Summer Quilting

It's been a while since the last time I posted, and I've been doing lots of quilting. One of my quilting gal pals had this quilt loaded on her frame one day, and I liked it so much that I hunted down a kit for it in the Keepsake Quilting catalog. It's called "Montana Log Cabin", and it now lives on hubby's recliner. This was another finish for May.

Years ago there was a quilt magazine called Foundation Piecer, which contained exclusively projects that were pieced on paper foundations. The magazine eventually changed its name to Quilts with Style, and not too long thereafter, the magazine failed and was no more.

At one point in time, pieced blocks with black leading were all the rage in the magazine; and this sampler was from one of the magazine issues. The publisher, Zippy's, also printed several pattern books with dozens of stained glass blocks. I have a couple of those books still and thought I might do another one of these sampler quilts some time.  

I hemmed and hawed for a long time, trying to decide what thread color to use to quilt my sampler and what pattern to use. I finally settled on a pantograph called Twofold Feathers with a variegated thread in jewel tones. I love how it turned out. This quilt was my June finish.

BarbaraD is the president of our quilt chapter, Tacoma Lakes Quilters, and she's been a wonderful president. Last summer someone thought it would be a good idea to recognize Barb's contributions with a quilt, and I was volunteered to chair a committee. A few of us had seen this quilt, Rhubarb Pie, in the Keepsake catalog, and we voted to make it as the president's quilt.

I started collecting four patch blocks from the membership in September and started assembling the quilt in January. I laid out the blocks for a quarter of the quilt at a time and then had a sew day with committee members to sew that section together. I liked that approach so much that I've made a couple of other quilts the same way--working on a quarter section at a time.

We also pieced the back of the quilt, using the brighter four patches (taken down to two patches) for sashing. The idea for the backing came from the cover of a McCall's quilting magazine that came out earlier this year. There are four fairly plain squares in the backing that we used for signature squares, and we managed to get the signatures of every single one of our members. Then we had one of our members machine embroider a label (in the lower right corner), gave it to another member for binding, and presented the quilt to Barb at our June meeting.

Beats me how we kept this a secret as long as we did. Barbara keeps her longarm down in my basement sewing room, and she comes over every Monday to work on it. Every Monday after she left for the day, I'd throw some blocks on the design wall, spend hours arranging them, and then Sunday night I'd have to take everything off the wall and hide it. With help from my committee, we got a quarter section sewn each week, so I didn't have to keep rearranging the blocks.

Because of all the work I put into this quilt, and because I was on the hook for it, I'm counting it as a June finish, even though I didn't get to keep it!

I worked on these King's Crown blocks here and there for a couple of years and finally got them together, added the borders and got it quilted this month. The binding is attached, and I'm working on the hand sewing. I plan to have it all finished by the end of the month. I machine embroidered a label for it this morning, then later in the afternoon realized I'd embroidered the text on the wrong side of the fabric. I'll be stitching a new one out in the morning.

I had to buy four half-yard cuts for the brown borders and wasn't sure if I'd have enough. I wanted to keep the motif in the borders all facing the same direction, and I also wanted to match the motifs down the length of the borders so that it wouldn't look chopped up. That worked out pretty well, so I matched the motif in the corner four patch to the border as well, just to see if I could do it. Worked out pretty well!

This is another quilt that was just a top for a couple years, and I finally had a friend quilt it for me. I mail ordered these fabrics for another project and was disappointed when they arrived. The colors were duller than were pictured in the catalog, and the scale of the border print was all wrong. They sat in the cabinet for quite a while until I finally hauled them out to use them up for a challenge quilt. I suppose it is a rather plain quilt, but I like it now that's it's almost finished. Still have to put the binding on.

This is the Curvy quilt, so named by designer Mark Lipinski. This quilt appeared in an issue of Fons and Porter's Love of Quilting, two issues ago, I think. I have always shied away from curved piecing, but I found this design so interesting that I resolved to give it a try.

So I pulled 20 fat quarters from the stash that had red, yellow, and green in them and got started. A template to cut the curved pieces was included in the article, but I decided the specialty ruler Simple Curves might be easier. I got more proficient sewing the curves as I went along, and now I'll be making a second one in order to teach a small workshop for Tacoma in the fall. I think this quilt would be really fun in Kaffe Fassets too. I just finished doing the quilting on this today, but I won't get the binding on it til next month.

I know lots of folks like the Turning Twenty quilts, but I was never crazy about them until I found the book for this quilt, Turning Twenty Hope Chest Treasures. It sort of reminds me of Lincoln Logs we had when we were kids. These are 16" blocks, so this is probably the fastest top I ever made. Quilt show for Maine Quilts begins tomorrow for four days, so quilting and binding for this quilt will have to wait until next month too.