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New Quilt, Old Mystery

1/26/2018

Last week I shared my progress on a mystery quilt I'm currently working on. This past week I finished quilting one of my own quilt tops that has been waiting patiently to be quilted for 5 years! This was the Winter Mystery Quilt from (one of my favorite local shops) The Quilt Company in Allison Park, PA, back in 2013. It was meant to be a scrap buster. All of the fabrics in this quilt were from my stash. Even the white is a collection of different white-on-white prints mostly. I love the combination of blues, greens, and sprinkles of yellow and orange here and there.

Above you can see (picture from back in 2013) I had all of my pieces cut and ready to sew - all 1,400 of them!! This is the actual block . . .

. . . and here's the whole quilt.

It was such a nice day today I thought maybe we could get some pictures outside. It was Friday afternoon, and we were all feeling goofy, I guess.

The backing fabric is this great aqua/blue flannel with circles. I love the happy colors in this quilt, and it's great fun to see some of the little prints up close and remember what I made with them. I might bind this quilt with white which should frame it nicely, though I'm not 100% sure.

It was quite windy outside today also, but I'm thankful for my helpers :-)

Don't be discouraged if you have a project sitting around for years! It's definitely possible to get that quilt finished if you still have some love for it.

Linking up with Crazy Mom Quilts Finish It Up Friday. Thanks for visiting!

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Mystery Half Solved

1/20/2018

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I have been having a lot of fun over the last 4 weeks participating in a mystery quilt project created by Deb Heatherly, the creator of some wonderful Creative Grids rulers. It is a free quilt-a-long for the Grids Girls Facebook Group. It is a private group, but if you are interested, you can request to join. If you are a Creative Grids junkie like me you might want to check it out!

This quilt requires the Pineapple Trim Tool, the Strippy Stars Tool, the Cat's Cradle Tool, and the Ultimate Flying Geese Tool, all from Creative Grids USA. These are specialty rulers, but they all have the ability to help you create many different sizes of quilt block units.

The fabrics that I am using are from my batik stash. I did have to purchase a light background and a dark contrasting constant fabric.

First clue was to make some of these units with the Strippy Stars tool. It's too soon to tell how these will be used yet!

Here are some long rows of Flying Geese. I think I'm going to like this.

There are 4 blocks like this made using the Pineapple Trim Tool. This isn't the usual pineapple block but a variation of it. The top picture is the 4 blocks put together, but this probably isn't how it is going to be. I love a good mystery!

The last unit is the cat's cradle, made using the Cat's Cradle Tool, of course. How do you think this piece of the puzzle might fit in?

In 4 more weeks the mystery will be solved, and I get more curious each week. This isn't genuinely a quilting finish, but I have completed all of the clues. I'll definitely share the real finish with you when it happens! For now I'll link up at Crazy Mom Quilts Finish It Up Friday.

Deb Heatherly has some awesome patterns to accompany the rulers she has created. You can check them out at her site here.

Thanks for stopping by :-)

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The Cat's Cradle

1/13/2018

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Hello, friends. I just finished this fun little quilt that I'd like to share with you. This was an experimental project using a Christmas present that I received, the Cat's Cradle Tool from Creative Grids. I asked for this tool/template because I'm currently working on a mystery quilt that requires it. Though I'm trying to be diligent about finishing already-started quilt projects, I just had to see how this new tool works!

The good news is I didn't buy any new fabric for this quilt! Last year I had purchased one of those scrap collections from Moda (Basic Mixologie) down at The Little Foot Quilt Shoppe, and I decided to see what I could make with that. This was the first time I bought one of those fabric packs, and I didn't know what to expect really. You can see the strips in the pic above. Most of them look about 3" wide, but they do contain selvage edges, so by the time they are trimmed to actual usable fabric, some weren't even 2" wide. I probably wouldn't buy this product again, but, hey, I gave it a try for around $10.

I was inspired to make that quilt block that was part of a daily quilt calendar. Can you see the cat's cradle unit in there? It is made up of 12 cat's cradle units and 4 squares for the corners. I haven't really thought much about this quilt unit before, but it's really quite common in many traditional blocks. That star is a 10" finished block.

My mom is currently working on a sampler quilt that inspired the blocks below. It is a much quicker one to make. I made the biggest units that I could with the size of the fabric strips that I had, and these are 5" finished blocks.

In deciding how to put them all together, I added some strips with cornerstones around the green blocks and sashing with cornerstones to bring everything together. I love it when quilt designs flow like this and it's hard to tell where one block stops and the next one starts.

I even had this backing fabric with the green dots on hand that I decided against using in a quilt a few years ago, and just the right amount! Confession: I did have to buy the binding fabric. There just weren't enough 2-1/4" wide pieces in the scrap collection to make a scrappy binding. I ordered 1/4 yard of matching fabric from another Etsy seller, and it was in my mailbox in just a few days.

There are SO MANY POSSIBILITIES with the cat's cradle tool! It makes various sizes which is great. When you use it, everything is trimmed down to the perfect size, so the units fit together just right, and getting nice points on the triangles and squares is pretty easy.

This quilt is 33" square and will soon be hanging in my house somewhere. Wouldn't this look great as a big quilt with more blocks, bigger blocks? How about setting the whole thing on point like below?

It's a very wintery weekend here, perfect for sewing a lot, which is what I plan to do. Thanks for visiting and reading, and I hope you were inspired to sew! I'm linking up at Crazy Mom Quilts Finish It Up Friday. See you soon!

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Dwight the Deer

1/5/2018

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Dwight the Deer is finally finished and in his new home. He was the one thing that I didn't get done for Christmas. Lydia and I decided that he would be a great Christmas present for Aunt Brenda and Uncle Dave. The week before Christmas my longarm machine was out of commission. I ran over a quilting ruler and had to re-time my machine. I never did that before (yes, I was a little sick about it), and it took me a couple of days to get the problem resolved. So instead of being a Christmas present, Dwight was a New Year's Day present.

The pattern for Dwight The Deer is designed by Elizabeth Hartman. She has many pieced animal patterns. I have a lot of fun making them because they aren't typical patchwork. You cut up various sizes of triangles and rectangles - lots of them, and you HAVE TO FOLLOW DIRECTIONS very well. I find them to be a fun little challenge. I have some of Elizabeth Hartman's other animals in the works, too, and I love them all.

Over the years Uncle Dave has hunted many deer and has given us lots of venison for our freezer. So we got to give him a deer for a change. I think this one will look good in their beautiful home.

It's Finish It Up Friday over at Crazy Mom Quilts where I'll be linking up. Thanks for stopping by. I'm looking forward to a weekend full of sewing in my nice warm house. I wish the same for you, too!

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New Quilt, Old Mystery

Mystery Half Solved

The Cat's Cradle

Dwight the Deer

This is me...

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