crafty mcgee

quilting monday on friday: a christmas surprise

The surprise is that I even completed this. Even my cat gazes in wonder. When I was stitching the strips together, the shiny silver stuff actually melted, and made a big mess on my iron and the back of the quilt! My attitude  turned to, "if that's the way you're going to be, just see if you ever get finished". Then several members of my family decided they were visiting for the holidays, and I realized I didn't have enough blankets, so I finished the quilt as quickly as I could. I used fusible batting for the first time, and I was really happy with how well it worked, and with a lot less hassle than basting.  I am most happy about the quilting itself, which I thought would be time consuming but was actually easy to sew. It's hard to see, but there are "snowflakes" on the ornaments and the upper part of the quilt, and drifts on the bottom. I'll do a couple little picture posts over the weekend, but for those of you who won't be back until after Christmas, I hope you and your families have a wonderful day!

quilting monday: two quilts in one

Here's the back of my "Love Beads" quilt.

I found all of this great Christmas fabric and just had to use it. I was going to put a little green and gold blanket stitch down the seams, but decided against it. It's busy enough already, and I was worried that it would look strange with the quilting, which will be a little different. Here are some details of the fabric. Click on them for larger pictures.

The Roy Rogers fabric is from In the Beginning, a local fabric store. They have their own line of fabric, but this isn't one of theirs. I haven't seen this one on line. The Santas on white are from  eQuilter, but they seem to be out. The other Santas are from Cia's Palette. I looked all over for another piece of fabric with that cool 40's green background without success. The shopping ladies are from The Virginia Quilter. Reprodepot carries this fabric, too. Also from Virginia Quilter are these two greens I got for the beads.

I realize I'm jumping from the 40's to the 60's on either side of the quilt, but I'm okay with that.

quilting monday: modern quilt-along part 2

This is a very weird shape to work with:

But it's the main shape for the Modern Quilt Workshop "Love Beads" quilt, which is my second quilt for Kim's  Modern Quilt-Along. I had my doubts when I saw the templates, but others have actually completed their quilt, so...

I'm going with a Christmas theme (to compliment the Halloween theme of my last quilt). Most of the fabrics are from local craft stores, but there were a few "special order" pieces that I'll post when I finish the back. Here's the first go 'round on the design wall. I'm going to live with this a couple of days, and then decide if I want to go with an all solid color scheme (like the second row). I'm torn at the moment.

quilting monday: "once upon a time" FINISHED!

Although it should probably be called "It was a dark and stormy night..."

I would never have believed, when I started this back in September, that I would finish this in time for this Halloween. Christmas, maybe. Halloween 2006, very likely. But in two months? Ha! This blog sure is good for me. I'm very happy with how it turned out, even though the binding is a little wonky (Weeks and Bill said their binding was tricky at first), and after I washed it, this happened to a few of the seams (on the left). On the right is a detail of the quilting, with a little alternating zigzag stitch.

   
It's also fun to "play". It's very cinematic, with lots of good stories. It could almost be a board game. For example:

Sugar rush, move ahead three squares; run into Vlad, lose a turn.  It could work!  (For those of you who wanted to see closeups of some of the pictures, check here) So, all in all, not bad for my first quilt. Heads up, Kim, since I'm still in a holiday mood, I'm thinking I might to a Christmas version of "Love Beads", so I might be in the pool a little while longer.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN EVERYBODY!

quilting monday: finished top!

The piecing is far from perfect, but I still think this looks really cool. A word of advice if you're thinking of making one of these, the directions call for 1/4" seams on the story lines, but I'd suggest using 1/8" or a teensy bit bigger, to avoid this:
 
It happened on all of them, so I don't think it's my lack of piecing skill. It's not an insurmountable problem, but you can avoid a lot of hassles with narrower seams. Now for the quilting (gulp). The binding is going to be bright orange, and I'm thinking of making the quilting the same color, but I'll have to do a few test swatches first.

quilting monday: the wall

I have a nice old house, built in 1911. In my craft room (aka the dining room), I am fortunate to have picture rails. I bought two 2-yard pieces of flannel, stitched them together, tacked it to the picture rail, and have an instant design wall. It works really well, is very portable, and collapses almost flat when I'm finished with it. I put the story blocks up. I'm doing this first for the best color balance. I will then will place the lines for the best story flow. This was the first go:

A little bleh. Needs more green, yellow, general brights. So I used up the last of my "Printed Treasures" and made some more story squares. One of them is a drawing that my mom did, one is a National Geographic cover, and the rest are images from good ol' Dover.
 
I'm hoping to get the top stitched together soon.

quilting monday: spooky squares

My "Once Upon A Time" quilt for the Modern Quilt-Along is progessing nicely. All of the story line blocks are pieced, and I hope to get the top planned out by the end of the week. I've tried to avoid the excessively cutesy Halloween fabric, and had to come up with some extra squares. Here are some that I've taken from snapshots, magazine pictures, cards, my son's drawings, and some I stamped with fabric paint with stamps left over from my mail art days. Click on a picture to enlarge it.

       

     

Just a sampling. The kids in costumes are me, my cousins, and my oldest younger brother. I'm the tall one in the go-go boots. Those were my everyday boots, too. I think I had my mom make the costume around them.  The skeletons in the car is from an old postcard swap, I couldn't find a name. I used the "Printed Treasures" inkjet fabric for the photo squares. I like it. It's easy to use and has a soft hand after printing, unlike some other transfer processes. I think it can be found at most terrestrial and on-line quilt shops.

quilting monday

I signed up for Kim's  Modern Quilt-Along based on the Modern Quilt Workshop . I've chosen the "Once Upon a Time" quilt, with my Big Idea being Halloween. Most of the quilts in this book are gorgeous- the colors practically sing - but I think this is by far the least successful.  I mean no disrespect to Weeks and Bill, but they seem to have disregarded their own suggestion for color selection: "Avoid using colors of similar hue and value".

Enough griping. I'm going follow their directions. These are the colors I originally chose:

That orange on the top is too bright, and too much the same tone as most of the darker Halloween image fabrics. I have already thought of another quilt I could use it on. These are the colors I am going with:

The orange is the background, the green will be the diagonal story lines and crosses, and the chocolate grey will be the horizontal story lines. That nice pinstripe will run along in the same direction (most of the way, it's slightly wavy). I'll post about the story squares later (I'm still working on them), but here's a parting shot of my Very Favorite Halloween fabric EVER, before it is mercilessly hacked into 3.5" squares:

By the way, this is my first quilt!