Finish Report! ~ Marissa's Home Quilt ~

 Yesterday I finished the binding for Marissa's wedding quilt:

Pattern is Kim Diehl's "Journey's End," fabrics are her "Katie's Cupboard" collection. 
65 x 65 inches, Hobbs Heirloom 80/20 batting

I love doing custom quilting. Usually, the fancier the better, as far as I'm concerned. Once in a while, though - Less is More. 

I'd intended to do some roofing and siding lines in the houses, and then some fill work in the background of the blocks. However, when I started doing that with one of them, it detracted from the quilt instead of enhancing it. The houses are very busy with the dozens of different prints and the piecework of the blocks in them. Putting more quilting in mushed things together rather than highlighting them. So . . . I stuck with "just" stitch-in-the-ditch on the blocks with one 1/8-inch echo around the windows. That simple work did a lot to bring out the features in the houses, so that the center of the quilt no longer melted into itself.

On the sashing, I simply ran lines straddling the thin stripes in the fabric print. Looks great!

In the border, I wanted the white bricks to stand out better than they did before the quilting. To highlight those, I threw in some continuous-curve quilting, then I ran some fun leaves-and-vine-curls free-motion style through the colored bricks, treating them as one field on either side of the white bricks.

I loved this teal print from the collection, so I'd bought enough to make the whole backing with it, and the binding frames the quilt with the same fabric as the sashing.

I'm very happy with how the quilting enhanced this top. It felt a little too busy for its own good beforehand, but the subtle-yet-effective strategies in quilting brought it up to its full potential. It's a great scrappy quilt with a wonderful old-timey heart-is-where-the-home-is feel.

Marissa surprised me by choosing this quilt top for her special quilt. I didn't expect the reproduction fabrics and highly traditional pattern to appeal to her taste, but the top really called to her. It makes me happy when a quilt I've made resonates with others.  :)  

I'm linking up at:

Tish's UFO party

TGIFF at Storied Quilts this week

TGIFF Is Here This Week - What a Hoot, Marissa!

Hi! Welcome to this week's "Thank Goodness It's Finished Friday" link-up! Have you finished something lately that you'd like to share? Link up at the bottom of this post, and be sure to visit a few links to help your quilting peers celebrate their finishes.  :D

This is a super fun finish for our family. "What a Hoot, Marissa!" is the last in a series of three quilts made for our daughters as each of them graduated from high school!

This was my first original quilt design, and when I made the first one in 2010, it provided the basis for my blog's name as that was when I started recording my quilting endeavors here. The first two had one more row so they'd be a good length for the extra-long twin beds of college freshman dorms. This one fits Marissa's needs better in a regular length, and it's done to a 70 x 90 inch size. I *loved* the backing fabric I found for it!

Marissa chose her school colors for the checkerboards, and the owls were appliqued with satin stitching. I get the best result with this approach when I pin a layer of unprinted newsprint behind it to stabilize the fabric and keep puckers and ripples away. (I got a free "endroll" from a county newspaper a few years ago, which had yards and yards and yards of remnant.) It tears away so easily, it's no big deal at all to remove! I also clip away back layers to take away extra bulk and stiffness in the finished quilt.

Every so often, I get really picky about how I construct a quilt. On these, I adore the Celtic ribbon corners and didn't want the easier way of putting them together using HSTs as end-caps that would cut up the flow of the ribbons. So the fabric was cut in a way that uses a lot of Y seams and puzzle-piecing to put them together in a way that preserves the continuity of the ribbons. They look terrific in the finished product!

Another fun thing about these quilts is the button eyes that really liven the owls up. Yes, it takes a while to sew them all on. Not my favorite part, but definitely worth the effort.

The first two "What a Hoot" quilts were quilted by a guild co-member when we lived in Florida. This time around, I'm completely comfortable doing my own quilting, so this was completely finished by me. 

The inner field is quilted exactly the same as her sisters' had been done. But I didn't have the computerized system to easily measure out the Celtic style geometric design quilted in the wide border of the earlier versions, so I marked a spine all the way around and free-hand quilted feathers for that space.

Wow, am I happy with how those turned out!

Almost as happy as this remarkable young woman was to graduate.  :D  Love this huge grin of accomplishment!

Right now this fabulous quilt is hanging in our great room, where Marissa can bask in recognition all summer, and anyone who comes into the house can help us continue to celebrate. Soon she'll be starting her university studies, so I suppose we'll change it out. But for now, it makes me smile every day!

Oh yeah! And guess where half of the binding was stitched down? - In Hawaii! Specifically on a balcony on Waikiki, Oahu, and another balcony on Ka'anapali, Maui during sun breaks. Definitely worth lugging that heavy puppy in my carry-on from Colorado and back. . .   ;D

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Now it's your turn to toot your horn and let us help you celebrate a finish! Link up right here.  :) 

An InLinkz Link-up

BOMs Away - "Miss You! Love, Mom" February

Welcome to the Link-Up for BOMs Away Mondays!

We'd love to see the BOM you're working on lately.

This week's link-up is at the bottom of the post.

Alright!!  How 'bout that Super Bowl game? Huge Bronco following in our area, of course, so that was fun.

Today I got back on track for my normal BOM line-up each week. I got both of my Devon & Kyle minis fused up just as the first quarter was really getting going.

I drew an extension of Cynthia Staub's pattern, "Garden Visitor," which I had purchased from her Craftsy shop - Quilt Doodle Designs. (Her original design is the girl fox with her flowers. I added the boy fox and the bleeding hearts stem.)  It came out so cute, even if you do have to see it in the dark:

Still needs all stitching to be done. Hopefully, I'll have these finished up tomorrow in time to post one to Devon & Kyle. (Hmmm - I'm wondering if I ever showed you the first one that I finished up for their December mini. . .)

And here's a shot of Marissa and her friends before they went out to their senior-year Snowball Dance last night. Good times!! Apropos name, with over a foot of snow still out there on the ground.

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Anyway, Let us know if you've done any BOM or QAL work recently!

An InLinkz Link-up

Finish Report - Marissa's Restore Innocence Civics Project

In our school district, Civics is a required class for graduation, and to pass that class, you must do a minimal number of hours of an approved community service. Marissa got permission to make a quilt under the auspices of the Front Range Modern Quilt Guild, and her targeted organization was Restore Innocence. Before moving out here to Colorado and coming into contact with people who work with rescued girls and women, I had no clue about the extent of human trafficking in the United States. It's truly appalling.

The best way for us to journal this for me to insert her report, so I'm just going to do that.  :)  Hope you enjoy, and may you be inspired to include a little community service sewing each month in your lives - be that making quilts for Restore Innocence, Quilts of Valor, firehouses or police stations, or battered women and children's center, Christmas stockings for children's centers, bibs for Alzheimer's patients, fetal demise pouches for stillborns, wheel chair lap quilts for nursing homes, or individual blocks for any variety of gifts of love to people near and far. 

Here are Marissa's words:

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For my Civics project, I made a quilt for Restore Innocence. This included piecing the top, basting all the layers together, and quilting it. The quilt I made used a rainbow of colors on a white background. The entire quilt is 165 separate pieces. This part took about six and a half hours.

Finding a layout I like

I went to the April meeting of my mom’s quilt guild to show them the top. It took my mom and I about an hour and a half to pin-baste the layers. I quilted it in a grid-work style that’s popular with modern quilting. My mom did about a third of the quilting to get it finished on time, and it took us each about four hours to quilt the entire thing. Once the quilt was finished it was washed, so it would be clean and ready for its future owner. On the third Saturday of May, I will show the guild the finished quilt, and then turn it in to Restore Innocence.

Sewing rows together

At the guild meeting I learned that my work making a quilt helps them at the same time that it helps the charity I chose. This is because the guild is a non-profit organization and keeps track of its community service hours to help determine its tax-free status. But the real beneficiary will be a girl, probably very close to my age, at the Cinderella House in Colorado Springs. “Restore Innocence is a faith-based, 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to helping victims of child trafficking. Because of the lack of aftercare facilities specific to victims of domestic minor sex trafficking in the United States, Restore Innocence operates The Cinderella House, a safe house where victims can find true restoration.”

Showing the top at the guild meeting

What new skills did I learn? I learned more about color theory, such as how the traditional R-B-Y color wheel is all wrong. I learned how to use an advanced sewing machine, and also how to pin-baste a quilt. You need to tape the layers down on a flat surface. You can’t let the pins be too far apart, or else the quilt will have ugly creases in the back.

Pin-basting the layers

I would say it was a positive experience because nothing really happened that was negative. I scraped up my finger pulling pins when the quilt was done, but overall, it went well.

Learning to use the safety-pin tool

I have grown personally working on this project, because I learned that there’s so much more to community service than volunteering. The guild my mom goes to now does things like fetal demise bags, so mothers who have stillbirths don’t need to take their baby home in a brown paper bag. They also do firehouse quilts, so that if a child’s home burns down, the fire station can give the child a quilt. The Flying Needles quilt guild focuses on quilts of valor for military people who are injured on deployment, wheelchair lap quilts for nursing homes, quilted bibs for Alzheimer’s patients, and quilted stockings for children’s centers. And my mother told me about opportunities for community sewing that are organized in the blog world; for example, in the past year, she has answered calls for cheerful pillowcases for the surviving elementary students at Sandy Hook, quilt blocks for a woman whose husband died of a brain tumor, quilt blocks for a young bride whose husband was killed in Afghanistan, and most recently, blocks for victims of the Boston Marathon bombing.

Showing the finished quilt to Mrs. Richie, my Guild supervisor

I never realized how much community service you can do from your own home. It’d be great for someone who’s very introverted, or has just moved to somewhere new and doesn't know anyone.

Here you can see the back

When I took the finished quilt to Mrs. Richie’s house, she told me how I probably won’t be able to give my quilt directly to a girl because after the FBI bring them in, their identities and locations are kept secret for their protection. I’m glad I made a quilt though, because for a lot of them, this will be their first personal item, as they don’t even have the clothes off their back because they’ve been taken for evidence.

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I just love the giant smile on her face when she was showing her quilt to Melissa.  This quilt is 65" x 72", has a scrumptious batiste backing with a very thin poly batt, which made for a super-scrunchable feel that just begs you to squish it in a hug. 

You gotta love the rainbow ice cream fabric that called to her!

The feature squares are the Mirror Ball Dot Michael Miller fabric. I let Marissa use up the set of 18 colors in fat-sixteenths that I got in my swag bag at the Crazy Old Ladies retreat in February, along with a bunch of my Kona snow yardage. Scott sponsored her for buying backing fabric since we couldn't find anything in my stash that looked really great for it, and it was going out as a special gift from the heart. 

I did put the binding on for her since she was out of time, way over the required hours, and had never done that before. Whenever her next quilt-making time is, I'll teach her that skill, too.  

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Linking up at

TGIFF

Can I get a Whoop! Whoop!

Link-a-Finish Friday

WIP - Marissa's Community Sewing

Hi there!  My own WIP work is moving very slowly - still the Dear Jane catch-up, and some binding stitching on an exciting upcoming finish. 

But the FMQ feathers on the blue fields in Run, Kitty, Run have been put on hold while I let my 15yo use the machine I normally do my quilting on. 

In her Civics class she has to do an approved community service project, and she's making a quilt for Restore Innocence, an organization that helps women and girls who have been rescued from human trafficking. Their Cinderella House in Colorado Springs is not too many miles from us here in the next town up the highway.

This is the teen version of playing with your quilt layout. :)    Note that you must lay out with it!

She's got the rows all sewn together and some of the sashes put in, too, but getting a shot of her at the machine last night got nixxed because she got ill around dinnertime and went to bed early. This is the plan she has, using some fat 16ths I got in a retreat swag bag and Kona snow from my stash:

It's fun to watch her working on her quilt!  It's going to be a hard one to let go of, too. We couldn't find anything in the stash that would be good for the backing, and were bummed, until Dad said "She has a sponsor!" and he's springing for her to shop with the latest JoAnn's coupon for a backing she loves. What a guy. :D  (He knows I'm on a shopping hold while things gets under better control.)

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Linking up at

Quilt Story's Fabric Tuesday

Lee's WIP

Pat's Show and Tell

Esther's WOW

Finish Report! - Marissa's Moment of Caprice

Marissa’s Moment of Caprice

There once was a girl who was NOT a pastels and frilly kind of gal. She had more of a Gothic taste. But one day her mother needed to stop in a quilt shop. After some time, the girl wandered to her mother with a very feminine pastel charm pack in her hands and a very odd look on her face, saying, "Mom, I don't know why - I can't understand it, but I LOVE these. This is so weird!" So her mother replied: “Then we'd better buy them!” So they bought 2 packs and some yardage from the line, having no clue what they would be used for. The mother thought and thought and thought. And several months later she got an idea when she saw a nifty gadget for making yo-yo’s. The idea evolved and sewing ensued, interrupted by obligations of other quilts and by schooling, until one day it was a pretty pastel flimsy with a gorgeous pieced backing. This fledgling quilt waited once again while the mother gained some skills in free-motion quilting, the family moved across the country, storage mix-ups kept it locked behind many, many boxes. . . until at last, one winter, the mother finished the quilting on a pretty deviation for her daughter, chock full of a mother’s love for her wonderful young lady.

This is the tale of a long journey that started in 2010 and culminated today when I finished this label with the above story. (With the stats underneath)

What I love about this quilt:

It's *nothing* like Marissa's normal tastes, but it's special. It's almost entirely constructed from the Three Sisters "Aviary" line. From my stash I added white-on-white  for the pinwheels and a stronger green for the stems/leaves of the flowers and the center's flanges.

It's my very own design, made to spotlight the center on a twin-sized bed (which we no longer have). Post-wash size: 62 x 87 inches.  Pre-wash 65 x 93 inches. That's how much shrinkage you get between moderately heavy quilting and Hobbs Tuscany washable wool shrinkage. (washed on the delicate cycle with warm/cold water settings, dried at medium heat about 3/4 of the way, then laid out to finish drying)

The back - made from the rest of the pinwheels and what yardages we could still find for the line of fabric.

The pinwheel field with scrappy opalescent buttons.

How much the heart flowers pop. These were stitched on at the hospital when Scott had his stroke. (With a full recovery, thank goodness!)

The "eyelet" I sneaked in. I wasn't allowed to put any lace or eyelet on, so I quilted some in around each transition point.

The outer border quilting.

The messages quilted into each side. Like this one: "You make the world. . . a happier place."  You can also hunt out "Mom loves you always. . . and forever";  "Smile  . . . Sunshine"; and "Marissa is. . . Awesome".

That I did all the quilting myself - and that was a feat on a domestic!  I counted it up, and there are no less than 96 hours of quilting in this. Probably quite a bit more.

Challenges I overcame:

Getting the diagonals to match during the construction. I needed 8 panels, cut from two different orientations on the yardage, to meet around the center. I couldn't let go of getting the lines to match up properly at the seams, so I agonized over the math, almost forgetting the seam allowances, and got everything worked out somehow. If you look carefully, you can see the seam running straight down the center of this photo from the corner of the green flange.

In the center of each of the four sides, the diagonals meet in a V. That was a compromise since there wasn't enough yardage to cut the panels in a way to keep the diagonals running the same way on the entire field, as I'd originally wanted. But I really like it this way now.

Learning to Free-Motion Quilt. This round was particularly challenging to me, working with persnickety threads, 3-D flowers, and tons - TONS - of thread tales to knot and tuck.

Braving contrasting thread. I was worried that the blue and pink I chose for the bugs and petals contrasted too much on this pastel quilt. Once it crinkled up after washing, though, that factor was greatly reduced, so I'm really glad the threads stood out as much as they did.

Putting on scalloped binding, which was addressed earlier in this tutorial post.  (And check out how much the Tuscany washable wool batting crinkled up with the wash! You can see the contrast in the before-washing shot below. It's got a nice, soft feel now and doesn't smell sheep-y, if you're wondering about wool batting.)

Quilting the diagonal field. For some reason I was really freaked about quilting this, worried I was going to ruin the whole thing. I wasn't particularly happy with this element of the design to start with. I finally talked myself into understanding that an "unruined" quilt was no good at all so long as it was unfinished, and I finally got myself into gear for this last stretch. I fretted about a quilting motif that would blend with the rest of the quilt - and with all the crinkling combined with a print to begin with - you can see I didn't need to fret at all!  Those messages I quilted in on each side - you really have to search to find them. Major "where's Waldo?" effect going there. . .  And while I wish the quilt hadn't crinkled up quite so much, it did pull the feel of the diagonal field completely into harmony with the rest of the quilt. 

We still have smatterings of snow despite several days in the upper 50s. Love this view of the common-property meadow from the top of our back hill. . . 

. . . which is a great place for sledding!

It's all good.  :)

TGIFF * Link A Finish Friday at Richard's * Whoop! Whoop! * UFO Sundays