Jay McCarroll Habitat Challenge

Have you guys heard of the Jay McCarroll Habitat Challenge put on by Free Spirit and The Modern Quilt Guild? Well, all of the members of our little PMQG were given a fat eight bundle of some Jay McCarroll Habitat fabrics and asked to make a 12.5" square block adding only solid fabrics to the Habitat. These will then be assembled into a quilt for a local charity. I think this is a great challenge and was eager to participate. I knew I wanted to design a block for this challenge, and this is what I came up with:


I took my Habitat and added 2 aquas and 2 yellows, and started cutting and sewing curves (yikes). Super bias-y and stretchy. OK, so this block won't be going viral or anything, but I like how it looks, and I hope quilting will flatten it out. (Sorry Nancy.) Check out the Flickr group for the challenges from all the different Mod Quilt Guilds!



Then I played around with how these blocks would look as a quilt:


I kind of like it (lots)...but I don't know if I want to sew it. Hope you're all having a great quilt-y day!

Cheers, Jill!

A Busy Summer, and Some New Pillows

Summers are pretty busy around here... camp, beach trips, fairs, swimming, birthday parties, yard work, construction projects, friends and family visiting from out of town, brew fests. You get the picture. It's hard to fit sewing into that schedule - but surprisingly I have found some time.

I tend to do things backwards. We (ok, I) decided to re-do our family room. This involved some demo, some wall building, and dry walling. Really, I had the vision in my head awhile ago, so I decided to make some throw pillows for our newly revamped space before I started the revamping.


I wanted to use these pillow to try out mini-samples for some quilts I have in my head. The first one is the squares in descending sizes, I have a plan for a twin quilt with a similar pattern (in much different colors).


The second was this apple core pattern. Which I have to say was kind of a beast to sew together. (I'm new at curves.) It turned out looking fine, but I quilted the heck out of it. I think I will not want to deal with a whole quilt of apple cores.


I backed them both in chocolate Alexander Henry Heath, which I love. I also quilted the back which gives them such a nice sturdiness and texture. I'll make 2 more in these colors for our final family room re-do. I think maybe a tumbler pattern, and maybe something else with curves?

I really love my new pillows!

Pillows are great little projects, I love the sense of accomplishment I get from finishing something. I did the square one in 1 day, while wrangling the kiddos - and the apple core took maybe 2 or 3 days between kid antics.

Hope you're all enjoying your summer!!

Cheers, Jill

A Catch-up Post and Some Randomness

Lots going on here, but nothing really too exciting - ever have that problem?

My son finished his first year of preschool, he's changed so much in the last year, I'm a bit emotional about his first school year ending.

My Dad came from Buffalo for a visit and stayed with us for 3 weeks. 'Nuff said.

My Mom is coming next week and staying for 10 days.

My daughter slept through the whole night and stayed in her crib until 8am this morning - this has NEVER happened before, she's 2. I haven't slept for a whole night in 2 years.

My husband is working on 4(!) projects at one time, which is relatively equivalent to 4 full time jobs. He builds architectural models and he's been a bit dry on work for awhile, so this is good, but I miss him.

My sewing machine is a bit dusty. So sad.

I have completed a few things though. The Portland Modern Quilt Guild had a block swap/challenge with all solid fabric. So we each brought in a 12.5" square block made of all solid fabric, and did a blind swap. Then we made a project (pillow, mini quilt, etc.) out of the block adding our own (solid) fabric and returned it to the original block-maker. I received Cherri's block, and made her a pillow out of it, here it is:


Cherri's block ended at the blue/purple edge, and I added the gray and everything outside of that. It was a super fun project.

My block was turned into a darling little pillow by Michelle, unfortunately I can't take a picture of it now, because my son (who doesn't nap) is napping on it right now.

We also had to bring in a 6" block each to be added to the PMQG banner for the Sisters quilt show, where several members (including me!) will have quilts on display. I used my leftovers from Cherri's pillow to make a simple block.


I received my pouch from the Pretty Little Pouch Swap! It was made by the lovely Naomi (linen&string). Look at all the sweet goodies included in this fabulous bag! I adore the fabric covered magnets which live on my magnet board in the kitchen (where greasy little hands can't touch them).

Just look at the gorgeous little details she added. I LOVE this bag, I've already used it several times to carry sewing essentials to meetings - and I've gotten tons of compliments on it. I intend to use it as a toiletry bag for travel, but it's so pretty, I don't want it stashed away when we're not traveling.


I did actually make a whole twin sized quilt top out of sherbet pips... just haven't gotten around to taking pics of it. So stay tuned!

Mother's Day Nicey Jane Quilt

A few weeks ago, Jen and I were having a mellow playdate and missing Megan. The kids were so unusually quiet that we started 'playing' with fabric. I was telling her that I have a couple collections that I bought, that I LOVE, but I'm afraid that if I don't use them, I may lose the love someday, and I'd hate for them to go unused. Let's face it, all of our tastes change, and styles change. But I am seriously still in love with Nicey Jane in a major way. Jen and I went back and forth about what to do with it, and we finally ended up at a lattice quilt with big blocks of the prints to show them off.

CAD drawings and came up with these 2 schemes:



I finally settled on the second one and off I went. It was a pretty quick top to put together, but Jen put a whole quilt together in this pattern in about 2 or 3 days, beating me by about, oh, a month.

Here is the finished product. I managed to quilt the whole thing free motion on my tiny Janome Jem 720. It's the 1st quilt that I've free-motioned on my baby. I'm really happy with how it turned out.

The pattern on the back was inspired by this quilt that I found over on flickr.

I gave this to my Mom for Mother's Day, I really love this quilt, and really love my Mom. Happy Mother's Day, Mom!

note: all pictures of this quilt were taken by Jen Bailly (bettycrockerass)

A Pretty Little Pouch

Well, pretty by my standards anyway. I really love this box-style pouch shape, so cute. I also LOVE the Ruby Star Rising fabric. I paired it with linen and kona solids in aquas and yellows to compliment the Ruby colors. I followed this tutorial for the pouch. It's fully lined. I hope my partner in the swap likes it too!

It's a gorgeous, sunny day here in P-town. I think I'll try to go soak some of it up before it disappears. Cheers all!

Project Modern Challenge 2

Woah, I can hardly believe it! My yellow quilt is one of the winners of Project Modern Challenge 2! I'm super excited! All of the entries in the flickr group look amazing, so I'm really surprised I'm one of the chosen 3. Here is what I submitted:

This quilt measures 62"x50"

This quilt is called "Yellow Quilt". I was inspired by a very bold, graphic photograph I came across of a tile pattern on the side of a building. I had been wanting to make a quilt for our brown and yellow family room, so I decided to take this image and translate it into a yellow quilt. This is a color that I have not worked with much and I wanted to really challenge myself. My process started with pulling the original photo into a CAD program and drafting a pattern for the quilt over the photo. I then took the drawing and 'colored' it with several different schemes in Illustrator until I came up with one I liked. With my color scheme in hand I ordered 10 different kona solids from the yellow palette. I didn't end up using all of the solids, I really wanted to add some prints for a bit more of the fun, modern feeling that I was going for. It was really hard to find fabrics that gave me the feeling I wanted and were truly monochromatic. The solids range from the palest wheat-yellow to a deep ochre, and the prints are all yellow on yellow and simple dots. It was really fun and challenging to make a quilt with a limited palette like this, and it has given me a lot of confidence that I can step out of my comfort zone and come up with an end result that I am really proud of.

I'm just still kind of blown away and in shock. Thanks Malka (The Challenge 2 Judge)!

A Process Post

So I made a monochromatic quilt for Project Modern Challenge #2. I thought I'd give you all a little insight into how crazy my process is when designing a quilt. Remember that I was trained as an Architect and not in using textiles in any way. So this whole process just seems normal to me - even though looking at it all spelled out it seems a bit insane and ridiculous.

It all started with a really cool picture that I happened upon on flickr while searching for cool pics of Architecture. This is the picture. I did not take this photo, I just found it online.

I really like the movement in this pic and thought it'd make a great quilt - a great monochromatic quilt. So my first move was to draft it up in AutoCAD. I draft EVERYTHING up in AutoCAD. I'm weird that way. This is what I came up with:
Pretty do-able for a quilt, 29 rows made up of little pieces. Then I imported the file into Illustrator and colored it. I decided on yellow, because we have a brownish room in need of a yellow quilt. This is what I came up with next:


I really fell in love with the yellow image and was highly motivated to keep going by this point. So my next move was to separate all the rows out and dimension each piece for cutting. This terribly dull and boring image was what I came up with next:

I used this as my cutting guide to cut out 1 row at a time. I was afraid to cut anymore than that for fear of getting pieces mixed up. Oy, it took awhile to get all of the rows made up, and i did make a few mistakes in the process and ended up ripping some pieces out. I know, this is all the boring part, I'll show you the finished product in my next post. How do you guys go from idea to cutting fabric? Anyone else feel the need to put everything into the computer before cutting? Cheers, Jill

Pouches! A New Swap

Anyone else doing this swap?? It looks fun, I signed up - hope you do too!

This is my inspiration mosaic

Michelle of 'I like orange, too!' is hosting - check it out...

What is all this MADNESS?

Mug rugs, snack mats, coasters, mini placemats - call them what you will, but they are all over blogland right now. Thanks to MugRugMadness I'm now feeling compelled to post about the snack mats I made for the Portland Modern Quilt Guild's February swap.

Blind swap. Simple concept. I decided to make 2 because they are quick and fun. Both are improvised, I had no idea what they would end up looking like when I started. I also used entirely scraps for both.

Fronts:


Backs:
That's it, not the most exciting crafting in the world, but they're just so fun and quick to make, I can hardly resist. Can I just say that I really dislike the term 'mug rug'? I don't have the same issues with it as Jen does ;) but I prefer 'snack mat' - thank you Megan for that perfect substitution.

Anyway (thanks to Kristen and a long story)- I was the lucky recipient of this:


A true work of art by Elizabeth. I love it, and won't put snacks on it. It lives on my desk. I think it is happy there.

I also changed the look of my blog - what do you think, better, worse, fine, you don't care? Let me know!

Cheers all, hope spring is coming your way (and my way too).

Oh Echino, I love you!

I want to thank Jen Bailly (bettycrockerass) for taking all the pictures of the quilt in this post.

This is the cozy couch quilt I made for my son for Christmas. I totally forgot to post about it, and realized last week that I didn't even have a picture of it. My daughter's quilt got finished first, and it was a race to get this one done in time - but I did. They both love their quilts and regularly snuggle with them on the couch.

Can I just say that I LOVE Echino fabric? It's so bright, graphic, and bold. It is also a joy to work with the cotton-linen blend. I used some kona solids and some 100% linen in this quilt as well. I think it turned out really fun, and we all kind of fight over it a bit in the evenings.

It's backed with a piece of minky that I got at 50% off, and it quilted up pretty nice. It was a bit heavy for my walking foot to pull through, so I had to help it along quite a bit. Even so, it wasn't all that bad to quilt.

We just rolled back into town after a long spring break weekend at the coast....ahhh, the ocean air does wonders to my mood and my brain. I feel pretty much ok for the first time in awhile. Cheers all!

Holiday Gift Giving

Yes, I know that the Holidays are LONG over, but I did manage to take some pics of pillows that I gave as gifts, and wanted to share. Way back in August I took this class which was taught by Elizabeth on free motion quilting. I wanted to practice what I learned so that I didn't lose it. I ended up deciding to make pillows for a bunch of people on my gift list so that I could get a lot of quilting time in. I think it really helped, I got way more confident with free motion. Now I just need to get up the courage to do it on a whole quilt...



Plus - everyone can use a another pillow, right? Also, please try to ignore that huge mess in the background and all the unfinished walls with no trim. Cheers all!

1 More Block

Well, I've made 1 more block for my son's quilt. I was inspired by Megan and Christina, it's my first time trying paper piecing. I love how it turned out, but it took FOREVER and made a huge mess. It wasn't hard, but I still managed to screw it up a couple of times. So now I have an 'X' and an 'O', and I think that may be the name, or at least the theme of this quilt. X's and O's (cause I love the little bugger so much), or tic tac toe (because of the grid) or something like that. It's still really just an abstract concept, and I'm hoping it'll just come together.

I'm finding that I'm still really, really tired from my new medication and I'm not getting a lot of time to sew, but I'm more inspired then ever lately. I have like 100 projects in my head. Maybe more. I need to maybe start writing them down - before I lose them. This Thursday is our March meeting of the Portland Modern Quilt Guild (I can't wait!), and I also have a neurologist appt that day. I hope he can give me some insight, or advice, or anything.

In super exciting news, my Etsy shop - tabslot is sponsoring a giveaway at I Like Orange, Too! Check it out!!

Cheers all!