The Wedding Quilt!

This may not look like what you would traditionally think of as a wedding quilt, but my husband and I thought it would be perfect for our friends Maestro and Joy when they got married. Maestro is retired Air Force and Joy is still on Active duty in the Air Force.  They have a little funny story, they met 16 years ago when he was enlisted and she was a young officer.  The story as I heard it is, she would not date him because he was enlisted and she was a officer.  Well all these years later they re-connected, he was now retired, neither ever married, and she finally agreed to date him!  

 Ric and I were lucky enough to join Joy and Maestro in the Cayman islands for there beautiful wedding!

Ok, back to the quilt!  Back in the late 1990's early 2000 these panels were very popular!  I made many quilts with them, taught panel Quilt classes, and was know as the panel lady in a few circles! I cut the panel into six different pieces and then put a border around each piece.  I then made 4 log cabin blocks to add into the quilt.  

One of the things I love about this quilt is the main fabrics are not what you would normally use in a patriotic quilt.  I think there was only one star fabric in the whole quilt.  Using none patric fabrics in a patriotic quilt is what I believe made this quilt pop!

I quilted a involved pattern in the long cabin blocks, (back of the quilt to show the quilting close up).

 I always label my quilts, I think of it as signing my art.  It is a great place to put a little note or memory.  This is one of my favorite labels because I  added a picture from the wedding.

Lady Bugs, My Beginning Quilt

I started teaching a beginning Quilt class last weekend. The funny thing is I always said I would never ever teach beginning quilting.  Never say never! Sew Special Quilt Shop had been asking me to teach a beginning class from the first day I went in to talk to them about teaching in the shop.  After teaching a few classes I realized, there was a need for a beginning class!

I havn't made a sampler quilt in a long time, but I really enjoyed it!

My favorite part of making this quilt was quilting it.  At first I was a little overwhelmed, I am not sure I ever machine quilted a sampler quilt. First things first, it was time for a new pair of quilting gloves!  I swear by these gloves and can not imagine machine quilting without them.

Not knowing where to start I decided to start with quilting the red sashing.  As I was quilting the sashing I started to get ideas for the blocks.

 I quilted in all the fabrics except the white background fabric. I felt like quilting the quilt in this way gave me boundaries.  It was so much fun deciding on what to do with each block.

 In all the smaller triangles in the quilt I quilted the same pattern throughout.  In the larger triangles I did another design.


I quilt the squares the same way.  In the smaller squares I quilted the same flower throughout, and a different design in the larger squares.

All in all I love how the quilt turned out.  I taught my first class of a four part series last Saturday! I think this will be a huge learning experience for me and my students.  I truly feel blessed to be able to share my knowledge and joy with my students.

Happy quilting :)

Happy Mothers Day Weekend!

Happy Mothers Day to all the Mothers, Grandmothers, Aunts, and Sisters out there!  I have decided on this Mothers day weekend it will be a quilt weekend for me!  No cleaning, well maybe dishes, and laundry but cleaning bathrooms, hardwood floors, vacuuming and mopping are not on the to do list. What is on the to do list this weekend is quilting and enjoying time with my family and that is it!

I started the weekend off right, ordered pizza for Friday night dinner and then started quilting.  I have had fabric set aside for my great niece Saylor's quilt, I have been having a hard time deciding on a pattern.  So much fabric and ideas, so little time!  I am still undecided which one will be Saylor's Quilt, but I seem to be making more of the 4 patches with the half square triangles blocks. I guess we will have to wait and see.

The other quilt I and working on this weekend is my quilt for my beginner quilt class starting next month. Yikes, I need to get the quilt done, Sew Special is already advertising it and people have signed up. The top is done, it is ready to be basted and quilted, so that is the plan for the rest of the weekend.  

Happy Mothers Day, Happy Quilt weekend!

Vinny's Quilt

This is the fourth quilt in my UFO(unfinished objects) challenge.   I am really too embarrassed to tell you how long ago I made this quilt top, but I will tell you the right baby hadn't been born, until this year. My nephew Levi and his wife Ashlee had their first baby on leap day! I am so excited to be able to give them this quilt for this precious little guy!

My sister Julie had made a similar quilt to this and I loved it, so I had decided to make one.  It is a true scrappy quilt.  I bought the bug fabric and green polka dots fabric, but all the fabric for the pieced blocks and first border came from my scraps and fabric stash.

This quilt has a lot going on as far as the fabrics and colors so I decided to quilt it with a straight line thru all the pieced blocks diagonally.  I could not decide on one color to do this so I used green thread thru the green fabric, red thread thru the red fabric and ect. I also did a little stippling around the bugs. This may make me sound old, but the hardest part of making this quilt was sewing on the binding.  The binding is black with green polka dots, the backing is a black tone on tone fabric.  To finish it I hand stitched the binding down with black thread!  All that black was tough on my eyes!

My Mom is visiting from Montana, so she will take the quilt back with her to give to baby Vinny!

Natalie's Quilt

I made this quilt for my step daughter Natalie.  The blocks are a traditional jacob's ladder, laid out in a not so traditional pattern. To make things easy I used mini charm squares for the four patches, saving me tons of cutting time. I made this quilt with Moda's Cannon fabric by Kate Spain.

I bought 10 packs of mini charm squares plus(8) 2 1/2 inch squares from my sash.

 I quilted it with flowers and leaves in the purple/orange areas, and flowers in the green/yellow fabrics. In the white I quilted lines back and forth.

This was one of those quilts that went together so smooth and so fast. I had a blast making it for so many reason. It was great to see what I could make with mini charm squares, I loved the fabrics, and colors. The quilting turned out beautiful, I hope Natalie loves it as much as I do!

I will be posting the free pattern.

Ben Came Home!

Well it has been a little busy at our house with Easter and the beautiful weather.  Saturday was spent cleaning flower beds, and planting new flowers. Trimming plants, adding new edging and all that fun stuff we get to do in the yard at spring time.  This is truly my favorite time of the year! We also had the family over for Easter lunch, we enjoyed food, pinata, cascarones. Fun was had by all.

 My oldest son, Ben, came home for Easter weekend from the Army!  Happy Happy, Joy Joy! Usually when he gets home, he is off to see his friends. Lucky me, he decided to hang out in the Ginger Hut Friday night!   As we were talking and I was doing very little quilting, he asked me where his quilts were.  I have made him many quilts over the years, but I knew what two he was talking about! I said I guess up in the attic with the rest of your stuff, and he told me he wanted to take them when he left. Awww who doesn't get teary-eyed over that? Sunday night when he was packing up to leave, he said, "Mom where are my Quilts"?  So up to the attic we climbed, as we were going up there, he was worried, I hope they are not damaged from being in the attic, I hope something hasn't nested in them! Awww... they were just fine, needed some fresh air, maybe even washed, but nothing had nested in them! Here are the two Quilts my grown son took back to Base/Post when he left.

Ben on the bed hugging Sam.  Ben's pinwheel quilt, the first large quilt I made him.

Ben's Dino Quilt! He loved dinosaurs as a kid, we lived in Maryland when he was 2 years old to 5 years old.  I swear we went to the museum of Natural History every month so Ben could see the dinosaur bones and get his Dino fix! We moved back to Maryland when he was starting 4th grade, he was so excited to show his brothers around the Natural History Museum!

As Ben left with those Quilts all I could think was, it is time I made him a adult quilt!

Bella's Block Party!

The first class I taught at Sew Special Quilts was Bella's Block Party. I love this Quilt!  I used a Moda Jelly Roll, Block Party by Sandy Gervais for the blocks.  It amazed me I made all 24 blocks from one Jelly Roll. I think this quilt looks harder to make than it was, you sew your strips together then cut out triangles from your strips.  Why a Jelly Roll works so good for this pattern is, most Jelly Rolls have two different color directions making it hard to use all of one Jelly Roll in a quilt.  This pattern works because you separate the two colors, I used the oranges for half of the block and the greens and blues for the other half.  I believe what really makes this quilt pop is having high contrast between the two halfs of the block.

I like the way the borders are done, it looks like the quilt is framed, I could not be happier with how this quilt turned out!

The pattern was out of the book Smash Your Precut Stash, This is really a great book, the directions are well written and easy to follow.

I have been able to see a couple of the quilts made in the class, I love seeing finished projects!  Bring on the show and tell!

My favorite thing is seeing my beautiful niece, who the quilt was made for, sitting under it!