Russell's quilt from Kathy

I don't know if anyone else was going to post this, but I can't resist showing the quilt that Kathy made for Russell. It arrived when I was in Baltimore, and we all fell in love with it! Here's Russ lounging on it with his favorite teething toy, Sophie.


The quilt is so cute with bright colors that Russell really likes now. He likes to be on his tummy on something bright, and he reaches for all the bright objects. He will love this!
The back of the quilt is as cute as the front. This picture doesn't do it justice, but is spells out "Good morning Russell" in yellow block letters.

Maybe Kathy will share her source for the pattern. Good work Aunt Kathy!

San Francisco Quilt Show

The San Francisco Quilt Guild held its biannual quilt show last weekend. There were over 200 quilts displayed, and it was a great show. Here are some of the quilts in the show that I made (or at least worked on).

One of the categories was Miniature Quilts. I was working on this small Amish-style quilt (the one on the right in the photo) so I decided to put it in the show as a miniature, since it met the requirements. I did the flying geese parts using a foundation fabric. I didn't have enough time before the show to hand quilt it like I wanted to. I might still do some hand quilting before hanging it in my house. I think it's too dark with the black border - I should have used a color for the border, I think now. You can see that this category had quite a variety of quilts, based on the two hung next to mine!

The quilts in this group were made by members of my sewing circle. We had a fabric exchange where we exchanged 5" squares of fabrics, a different color each week. We ended up with ~100 squares. Then we each made a quilt out of them. Mine is the one in the center of this picture. I made a spool block out of each fabric, using some of them for the background and some for the spools. Then I set them in a solid green fabric and quilted it with a multicolored thread.


These blue quilts are part of the display of Challenge Quilts. There is a theme for the challenge quilts - this year it was "Indigo Passport". Everyone is to make a 24" square quilt, interpreting the theme however they want. Mine is the quilt on the right with the circles. I wanted to make a larger quilt with these fabrics and the quarter circle blocks, so I "practiced" on this little one. I have some nice, textured Asian fabrics that I think are perfect for this quilt. The other 2 in this picture were done by friends of mine and show a little of the variation in interpreting the theme.

Finally, this is a group quilt put together in a joint effort by my sewing circle. We used Ruth McDowell's book of paper-pieced vegetable patterns, and each chose 2 vegetables to make. (I made the ear of corn, and the 4 tomatoes.) Once we were done, we all got together and put them together into the quilt top. That was quite a contentious process - quilters have strong feelings about these things! But we forged ahead, and completed the top, and one of our members coordinated the quilting on her mid-arm quilting machine. We're going to donate it to the Food Bank. I really enjoyed doing the paper-pieced blocks, so I made more of them for myself, and am now composing my quilt top with them.

One of my volunteer jobs for the quilt show was helping with the judging, which was quite interesting. There were over 200 quilts in the show, and there were 5 judges hired to judge the quilts for various awards. We spent one long day in the home of our guild president displaying all the quilts, recording comments, and helping the judges as they looked at all the quilts and chose the winners. I learned a lot about how quilts are judged, so maybe for the next show I'll have mine judged! This year I opted out of judging for my quilts.

My Friendship Blocks

I belong to the San Francisco Quilt Guild, and one of my favorite activities there is participating in the Friendship Block exchange. People submit patterns or kits for blocks that they want others to make for them. By making blocks for others, we collect points and when we have enough points, we can submit our own blocks for others to make. I enjoy making blocks for other people just to try new things - they vary from a straightforward patchwork blocks with fabric provided, to paper-piecing, or instructions for an improvised block using our own fabrics - almost anything goes, as long as you can convince others to make them!

I've had enough points for a while now to submit my own blocks but couldn't decide what to do. I didn't want to hand out kits with fabric for patchwork blocks - I wanted something that would allow some variation based on other people's design and fabrics. So I finally decided to ask for Paintbox Blocks.

These are blocks based on a quilt made by Elizabeth Hartman and described on her blog www.ohfransson.com. Hers is one of my favorite quilting blogs. She makes really vibrant, modern, scrappy quilts, and although she has a couple books out, she has a ton of free patterns and tutorials on her blog.

These green blocks are the first ones I made as a prototype to try out her instructions. The idea is to match a solid color with prints that are very close in color to the solid. I chose to do her "scrappy" version of the blocks to use more than one print fabric.

I really had fun going through all my fabrics, matching up solid fabrics with prints. The blocks use only small pieces of fabric (the finished blocks are just 6-in. square). So I was able to pull things out of my scrap bag for some of them. I made another set of blocks in grays- each color combination of solid and prints makes two 6-in. blocks. I think the gray ones are my favorite so far!
I ended up making 8 sets of blocks before I ran out of steam.

So for my friendship blocks, I just wrote up the instructions with a couple of diagrams, and decided to let each person use whatever color they want to. This way, I'm hoping to get a good variety of colors, and once I have them all back, I can make more blocks to fill in colors that aren't well represented. So far about 12 of the patterns have been taken by other guild members - I'm hoping to get 20 of them done eventually. The woman who organizes the friendship blocks warned me that it might take a while to get these back! So this is a slowly-evolving quilt, which fits with my quilting style anyway!

If anyone out there would like to contribute to my Paintbox Quilt, you can go to Elizabeth Hartman's website www.ohfransson.com, and look under her "Quilt Along" link for the tutorial on how to make scrappy paintbox squares. If you make me some blocks, I'll make some for you, too! I'm asking everyone to provide, along with the 2 6-in. blocks, the swatch of solid color fabric that they use, for the back of the quilt.

Last night I went to the guild meeting and found that 7 sets of blocks have been done for me - here they are:

(Whoops - the dark blue set got cut off the edge of the photo.)

Looks like I'm off to a good start!

More baby things...

Emily's house is a treasure-trove of handmade baby items these days. They have so many crafty relatives and friends and Russell is the beneficiary of lots of beautiful things!
This is the baby quilt I made for him. I got the pattern from the book "I (heart) Patchwork". The pattern was for a lap quilt, so it's a bit big for a baby quilt (60 in. square), but I thought the pattern was cute for kids prints, and it can be a nap quilt or floor playmat. The main blue fabric is a cotton/linen blend, which is so nice to work with. It washes up beautifully and is so soft. I'm going to start using it more in quilts. The only drawback to it is that it stretches a bit more than pure cotton, so I was almost afraid to machine quilt it, but I followed the pattern recommendation and just machine quilted straight vertical lines down the rows of squares and it worked well. I used the blue/white/orange color scheme and used various prints for the cross pieces.
I added some hand quilting to define some of the solid blue cross shapes, where two solid ones overlapped. I used embroidery floss and big stitches. It helped anchor together the layers a bit better, too.
This is a quilt that Emily made for Russell. It's from Anna Marie Horner's book of baby patterns (I forget the name of the book). The pattern and instructions for making the wedges of strip-pieced fabrics are not very straight-forward in my opinion, and it ended up with a big "bubble" in the middle when the wedges were put together. Emily and I worked on it when I was there in October - we took apart the wedges and re-cut them with precise angles, then re-assembled the quilt top. Emily then hand-quilted it with embroidery floss and bound it. Isn't it darling? So colorful! And even though we cut it down a bit it's still plenty big for a baby quilt.

From the same Anna Marie Horner book, Emily made this little square bin in the owl print. She's using it for wipes on the changing table. It's one of a set of nesting blocks, intended as toys for the baby, but they make great bins for the baby supplies, too! And in front of it is one of a set of burp rags made by one of Emily's friends. She took a regular cloth baby diaper and sewed a panel of print fabric down the middle section. So clever - and they were getting a lot of use when I was there!

Not Cool Enough

I saw a great post on Anna Maria Horner's blog about quilting with embroidery floss. I even commented (which I rarely do) that I would try it on my next quilt. Well, my next quilt is one of the twins quilts for Brian's cousin. I thought that I could use the same color of thread for both quilts to help make them more similar to one another, but it turns out I'm not cool enough for colored thread.

As you can see, I have my usual obsessively-tiny white quilting thread on the left and the chunky purposefully-larger embroidery thread on the right. It turns out that I am not open-minded enough for large visible stitches. I'm back to my little white ones and if anybody can use some navy embroidery thread, let me know. I have more than a few skeins :)

more baby quilts

My love affair with 3 inch squares is apparently not over yet. I started another patchwork quilt (2 actually) but on a smaller scale for some baby quilts. Brian's cousin is pregnant with twin boys, so we figured a couple of similar-but-not-identical quilts would be helpful. Here's a picture of early planning steps on my project board:

San Francisco Quilt Show

The San Francisco Quilt Guild held its bi-annual show this past weekend. This is the first time I've participated in the show as a member. It was fun, and exhausting (even though I only had to do two easy shifts taking money at the door)! The picture above is my Wednesday sewing circle, which is just a small group of guild members who get together every other week to work on projects together. We made this group quilt by cutting up a picture and each making a quilt to represent one "slice" of the image. Then they were hung up sie-by-side to re-create the picture. Each of us used whatever techniques we wanted to, so each panel is different. It was great fun to put together and seemed to generate a lot of interest at the show. Every time I tried to take a picture of it, it had a group of people standing in front of it. Late on the last day of the show, we all got together for this picture. The members are Priscilla, Dani, Melissa, Dorte, me, and Janelle. Missing is Carol, who is in Australia and mailed us her finished panel from there! The project was Carol's suggestion as we were debating what kind of group quilt we could make for the show.

The only other quilt I entered was this small (24" square) challenge quilt. The challenge topic was "How Green is your Quilt?". I wanted to try this paper-piecing pattern that I found in a magazine, so I made it to represent green trees and used it for the challenge quilt. There were ~20 quilts in the challenge exhibit, with many different interpretations of "green".

There were so many beautiful quilts, of all kinds, in the show that I couldn't take pictures of all of them. This one is one of my favorites, made by the featured quilt artist, Judi Mathieson. I think I'll try to make one like it with some of my Asian fabrics.
These quilt shows are so inspiring - I'll undoubtedly be trying to do more quilting in the days ahead. Maybe by the next show in 2011 I'll be ready to enter a quilt for judging!

Lauren's First Quilt

I posted this to brag about Lauren's first quilt! She made this several years ago, I think while she was in high school. At the point where she had the top all finished and pinned to the batting and backing, somehow Jessie (the dog) discovered it in the basement, and took a few naps on it and otherwise abused it. A couple of times, we had to un-pin all of the quilt pins, wash everything, an re-pin it. But, she eventually finished it, and it now looks beautiful in our little porch room.