A Baby Quilt

 I've been quilting for the past few days on a baby quilt for my guild.  We need to "fill our merchandise" to sell at the next Art in the Redwoods, and then Winter Wonderland.  These are the two main fundraisers for our guild (and for other organizations as well as the parent organization, Gualala Arts Center).  I had some fabric in my stash that had multi-colored squares printed on it, and I bought it with the idea of making it into a baby quilt.  So I pulled it out, got it sandwiched with a cute "kiddy print" on the back, and am now doing the quilting.

I don't pretend to be a very good free motion quilter, but I think that the more I practice, the better I should become, right?

This first design is simple leaves, all over and all different directions.  It was fun!

I believe this was a design that I found in a Leah Day free motion quilting book.  I drew one line wavy from corner to corner, then drew a straight line between the other corners.  Then simply followed the line, and echoed it.  I like this design a lot.

This kind of looks like a star to me, or a flower.

And some plain old stippling, which I really like, now that I've finally learned how to do it!

Several years ago, in my free motion quilting attempts, I could do "pebbles" quite well.  Now, however, something has changed, and I find myself pebble-challenged.  But I thought I'd try pebbles again.  The bigger pebbles are definitely easier for me than the small pebbles.

Below you see a square with a very simple wavy line going across it.  Also, you can see that these squares are about 5" square.

I still have several squares to quilt.  I'm quilting every other square, leaving the alternating squares blank.  I thought the quilt might get too stiff if it was quilted in every single square.

"One Red Square" Quilt Guild Challenge

I think I mentioned that our guild's challenge theme for this year is One Red Square.  Anything we enter must contain one red square.  Not two squares or more, just one red square.  I came up with LOTS of ideas for this challenge!  And I carried through on most of them!

There is a large white barn near where I live.  It is the only barn in the immediate vicinity.  And it is called (wait for it. . .) The White Barn.  Every time I drive past it I think, "That barn really needs a barn quilt on it."  So with this challenge, I was able to produce a barn quilt on my very own 

White Barn.  

I used a technique which I have used in the past called Fabric Confetti.  I took a class a few years ago at Asilomar (Empty Spools) from Denise Oyama Miller and Nancy Ryan.  Here's the process in a nutshell.  First I cut the fabric pieces into "confetti."  Fast back and forth with the rotary cutter accomplishes this.  The backing fabric and batting are laid down on a surface, and the colored confetti pieces are laid onto the batting to form the picture.  

When that is finished, a layer of black tulle is (very carefully) laid down on top, being careful not to move the fabric pieces.  Then it gets safety pinned really, really close together to baste it all and to hold the tiny pieces in place.

The next step is to stipple the * out of it, using invisible thread.  That holds everything in place.  Here you can see the quilt in the midst of being quilted down.

After I did that, I laid down the white fabric pieces for the barn itself.  In the photo below you can see that I've made some "barn board" lines in the barn, as well as tiny stippling.

When that was done, I had some fun laying down brown tree trunk pieces amidst the greenery.  I added a fence, which appears in that part of the scene.  I had the very edges of the quilt turned over and pinned for two reasons.  One is so I didn't "leak" any more pieces of fabric onto the floor!  There was already enough of that!  And the other reason is to minimize the risk of getting the edge of the quilt folded over underneath where I was quilting.  Yes, I did do that, and had to rip out some very dense quilting I had done over a tree trunk.

This is just a tiny sample of what the floor looked like, as well as the clothes I was wearing.  Little tiny fabric pieces everywhere!

Here's a close-up of part of the barn, where you can see the two slightly different colors I made the barn to give an impression of shadows.

I created some pink "Naked Ladies" and yellow dandelions and tall grasses in the foreground.  Naked Ladies are properly known as amaryllis belladonna.

Maybe My Fastest Quilt Ever?!

I think this might just be the fastest quilt I've ever made!

                                     

On a Friday I was given a bag full of pre-cut squares.  They were about 4 1/2" square.  And I was told to make a quilt to sell at our annual Festival of the Trees at Gualala Arts Center.  Every year our quilt guild has a booth there and raises a lot of money for the Art Center and for us.

So I separated lights and darks into two stacks.  Then I proceeded to make them into 9-patches.  I always put the dark patches on the outside, as that pile was higher than the pile of light patches.

All of the nine-patches got sewn together, then basted with batting and backing.

I used a large-ish overall stippling to quilt this, and now I think I can really, honestly say that stippling is one of my least favorite designs to quilt.  I used to think that was just my opinion because I couldn't do it very well.  But this one came out pretty good.  I just--plain and simple--don't like sewing this type of design!

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.  The nine-patches don't show up a lot, but they are there, and give it just a slight bit of order.

For the backing I chose a light pink/green/blue stripe.  This quilt turned out to be just a tiny bit wider than 44", and this particular piece of fabric was a little wider, too.  So no piecing!

I even had one 9-patch left over so I used it as the label on the back.

And I couldn't possibly do anything but a scrappy binding on this scrap quilt!  We quilters are often hoarders, aren't we.  I have a collection of leftover bits of binding.  Whenever I had a piece left over after binding a quilt, I would throw it in a bag.  So I sewed several of them together to bind this quilt.  I knew I was saving them for a reason!

So after receiving the blocks on Friday, this nice lap-size quilt was finished the following Wednesday.  I'm sure that's a record for me!