Sometimes you just NEED to Quilt

It's been a fairly rotten two days for me.  I really don't want to dwell on it, so I'm not going to.  I knew I was on the road to recover when I spent 1.5 hours quilting this evening.  It's good for my soul and the best therapy for me personally.  I love getting together with all my amazing quilting friends and laughing and sewing and always eating too much. But sometimes, I just need some time by myself at the machine.

So I made that time for myself this evening quilting up a future project for this blog and then making a gift for a dear friend who really helped me emotionally this morning.  I am definitely in her debt and what better way to say thank you than a quilt!  Or in this case....a clutch...I think that's what you'd call it.  It still needs a closure of some kind.  I'm going to see what she'd prefer.

I always try to do something new when I'm quilting.  Often it's unexpected and just happens.  It's not planned.  Today I decided to put the ends of two feathers together in a twirl.  I like the results.  I also used lots of different feather patterns and varied their length.  I'm quite happy with the results.  Here are a few more detail pictures.

You can see I had a fold-over problem in the corner.  I hate it when that happens, but since I was planning on trimming it anyways I didn't bother to rip.

Above is the final pouch!  I am feeling much calmer.
Suzy

Flower in a Pot #6 - Part One

Flower in a Pot #6 is a tulip design.  I knew I wanted to make it in orange.  It has three pieces and so I was playing with some fabrics trying to decide how I wanted to arrange them.  I love the fabric below because it has so many different motifs in it.  You can really cut out a lot of interesting petals from it.  Some of my friends laugh at me because I will hold my thumb and pointer finger in a circle to check fabrics for cutting out petals while I'm out fabric shopping.

Here is one arrangement I had for the flower.  However, I realized that the top layer would be the lightest fabric.  I didn't want to have to line the fabric with a second layer of either white or the fabric itself so I decided to change around the fabric placement.

Here are the same three fabrics in a different arrangement.  This time the darkest fabric will be the top layer.  This will make it much easier to ensure their is no shadowing (when the color of an underlayer shows through the top layer).

Now that I knew where I wanted to put the three fabrics I decided on a few things.  First, the lightest orange I wanted to cut out he swirly patterns you see in the fabric below.  Second, I started playing around with which section of the raindrop fabric I wanted to use.  In this case, I checked to see if I wanted to use an area with a lot of yellow/dark orange contrast.  I decided it took away from the dark orange piece and I needed to try something else.

Here are my final pieces for the flower.  I like how the lightness of the teardrop fabric (an Island Batik!) sort of connects the two outside fabrics.

I love playing with fabric and print.
Suzy

Flower Pot Inspiration

I  love flower pots.  I can't help it.  I think their decoration and ornament is so neat.  I have also discovered that I love having my camera phone in my pocket all the time because I am able to snap pictures whenever something inspires me.  The three pots below were for sale at my local Sam's Club a few weeks ago.  They are great quilting inspiration.  

I will always love black and white, or in this case navy and white?  

I like all the different elements in this pot work together.  I especially like the black and white grid lines behind the arcs.

While I don't like the overall composition of this pot, it has elements that are nice.  I like the dark navy arcs and the red flowers that come out of them.

This pot lives outside my grandmother's house.  It is definitely quilterly.  I have quilted that eye shape/diamond border of quilts before!  

I hope you find some fun inspiration today!

Suzy

Flower in a Pot Quilt Along - Pattern #5

I am so excited to share this block with you.  It's definitely my favorite so far!  Please make sure to join my Machine Applique Adventures Facebook group and share what you've done with my patterns and any other applique project too!



Here are the links you'll need for this block:
Flower in a Pot Pattern #5

Basic Applique Directions

You should also check out my posts about how I made this block:

Flower in a Pot #5 - Part One

Flower in a Pot #5 - Part Two

And be sure to join my Machine Applique Adventures Facebook group to share your progress on the blocks and any other applique too!

In case you missed it, here are the other blocks in this series:

Flower in a Pot Pattern #4
Flower in a Pot Pattern #3
Flower in a Pot Pattern #2
Flower in a Pot Pattern #1

Happy Quilting!
Suzy

Flower in a Pot #5 - The Quilting

Those of you following my Flower in a Pot Quilt Along know that I'm trying to quilt each one with a different kind of feather.  This pot is quilted with swirl end feathers.  I've not quilted them before so it was fun to do something different.

I started by echo quilting around the flower and pot.  I then used them as the "spine" for my feathers.  This was a little tricky around the leaves.

Here is a view of the back.  It needs more stitching in the flower and pot which I will get to eventually.

Here is a picture once the rick rack that will go in the binding was added.

Here is a close-up of the area near the leaves and how I managed to use the vase as a spine still.  It was challenging, but I didn't want to have to fill it with something else.

The final quilt!  Look for the pattern coming Saturday.  And don't forget to join my Machine Applique Adventures Facebook group!

Suzy

Tentmakers of Cairo Inspiration

A few years ago, I heard about the Tentmakers of Cairo.  Here is an excellent video about them by Bonnie McCaffery.  There work has inspired me for a while, but with the American Quilter's Society offering it at 50% off through April 30th (Code: ART50), I knew it was time to buy a piece.

I purchase this one:

It came in the mail last week and was even more gorgeous than it looked on the internet.  Here are a few close-ups.

I was so happy to have a nice label on it so I know who made it!

My mother and cousin also purchased a piece.  Theirs are equally gorgeous:

Have a great Monday!
Suzy

Flower in a Pot #5 - Part Two

Sometimes applique pieces are layered on top of each other like shown below.  When this happens it can sometimes be hard to see through the background fabric and layer one when adding layer two on top. To help solve this problem, I often add the pieces to layer one before I stick it down to the fabric.

You can see below that I used my light box to align the pink pieces on the blue piece before I stuck to the background.  It sticks because I'm using Steam-a-Seam 2.  If I was using a different fusible, this would be more challenging because you can't fuse the pink pieces to the blue without heat setting the blue.  Another advantage of using Steam-a-Seam 2.

Here is the finished block!  I love the way it came out.  I also really like the purple petals in all those different fabrics and threads.

Here's a close-up of the final flower.  Check out all those different purple threads and fabrics!  It kind of reminds me of a crazy quilt.

You can see in the picture below how I start and stop my threads.  Pick a purple petal.  I started at the top with some really small straight stitches that would be covered by a different piece later.  Then if you follow the stitching aorund you can see that I did the same thing at the end of the petal, a bunch of small straight stitches, to finish off my stitching.  When you are working with a piece that doesn't get covered by another there are other methods to doing this.  One is to take tiny stitches and then cover the with blanket stitching.  The other is to pull tails to the back and knot them.  I do the later in my show quilts, but otherwise I cover my ends with blanket stitching.

The back of the final block before I ripped off the stabilizer.

Happy Quilting!
Suzy