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
Everyone got spoiled for Christmas. Greg and I were lucky enough to recieve iPads from his parents (!!!!!) and my mom got a Kindle Fire as a gift from my dad. So I whipped us all up some electronics cases using this tutorial from one shabby chick! I changed the measurements for my mom’s Fire – and I wish I could tell you the measurements I used, but that information is now in my brain’s trash bin (had to make room for remembering-where-every-dinosaur-in-the-house-is).
Greg’s case features an iron-on Star Wars decal. Mine uses one of my absolute new favorite prints from Fasset, and also some black cording, which I used for the very first time.
My mom just made an awesome under-the-sea quilt using some batiks, so I reflected this latest passion in her case.
I hope everyone reading this gets a little spoiled today!
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
Feeling inspired by Mr. Still today…
From poulwebb.blogspot.com
From the SFMOMA website
From alxndracook.blogspot.com
Filed under Inspiration
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
I have an addiction. I can barely stop myself from quitting everything else and just dedicating myself 100% to making these “quilted” ornaments all day long, every day.
These are no-sew and SO FUN. These are my hexies (in that they are addictive hand-work projects that you take everywhere you go).
The "right" side and the "wrong" side of a piece of duponi silk. Some of the ornaments I embellished with the furry selvage edge of the fabric...
As I mentioned before, a lot of what’s been going on around here is top secret Santa work, but I did manage to make time to create these two Swoon pillows in shades of green.
Not my most precise work… lots of the points are a little murky. But I really love the colors! I like using apple green in Christmas decor. It looks great with both evergreen and all shades of red and maroon. Now if only I could set aside enough time to make my swoon quilt to really set off the living room. Oh well!
The blog might get a little dead for a couple of weeks here at howtobejenna. Too many of my upcoming projects are Christmas gifts!
I did make these pillows (there are two of them) recently for a housewarming present and they have already been gifted. All you can see is the pillow case, resting on a green pillow, because the gift recipient has already received pillow forms from me in a past present.
It’s a reverse-applique embracing frayed edges for texture. I’m VERY inspired by the work of THIS ARTIST. So cool – definitely a technique I’ll be working on.
I should have snipped some of the unruly threads before I took this picture, but… you know….
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 