Bias 3 - all finished!

I put the final stitches in the binding of Bias 3 this weekend! I so enjoy getting a quilt finished up. And I am really in love with this one.

As my work has progressed I've tried to maintain the balance of working with minimalist design, yet keeping interest in the quilt. If I may say so myself, I think that I hit that note just right with this quilt and it's a place that I'll keep exploring.

I did my usual straight line quilting on it - following the lines of the piecing. I left the red stripes unquilted to make them pop even more...

You can really see the quilting on the back!

Believe it or not, I'm gonna blog AGAIN this week so keep an eye out. Happy Monday!

Every Color featuring my solids!

I am newly home from Quilt Market.  It was a good one... Was great to see so many friends again. I had to make a quilt for the In the Beginning booth that featured all of my Modern Solids.  Needless to say, it wasn't an easy task for me to come up with a quilt that had all of the colors, but didn't read too much like a rainbow.  Here it is, hanging at Market, all finished up:

And a wider photo that shows it with the other two quilts featuring my fabrics.

Jacquie made the one next to mine and Jen the last one.  They are both so so beautiful! I'm very lucky to have friends who are such talented quilters who were up for making these  amazing quilts so quickly.

I don't have many progress photos, but here's a couple...

For the quilting I did straight line quilting across the whole face of the quilt (using the edge of my walking foot as a guide for each seam).

Then in order to accentuate the negative space, I went back and added another line between each line in the light gray.

I can't can't wait to keep working with my fabrics more! And I won't have to use every single color in the next quilt! There's definitely a certain satisfaction in sewing with your own fabrics. It's wonderful.

Another reminder that I'm over on Instagram more than I'm posting here... it's just so much faster! Please follow me over there if you'd like to!

Mini Quilts for Sisters Class Samples!

I just spent the last week up in Sisters, OR for a week of teaching at the Quilters Affair and the Sisters' Outdoor Quilt Show. It was an amazing week and I'll get a blog post about it written up soon. Meanwhile, I thought I'd post all of the mini quilts that I sewed up for my various class samples.

A few are made up of blocks from my Modern BOM over on Sew, Mama, Sew and the others are from blocks in Block Party.

This is a my January block, sewn up with three fabrics, rather than four. (Yes, I still needed to finish stitching the binding when I had time to snap these photos.)

The

October

block.

The

July

block.

The

August

block.

And finally a couple of different blocks from Block Party!

It was so much fun to work with these blocks again and be able to get some quick projects sewn up. Lots of work to sew up so many, but it was great to be able to mix and match with colors and my usual use of solids. Now, what to do with so many minis??

Didn't Get the Memo - all finished up!

Finally finished up this little quilt! I love it. The quilting looks like it was randomly done, but it wasn't. Each line follows along the edge of a different triangle... This was one of those quilting situations where you really aren't sure you're doing the right thing as it's happening, but the end result is fantastic. I'm really happy with the overall effect!

Here's the back:

I took a quick video of it for Instagram and thought I'd post it here too!

Tomorrow I'm headed up to Sisters, Oregon a week to teach and speak! I'm so looking forward to it. I should be a wonderful time. I'll post all of the mini quilts I made for class samples soon!

Greater Than - Center City

I finished up my quilt that I made with Jay McCarroll's latest line, Center City. Of course I included lots of solids too to really make those prints shine!

It's a different spin on this same idea...Lots more improv piecing this time around.

The more time I spend quilting the more I'm realizing that I like repeating some main design elements. But I think there's something to be said for exploring a theme for a bit... I like each one a bit more than the previous!

For the back I used some big pieces of the same line.

Of course there's loads of straight-line quilting and I also bound in my favorite print of the line.  I so, so love the binding on this one. It's so nice to get another quilt finished up!

Bee Imaginative Quilt finished!

Another quilt that I had hanging at QuiltCon was this group quilt, made by the members of Bee Imaginative. I have posted about what inspired these blocks here.

I finished it up by quilting the backgroud with dense straight lines. Then I went back and filled in the piecing with straight lines in the opposite direction that are set further apart.

I am so happy to have finished up this quilt. I often put my bee blocks to the side with every intention of putting them together into a top, and suddenly two years have passed and I still haven't found the time... Thrilled to get to use this wonderful quilt!

Bias

I was proud to have quilts hanging in the QuiltCon show.  One of them was Bias which I've posted about a couple of times while it was in progress.

The quilting on this is all straight line, echoing the piecing design. It took foreeeever, as this dense straight line quilting always does. Good thing there was a deadline to get it finished because it was hard to get it done!

I think that this quilt is a nice balance of clean, uncomplicated design, while also having interest. I'm really happy with it!

In a Sea of Blue finished!

Remember this idea? Well I got this commission finished up about a week ago. My first finish of 2013.

It's a big queen sized quilt. And look, I'm taking a flat photo of it! Very exciting stuff. This is because for Christmas my husband got me a great photography set up for my big quilts.

Until the day comes that I have some fabulous enormous studio space where I can shoot my big quilts, this will be my set up! I need to figure out a better clip and hang system than the clothes hangers but I will... and then I'm hoping that I get the gumption to take it different places beyond my sister's back yard.

Here's a detail of the quilt after I'd washed it (these first photos are before I washed it) and it got that nice crinkle. I'd say that the colors are truest in this photo.

The orange is Kona flame and boy is it bright! But in this sea of blue it works. I was thinking about using negative space differently in this quilt... sorta like I pieced it with all of the blue. I know it doesn't really read that way, but it's an idea I hope that I find more time time to explore in the future!

Pink Greater Than

Finished up a little baby girl quilt!  Named it Pink Less Greater Than (my math memory is definitely less than great and I got it backwards! Name adjusted!) because it looks kinda like a greater than symbol.

I made this block...

...for my Modern Block of the Month awhile back and I wanted to make a whole quilt version. I foresee more exploration of this design in the future.

I had fun with the quilting on this one.

I echoed the piecing with straight lines in gray and then I filled in the piecing with vertical straight lines in pink.

I was happy with how it came out!

-----

And speaking of my Modern Block of the Month, I'm going to be teaching all 12 blocks over the course of a year at Sew Modern! Every second Saturday of the month, from 2pm to 5pm.

You can either sign up for the whole year, or just one month at a time!

Intersections

I finished up this quilt last week. I'd been working on it for quite a bit of time... It's basically the quilt version of these placemats that are in Quilt Scene. The quilting took me forever and I have to admit - while I love the results, it's hard to stay motivated to get this dense straight line quilting done. But now it's finished and I couldn't be happier with it!

The orange is a shot cotton and in person really adds to the quilt - those shot cottons are so pretty with the depth of color they have.

Here's a detail of the back... always easier to see the quilting on the back!

Broken Plaid

I finished up this quilt!

Lots of dense straight line quilting that fills in the piecing pattern and then continues across the rest of the quilt.

Here's a detail of the quilting on the back... All that stopping and starting with the straight lines takes a lot of time, but it's so worth the end results!

Happy weekend to all of you!

Habitat Challenge quilt

The LAMQG had its November meeting last night. It was time for the reveal of our projects for the Habitat Challenge. You can see all of the projects here if you'd like. We Skyped with Jay McCarroll and it was a a ball...He is a total crack up.

Then he hung out with us as we all showed our projects. He was so great about giving individual feedback to everyone!

Here's the quilt I made. It's similar to the other one I recently made.

For the challenge we were allowed to add all the solids we wanted, but only use the Habitat line otherwise. I took these pictures after washing the quilt so it's nice and crinkly!

I used more of the line on the back, along with my go to Kona Coal.

On to other things!  The winner of Quilting Arts' Quilt Scene magazine is Janine - keep an eye out for an email from me!

And finally, Action Kivu gets 50% of the proceeds from sales of jewelry from Ember Arts through Dec. 7th. They have some really beautiful jewelry - maybe you wanna do some Christmas shopping AND do a good deed?

A quilt and a winner

The LAMQG had its second anniversary meeting on Monday night. It's crazy how quickly those two years have gone by and how much The MQG has grown since then! We coordinated an anniversary swap and I was sewing for Liz. Her adorable little baby girl is right at the age where they can always use one more quilt to put on the floor, so I quickly put together a little one for her.

I had to use scraps she gave me and I could only add one new fabric. Obviously I added the yellow. Oh and I cheated and added the binding too. Figured a stripy binding was worth a little cheating!

And thanks for all of your comments on the Quilt Retro blog tour post. I used the random number generator and the winner is Anita! Congrats and keep an eye out for an email from me.

Another finished quilt!

Ok - so I have no clue what to name this one so if you have bright ideas please leave 'em in the comments! This is the one I was starting back here...

I have been leaning more and more on non-block based quilt designs but I also love to improv. piece so I have been thinking of ways to combine the two. I feel like this quilt is a good example of that. Personally, I love it.

I quilted with dense straight lines (as usual - expect to see a whole lot more of this outta me - I'm loving it these days) and then less densely through the piecing. You can see the quilting really well on the back.

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

Queen Baby Quilt

Sometimes friends having a baby have a great last name (Queen in this case) and you just gotta use it when naming the quilt! Well, that and the fact that I'm the absolute worst at coming up with quilt names and there you have it... The Queen Baby Quilt!

I loved the central gray sorta plus sign created in this quilt, and was doing that that again here. I was also exploring intentionally ever so slightly wavy seams. Not just cutting with no ruler, but also cutting both pieces of fabric at the same time (overlapping them a bit) before sewing them together. Fun stuff and something I'm gonna do more of. It's a subtle difference, but it does effect your "wonky" look and I'm ever continuing to explore that... It's endless that wonk exploration, isn't it??

I did dense straight line quilting (yes, I'm stuck there right now) but I tried to mix it up a bit by outlining the blocks and then echoing that outline. And I filled in the blocks themselves with the wavy watery pattern I just did on my mother's quilt. I will be handing this quilt off to its new lil' baby owner on Saturday and I hope he loves and cuddles with it for years.

I'm headed to NYC for Fashion Week for all of 36 hours tomorrow. And in other exciting news, I found out that I'm going to the Emmys this year! Fun!! Project Runway is nominated and my fingers are seriously crossed that it'll win. My outfit is 90% sorted out. Now I just need to get used to walking around in my new super high stilettos...

Clouds & Water Quilt

I finally got my mother's quilt all finished up!

To tell the story of this quilt again, it's 100% fabric that my mother gave me.  She had slowly collected fabrics with cloud and water imagery and she wanted them all in one quilt. Along with the cloud and water fabric, she also had all of these solids and I knew I was going to lean heavily on them to make this a quilt that is my voice. I actually really love a challenge like this... I like being given certain confines that I have to design within - it forces some of the decisions. It's a bit small for my bed here but it's just the right size for my mother's bed!

I wouldn't have picked these fabrics myself, but I'm really happy with the end result. I really like the way the fabrics in the pieced strip go from dark, to light, to dark again and I think the fabrics are all featured well.

And I used more clouds for the binding...

Hope you all have a great weekend! I'm headed home to New Hampshire next week for a family visit. I can't wait!! Summer in New England...there's nothing better. Except the mosquitoes!

All finished.

The Nice Baby Quilt is all finished.  So simple. It was perfect for needing to sew up a quick gift for friends.

I used lots of linen and Kona Ash which are very close in value. They really make the greens, yellows and bit of pink pop out of the blocks.

I used up my last bit of this Castle Peeps pink stripe with the binding and it was just a bit too short so I added some solid pink to make it long enough.

I'm finishing up my day job this week and will be back at full time quilting shortly! So many project and plans to tackle... I can't wait!!

Blue.

Lots of it in this quilt!

Plus a little gray and just a tiny bit of golden yellow. And I seem to be on a dense straight line quilting kick these days.

A friend from the LAMQG is adopting from Ethiopia and I made this quilt for Linus, her little baby boy!

Otherwise, did you see that Challenge 3 of Project Modern was announced? Check it out here!

Robert Kaufman Kona Cotton Solids Challege

It was so much fun taking part in the Kona Cotton challenge that Robert Kaufman was generous enough to sponsor for many many of the Modern Quilt Guilds. Each group was allow to create their own rules for the challenge.  Here in LA, we were each given one charm pack in the dusty palette.  From there we were allowed to add one additional solid fabric in the quilt top, and one more for the binding.  Here's the quilt I made.

The quilting is 100% inspired by this quilt.

This type of random piecing is so much fun for me to do.

And I used some scraps from the piecing in a bit of the binding.

There were so many amazing entries into the challenge. We had a lot of categories that the guild picked winners for but these are the two that tied for "best of show."

Amazing, right?? So wonderful! And isn't it funny how much they work together?? They both picked Ash as their background! You can see all of the quilts that were made by The LAMQG here.  And there's also a flickr group for photos of all of the different guilds' challenge quilts.

And here we all are showing off our quilts!

Oh and Jacquie's talk? So so inspiring!

Everyone was so thrilled to get to know the woman behind the blog we've all been reading. She was open and warm and just an all around wonderful speaker. And the quilts! She brought many more than you'd imagine could fit in one suitcase and each one was more beautiful than the next. I heard rumors of a petition getting started to get her to move to LA...

The Baby Harvatine Quilt

I have been reading my friend Liz's blog, Lady Harvatine, for a long time. It was one of the first I found when I started quilting. Thanks to the LA Modern Quilt Guild, we now know each other and are pals. She's having a baby very soon, so of course I had to make her a quilt!

I'm a touch stripe obsessed these days...

I quilted double zig-zags in each blue and yellow strip (I didn't use a double needle, just did one zig-zag then echo quilted it) and added the occasional pop of monochromatic fabric.

Oh and guys, did you see? There's totally a dog in a teacup right there.

Hope 2011 is off to a good start for you!