Island Batik Ambassadors Mini Challenge Quilt 3 - Hand Piecing?!

I drafted a pattern for a mini quilt that ended up needing to be hand pieced.  I think that it must have been 20 years since I last hand pieced.  However, in this case, it was easier for me.

I started with pulling out some of my gorgeous Island Batik fabrics.

Next, I drew my paper piecing designs on a stabilizer that I was going to use to piece on so I didn't have to rip paper later.  I was glad I was only doing one block!

Here you can see the drawing before I cut it apart into pieces.

Here's what the pieces looked like when the paper piecing was done.

This is the back.

Here's another finished section.

A progression on the hand piecing.  It's getting better!

Done!  All the hand piecing is complete!

Here's a picture with a pencil for scale.

A close up of the center.  I steamed the top and it made it lay really flat!

I added some black around the edge to make the quilt square. 

Come back Wednesday to see the quilting!

I hope you get to quilt today!
Suzy

Island Batik Ambassadors Star Struck Part 1

Quilters love stars.  I've made many, many star quilts over the years, but they always draw me back in and I make another.  For September's Island Batik Ambassador Challenge we were asked to make a star quilt.  

I chose this gorgeous collection of fabrics called All a Flutter.  I knew that I had two 10 inch squares of each fabric and I kept this in mind while designing.

I decided to create a paper pieced block that is an original design.  Below you can see that I am laying out fabrics trying to figure out what I wanted to put where.  One thing I keep in mind while doing this is to make sure there is enough contrast between the different pieces that are next to each other.  I also knew I wanted to include all the colors from the collection - blue, pink, and purple.

For the background I chose a new Island Batik solid called Shadow.  It's a light gray and the colors really pop against it.  I wanted to conserve fabric so I laid out my pieces to best fit and then cut between them.

Here is my block all together.  I LOVE the star and I will more than likely make more of these eventually.  

I also love it when eight points come together so neatly!  Isn't this hexagon print amazing!  It's one my favorites and I keep buying it in more and more colors...I might have a problem.  Not!

Come back next week to see how I quilted this beauty.

I hope you get to quilt today!
Suzy

Wish Upon a Star Blog Hop!

I am SEW excited to be a part of the Wish Upon a Star blog hop with Just Let me Quilt!  What quilter doesn't like stars?  I wanted to create something new for this hop and I was in the mood to paper piece so I designed this block in Electric Quilter and got to work.  I wanted it to appear 3 dimensional so I used two different shades of orange to create that effect.  I also like the way it appears to spin.

I started with three solids from Micheal Miller's Cotton Couture solids collection.  They are my absolute favorite solids as they feel like batiks (go figure...I love batiks!).  I paper pieced the sections of this block.  I'm quite happy with how they turned out.

I started by drawing the white lines you see above.  I then filled them with elongated pebbles.  I used a slightly lighter gray to make these pebbles stand out.

Next, I stitched the same pebbles in the spikes.

It was an interesting challenge as the space got smaller.  I ended up with curvy lines at the very tip.

Next I had to stitch the rest of the backgrounds.  I added some sprays of feathers in the corner.  Then I stippled the center, did swirls in the skinny strip between pebbles and repeated the stippling in the corners.  I did this quilting in a darker gray to let the bubbles stand out.  All of the thread used is my favorite Aurifil 50 weight.

This picture is more true to life in color.

And the final quilt!

Be sure to check out the other amazing quilters on the Wish Upon a Star blog hop!

May 21

Moose Stash Quilting

Tu-Na Quilts, Travels, and Eats

Quilt In A Not-Shell

What About Rheema?

Clever Chameleon Quilting

Sunlight in Winter Quilts

Life in the Scrapatch

Sew Many Yarns

Hazel’s Daughter

May 22

Want To Be Quilter

Cynthia's Creating Ark

Selina Quilts

Ridge Top Quilt

Creative Blonde

Days Filled With Joy

Seams To Be Sew

Lily Patch Quilts

Why-Knot-Kwilt

May 23

Marjorie's Busy Corner

Quilt Doodle Designs

Adventurous Applique and Quilting

Vroomans Quilts

Peanut's Patchwork

Ms P Designs USA

The Little Mushroom Cap

Stitchin At Home

That Fabric Feeling

May 24

Kathy’s Quilts

It’s A T-Sweet Day!

Freckled Fox Quiltery

Elizabeth Coughlin Designs

Melva Loves Scraps

Beaquilter

Quilting Nonnie

Den syende himmel

All Thingz Sewn

May 25

Creatin' in the Sticks

For the love of geese

Words & Stitches

Quarter Inch Crafter

Quilt Fabrication

Home Sewn By Us

Kathleen McMusing

Just Let Me Quilt

I hope you get to quilt today!
Suzy

I Wish You a Merry Quilt Along - Blocks 4

If you follow my blog, you know that I have a hard time following patterns exactly.  I tend to adapt them as I go.  Block 4 was no exception.  It was supposed to have four hanging ornaments, but I saw someone fussy cut a fabric with a six pointed star in the center for the largest of the original ornaments.  It occurred to me that I could paper piece a star and make mine look similar.  So that's what I did.

I'm also sticking with a red, white, and green color scheme and it helped me stick to my fabrics.  Since I'm using batiks it's hard to find a ton more to choose from.  Not that I'm complaining, I LOVE my fabrics I'm playing with.

I love the fussy cut snowflake in the middle!

The final block.  

I hope you get to quilt today!
Suzy

Paper Pieced Diamonds

I had a lot of fun with this little quilt!  I wanted to do something paper pieced that was fairly modern.  Of course I dug into my batik stash and found the perfect fabrics to create it!  I found two orange and purple fabrics and then accented with a yellow tone-on-tone batik and an orange solid.

Here's the quilting I did on the back.

And on the front!  I stitched in the ditch around all the shapes.  I'd forgotten what a pain that can be!  I also decided to stitch the center diamonds around the edge in the dark purple thread.  It adds a little extra separation between the center diamonds and the yellow.  I like it, but boy did I have to be careful to stitch in exactly the right place!

More next time on the challenge of choosing binding for this quilt!

I hope you get to quilt today!  I do....my boys are all away at scout camp for the day.  It's time for mama to enjoy the quiet and quilt!

Suzy

Quilting my Island Batik Playful Pinwheels

I am a doodler.  I almost always sketch out an idea for quilting before I do any stitching.  Below you can see the original idea I had for quilting Playful Pinwheels made with gorgeous Hollywood Hills Island Batiks.  I knew it was going to be a lot of straight lines, but I really liked the effect.

Now that I knew what I wanted to quilt, I picked out threads.  You can see that there are two green threads and two pink threads.  To check which I wanted to use I lay a little of the thread out on top of the fabrics and make a choice.

Below you can see some of the quilting I started with.  I put a rope in the darkest purple areas and in the pink and green areas I simply did curves from corner to corner.  I know this has a name, but I can't remember it right now.

In the background I decided to simply do a filler over the whole surface.  As a show quilter I usually do very small fillers.  I decided to do something in a larger scale for this quilt and I'm really happy with the results.  This is an original filler I designed I'm calling Double Bubbles.  Come back Saturday to see how it's stitched!

Here is the whole quilt with binding, but without binding stitched.  I ran out of time!  Such is life sometimes.

Happy Quilting!
Suzy

Piecing my Island Batik Playful Pinwheels Quilt

Here is my finished quilt top!  If you missed Wednesday's post click here to see how I developed the pattern for this quilt.

As an Island Batik Ambassador I was given a lovely layer cake of Hollywood Hills Island Batik fabrics. I decided to open it up and use it in my pinwheels.  It's hard for me to cut into precuts.  It makes no sense, but they looks pretty in their packages!

I was looking for 2 fabric combinations for the two different pairs in the pinwheels.  Here are a few combinations I tried:

I really like this color combination, but I felt that the fabric on the right would get lost when I cut it into small pieces so that was out.

Here are two lovely greens I was thinking about using together.  I decided that the light green looked kind of washed out on the tan background fabric.  It didn't stand out like I wanted it to.

Here are my final color choices.  The pinwheels have a thin border (the dark purple on the left) and then there are two sets of colors.  The two pinks became on combination and the green and blue the other pair.

Since I had a layer cake I wanted to make sure that I had enough fabric to complete the two blocks.  The best way I know to do this is to carefully precut all my pieces.  I cut strips the right width.  Then I drew a template the size of the final piece I needed.  I then add 3/16-1/2 inch extra all the way around to allow for paper piecing.

Using my template I cut out the pieces so that they were just about the right size with little fabric wasted.  You can see how I do this in my picture below.  I just run my rotary cutter right along the edge of the paper to get pieces the exact shape I want without a lot of waste.  I had plenty of fabric left in case I made a mistake.

I was so excited to see what my pinwheels would look like!  Here is the first one all laid out once the pieces were completely pieced.

And here are both pinwheels together.  I wanted to use the same color combination, but make them opposites of each other.  One pinwheel has long green spikes and the other pinwheel has long pink spikes.

After making all the pieces I set in the square blocks.  This was a little easier because of the paper, but of course I still had one that I had to resew four times before it came out without a pucker.  Such is life.  Then, once I had the squares inset, I had to figure out how to construct the quilt so those two points would touch.  This took some creative thinking, trimming and unsewing (my seam ripper has had a workout lately!), but I was able to piece it successfully and not revert to my usual fallback of appliqueing something I can't figure out how to piece.

Here is the final top of my quilt.  I love the way the two pinwheels play together and complement each other. They really draw my eye around the quilt.

One thing that was a challenge for me in sewing this quilt was thread color.  I know it may be a strange thing to think about when piecing, but I had a problem.  When I was sewing the background fabric of this quilt I obviously used tan.  When I sewed the paper pieces I used blue and pink thread on the two different colored pieces.  Then, when it was ready to sew together I didn't want to switch thread color as I went from colored fabric to tan fabric as that would've made it a lot more complicated.  I decided to just use tan thread and go for it.  If you look carefully at the picture below you can see the tan thread showing up in the center seams of the block.

So...is this a big deal?  Since it's not for show and it's just for me?  No.  However, the reason I bring this up at all is to talk about how to fix this problem.  There are two possibilities.  One is to change thread colors while sewing those seams (what a pain).  The other is to color the thread with a fine point sharpie in the fabric color the thread is next to.  If the tan thread shows near a pink fabric color the threads with a pink marker.  If it's near a blue fabric color it with a fine blue sharpie.  There are enough colors of sharpies out there right now finding the right color is very possible.  And close is good enough.  Yes, I know this for a fact.  I've done it on show quilts!

Did I do the coloring this time?  No, not yet.  Will I?  Maybe, if it bugs me enough.  Right now I'm just happy with how it turned out and I really don't feel like going on a sharpie hunt.

Come back Saturday to check out the quilting I did on this Playful Pinwheels quilt!  And don't forget to join my Machine Applique Adventures Facebook group.

Happy Sewing!
Suzy

Designing my Island Batik Playful Pinwheels Quilt

The Island Batik Ambassador Challenge for May is Playful Paper Piecing.  I knew I wanted to do a star of some kind.  So I started sketching and ended up with the star you see below.  I then put it into Electric Quilter so I could play around with color.  After looking at the star I knew I wanted to add more to it or a border or something.  I just wasn't quite sure what, so I cute out the pieces of a second star and started playing.

One of the things I love about some of the blogs I read is their descriptions of the creative process.  It's really fun to see how other people work their own personal magic.  I started my journey with the idea of doing a broken star where it extends all the way around the edge.  It wasn't my favorite and I moved on.

Next I tried doing a diamond border.  It was okay, but didn't seem like it was worth all the effort it would take to make it.

Next I tried putting diamonds in the corners.  Okay, but not great.

Then I tried putting diamonds off the centers.  I like this a little better than the picture above, but it's still not my favorite.

I tried putting it on point too, but it still didn't quite work.

Next I tried extending one of the sets of diamonds to twice it's original length.  I really liked this!  It was different.  So, now what to do with it.  Below you se it where the original block is still vertical.

In this image below I've tipped the block so the outermost points are at North, West, East, and South.  I like it, but it didn't add much and would make it much more challenging to construct so I decided to skip it.

If one is great, two must be better, right?  Wrong.  I added the extra set of purple and red points, but it made the block messier than I wanted and challenging to construct as well.

Okay, so what if I put an extra set at the tips?  Nope.  It spreads the block out, but didn't really add anything.

What if I made two?  OH...I like it!  Now to pick fabric and create it!  Come back Saturday to learn all about how I constructed this quilt.

My son has decided this quilt needs to be called Playful Pinwheels.  I like it.

Happy designing!

Suzy