This super cute wall hanging was made by Wendy. There will be a tape measure added to the tree trunk, and it will become a growth chart. What a wonderful gift for a baby shower! The appliqué is wool, and the details are embroidered. I only stitched around the shapes and filled the background with swirls. An adorable project, and lots of fun to work on.
Carol loves Civil War Reproduction Fabrics and made this Double Four Patch Quilt using up leftovers from her stash. The allover quilting design we chose for her project is called “Lapis”.
I am back from my trip to Germany. In fact I have been back for a week, but it took me a while to readjust to the time zone change and get organized. Writing blog posts is at the bottom of my to do list right now, so I will leave you with a few pictures from my trip today. It was very hot in Berlin pretty much the whole time, luckily I had taken my Yellowstone hat which made walking around in the sun a little easier.
June has arrived, and summer is here. Can you believe that we are already halfway through the Tuxedo Cats blocks? The months have just been flying by. I will be in Germany when you read this, and I have made changes to my schedule for when I return, and hopefully I will feel less stressed and have a little more time to do some sewing. Here is this month’s kitty, providing another dot of colour with her red water bowl. The pattern is available for free download until the end of the month and will move over to the store on Canada Day with the release of the seventh block.
EDIT: The month of free download is over, and the block has moved to the pattern store where it is now available for purchase.
Für die deutsche(n) Version(en) mit metrischen Maßen bitte dem/den Kauflink(s) unten für die englische(n) Version(en) folgen und beim Checkout angeben, dass die deutsche Version gewünscht ist. Ich verschicke dann per email die Anleitung(en) in der gewünschten Sprache.
Lisa pieced this “Panama Pyramids” quilt using leftovers from her stash and asked if it could be quilted with a Baptist Fan pattern. The original Baptist Fan would have to be done with rulers which would take a lot of time but luckily there are clever pantograph designers around who came up with several allover versions of this pattern. The one I used is simply called “Continuous Baptist Fan”, and it looks really nice on Lisa’s quilt.
This is another one of Penny’s projects, she made this quilt as a wedding gift for her son. She had seen a similar quilt on Pinterest and liked the quilting on it. The pattern wasn’t exactly the same, and I had to make some adjustments but it is still pretty close to the original. I even remembered to take a detail picture while the quilt was still on the frame.
Penny made this quilt from batik fabrics, and the colours reminded me of northern lights. I quilted it with a combination of swirls and feathers and a few leaves in the purple border.
I have been really slow in posting here lately, there just aren’t enough hours in the day. In the meantime I managed to finish another one of my personal projects. In 2016 the 365 Challenge Quilt was a big hit, and I started making the blocks in January, not knowing if I really wanted to make the whole quilt. But it sounded like fun, and I made a block a day for the first two months of the year. Then the blocks went into a box because we moved to a different house, and I unpacked them again a year later. I managed to make another month’s worth of blocks and then decided that I didn’t like the project. I was getting increasingly frustrated with the instructions, it was very obvious that the designer had just drawn up the quilt in EQ but never actually sewn it, and I ended up unpicking several blocks and redoing them my way. I gave up, and the blocks went back into a drawer.
Last November I signed up with this project for my guild’s UFO challenge. Giving myself this deadline was the only way I was ever going to finish this quilt, I was very close to just putting the blocks on the giveaway table at the next guild meeting. I put them together in a way that is close to the original design, and I still don’t like the quilt. Considering how long it took to assemble all those 3″ blocks and how small many of the pieces are, the layout just doesn’t do it justice in my opinion. The individual blocks just get lost in that dark border. Quilting the centre block was fun but I didn’t put too much effort into the pieced borders, the quilting wasn’t going to be very visible anyway. I picked a floral pantograph design and then just echoed around it. I actually prefer the back, I pieced leftover fabrics because I didn’t have enough of the floral batik and couldn’t get more. But it is finished, so I will stop complaining, and I will donate it to the guild’s We Care program next month.
May is a busy month with lots of square dancing. Square (and round) dancing is the one thing I always make time for, no matter how busy I am with quilting. Last weekend we headed to Wenatchee in Washington for the Apple Blossom Weekend, and our route took us right through Leavenworth, Washington’s “Bavarian Village”. Before you ask, no, it is not very authentic, it is more a North American vision of Bavaria and very touristy, but it is still pretty and a nice place to visit, and the weather was gorgeous. We had an early supper sitting outside on a balcony and enjoyed the view. The one authentic place in town we found was the Bavarian Bakery, and we took one of their German whole grain breads home with us. A very nice weekend getaway!
Welcome to May! And to shake things up a little, I will begin this month’s post by talking about next month’s block 🙂 The June block will be published on the 1st of the month, as always, but it might be at a different time. I will be in Germany in early June, and depending on my plans that day and how much time I have, it might be a little earlier or later. Yes, I know I can just schedule the post but sometimes that doesn’t work (some kind of WordPress bug), and I also need time to update the previous post and share the block on social media. In any case, please make sure you download the pattern right away and don’t wait until the very last minute. If you are an email subscriber, you will receive a notification when the new pattern is posted. But now back to the present and the May block which might be my favourite block of the whole quilt. I love how the sleeping kitty turned out, and I can almost see her paws twitching while she chases something in her dream. The pattern is available for free download until the end of the month and will move over to the store when I post the June block.
EDIT: The month of free download is over, and the block has moved to the pattern store where it is now available for purchase.
Für die deutsche(n) Version(en) mit metrischen Maßen bitte dem/den Kauflink(s) unten für die englische(n) Version(en) folgen und beim Checkout angeben, dass die deutsche Version gewünscht ist. Ich verschicke dann per email die Anleitung(en) in der gewünschten Sprache.
