over in the flickr pool as well.

This is a fun little quilt along I just happened to stumble across.  To be honest I'm not sure where I first saw it but I'm super excited about this one.  There was a mock up in Echo and Heath that was just amazing.  So I am pretty sold that I am going to order those fabrics to make this quilt for a dear friend for her 2012 Christmas/Birthday gift.  They are both in December and I figure that should give me plenty of time to finish this.  It's pretty massive at 80 by 80 but I've been told it is super easy and will go together quickly.

This quilt along being hosted by Shelia looks like a lot of fun.  In fact my mom and I have Zippity Doo Dah fabric we ordered to make 4th of July Picnic Quilts with but our original plan didn't turn out so I am thinking this quilt along might be the perfect plan for using those fabrics and actually getting our 4th of July Quilts done.  Maybe we can even finish them in time to use them this year.  We have a neighborhood picnic each year on the 4th of July and it's bring your own seating.

So there you have it four fun and exciting quilt alongs.  I'm sure there are many more out there these are just a few that I've seen popping up over the last little bit and thought I would share with you.  All of these pictures have links back to pages with more information as well so be sure to check them out.  And remember if you have more to share please just link them up in the comments.  I'd love to hear about them.

****Edited to add****

I don't know how I managed to forget this one in my list yesterday but Elizabeth is also hosting a Sparkle Punch Quilt Along.  I loved this quilt from the start I was contemplating how to make a quilt top based on this quilt but with a lot of negative space when she announced the quilt along.  I'm planning on using a gray and blue bundle I bought for another project that never happened to make this one in baby size for a friend who added her first little one in December.

WIP Wednesday

With all the craziness that has been going on here I haven't been doing as much sewing as I would like so I don't have a ton of things to share this week.  I am at a stopping point on my Sunny Trails Quilt because I have to order some Bella White but once I do that I plan on finishing up that quilt top pretty quickly.

In the mean time I started work on my Loulouthi Tiles Quilt.  This quilt so far has not been what I expected.  There were some hiccups with cutting followed by some frustration in layout but now that I have it all worked out and on a chart I am making steady progress on this one.  This quilt is a little different for me because it is put together in sections rather than in rows.  It's a fun challenge making sure you put the sections together in the right order and then that you connect them the right way.  Since I snapped this photo a few days ago I have completed another section.  But it's dark and rainy here so no updated photo.  Sorry for the bad iphone photo as well.  But that's all I had on hand when snapping the picture.

This one is going to be a massive queen size quilt for my bed.  Not sure yet about the quilting.  I do plan to do a little hand stitching around the large blocks as Rachel suggested but probably before I make my quilt sandwich and then I will probably have the rest of it quilted on the long arm.  Anyone have any experience with this?  Or thoughts?


Be sure to head on over to Lee's to see what everyone else is up to this week.

The List Part II

2011 Finished Quilts

So I've been thinking more about these quilty goals for 2012 and while 12 quilts seems like a lot I realized that my list did not include a lot of growth.  I'd really like this year to be as much about quality as it is about quantity so that means learning some new skills.  So I've been giving a lot of thought to what I want to learn in 2012 and what opportunities are out there that can help make that happen.

1. So obviously the big one is Sewing Summit.  I'd love to attend but since it is in Salt Lake City again this year I'm not sure how reasonable that will be.  It is the weekend of my birthday but I already started pricing plane tickets and the cheapest I could find even this far in advance was 400 bucks round trip.  So the budget is probably going to rule that one out for me but I can always keep looking and who knows maybe it will work out.
2. Learn to embroider.  I was planning on learning this is 2011 by following along with Corey and her birdie stitches quilt along but I never got started and ended up not following through on this one.  Maybe this year I will have better luck.
3. Curves-I'd really like to learn to sew curves.  Rachel is gearing up for a curves class over at Stitched in Color and I am seriously considering joining in.  Right now though I am trying to weigh my options.  I'm not sure I would be able to keep up with a project a week and if I can't finish them then I won't know what I'm doing wrong or what questions I should be asking so it seems like it would be kind of silly.
4. Paper Piecing-this one scares me a lot but I am determined that I need to learn this skill.  There are so many projects I have missed out on because I don't know how to do this.  So I need to learn for sure.  Besides there are some amazing blocks out there that can only be made through paper piecing.
5. Quilt Along-I'd really like to cohost a quilt along this year.  I've been toying with some patterns but I'm not sure I have the time or the following to warrant hosting a quilt along.  I was lucky to participate in some great quilt alongs last year hosted by multiple bloggers and I am hoping I might get the chance to work on one myself this year.
6. Tutorials-I'd like to share a few tutorials here.  I'm starting to dabble with creating some original blocks and patterns and I'd love to share them here.  Still working out in my own mind what's worth sharing and what someone might be interested in so there's that.  What would you like to see?

So what new skills do you want to learn in 2012?  What are you excited about out there?  Is there anything you just can't wait to participate in?  I'd love to hear them maybe it will encourage me to expand my list a little.

WIP Wednesday

So the lovely Lee is once again hosting WIP Wednesday and I thought I'd better get started again so I could maintain some sort of schedule.  I don't have as much going on in my sewing room as I would like these days.  I know I'm never going to reach that goal of 12 quilts if I don't get busy but there has been a lot of adjustment going on here.  But that's a whole other story.

I am making progress on my Sunny Trails quilt.  I have 11 out of the 20 16 patches sewn together.  So that is pretty good progress there.  I imagine I will have the rest finished this week, although Wednesday did sneak up on me a lot faster than I expected it too.  Hopefully the rest of the week won't go by too quickly.

16 Patches Sewn Together

I've been spending a lot of time online searching for the perfect center square for a new project I'm doing this year.  Some of the members of the Old Red Barn Quilt Along Group have branched off and are doing round/row robins.  I am part of the group doing the round robin and I am super excited to try it out.  It's a lot like a bee I guess except we get to make whatever we want and at the end you have a finished quilt top and not just a bunch of squares.  I figured it would be a fun way to meet some new friends and get to know some other ones better.  I'm just having a really hard time deciding what parameters I want to set for my quilt top.

Stack of Farmer's Wife Blocks

Other than that I've been making a little progress on my Farmer's Wife Quilt Along Blocks.  The Quilt Along isn't starting back up until February but I needed to make a few blocks to get back on track with the group so I am sewing away on those.  More details on those blocks later.

Be Sure to head over to Lee's and link up your WIP's.  I always love seeing what everyone else is up too.

Homemade Holidays (Part 2)

The other big finish for my Christmas gifts was the quilt I made for my mom.  Yellow is her favorite color and last year around November she mentioned to me how much she liked the Origins fabric line.  I ordered what I needed to make a quilt for her thinking maybe I would do it for her birthday in January.  Well then I saw this quilt and I thought it was amazing.  I emailed Kati and asked her how she did it and she told me she was writing a tutorial for her blog.  So I showed my mom two options and asked which she liked better.  Months later when I was ready to make the quilt she couldn't remember which she had chosen so I opted not to post about it here.  Of course those of you who are on flickr have seen the finished top before it was quilted.

I used Kati's tutorial which was so well written it couldn't have been any easier to make this quilt.  I used Kona Maize for the solid in place of white to give it more of a yellow factor.  I am a side seam presser and I figured out very quickly that if I ironed all of my seams towards the yellow on one side of the block and the patterned fabric on the other that I would have no troubles matching and locking my seams.  It made this quilt top come together very quickly.  And then of course I stalled.  Since I had ordered my fabrics based on the measurements of the other quilt I had to think about how to piece the back.  Once I figured it out I made a cutting mistake and then ended up needing to add a piece to the side of the back to make it large enough.  It worked out and hopefully no one but me would know this wasn't the plan for the back.  Sorry I didn't get a good picture of that.

I knew I wanted to have this one quilted on a long arm with a rose pattern since roses are my mom's favorite flower (yellow roses to be exact) so when I saw Nichol's post saying she was still taking quilts in time for Christmas I sent her an email.  Have you seen Nichol's work?  I know she is relatively knew to long arm quilting but she did an amazing job.  And get this, she even listened to what color thread I asked her to quilt it with.  You can see what Nichol had to say about my mom's quilt here.

All in all I am very happy with my mom's quilt and I hope she is too.  She texted me after on Christmas to ask me how I made her quilt smell so good so I thought I would share my secret with all of you too.  I used Downy Unstoppables in the wash with my quilts.  They are pretty pricey so I only get them when I have coupons and I only use them in loads like my sheets, towels, and quilts but they make the laundry smell fresh for a lot longer and really is there anything better than snuggling under a great smelling quilt on a cold day.

Homemade Holidays (Part 1)

Just in case you thought I forgot to share all of those holiday projects I has been working on here is the first part.  I bet you thought I was all talk back in August when I shared my plans to make Vanilla Extract as Christmas gifts but I actually did it.  It's so simple and it was a huge hit with the husbands family.  It made great last minute gifts for a few people I hadn't planed to gift give with but who I knew would be at family events and would be bringing gifts.  I actually received a cookbook wrapped in a kitchen towel with a cookie cutter holding it shut and thought that was so nifty I implemented the idea myself the next day with a bottle of vanilla inside.

I made the labels on my home computer and just printed them off on Avery Labels.  It was simple enough and the overall look though not everything I had hoped for turned out well enough I guess.  I hope that doesn't sound like too much of a cop out but the truth is I was sick right before Christmas and even bailed out on some family functions just to make sure I had enough energy to make it through the BIG day.

UNC Quilt

My big surprise present this year was a quilt for the husband.  See we aren't big on sports in our house but we both really enjoy college basketball for some reason.  I don't really know why I like it because being in the Marching Band in High School I always went to football games but it worked out that way and the fact that we both like UNC (University of North Carolina) is an added bonus.  So my husband wanted me to make him a quilt with all of his UNC t-shirts, he has a ton of them, even though he never went to school there.  I gathered them up and started making a plan which quickly fell by the wayside.  Then way back last August 2010 when it was my turn to send fabric in the Circuit Bee I sent out fabrics and asked for blocks inspired by this quilt.  It was a difficult task to say the least, using collegiate fabrics and making minimalist blocks at the same time but the ladies really pulled through for me.

It turned out better than I could have imagined.

I went to my mom's for a day of sewing and got the top and backing put together with the help of my mom.  Thanks again mom!  The finished quilt is about 44" wide by 68" long, it still amazes me how much they seem to shrink.  This one especially but I think that may have to do with the fabrics and knowing I didn't prewash them I can't complain.  I knew I wanted to have it quilted with something Tarheel related but not over the top.  I took it to a long arm quilter here locally because I was pressed for time.  Remember when I said I would never use this person again?  Turns out I did and now I really mean it!  It's not that I don't like the quilting I do and she was even nice enough to order the foot design special for me.  But sometimes it's the little things, like the fact I asked for it to be quilted in white that didn't happen obviously, but I do like it.  And there are some rather large spaces that don't have quilting if you ask me.  In the end I love the way it turned out though so I really shouldn't complain.

One of my favorite blocks.  I can't believe how she made the symbol and everything.

My mom was nice enough to sew the binding on for me so I could keep it a secret.  And it was right up until we were about 1/2 way through opening presents on Christmas Eve with my side of the family.  The hubs admitted that he assumed since my mom received a quilt for Christmas (look for part ii for that quilt) that was the only one I was making.  He later admitted to me that after she opened it and my dad told him maybe next year he had the feeling his UNC quilt was in one of the boxes beside him yet to be opened.  Not too bad for a surprise present.  I say he didn't really know and doesn't want to admit I managed to surprise him.  Although for the life of me I don't know how I pulled it off because I am terrible with surprises and I almost told him about things that happened along the way about 100 times.

Step 1: Just Sew Something

After setting such a lofty goal for 2012 I knew that if I dragged my feet I would never be able to accomplish 12 quilts in only 12 short months.  So after giving Bertha a good cleaning and a fresh needle I changed the blades in my rotary cutters and got down to business.  Since I have almost everything I need for Sunny Trails and the pieces are small enough to cut in my tiny sewing space I thought I would start there.  For this quilt I am following Corey's Moda Bake Shop Tutorial.  So far things are going well.  I did a little rework of the math since Corey advised she had a lot of extra pieces left over.  After I took out the solids and duplicates as Corey suggested I had the same 37 layer cake squares left.  From this I figured out that I could cut three 2" by 10" inch strips from 18 of the squares and four 2" by 10" strips from the remaining 19 squares.  This left me with a larger piece left from some of the squares which I plan to incorporate into the back of this quilt. 

All of the pairs sewn together and cut back down.  Now time to sew the four patches.

I knew I wanted all of my words to go in the same direction so I took special care when sewing together the pairs and then separated out all of the pairs with words when cutting down the strips.  The next step is to sew all of the pairs into four patches which is where I am now.  I had to order some Bella White since none of the local stores carry Moda.  So once I get my four patches and sixteen patches done I will be putting this project on hold for just a little while until the White fabric arrives but have no fear I have Farmer's Wife Blocks to make to get back on track and ready to start with the group again at the end of January.  That means lots of sewing and lots of projects to share.

Almost done making four patches.