Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Vegetable Patch Quilt


Last winter when I was in NYC for my cousin's wedding, I made sure to make time for a little shopping at Purl Soho.  Such a beautiful place, and so much fun to shop there!

One pattern that I came home with was this Vegetable Patch Quilt:
I did the appliqué on my old Elna 3007, using a short zig zag stitch.  I matched colors for the veggies but used a variegated thread on the green tops, which I love.  

In retrospect, I think it would have been better with a shorter "dirt" section and a taller "sky" section, but I made the quilt entirely out of fabrics from my stash -- and I didn't have very much of this loopy blue fabric!  So the proportions of dirt and sky are different than the pattern suggests.  I think next time I'll try the sky and dirt fabrics with Kona solids and the leaves and veggies with patterned prints.  This is one of those fun patterns that I'll definitely make again!
I'm entering this quilt into the Appliqué Category of the Bloggers Quilt Festival -- 
and also linking up with Fabric Tuesday!

Friday, October 23, 2015

Barn Quilt with Sheep, an original design

For the past 3 summers, my girls and I have made a "scrap" quilt to enter into the Minnesota State Fair.  I have a jar of 2 inch scraps that I fill up all year, and then in the summer we get it out and start designing a quilt.  This year we had a really hard time deciding what to make -- but eventually I came up with a design that we were all happy with.  I started thinking about how to make it work on a car trip home from my parents' house, then got out the graph paper and started coloring.  And here's what we came up with:





Quilt Stats:
Made entirely from 2 inch scraps, with the exception of the Barn's Pinwheel Quilt, the Sheep's Background, and top of Silo -- over 3000 two inch scraps, yikes!
Double Bed Sized -- perfect for my sheep loving daughter's bedroom
Quilted with Aurofil thread (size 28, light gray) in a diagonal cross-hatch pattern, with extra diagonal lines added for the sheep's wool.
Binding is scrappy and matches the green grass/blue sky, using Debbie's Matched Binding Tutorial.
Winner of a 5th place ribbon in the Scrap Quilt Category at the Minnesota State Fair!
(I haven't written up a pattern for this quilt, but I certainly could if there is enough interest.)



I'm entering this quilt into the "Original Design Quilts" category of the Blogger's Quilt Festival.

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Works in Progress {Oct 21, 2015}

This week I've been working on a Halloween costume -- the first one I've ever made!
The body is a little large, but the headpiece is really cute!


It was a great weekend to take some photos of my latest finished quilt -- here's a sneak peek.  I plan to enter this one into the Fall Blogger's Quilt Festival next week.  More pictures to come!

I recently decided to dig into my stash of beloved fabrics (mostly Anna Maria Horner) and USE THEM!  So I started with these cute little houses -- pattern at stitcherydickerydoc.com.  I'm not sure yet if these two blocks are headed into a pillow or a larger quilt . . . I think a bed quilt made from rows of houses would be so pretty!