Bone & Chain

Since it's late October, I thought Bone & Chain would be a good quilt to finish and blog about! The pattern of Bone & Chain is by BasicGrey, and I used fabrics from Guicy Guice's Declassified line. I love the funky and fun colors in this quilt!

Without a doubt, this is the most intense and complicated cutting I've ever done. There are thousands of little pieces, and they come in all these different sizes. It was amazing I managed to keep track of them and not make a mistake, but I think the well-written pattern has a lot to do with it. The whole quilt is made of straight seams or snowball corners, but I would say the main challenge is keeping everything organized.

After all that piecing, the quilting is actually the easier part. The space is already pretty well divided, so I added in some straight lines for contrast and filled the rest of the background with a swirl.

The skulls themselves, however, were tough. I never quite know what to do with these "face" type quilts, to be honest, so I did some geometric dot-to-dot designs. I did have fun with the eyes though ... some of the skulls are totally dead, others have eyeballs.

This quilt was tough but enjoyable, and I'm so glad I finally finished it! I adore skull quilts and though this is my first one, it will not be my last.

For the back of the quilt, I used more of my Tula Pink backing fabric. It literally pains me to use such nice and expensive backing fabric like this (I'm cheap) but it does make the quilt feel even more special!

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Earlier this year I made the Scrappy Market Tote, an improv bag by Christina Cameli. I really loved the finished result, but I couldn't get enough of the palette of blue / green / yellows I picked, and I wanted to make a full-sized quilt with the same palette.

The pattern I decided on is Facets by Christa Watson. I love how the improv patchwork is juxtaposed with white fabrics for some breathing room, and the solid column of colors is perfect for a bit of balance.

In order to gather fabric however and for a truly scrappy look, I had to dive into my scrap bins. I have quite a few of them, and they're all incredibly heavy. I usually don't look inside them because I'm scared of facing my scraps, but I also don't have the heart to toss them. After pulling a ton of fabrics and ironing them and cutting them into random-sized strips, I had a good selection to work with.

The first step is to make large rectangular panels from where I could cut the shapes I need. This part was fun but also very exhausting. I realized that my brain is consistently on and I'm constantly making decisions when I'm doing improv, and it's not something I can help. The result is that I'm completely mentally drained at the end of an improv session!

After I had enough panels (it took a lot) I cut them into triangles for this quilt. I decided to use foundation paper piecing to make these blocks so they'll be perfect and so I don't have to buy any specialized rulers.

Final assembly took awhile as there are a lot of blocks, but it was exciting to watch this quilt come together.

Well, I'm really, really happy with it!

Fragile

It's been 3 years since Brigitte Heitland of Zen Chic released her Fragile collection, and to this day it remains one of my favorite collections ever. I have made quite a few quilts with it, including Critical Sunshine and Paradox. And, it was because of Paradox that I have this new quilt.

Paradox was a quilt full of large flying geese made in the traditional way, and that meant I had a lot of leftover half-square triangles. I couldn't throw them away, so I decided to try to arrange them to see if I could come up with anything interesting. Happily, I did manage to arrange them in a manner that I found very pleasing, and after tacking on a wide border to fill it out a bit, I had in my hands a very nice throw-sized quilt.

I held onto this quilt top for about 2 years because I was just too in love with it to quilt it. (That statement made a lot of sense in my head.) But, I decided it's finally time. After some sketching, I decided on a design that both emphasizes the geometric lines of Fragile, as well as the theme of the fabric ... beauty in nature.

I always have a bit of trouble deciding what to do with borders, because I don't really like to treat borders like traditional borders. Instead, I prefer to think of it as a negative space. So I extended some of the quilting designs from the blocks out to the borders. I further divided the space and then filled the rest in with a mix of designs that reflect nature, such as leaves, feathery swirls, and pebbles.

The blocks had quite a bit of print on them, so I kept the quilting more minimal with dot-to-dot designs and straight lines.

After all this time, I'm finally done with Fragile, and I couldn't be happier with it. It really is everything I wanted it to be, and the best part is I didn't use up any of my precious hoard of Fragile fabrics to make this quilt, since it's made from leftovers!

Pick-Up Sticks

Pick-Up Sticks is such a fun and unusual quilt for me. The original pattern is called On the Ball by Brigitte Heitland (of Zen Chic). I really liked the pattern, but it was made with the splice and insert technique which will be incredibly difficult on this scale. So instead, I made it with the applique technique. Details on how I made this top is here.

When it comes to quilting it, I decided to keep this one simple in concept. I extended each "stick" into the background space, and I love the way it divides up the background.

I filled all the areas in between with my favorite filler: elongated elegant swirls.

I filled the center areas with pebbles, and left all the sticks unquilted so they would rise to the top of the quilt.

This quilt was easy even if it was time consuming. I absolutely love it, but I also cannot use this as a lap quilt because between the applique and the pounds of thread I added on, it's just too heavy! But I think it'd make a fabulous wall hanging ...

Solstice ~ Ready to Quilt

Late last year after I finished the 极光vpm破解无限版 Block-of-the-Month run by Rebecca Bryan, I said I wasn't going to do another one. Stargazer was a lot of work, and I was still feeling tired from it.

A few months later, when Rebecca revealed the 2020 Block-of-the-Month, Solstice, I decided that yes, I was going to do another one. Rebecca's quilts are never easy, but they're super interesting and unique. I certainly don't have another quilt like Solstice in my collection.

After 8 months of block making, I finally got ready to assemble Solstice.

Solstice wasn't too difficult to put together as it consists mostly of 60 degree triangles assembled in rows. There are no bias edges on the outside which is good news for me. However, some of the seams are very, very thick and I found that the most challenging part. The end result definitely has a wow factor! I would never have thought to use these colors, but they work so beautifully together.

Solstice is the first block-of-the-month I finished this year, and I couldn't be more pleased with it. One down, 3 more to go!

Velodrome

I was in the mood for a quick and easy finish this week so I pulled out a quilt top I finished quite awhile ago. The original pattern is Mod Ovals by Malka Dubrawsky, but I made my blocks bigger. The fabrics used in this quilt are all from Libs Elliott's Tattooed North line, a sparkly line of neutrals with some golds mixed in. I simply love Libs Elliott's fabrics, and I consider her the rock star of the quilting world.

Even though I meant for this quilt to be quick and easy, I still wanted to put some effort into the quilting to make it special.

I quilted each block with a mixture of straight lines, ribbon candies, and dot-to-dot designs. I love how the secondary designs show up in these types of quilts.

There are 3 special blocks in this quilt where the fabric is gold instead of the neutral, so I decided to quilt them a little differently.

I named this quilt Velodrome because the individual blocks really remind me of cycling velodromes. I'm super happy with the fabrics and the graphic and urban look of this quilt, and it looks so different from Malka's original quilt that I marvel at just how much a quilt can change its vibe just by using different fabrics.

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There's no question that Brigitte Heitland from Zen Chic is my favorite fabric designer. I have loved most of her collections, to the point of collecting them obsessively, but I was a little disappointed when Day in Paris first came out. But when I actually saw it in person, it began to grow on me, and when I saw X & + made with Day in Paris, I fell madly in love with it.

I really enjoyed working on this quilt because of the gorgeous fabrics, and I knew the quilting just had two jobs: play up the huge borders and show off the fabrics on the blocks.

This quilt was rather easy to design quilting for as I didn't have a story in mind (unlike Rainbow Road), so I just wanted to play up the design of the quilt. I created some channels in the borders that extend the block design, and filled them with a combination of swirls and more linear designs.

I quilted each block with a few different designs, including serpentine lines, ribbon candies, straight line echoes, and dot-to-dot designs.

This quilt is pretty big at 83" x 83", and I had such a great time working on it. The colors are perfect and I'm really happy with how the quilting turned out. I hadn't quilted a swirl or ribbon candy in several months, and I missed it!