Friday, February 27, 2015

On Quilt Guilds

Last pics of finished baby quilt; I washed it and had two yo-yo's fall apart on it, so re-stitched  them and decided to hand stitch all around every yo-yo's for a secure hold.  Quilted with 80 /20 cotton batting (the last of a roll I had for several years) on my Juki, just freemotion scribble.

This past weekend I worked on a sample of the Delectable Mountain block (Bonnie Hunter) at http://quiltville.com/delmtspf.html.  She is just the best, I try to read her blog at least once a week.  She shares a whole lotta patterns for free and is just fun to read and follow. 
Every month the quilt guild I belong to has a member do a tutorial on "block of the month".  My turn is this month.  Members can (if they wish) make a few samples of that block for the next month and they are all put together for a drawing, each block you make equals one ticket for the drawing.  If you win, you get all the blocks.  The block can also be done up in red, white and blue and donated to our wounded warrior quilt efforts.  I enjoy the quilt guild.  Visiting with friends, beautiful eye candy when it is show and tell, it is a relaxing evening for me.  So this is my demo for the quilt block:



Hopefully, if you click on the pic, you can see it enlarged, it is a fairly easy block with various setting options.  It has been snowing all day and the weatherwoman predicts it will continue to snow all weekend.  I am going to try to just stay and home and sew, my own little weekend retreat.  Adios. Bernie.



Monday, February 2, 2015

Baby girl quilt - yo yo - applique & Superbowl



Well, well, well, that was quite a game yesterday.  I don't even follow football or pretend to understand more than that each team tries to get to the opposite end of the field and score points, but thought it was an exciting game to watch anyway.  I got pulled in because my husband was watching, usually that football time finds me in my sewing room.  Congrats to the winning team and fans.  Both teams played hard.  
I have a flimsy to show.  It is intended for a cousin's daughter who is expecting her first baby in April Z(I think).  I was told it is a girl, so I went for pinks and purples because the momma to be is favoring lavender for the baby's room.  It will have a lavender flannel backing.

The fabrics are an assortment of the 1930's reproductions and then I fused some freeform flowers, hand embroidered the edges and added yo-yo's to them (the yo-yos are attached with the sewing machine zig-zag stitch through the centers and tacked on some of the edges.   I used SoftFuse for the flowers.  The winding stem is a bias tube I stitched on by machine.  It was difficult to hand embroider the edges through the fabric layers and the fusible.  The edges of flowers and leaves are embroidered with perle cotton #8 and #12.  I won't put a border on this and am not sure if I will try to machine quilt around it or use the birthing method and tie it.  It came out okay - I would like to try the flowers and vine again as a border, but don't think I will use the Soft Fuse, I will try the freezer paper turn under method.  I saw a similar wall hanging of the flowers on Pinterest and lots of pics of these "strip" type baby quilts, so I just put the two together.  That's it for this week !
Bernie