What is this feeling? Pride? It’s strange and nice – like a sneeze, but better.
I won second place for the Tangerine Tango Quilt Challenge!
Check out the other winners HERE!
More on Pantone’s Color of the Year: Tangerine Tango!
And I get a fabulous $50 gift certificate to Sew Modern! Don’t mind if I do!
Filed under Challenges, Quilting
Remember back when I declared it Swoon-vember? Well now, 4 months later, I’m finally buckling down on my very own Swoon quilt. Many other people have been rockin’ the Swoon – check out the ~900 members in the flickr Swoon-a-long group!
This is quilt is important because it’s actually going to STAY in this house and be used every day on my very own couch. That’s right – this one’s for ME. And believe me, blankets matter in this 100 year old house that is insulated with what I can only assume are balled-up napkins.
I’m making my blocks using just two colors (in a variety of fabrics) and an ivory background: raspberry reds and toasty tans.
My color combinations (and adorable husband)
So I cut all of the pieces out in one or two power sessions – and set the plan to do this in as few super intense chain-piecing sessions as possible. This requires crazy organization – check out my shoebox o’ HSTs and a file folder with colors divided in sheet protectors.
But WOMP WOMP I cut everything before I discovered the Swoon community (was it even there back in November?) and their wise advice posted in the forums. As a result I DID cut those pesky squares for my HSTs at 3 7/8inches instead of 4inches… and now it’s time to square-up my HST blocks and the outlook was GRIM.
I stopped chain-piecing long enough to focus on one block and see if this was possible.
The result is… good, not great.
::ahem::
I think it’s definitely worth pushing forward. Once it’s quilted, I bet these little off-points will be even more unnoticeable.
Pulling out the starch and my prayer-rug. Wish me luck wrestling my Swoon! There’s no going back after having cut-up this much fabric…
Here is my entry for the Modern Mini Challenge hosted by Ellison Lane Quilts!
I call it “Sugar Mountain” after the Neil Young song (my 3-year old’s favorite).
The color units are pieced together to make a single mountain-range unit, which was then hand appliqued to a white background. The bottom white strip was machine pieced.
I quilted clouds in the sky and rolling fog for the bottom of the mountains. I added a little echo hand-quilting to the mountains in clear thread.
It measures 30″ x 9″.
This was such a fun challenge – I saw the logo for WAMU (which hosts the Diane Rehm show) and was instantly inspired. I drafted this pattern and am so pleased with the results.
What a great skill-builder to combine machine piecing and hand applique, as well as machine and hand quilting!
This quilt uses almost the entire line of Moda Crossweaves, Kona Snow, Kona Curry, and Free Spirit Gold.
Filed under Challenges, Inspiration, Quilting
My husband’s grandfather (“Pa”) is an incredibly important part of our lives. For Greg he’s been an essentially constant presence in his life, living always just a minute or so away. For me, he’s filled a hole that I’ve had in my life never having gotten a chance to know my grandparents. When Greg and I bought our house, we were ecstatic to live just a couple of blocks away from Pa.
So needless to say we had to celebrate Pa’s 90th birthday in a big way. 90 years! Greg and I spent a lot of time thinking about all of the things Pa has seen during his years. Eventually I came up with the idea of making a simple patchwork quilt where each block would represent a year, and that I’d embroider a patch to mark each birth, job-change, and wedding that was a part of Pa’s life.
Pa waving to his fans. Quilt on display at his party.
Picture of Pa with his twin to the left.
Every block represents a year...
This is a very traditional blanket, backed with flannel, quilted in the ditch. I hope it keeps Pa warm in his chair for many more years!
Just a sample of all the people who came to his party!
Filed under Embroidery, Quilting
Here is my quilt entry for the Tangerine Tango challenge.
Yup, it’s a variation on my Dusty Springfield Quilt!
It measures 52″ x 60″
Only this one features a random 90 degree angled, meandering quilting…
and some fun double binding.
And here’s the back:
Check out the rest of the entries HERE!
Filed under Challenges, Quilting
The color of the year is Tangerine Tango, according to Pantone.
In celebration of inspiration, there’s a Tangerine Tango Quilt Competition gearing up on flickr. I really love participating in quilt challenges, and I’m intrigued by this bright orange shade, so I’ve decided to participate! Wish me luck.
For now I can tell you the quilt will be called “Patti Page”…
Filed under Challenges, Fabric, Inspiration, Quilting
I’m working on a very non-modern quilt for my husband’s grandfather, Pa. He turns 90 at the end of February and is such an inspiration. He still lives in his own house, drives his car, and cooks his meals. He is also the sweetest man, who just loves family and especially babies.
So for this very special birthday I am making him a very special patchwork quilt which will represent each year of his life, and am embroidering squares commemorating major events. I’ll then applique the squares on to the blanket. I could have embroidered the quilt-top directly, but I like the idea of having these blocks pop-out with the ivory squares.
Anyway, at first I was frustrated with the imperfect nature of my embroidery skills, but then I remembered that I’m doing this by hand rather than machine because I am crazy because I want this blanket to look hand-made. Sure I could use the embroidery function on my sewing machine, but then it’d look like a computer made this blanket. And since I hope this will become an heirloom, I want whoever touches this quilt to know it was made with lots and lots of love. Because it is.
Filed under Embroidery, Quilting
It’s been a big year – Gave birth to Henry who is now 9 months old. Got a new client for work. Moved Lloyd into a twin bed and got him well on his way to being potty-trained.
We surely hope 2012 will bring many wonderful things for us. Henry walking, talking, running? Lloyd in preschool and making friends? And hopefully many more wonderful quilts : )
Here are the quilts I made in 2011:
1. HSTs for Henry,
2. Party Time Quilt,
3. Cogs3,
4. solids1,
5. gate1,
6. Halloween Quilt
Happy New Year to you and yours!
Filed under Quilting
Here is a reverse-appliqued table runner I made for my house for the winter.
Shown here on a bench because my table is a disaster.
To make this start with a piece of your main fabric (mine was a duponi silk in grey/silver). Back it with Wonder-Under (a double-sided fusible interfacing that is paper-backed so you can fuse one side at a time). On the Wonder-Under, draw your snowflake shapes and then cut them out with sharp scissors.
Remove the paper backing. Carefully place the main fabric on top of your accent fabric (both fabrics have right-side-up. You are fusing the right side of the accent fabric to the back side of the main fabric). Iron to fuse.
Next I sewed a backing fabric on to the runner. I placed my backing fabric on top of the runner, right-sides of my backing fabric touching right-sides of the main fabric. I sewed all the way around, leaving a gap to turn the runner right-side out. I did not include batting, but you could if you wanted a thicker runner.
Once it was right-side out, I did a quilted stippling design.
Yay! I have to say I really love this one.
Filed under Holiday, Quilting, Techniques, Tutorial
Woops! This quilt would have ideally been finished a month ago. Whatever, I have all of my future Halloween seasons to enjoy this blanket.
The tree is needle-turn appliqued onto a strip-pieced quilt.
I made a variety of… challenging choices when it came to this project. For one, this was a LOT of needle-turning, but I needed the practice.
For another, I chose to do a sort of scribbly pebble quilting which I have never tried before. Something about quilting circles really stuck on me. I think I was thinking about cauldron bubbles…
Anyway the quilting wasn’t perfect and of course it was much more time and thread-consuming than a simple stiple. However, after this quilt came out of the wash I was immediately elated with my efforts.
Ok so making the tree piece was a little tricky. I found a clip-art image of a spooky tree I liked, made a couple of alterations using photo-shopping software, and printed it out as large as I could. Then I drew a one inch grid on top of the image. I wanted my tree to be pretty big so I made a ratio of 1:5 and made each one inch square on my grid equal a 5 inch square on my gigantic pattern paper made out of taped together grocery bags. I think originally I had planned on doing a 1:6inch ratio (hence the numbers on my grid sheet below), but ended up thinking that’d be too big…
Can’t wait to pull this out next year and every year after!
Side note: Just a minute before I took this quilt outside to photograph I realized that I had turned the oven on to cook dinner, but had forgotten to empty the oven of all of the messy kitchen appliances I hid inside in a desperate quick-cleaning attempt. So I melted my rice-cooker steamer basket. C’est la vie when you’re Jenna.
jenna brand 