Bloggers Quilt Festival: Large Quilt Entry

Hi!  Welcome to my blog.  I am happy to share my second entry to this Fall's Bloggers Quilt Festival, my quilt All Tied Up.  Here I am sharing some photos of my 72" square bow quilt that I wrote about in detail over here.  Cheers and thanks for stopping by!

Blogger's Quilt Festival- ROYGBIV Entry

Hi! Thanks for stopping by my blog.  My name is Rachel and I am a stay at home mom of two littles and I keep my sanity through quilting!  This is my second time joining the Bloggers Quilt Festival and I am happy to share my entry into the ROYGBIV category.  

This mini quilt finished at 22" square, using 2.5" cut squares.  The colored fabrics were all from my scrap bin and I chose the "how to make a pillowcase" text fabric for the background.  This is the mini I gifted for the second round of the Schnitzel and Boo Mini Quilt Swap.  Below I'm sharing some *never before seen* (and for good reason!) iPhone "in progress" photos of the quilt in hopes it'll illustrate  how I made it.  The quilt is based on the pattern "Supernova" from the book Quilting Modern.

(1) I cut out all the main "base" squares.

(2) I started stitching orange scraps onto base squres that surrounded the middle red square

(3) Kept moving outwards to keep track of what color should be added to which base square

(4) added pink and purples to the outside negative space.

Evolution of a pillow

Sept 21

Sept 22

Sept 23

Oct 1 

Oct 2 

Oct 2 

Oct 3 

Oct 3 

This is one of those projects where I truly enjoyed making this every single step of the way. The pattern comes from Rachel of Wooden Spoon Quilts.  She has an excellent tutorial for these raspberry kiss blocks you can find here.

This pillow is for my bestie, and her favorite color combo is pink and green.  I loved that this project was scrap friendly and I had so much fun digging through my bins finding all shades of pink and green fabrics.  I also loved that it got me busting out some long hoarded low-volume fabrics.  I tried color blocking my X's at first as you can see in the first photo but the more blocks I made the more I liked alternating the colors.  Then I tried for an ombre effect but then decided against it.  I like the way the values are thrown around randomly. It gives the pillow a little sparkle.  I was originally going to make an 18" pillow with the 4x4 layout above… until I ended up buying a 24" pillow form and was happy to have an excuse to make more :)

My bestie had visited me and seen the strawberry swap mini I had received from Rita (lostinoz1966 on flickr to see a photo) hanging up in my sewing room and told me she might steal it (a giant swoon block in Heather Ross pink and green strawberries with pink FMF seeds) so I knew I needed to use the same strawberry print for the back.  And pink bias stripe binding for the win!  If

4th Anniversary Quilt

When my husband and I first started dating, he kept asking for a quilt.  I would tell him its takes a lot of time, and that there were a lot of people in line in front of him, hehe.  So he started begging for a "four square quilt," a quilt that would be comprised of only 4 squares of fabric and thus (in his mind) quick to make.  The following year I did make him a quilt, granted it wasn't a four-square quilt and it's been on his, and then our, bed ever since (I'll have to do another post on it sometime… throw back to 2008!).

So fast forward to this summer we were celebrating our 4th anniversary so I thought what better than to make his four square quilt?!  It'll be so "quick" right?! Hahaha… As you can see above I had a hard time narrowing fabric down to only 4 fabrics (story of my life)… so I decided to make 2 four-patches in a four-patch.  Then I had some slight cutting errors, hence the little strips of black, but I like the interest it adds.  And then there's the fact that my husband is tall and I knew he would complain that the quilt isn't long enough, so I added the top and bottom borders.

I used minky for the back in gray and teal and lets just say I didn't particularly enjoy sewing with it.  I tied off the quilt in a 6" grid using yarn.  One tip for tying off a quilt is to wear a vinyl glove or rubber cleaning glove on the hand that you use to pull the needle through the fabric.  It grips the needle really well and makes the job easy as opposed to nearly impossible.

A lot of the fabrics relate to either him or our relationship… cuckoo clocks, ledger print, dominos, sea turtles, sailor knots, hockey players, French text, math/science, and constellations (for camping!).  We happened to be camping the night of our anniversary with both sides of our families so we had a fun little celebration and he got his quilt.  My parents and sister helped hold the quilt for photos but it was already pretty dark so I only got a few good ones.  They couldn't believe I didn't want them in the photo and to hide behind the quilt, so they'd keep peeking out.  Isn't my sister cute!?  I like this photo below too but it's not an accurate depiction of the true colors.

Thanks for reading!