Archive for the ‘Quilting Projects’ Category

Here’s what I’m up to now…

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

So, after thinking for quite a while about what to do for my second boy baby quilt for early June, I was finally struck with inspiration. My idea was to do sort of a combination of these two quilt patterns from Quiltmaker:

The one on the left is Turtle Twirl from the September/October ’08 issue, and the one on the right is Rickrack Regatta from the most recent (May/June ’09) issue.

I have this cute sailboat fabric, which I got on sale ages ago, which I thought would be great in place of the turtle print.

So, I changed the turtle to the sailboat from Rickrack Regatta (and added a second sail) here:

Then, I made the checkerboard part white and red:

So far, I’m very pleased with how it’s turning out. The next step is to attach the sailboat print borders. More to come when that’s done…

Yikes! It’s a quilt top!

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

In fact, it’s the Mystery Quilt, instructions for which were published in Quiltmaker beginning in the Jan/Feb 2007 issue. Crackpots may remember that Cathy started all this with her post in Nov., 2006 when she announced that she was planning to work on the mystery quilt and showed us her palette. Then I joined in. As I said way back then, I generally think mystery quilts are dumb. Why commit yourself to a whole lot of work on a project when you don’t know what you will end up with? But Cathy suckered me in. I thought – and still think – that it would be cool to have two Crackpots work on the same quilt and see how different they would be when finished. If you go back to our earlier posts, you will see that Cathy and I did indeed come up with very different blocks using the same instructions but our own unique choices of fabric. But the posts, and the efforts, petered out with the last post being from Cathy in July 2007. Cathy had the very good excuse of a certain adorable small James for putting her mystery quilt on the back burner, but I have none, except, of course, of having the responsibility of being grandmother to the aforementioned James.
But then shortly after Christmas, as I was planning and packing for a visit to the Cute Little House, I was looking through my various quilting UFOs trying to decide what I wanted to take with me to work on and I came across the plastic shoe box with the bits and pieces and fabrics for the mystery quilt. Despite higher priority projects, something in it called to me, and I took it along. Soon I was hooked. And here you see the result. I like it!!
Now all I have to do is layer and quilt it. It will be machine quilted in the ditch and shadow quilted. I’m not about to take on the task of learning free-motion quilting to quilt it as recommended in Quiltmaker. The current plan is to hang it over the couch in the Cute Little House. I just hope I can keep up the momentum.

Holy Cow, I finished something!

Saturday, January 10th, 2009

Look, it’s the quilt label! Actually, like, attached to the quilt and everything!

There have been times when I’ve thought that I’d never finish this project, or any other project ever again. So I’m just going to go do a little “I finished it!” Happy Dance over here…

Gift Bags Galore!

Saturday, December 13th, 2008

Here is my current 2008 Christmas Gift Bag Collection, all ready to be sent off to Hungary – as soon as I finish the label for Kristof’s quilt.

Birthday Quilt!

Saturday, December 6th, 2008

The Birthday Boy with his quilt, only a few months late:

It still doesn’t have a label on it, but I decided that if I was going to wait for the label before I hung it on the wall, he might be in elementary school before I got it hung. At the very least, he would have decided he wanted to re-decorate his room in construction vehicles or some such.

Closeup of the quilt, although you’ve all seen it in person at this point:

Check out the Flickr page for photos of us in the snow….

More baskets

Monday, November 3rd, 2008

Here are some more of the baskets for my quilting group. You can see I made a switch to brighter colors!

Quilted Baskets

Sunday, November 2nd, 2008

Several of the crackpotty things I’ve been working on lately cannot be published at this time because they must be kept secret from one or more of my fellow Crackpots. However, here is something I can share. My quilting group is working on a project where everyone has a different basket block which she makes enough of for everyone in the group, and then we’ll swap once they’re all done. Here is my block: it’s a combination of piecing and applique. The first three I made in muted colors, using scraps and fabrics from my stash. I like how they turned out, but after three, I got tired of the calm colors and went for brighter fabrics, but I’ll save that for another day…

First Attempt at Machine Applique

Monday, October 13th, 2008

It’s been about a month since our return from the substitute house, and I finally dusted off my sewing machine and got things set up so I could sew a little. Yay! I was inspired to finally try some machine applique by this month’s Quiltmaker, which has an ad for fabric that shows some cute Christmas placemats with machine applique. I’ve always avoided machine applique, thinking that I didn’t have a good enough machine or good enough machine sewing skills, but I finally decided to give it a try, and here’s the result. Not half bad! More crackpotty activities to follow…

Quilt for Baby Oberreuter-Charzinski #3

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

Finally, the chaos of construction and moving back from the substitute house has subsided a bit, and I’ve had a chance to download the picture of the quilt I made for Helene and Joachim’s youngest child, Agnes, born in May 2008.

A Week at the Cottage

Saturday, August 23rd, 2008

As most of you know, Lou and I were at the Cute Little House last week, and all I can say is that it is amazing how much one can accomplish when there are no moats to be constructed. Not that one objects to constructing moats, mind you, but moat construction and quilting/sewing/needlework are not especially compatible.

So I approached my week at the CLH unaccompanied by moat builders with great anticipation, bringing an unprecedented four (4) projects with me and certain that I was suffering from delusions of accomplishment. But I actually completed them all! And still I found time for a scintillating morning with the local historical society and a 33 mile bike ride. Talk about a sense of accomplishment!

So, in order from Highest Priority Project to Just Plain Fun Stuff, here they are:

1) Bibs, bibs, bibs (Avert your eyes, Cathy. These are en route to you and will arrive in a few days.) The terry cloth bibs that Cathy requested for James after discovering, thanks to Great Aunt Pat, just how great terry cloth is for self-feeding babies. Cathy insisted that the bibs need not be gussied up, and Grandma Ann did her best.

bibs

Priority #2 was to complete the quilt top for little Kristof, our Hungarian grandson. Here it is:

Kristof\'s quilt

And so you can admire the incredibly cute focus print, here is a detail of one corner:

detail

I just discovered that I have enough quilt batting in stock for the quilt, so quilting will probably start soon.

Priority #3, continuing in the tradition established last Christmas by Marty (also known as Not That Martha), was a gift bag for the books that I am planning to send to Hungary for the aforementioned Kristof. Using an irresistible flannel purchased on a Crackpot Fabric Expedition in one of two states in which Crackpots are resident, I came up with this:

gift bag

And finally, just for fun, I did a second version of Rebecca’s Challenge from last Christmas. Crackpots who may not have completed even one version of the challenge are forbidden by Crackpot Rules from any feelings of envy or guilt because one us has done two while they have done none. Remember, we are Crackpots, and we do what we feel like doing, at least creatively speaking, whether it makes sense or not. So here are the two versions. As Rebecca predicted, they look really different, despite being the same pattern executed with the same fabrics.

chllenge

Now I’m tempted to try for a third. But there is also the challenge of what to do with these. I’m considering putting a dark green border on each of them and making them into wall hangings for the kitchen of the CLH. But then I would have to make a new kitchen curtain to match… Another good example of how One Thing Leads to Another among Crackpots.