Beach Quilt

I have a friend who asked me to make a beach quilt for her. She was stationed in Washington state when her husband was in the Navy and McKenna Ryan's quilt "From the Coast With Love" was a perfect pattern.

I just finished assembling the blocks for this quilt this morning. If you have not ever made a McKenna Ryan quilt, the first part is all tracing, cutting, layering, and fusing the appliqué pieces onto the block. All of the fabrics are batiks, so there are lots of oportunities to find just the right shading and shadowing for each piece. I follow the pictures on the patterns quite closely as I am not that artistically minded. The raw edges of the appliqués will be stitched down when the assembled blocks are quilted.

A lot of these blocks remind me of the Texas coast where we like to vacation and spent last winter.

Many laughing seagulls in these blocks.

But this quilt is definitely from the Pacific coast with it's sea otters,

seals,

and heavily forested islands.

The next part will be sewing the blocks together and a few more appliqués in the borders. It is a rainy cool day here in Nebraska, a good day for sewing and dreaming of the beach.

Happy Stitching,

Cheri

 

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One More Wool Block

My small group is making a wool album quilt for a charity auction for our local guild. I had made a block and showed it in a post last month but there was one more block kit that was not taken. The first one was so quick and fun I completed this unclaimed block this past week. The blanket stitch is done by machine with King Tut variegated threads. The stem couching was hand done with DMC wool floss. I had not ever tried the "couching" stitch but it was a great effect on the stems making them look sort of branch like.
Happy Stitching,
Cheri

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Back to Patchwork of the Crosses

We have a road trip coming up and English paper piecing is a great take along project for me. I have planned to make the quilt with 49 blocks in a 7 x 7 grid.

These are the last few blocks I have made and the main 49 are finished. Yea!

I have been going through all my left over fabric from the main blocks and started to cut the small square corner blocks. 68 of these are needed.

Next will come around 1000 fussy cut sashing connector blocks from this fabric.

ONE THOUSAND ! What was I thinking? It is a good thing I enjoy the process, you sort of get into a rhythm.
Finally the background pieces will be sewn to the sashing and corner squares to make these two different units. They will be sewn between the main 49 blocks.

Easy right? This quilt is not even to the half way point yet. It is not going to be finished for a long time but that is okay I have come to enjoy these labor intensive quilts.

My husband has been telling me there has been a black squirrel around lately and I finally spotted him at my neighbor's feeder today.
Happy Stitching and Happy Spring!

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Rose Fan quilt

Rose fan is a quilt that started in a class I took with Sue Garmen at the Baltimore on the Prairie applique conference (botpapplique.wix.com). Our class project was the rose fan block from Sue's Bed of Roses BOM patterns (comequilt.com). There are pictures from the class and of the quilt on my Sept. 11, 2014 post. I made four of the blocks to make a quilt for my dining room table.

 

One of the things we worked on in class were stuffed berries and this quilt has plenty of them. I love the way they stand out from the quilt.

 

The blocks are 14 inches and there was not a lot of unfilled space for special quilting but I got a couple little feather sprigs around the vases.

Even the berries on the vases puff out nicely.

The border fabric is a little busy for the quilting designs to show, but I repeated the feather sprigs.

I usually have a vase or glass bowl on the center of my table quilts but the secondary design of the berries keeps catching my eye whenever I walk by and I can't quite put anything else on top of it yet.

Happy Stitching,

Cheri

 

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Finish Drought Over!

I have not had a quilt finish in quite a while, but chubby chicks has ended that. This was a fairly fast and a fun quilt to complete. I kept the machine quilting pretty simple, mostly walking foot work.

There is a little meandering with occadional chicken footprints in each of the chicks blocks

and a few hearts in the corners.

Now I am on to my next machine quilting project, the four appliqué Rose Fan blocks. I am using the pattern sheet to pencil in some quilting ideas and drawing a diagram of the finished vases with some room for some feather designs.

Hopefully practicing this echo quilting on the pattern with a pencil will give me some muscle memory when the real quilting starts.

Happy Stitching!

 

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A Couple a Little Ta Das

I have not completely finished a quilt in a long while, but I have a couple little projects completed.

The above wool quilt block is my part of a charity auction quilt my small group is doing this year for our local quilt guild. The quilt is from a 2005 series in Quiltmaker magazine named Home and Harvest by Erica Kaprove. I did the blanket stitch applique on my sewing machine and used DMC wool floss for the embellishing embroidery.

I have also finished another border of Auntie Green's Garden and sewn the first two middle borders to the quilt center. It is getting too big to capture in one picture very well.

Some of my stems are a very light green so the flowers look like they are just floating in mid air from a distance but on close up the soft lighter colors give a nice variety.

I think I am just going to leave it because I don't intend for this quilt to hang on a wall. I have started the bottom border next. There are five sections of flowers along the bottom so that will be my hand project for the next couple weeks.

I have also finished the Chubby Chicks top. I have the back pieced so it is ready to layer and start machine quilting.

My projects are lined up and waiting so to the sewing machine I go. Happy Stitching all.

 

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Needle Felting and Other Fun

We are back home from our winter travels. I spent two days unpacking from the trip and then a day packing some sewing projects for my small quilt group's winter retreat. It was fun to spend three days with my quilting buddies after being gone for 4 1/2 months.

Here we all are at the table learning wool needle felting and making Easter eggs and little chicks.

Betty brought all her wonderful wool rovings and was such a good teacher, she soon had us all designing beautiful eggs.

Our favorite was the top center blue (In the post header picture) who seemed to have uncontrollable orange hair and a face. We ended up naming him Wilson after the volleyball character in the movie Castaway.

One of our members won a Go cutting machine and we put it to good use cutting up our stash and making a quilt for our local Hospice.

I have such talented friends, the projects were hanging everywhere by weekends end.

The super talented Betty also made us this awesome, decadent chocolate cake with chocolate ganache filling and raspberry filling. The Singer sewing machine is molded and frosted rice krispe treat. The pin cushion, thread, seam ripper and applique flowers are all fondant. She followed a picture and hand painted all the gold filligree with an edible gold paint. Isn't it just amazing!

My sewing machine did not go along on our camping travels so I enjoyed doing piece work this weekend.

I have started a new toddler's quilt with flying geese, pinwheel, and applique blocks. I love these cute little zigzag chicken legs.

The quilt is a pattern from Black Mountain Quilts called "Chubby Chicks", a very apt name for us quilters after that cake.

Happy Stitching All

 

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