My Orange Peel Finish

This summer I have had a ton of fun making mini and baby sized quilts, mostly so that I could try some different techniques and enjoy designing my own quilts.  An added bonus has been making most of these projects out of fabric from my stash!

I think my most favorite finish is my orange peel mini which I just completed this afternoon.

The orange peels are made out of several fat quarters of Mimi by Chez Moi for Moda.  I have had them since last fall and I was just waiting for the perfect project to showcase this beautiful material!  The background squares are low volume fabrics that I have been collecting.  For the backing I used a fun multi-colored polka dot fat quarter from my stash, and I used the leftovers from the orange peels to make the binding.  This mini finished at 18 1/2 inches by 18 1/2 inches.

To quilt this mini, I stitched around each orange peel and then used this idea from Crazy Old Ladies quilts to add echoing lines in the space between the orange peels.  I love the pattern the quilting created!

I am linking up this week with Quilty Habit for the Orange Peel QAL, as well as Sew Cute Tuesday and Needle and Thread Thursday.  Have a happy week!

Quilty Flashback Friday

This is a quilt I made for my mom to celebrate her 80th birthday.  I was just visiting her in Arizona earlier this week, and realized I had never gotten a good picture of it since she hung it up on her bedroom wall.  It's still not a very good picture because of the lighting, but it's the best "official" picture I've got!  :)

I made this quilt in 2011, right before I started blogging, and I am really proud of it for many reasons.  My quilt group was doing a medallion project where we learned how to put on various sizes of borders, and to do the math correctly for the borders!  And, by golly, I did the math right on these borders!

The center block is called "Sharon's Star" and I found it on Quilter's Cache.  I chose that block because my mom's name is Sharon.  I didn't keep track of the particular fabrics I chose for it, but I am still enjoying them because the scraps keep finding their way into my current projects!

I'm linking up with Don't Call Me Betsy for Quilty Flashback Friday, a fun new linky party I just discovered. 

Back to School!

It always seems like the beginning of August means it is time to think about school again.  Even though teachers in our district don't officially report back until August 14th, there are many trainings scheduled for this first week of August.  It will seriously cut into my sewing time!  Oh well...

For a back to school gift for my teaching partners, I made these fabric lanyards for our keys and name tags.  I used this tutorial by Gemini Stitches.  It was super easy and I made three of these lanyards in less than an hour!

I chose a couple of fat quarters of text fabric I had in my stash that seemed perfect for teachers.  Both of them have letters of the alphabet in fun fonts and colors.

For the third lanyard, I made a patchwork of both of the fabrics.  At the bottom of each lanyard, where the hook goes, I stitched across a couple of times so that the hook will stay in place. 

 

 

 

Hope my teaching partners will enjoy these and get a lot of use out of them!  I know I will!  Linking up this week with Sew Cute Tuesday and Needle and Thread Thursday.  Go check out all of the fun projects!

Orange Peels Midway

I made a bunch of orange peel blocks so I could join in with the QAL at Quilty Habit, and here they are!

The backgrounds are 5 inch blocks cut from my stash of low volume fabrics.  The orange peels are cut from a stack of fat quarters that a friend gave me for my birthday last year.  The fabric line is called Mimi by Chez Moi for Moda.  I love the large florals in oranges, greens, teals, and pinks!

My plan so far is to make a table topper from these orange peels.  But that remains to be seen!
Linking up for the Midway Linky Party.

A Different Design Idea!

Somehow, this:

And this:

Turned into this:

I spent some time over the last few days arranging and rearranging the eight 4 inch x 22 inch strips of various greens from my stash, and ended up sewing them all together without any sashing.  It made an interesting pattern because I started with four strips and cut each of them in half.  I really like the gradation of color from light to dark that you see when they are sewn together this way!

 

Right now this quilt is 24 inches wide, so just about perfect for a table topper or a mini.  I just have to decide if I want to add a border to make it bigger or not.  This will be a good size project to try some FMQ on.  I definitely need the practice!

 

This quilt is inspired by Quilting is More Fun than Houseworks's Scrap-a-Palooza series, Quilt #7. (Even though I really took off on a completely different tangent!)  It has been fun to experiment with color!

A New Favorite

Right now,  I am definitely affected by Quilter's ADD!  I have multiple projects to work on, but I just needed to start a new one.  So, I found this stack of fabric:

And turned it into this:

Yes, it is a Noodlehead 241 Tote!  And I love it!  I had been wanting to make one ever since I first saw the pattern, probably a year ago.  It turned out to be pretty straightforward to put together, with clear directions, and I didn't make too many mistakes.  Just a few places where my seam ripper was needed!  I even installed a magnetic snap, which was easy as can be.  It is the perfect size to tote around what I need on a daily basis.



So glad I gave it a try!

A Finish and a WiP

Last night I finished a quilt I started in February!  I decided I wanted to make a Jelly Roll Race quilt, so I watched this video from Missouri Star Quilt Company to see how it was done.  I bought a jelly roll of Road 15 by Sweetwater for Moda and I thought it might make a fun quilt for my youngest son who turned 30 yesterday.  I loved many of the fabrics because they made me think of the small town in Kansas where he lives, and also the trip he is taking next week to Las Vegas for the Star Trek Convention.  He is so excited!

 

 

 

It has been really fun to look at all the fabrics in this line as I stitched them together!  Since it was February when I made the basic quilt itself, I couldn't take it outside to lay out all 1600 (or however many it is!) inches when they were sewn together end to end, so I had to run up and down the stairs with all it night long!  I told my friends at work the next day that I now have proof that quilting is an aerobic activity! 

 



 

Unfortunately, I think I missed one important part of the video in my haste to sew all the strips together:  I forgot to cut off part of the very first strip to offset the seams.  That caused me to end up with a lot of seams close together in rows that touch.  Probably not a huge mistake, but noticeable to people who have made this quilt before!

 

 

I decided to add a border to make the quilt bigger for my son, so I used a gray solid.  I backed and bound it in a marbled dark gray fabric I found at Hobby Lobby.  I liked the way my quilting showed up on the dark gray on the back and the way it framed the lighter gray solid on the front.

 

 

 

In spite of my mistakes, I really do like how this quilt turned out, and I hope he will, too!  I'll be seeing him next week to give it to him.

 

This week, I also got started on some orange peels so that I can quilt along with Jessica of Quilty Habit!  They were fun to make, and I'm loving how they look.  My plan is to make a table topper wiith them, and I think they're going to work great for that purpose.

 

 

 

The backgrounds are 5 inch squares cut from my Low Volume stash that I have been collecting recently, and the orange peels are from a fat quarter stack that a friend gave me last fall for my birthday, a fabric line called Mimi by Chez Moi for Moda.  They are beautiful larger florals in greens, pinks, oranges, and teal.  Fun to sew with!  Can't wait to put the whole thing together and see how it turns out!

 





Linking up with Sew Cute Tuesday and Needle and Thread Thursday this week!