Friday, November 29, 2013

Mystery Quilt: Fabric Choice (better late then never)


Today is the official start of the Bonnie Hunters Celtic Solstice Mystery Quilt along!  

She has a linky for everyone to share their progress here.  Very cool way to see how everyone is coming along! (and know that everyone else is way ahead of you! lol )

Since I am waiting on my tri-recs to arrives, I re-did my fabric choices...again. I decided to be brave and use orange. I found a yard of this underwater print in my stash and decided it would make a great fabric to base my color scheme on. I am using shades of solid blue/blue green as my neutral and then red,orange, yellow, and green. Still need more of all of them, but it's a start.

Friday, November 15, 2013

Christmas Quilts -Part One

I have been getting back into quilting...big time.  Here's the first of the Christmas quilts.  I was at our LQS and picked up a fat eighths bundle of this:

It's BasicGrey's Fruitcake for Moda. I think it's a few years out of date.  I know the yardage is getting harder to find.  I got it home, laid it out on the cutting table, and just stared at it for a few weeks.  I tried to find patterns for fat eighths, and there just aren't that many of them.  I ended up cutting the eighths into 9.5 inch squares, and treating them like two layer cakes.  This led to making two smaller quilts instead of one big quilt. Which is a good thing because they will be much easier to quilt.

I decided to go with a simple pinwheel for the first quilt. 
It was interesting trying to pair up the colors together to create a good contrast and balance.  Once I had the pairs together, I followed the HST tutorial here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUNGH9B0Ohw&list=PLE250BDA2E891066B   You match up your large squares, sew all the way around the edge and then cut the square in fourths diagonally. (Just watch the video...) I think I will do the chevron shown in the tutorial for the other Christmas quilt.
Anyhow..you end up with HST (half square triangles) I am not that great at keeping my seam allowance exactly 1/4" So I have to square up all my squares.  Which means cutting off little tiny slivers of fabric. Until you end up with a pile like this:
It was at this point I remembered a conversation with a good friend of mine at a quilting class.   She told the teacher that I was the perfectionist between us.  I vehemently denied being a perfectionist! I have the cat hair tumbleweeds in my family room to prove it!  Okay, looking at this pile of tiny slivers, maybe I am a little bit of a perfectionist, but only in important areas...like quilting and painting.  

Chief was watching, so I had to get it right.
( I love how the iron gives him a third ear!)

After all that trimming, I crossed my toes and sewed the pinwheels together.   
And LOOOK!!!!
All that trimming was worth it! My points match!  They really match! Almost all of them mostly do!
This is what I have so far.  I will ad another border or two, but haven't decided what yet.
 I need to get a better photo of it outside.