Birthday Quilt in Blue and Yellow

One more finished quilt!  It was a ton of fun to make, and came together super fast.

This is another birthday quilt for a breakfast club friend.  Last year I gave her a cathedral window pillow in yellow, orange and blue, so I wanted something that would kind of go with that.  I was also in the mood to do something really scrappy.  I pulled out a pattern called Field Greens by Madison Cottage Design, and started chopping up my blue scrap bin.  The surprising thing is that although the blue scrap bin is super full, I ended up cutting a few strips from yardage.  So many of my scraps are smaller than 6.5x2.5 in one dimension or another.



When it came time to quilt, I decided on a stipple.  But only in the blue.  I thought leaving the pinwheels unquilted would help them stand out even more.



I always like to learn and try new stuff, and on this quilt I did a few new things.  One was to try out machine binding once again.  I really do love the look of hand sewing the back, but have been wanting to try out doing the whole thing by machine, and this seemed like the perfect quilt for it.

All the edges on the front are scrappy blues, instead of my more common solid neutral.  I thought that would help hide the stitching line that results from sewing down the back half.  It worked out really well, including nice mitered corners.  And for sure is WAY faster.



I only have a couple pictures, because I seem to put that part of the process off for too long.  We meet at our restaurant at 8:15, right after the kids are all off to school.  I'm often trying to take pictures about 7:30 that morning, in the early light without anybody to hold them up, right before I bundle things up for gifting.

But I did have a chance later to take a photo of my horrible thread pile.  Another thing I was going to try out was quilting with this variegated Mettler, instead of my standard Isocord solid.  Seemed like the perfect time to try it out, in the sea of blue.

I got about a 6" square quilted before my thread broke, although the stitches looked good up to that point.  Changed needle, rethreaded, reseated the bobbin, then same thing.  NOT a happy camper, I decided to ditch the thread and go back to my solid isocord, having to unspool the four bobbins I already wound. Leaving that nice pile of thread spaghetti, and a crazy amount of time unpicking, for such a tiny quilted space.  Maybe this spool was old and had been sitting out in the sun at the store for too long.  I don't think I'll be trying it out again any time soon.

Retreat : recap one

I have so much to share with you, I'll break my final retreat post into a couple days.  I don't want to leave out a single, fun photo or moment.

Perhaps it was the fact that this was my first quilt retreat, or that all ten of the other women there just amazing, but I can not imagine a more awesome retreat.

(seriously, I've been gushing about it for the last two days to whomever I can get to listen!)



As everybody arrived Friday afternoon, we uncrammed our packed cars and started loading up the retreat center.



By evening we filled eight banquet rounds and a big rectangle table with an amazing variety of machines and quilty stuff.

Karen had a cool tilted base-thing so that her sewing surface is at perhaps a 10-15deg angle.  And Flaun had a Horizon that I tried not to drool on, along with Amanda's screamin' fast Juki (no fancy stuff, not even a zigzag, but as she said, it has two modes - fast and faster!)



Melinda's cool, vintage Kenmore doesn't have a quilting platform, so she improvised.

With yoga blocks, a few books including e.e.cummings, cardboard, and packing tape....It was super Zen!

After a yummy dinner of tacos and cupcakes (mmm!) we sat together to introduce ourselves more formally with some show & tell and flimsies.



I brought a few, including this dutch pinwheel I made a couple years ago with Snippets turnovers and a bit of stash.  We decided that proudly stippling it and a scrappy binding would be the way to go.

(I love to stipple, and I'm going to own that I'm proud of it - even though it kind of feels like stipple is trending 'out' in blog land lately) 



Melinda's string quilt.  Amazing. Oh, and she brought her voile quilt top as well - too busy gaping at it's wonderfulness to take a photo.  Go visit it....



Flaun had the most awesome aqua suitcase full of stuff.  She's a hoot and has made some cool stuff - you should check out her blog.

Melinda, Amanda, and the rest of us talked over lots of quilting ideas for all the flimsies we brought.



I brought my Figgy Pudding table cloth/quilt to sleep under.  Bummed I didn't take any photos of it in my nice room.

We over-talked.  By a whole big bunch.  It was just too much fun.

So the first class that Amanda was going to do for us go put off until Saturday morning - probably best not to start learning at 10:30 the first night!



That was perfect for me, as I had fallen in love with this quilt by Amanda.  She had been at a book signing the night before, and had all her quilts along - lucky us!

Amanda is truely the queen of scrap quilting.  But I have struggled with it.....How do you get the above out of a bin like this:



So, late Friday night I asked and Amanda happily dove into my bin and taught me how to do it.

Being an engineer to the core, I really just needed SOME basic process, other than - sew scraps together.  Her little improvised lesson was perfect.

Then it was off to bed a little before midnight - we had a big day planned for Saturday.  I was hyped up on caffine....

Diet Dr Pepper and Iced coffee - the drinks of the champion quilters :)

And had my new scrap-piecing skills churning in my head.  I tossed and turned, finally waking up at 4:30am.  I tried really hard to sleep some more, as we weren't starting until 8:30, but I gave up at 5 and hopped into the shower. 



I was up alone, so headed out back for some yogurt.  With the red winged blackbirds, and the sweet grass smell, it was a wonderful start.

Then I dove back into my green bin to try blocks by myself.



And I did it!!  By the time others started joining me around 7:30, I was super excited and waving my green blocks for all to see.



Amanda had started parts of these, and I just ran with it until the call for breakfast came at 8:30.



This one I did all by myself.

After breakfast we start the real lessons - and first up would be using a walking foot.....