A quilter who doesn't have a quilt on her bed?

Yes, I'm that girl — a quilter without a quilt on her bed. It's not that I'm overwhelmed by making a queen-size quilt or anything like that. I just really love my fluffy down comforter! I love the look of quilts on beds, but I just don't like the feeling of sleeping under one. I know, I'm crazy! Anyway, I have a store-bought duvet cover, but I couldn't sleep last night and decided one of my next "big" projects will be making a patchwork duvet cover. It will be "quilted" in the sense that I'll back it with muslin or something like that, but no batting. I stayed up for hours looking through magazines and Flickr groups for inspiration. Of course I found an overwhelming amount! Here are some of my favorites:

1. shade garden quilt, 2. Playing with the Boys Quilt, 3. Halloween Quilt, 4. Flying Geese Quilt, 5. geese in the city, 6. finished!, 7. Arcadia, 8. playpen quilt 006, 9. Jakob's quilt, 10. Funky Quilt Squares, 11. Basted - Front, 12. Dick And Jane Quilt

As you can see, I have a lot of narrowing down to do! I want to try to avoid anything with too much white (cause I'm lazy and don't want to wash it too often, ha!), and something that will go well with my black bed frame. I'm thinking lots of bright, bold colors...

I think I'll also make a "real" quilt to hang on the footboard and move to the bed during the winter months to keep my feet nice and toasty at night. Now I just have to decide on a pattern and figure out what colors I want to go with! (My room is kind of a blank slate once you take the duvet I'm using now out of the picture.)

I won't be able to start this project for a while (lots of time to let ideas marinate!), because I really want to try out a voile or cotton lawn to get a nice feel and easy drape. These tend to be a bit more expensive, but it'll be worth saving for. I've never worked with anything but a mid-weight cotton before, so I'd love to hear any tips on working with lighter fabrics.

Today was the deadline in Amy's One Thing, One Week Challenge. I haven't 100% finished the secret wall-hanging yet, but I did finish quilting and attaching the binding to the front. It's about 28" square, so I'm holding out hope that I might finish at some point tonight. Pictures to come as soon as it lands at its new home :)

Crafty A.D.D.

I feel like I've had crafty A.D.D. lately. I get to a mid-point with a project and then just completely switch gears! Does this happen to you? I was so psyched about my hexagon QAL quilt, but I keep finding ways to put off basting and quilting it. Though I did finish one of my distraction-projects last night:

This started a week or so ago. I came home from work one night and thought "I finally want to do something with that cute robot fat quarter I won a while back." So I started putting together a haphazard log cabin block. (Side note, I think I'm liking "haphazard" better than "wonky." Thoughts?) I was planning to make a small wall hanging, but then I remembered I had a naked pillow form in my closet, and it just grew from there.

Here's a close-up of the quilting. It took a while, but I really like the effect. I just quilted straight lines within each "log." And since it's a pillowcase, I didn't have to hide the thread ends, I just pulled them to the back, tied them off and trimmed them. Gotta love that!

I was walking home from work last night and the craziest thought popped into my head: "I'm craving a jelly roll." For those non-quilters reading, no I was not craving a pastry. I was craving a lovely roll-up of 42 2½"x44" strips of beautiful fabric. I think a huge part of the reason is that I kept coming back to stare at this beautiful patchwork table covering that Aneela at Comfort Stitching made with just a jelly roll and some background fabric.

I ended up ordering a Fandango jelly roll from Piece N Quilt. Natalia is de-stashing and has a few bundles of 10 fat quarters that she's selling for only $15 (that's only $6/yard)! I had to pick up one of those, too, of course!

So no more shopping for me for a while, but at least I have a billion projects to work on in the mean time. I just need to work up the motivation to quilt some stuff that's already pieced. The quilting is definitely one of my least-favorite parts of the process. Encouragement in the comments is always greatly appreciated :) How do you power through your least favorite part of the process?

A purse — finally!

I came home from work the other night determined to cross something off my list that's been on there for months: a new purse. I've been carrying a ratty, not too pretty, purse that I got for my vacation last October only because it had a lot of pockets and an adjustable strap I could wear messenger-style (so much safer when traveling). It had seen better days. I found this too-cute pattern on the IS•LY blog, and decided to give it a shot. This is what I wound up with:

Let me first say, the pattern is mostly a set of templates. The instructions are definitely written for seasoned bag-makers. If you want to try making a purse for the first time, spend the money on a pattern with detailed instructions — Amy Butler has some good ones.

I decided to alter this pattern quite a bit by adding interfacing and batting. For the main outer shell, I layered the fabric, interfacing (Pellon 40 I think), batting, and more interfacing. That made the pleats a little tricky to sew together, and I'm still not 100% happy with how the bottom pleats turned out, but I think that's just in my head. I really like the look the quilting gives the bag. I was a little apprehensive and the only reason I actually went through with it is that I wanted something a bit sturdy. I went with straight-line, "organic" quilting, because I knew I wouldn't be able to get the lines all straight and evenly spaced. I eye-balled a line down the center of each piece, then went out from there.

Oh, and the inside, of course:

I think I may go back and add a button and some elastic across the top to keep it closed. Now that I have all my stuff in it, it keeps popping open. As cute as the lining is, I don't want everyone to see that far in my purse!

In other news, Amy over at Amy's Creative Side is motivating people to finish one thing in one week. The week for this challenge ends on Tuesday, July 27.



I'm aiming to finish the Pure wall-hanging. What do you want to have done in a week?

Wall hangings galore

I finally got paid last week, and I went on a mini-shopping spree :) I finally got some graph paper and colored pencils, which allowed me to sketch up a little design for a wall hanging I'm working on:

This sneak peek is all you get for now. It's a gift, so no more pictures until it is at its new home.

I also finally finished the yellow and black wall-hanging I've been working on. I tacked it to my wall for a while, ultimately deciding that the more it hung, the more the quilting stood out. So I slapped some binding and hanging tags on it and now it's decorating my living room:

(oh how I wish I could paint those walls...)

I used this awesome tutorial for hanging loops using embroidery thread from Aneela at Comfort Stitching.

I'm really excited to play with my graph paper and colored pencils... I don't know if I've been this excited about colored pencils since elementary school :)

Musings on Inspiration

These are just a few things that have been inspiring me lately.
(Clockwise from left: a colorful trace I made of a sketch a friend drew;
the Austin skyline; and a shot of something I saw in the background on TV)

I've been thinking a lot lately about inspiration. First of all, there are many different kinds. There's the inspiration to create a design from scratch, the inspiration to modify a traditional pattern, the inspiration to just simply make something you've seen someone else make. The idea of starting from scratch has always left me dumbfounded. How do you start with a piece of blank paper and sketch out a beautiful quilt? Furthermore, how do you take something you see in real life and translate it to the language of quilt? It's always really overwhelmed me, to the point where I had almost resigned myself to simply re-creating others' designs.

But that seemed boring. Well, maybe boring isn't the best word... defeatist? Yes, I was throwing in the towel. Figuring out the math is one of my favorite parts of the process. Wouldn't it be even more fun if it were my design? Still, the idea of a blank sheet of paper and a pencil in my hand unnerves me.

I've been following the City Quilts Blog Tour, and on Monday I came across a blog post that floored me. Cheryl, who hosted the first stop on the blog tour, had a link on her sidebar titled "Modern Quilting — A Throwback." Well of course I had to check it out. Actually, you should, too! Cheryl writes about an antique quilts room in a quilt show she attended. It dawned on Cheryl that modern quilting really isn't so modern at all. Modern quilting is, in fact, traditional quilting, she says.

It's like the title of that Kaffe Fassett book Simple Shapes, Spectacular Quils. The idea is not new.

As I was reading Cheryl's post, I found that she managed to put into words many ideas that had been forming in the far reaches of the back of my mind for months. And then, of course, that old Barenaked Ladies song popped into my head: "It's all been done; it's all been done; it's all been done before." (Hey, I was in junior high when that song came out, so it's not lame that I know it so well...)

This took the stress away for me. It's all about putting my own touches on a design that speaks to me. What I need to do is not copy the pictures of quilts I love, but jump off from the idea and make it my own. That I think I can do :)

I spent more than an hour last night clicking through the 1,000+ images in the Amish Country Lanes online quilt tour, and I came up with quite a few ideas! (I would love to share them with you now, but this post is already long and text-heavy, so I'll wait until I have some sketches or InDesign mock-ups to show.)

I really want to know where your ideas come from. Do you prefer to follow patterns? If so, do you follow them to the letter or modify them a bit? Do you buy fabric to fit your pattern, or pick a pattern to fit your fabric? Do you write your own patterns? If so, where do the ideas come from?

What's the best idea you think you've had lately?

Bee blocks

So it occurred to me that I've yet to show you guys the blocks I've been making for my Virtual Quilting Bee (VQB), the Bee in my Bonnet. So here's a little wrap-up of what I've contributed to our first quarter...

Deanna was nice/brave enough to volunteer to go first, and got us kicked off in May with string blocks:

We used a white square for the foundation, rather than paper, and they came out really well. Deanna's actually pretty close to having the quilt top put together, and I can't wait to see it!

Then, for June, Kelly requested some wonky log cabin blocks. I dug some out of my stash to make two blocks for her:

This was my first time making anything wonky, and you can tell how my first block (on the left) turned out more straight than wonky! But I think the different degrees of wonkiness will play off each other well in Kelly's finished quilt.

For July, Candi gave us some lovely open-ended instructions: right angles, no wonkiness please. She also had a beautiful array of fabrics. So I perused the Quilting Bee Blocks Flickr group, and found some glorious inspiration. I followed the tutorial at Little Miss Shabby and cut what seemed like a billion 1½" squares. I "sketched" out my designs (using computer-generated graph paper, a sharpie, and some highlighers) and laid out all the teeny pieces on my new, big table. Each block took about three hours, but I am so happy with how they turned out:

It's going to take all my willpower to take these to the post office tomorrow :)

I love how each month I get to learn something new or try a new technique. If you're interested in joining a VQB, check out the Quilting Bees 101 page of the Quilting Bee Blocks blog. There's also a link from the blog to their fabulous Flickr group, which is just teeming with inspiration.

---

This is entirely unrelated, but I finally figured out how I want to piece the back of my Hexagon QAL quilt, and it's left me with an untouched layer cake of Glam Garden. I love this fabric line, but I'm currently at a loss as to what to do with the layer cake. What would you make with it?

hexagon progress!

A lot of people have been taking the "process pledge" and writing more about their process in creating a quilt. So I thought I'd take this opportunity to fill you guys in on my process.

I quilt in a corner of my living room, and I don't have space for a design wall. I also don't have any quilt design software (I don't think they make it for Macs). So I either sketch or use Adobe InDesign to lay out designs. Here's an example of an Adobe layout I made for the ORB Hexagon Quilt-Along:

I took individual photos of each of my hexagons, did a little photoshop magic, then arranged them in an InDesign document. Once I had everything arranged, I got it all put together:



I know it seems like a lot of work, but it would have taken most of my living room floor to lay it out, and then I would have been stepping on everything whenever I wanted to move something. It's just so much easier for me to drag the pictures around on my screen.

In other hexagon news, I was bored the other day after work, and I made myself a little bookmark:



What's your latest impulse project?